A Jewish sense of story

In a footnote to Most Famous Short Film of All Time, I wrote:

"Literary critic Frank Kermode in The Sense of an Ending (1965) said stories need satisfying endings, just as the Christian story offers an ending that provides a meaning to everything that came before. Dara Horn dissents, saying that Jewish storytelling recognizes that we 'cannot be true to the human experience while pretending to make sense of the world,' and so a story may instead serve as 'the beginning of the search for meaning.'"

I recently came across this reflection by Rachel Klein:

"Where apocalypse narratives are primarily concerned with the restructuring and healing of society writ large after tragedy, time loops focus on the personal growth of an individual by having the person relive their experiences until they learn the lessons required to move on."
— "A Case for Why Time Loops Are Inherently Jewish": These cyclical stories, from 'Russian Doll' to 'Palm Springs,' are the Jewish answer to the Christian apocalypse narrative. Rachel Klein, HeyAlma, June 13, 2022

It's likely that all cultures and religions have some sense of the life cycle, that is, of each generation as a cycle, and of each year as cyclical too. But Judaism, unlike Christianity, doesn't layer on any focus on the supposed end of history. There's just the cycle itself.

There are endings, though.

"The ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation ... likely reinforced the idea that the end times would inevitably be sudden, and total. All these years and millennia later most of us still haven’t learned the painful truth that most ends, even most apocalypses, are gradual, painful, drawn out and sometimes ongoing. If we don’t learn the truth about the end of the world, and worlds ending, the apocalypse may rest eternally on the horizon, ever-present, always informing our lives in numerous ways, but never quite occurring. And the truth is that worlds are ending as we speak. Our own world, your own world, could also end; it might already be falling apart."
— "The Apocalypse is not the End," Joshua P. Hill, New Means (Substack), December 30, 2023