By Rabbi Josh Wander
The world is run by Hashem—God. For a believing Jew, that should not be controversial. We say it in our prayers, study it in our Torah and repeat it constantly. Yet the moment we open a newspaper, we suddenly begin thinking like everyone else. We analyze politics, economics, military capabilities, polls and personalities, somehow forgetting the most basic reality of all: Hashem runs the world.
If Hashem runs the world, it should come as no surprise that the calendar He created has an enormous influence on history. The Jewish calendar is not simply a religious scheduling system reminding us when to eat matzah, sit in a sukkah or fast. It is part of the spiritual architecture of creation. Time has a structure, and the Jewish calendar is its map.
Rav Matis Weinberg develops this extraordinary concept in his book Patterns in Time. We tend to imagine time as a straight line. Pesach, the festival of Passover, happened thousands of years ago and each spring we commemorate it. Shavuot recalls the giving of the Torah. Tisha B’Av, the Ninth of Av, remembers ancient catastrophes. We stand in the present and look backward. But Jewish time is not linear; it is a spiral.
Every year we move forward while simultaneously returning to the same spiritual coordinates. We do not merely remember Pesach; we return to a season of liberation. Shavuot returns us to revelation and reception. Elul, the Hebrew month preceding the Jewish New Year, creates an atmosphere of divine closeness and repentance. Tishrei, the month of the High Holidays, confronts mankind with judgment, kingship and renewal. The Three Weeks return us to the tension surrounding Jerusalem, destruction and ultimately rebuilding.
The scenery changes, the people change, and governments and armies carry different names, but the spiritual forces embedded in time remain. History moves forward, yet repeatedly encounters the same spiritual coordinates on a higher turn of the spiral. Once you see this, Jewish history looks very different.
The Exodus occurred on Pesach because Pesach is the time of Exodus. The Torah was given on Shavuot because Shavuot is the time of revelation. Both Batei Mikdash, the two Holy Temples in Jerusalem, were destroyed on Tisha B’Av. The expulsion from Spain culminated around Tisha B’Av. The Yom Kippur War began on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. On Simchat Torah, the festival celebrating the Torah-reading cycle, October 7, 2023 violently threw the Jewish people into an entirely new historical reality.
Even COVID provides a fascinating modern example. The virus existed before Purim of 2020, but around Purim it suddenly became an inescapable global reality. The World Health Organization characterized COVID-19 as a pandemic on March 11, which was Shushan Purim, the day Purim is celebrated in Jerusalem and other ancient walled cities. A holiday centered on concealment, masks, confusion and sudden reversals coincided with the moment an invisible threat transformed the world.
Then, on February 28, 2026, Israel and the United States launched their major attack on Iran on Parshat Zachor, the Sabbath on which Jews read the Torah’s command to remember Amalek and its attack against Israel. It occurred immediately before Purim, the holiday commemorating Jewish salvation from attempted genocide in ancient Persia. Modern Persia was again ruled by a regime threatening Jewish destruction, and Israeli and American forces struck as Jews gathered in synagogues to remember the archetypal enemy of Israel. One need not claim that military planners chose the date for religious reasons to recognize the extraordinary symbolism.
Are these coincidences? Perhaps. A person can call anything a coincidence if he is determined not to see a pattern. But when the same themes, nations and struggles repeatedly emerge at similar spiritual coordinates, a believing Jew should at least ask whether history has seasons. Interestingly, our enemies often understood the importance of timing.
Bilaam, the biblical prophet hired to curse the Jewish people, sought the precise moment of divine anger so he could exploit it against Israel. He understood that spiritual time was not uniform. Haman understood this as well. He cast a pur, meaning a lot, searching for the correct month and day to destroy the Jews of Persia. He believed Adar was a vulnerable month because Moses died during it. What he failed to recognize, our Sages explain, was that Moses was also born in Adar. Haman saw part of the pattern but could not see the entire picture.
Even the Nazis recognized the psychological and spiritual power of Jewish time. Holocaust survivors and scholars have referred to a murderous timetable known cynically as the “Goebbels Calendar,” under which attacks, deportations, selections and killings were intentionally carried out on Jewish Sabbaths and holidays. The Nazis understood that attacking Jews on sacred days added another layer of spiritual cruelty to physical violence.
Think about the absurdity. Bilaam understood timing, Haman understood timing, and the Nazis understood timing, yet Jews today open their phones, analyze military developments and debate geopolitics without even knowing what month it is on the Hebrew calendar. Our enemies have sometimes paid closer attention to Jewish time than we have.
Of course, recognizing the calendar does not mean controlling it. Bilaam’s curses became blessings. Haman chose Adar believing he had discovered Jewish vulnerability, only to have his plan reversed upon him. The Nazis attempted to desecrate our holiest days, yet the Jewish people survived and rebuilt a sovereign Jewish state. They could sometimes recognize the pattern, but they could never control the God who created it.
Perhaps patterns do not apply only to time; perhaps they apply to nations as well. Modern society is increasingly uncomfortable with the idea that nations and peoples are genuinely different. It is more politically acceptable to imagine humanity as one interchangeable population divided by artificial borders. Of course, every human being is created b’tzelem Elokim, in the image of God, and possesses infinite individual value. But equality of human value does not mean uniformity. The Torah recognizes tribes, nations, languages and cultures. Humanity is diverse by design.
Different societies develop different intellectual traditions, family structures, priorities and strengths. Some produce extraordinary concentrations of scholars or innovators. Others excel in particular sports, arts, trades or military disciplines. These differences may emerge from history, geography, education, culture and countless interacting influences. Pretending they do not exist does not make us enlightened; it simply makes the world harder to understand.
The Torah speaks about nations as nations. Egypt has a character. Edom has a character. Yishmael, or Ishmael, has a character. Bavel—Babylon—Paras—Persia—and Yavan—Greece—appear in the Hebrew Bible as civilizations with recognizable historical identities and roles. The traditional seventy nations are not seventy identical societies carrying different flags. And then there are the Jews.
There is simply no ordinary explanation for the attention the world gives the Jewish people. We constitute a tiny fraction of humanity, yet the world is obsessed with us. Jewish representation among Nobel Prize recipients is wildly disproportionate to our numbers. Condemnations of Israel at international institutions are also wildly disproportionate. Our achievements receive disproportionate attention, our failures receive disproportionate attention, and our wars dominate international news. A Jewish housing project in Jerusalem can generate headlines on the other side of the planet. Whether they love us or hate us, the nations cannot seem to stop talking about us.
More than a century ago, Mark Twain struggled with precisely this mystery. In his famous essay Concerning the Jews, Twain looked across history and observed the extraordinary imbalance between the tiny size of the Jewish people and their influence on civilization. Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome had risen, dominated the world and faded, yet the Jew remained. Twain famously asked, “All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”
Twain never saw the State of Israel. He never witnessed the ingathering of Jews from Europe, North Africa, Yemen, Iraq, Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union. He never saw Hebrew resurrected as the spoken language of a modern nation or Jewish soldiers return to Jerusalem. If Jewish survival was already an inexplicable historical phenomenon in Twain’s generation, what would he say if he opened a newspaper today?
Now combine these two concepts: time has patterns, and nations have patterns. Suddenly we are given an extraordinary lens through which to examine history. If periods of the Jewish calendar repeatedly carry particular spiritual realities, and particular nations repeatedly play recognizable roles, then history is not simply a chaotic collection of unrelated events. There are seasons, coordinates and players.
Imagine watching the ocean without understanding tides. You could analyze every wave, measure the wind and study the temperature, yet still miss the larger force moving the water. Perhaps this is how much of humanity watches history. We analyze wars without considering the ancient relationships between the nations fighting them. We watch Jerusalem return to the center of world attention without asking why this tiny piece of land has obsessed empires for thousands of years. We watch events unfold around Pesach, Purim or Tisha B’Av without even glancing at the Hebrew calendar.
Perhaps one of humanity’s greatest illusions is that we control time. Governments move clocks forward or backward and call it daylight saving time. Legislatures create new holidays and designate national days. Empires create calendars and rename months. Political revolutions have even attempted to restart the counting of years. Man moves the hands of a clock and convinces himself that he controls time.
But changing a clock does not change time, and declaring a holiday does not necessarily create a spiritual season. The world can rename the months, but it cannot rewrite the architecture of creation. Perhaps this helps explain the Hellenistic Greek assault on Kiddush HaChodesh, the sanctification of the new month.
The Greeks understood that the Jewish calendar represented a fundamentally different understanding of reality. Greece could control territory, issue decrees and organize civic time, but the Jewish people looked to the heavens and sanctified sacred time according to the system given by Hashem. The nations may move the hands of the clock, but the Jewish people were commanded to sanctify time. That is a very different kind of power.
Yet it is critical to understand that we are not controlled by the calendar. Jewish time is not a prison, and dates do not dictate our fate. The calendar brings us into unique spiritual seasons in which we live, choose and act. Some periods may be particularly auspicious for liberation, repentance, judgment, revelation or rebuilding. They create an atmosphere and an opportunity, but what we do within that time matters.
Our Sages teach, ein mazal l’Yisrael—“Israel is not bound by the constellations or predetermined fate.” This is what separates the Jewish understanding of time from astrology. We are not helpless passengers being carried through a predetermined cycle. Repentance matters, prayer matters, national decisions matter and human courage matters. Above all, Hashem’s ultimate plan directs history toward its destination.
Perhaps nowhere is this more relevant than as we approach Tisha B’Av, the Ninth of Av. The date carries thousands of years of spiritual and historical weight and is associated with destruction, exile and national tragedy. But that does not mean we are condemned to repeat the same tragedy forever. Our prophets explicitly describe these fast days ultimately becoming days of joy and celebration. The spiritual coordinate remains, but what we experience when we arrive there can change.
The upcoming Tisha B’Av is not automatically destined to be another day of mourning simply because the calendar says the Ninth of Av. Whether we sit on the floor mourning another year of destruction or witness the transformation of that day into a festival of national redemption is not determined by a date printed on a calendar. Our actions and Hashem’s ultimate plan will determine how the spiritual potential of that moment is revealed.
This is not astrology or numerology. The calendar is not a fortune-telling device, and the Torah is not a codebook for predicting tomorrow’s headlines. But refusing to make reckless predictions is not the same as refusing to recognize patterns. The farmer understands seasons and the sailor understands tides, so why should a believing Jew assume that history has no deeper architecture?
Perhaps that is the most powerful lesson of the spiral. We return to the same spiritual coordinates, but we do not have to return as the same people. History does not merely repeat itself because we are capable of changing. The calendar brings us back to the moment, and the question is what we will do when we get there.
The world looks at the clock and sees chaos, but perhaps we are looking at the wrong clock. The Hebrew calendar does not merely tell us what day it is, and the Torah does not merely tell us what happened thousands of years ago. Together, they may help us understand what time it is, who the players are and, perhaps most importantly, what we are being called upon to do.