When we watch the evening news, everything we hear and see will have already happened. The news anchors are telling us stories. We watch because we believe that knowing those stories will help us navigate the path from the present to the future.
We hear the same story over and over again, told with slight variation. Books and movies are the same book or movie, made with different actors or characters, set in different settings, but the same story.
How many times do I have to listen to the same story before I absorb its lesson?
I remember reading stories to my young children. They wanted to hear the same story over and over. I would read it because I loved them, and experienced powerful joy when I pleased them; but in the back of my mind I noted how silly it was to read the same story over and over. The same happened with songs, the same song, over and over and over and over, until it became almost unbearable.
As I prepare for Pesach this year I Imagine G-d’s love and patience. He plays the same story over and over, the same song over and over, and I continue to ask him to play it again and again, still not getting it.
