After living in Israel for years, time stopped meaning the same thing.

January first now passes quietly for me.

I notice it. I acknowledge it. And then I move on.

That reaction would have surprised me years ago. I grew up in France, where January first marks a collective pause and restart. Wishes are exchanged. Resolutions are made. The calendar turns, and with it comes the sense that something new has begun.

After sixteen years in Israel, that sensation has been thinning. Not because January first has lost its legitimacy, but because I no longer inhabit time in the same way.

This is not about religion, and it is not a critique of the Gregorian calendar or Christian traditions, but an observation about how calendar systems shape how we experience time, continuity, and belonging.

Living in Israel makes that difference impossible to ignore.

Calendars do more than organize days. They encode assumptions about what time is for.

The Gregorian calendar structures time as linear and sequential. It emphasizes progression, forward motion, and clear markers between what was and what comes next. January first functions as a civic and symbolic threshold. It allows societies to synchronize, to reset administratively and psychologically.

The Jewish calendar operates on a different logic. It is cyclical, layered, and accumulative. Time does not move away from the past. It revisits it. Meaning is not exhausted in a single........

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