If the country has been arguing about the same three things for forty years, at what point is continuing the argument the actual tradition?

The Talmud has been arguing about whether an egg laid on a festival day may be eaten for two thousand years, and nobody calls that a failure. Machloket l'shem shamayim — argument for the sake of heaven — is not a detour around truth; it is the road. What you inherit in this tradition is not the answer but the obligation to keep showing up to the table: candle lit, bread broken, the same three questions your grandfather brought. The Hillel-Shammai disputes never ended and were preserved in full, both sides, because the disagreement itself was considered holy. The test is not whether the argument continues. The test is whether you are still capable of being changed by it — whether the other voice at the table has any chance of landing. When it doesn't, when the form remains but the risk is gone, you have kept the ritual and abandoned the covenant.

“Both these and these are the words of the living God.”

— Babylonian Talmud, Eruvin 13b

Late November, that hollow week after the holiday when the table is cleared but nothing resolved — yes, the argument is the tradition now, and the question worth sitting with is whether you chose it or inherited it and convinced yourself there was no difference. Sartre's insight was not that freedom is pleasant but that it is inescapable: even the decision to repeat is a decision, made fresh each morning, dressed in the clothes of inevitability. A society that names its recurring argument a custom has made a choice — not suffered a historical accident, a choice — and the bad faith isn't in the arguing but in the warm relief of calling the cowardice a custom. Forty years is not a wall. It is a posture, collectively held, collectively renewable. You were born into it, which is different from being trapped by it, though the difference requires something most people would rather not spend.

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism

When a people circle the same three disputes for forty years, they are not preserving a tradition — they are building a shrine to their own refusal. The Quran is not tender on this point: the Children of Israel wandered forty years in the wilderness, and the wilderness was not the destination; it was the consequence of a people who could see the Promised Land and still find reasons to delay entering it. The tongue was created for dhikr — for remembrance, for testimony, for the word that cuts clean and moves forward — not for the performance of grievance dressed as principle. An argument that cannot resolve, that feeds on itself, that grows more elaborate with each decade, has become an idol, and the first command remains the first command. There is no tradition in Islam that sanctifies the loop. There is only the straight path, and the question of who is actually walking it.

“So lose not heart, nor fall into despair: for ye must gain mastery if ye are true in faith.”

— Quran 3:139

The argument is the bell. You keep striking it to hear yourself exist — which is not nothing; existence wants proof, and sound is faster than thought. But notice: you are not listening for the tone anymore. You are listening for the strike, the moment of your own impact, the confirmation that you are still here and still swinging. Forty years is not a long time to avoid the silence between strokes; some monasteries manage centuries of productive noise. The practice is not to argue better or to stop arguing but to put your palm flat on the bronze and hold it until the ringing quits. What remains after that is not the answer to any of the three questions. It is the thing that was never one of the three questions — the one nobody will bring to the floor for a vote, because it does not have a side.

“Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”

— Zen proverb

Camus watched Sisyphus and declined to pity him, because pity would require the boulder to be a problem rather than a fact. Forty years on the same three arguments means the country has chosen this weight — has shaped its hands around it, learned the particular ache of this hill at this hour before the rock rolls back again. This is not a critique. It is a description of what humans do when confronted with questions that do not resolve: they develop a relationship with the not-resolving, give it a name, teach it to their children. The absurdist move is not to escape the boulder or to pretend it is light, but to look the thing full in the face and refuse to call it a tragedy. You are not diminished by forty years of the same argument. You are, at this point, its author — which is the only dignity the hill allows.

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus