How frequently I hear people express this sentiment. These might be the words of one stricken with a fatal illness, or of a busy parent or spouse who yearns to be with the family, or of the many people who find themselves missing out on an important activity or merely a good night's sleep.

Time is a currency more precious than money. Many of us would trade dollars for a few extra hours in the day, if it were possible.

In his novel, Einstein's Dreams, Alan Lightman imagines young Albert Einstein dreaming about worlds in which time behaves in unusual ways. There is the world in which time moves backwards, life beginning at the grave and ending at birth. There is a world in which each day is an exact duplicate of the day before, as in the movie, Groundhog Day. In another world, time moves more slowly as one moves farther from the earth's surface, so people seek out the highest altitude in order to live longer.

Logically we know that these descriptions are pure fantasy. Time only moves forward, sixty seconds per minute, sixty minutes per hour, each moment passed is gone forever. But our experiences tell us that Einstein's Dreams are not so farfetched. A child waiting for a toy to arrive in the mail feels as if each day is an eternity. Two lovers on the verge of a brief separation feel the hours pass like minutes. There are people who seem to live in the past, whether by keeping alive old traditions, or by avoiding any notion of progress. There are people for whom life never changes, each day exactly as the one before. There are senior citizens who are as physically fit as children, and there are young people who look old beyond their years.

Time is constantly moving, unchangeable. But time is also a mystery, and sometimes fails to adhere to the rules of logic.

In our Jewish tradition we experience the full flavor of time. Our lives move forward with the passing of time. We experience the pain of illness, death, family separation, personal failure. And we experience the joy that accompanies the passage of time-birth, marriage, graduation, recovery. Then again, we see time continually repeating. The joke about the astronaut who complains that his orbit around the earth was nothing more than tefillin on, tefillin off reflects a basic truth about Jewish tradition. Every morning of our lives, as we recite the same words of the Shacharit (morning service), we declare that God creates the world everyday!

So each day is exactly like the day before, and that should be as exciting as experiencing God's creation firsthand. Each year is like the one before, in that we will go from season to season, and from holiday to holiday. Therefore, even routine activities, like a walk outside, or the touch of another human being, though we've experienced it a thousand times before, can feel fresh and new if only we remember to see it that way.

Though we can't really travel back in time, we nonetheless defy science when we celebrate the holidays. Pesach returns us to Egypt and Shavuot takes us back to Mt. Sinai. And we can even make time stand still, just briefly, when we breathe in the spirit of Shabbat each week, and temporarily set aside the affairs of the real world.