Every day, tens of billions of man-hours are wasted sleeping. One could argue that sleep is our most wasted resource. Indeed, why spend 25 to 30 percent of our lives doing nothing? Why sleep?
Perhaps it seems like a pointless question. Why sleep? Because our bodies demand it. Because that's how we're physiologically built—we require so many hours of sleep each day to function. However, for a Jew, there are no pointless questions. If God created us a certain way, there's a reason. If our active hours always have to be preceded by what the Talmud calls "a little death" of sleep, there's a lesson here, a truth that's fundamental to the nature of human achievement.
If we didn't sleep, there would be no tomorrow—life would be a mere, seemingly endless "today." If we didn't sleep, each of our actions and thoughts would be a continuation of all our previous actions and thoughts. There would be no new beginnings in our lives, since the very concept of a "new beginning" would be completely foreign to us.
Sleep means that we not only have the capacity to improve but also to transcend our own being. It means opening a new chapter in life that is neither predicted nor made possible by what we have done or the level we have reached so far. It means freeing ourselves from the limitations of the past and building a new, recreated self.