By Mike Steklof, Ed.D.
For many years now, I have spent a portion of Friday night learning the weekly parsha, the Torah portion of the week. I also try each year to choose another Torah commentary to read alongside the weekly parsha. This year, that was Rabbi Shai Held’s The Heart of Torah.
Then there are the divrei Torah I hear in shul, which have become even more meaningful when they build upon what I have already learned. At Kehillat Ohr Tzion, Rabbi Schachter returns again and again to an idea that is both simple and profound: G!d loves us. Hearing that message after spending time with the parsha often causes me to look back at what I have learned through a different lens. Where is G!d’s love present in this story? How does it shape the relationship between G!d and the Jewish people? Even in moments of struggle, anger, or disappointment, is there an underlying love that holds that relationship together?
The longer I learn Torah, the more I appreciate how remarkable it is that we can return to the same words year after year and continue to discover something new.
The Torah hasn’t changed. I have read these stories before. I know that Abraham leaves his home, that Jacob wrestles with the angel, that the Israelites leave Egypt, and that Moses stands at the edge of the Promised Land. Yet each year, a friend, a book, or a teacher points to a word or an idea that I have passed over countless times, and suddenly I see the story differently.
That, to me, is one of the wonders of learning Torah. The more we learn, the more we realize that there is still more to learn. A familiar story can take on an entirely different meaning simply because someone has taught us to ask a new question.
This year, one of those questions has been inspired by Rabbi Schachter: What changes when we read Torah knowing that G!d loves us?
What if we look at the Torah not simply as a collection of laws, stories, and obligations, but as the story of a relationship? Like any deep relationship, it contains expectations and disappointments, moments of closeness and moments of distance. The Jewish people struggle with G!d, and sometimes G!d struggles with us. Yet through it all, the relationship endures.
Perhaps that is one reason we never finish learning Torah. A relationship cannot be understood in a single reading. We return to it, experience it differently, and discover dimensions we could not see before.
And we have changed as well. I am not the same person reading the parsha today that I was five, ten, or twenty years ago. New experiences allow old words to speak to us in new ways.
Soon we will reach the end of the Torah and immediately begin again. We already know the words that are coming. But we don’t yet know what we will discover in them this year.
Perhaps that is one of the great gifts of Torah learning: the words remain the same, but there is always something new waiting for us to discover including, perhaps, new ways of recognizing G!d’s love for us.
Mike Steklof, Ed.D. serves as the Executive Director of Hillel of Buffalo and is currently searching for the Torah commentary that will accompany his Torah learning in 5787. Suggestions welcome at [email protected].
