Staying Alive
By Reading the Book of Life
In elementary school, kids learn to track their reading. Do you remember submitting reports–with your parents’ signature–documenting you read a certain number of pages?
I do. And my kids went through the same process.
This exercise is well-intentioned. But more pages do not equal more learning. When it comes to reading sometimes quality beats quantity.
The Old Is New
These days I'm rereading cherished books more than discovering new ones. This feels odd. I used to love to make lists of all the books I read.
But now it feels like a safer bet to reread a good book rather than a new one because the best books constantly yield new meanings.
Perhaps that is what Vladimir Nabokov meant when he said, "There are no readers, only re-readers."
But Nabokov's insight is about more than my reading habits. It also tells us something about the Jewish holy day of Simchat Torah.
The Hebrew phrase means "Rejoicing with the Torah." We gather in the synagogue tonight and read the last verses of the book of Deuteronomy, immediately followed by the opening lines of Genesis.
Some try to read it all in one breath. It's like turning the last page of a book with your left hand and then immediately turning back to the first page with your right.
Torah is Life
Why do we do such a thing? Because we always have more to learn from Torah.
I don't mean more facts. I mean more wisdom and meaning. I mean more life. The more we live, the more we see.
Someone who has traveled to Israel sees more in the text than someone who has not.
A parent who has gone through infertility relates differently to Sarah pleading with God for a child than a single college student.
The Bible grounds our lives in a timeless and timely story. And that story never ends.
Does the Torah ever get boring? Well, my attention wanders when reading some of the genealogies. But I can't read the text without seeing some new idea. That's just the way it works.
Staying Alive
In Hebrew a new insight is called a hiddush. It means renewal.
Every time we read the text we are renewing it. We are keeping it alive.
But we are also renewing ourselves. The Jewish sages compare Torah to water. We thirst for it. And it keeps us alive.
As Jonathan Sacks put it, "Simchat Torah was born when Jews had lost everything else, but they never lost their capacity to rejoice. A people whose capacity for joy cannot be destroyed is itself indestructible."