Stringing the Pearls: How to Read the Weekly Torah Portion

1. Starting Points

2 PRELIMINARIES: WHAT ARE WE TALKING ABOUT? 1. Starting Points Long ago our Rabbinic forebears divided up the Humash into 54 consecutive units. Each week, starting in the fall at the end of the Sukkot festival, one unit or portion would be read starting with the beginning of Genesis and progressing, over the succeeding weeks and months, to the end of Deuteronomy, so that in the course of a luni-solar year the entire five books would be traversed .1 Thus did the annual cycle of weekly Torah portions come about. In Hebrew these weekly portions are called variously parshiyot or parashiyot (singular parashah) or sidrot (singular sidrah). This practice of reading through the entire Humash annually began in Babylonia and has since become normative for much of Jewry. An alternative cycle was developed in Palestine that spanned three years (some sources speak of three and a half years). In that system , which itself has variations, the weekly readings are of course shorter and only about a third of the five books are read within a calendar year. Modifications of that practice obtain today in some Conservative synagogues. This book is pegged to the annual cycle , though everything in it applies and is easily adapted to the triennial system. Here we come to a basic question: Was the Torah and its weekly portions meant to be read or heard? Is the public reading of the Torah in synagogue on Shabbat and holidays, not to mention Monday and Thursday mornings, a liturgical act or an intellectual endeavor , a kind of group study session? The indications are that it is both. Hearing and reading, reading and hearing, are not mutually exclusive acts. The Torah addresses 3 STARTING POINTS both the heart and the mind—though not necessarily in that order . It is meant to be heard and it is meant to be studied. Indeed, Judaism presumes a synergy between the two, between what the auditory nerve and the optical nerve each transmit to the brain. To hear the weekly Torah portion read aloud without having some idea of what it is that is reaching our ears is, in the Jewish scheme of things, as problematic as knowing a great deal about the Bible without hearing the voices that are speaking in and through its text and pondering the import of what they may be suggesting or implying to us. What you are holding now is a guide and a handbook, the goals of which are: • to tell you what kind(s) of texts you are looking at—and hearing —when you are reading or following along any one of the 54 weekly parshiyot; • to map out for you the textual terrain of the Pentateuch; • to identify for you an array of strategies you can use in your own encounter with the text, as you struggle to make sense of it from year to year; • to furnish you with some basic tools and resources, both in books and on the Web, that can help you develop your knowledge and your reading acumen. This is a book that will send you off in many directions depending on where you will want to go in your spiritual and intellectual search. One more preliminary point. This is not a book about the Hebrew Bible (TANAKH) . But I will certainly have a lot to say about it, for it is difficult, if not impossible, to talk about the Humash in isolation from that larger corpus of text. There are many ways to read the Humash, many lenses through which its depth and breadth can be seen. The oldest ones, which originate as far back as the very early Rabbinic period (2nd century B.C.E.), are peshat and derash. Peshat derives from the Hebrew verb root p-sh-t, +#p “to lay out” or “to explain,” and is related to the Hebrew word pashut, “simple.” To read for peshat is to read for the meaning that the plain sense of the words, the grammar, and the syntax of a verse furnish. Derash derives from the Hebrew verb root d-r-sh, #rd, “to seek” or “to inquire.” It involves putting some kind of interpretive move on the text whereby a word or a 4 PRELIMINARIES: WHAT ARE WE TALKING ABOUT? phrase or a verse is understood to say something that goes beyond its literal meaning. The Rabbis developed a whole menu of such interpretive techniques...