Reading the Torah Year After Year

I was sitting in services this past Shabbat, listening to the Torah reading and then to the rabbi’s comments afterwards. We were just starting the book of Deuteronomy, Moses’ farewell address to the people summarizing all of the events of the Exodus and subsequent wanderings in the desert, as he recalled them. His audience was the second generation, those who had been children at the time of the Exodus or had been born during the wanderings, and so they had no direct personal memory of crossing the Sea of Reeds or of the revelation at Sinai, except for Joshua and Caleb.

Because of the nature of this book, the sermon touched on various narrative points throughout the Five Books of Moses. I found myself nodding along familiarly, feeling excited or moved, feeling like weeping as I always do when Moses dies at the end and does not get to go into the Promised Land himself. I was also remembering having seen so many of these locations for myself when I spent this summer in Israel.

It suddenly occurred to me WHY we read the Torah all over again, year after year. Or at least the reason that speaks the most clearly to me. Other explanations have been given. The Rabbis in the Talmud emphasize that you have to study and review and study and review or you will forget all of your knowledge. We need this repetition to remember and thus refresh the lessons we have been taught by the Torah. Contemporary rabbis often say that we read the whole Torah every single year from start to finish because, while the Torah is in the same place year after year, telling the same stories and teaching the same lessons, WE are in a different place each year and our perceptions and understanding change as we hear the passages read to us once again.

But I had a whole different awareness at this point, an “aha moment” if you will. Repeating these stories year after year reinforces their familiarity for me. I smile and laugh, or I sigh and cry, or I nod my head as memories flood in. I have heard these stories over and over again throughout my entire life. They are now embedded in my memory – indeed, they have BECOME my memory by now. I am reading (or listening to) my diary being read aloud. These ancestral records are as well-known to me as the memories created by my personal experiences. The sense that I was present, that I personally remember all of these events, is reinforced each year because of that repetition. My family’s history is seamlessly blended together, from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob through my maternal and paternal grandparents and down into the generation of my own grandchildren. I remember it all. No part is less familiar to me than any other. And THAT is the value I am deriving by hearing the Torah read all the way through year after year.