Reading the Torah

The Jewish tradition is to read a weekly Torah portion and in so doing, in one year you have read or reread the entire Torah. Each year of this reading cycle enables the believer to learn more and see new insights into God's Word. And so in our pursuit, the best way to test what relevance the Torah has in our lives as seekers is to read it. But read it as you never have before--as if every letter pertains to you and see what you discover.

Consider this thought: "To read the Torah at any level beyond "Sunday school," one must have a sense of the whole when one reads the parts. To comprehend what happens in the exodus and in the revelation at Sinai, you have to know what has happened in Genesis 1. Like some films that begin with a sweeping shot that then narrows, so the first chapter of Genesis moves gradually from a picture of the skies and the earth down to the first man and woman. The story's focus will continue to narrow: from the universe to the earth to humankind to specific lands and peoples to a single family. (It will expand back out to nations in Exodus.) But the wider concern with skies and the entire earth that is established in the first portion will remain. When the story narrows to a singular divine relationship with Abraham, it will still be with the ultimate aim that this will be "a blessing to all the families of the earth. "Every biblical scene will be laden--artistically, theologically, psychologically, spiritually--with all that has come before. So when we read later of a man and his son going up a mountain to perform a fearful sacrifice, that moment in the history of a family is set in a cosmic context of the creation of the universe and the nature of the relationship between the creator and humankind. You can read the account of the binding of Isaac without being aware of the account of the creation or the account of the covenant between God and Abraham, but you lose something. The something that you lose-depth--is one of the essential qualities of the Torah." read entire article by Richard Elliot Friedman

And so here's a challenge: begin reading the Torah today. I will post each week's reading. This a great time to start as we have begun a new Torah reading cycle. So let's begin mining God's Word, in the beginning . . .

Genesis 1:1-6:8
if you use the above link, you can change the reading to different translations