What Torah Means... to Cindy Rozenberg

Counting the Omer Day 12

My first adult encounter with Torah was at college. I took a course called "Mythopaeic Thought" in which we read and compared the stories in Genesis to the stories of other contemporaneous cultures. It was my first window into the wisdom of Judaism showing me that our ancestors elevated the common mythologies of the time to posit a moral code, a compassionate theology, and an ordered universe.

Torah tells the stories of real people, even the archetypes are described with their strengths and their weaknesses. Torah tells our ancestors' stories in a historical narrative encountering God who expects moral behavior. Other mythologies illustrate the randomness of human fate and the capricious behavior of the gods. Their legal codes value property over human dignity. I took other courses in the Judaic Studies department as a result of that first course and had the privilege of exploring Job with Nachum Glatzer and Genesis with Nechama Liebowitz, whom I thought were just professors but later learned they were famous in their fields. They taught me the value of studying interpretations of Torah from different time periods as both a mechanism of understanding our people's history and sociology as well as a way to grapple with the text myself. I found depth of spirituality, wisdom, and life lessons in this study as these professors shared ancient, modern and their own commentaries on the text and encouraged us, their students, to engage the text ourselves. I learned that Torah has both universal lessons as well as offering us Jews our particular history.

I enjoyed Shabbat morning Torah Study whenever I was able to participate. I found the group discussion approach to Torah refreshing and inspirational. For me, reading the text and participating in the discussion as it might move onto tangents and then come back again to the text, became the process of Torah. Torah was the starting point for our exploration of our relationship to God, to our people, to our history, to our everyday lives, and to our present practice of Judaism. I was enriched by the comments made by others in the group, whether I agreed with them or not, and I felt I was participating in an ancient Jewish practice of encountering the text. Torah tells the story of our people and its relationship to God through our ancient history and as such it can be the starting point of our encounter with God as well. Torah grounds me in Jewish history and make me feel that I am a part of the continuing story of Judaism.