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If I asked how many of you love to read, I imagine an overwhelming number of you would answer in the affirmative… enthusiastically so.  I’ll ask instead: how many of you love to re-read?

Have I got a book club for us!

Picture it: we’d pick a novel, we’d meet … we’d discuss … and then for our next meeting there would be no need to process our next choice.  No need to stress the week of about how maybe you shouldn’t go to Book Club because you’ve things have been stressful and you didn’t have time to get to this month’s book.  You’ve already read it! Month after month, year after year: the same book.

It sounds a little different, I admit.  But I’m positive we have something here.  Because Jewishly speaking, we’re all re-readers. 

Next week we will celebrate Simchat Torah – the last of our four High Holidays.  Simchat Torah marks the end of another Torah reading cycle.  And the moment we’re done, what do you suppose is the first thing we do next?

We start  it all over again.  In the words of Rabbi Jeff Salkin, “the scroll goes from the death of Moses to the creation of the world without missing as much as a breath.”

If you ask a faithful re-readers of their most beloved books why they do it, these are some of the responses you are likely to hear.

“Every time I read it again, I discover something new, something that didn’t strike me the first time I read it.”

“Life changes so much, and so quickly.  Returning to old books is like returning to conversations with old friends – someone, or something that knows where you’ve been, knows who you are.”

“I guess I do it to remind myself that it’s not always brand new things we need to look to in order to feel alive and inspired.”

When speaking about Torah, our rabbis taught,: “Turn it and turn it, for everything is in it.”  Reading after reading, the words on these pages – on this parchment, as it were-- have so much to teach us.  And so does the practice of re-reading.  Every time we begin the cycle again, the story of Abraham’s journey up the mountain with Isaac, or Rachel and Leah’s bitter rivalry, or the Israelites constructing a tabernacle in the middle of the wilderness as part of their quest for God and a place in the world – every time we read it again, there is the potential to discover something new, something that didn’t strike us the first time we read it.  The words on the page don’t change, but we do.  And so we return to them year after year, because they hold our both our history and our future.

And something else is revealed here, with still another turn.  Re-reading Torah reminds us of the value in shaping what is old and seemingly well-known into something that still may have the power to surprise us.  The ending of a Torah cycle and beginning it again tells us, without ever saying the words: “stop and look around.  Pay attention to everything you think you know.  You may just surprise yourself.”

So we end the story, but the story never ends. For all of us, as we begin again, may you find new ways of reading what it is you need to find into our story.  For all of us … a good turn forward. 

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach,

Rabbi Rebecca Gutterman