By Elias van Tijn
Welcome to the web site for ‘The Torah – a book to read together’
This book helps to make the Torah more understandable and adds questions to think about.
If you are interested in reading the Torah (the 5 books of Moses) in the way we read it in Judaism, find the original difficult to read, and the children bibles to childish, then this is the book you want.
In traditional Judaism we read the five books of Moses (e.g., the first five books of the Bible[1]) in a one-year cycle; every Shabbath (Saturday) a defined part[2]. In Hebrew these parts are called ‘parashot’ (parasha in the singular). The cycle starts at the Jewish festival of Simchat Torah, this means ‘the Joy of the Torah’. In the western calendar this festival always occurs somewhere around September-October. Because the Jewish and the secular calendar are built differently, the exact date in the Christian calendar varies somewhat. More information about the Jewish calendar in this book is found in chapter 23 Pkudei – ‘About the calendar’.
This book follows this ‘parasha-of-the-week’ rhythm with added explanations for each parasha, and if you follow that, you will have read the whole of the Torah in a period of one year, and learned a lot about how we, in Judaism, read and interpret the text.
That is why you should buy this book!
[1] In Judaism we do not use the term ‘Old Testament’ because for us there is only one bible, the Jewish bible containing the five books of Moses, the Prophets and the Scriptures. The text commonly called ‘the New Testament’ is no part of the Jewish tradition and we don’t read it or acknowledge its divinity. If needed I will refer to the two texts as ‘the Jewish bible’ and ‘the Christian bible’.
[2] Some less traditional Jewish communities use a three-year cycle.
