How to Read the Torah Correctly
What does it mean to read the Torah “correctly”?
I don’t think it’s especially difficult, I just think it’s a foreign practice to most people who try, contemporary Jewish people included.
Certainly, Jewish cultural context provides innumerable points of deepening and enrichment that would be inaccessible without it, and indeed that should speak volumes to you about how much energy the world has spent interpreting this text without that context.
But anyone who knows how can read a story.
The foreignness part is that “modernity” — and the postmodern vacuum that has followed it — has dislocated people and media, so subjects of that dislocation imagine that all stories are the same, reflect the same reality, convey messages directed at all human beings — because they imagine that all human beings can receive and comprehend all messages, that messages convey absolute rational principles, and that the human mind is the absolute computer of such principles.
This is how people “consume content.”
But I bet it isn’t how you read stories you love.
I bet you relate to those as special, as dear friends, as BEINGS with whom you share a WORLD, one few others understand or can even access.
When you see “content” that doesn’t resonate, you scroll past, but I bet you have an extra deep relationship with the difficult parts of stories you love, because you love those stories, and you need them to be whole for you despite their difficulty.
This is how you read a story that’s part of your culture.
If you think about — and really feel into — how that works with your own stories, can you begin to imagine how it could be the same for others, with stories that are theirs and not yours?
That’s all you have to do to read someone else’s story correctly.
Read the Torah like it is what it says it is: the Beloved of a particular people, in the form of a story so that it can be transmitted down the generations. That transmission of those lineages is what the story is about. That transmission and those lineages continue to this day.
And I want to stress: I find that Jewish people around me do not do this! They read the Torah as content, delivering underlying ultimate principles, which they either accept or reject. This is what the materialist overculture has taught all humans to do, and few cultures have successfully remained immune.
But we haven’t forgotten how to read stories. We just have trouble distinguishing the ones that contribute to Profits from the ones that come from our Prophets.
Fortunately, culture survives.
