READING OF THE TORAH From earliest times, the public reading of the Torah has been a constitutive element of the spiritual life of Israel. At Mount Sinai, to confirm the covenant between the people and God, Moses “took the Book of the Covenant and read it aloud to the people” (Ex. 24:7). The penultimate commandment of the Torah specifies that every seven years (on Sukkot following the sabbatical year) there should be a national assembly at which “the people, men, women, children and the strangers in your communities” are to hear the Torah proclaimed “so that they may listen and learn to fear the LORD your God and observe faithfully all the words of this Torah” (Deut. 31:12). At critical moments during the biblical era, when the people had drifted from their faith, national renewal was marked by a public Torah reading. King Jehoshaphat sent out officers who “taught throughout Judah, having with them a scroll of the LORD’s Torah. They circulated throughout the towns of Judah and taught the people” (II Chr. 17:9). King Josiah assembled “all the men of Judah, the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the priests, the Levites, and all the people, young and old alike, and read to them the entire Book of the Covenant which had been found in the LORD’s Temple” (II Chr. 34:30). The book of Nehemiah (8:1–12) contains a graphic description of the return of the Babylonian exiles to Israel. Ezra gathered the people at the Temple and read the Torah to them “from dawn until midday,” assisted by Levites who “interpreted it and explained its meaning, so that they understood the verses.” These were national occasions. At a more local level, tradition holds that Moses instituted the practice that the Torah be read on Shabbat, Yom Tov, Ḥol HaMo’ed, and Rosh Ḥodesh. Ezra ordained that it also be read on Mondays and Thursdays (market days in ancient times) and on Shabbat afternoons (Yerushalmi, Megilla 4:1). The public reading of the Torah is as ancient an institution as prayer itself. The synagogue thus became not only a house of prayer but also a house of study. The result is a dynamic tension between speaking and listening. In prayer, we speak to God. In study we listen to God speaking to us, His word unchanged and undiminished across the centuries. The assembly convened by Ezra, when the Torah was not only read but also explained, became the model for educational activities within the synagogue, of which the derasha (“sermon,” or more precisely, “exposition”) is only one of many forms. To an unparalleled degree, Judaism is predicated on universal literacy and lifelong learning. The Torah is not just written on parchment; it is meant to be engraved on the Jewish soul. Keriat HaTorah, translated as “the reading of the Torah,” also means “the proclamation of the Torah.” The public reading symbolically affirms the Torah as the written constitution of the Jewish people as a nation under the sovereignty of God. It is a reenactment of the revelation at Mount Sinai when the Israelites first became a nation, bound by the Torah’s laws, summoned to translate its ideals into life.

לְדָוִד מִזְמוֹר A psalm of David: A psalm of joyous procession to the Temple. It begins with creation, “The earth is the LORD’s,” and moves directly to the moral requirements of the religious life: “Who may climb the mountain of the LORD?” Just as God created an orderly universe, so we are commanded to create an orderly society. Worshiping God at the Temple may not be divorced from honesty and integrity in everyday life. The latter part of the psalm, “Lift up your heads, O gates,” was said by King Solomon when the Ark, containing the tablets of the covenant, was first brought into the Temple (Shabbat 30a). As the Torah scroll is returned to the Ark, we recall that historic scene.

וּבְנֻחֹה יֹאמַר When the Ark came to rest: These words, taken from Numbers 10:36, recall the journeys of the Israelites through the wilderness in the days of Moses. They parallel the words we say when the scroll is taken out, “Whenever the Ark set out” (page 159), said by the Israelites when they began a new journey. Throughout the centuries, wherever Jews went, they took the Torah with them: it became their “portable homeland.” עֵץ־חַיִּים הִיא לַמַּחֲזִיקִים בָּהּ It is a tree of life to those who grasp it: though Adam and Eve were forbidden to eat the fruit of the tree of life (Gen. 3:22), the Torah is our intimation of eternity in the midst of time. Immortality is a matter, not of how long we live, but of how we live.