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I started studying Torah every week.
Even writing that sentence feels weird to me.
For most of my life, ongoing Torah study seemed like something only very religious people do. It seemed archaic and repetitive. And, if I am being completely candid, it seemed a little boring.
After all, how many times can we read the same stories over and over again, year after year?
Adam and Eve eat from the tree. Noah builds the ark. Abraham leaves home. Isaac is almost sacrificed. Jacob wrestles with an angel. Joseph gets sold by his brothers. Moses confronts Pharaoh. The Israelites wander through the desert.
Then we finish Deuteronomy, roll the Torah back to Genesis, and start all over again. I never quite understood it — until I started studying it. And I discovered something almost embarrassing: Nearly everything I had been searching for everywhere else was already there.
I have spent decades interested in psychology, self-development, relationships, leadership, discipline, philosophy, meaning, ambition, and personal growth. I want to understand why people behave the way they do. I want to understand why I behave the way I do.
How do I become less reactive? How do I deal with jealousy? How do I control my fear of abandonment? How do I make difficult decisions? How do I forgive? How do I repair something I damaged? How do I choose the right partner? How do I build a family? How do I handle money? How do I respond to failure? How do I balance ambition with gratitude? How do I know when to fight and when to surrender? How do I become the best version of myself?
There are entire industries built around answering these questions — books, podcasts, therapists with Instagram accounts, life coaches, leadership seminars, meditation retreats, YouTube channels.
And then we open the Torah and realize Jews have been discussing many of the same questions for thousands of years, and not always directly. That was the part I had missed.
I used to read Torah far too literally. If we read it only as a collection of ancient stories, we can understandably wonder what any of it has to do with modern life. But Jewish tradition almost never stopped at the literal story. The Torah became the beginning of the conversation, not the end of it.
The Talmud interrogated it. The Midrash filled in its psychological dimensions. Jewish philosophers examined its social, political, and moral implications. Kabbalists searched for spiritual realities beneath its words. Generation after generation asked the same essential question: What is this trying to teach me about being human?
Take Abraham. God tells him: “Lech lecha” — Hebrew for “Go forth.” Leave your land, your birthplace, and your father’s house. Literally, it is a story about a man migrating from one place to another. But Jewish commentators noticed something extraordinary about the language. “Lech lecha” can also be understood as “Go to yourself.”
Suddenly, Abraham’s journey is not merely geographic. It becomes psychological, even spiritual. To become who we are supposed to become, sometimes we have to leave behind the identity we inherited: the expectations of our families, the presumptions of our cultures, the versions of ourselves that have become comfortable. Abraham’s journey becomes everyone’s journey.
Even the Exodus changes when we stop seeing it only as history. Egypt in Hebrew is Mitzrayim, a word associated with narrowness and constraint. Suddenly, the Exodus is not only about Jews escaping Pharaoh thousands of years ago. It becomes a recurring human experience. What, in each of our lives, is our Egypt? What is constraining us? What are we being narrow-minded about?
Yet Torah is not just about these profound moments in the Jewish story. It also lives in the more mundane, specific, and seemingly ordinary details of daily life.
Take Ki Teitzei, the Torah portion we just read last Saturday. It says that when we build a house, we must construct a railing around the roof so nobody falls. Ancient building code? Yes. But it is also a lesson in responsibility. We are responsible not only for harm we intentionally cause, but for dangers we can reasonably anticipate. “I didn’t mean for that to happen” is not always enough.
That applies to houses, but also to businesses, relationships, leadership, and parenting. Sometimes responsibility means building the railing before anybody falls.
Ki Teitzei also says that if we see something our neighbor has lost, we cannot simply ignore it. The Torah repeatedly warns us not to “hide ourselves” from it. The temptation being regulated is not theft. It is indifference. We see someone else’s problem; we could help, but helping is inconvenient, so we look away. Torah challenges that instinct.
Another law says that if we forget a bundle while harvesting our field, we should not go back for it. Leave it for the stranger, orphan, and widow. Western culture tells us to optimize everything. Maximize revenue. Maximize productivity. Capture every opportunity. Torah asks a different question: Does everything have to be maximized for us? Maybe leaving something behind for someone else is not inefficiency. Maybe sometimes it is morality.
There is even a commandment exempting a newly married man from certain obligations for a year so he can remain home with his wife. The principle is obvious once we see it: Relationships require protected time. We cannot say a relationship is high-priority while giving it whatever time remains after work, friends, hobbies, phones, and everything else.
Then there is Ki Tavo, the upcoming Torah portion. It begins with a farmer bringing the first fruits of his harvest to Jerusalem. But instead of simply saying thank you, he recounts Jewish history. He remembers Egypt, slavery, redemption, and how his people reached the land.
Why should someone harvesting fruit have to tell a history story? Because success creates amnesia. When things go well, it becomes easy to believe we created everything ourselves. So Torah interrupts the successful farmer at precisely the moment he might say, “Look what I built,” and tells him: Remember what came before you, remember what you inherited, remember the circumstances you did not control. What looks like an agricultural ritual becomes a defense against entitlement.
Ki Tavo then goes even further. The Torah criticizes the Israelites for failing to serve God “with joy and gladness of heart” despite having abundance. They had good things; they had simply lost the ability to experience them as good. That may be one of the most modern psychological problems imaginable. We spend years wanting the career, money, relationship, house, children, or recognition. Then we get them. And astonishingly quickly, what we desperately wanted becomes normal.
Today we call this hedonic adaptation. Torah understood the problem thousands of years ago. Having blessings and feeling blessed are not the same thing. Gratitude is not merely an emotion. It is a discipline
.The deeper I went, the more I started seeing this everywhere. The Torah is overflowing with accountability, consequences, repairing relationships, controlling appetites, treating people fairly, respecting parents while still leaving their homes, choosing life, remembering where we came from, protecting strangers precisely because we know what it feels like to be one, building societies that restrain power, forcing human beings to stop working one day every week because productivity cannot be the whole definition of a human life, and so much more.
The sages took these ideas even further. The Talmud asks questions that feel strikingly modern. What do we owe other people? What constitutes embarrassment? What damages someone’s dignity? When does intention matter? When does behavior matter more than intention? When are we responsible for consequences we did not intend? How should competing obligations be prioritized? How should disagreements be conducted? How much responsibility do we have for the behavior of the communities around us?
The sages disagree constantly. That itself became one of the things I love about Jewish learning. Judaism rarely gives us the luxury of pretending difficult questions are simple. One rabbi says this. Another says the opposite. A third creates an exception. A fourth asks whether the exception has an exception.
At first, this can be maddening. Eventually, we realize it is the point. Life is complicated. People are complicated. Ethics are complicated. Wisdom requires learning how to think, not merely being told what to think.
Whether every interpretation speaks to us is almost beside the point. Instead, the point is that Torah is much larger than the literal reading I once gave it — which brings me back to the question I used to ask: Isn’t studying Torah repetitive?
Yes, absolutely. Every year Abraham leaves. Every year Jacob wrestles. Every year Joseph gets thrown into the pit. Every year Moses stands before Pharaoh. Every year the sea splits. Every year the Israelites complain in the desert. Every year we return to exactly the same text.
The question is not whether the Torah is repetitive. The question is whether we are the same person returning to Torah each year.
At 20 years old, we might read Abraham leaving his father’s house and think about independence. At 30, we might read it and think about identity. At 40, we might read the exact same passage while raising children and suddenly wonder what parents are supposed to give their children — and what they eventually have to let them leave behind.
Joseph’s story means one thing when we are beginning a career. It may mean something entirely different after we have experienced betrayal. Jacob and Rachel look different when we are dating. They look different after 10 years of marriage.
The binding of Isaac looks different before we have children than it does after we become a parent. The commandment to honor our parents changes as our parents grow older. Shabbat changes once we have spent 20 years answering emails at midnight. Forgiveness changes once we desperately need someone to forgive us.
The text stays still, but each of us moves. That is why we can study the same Torah for 70 years without actually studying the same Torah twice. Every time we return to it, another version of us is doing the reading, the studying, the contemplation, the analysis, the execution and implementation.
And that may be one of the deepest ideas Judaism ever gave us: We tend to imagine wisdom as something we acquire. Read the book. Learn the lesson. Move on. Judaism seems to suggest something different: Some lessons cannot be learned once. They have to be revisited. Knowing something intellectually and understanding it through experience are not the same thing.
At 25, someone can tell us that life is short. At 50, we may finally understand what the sentence means. At 20, we can learn about forgiveness. At 35, somebody may hurt us badly enough that we finally have to practice it. We can read about parenthood for years and still encounter the Torah differently the first time our children disappoint us.
Wisdom does not merely depend on the quality of the teacher. It depends on the readiness of the student. And life keeps changing the student.
I used to think the repetition of Torah was evidence of its limitations. Now I think it may be part of its genius. We repeat the Torah because human beings repeat themselves.
We become jealous again. We become afraid again. We lose perspective again. We become arrogant again. We fall in love again. We make mistakes again. We forget what matters again. Every year, Judaism brings us back — back to creation, back to Abraham, back to Egypt, back to Sinai, back to the wilderness, back to the questions and, hopefully, back to the best version of ourselves.
I started studying Torah because I thought I might learn more about Judaism. Instead, I find myself learning about ambition, relationships, fear, responsibility, discipline, love, leadership, forgiveness, failure, family, and myself.
It turns out the ancient book I assumed had very little to say about modern life has been discussing the things I care about most for thousands of years. I just wasn’t thinking about it that way.
I've literally just come to this realisation that my own tradition contains all the wisdom I have been seeking elsewhere, after spending a lifetime avoiding it or skirting around the edges.
Written with your usual eloquence and brilliance, Joshua!