This was my D’var Torah for Parashat Bereshit 5785 (October 26, 2025), the start of the new Torah reading cycle. Here’s a short video that does some of this from a similar angle.
Some of the best cookbooks are mostly not recipes. Each dish is the occasion for a story – of someone special in the family who passed the recipe along, or of a culture where this originates, or a time the author traveled to the place the recipe is from. Those descriptions can themselves be luscious, and the stories and images make the tastes even more layered when you actually make the recipe.
Should we think of the Torah as the original great cookbook? If you skipped past the introductory pages, say into the middle of Leviticus, it would totally seem like that kind of cookbook.
Scrapbooking – that’s a practice which has come a long way from scissors and bad glue. Forget about digital, I’m talking about the craft of scrapbooking. The fine papers to write on or paste on, handmade or marbled; the perfect sleeves to slip things into. Which could be anything from pictures to favorite poems to family trees. All of which tell a story — the growth of a person, a family, maybe even over generations, helping us know who we are.
Should we think of the Torah as the original fabulous scrapbook? It’s on such beautiful parchment, presented so artfully. It’s got all kinds of things in it, with the perfect cover to slip it into and out of.
I am trying to get you thinking from other angles about what kind of book the Torah is, or if it’s even a book at all, as we embark for something like the 1500th or 2000th-plus time leafing it through it.
It’s interesting that we call the Torah a “book” pretty automatically. It does seem to be in a book, or in a scroll, and every part of it looks pretty much the same, like one book. And yet it’s unlike every other book, where someone asks you “What’s that book about” and you can answer in a couple sentences. That’s not what we do — we’re so used to considering the Torah’s parts – each story, each law, often each word.
So forget for a minute what you know, and consider the cookbook quality and the scrapbook quality of the Torah.
The Torah has recipes, lots of recipes, and stories of meals. It has travelogues and family trees. Price lists and blueprints and property deeds. Jokes – some pure slapstick, some edgy enough to get you cancelled and not just today, maybe even back then. Yes, laws and stories, but so many kinds of stories, traversing the known world and the mythical world, up mountains and into deepest hottest valleys, adventures and long slogs, crises and amazing triumphs, wrenching dilemmas and world-changing turnarounds.
Is there any other kind of single book that is like this? How do you classify this, what kind of genre or thing even is the Torah?
We’ll just have to call it – a Torah. It’s more than stories and laws, or laws and stories, which is often how we divide it. Halacha and aggada. It’s in a class all by itself.
So we’re starting today another year of reading it and hearing it and seeing it and acting it – and tell me there’s another book group you’re in that does all of those things! And if by chance there is, tell me that it does all of those things with the same book year after year.
We can get much out of Torah by focusing on each week’s installment, or even on a single episode or verse or word. But it’s a good idea also to zoom out and think about the whole thing, to consider what the big story is of the cookbook, the scrapbook, the Torah.
Stories are everything, and the best stories create our lives and our world, just as surely as we make stories and tell them.
I was going to say, “I don’t have to tell you that stories are everything”, but I do have to tell you, and I have to reassure myself. Last year when we began to read the Torah, Parashat Bereshit a week after last Simchat Torah, I worried out loud right here that in a world of bombs Torah would turn out to be too small, and the next week I worried out loud that in the world of lies Torah might nothing more than a temporary hide-out for us away from the world.
But lies get their energy out of stories too, and bombs are usually justified with stories. Stories give life and take life, even if they don’t do so as directly. So it is urgent that we think about what story we are trying to be within, as we start to encounter the Torah this year. Let me tell you what a few might be.
First a story I don’t think we should go with. The cookbook theory of the Torah I didn’t get from left field. There is a version of the-Torah-is-a-cookbook that was for a while the dominant academic theory about how the Torah was first assembled, by the original keepers of the sacred recipes, the kohanim, the priests. The idea is that the recipes for the holy meals, the offerings, were put in the middle part of the Torah for a reason by the priestly editors.
They wanted us to believe that the sacred meals are everything, that they were vital to keeping us connected with the Divine, and the stories in the cookbook helped us to understand why and what would happen if we didn’t. The cookbook told us that the Temple was the center of everything, and that we should admire the kohanim as priests and judges. Because we needed them to keep balance and keep us from changing the one good thing that was helping us keep our home and keep ourselves alive, as a small people in a vast world.
That was never the only view of what story the Torah is telling. And I don’t think it’s a good one even if you substitute our rituals for our ancestors’ and rabbis for kohanim. We should still cherish the recipes and the family stories around them, but that’s not the kind of cookbook the Torah should be for us.
There is another scholarly historical view that the Torah took shape when we were in exile, and that it’s the story of a people who have always been beloved of God no matter what seems to be happening around us. After all, the Torah is a scrapbook of the scrappy, full of pictures of when the first-born gets his comeuppance and the unlikely child emerges. Even Pharaoh is humbled and we come forward.
And though the Torah scraps far too many travel receipts, exile after exile, starting from the Garden of Eden and through our Genesis ancestors, the real story is that we are never permanently far from where we ought to be as the Jewish people. When we are not home, we are for most of the story in the desert heading toward a promised land, and we are never really detached from our destiny, only delayed. The brochures for where we’re going, pasted into the scrapbook in Exodus and Numbers, just get better and better.
And there is another view that the Torah got edited along the way two or three times when we were strong in our land, either really strong or stronger than we had recently been. Twice it was prophets and maybe even some renegade priests, who put this scrapbook together. They lived a bit north of Jerusalem, close enough to have the inside scoop but far enough for some critical distance. They weren’t satisfied with resting on the laurels of priests or kings, the Temple or royal power as it was.
So they assembled for us a story with the Exodus as its backbone. In Genesis we learn that we are part of humanity, and all of humanity arrived as the image of the amazing Creator. We Jews were brought onto the stage as a unique part of humanity, not because we are a different sort of human but because the Divine needed a tikkun for humanity, a pilot project that would affect the whole. Even God can’t control everything about the whole world once these majestic humans are part of it, so there’s Pharaoh out there, and we got caught by him. And we had to fight our way out and pray our way out and then spend a long time learning how not to let Pharoah seep his way into us – his way of power and the idols he imagined were real and his easy slide toward oppressing.
We would be a people at home again, we would rebuild ourselves, we would be empowered — but we’d continue to be watchful of ourselves. In better times to build our spiritual strengths, and not to sell out and cut corners by taking advantage of our weakest. In worse times, not to lash out at each other, not to find the only answer in physical power, but to find it also in the same spiritual strengths.
Which of these stories, or their variations, will be the one we need this year, as we page through our ancestral scrapbook? Pore over the specific tales and teachings and words. Savor all the tastes and the keepsakes, the adventures and the. But don’t forget to keep the thread of the big story, the one we need to make powerful in the world of bombs and lies. Let’s find that together, week after week.