Rabbi Stiefel's Monthly Article

Current October 2026

Rabbi Sharon Stiefel

The Book Club That Reads the Same Book Every Year

What do you call a book club that reads the same book every year?

Judaism.

We just finished reading the Torah from beginning to end, and now we start over. Again. And again. And again. With Bereishit, we return to the very beginning not only to the beginning of Genesis, but to the beginning of another year of Torah reading. Jews have been doing this for millennia: rolling the Torah back to the beginning and starting the story all over.

Rabbi Ben Bag Bag taught in Pirkei Avot, a collection of ancient rabbinic wisdom: “Hafoch ba v’hafoch ba, turn it over and over again, for everything is in it.” Rabbi Ben Bag Bag understood that a single reading could never exhaust what Torah has to offer. Turn it over, look at it from another angle, and you may discover something you couldn't see before.

I am not one for rereading books. The Torah is my exception.

In school, we generally repeat a class only if we have failed it. Torah works differently. Year after year, we return to the same stories of creation, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Moses, Miriam, and the Exodus not because we have failed, but because we have changed.

The words may be the same, but we are not.

A verse that meant little to us last year may suddenly speak to something happening in our lives. A character we once dismissed may look different. A familiar story may raise a question we never thought to ask before.

We inherit Torah, but we also have a role in its continuing life. When we question, reinterpret, and bring our own experiences and moral understanding to the text, we are not standing outside the tradition. We are participating in the tradition’s unfolding. The Torah changes as we encounter it, and we change as we encounter it. In that exchange, something happens: the Torah speaks to us, and we speak back.

This is at the heart of what I value in Reconstructionist Judaism: the understanding that Judaism is not a finished inheritance, but a living tradition that continues to evolve. Our task is not simply to preserve what we have received, but to engage it deeply enough that it can speak meaningfully to our lives and that we can help shape what Judaism will become.

Perhaps that is what hafoch ba asks of us: not simply to read the same words again, but to encounter them again.

We don't return to Torah because we have nothing new to learn. We return because there is always something new to discover and because we ourselves are always becoming someone new.

So here we go again.

Bereishit. In the beginning.

Same Torah. New year. New eyes.