By Mordechai Schmutter

We made it to Simchas Torah! I especially am excited, because for the first time ever, I learned the entire Torah–ChumashandRashi. (And Stone! It helps that the Stone has a bookmark.)

And yes, we’re all supposed to learn the parashah every week, but not all of us make it. Some of us just lein through it quickly, and some of us basically just look it over to see what it’s about.

“Um, it’s about 150 pesukim.”

Sure, on Simchas Torah everyone’s inspired and decides to start. “Chumash and Rashi! This is going to be the year!”

Everyone says that. You look around the shul–everyone who’s not dancing is off to the side, learning Chumash. Or they’re staring into a Chumash, thinking, “How many pages of Rashi are there on the first pasuk? A dikdukRashi? Already?” Sitting in a room where everyone is running in circles is not conducive to dikdukRashis. Especially when inebriated, sweaty guys keep coming around and dragging you back into the circle.

“Why aren’t you dancing? We finished the Torah!”

“I’m only up to Bereishis.”

But everyone’s inspired. It’s like at the Siyum HaShas, when everyone sitting there said, “Yeah, I can do that! How hard can it be? One page a day. Half the page is commentaries!”

But as with dafyomi, few people make it to the end. You know how with dafyomi they say that everyone starts enthusiastically with Berachos, and then “Ba Shabbos, ba menuchah?” Well, with parashah, it’s the same way. Everyone starts on Simchas Torah, and then “Ba Shabbos ba menuchah.”

I start off learning the parashah almost every year, and then I fall off when I realize how long it takes to get to sheini in ParashasBereishis on a week that is basically one day long. Did you know that you can go through all seven days of creation before making it to sheini? Until I was in second grade, I thought the seven days was the entire parashah! Or I make it through a few weeks before realizing how hard it is to learn the parashah when you don’t have nine days of yomtov to sit around in a quiet sukkah and digest food in front of an open Chumash.

But I’ve been on top of it this year, and it wasn’t easy. Sometimes the week goes by too quickly, and I wake up on a Friday night (literally–I am continuously falling asleep all Friday night) and say, “Shoot! I haven’t started the parashah yet!” And there goes my Friday-night post-seudah pre-being-woken-up-and-dragged-upstairs nap.

But even when I learn bits of it during the week, it’s not easy to keep up. For one thing, you can’t set aside a specific amount of time to do it, because one parashah is 30 pesukim and another is 176. Originally, I started by saying, “Well, there are seven days in a week, and there are seven aliyos.” But firstly, the aliyos aren’t even. No one looked at the parashah and divided it equally seven ways so that every aliyah is exactly the same size, and some aliyos just stop in strange places. (It says, “Vayedaber Hashem el Moshe leimor,” and then it just stops. I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.) That was not one of the cheshbonos. For example, in Parashas Ki Sisa, two-thirds of the parashah is just about getting up to shlishi. The other aliyos are all basically on one page.

For dafyomi, you set aside your hour or whatever, and that’s when you do it. With Chumash, sometimes an aliyah takes you 45 minutes, and sometimes it’s 52 pesukim of names.

“I don’t know these guys. It’s Eisav’s in-laws.”

So you start looking forward to small aliyos. “Yay, today’s only five pesukim!” But you don’t realize that if your aliyah is small today, it’s going to be huge another day. They have a helpful note at the end of each parashah that says how many pesukim the parashah was, so you know afterward. Any pasuk you don’t do today makes tomorrow’s aliyah longer. Also, there’s no little note there that counts the Rashis.

It’s also not easy to find a good time. Some people learn it on the train, for example. And then, if it’s a short aliyah, they spend the rest of the time awkwardly staring at people. But I work at home. Should I take a train just so I have somewhere to learn Chumash?

But after finally learning every parashah, I’m glad I did. And for several reasons:

First, when you actually go over it, you find pesukim that you recognize. And you’re like, “Hey! This one’s from davening!” (Note: I know it’s not from davening. But you saw it there first. Until now you’ve been going through, say, Rosh Hashanah davening, and you were like, “Where are they getting all these pesukim from? Nach? Hang on, there’s a note . . . What’s a Deuteronomy? It sounds like a medical procedure. Numbers 13:1? I know 13 and 1 are numbers! Where is this pasuk?”)

Also, when you learn entire parshiyos in order, you start seeing it as one long narrative. You know all those Rashis at the beginning of the parashah that talk about how the parashah connects to the end of the previous one? Until now, I just kind of took his word for it. “The parashah ended with that? OK.” But if you see the Torah as one big unit, it actually makes sense. If you learn it from the beginning and keep going, you get to see why things are where they are. Especially if the line between parshiyos starts blurring because you’re always running behind.

Last week’s parashah wasn’t last week. I was still doing it five minutes ago. I didn’t even take a break between parshiyos. I have no idea which things are in which parashah.

Also, the things you didn’t even notice before start to have more meaning to you. Like where there’s a note in the Torah that says, “Half of the Torah in words.”

Woohoo! I’m buying a bagel.

It also helps if you celebrate these moments. When you were a kid, every time you finished a parashah, there was a siyum. And we still do that. Every week we finish a parashah, and there’s a mini siyum. Of Shabbos food. And it’s always a fleishigsiyum. Even in the Nine Days.

Maybe every time you finish a parashah, someone should sponsor shalosh seudos.

My point is that you should definitely learn the parashah every week, because it’s a wonderful thing. It’s like dafyomi–wherever you go, in any country in the world, you’ll always find people who are behind on the very same parashah that you’re behind on. Isn’t that amazing? You could be asked to speak at an aufruf–by which we mean that they came over to you at the actual aufruf and informed you that you’re speaking–and you can just find something on that parashah and everyone will have some context. Except you, because you didn’t actually learn the parashah. You were busy looking up a vort all Shabbos. Not that this happened to me, smack in middle of ChumashDevarim.

And better than dafyomi, we finish it every year! But we don’t sell out seats in major stadiums and sell kosher nosh and have tons of inspirational speeches. On the other hand, we dance and have a sponsored Kiddush featuring stuffed cabbage. Where is my stuffed cabbage after seven years of doing dafyomi? Why aren’t the stadiums selling me stuffed cabbage? Are they worried about the reaction of the cleaning staff?

“Where did all this cabbage come from? What happened here? A Polish soccer game?”

Are they worried that someone will drop a meatball and it will roll down 80,000 levels of seating and Shabbos clothes? Where is the guy singing Ein Adir K’Hashem standing on a chair with another guy behind him doing the hand motions? Where’s the train of people holding on to each other’s shoulders and weaving in and out of the dancing circle?

There’s also way more drinking when we finish the Torah than when we finish Shas. Drinking and running in circles. You come out feeling like you just had a Deuteronomy.

Mordechai Schmutter is a weekly humor columnist for Hamodia and is the author of four books, published by Israel Book Shop. He also does freelance writing for hire. You can send any questions, comments, or ideas to MSchmutter@gmail.com.

 

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