Perek Yomi – Learning Torah Every Day
What has 924 chapters, is among the foundational texts of world civilization, and is read all over?
That’s an easy question. It’s the Tanach, the scriptures upon which Judaism is based, the writings that form the structure upon which we live our lives. Together, the Tanach’s three sections – the five books of Moses, the Torah; the Nevi’im, or Prophets, and the Ketuvim, or writings – make up the Bible.
If you were to ask most Jews detailed questions about the Tanach, though, you’d learn you were asking something far more difficult. You’d get vague answers at best. Most of us were taught Bible stories in Hebrew school; those of us who go to synagogue regularly know much of the Torah and some of the Prophets (except, for many people, the part you read in the summertime); many of us took Bible as Literature courses in college. But few of us actually have read all of its 24 books. United Synagogue’s Perek Yomi program offers a way to fill that gap, to help us read the Tanach, understand it, engage with it, and integrate it into our lives.
Perek Yomi – literally a chapter a day – encourages participants to read a chapter of the Bible every day. That’s one chapter every single day, with no time off for anything (you can, of course, fall behind and catch up). United Synagogue offers questions for each chapter, and makes them available on its website, www.uscj.org, and as email, but it does not supply answers. Those come from the readers themselves.
It takes about two and a half years to complete the cycle. Since the program started in 1999 (when receiving the questions as a fax or even snail-mailed hard copy was the norm) Perek Yomi has run through three full cycles. Participants can discuss the chapters in synagogue-based groups or in groups they set up themselves, or they can mull them over alone. When they have finished the entire Bible they can start it again – one thing they can know for sure is that they will see different things and have fresh insights each time around – or they can move on to Mishna Yomit to tackle the Talmud.
The cycle will begin again this year. It will start where it always has, with the book of Joshua, the first of the prophets. From there it will go through the books in order, circle back to Genesis, and end with Deuteronomy. It will start on Simchat Torah, when we celebrate the cycle of the year by ending the reading of the Five Books and immediately beginning again. And the haftarah read on the day that we begin again? From the book of Joshua.
Dr. Morton K. Siegel, who is now United Synagogue’s senior vice president and the director of the Hazak program, has overseen many of the organization’s programs in his 50-year tenure. Perek Yomi is one of his many brainchildren. “Who is the ideal student for Perek Yomi?” he asked. “Anyone who is interested in learning about the fundamental matrix of Judaism. That person can be one committed to the idea that the Tanach is of divine provenance, a non-believer, or someone anywhere in between. I believe that the only hand that wrote the Tanach is the human hand; the inspiration might be divine but the hand is human. But that doesn’t make any difference. Anyone who would like to become familiar with Bible and study it – that’s our student. Every Jew should be familiar with it.”
Dr. Siegel wrote many of the questions; his goal was to make them neither too simple nor too complicated. “We want people to go into the text, not just skim the surface,” he said. “Most of our people are intelligent; one must never confuse lack of knowledge with lack of intelligence. And they also have good secular educations. So when we wrote, we wrote up, even in terms of vocabulary. I did not want to condescend; I felt I was writing to intellectual equals, or even superiors, although I had the benefit of knowing something they did not yet know. I knew that probing the text would be of interest to them, and the inquiry/discovery method would be just fine, far better than trying to spoon-feed them.”
As could be expected with a program that provides a strong frame but respects its users enough to know that they can provide their own building materials, people work with Perek Yomi in different ways.
Martin Shukert of Beth El Synagogue in Omaha, Nebraska, is a charter member of a group that has been getting together to discuss biblical texts every week since 1999. The group is lay-lead; out of a core group of about 15, between 10 and 12 show up every week. “The people who are in it look forward to it every week, just like people who meet every week to play softball,” Mr. Shukert said. For the first cycle, the group read a chapter a day; after that “we started cherry-picking; it’s sometimes more like passuk yomi,” a verse a day. The group is informally led by Dr. Leonard Greenstone, who chairs Creighton University’s Judaic studies department, but “it’s very much a group of autodidacts,” according to Mr. Shukert. “Everybody has different roles and different insights. Some people are analytical, some more intuitive; we have an Israeli and a South African; people who are in government and in politics; we have lawyers, I’m a city planner. People all bring their own perspectives.
“For example, we discussed the book of Daniel, which normally nobody ever reads. We spent about four months on it. We discussed Daniel as a paradigm for the Jewish overachiever because the book has a lot to say about Jewish life in America. Daniel and his friends are a minority group that rises to political ascendancy, so in an odd sort of way it’s a recipe for how Jewish public officials might operate in terms of squaring their civic responsibilities and their faith in civil society. We talked about how Daniel is such an odd book because of the almost hallucinatory elements of the second half, and we tried to figure out how the parts fit together. And we spent a fair amount of time on the idea of resurrection and related concepts. The group tends to free associate; that’s why it takes such a long time to get through any one thing.
“We are all good friends,” he continued. “It’s not quite a havurah but it’s a group with very special relationships. What makes it work is our interest in exploring the text without constraints.”
Rabbi David Kalender of Congregation Olam Tikvah in Fairfax, Virginia, used a slightly different model; his Perek Yomi is a clergyled program. It did not start that way. At first, in 1999, “I simply passed out the information, so people could get the email,” Rabbi Kalender said. “But a couple of months into it I realized that it could be a study opportunity, so I set up a weekly class. People could read each day, and then we’d study those seven chapters together.
“What became apparent after just a couple of weeks, though, was that people wanted to bring so much to the table, sharing ideas, that if we tried to go through seven chapters in an hour it would be ridiculously superficial. So we decided to go off schedule. It’s supposed to take two and a half years to finish a cycle but it took us another 18 months.” The class draws about 12 people each week from a pool of about 16; many others read a chapter a day and look at the Perek Yomi questions but do not come to the class.
“People are attracted by the idea that this program is larger than their own community” Rabbi Kalender said. “It’s the chance to plug into a national or even international community of Jews. You’d see references to it in United Synagogue publications, or if, for example, you go to someplace in Minneapolis for your cousin’s daughter’s bat mitzvah and you see that they also have a Perek Yomi or Mishna Yomit program going on.”
Students in his class, like the members of the Omaha group, bring their own backgrounds to it. “People have insights I never thought of,” Rabbi Kalender said. “One person is a therapist, and she brings her knowledge of human relationships; I have somebody who is an archeology buff and another who studies Jewish-Christian interactions at the turn of the millennium.
“The class builds community,” he concluded. “It’s been a catalyst for deep and thoughtful and spiritual experiences. As it fosters spiritual growth it also helps create yet another community of Conservative learners. A synagogue community can connect people to one another and transform a sacred singular act into a sacred community.”
Lois Jacobs, who belongs to Congregation Beth Emeth in Herndon, Virginia, did not join a group for Perek Yomi. Instead, she read a chapter almost every day, and she used Dr. Siegel’s questions faithfully. She found that the program filled what had been embarrassing gaps in her Jewish education, and the questions “made me think about what I’d read, and connect it, and put things together. It was a deeper level of critical thinking.” And that was just the beginning. Since then, “I’ve done so much more!” Among other things, Ms. Jacobs spent a summer in Israel studying at the Conservative Yeshiva, part of United Synagogue’s Fuchsberg Jerusalem Center. “I think it sparked a new hunger,” she said. “Everything is incremental, and you never know where this stuff is going to lead you.”
She did read a chapter almost every single day, Ms. Jacobs said. “One of the things that’s so wonderful about it is the discipline of doing a little bit every day.” And although it wasn’t wonderful every single day – sometimes she wasn’t in the mood to study, sometimes the questions didn’t excite her or simply left her cold – on the whole she found studying to be increasingly exhilarating. Just as runners are fueled by the endorphins their own bodies produce, she floated on the intellectual energy she generated. “There’s nothing like it,” she said.
Rosalind Judd of Temple Israel in Albany, New York, like many women of her generation, neither became bat mitzvah nor had an extensive Jewish education. She learned to read Torah when she was an adult, but then, she said, she felt somehow fraudulent, as if by reading Hebrew she was incorrectly signaling that she could understand it. “Perek Yomi,” she wrote in a talk she gave about it, “was my opportunity to rectify the omissions of my childhood.
“It has added enormously to my sense of myself as a Jew, and my understanding of the breadth of our foundation. I have gained a familiarity with the voices of my ancestors. I can now differentiate between the stern resonance of Jeremiah and the tremulous hope offered by Isaiah; I can hear the bleakness of Kohelet and the sensuality of Shir Hashirim.
“I am grateful to the Perek Yomi program for prodding me to do what I should have and could have done on my own years ago,” Ms. Judd concluded.
To learn more about the next Perek Yomi cycle, due to begin on Simchat Torah, email Dr. Morton Siegel at siegel@uscj.org or call him at 646 519-9340.
