This week we joyously celebrate the bounty of our lives during the festival of Sukkot. Even though most of us are not farmers, we think about the cycles of nature and, more specifically, the harvest season.  

If we were farmers, while focusing on the harvest at hand, we also would be thinking about the next year, the next growing season, as nature is a never-ending cycle. Farmers and even gardeners look ahead, learning new tricks, gaining new insights, buying new equipment that will help them reap greater benefits from what they sow.

So, too, is it with Torah.  At the end of this week, on Simchat Torah, we will finish reading the Torah and start reading, once again, from the beginning. According to our tradition, the Torah reading cycle never really comes to completion. We finish the book of Devarim/Deuteronomy and then immediately reroll the Torah and start Bereshit/Genesis from the very beginning.  

Like nature, Torah is a never-ending cycle.

By rereading the Torah year in and year out, our tradition teaches that there are always new things to learn.  

In Pirkei Avot, Rabbi Ben Bag-Bag said, “Turn it over and over for everything is in it” (Avot 5:22).  The text does not change from year to year, but we do, as through living we have gained new insights, experiences and knowledge, and maybe we even have new questions. Just as a farmer or gardener may bring new life to their soil, we bring new life, each year to Torah. 

As we enter a new cycle of Torah, may each reading produce new nuggets of wisdom, infuse our lives with marvelous insights and be as sweet as honey in our mouths.