-Torah, the word, means teaching.
The way teaching is often given in Judaism is through books.
-The Torah has a lot of valuable lessons
and a lot of interesting things to say even
to people who are not Jewish.
-That's totally correct, because the reason that the Torah was
given in the desert for everyone to see,
was that everybody has a piece of the Torah.
-People sometimes call it The Five Books of Moses,
because he's one of the main characters,
and also he was involved in writing them down.
So Torah can mean the Five Books,
or it can mean all those books and conversations that
have grown up around the Five Books,
with people trying to figure out how
to live responsibly and kindly.
We read the Five Books of Torah on a scroll, written in Hebrew.
-So the Torah is really five books in one.
-Genesis, Exodus Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy--
or actually, the Jewish terms for those books
are Bereshit, Shemot, Vayikra, Ba Midbar and D'Varim.
-So at the beginning of the Torah,
we have the story of creation, the story of Adam and Eve,
the story of Noah, and then we have the story of Abraham,
who had a child, Isaac.
And the first book of the Torah tells us
about their travels and their missions.
-Second book is called Shemot, Exodus,
and that's about the Jews who were stuck in Egypt,
and then they were freed from slavery with lots of miracles,
and they moved off onto their journey
to the Promised Land, which is Israel.
-Moses leads the people to Mount Sinai,
and Moses runs up the mountain, has some conversations
with God, and then carries some of God's laws down the mountain
on two tablets of stone.
-The third book is kind of a bit of an interruption.
It's called Vayikra, and it's about the priests,
and the offerings, and it's lots and lots of rules.
-Nowadays in Judaism, we don't sacrifice animals,
but we do give up our time in order
to think about how to behave well in the world.
-And then the fourth book is Ba Midbar.
It's all about the wandering in the desert for 40 years.
Really, that's about them stopping being slaves
and learning to actually be a people.
-They tend to complain a lot.
They argue with Moses.
They argue with God.
But eventually, they're getting towards a new land,
and that's what we have in the fifth book of the Torah.
-Finally, the last book, just before we go into Israel,
is Moses telling them all the rules,
reminding them of everything's that's been happening.
That's called D'Varim-- Deuteronomy.
-Moses dies just before the people enter
the land of Israel, so in a way, the Five Books of Torah
end with Moses being buried.
-The Torah scroll is treated with great respect.
So it has clothes like a queen or a king.
It has wonderful, silver crowns, and it has this special robe.
Now we undress it on Saturday morning during our service,
and also some synagogues have services on Monday and Thursday
morning, as well, when you would also undress the scroll
in order to read from it.
Hagbah means lifting up, and it's
a moment when someone lifts up the scroll,
so the whole community can see the section
which is going to be read.
-You would show all directions, so that everyone can see it.
[SPEAKING HEBREW]
-We read the Torah from right to left,
and we read it using something called a yad,
which means hand in Hebrew.
And as you can see, there's a little hand
carved at the end of this.
And we use it to point at the letters, as we read them.
-We don't want to touch the parchment,
the stuff that the scroll is written on, directly
with our fingers.
And that's one of the reasons we also dress the scroll,
so that when we're not using it, it's well respected.
It's in its special Ark, which is where the scroll lives,
where the scroll is kept.
-The scrolls that we use today are essentially
the same as the first ones written thousands of years
ago, because we can only copy from one to another,
and then it has to be checked three times,
because one mistake can change the whole meaning of what
it says.
It's important for it to be written by hand.
A computer can print out a book that you can read,
and you can still learn it that way,
but you can't use it in public ritual,
because it hasn't been imbued with the holiness
that a person with a soul can give to it.
-So originally, all the Torahs were written with one of these.
This is a reed quill.
Nowadays, most people use a feather.
This is a swan's quill.
But this quill is from a vulture, a bird we can't eat,
so I can't use it to write.
The parchment sheets, they're joined together
with animal sinew and a gold-plated needle.
-The book is never finished.
You can roll up the scroll, but really, the scroll
continues in all those conversations we
have about what does this mean?
And how does it affect my life?