Written by Lisa Bennett, High School Talmud and Tanakh Teacher and Akiva Coordinator

On one of the many sleepless nights of March 2020, I found refuge in the pages of Angels in America. As someone whose life was touched by the AIDS epidemic, I found comfort in words that only a survivor of those times could have penned. In the early days of this pandemic, I was very focused on what I needed—I wanted words that would bring me back to the New York I knew and loved, and so I read Rachel Wetzsteon’s Sakura Park and reread Angels in America. I knew I wanted to encounter these words, these authors; but the spiritual wisdom of our tradition is that we read and reread our sacred canon—even when we don’t feel called to do so and perhaps most importantly when we least feel called to do so. And so I began to read the Book of Ruth and journey with Moshe. It was hard to remember who I was when I last read these texts and that is part of what makes Torah study a spiritual practice. It is a sacred experience to make room for how we have changed since we last read the words. We revisit the words of Torah to both meet the characters and to meet ourselves on the page. There were details in these stories that I once glanced over, that now stood out in sharp relief. The words have stayed the same for thousands of years, but we have not. We see the stories differently at every reading because we are different people each time we pick these stories up.