We made it to Simchat Torah! I especially am excited, because for the first time ever I learned the entire Torah—Chumash and Rashi. (And Stone!) It helps that the Stone has a bookmark.

And, yes, we’re all supposed to learn the parsha 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 Simchat 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, going, “How many pages of Rashi are there on the first pasuk? A dikduk Rashi? Already?!” Sitting in a room where everyone is running in circles is not very conducive to dikduk Rashis. Especially when heavily inebriated sweaty guys keep coming around and dragging you back into the circle.

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

“I’m up to Bereishit.”

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!”

I actually start off learning the parsha almost every year, and then I fall off when I realize how long it takes to get to sheini in Parshat Bereishit on a week that is basically four days 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 parsha!

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 and say, “Shoot! I haven’t started the parsha 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 parsha is 30 pesukim and another is 176. Originally, I started off by saying, “Well, there are seven days in a week, and there are seven aliyot.” But firstly, the aliyot aren’t even. No one looked at the parsha and divided it equally seven ways so that every aliyah is exactly the same size, and some aliyot 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 cheshbonot. For example, in Parshat Ki Tisa, 2/3 of the parsha is just about getting up to shlishi. The other aliyot are all basically on one page.

For Daf Yomi, 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.”

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

Firstly, when you learn entire parshiot in order, you start seeing it as one long narrative. You know all those Rashis at the beginning of every parsha that talk about how the parsha connects to the end of the previous one? Until now, I just kind of took his word for it. “The parsha ended with that? O.K.” But if you see the Torah as one big unit, it actually makes sense. Especially if the lines between parshiot start blurring because you’re always running behind.

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.”

Woo hoo! I’m buying a bagel!

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

My point is that you should definitely learn the parsha every week, because it’s a wonderful thing. It’s like Daf Yomi—wherever you go, in any country in the world, you’ll always find people who are behind on the very same parsha that you’re behind on. Isn’t that amazing?

And better than Daf Yomi, 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. But, on the other hand, we dance and have a sponsored kiddush featuring stuffed cabbage. Where is my stuffed cabbage after seven years of doing Daf Yomi? 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?”)

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.

So, start learning the parsha! No, like right now. You want to finish it before the sweaty guys start drinking.

By Mordechai Schmutter

 Mordechai Schmutter is a freelance writer and a humor columnist for Hamodia, The Jewish Press and Aish.com, among others. He also has five books out and does stand-up comedy. You can contact him at [email protected].