Torah & Texts

What’s the Torah? What’s the Tanakh?

The Torah is the sacred religious text of the Jewish people. It’s sometimes called the Five Books of Moses. Sometimes its called the Hebrew Bible (more on that here) and the Old Testament. The Torah consists of the Books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Each week Jews around the world read the same section of the Torah. This section is called a Torah portion or parsha in Hebrew. It is read aloud during services, most commonly at Shabbat services on Saturdays.

Each Torah portion recounts a story from the Torah, beginning in the book of Genesis (i.e. In the beginning…) and concluding in the Book of Deuteronomy (i.e. And this is the blessing…). Jewish denominations have different cycles of reading the parsha. The Reform and Conservative communities read only one-third of each weekly parsha so it actually ends up taking three years to completely read the Torah. Orthodox communities read the entire parsha each week and finish reading the Torah on Simchat Torah, a holiday that celebrates the ending and beginning of reading the Torah.

While some Jews go to services and hear the reading of the Torah portion, others read each parsha in the comfort of their own home. We’ve brought each Torah portion into the 21st Century by animating all 54 Torah portions into short videos.