Journey Through Nach with Rabbi Ya'akov Trump
Why is it that most of us never make it past the first few sefarim in Navi?
We learn Chumash every week and leave the other two thirds of Tanach alone. Nineteen books of kings and prophecy, exile and redemption, and Israel as a young nation trying to live out what the Torah foretold.
Weekly. Every week in Journey Through Nach I take the text in depth, with the commentaries, the explanations, and the patterns that run underneath the stories and what they can mean today. We are in Shoftim at the moment, and it is a good place to join.
Daily. Our app, Tanach Yomi, holds a full library of ten minute overviews of each perek covering every sefer of Nach and every aliyah of Torah. Join the cycle that is running now, or begin your own whenever you are ready.
And each week I give a second shiur, The Whys of Judaism, on the reasons behind the things we do.
Before we go anywhere else, I want to give you the shape of it. Most of us are carrying a handful of episodes with no sense of where they sit or even what they mean. When was the last time you reviewed the full arc and the episodes of this epic timeline?
It begins at a river. Yehoshua brings a generation that has known nothing but wandering across the Yarden and into the land. The manna stops. From here they grow their own food and fight their own wars.
Then three centuries with nobody in charge. Shoftim covers a long stretch with no king and no capital, when every crisis produces a temporary rescuer and the same collapse follows each one. The sefer says it plainly at the end. Every man did what was right in his own eyes.
They ask for a king, and are warned. Shmuel tells them exactly what a king will cost them and gives them one anyway. Shaul cannot carry it. David can, and unites the tribes, and takes Yerushalayim, and then nearly loses everything to his own household.
The high point comes early. Shlomo builds the Beis HaMikdash, and Israel is, for one generation, wealthy and unified and at peace. It does not survive his death.
The kingdom splits and never comes back together. Ten tribes in the north, two in the south, two capitals, two priesthoods, centuries of hostility. This is the hinge of the whole thing, and everything after it is decline in two directions at once.
The prophets arrive as it worsens. Eliyahu, Elisha, Amos, Hoshea, Yeshayahu, Yirmiyahu. They are not fortune tellers. They are the opposition, telling kings what nobody else will, and mostly being ignored.
The north disappears. Assyria takes the ten tribes and they are never heard from again. Yehuda watches it happen and does not change course.
Then the ruins. Bavel takes Yerushalayim, burns the Beis HaMikdash, and marches the survivors out. Yirmiyahu had been saying it for forty years. Eichah is what is left.
And it does not end there. Koresh permits a return. A much smaller group goes back. They rebuild an altar, then a Temple, and the old men who remember the first one weep when they see the second, because it is nothing like it. Ezra reads the Torah aloud to people who no longer understand the Hebrew. Nechemiah rebuilds the walls with a sword in one hand.
Then the prophets fall silent. Malachi is the last. No king, a diminished Beis HaMikdash, a small community holding on in someone else's empire, and no more direct word from God.
Two sefarim run alongside all of this, among the Jews who never came back. Daniel in the courts of Bavel and then Paras, receiving visions he is told to seal, and Esther in Shushan, in the only sefer where God's name never appears.
That is where Nach leaves us. Not in triumph, but in a partial return and an unfinished rebuilding, at the start of a long stretch in which we would have to work out what faithfulness looks like without prophecy to guide us.
Which is roughly where we still are.
Avraham and Moshe stand at a height. We look up at them, and their failings are subtle enough that the commentators have argued for centuries over what they were.
The figures in Nach are drawn closer to the ground.
Shaul, chosen and reluctant, undone by measuring himself against someone better, visiting a witch on the last night of his life because the prophets have stopped answering him.
David, gifted and vain and wholly devoted and self-serving, sometimes within a single afternoon.
Eliyahu, who calls down fire in front of the entire nation and then walks into the wilderness and asks God to let him die.
Yirmiyahu, right for forty years about the thing nobody wanted to hear, and hated for it the whole time.
Devorah and Yael, who between them end a war the men would not.
This is where our tradition keeps its portraits of recognizable people, with the failures left in and the consequences attached. I find it is the part of Tanach in which a person can locate himself.
When I learn through Nach the thing that strikes me most is how often the same shape returns. Security, then drift. A warning nobody wants to hear. A reckoning. A remnant that comes back and begins again.
It happens in Shoftim on a cycle short enough to watch inside a single sefer. It happens again across Melachim, slower and larger. It happens at the Churban, and again at the return. The scale changes and the shape does not.
This is what it has meant for us to be a nation. Not steady progress, but failure and redemption, repeatedly, with the record kept honestly enough that we can still recognize ourselves in it.
Once Gemara became the measure of a serious Jewish education, Nach turned into the material one covered before the real learning began. Day schools move through Chumash, gesture toward Nevi'im, and go on.
I wrote about this in Mosaic not long ago. Many of us with genuinely good Jewish educations have never learned Amos or Daniel, and it occurs to almost no one that this is unusual.
It has begun to change. This past February, twenty-two thousand women completed a cycle of daily Tanach and began again the next morning at the first perek of Yehoshua. In Israel, Project 929 is now in its fourth cycle.
Rabbi Ya'akov Trump serves as rabbi of Young Israel of Lawrence-Cedarhurst. He has recorded more than two thousand shiurim, has taught the full cycle of Nach more than once, and writes on Tanach for Mosaic, HaMizrachi, and Jewish Action.
Leave your name and email and I will send it to you.
With gratitude to our many sponsors, this is a free program.