To those who have ever been privileged to lease or buy a new car, there is something thrilling about that new car smell, about seeing the odometer at such an incredibly low number, about the pristine condition of the car.

Some drivers, in the spirit of wanting to take good care of their new car will even look at the Owner’s Manual in the glove compartment. They will browse through it. They will take special note of the car maintenance instructions. How often should the oil be changed? What is the ideal maintenance schedule? What to do in case there are any issues?

Statistics have shown conclusively that owners who follow the Manual have cars that last much longer, run better and have less breakdowns or issues than those who ignore the Manual or simply wait until something goes wrong. The well-maintained vehicles also have a much higher resale value.

Well, in Judaism, we believe that God also gave us an Owner’s Manual: the Torah, the Five Books of Moses. Our belief is that the Five Books of Moses were written by Moses as dictated word for word by God at Mount Sinai, over 3,300 years ago. The Torah has since been painstakingly copied, word for word, letter by letter, in an unbroken tradition ever since. The tradition of flawless transmission of the text of the Torah is so inviolate, that if a reader of the Torah were to mispronounce a vowel of one of the words during the public reading in the synagogue, there would be a howl from the crowd correcting him with the right pronunciation.

A portion of the Torah is read every Sabbath in the synagogue in a yearly cycle where the full text of the Five Books of Moses is completed on the upcoming holiday of Simchat Torah (October 14-15, this year). It is a time of joyous celebration, with dancing in the synagogue, together with the beloved Torah scrolls. (Since the October 7, 2023 attack, which was Simchat Torah that year, it is twinged with sadness as well).

Now imagine taking the Vehicle Owner’s Manual out of your car, getting together with other car owners and their manuals and once a year, on the anniversary of having completed reading it once again, dancing and singing, while lovingly embracing the manual. It sounds absurd. Of course, we can’t compare a Vehicle Owner’s Manual to the Torah.

As brilliant as the car designers and engineers were and as clear and as articulate the manual writers might be, it is in almost no way comparable to the Torah. The parallels are that the Torah is an Owner’s Manual for us and our world.

History has shown that people who follow God’s manual generally last longer, run better, and have less breakdowns. This is true for us as a people and also individually, though there are of course many exceptions, at least on the surface.

Now you may ask, ok, what’s in this amazing, God-given manual? A lot.

It starts with a lot of narrative, from the famous creation of the world, Noah and the flood, the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, the Exodus of the Jewish nation from Egypt, their receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai, their wondering in the desert for 40 years, and ends with the death of Moses on the eve of the Children of Israel entering the Promised Land.

But it is much more than just a history book. It is full of laws. Commercial, judiciary and property laws, dietary restrictions, prohibitions regarding intimacy, holiday observance, interpersonal behavior, temple and sacrificial rituals, agricultural and charity laws, environmental sensitivities and much, much more.

But it is not only a book of laws or a history book. The stories are also models of behavior, showing both good and bad examples. It models relationships between parents and children, spouses, siblings, tribe members, the nation and with foreigners. And yet, there’s still more.

But in short, it is a unique, divine, holistic blueprint for living. It is an unbroken, material link and testimony to the history and traditions that have maintained us for millennia. It is an ethical and moral compass that transcends the ever-changing values and fads of society. Somehow, every week, when reading from the Torah, no matter how many times it’s been read, there is some eternal lesson, some insight that speaks to the challenges of the day.

My hope is, now that I’ve completed a review of the Jewish holidays of Tishrei (Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, Sukkot and Simchat Torah), to delve into the weekly Torah reading, and connect it somehow to the aftermarket.