By Aaron Mandel
You came looking for a single, simple thing: which Torah portion is read this week. Maybe it is for a child’s bar or bat mitzvah, and you want to know the parashah that will belong to that day. Maybe it is your own birthday on the Hebrew calendar, and you have heard that a portion is somehow yours. Or maybe you simply want to open the book to the right page on a Shabbat morning and not feel lost. The question sounds technical, but underneath it is something quieter: a wish to find your place in a reading that has been turning, week after week, long before you arrived.
There is an old image for the frustration of searching and coming up empty. The tradition describes a field of the diligent man set against the field of the sluggard, and of the latter it says that “it was all grown over with thorns” — refers to one who seeks the interpretation of a portion of the Torah and does not find it (Mesillat Yesharim 6:12). The good news is that finding the portion itself is not the thorny part. The cycle is fixed, public, and easy to read once you know where to look.
How do you find this week’s portion?
The Torah is divided into weekly portions, or parashiyot, read in order across the year and completed and begun again on Simchat Torah. Each portion is named for one of its opening words, and the whole cycle is mapped onto the Hebrew calendar, so the reading for any given Shabbat is already determined.
The simplest tool is a luach — a Jewish calendar, printed or online — which lists the parashah beside each week’s date. Open it to the coming Shabbat and the name is right there: Bereshit, Noach, Lech-Lecha, and onward. Most synagogue bulletins, prayer-app home screens, and Jewish calendar sites display the current week’s portion prominently. You do not need to calculate anything; you only need to read the right line.
If reading the calendar feels opaque at first, that is normal, and it eases quickly. Of clear teaching it is written, “They are all plain to him that understandeth, And right to them that find knowledge” (Proverbs 8:9). A week or two of looking, and the rhythm becomes second nature.
How do you find a bar or bat mitzvah, birthday, or simcha portion?
Here the key shifts from “this week” to “that date.” A person’s bar or bat mitzvah portion is the parashah read on the Shabbat of, or nearest to, their thirteenth (or twelfth) Hebrew birthday. Your own “birthday portion” works the same way: find the parashah read on the Shabbat that falls on or just after your Hebrew date of birth.
Two steps make this concrete. First, convert the civil date to its Hebrew equivalent using a date-converter or luach. Second, look up which Shabbat carries that Hebrew date and read off the portion assigned to it. For a wedding, brit, or other simcha, the same method gives you the portion that will frame the occasion — a small way of letting the week’s reading speak into the day.
There is something fitting in tying a life-moment to a fixed reading. The patriarch Jacob, the tradition recounts, “fulfilled her week; and he gave him Rachel his daughter to wife” (Genesis 29:28) — even our oldest stories measure joy in weeks honored and completed. Anchoring a celebration to its parashah lets the day inherit words it did not choose, and that is part of the gift.
Why do Israel and the diaspora sometimes read different portions?
For a few months of most years, communities in Israel and communities in the diaspora are reading different parashiyot on the same Shabbat. The cause is the festival calendar. Outside the land of Israel, the last day of certain festivals is observed for an extra day. When that added festival day lands on a Shabbat, the diaspora reads the festival reading while Israel, already past the festival, reads the next regular portion. From that point the two calendars are out of step by one portion.
The gap does not last. The calendar is built to resynchronize, and within a few weeks a “double portion” is read in one community but not the other, bringing everyone back into alignment. So if you are traveling, or comparing notes with family across the world, and the portions do not match for a stretch, you are not mistaken — you are simply on the other side of one extra festival day.
What are “double portions,” and why do they happen?
Some weeks two adjacent portions are joined and read together as one: Tazria-Metzora, Acharei Mot-Kedoshim, Behar-Bechukotai, and several others. These pairings exist for a practical reason of arithmetic. The number of available Shabbatot in a year varies — a Hebrew year may be common or leap, and festivals that fall on Shabbat displace the regular reading. To fit all the portions into the year and still finish the cycle on time, certain pairs are combined.
When you see a hyphenated name on the luach, that is a double portion: two weeks’ worth of text in a single Shabbat. In a leap year, with its extra month, those same portions are more often read separately. Knowing this spares the confusion of expecting one name and finding two — and it explains why Israel and the diaspora often “catch up” to each other precisely on a double-portion week.
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How might you anchor a weekly reflection on your portion?
Once you can reliably find the portion, a deeper use opens. Each parashah carries themes, and within those themes a central character trait — a middah — that you can sit with for the week. The tradition links the two inseparably: “Where there is no Torah, there is no right conduct; where there is no right conduct, there is no Torah” (Pirkei Avot 3:17). The reading is not only information; it is an invitation to conduct.
A simple practice: each week, write the portion’s name at the top of a journal page, name one middah it stirs in you, and watch how it lives in your days. One week it might be zeal — and you may feel its difficulty, for “the trait of Zeal is a very high spiritual level of Shelemut (perfection) which a person’s nature impedes him from attaining at the current time” (Mesillat Yesharim 7:10). Naming the gap honestly is itself the work. To keep the practice from stalling, take the counsel to “make sure to always adhere to good character traits and right conduct and do not let a day go by without doing a mitzvah — commandment, be it a minor mitzvah or a major one” (Tzava'at HaRivash 1:2). A small, daily mark on the page keeps the portion present long after Shabbat has passed.
This is, in the end, what finding your portion is really for. The mechanics — luach, Hebrew date, double portion — exist so that the words can find you. And the old prayer asks for exactly that: “set our portion in the studying of your Torah” (Pirkei Avot 5:20). May the page you turn to this week be one you can read plainly, return to gladly, and slowly make your own.
Published by Higgayon Press. For questions of halacha, consult a qualified rabbi.