In youth ministry, we have all cringed at one time or another when we thought of teaching the Torah, also known as the Pentateuch – the first five books of the Bible – to teens. To be honest, some of us cringe at the idea of teaching any parts of the Old Testament to students. We think about seemingly endless genealogies in Chronicles or portions of Genesis. We think of repetitive laws in Leviticus and Numbers. We might think of the list of David’s mighty warriors in II Samuel. Regardless of our own personal list of reasons why we cringe, the fact remains that we do. Sometimes we’re so busy cringing that we forget there are actually wonderful things the Old Testament can teach teens.
Perhaps one of the issues that makes us cringe when we think about teaching the Torah to students is we don’t expect them to have any interest in such things. Some of us have had bad experiences trying to work our way through the Torah. We’ve gotten bogged down in Leviticus, or we got bored in the latter part of Exodus with the repetitious passages about the gifts the various clans brought for the Tent of Meeting. The idea of teaching Leviticus 16 to students is, in our opinion, crazy. Yet students don’t always think the same way we do as ministers. It is true, trying to teach a lesson about one of the genealogies may prove unfruitful. But there are a variety of passages that are often glossed over or never talked about with students that can be very helpful to them in their spiritual journey.
Having taught the Torah to students on various occasions in my time working with teens, I can say without reservation these teaching times have been some of the most profitable and well-received that I’ve had. It can sometimes be easy to forget, in our rush to help teens deal with the veritable maelstrom of temptations and problems they face, that the Torah is where our story as God’s people begins. Within the Torah we have the creation account, the cycle of sin-judgment-hope that repeats throughout the first eleven chapters of Genesis, we have God’s choosing of a single family to bring about his purpose; we see that family become a great people, and eventually a nation with land and descendants.
Students need to hear the stories contained within the Torah. They need to be able to ask questions and search out what God is doing. The narrative portions of the Torah can become companions that students can relate to as they walk through life. Apart from becoming encouragement for students, the narratives of the Torah (and the entire Old Testament) help students to see how God has interacted with people in the past. It lets them see God as more than a deity to be prayed to and worshiped, but as One who is intensely involved with his creation. Obviously Jesus comes to mind as the best example of this, but the Torah contains a wealth of stories illustrating how God interacts with humans. The legal portions of the text can be a huge help in communicating theology to students.
