You don’t need to be religious to enjoy the weekly Torah portion
Even atheists can enjoy these secular Yiddish poems and their translations, related to the Torah reading
On Simchat Torah, Jews complete the Torah reading cycle and go back to the first chapter — Genesis. Above: The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man, painted by Jan Brueghel the Elder, 1613. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
By Rukhl Schaechter October 10, 2025
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Every Shabbos, Jews in synagogues of all denominations hear the cantor, rabbi or a layperson chant that week’s Torah portion from an open scroll.
But Yiddish scholar Sheva Zucker says you don’t need to be an observant Jew, or even believe in God, to enjoy the weekly Torah portion, known in Yiddish as the parshe or the sedre.
Zucker has a blog that includes an online collection of secular Yiddish poems — complete with English translation, transliteration and audio recording — that were either inspired by a Torah portion or whose meaning could be illuminated by it. The poems in the collection, which she calls Parshe Poetry, were written by over a dozen renowned poets, including Yankev Glatshteyn, Itsik Manger, Kadye Molodowsky and Rokhl Korn.
“Even though Modern Yiddish poetry is generally thought of as created by heretics, atheists and agnostics, the Khumesh [the Hebrew Bible] remains a powerful force in their writings,” Zucker said. “It was generally not hard to find Yiddish poems that were either inspired by the sedre or shed new light on it, in ways that should interest and entice both believers and non-believers.”
As Jews celebrate the holiday of Simchat Torah by completing the annual Torah reading cycle and going back to the Bible’s first chapter — Genesis — Parshe Poetry provides several exceptional works of verse related to that chapter’s timeless stories. One of them — a delightfully satirical one by Itzik Manger — retells what happens when Eve gives Adam the apple from the Tree of Knowledge. Whether you read the original Yiddish poem or its English translation by Leonard Wolf, you’ll get some true insight into how Manger, a secular Jew, viewed his people’s ancient sacred texts.
