My family has a running joke about me. Ask my husband, ask my kids, ask my closest friends, and they’ll all tell you the same thing with an eye roll and a grin: I cannot go more than a few hours without connecting whatever is happening in my life back to the Torah. A traffic jam becomes a lesson about patience from the wilderness generation. A fight between my kids becomes a conversation about Cain and Abel. Writing Daily Inspiration essays for a living has done something to my brain that I don’t think will ever undo itself, and honestly, I wouldn’t want it to. Every single day, I sit down to find the line in the text that speaks to right now, and somewhere along the way, that search stopped being my job and became my instinct. I am always looking. I am always finding.
There’s a verse in Proverbs that explains this better than I ever could on my own.
I remember singing this verse in English long before I understood what it actually meant. Some of you probably know the tune too. For many, it’s a melody most of us could hum without thinking, and maybe that’s exactly the problem. What does this verse actually mean? King Solomon is describing the Torah here, and the verb he chooses matters more than people give it credit for. Machazikim doesn’t mean admire. It doesn’t mean study occasionally or keep nearby for reference. It means grasp, hold fast, take hold of and not let go. A tree of life isn’t something you glance at from across the room. It’s something you have to reach for, wrap your hand around, and keep holding, or the whole promise of the verse falls apart.
This is the piece I think gets lost when people imagine what a relationship with Scripture is supposed to look like. We tend to picture it as something ambient, a general reverence you carry around, a book that sits nearby and radiates meaning whether or not you ever pick it up. But Solomon isn’t describing ambient reverence. He’s describing a grip. The life doesn’t come from the tree’s presence in the room. It comes from the hand actually closing around it.
That instinct I described at the start of this essay didn’t show up on its own. It formed because I kept reaching for this verse and others like it, year after year, the way you’d keep your hand on a branch instead of letting go. A traffic jam doesn’t become wilderness patience by accident. A sibling argument doesn’t become Cain and Abel without years of practice reaching in that direction first. What looks automatic now used to be effort. I just kept doing it long enough that it stopped feeling like effort at all.
A tree doesn’t hand you its fruit. You reach up and take hold, or you don’t eat. That’s not a flaw in the design. It’s the point. One verse a day, on paper, at a kitchen table, makes that reach as easy as turning a page.
Ready to start reaching? Daily Inspirations is available now as a book, one verse and one teaching for every day of the year, in Hebrew, English, and transliteration, so the branch is always within reach.
