Some pages are mostly sacrificial procedures or tabernacle construction specs. But any narrative page tells a tale of human frailty, human inadequacy, human mistakes. Quite a lot, as it turns out. The themes and struggles of our traditional history are not so different from the challenges we face today. The Torah is full of domineering parents, disruptive children, stern judges and moralists, arrogant chiefs and conquerors, fallible rulers and subjects.
Mistakes are the one thing they all have in common.
It's vital to have this very human context, this eternal but twisted framework, to fit our own biographies into. I feel lucky to be a member of the people for whom this difficult book was written, to come from a cast of such flawed characters. But anyone can see that wrong choices are an everyday occurrence, and they will be until the messiah comes. Mistakes are part of our God-given nature. In fact, since we're made in the image of God, perhaps our tendency to err is a reflection of Divine fallibility.