Now that my youngest child has started school, I have begun reading him chapter books with text that is geared for slightly older readers and without illustrations on every page. Though I was excited to share with him many of my favorites from my own childhood, initially he could not hide his disappointment.

“Why aren’t there more pictures?” Yitzvi asked, poring over the lone full-color illustration on the cover—Charlotte hanging from her web, or Willy Wonka in a top hat and bow tie standing proudly before the entrance to his chocolate factory. My 5-year-old son, raised on a steady diet of Sandra Boynton, Dr. Seuss and William Steig, is experiencing a kind of sensory deprivation. Why are there pictures only every five pages or so? And why are they in black and white?

I try to explain that he can make pictures in his head. While I read the story, he can illustrate it, drawing on his imagination.

I wonder if this was what it was like for Abraham, the first monotheist, who worshiped not a statue carved in stone but a God whose presence had to be felt and intuited, and for the Israelites, who were told by Moses that “you saw no picture when God spoke to you at Sinai out of the fire” (Deuteronomy 4:15). The Israelites, too, found it difficult to worship a God with no physical form, which explains why they rushed to fashion a calf at the foot of Mount Sinai. “Why aren’t there pictures?” they presumably wondered.

Reading these books is an exercise in imagination. It is also a sacred activity. Reading reminds us that the world as we experience it through our senses is not all that is out there. There are, for instance, scientific realms we can only intuit, like the non-visible wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum.

We Jews believe that this world, the world we readily perceive, is only a fraction of the totality that God perceives. Perhaps Olam HaBah, the world to come, is like the chapter books I have begun reading my son, or like the ultraviolet and gamma rays our eyes cannot detect: We can comprehend them, but we cannot apprehend them.

This is not the first time I’ve shifted from picture books to chapter books with one of my children. Yitzvi, the youngest of five, is hearing many of the same books I once read to his siblings. But as the Talmudic rabbis teach, no two reading experiences are the same. “It is impossible to compare one who has read a text one hundred times to one who has read a text one hundred and one times” (Hagigah 9b).

The book may look the same, but the interaction between the book, the parent and the child’s imagination is different each time. So, while I love buying new titles—a book is the best Hanukkah present, and it’s no coincidence that Hanukkah falls during Jewish Book Month—I rarely tire of revisiting the books, both sacred and secular, that have given texture to my decade-and-a-half as a parent. When we read to our children, we are also learning how to read our child.

This same phenomenon applies to the ways Jews read Torah. In the Jewish liturgical cycle, we read through the Torah from start to finish every year. Just minutes after reading about the death of Moses in the Torah’s final chapter we turn back to the creation of the world. As a result, we are always in the middle of reading the Torah. It is the book Jews never stop reading, like the countless books I’ve read to my children.

And yet each time we read Torah, we absorb it somewhat differently, because we ourselves are different. We discover new meaning in the text in light of our experiences, and new meaning to our experiences in light of the text. It is not just the Torah we are reading and re-reading, but ourselves.

Ilana Kurshan is the author of Children of the Book and If All the Seas Were Ink, winner of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.