We are always looking for something new. A new place to go, a view we haven't seen, a fresh experience to inspire the spirit. There is a deep restlessness in being human, and no superficial experience ever quite settles it.

In this week's talk for Shavuot - the festival whose name means weeks, the festival of the journey - the Chief Rabbi opens with this restlessness, and what it tells us about who we are.

Drawing on Pirkei Avot's image of the human being as a traveller from another world, on the Maharal's reading of 'Adam' as pure potential, on the strange Mishnah about those who walk and learn, and on the Chief's own observation that animals don't get bored, this is a talk about a profound psychological need that we have, and why no destination ever quite scratches the itch.

What are we searching for, and where do we find it?

Key Questions

• Why is the human need for change so deep, and so easily disastrous?

• What does it mean to be a traveller from another world?

• Why are we never quite satisfied by the new things we find?

• What is the difference between travelling outwardly and travelling inwardly?

I spent years learning it, teaching it, writing about it. Then one day I stopped and realised I had never asked what Pirkei Avot actually is.

What I found changed how I understand almost everything else.

Many of us grew up with Pirkei Avot. Its teachings feel like something we have always known. If not now, when? Acquire yourself a friend. The world stands on three things. There is a warmth and familiarity to this book that is unlike anything else in Jewish life.

And that familiarity, I have come to realise, is precisely what hid the question from me.

After more than two decades as Chief Rabbi — after years of giving shiurim on this text, writing commentary, serving as general editor of an encyclopedic work on Avot — I stopped one day and found I could not answer the simplest question about it.

What is this book?

Not what does it say. What is it? The Mishnah is an elaboration of Jewish law — more than sixty tractates, each one unpacking what a Jew is obligated to do. Every single tractate deals with commandments. Except Avot. Avot contains no law, no ritual, no halakhic ruling of any kind.

So why is it in the Mishnah? Why did the greatest compiler in Jewish history put this book there, among all the laws — and why have we been reading it every Shabbos for over a thousand years without ever finding that strange?

This is the question I could not let go of. And the answer — traced through the Maharal, the Maharasha, and the Vilna Gaon, three towering minds writing centuries apart who arrived, independently, at the same conclusion — turns out to be unlike anything I had expected.

This episode is where that journey begins.

KEY QUESTIONS

· How can a book feel deeply familiar your whole life, and still contain a question you have never thought to ask?

· What does it mean that the one tractate in the Mishnah without a single law is also the one people love most?

· Is there something Avot has been doing all along that we never had a name for?

· What would it mean to discover, after decades of learning, that you had never quite asked the right question about a text you thought you knew?

· If the greatest minds in Jewish thought all arrived at the same unexpected answer about Avot - what is it that they saw?

We all reach for structure. Routines, habits, the small repetitions that hold a day together. Without them, life can feel like chaos.

In this week's talk on the Parsha of Bamidbar, the Torah describes the Israelite camp arranged with extraordinary order around the Mishkan, every tribe in its place. The Chief Rabbi argues that structure is not just helpful. It is one of the deepest psychological and spiritual needs of the human being. The architecture beneath every meaningful life.

But there's a problem. Too much structure crushes the soul. Where does the joy go? The spontaneity? The love?

Drawing on the Maharal, on Rabbi Yerucham Levovitz's image of pearls held by a string, on the Mishnah's strange instruction to pray with structure but not as routine, and on the very word Siddur, the Chief Rabbi traces the paradox at the heart of Torah, and the way it holds structure and passion in tension.

And asks what holds a life together, and what sets it free.

• Why do we need structure to feel alive?

• Can routine crush the very thing it's meant to protect?

• What is the difference between Torah as structure and Torah as rote?

• How does the same Mishnah tell us to pray with order, and yet not by rote?