2 weeks Ago
Over the past few weeks, Abigail Pogrebin and Rabbi Dov Linzer have been travelling around the USA, visiting Jewish communities in Detroit, Miami and elsewhere to promote their book. But the journey has proved to be more than a book tour. It has been an example of pluralism in practice, showing how Jews from different religiousbackgrounds can come together through a shared love of Torah.
She is a journalist and former president of a leading Reform synagogue in New York, Central, who some years ago published a book on her personal journey through the festival calendar, My Jewish Year. He is president of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah in New York, which lies at the modern end of the Modern Orthodox family. It Takes Two to Torah is based on their discussions, five to six pages each, on the weekly Torah portion.
They met at a Jewish conference called the Conversation 15 years ago - “we started talking and haven’t stopped”, said Pogrebin. From 2018 to 2020 they did a podcast on the parashah for the Tablet magazine, an audio equivalent of chavruta, the time-honoured Jewish method of studying texts with a partner. The book is the print version of the podcast.
The rapport they enjoy comes off the page. While they may disagree, they do so with warmth and humour. And more than any difference what they convey is the joint search for meaning in what for Judaism remains the Book of Books.
Sometimes they grapple with a nuance in the text, at other times the Torah passage acts as a springboard for broader themes. A section on priestly garments moves effortlessly into discussions of badges and symbols of Jewish identity, for example: a look at the rituals around leprosy moves on to quarantine and social reintegration after Covid. Their exchanges are enlivened with personal detail.
He confides it can be hard to find spiritual focus when praying in synagogue. He doesn’t do tashlich, the ritual of casting sins into the war on Rosh Hashanah, whereas she has found it rewarding. Linzer notes that there may have been books before where an Orthodox and a Reform rabbi offered different perspectives but they took the form of separate presentations whereas this book is a “genuine dialogue”.
At the book launch where Jews of various stripes mingled over hors d’oeuvres, someone remarked to him, “What a salve to the soul. We are not here to talk about antisemitism, we are not here to talk about the war, we are here to talk about Torah, which is what is meaningful to us, what gives us connection.” One of their recent visits was to a Reform synagogue in Atlanta.
“It was the first time in my life I had spent a Shabbat at a Reform synagogue. It was probably the first time in decades that an Orthodox rabbi had spent a Shabbat with them in their synagogue,” he recalled. “It was clear how deeply appreciative and grateful people have been that we are coming and modelling this connection across differences.
” For Pogrebin, the exercise has demonstrated how “the Torah binds us and gives us that place where we can meet in the middle”. And that encounter has gained extra force in the wake of events over the past year when Jewish communities have been reeling from the backlash of antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment. “There has been such a justifiable response to October 7, which is ‘I’m going to suddenly wear a kippah, put my mezuzah up, I am going to wear a magen David around my neck’.
Those are important signposts of pride and identity. “But I think what our book is also reminding people is [to] go back to the text that has bound us and kept us the Jewish people for millennia. So many people are telling us what Jews are or not, and often that language is so ugly and oversimplified and unjust.
“Let’s go back to the texts that speak to how our ethics and law were envisioned and what is asked of us, what is required of us as Jews.” Each has been open to learning from the other despite what she calls the “gulf in how we live our lives. I think that has only enriched and deepened our connection because we have had to navigate that chasm.
We move through the world differently, he eats differently, he prays differently, he’s fasting six times [a year] when I am fasting once. Even on this book tour, I can leave after we have an event on Saturday and he has to sleep over.” Both hope the book offers an accessible way to engage with Torah - and how religious divides can be straddled by a sense of common heritage.
Particularly in non-Orthodox communities, she reflects, “Torah isn’t necessarily front and centre of our days, even necessarily our years. And that’s not a judgment, I was there myself. We are not as honest as we should be about the barriers to opening this book, to engaging with it, feeling entitled to it.
” Many adults who have had a good secular education can be inhibited by a sense of inadequacy when it comes to the Torah, a feeling that they “could never catch up”. But this, she says,”is the foundational book for a reason. It’s endured not by accident, not just because of Jewish guilt, not just because we go to synagogue and see someone giving a drosh [sermon] and chanting the Torah portion.
It’s alive and demanding and enduring for a reason - and don’t you want to investigate why?” For Linzer, the problem in the Orthodox community has not been “not engaging with the Torah but almost engaging in the Torah exclusively of everything else. I find so much, whether it’s sermons in the synagogue or the learning that goes on in the bet midrash..
. is so self-referential - texts are interesting because of the way they speak to other texts, things are relevant because of how they speak to internal Orthodox concerns.” He recalls being so mentally engrossed in his talmud studies all day that walking along the street he would sometimes bump into telephone poles - a metaphor for “not looking at the world around you”.
The podcasts and the book have shown how the Torah can help to address “what is happening right now in the world and what’s in the headlines...
- and I hope that book opens that door”. It Takes Two to Torah - An Orthodox Rabbi and a Reform Journalist Discuss and Debate their Way through the Five Books of Moses, Fig Tree Books, $27.95.
