It Takes Two to Torah: An Orthodox Rabbi and Reform Journalist Discuss and Debate Their Way Through the Five Books of Moses - Hardcover

Pogrebin, Abigail; Linzer, Rabbi Dov

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1941493343 ISBN 13: 9781941493342

Verlag: Fig Tree Books LLC, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

It Takes Two to Torah is not just an education, it’s an invitation – to join the oldest Book Club in the world.

This book is a Torah conversation-starter for families on Shabbat, for religious school instructors with students of all ages, for individuals who have never found a way to read the entire Torah in bite-size, relatable nuggets, and for young clergy looking for some sermon ideas if they’re stuck! Most of all, it is a snapshot of what Torah study is meant to be: a real-time, candid, instructive, challenging exchange of responses to ancient text.For the first time, in a single volume, readers can take a tour of the entire Torah through the medium of one challenging, instructive, irreverent, animated conversation. Rabbi Dov Linzer, an Orthodox rabbi, and Abigail Pogrebin, a Reform journalist talk their way through the Five Books of Moses with candor, humor, emotion, personal revelation, and scholarship.

This book is the product of two people literally meeting in the middle to bring us their most honest intellectual and relevant understanding of the Torah. Pogrebin and Linzer engaged in short dialogues on a podcast forTablet Magazine, and they have now been collected and edited so that the full, fascinating exploration can be found in one place. 

Rabbi Linzer is President and Rabbinic Head of YCT Rabbinical School (a Modern Orthodox seminary,) and Abigail Pogrebin is a veteran journalist, author of My Jewish Year: 18 Holidays, One Wondering Jew and former producer for 60 Minutes.

Dov is a renowned expert in Torah and Talmud, whose personal values run liberal and egalitarian, but who also has clear parameters about what is halachically correct and comfortable when it comes to Jewish law and tradition. Abby is our relatable every-Jew in America, deeply engaged in Jewish life, but less through strict observance and prayer as through study, reporting, synagogue, and community.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Abigail Pogrebin is the author of “Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish” and “My Jewish Year:18 Holidays, One Wondering Jew” which was published by Fig Tree Books LLC and was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award. She has written for The Atlantic, New York Magazine, Tablet, and The Forward, and moderated public conversations for The Streicker Center, the Shalom Hartman Institute, the JCC in Manhattan, and Jewish Broadcasting Service. She is a past president of Central Synagogue in New York. 

Rabbi Dov Linzer is the President and Rosh HaYeshiva (Rabbinic Head) of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah (YCT), an Orthodox rabbinical school and Torah center which promotes a more open and inclusive Orthodoxy.A leading Torah voice in the Modern Orthodox community, Rabbi Linzer serves as religious mentor to YCT’s students and its over 200 rabbis in the United States and Israel. He has written for The Forward, Tablet and The New York Times, has published hundreds of teshuvot (responsa) and scholarly Torah articles, and hosted a number of highly popular Torah podcasts.

Mayim Bialik, PhD, is perhaps best known for her lead role as Blossom Russo in the 1990s television sitcom Blossom, and she starred on the top-rated comedy The Big Bang Theory. Bialik earned a BS from UCLA in 2000 in neuroscience and Hebrew and Jewish studies, and a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA in 2007. 

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Maya Bialik’s Foreword to IT TAKES TWO TO TORAH

 

 

An Orthodox rabbi, and a reform lady journalist walk into a podcast studio. No; it’s not the opening to a joke. It’s the opening to witness a living conversation about the most important book ever written.

 

The conversation is 52 weeks long and also eternal; it is a conversation designed to get directly to the heart of the matter. The matter at hand for Abigail Pogrebin and Rabbi Dov Linzer is The Torah, aka the Chumash, aka the Five Books of Moses.

 

The Torah is the guidebook and jumping off point for all of the questions humans have and even the ones we don’t yet know we have. And you’re not going to find anything in the Torah about how to get more followers on TikTok or how to use an AI algorithm to improve attendance in your synagogue. You also won’t find anything about which $300 sneaker you should (or shouldn’t) buy your teenager for their birthday, and you certainly won’t find anything about which transcendental experience might help you overcome the pervasive anxiety that is with you for all of your waking hours and some of your sleeping hours as well.

 

What Abigail and Rabbi Dov both believe, albeit from different sides of the ideological and philosophical room, is that the Torah is a foundation and a scaffold for life. Everything is in it, and everything comes from it. It is from this shared consciousness that they embarked on a conversation which you are now holding in your hands.

 

One of the most exceptionally unique things about the Torah as a foundational document of the Jewish religion is that it is prescriptively designed to not be studied in isolation. The Torah is said to be understood only by turning it over and over inside and out and questioning all of it and interpreting all of it and living it fully – but in order to do so, it should never be done alone. Rather, Torah must be studied with another person.

 

This kind of healthy confrontation of the text has historically occurred between two men. In addition, Orthodox Judaism tended to be the venue for this type of approach to interpretation of the Torah. However, the beauty of the Torah is that it allows for every conversation and every possibility in its understanding and analysis; especially those that shed new light on the wisdom contained within its letters and spaces.

 

What used to be a separation between men and women, between the Orthodox and the rest of us has shifted and evolved as, similarly, so many aspects of the black and white aspects of our culture have shifted and evolved. And what the Torah holds truest is that we are all united in our capacity to think and to learn and to question and find delight and joy in the Torah.

 

Abigail, a venerable and respected journalist and thinker, has decided to wade into the waters of Torah analysis with an Orthodox Rabbi from another dimension of Torah teaching. This book is the product of two people literally meeting in the middle of all that there is and all there was and all there will be to bring us their most honest intellectual and relevant understanding of the Divine Torah.

 

Every chapter has a narrative as it walks us through each story and lesson, but as any thorough analysis of Torah ought to be, each chapter touches on mysticism, hidden interpretation and insight into Divine meaning. Rabbi Dov and Abigail dutifully sift through doubt and fear and confusion together to find where they agree, where they disagree and where they – and all of us – can be united. Where they find themselves united is in the most diverse of places: the place where we are all one.

 

For those of us who crave Torah knowledge, Abigail and Rabbi Dov deliver in spades. For those of us looking for a deeper understanding of the mystery and beauty of the Torah, this conversation does not disappoint. And for all of us who picture a world where we are drawn closer together in spite of our differences in order to facilitate greater understanding, a deeper sense of purpose, and an intoxicating blissfulness that only comes from the partnership of Torah analysis, Rabbi Dov and Abigail let us into their world which is also our world. In every chapter here, they establish new branches on a thriving Tree of Life, and our wisdom, understanding, and joy grow with each branch we climb with them.

 

 

THE AUTHORS’ INTRODUCTIONS TO: IT TAKES TWO TO TORAH

 

                       Introduction By Abigail Pogrebin

 

I used to resist the metaphor I kept hearing from rabbis: that “we all stood at Sinai.” 

 

It wasn’t just because I’m a literalist and know that we weren’t actually there 4000 years ago. The symbolism felt remote, alien: how could I have inherited a document I do not live by? How can I possibly honor a contract I’ve never signed? I’m an involved Jew, but not a halachic one. Sinai is more a parable than a pledge. 

 

But instead of rejecting out of hand the idea that the Torah was given to me, too, I began a very simple act: talking about it. And lo and behold, doors started to unlock, windows started to swing open. I spotted or stumbled upon its verses and stories everywhere – in fiction, comedy routines, song lyrics, election stump speeches. In my quotidian activities and in the hardest questions in my head. In my parenting and my politics, my friendships and my failures. This ancient, stubbornly-enduring tome literally came to life –in conversation. 

I admit it didn’t hurt that the person on the other end of this dialectic was a rabbi who knows the document backwards and forwards, who has committed his life’s work to teaching it, but most importantly, who has a core belief in the God it describes.

 

Dov Linzer and I met back in 2009, when he was dean of the Orthodox seminary, Chovevei Torah (he’s now its president,) and I was a freelance journalist writing for publications about Jewish identity (or a lack of it). We were fortunate to be invited by The Jewish Week to a conference on Jewish ideas called – appropriately – The Conversation.  

 

We’ve been talking ever since. 

 

But our chevrutah (study partnership) isn’t an obvious one. We come from different ends of the spectrum when it comes to observance: 

 

Dov prays three times a day, I pray once a week if I make it to synagogue; 

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Fig Tree Books LLC
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1941493343
• ISBN 13: 9781941493342
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar