Talking Torah

Our new book, It Takes Two to Torah: An Orthodox Rabbi and Reform Journalist Discuss and Debate Their Way Through the Five Books of Moses, traces its roots back to a podcast we did for Tablet called Parsha in Progress, where—over the course of 54 episodes, stretching over 24 months (recording every other week)—the two of us discussed the weekly Torah portion.

We knew each other before the podcast began, having met in Baltimore back in 2009, when we were tossed together by The Jewish Week, which ran an annual retreat where Jewish clergy, professionals, journalists, and nonprofit heads were invited to talk about the issues keeping us awake at night. We kept landing in the same breakout sessions, and despite the fact that we differ in personality and religiosity, we felt challenged by each other in ways that prompted us to keep in touch.

It was Dov who suggested we meet biweekly to talk Torah for a Tablet podcast in 2018, believing that we would exhort each other to read this core text anew, to think harder about its implications in the midst of a polarized America.

Over the course of the project, we learned much more about each other—and ourselves. And now that we’ve edited and assembled every conversation into one continuous dialogue about the entire Five Books of Moses, it’s clearer how our approach to tradition and God overlaps, and how it clashes, often in unexpected ways.

Abby begins:

If I were asked to describe the biggest gulf between Orthodox Rabbi Dov Linzer and me—after we spent many months talking through the entire Torah for our Tablet podcast—it was not only that I repeatedly felt more moved than he did by verses he’s taught for decades, or that I’d see the contemporary relevance while he was focused on how the ancient sages deconstructed a phrase. The chief impasse was that Dov feels this ancient book obligates him, and I don’t.

By “obligate,” I don’t just mean the commitment Dov has made to live a halachic life. What I mean by “obligation” is that, despite our shared belief in God, his version of faith translates to an unshakable conviction that the Torah always is—must be—good.

Until our yearlong conversation, I had never realized that to be “traditional” means not only to observe mitzvot and study Torah daily, but to find in the verses a positive moral or religious message, no matter how shocking or repellent the text might initially appear to the reader.

Over and over again, when I confessed to Dov that certain words or storylines made me recoil, Dov explained how the Rabbis—the sages who parsed the Five Books of Moses in Talmudic commentary—provided explanations that implicitly acknowledged these difficulties and sought to soften the harshness. I would tell Dov that from my perspective, this repeated exculpation of objectionable texts seemed effortful to the point of being artificial, alienating. If all Torah is good, shouldn’t the goodness be less difficult to get at?

When, in Genesis 9 for instance, God floods the world and drowns every human being except Noah’s family, is it not meager atonement for God to vow, “Never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth”?

In Leviticus 10, when Aaron’s sons are snuffed out in an “alien fire”—ostensibly because they offered the wrong offering to God—should they not have been allowed a second chance at worshiping correctly?

And in Deuteronomy 21, when parents are instructed to stone a rebellious child, should we really rationalize it by saying the Rabbis knew that filicide would never actually take place?

The disconnect between Dov and me is perhaps encapsulated in the following exchange we had about the sotah ritual—described in Numbers 5:12—which forces a woman accused of infidelity to drink ink and see if her belly distends.

DL: What I’m really wondering, Abby, is how do you, as a Reform Jew, deal with this? Does this challenge your notion of the Torah as sacred?

AP: I don’t love the question being framed with “as a Reform Jew …” I’ll answer as a Jew. I have a problem with this text. I reject this ritual. I still think the Torah is a sacred document. I can hold both thoughts, because the Torah is sacred in the sense that it is enduring, inherited, magical, extraordinary, challenging, and resonant. But it isn’t a blueprint for living; it’s not a handbook. It’s not meant to be followed to the letter in that sense. I know it hasn’t been followed to the letter by Orthodox Jews either.

DL: What do you mean by that?

AP: You’re not stoning someone who doesn’t correctly observe the Sabbath. There are plenty of times that your community has chosen—selected—what you feel is comfortable in terms of Halacha. It’s not like all 613 mitzvot are being met every moment. I once interviewed an Orthodox rabbi on Tisha B’Av who wasn’t fasting.

DL: I’m not going to ask who, but OK.

AP: My point is that Orthodox Jews may accept the text as divine, but it is not an instruction manual.

DL: I didn’t say that it was, certainly not as written. We accept it as divine, and we deal with its difficulties through interpretation. But I want to know how you deal with difficult passages.

AP: I identify them as just that: difficult. I’m interested in unpacking them and discussing them, but I am not wrestling with whether to live by them. It feels like you are pretzeling yourself to accept a text as holy that is offensive to you.

DL: I start with the principle that it is holy and divine, and I have to square that with a belief that God is good. That’s what the rabbinic enterprise of commentary and interpretation is all about.

AP: I can engage with the sotah ritual, but it is not our religion to me. Part of grappling with our religion includes rejecting parts of it. That’s sometimes hard. But in this case, it’s not hard for me. It’s in the tradition; it’s in the text, but I’m not struggling to find meaning in it.

DL: Well, I will continue to struggle.

Dov’s last line—“I will continue to struggle”—could be a mantra for his entire approach to Torah, and it taught me something important about my lack of struggle, my impulse toward snap, facile judgments. The muscle Dov modeled is not to excuse cruelty or injustice, but also not to assume that a story is the whole story. Not when it comes to God’s book. I remain grateful to Dov that he nudged me to reckon harder with faith in a God whose words I can’t always accept as godly.

Dov responds:

Abby pushed me not to readily retreat to the comfort of the rabbinic explanations, to face the text as it is, in all its rawness, before trying to come to terms with it.

Abby was essentially saying to me: “I get that you believe the Torah is divine and therefore also have to believe that it is good, but do you really believe that the rabbinic interpretation is what the text is actually saying?”

If I do, then how is my approach any different than the ultra-Orthodox one, which sees no daylight between the text and the rabbinic take on it?

My answer is that unlike the ultra-Orthodox approach, I try to be honest with myself about what the text means on its own terms, honest with its difficulties, and, at the same time, to be committed to the belief that it is divine and good.

This sometimes leads to putting events in a historical context, like Maimonides did for the institution of sacrifice, arguing that the Torah commanded animal sacrifices not because it was the ideal way to worship God, but rather to serve as a stepping stone, as a means of weaning the Israelites away from paganism toward a more perfect faith.

My approach requires recognizing: 1) that the Torah deals with imperfect humanity—Noah being a case in point; 2) that the Torah legislates for all times and to a particular society at a particular time as well, and 3) that certain mitzvot in the Torah—like improving the institution of slavery—are not the end of the story, which would be its abolition, but its beginning.

So, if the sotah ritual was a curb on the husband’s total unbridled power to condemn his wife to death over suspicion of adultery, then even if it is not in line with our contemporary mores, I can walk away inspired by the Torah’s commitment to move society in a more moral direction, even as the ideal remains distant and elusive.

At other times, when grappling with a troubling passage, I choose to focus on its message rather than its literal meaning. In this light, I read the story of the death of Aaron’s sons, which happened after they offered God a ritual fire that wasn’t commanded, to be less about whether these two individuals should have been punished, and more about the societal dangers that can result from unbridled religious fervor.

I also listen more deeply to the text when its values conflict with my own. As a modern person who takes for granted the importance of individual expression, the verses that mandate the stoning of the rebellious son are so shocking, so completely at odds with my worldview, that they stop me short. They force me to see a society that will—at least in theory—take extreme measures to protect parental authority, that will put the well-being of the community and its institutions above that of the individual. And because I am committed to the goodness of the text, my next step is not to reject such an approach out-of-hand, but to ask myself if my own, more liberal values are the ones that need recalibrating.

Finally, and at a deeper level, I believe that the Torah is from Heaven but it is no longer in Heaven. The Torah was given by God to us as humans, and we are now in partnership with God over its meaning; it is our responsibility to read and interpret it in the best possible light. Our religious job is to best understand and apply the Torah in our lives: That—and not the original meaning of the text—is what matters most.

I feel blessed that Abby and I, through our learning in chavruta—discussing every parsha of the Torah—were able to remind each other to be fully honest with ourselves and with the words in front of us, to approach the Torah as sacred, each in our own way, and to fashion, through this process, an Oral Torah that is unique, precious, and one we can call our own.