What Gives? The Jewish Philanthropy Podcast · Jewish Funders Network

Abigail Pogrebin and Rabbi Dov Linzer - Bridging Divides Through Torah Study

·54 min·3 clips

Abigail Pogrebin says certainty is “corrosive,” and Rabbi Dov Linzer adds that “the opposite of faith is not doubt, it’s certainty.”

1. What Gives? The Jewish Philanthropy Podcast centers this episode on Abigail Pogrebin and Rabbi Dov Linzer, who discuss bridging ideological divides through Torah study. 2. Abigail Pogrebin is an author and journalist, Rabbi Dov Linzer is president and Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, and their book is It Takes Two to Torah. 3. The episode asks how a Reform journalist and an Orthodox rabbi can study the five books of Moses together without flattening their differences. 4. Abigail says her Judaism is anchored in “finding meaning where I find it,” and she names Central Synagogue and Angela Buchdahl as part of that path. 5. She says she met Dov at a Jewish conference organized by the Jewish Week in 2009, where they began talking off the record under Chatham House rules. 6. Their discussion led to a Tablet Magazine podcast called Parsha in Progress, which they made every other week for two years. 7. Dov says studying with Abigail opened “new vistas” because his earlier Torah learning was intense but narrow, even to the point of walking into a telephone pole while reviewing Talmud. 8. He contrasts that with havrutah as a practice of being challenged by another person instead of only by texts inside a narrow shared worldview. 9. Dov says Yeshivat Chovevei Torah stands for an Orthodoxy that is open to the larger world and translates ancient tradition into contemporary life. 10. Abigail argues that Torah study with Dov made the text feel alive during the George Floyd racial reckoning, the travel ban debate, the pandemic, the loss of her father in March, and the post-October 7 moment. 11. She quotes the idea that an Orthodox Jew can mark a Bible with academic criticism but still take a chumash to shul because the communal conversation changes what belongs in the room. 12. Dov and Abigail describe ground rules for avoiding language that would trigger the other person, including Dov’s refusal to label a verse “sexist” and his preference for saying how he experiences it. 13. Abigail says the book keeps asking “why” and “what” rather than only “how,” and she ties that to a 2018-2020 world of political turbulence. 14. Dov says that in most Orthodox synagogues the word “God” is less common than “sin,” which he uses to illustrate how halakhic language can crowd out broader questions. 15. The conversation turns to backlash, including warnings to Abigail about sounding like a “Judaism-lite Jew” and Dov’s decades of attacks from the Orthodox establishment over Yeshivat Chovevei Torah. 16. Dov recalls being uneasy about speaking on Shabbat in Reform synagogues during the book tour, while Abigail says she was surprised that this was a pressure point for him. 17. Both speakers present the episode as a sustained chavrutah, with Abigail crossing from the “cafeteria world” of choice and Dov speaking from a life shaped by obligation and commandment. 18. The tone is conversational and argument-driven, with quick back-and-forth, self-correction, and concrete examples from synagogue life, book touring, and Torah study. 19. Listeners interested in Jewish texts, pluralism, and denominational conversation will get the most from this episode. 20. Listeners seeking light banter or no-religion content may skip it.

As heard by us

A thoughtful case for learning across difference without flattening it.

Abigail Pogrebin and Rabbi Dov Linzer turn Torah study into a conversation about how people read the same tradition without pretending they will land in the same place.

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Why you'd press play

You hear an Orthodox rabbi and a Reform journalist model Torah study across denominational lines.

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