In 2019 and 2020, Abi­gail Pogre­bin and Dov Linz­er host­ed a suc­cess­ful pod­cast called Par­sha in Progress. Their lat­est col­lab­o­ra­tion, It Takes Two to Torah, turns this pod­cast into a writ­ten record of their dis­cus­sions, mus­ings, and ban­ter. Each chap­ter is a mod­i­fied tran­script of their con­ver­sa­tion. They move week by week through the Torah-por­tion cycle and the key ques­tions raised by that week’s material. 

Since the book is a log of their con­ver­sa­tions, one gets a real sense of both Pogre­bin and Linzer’s per­son­al­i­ties. Although they bring with them total­ly dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives, they are able to talk about some of the hard­est themes in the Torah: the place of women, the vio­lences per­pe­trat­ed in God’s name, and the role of Israel in one’s Jew­ish iden­ti­ty, to name a few. Linz­er is known to be one of the most knowl­edge­able and reli­able schol­ars in mod­ern ortho­doxy. The two authors must walk the care­ful line, then, between giv­ing Linz­er space to teach and avoid­ing the pit­fall of mak­ing the book a sim­ple inter­view with him. He equal­ly asks ques­tions of Pogre­bin, who shows her­self to be a keen observ­er of mod­ern life. They respect­ful­ly chal­lenge one anoth­er and some­times leave con­ver­sa­tions agree­ing to disagree. 

Where­as some books try to be uni­ver­sal and time­less, this book is an accu­rate account­ing of where the authors were in a spe­cif­ic era of Amer­i­can his­to­ry. Hav­ing record­ed their pod­cast dur­ing the pan­dem­ic and the Black Lives Mat­ter protests, the two do not shy away from relat­ing the Torah to mod­ern life. In one exchange, for exam­ple, they ask whether the ini­tia­tive tak­en by Pin­chas to stop an injus­tice in the Tem­ple might be a mod­el for how bystanders might have act­ed while watch­ing the mur­der of George Floyd. 

It Takes Two to Torah is a self-con­tained book. Although the authors can’t take on every theme in a giv­en por­tion, they pro­vide a brief syn­op­sis of each, giv­ing read­ers a basic under­stand­ing of the sto­ries cov­ered. This allows Pogre­bin and Linz­er licens­es to go deep. In their con­ver­sa­tion about Par­sha Noach, they stick to two main issues: whether Noah should have done more to advo­cate for the peo­ple before the flood, and the impor­tance of law as a guardrail against bad behav­ior. Because the authors don’t address every part of a giv­en por­tion, the mate­r­i­al they do cov­er is all the richer.

One leaves this book with the feel­ing that Linz­er and Pogre­bin are friends. It’s a peek behind closed doors at the kind of dis­course that real friends can have. The Tal­mud likens the best study part­ners to two flints that strike one anoth­er and both get sharp­er. The authors of It Takes Two to Torah are proof of this anal­o­gy — and we read­ers cer­tain­ly get sharp­er along­side them.