“It’s about being a lifelong learner.”
That’s what Abigail said to me when we reached the section in Deuteronomy that commands the king to keep a Sefer Torah with him at all times. It’s right there in the verse: “And it shall be with him, and he shall read from it all the days of his life” (Deut. 17:19).
But here’s the funny thing: Though I have been a lifelong learner—someone who has been immersed in the study of Torah since my teens, spending hours each day with my nose buried in one of the Five Books of Moses or Talmud, sometimes to the point of being so caught up inside my head with the ins-and-outs of a Talmudic discussion that I would bump into telephone poles—I never saw that verse in that way.
For me, the message had always been about what comes at the end: “…in order that he learn to fear God to observe all the words of this Torah.” The point was that the king had to be constantly reminded that there is an authority and power greater than he, that even a monarch is under God and bound by God’s Torah. And all of that is still true about what this text teaches. But how did I miss that key message of being a “lifelong student,” which Abby rightly highlighted?
I missed it because I’d overlooked what it means to be a true learner. It’s not just the hours one spends with their head buried in a book. It’s about engaging with other people and ideas, which may be radically different from your own. It’s about asking yourself: What can I learn from this other perspective? It’s about cultivating genuine curiosity and stepping outside of your echo chamber.
In the world of the yeshivot, the learning of Torah is not an individual pursuit; it is always studied bi’chavruta, in pairs. Two people, often sitting on opposite sides of a table with the same text open in front of them, work together to plumb its depths and argue back and forth, even yelling at times, in the pursuit of arriving at the true meaning of a particular piece of Torah.
The daily partnership of study is a beautiful image and exhilarating to experience. And yet. The difference in viewpoints—which each member of the pair brings to the conversation—is often extremely slight. The chavruta arrives at a deeper understanding but within very bounded parameters of shared theological and religious commitments.
Abby taught me—through the many years that the two of us have been learning, laughing, sharing, and challenging one another—that to be a committed learner requires not only going deep but also going wide. Otherwise, your field of vision will be so narrow, you’ll keep on walking into telephone poles.
That said, for me, learning Torah has always been more than an intellectual exploration. It is inexorably intertwined with my core religious beliefs and how I live my life. Like the king in the previously cited verse, I learn Torah “to fear God,” because I believe that study is a mitzvah and orients me toward a constant and ongoing relationship with God.
Learning Torah elevates me out of the urgency of the moment, the busyness of the mundane. At the end of the day, the stories and laws in the Torah are all about what it means for us to be human and to be created in the Divine Image, with a mandate to choose good, to choose life. Making time to study a parsha, whether on my own, or—much better—with a chavruta and sparring partner, gives me the space and breathing room to be reflective about myself, my world, and the people around me.
The Torah pulls you in with its messy stories about imperfect human beings, doing what God wants them to do (or not), acting toward their spouse or a stranger in ways that are awe-inspiring or horrific or a little bit of both. And in the middle of all of that, I find it drawing me back to the same questions again and again: How would I act in these situations? How do these issues play out in my own family, friendships, and work? What are my values and priorities, and are they the right ones? What is it that I want from God, and what does God want from me?
[…]
I am trained to read the Torah through the lens of the Rabbis. This means a lot has already been “pre-solved” for me, whether morally vexing narratives or mitzvot that seem dated and alien. To some degree, the more the text matters, the more its difficult passages have been tamed.
Thank God, then, for Abby. She has shaken me out of my over-familiarity with one way of reading and learning the Torah. Abby is one of the most incisive, insightful, informed, and intelligent—not to mention kind, caring, and funny—people with whom I have had the privilege of learning Torah with. She is a woman who has devoted her life to thinking, talking, asking, challenging, and writing about what it means to be Jewish. And she doesn’t let anyone—not the superstars whom she interviews regularly nor her Torah study partner—get away with complacency or wishy-washiness. Abby has kept me honest and helped make me, truly, a lifelong learner.
Our Rabbis teach us that when two people sit together to learn Torah, the Shechina, the Divine Presence, dwells among them. When two people challenge one another to understand Torah, they connect with something bigger than either one of them. They can even achieve a degree of transcendence. That has been my experience, and it can be yours as well. I guarantee you’ll start to see Torah everywhere.
Excerpted from Rabbi Dov Linzer’s Introduction to It Takes Two to Torah, by Abigail Pogrebin and Rabbi Dov Linzer. Reprinted with permission from the publisher, Fig Tree Books LLC. To be released this coming week, Sept. 10, 2024!
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