From 2018 to 2020, jour­nal­ist Abi­gail Pogre­bin (a Reform Jew) and Rab­bi Dov Linz­er (pres­i­dent of the Ortho­dox sem­i­nary Yeshi­v­at Chovevei Torah in Riverdale, NY) start­ed an unusu­al havru­ta. They talked through every par­sha of the Torah —across sig­nif­i­cant chasms of dif­fer­ence in opin­ion — with the dis­ci­pline of schol­ar­ship and with pro­found hon­esty. These were tur­bu­lent years marked by an increase in par­ti­san­ship, fis­sures around immi­gra­tion, the shock and iso­la­tion of the COVID pan­dem­ic, and the racial reck­on­ing after George Floyd’s murder. 

Pogre­bin and Linz­er record­ed their con­ver­sa­tions for a pod­cast that has now been adapt­ed into a book, It Takes Two to Torah, that cap­tures the live­ly dia­logue and dis­course of their discussions. 

JBC asked them to have one more con­ver­sa­tion about a key sub­ject in the Torah that they might have left out from their ini­tial talks and wished they’d had the chance to delve into. 

Dov Linz­er: Abby, in our two years talk­ing Torah togeth­er, we nev­er cov­ered the cen­tral affir­ma­tion of faith – the She­ma. How could we have skipped that?

Abi­gail Pogre­bin: It’s a shan­da that we did, but it has new res­o­nance now, after Octo­ber 7th, when so many Jews in Amer­i­ca are feel­ing a strong pull to pro­claim – or at least reck­on with – their Jew­ish­ness, espe­cial­ly as a response to the surge in anti­semitism. The She­ma has tak­en on new weight, new defi­ance. I’m always stirred by the real­iza­tion that this prayer joins every Jew in every nation. A glob­al prayer of Peoplehood. 

DL: Me too – it’s the oath that binds us all. And the She­ma is not just a ver­bal affir­ma­tion of our Jew­ish iden­ti­ty. It func­tions as a phys­i­cal sym­bol of iden­ti­ty. The words are inside the mezuzah, which marks our home as a Jew­ish one, and those same words are in our tefill­in, mark­ing our bod­ies as Jew­ish as well.

AP: Nobody would be wear­ing those black box­es if they weren’t Jew­ish, that’s for sure.

DL: Exact­ly. And we’ve seen, sad­ly, how Jews in Europe and even the US have had to weigh whether to take down the mezuzah from their front doors because they feel a need to hide, or at least not adver­tise, their Jew­ish­ness, for fear of being attacked.

AP: At the same time, I’ve seen how the recent upset­ting events are moti­vat­ing peo­ple to make more pub­lic affir­ma­tions of their Jew­ish iden­ti­ty and sol­i­dar­i­ty, to wear a kip­pah or a Jew­ish star, to put a mezuzah up for the first time.

DL: Absolute­ly. Let’s turn to the text, shall we? We are in the last book of the Hebrew Bible, Deuteron­o­my 6:4 – 9.

AP: Moses is relay­ing God’s instruc­tions to the Israelites – right after Moses laid out the Ten Com­mand­ments and just before his peo­ple will cross into the Promised Land. Will you read the verses?

DL: ​“Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one. 

You shall love your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. 

Take to heart these instruc­tions with which I charge you this day.

Impress them upon your chil­dren. Recite them when you stay at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you get up.

Bind them as a sign on your hand and let them serve as a sym­bol on your forehead; 

inscribe them on the door­posts of your house and on your gates.”

AP: It’s so straight­for­ward and force­ful in its economy. 

DL: Yes, and these words are part of the fab­ric of the tra­di­tion­al Jew­ish day. Three times we essen­tial­ly affirm, ​“I am a Jew; here is what I believe.” Once dur­ing morn­ing and evening prayers, once at bed­time, because for gen­er­a­tions, that became a cus­tom­ary ritual. 

AP: It’s curi­ous to me that the She­ma pledge starts with the word, ​“Hear.” Why do you think that​’s the direc­tive – instead of a com­mand to do? Why lis­ten instead of act? Espe­cial­ly since we just came from the scene on Mount Sinai, when the Israelites received the law and respond­ed, ​“We will do and we will lis­ten.” The doing came first, which sug­gests that deeds are paramount. 

DL: Maybe since so much of what fol­lows in the Torah is all about mitzvot – what we do, the She­ma is return­ing us to the ​“we will hear” part that we promised at Sinai. It sug­gests some­thing more inward: we need to inter­nal­ize the com­mit­ment to God, to the law, and to the life of a Jew. This gets to the why of what we are doing. It’s a reminder to be reflective.

AP: Let’s talk about this line, ​“with all your heart and with all your soul.” The all-ness is notice­able. Moses doesn’t just tell us to love God, but to love God with every­thing we’ve got. 

DL: Right. ​“All your heart” is under­stood to mean, ​“love God with all our emo­tions” – no mat­ter what we’re feel­ing, and ​“all your soul” is under­stood to mean, ​“with all your thoughts and intel­lect,” and ​“all your might.”

AP: Why ​“might”? What does it mean to love with force or with strength?

DL: The sim­ple mean­ing is essen­tial­ly, ​“with great much­ness.” With exces­sive­ness. It’s to under­score a lot. It can also be under­stood to mean ​“all your wealth.” And the rab­bis also offer a the­o­log­i­cal inter­pre­ta­tion: they read the word meod in the verse – ​“a lot” – to be con­nect­ed to the word mid­dah, which has a sim­i­lar sound. Mid­dah means ​“mea­sure,” so the rab­bis explain that what­ev­er God mea­sures out for you – whether you’re expe­ri­enc­ing good or bad for­tune – you should be thankful.

AP: That touch­es a chord with me because I have to con­fess that I recite the She­ma every night before sleep, and I’m aware that I’m say­ing it – and striv­ing to mean it–no mat­ter what awful thing has hap­pened in the world or to some­one I care about. In oth­er words, I’m re-com­mit­ting to faith regard­less of whether I can fath­om why God allowed some­thing ter­ri­ble to happen.

DL: Abby, that’s actu­al­ly an idea that chal­lenges me. Because when I recite the She­ma at night, my goal is to just gen­er­al­ly think about God as the last thought to end the day. But because of what you just said, I’d like to start incor­po­rat­ing your inten­tion. Thank you for that.

AP: You are very welcome. 

DL: Let’s turn to the end vers­es: ​“Inscribe them on your door­posts.” This is the mitz­vah of mezuzah: to take a tiny scroll with the She­ma prayer and affix it to the entry of our house. Do you have mezu­zot up on your door frames? 

AP: I do, but I don’t touch or kiss them when I walk in and out. 

DL: For a lot of my life, I also wouldn’t kiss the mezuzah. I took a very ratio­nal­ist approach. My not-kiss­ing was a state­ment: ​“I’m not super­sti­tious – I don’t feel, as some do, like the mezuzah is a mag­ic charm that pro­tects the house.” But then I real­ized it’s such an impor­tant part of God-con­scious­ness to kiss or touch the mezuzah going in and out. That’s the whole point of it: you stop and think, espe­cial­ly at moments of tran­si­tion, when we are mov­ing from our pub­lic space – and pub­lic per­sona – to our pri­vate one, or vice versa.

AP: I love that. Maybe I’ll start kiss­ing my mezuzah, too. 

DL: It looks like we might change each other’s She­ma practices.

AP: Before we end, let’s talk about the word ​“impress” in the line, ​“Impress them upon your chil­dren.” (Deut 6:7) When you think about the oth­er words in this litany – ​“impress…bind….inscribe” – they sug­gest to me almost like a brand­ing. We are mak­ing a promise to phys­i­cal­ize this com­mit­ment to God: put it vis­i­bly on our body. 

DL: That is so true. The Rab­bis com­pare tefill­in to exact­ly that – to a brand that the own­er places on his slave. 

AP: I don’t love the slave anal­o­gy at all.

DL: Well, we can’t avoid the way things used to be in the ancient world.

AP: When I laid tefill­in one time – right before I became a bat mitz­vah at age forty – I felt like I might cut off my circulation. 

DL: I can tell you that after doing it dai­ly over many years, one learns how to wrap it with­out mak­ing it too tight. 

AP: But the leather straps do leave marks.

DL: Absolute­ly. You’re left with the inden­ta­tions after you take it off. 

AP: How do you feel about those grooves? Are they sym­bol­ic of your dai­ly faith?

DL: I nev­er thought about it actu­al­ly, but see­ing marks on someone’s arm is the clas­sic way you know if some­body has just come from shul. It puts a kind of insignia on your body in a way that a kip­pah or tal­lit doesn’t. Think about the parsha’s lan­guage, ​“write them on the mezu­zot.” The Hebrew word ​“mezuzah” actu­al­ly means door post, it doesn’t refer to the scroll itself. So the lit­er­al sense of the verse is that you actu­al­ly write it direct­ly onto your house. You don’t just attach the scroll. 

AP: That’s even more per­ma­nent than a scroll you can trans­port or take down. 

DL: Yes, it goes back to the ques­tion so many Jews are ask­ing them­selves today: how pub­licly Jew­ish to be. 

AP: Let’s talk about the con­sis­ten­cy that’s pre­scribed in this verse – that you should be engag­ing the Torah no mat­ter where you are in your day. ​“Recite them when you stay at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you get up.”

DL: Yes, the idea is that you should always be talk­ing about Torah – these words should always be on your heart.

AP: It feels impor­tant that the charge is to ​“recite” – to speak it, dis­cuss it, be in con­ver­sa­tion about Torah every wak­ing hour.

DL: That’s where the project that you and I under­took – pars­ing every par­sha on a reg­u­lar basis out loud togeth­er – was a ful­fill­ment of that com­mand. As it is every time any­one learns or brings Torah into their lives.

AP: Our con­nec­tive tis­sue is the recita­tion of – and engage­ment with – this book. Every time we return to the She­ma, we’re declar­ing, ​“This is who I am.”

DL: Yes, the She­ma says, I am not just a Jew, but a pub­lic one – vis­i­ble in the black box on my fore­head, the inden­ta­tions on my arms, the mezuzah on my door.

AP: No mat­ter who would pre­fer we hide or disappear.