Commentary

The father heard the voice of God, Elli Fischer explains, but the son ends up with the blade on his neck.

In response to recent articles by Ezra Schwartz and Nathaniel Helfgot on the issue of centralization, Jeffrey Fox offers a vision of collaborative, personalized pesak in the post-Covid era.

Zach Truboff argues that Purim reminds us of our vulnerability even with the State of Israel.

Meir Ekstein review Yonatan Rosensweig’s recently translated book on mental Health and Halakhah.

A Talmudic poem about Holocaust appropriation.

The exhaustive Talmud commentary of Provencal scholar Menachem ben Shlomo Ha-Meiri was largely disregarded by Jewish scholars for centuries. Its revived popularity in the twentieth century presents a puzzle, then, for which multiple explanations have been offered. Michael Broyde considers the approaches advanced by his teacher Dr. Haym Soloveitchik and by others, before proposing his own explanation, focusing on Meiri's unique level of access to and use of Yerushalmi texts.

Just in advance of the shloshim for David Ellenson, the former president of Hebrew Union College, Jonathan D. Sarna pays tribute to a man whose life, work, and friendships spanned the Jewish denominational divide.

Tzvi Sinensky argues compellingly for a new way to understand the relationship between Shir HaShirim and Pesach in times of quarantine.

How did major segments of Orthodoxy come to devalue the importance of community-wide health? David Werdiger of Australia considers this and more in this insightful exploration of Orthodox responses to COVID.

Sima Fried reviews Jonathan Boyarin’s Yeshiva Days, illuminating the challenges of examining a community as both an insider and an outsider.