Coronavirus

Julie and Uri Goldstein offer a timely Haggadah for reflection this year.

At the height of the cholera epidemic in 1831, Hatam Sofer delivered a timely sermon on a perplexing midrash to Parshat Ki Tavo. The take-home, suggests Elli Fischer, is all-too familiar in the COVID era.

Alan Jotkowitz explores how frequently overlooked passages in the writings of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks can help pave a path forward for us on theological issues in a post-Covid world.

In this response to last week’s article by Ezra Schwartz, Nathaniel Helfgot wonders whether the new pandemic-fueled trend toward centralized halakhic decision-making overburdens the most learned rabbis and takes too much autonomy from the others.

How can we respond to a Seder during which it is prohibited to host guests? Yitzchak Etshalom and David Block each offer unique tefillot to be recited at our Seder table this year.

Contemporary physicians have been heroic in the battle against COVID-19, but what was it like to be one of a handful of Jewish doctors confronting the Bubonic Plague during the 17th-century in Italy? Prolific medical halakhist and historian Eddie Reichman takes a close look at the four Jewish graduates of the Padua medical school class of 1623.

Many synagogue goers found the abbreviated High Holiday services we recently concluded quite appealing. Need we eventually go back to the way it was before coronavirus? Not really, argues Moshe Kurtz, surveying the substantial halakhic support for shortening the services every year.

When Synagogues Reopen, May the Congregation Permit a Bar Mitzvah Boy to Make Up His Torah Reading? Moshe Kurtz weighs in.

After six months suspended between quarantine, isolation, and uncertainty, it’s natural to want to run away from home, especially as Yom Kippur looms and we realize it’s time for a change. But, as Matthew Nitzanim explains, this understandable reaction would miss the point of Teshuvah: everything we need to work on is right here, wherever it is we find ourselves.

Stuart Halpern explains how, when faced with uncertainty, danger, and personal and communal hardships, Americans have turned to the story of the Exodus for inspiration.