Scholarship

Yaakov Taubes examines three hypothetical “What if?” books and what they can teach us about history, science, and halakhah.

In light of the Supreme Court’s decision on Friday, Michael Broyde considers what American abortion law halakhah might prefer.

In his latest for the Lehrhaus, Steven Gotlib reviews the recently published collection of essays, Strauss, Spinoza, and Sinai: Orthodox Judaism and Modern Questions of Faith, which tries to answer: is there a philosophical defense of Orthodoxy in the modern world?

On this flag day, Moshe Kurtz surveys the arguments for and against displaying national flags in synagogues.

For Parshat Naso, Lehrhaus editor Yosef Lindell compares three twentieth-century rereadings of the Sotah ritual that make the passage more palatable to modern audiences.

Thanks in part to several new publications, portions of the Orthodox world have been engaging with modern biblical scholarship in a more significant way than ever before. Gil Perl provides a four-step framework for how Jewish days schools might profitably teach many aspects of biblical criticism that do not conflict with our mesorah.

Joshua Stadlan carefully explores the “blemishes” that invalidate a kohein for service in the Mishkan to argue that they were not an original part of God’s plan.

Judah Kerbel explores how differing approaches to listening to music during Sefirat ha-Omer balance the appropriate role for subjectivity in halakhic decision-making.

On Yom Ha'atzmaut, Zach Truboff reflects on Rav Shagar's insistence that the Israeli present must be rooted in the past, and explores the redemptive power of Torah as an answer for modernity.

Is God revealed through our speech? In his review of Ariel Evan Mayse’s Speaking Infinities, Steven Gotlib explores this question in the thought of the Maggid of Mezritch.