Scholarship

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.

Max Hollander analyzes the Talmudic narrative of Pardes and the four rabbis who entered it.

Yom Kippur marks the end of an 11 week period when thematic haftarot about the destruction of the Temple, consolation following its loss, and repentance replace haftarot connected to the weekly Torah reading. What can this grouping teach us about the nature of forgiveness and reconciliation? Hannah Abrams explains.

Daniel Goldberg examines how four versions of a Midrash about Shemini Atzeret reflect different aspects of the Jewish people's relationship with God.

How was the original Seder experienced, and how do we constitute a Jewish collective? Joel Levy and Leon Wiener-Dow argue that the collective must begin with the independent-minded individual.

In response to Gil Perl's Postmodern Orthodoxy, Gidon Rothstein asks for another look at Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein and the limits of pluralism and what we consider "truth."

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.

Shlomo Zuckier on the mechanics of a midrashic motif.

David Fried reviews The Golden Path: Maimonides Across Eight Centuries, the companion volume to the Yeshiva University Museum’s exhibit on Maimonides.

In honor of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s fifth yahrtzeit, we present Steven Gotlib's study of Rabbi Sacks's longstanding criticism of the religious worldview of Rabbi Dr. Joseph B. Soloveitchik.