Scholarship

Yonah Lavery-Yisraeli explores the relationship between the Talmudic term of "asmakhta" and the way we view our past, present, and future.

Dan Ornstein juxtaposes the narratives of Cain and Jonah and explores the motif of anger.

With Hoshanah Rabbah today and the theme of repentance in mind, Jack Cohen explores the role that outsiders play in one's teshuva process through an enigmatic midrash instructing one to return a person to themselves.

It is customary to celebrate Tu Bi-Shevat by eating fruits and reciting the She-Hehiyanu blessing on them. This custom, however, has proved challenging in recent years as advances in technology have made it difficult to find new fruit—as defined by halakhah—to say the She-Hehiyanu

Michael Bernstein examines how the individual experience is ironically incorporated into holidays that are all about the community.

Ben Greenfield examines the curious parallels between the stories of Moshe in the ark and the splitting of the sea.

Tehila Wenger offers a short story on loss, eternity, and olive trees .

Tzvi Goldstein responds to letters from Chaim Goldberg and Yaakov Resnik on his piece on the differences between Centrist and Haredi Orthodoxy, unpacking the view of Rav Hayyim Volozhin’s Nefesh Ha-Hayyim.

The propriety of celebrating the downfall of enemies presents a complex web of questions and seemingly contradictory Jewish texts. Michael Kurin makes sense of this subject and proposes a framework for applying it to matters of Israeli public policy.

Aryeh Dienstag and Penina Dienstag respond to the articles by Sharon Galper-Grossman, Shamai Grossman, and Alan Jotkowitz regarding vaccine allocation.