Talmud and Halakhah

Tzniut, much discussed in the Modern Orthodox community, is not an end but a means, prompting us to the higher value of awareness of being in the Divine presence.

As part of his Legal Fictions creative project, Dovid Campbell reimagines the content of Mishna Yevamot 16:6 in an evocative narrative.

The classification of certain people as "athenes" receives wide expression in Talmudic stories and even practical halakhic application. Shayna Herszage-Feldan considers the varieties of asthenes descriptions in Talmudic texts, proposing that the category encompasses the condition that is today diagnosed as contamination-focused obsessive compulsive disorder.

In the wake of recent painful times for the Jewish people, Batsheva Leah Weinstein discusses the ways halakha guides emotion through pain and joy.

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

Was the Mishnah intended to serve as a legal text? This traditional assumption, which forms a central premise of the halakhic process, has been challenged by more recent scholarship. Dovid Campbell engages with this scholarship and performs his own close reading of some of the Mishnah's more enigmatic digressions to propose his conception of the Mishnah as a corpus of "found philosophy."

In this piece, Rabbi Dvir Cahana and Rabbanit Shalhevet Cahana illustrate different methods of relating halakha and aggadah in Talmudic analysis through the lens of the Talmudic narrative of the Oven of Akhnai.

  Mark Glass I. A long time ago in a galaxy far far away. … Growing up, that’s how the gabba’im of my youth minyan would determine if...

Yonah Lavery-Yisraeli examines the complexities of interpersonal conflict and forgiveness which are demonstrated in the Talmud.

How can repeated tropes in rabbinic aggada help us to understand the rabbis' values--and how they related to Tanakh? Moshe Isaacson explores a variety of examples, suggesting that the question has only begun to be examined.