Meta-Reflections

The new book Reclaiming Dignity is taking the Anglo Jewish world by storm. Why? Emmanuel Bloch, who wrote his dissertation on the subject of tzeniut, argues that the work capitalizes on and extends a new, revolutionary halakhic and conceptual framework for tzeniut that has emerged only in recent years - one that offers a lens to the “soul of contemporary Jewish Orthodoxy.”

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."

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.

With lyrical prose, Natan Oliff teaches us how to view prayer as a virtue and let it enter every aspect of our lives, making us into prayerful people.

Yonah Lavery-Yisraeli offers a careful examination of an enigmatic discussion in the Shulhan Arukh’s laws on neighborly relations. She demonstrates how “radical presence” and attention to sensory details is an essential strategy for halakhic decision-making.

Shlomo Zuckier explores some surprising connections between the Talmud and the field of behavioral economics.

What sort of powers did Hazal have in the first century? Ari Lamm wonders.

In this personal reflection, Phil Lieberman addresses the unique pain that accompanies the loss of an abusive parent and considers the uneasy coherence of this pain with Jewish traditions of mourning.

Yaakov Taubes explores the background to Maimonides’s explanation for how the Mishnah is ordered.

Last year, Nathan B. Oman, a Latter-day Saint and law professor, bought hametz from the members of Chaim Saiman’s synagogue before Passover. This is his story—a profound meditation on the nature of religious law and legal fiction — with an introduction by Chaim Saiman.