Meta-Reflections

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 response to Tzvi Sinensky's earlier essay, Andrew Bennett presents Jewish legal scholar Robert Cover's and noted antisemite Carl Schmitt's thoughts on elu ve-elu.

Tzvi Sinensky offers a fresh look at one of Rabbinic Judaism's most important mottos.

In commemoration of the upcoming Sheloshim of Rav Moshe Kahn, Mindy Schwartz Zolty shares a Hesped of her teacher in which she discusses his derekh ha-limmud and his derekh as a melamed.

Moshe Koppel Reviews Chaim Saiman's Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law.

Jonathan Ziring comments on the "Jewishness" of religious tolerance.

Suzanne Last Stone reviews Chaim Saiman's Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law.

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.”

Jeffrey Woolf contributes to the Lehrhaus Symposium on the recent OU statement regarding female clergy.

A growing list of dati le’umi leaders and thinkers frame war as a desirable state and even an opportunity for spiritual elevation. Religious Israeli activist Ariel Shwartz traces this trend with alarm and argues that it contradicts deep-rooted Torah values. Translated by Mordechai Blau.