Meta-Reflections

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.

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."

Sarah Rudolph responds to Zev Eleff's article on "Digital Democratization".

Steven Gotlib reviews Eugene Korn’s To Be a Holy People: Jewish Tradition and Ethical Values, a book which asks hard questions about whether Halakhah can integrate with the demands of contemporary ethics.

In these difficult times for Israel, Aharon Frazer of Alon Shvut is thinking about the fundamental sanctity of human life and the long game. Can war and weapons really take us toward the messianic age?

The epikorus and the min apparently represent two different kinds of heretic in traditional Jewish literature. Elisha Price traces the evolving meaning of each term in Hazal and medieval writings, clarifying the differences between the major genres of Jewish heresy and helping illuminate for us why they matter.

In 1927, Rabbi Boruch Ber Leibowitz wrote a poem, an ode to Rabbi Hayyim Soloveitchik of Brisk. Nati Helfgot provides the background and a translation.

  Isaac (Amichai) Roszler Rabbi Joseph Hirsch Dünner (1833-1911), also known as Ritzad, was one of the first modern academic scholars of the Bavli, the Babylonian...

The most enjoyable feature of the book is the brilliant and creative integration of the daily Talmudic folio Kurshan studies with experiences of her life.

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