Meta-Reflections

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.

Yaakov Jaffe responds to David Stein's earlier call to revamp the standard day school Talmud curriculum.

Sefaria has recently published a new bilingual digital edition of Talmud Yerushalmi. Taking stock of this development, Zachary Rothblatt offers an erudite synthesis of the history of Yerushalmi.

Judah Kerbel explores how differing approaches to listening to music during Sefirat ha-Omer balance the appropriate role for subjectivity in halakhic decision-making.

Lawrence Kaplan responds to Eli Putterman's essay on Reish Laqish and sexuality.

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.

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.

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."

Rabbi Daniel Reifman reviews Christine Hayes' Whats Divine about Divine Law?

Dan Jutan, Dov Greenwood, and Meir Kerzner explore the fundamentals of Jewish Education.