Talmud and Halakhah

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.

What is the appropriate way to address a rabbi? Moshe Kurtz offers a thoughtful perspective on lay usage of rabbinic titles.

The Talmudic story of Kamtza and Bar Kamtza is often used to highlight the destructive consequences of baseless hatred. In an intriguing reading, David Hellman suggests that the hatred that motivated the tale’s participants is more complex than meets the eye.

The secular calendar has its leap day on Feb. 29. On the Jewish calendar, our leap day is 30 Adar I, since Adar in a non-leap year always has 29 days. Yaakov Taubes explores all of the Halakhot pertaining to this unique day.

In his latest for the Lehrhaus, Dan Ornstein creatively imagines the story of the Talmudic sage Rabbi Yohanan through his teachings on the Book of Job. The short story is followed by a reflection on the methodology and power of "contemporary midrash."

Elinatan Kupferberg argues that the boundaries between Torah and Madda have blurred and evolved throughout Jewish intellectual history. This erudite analysis upends our assumptions about Torah u-Madda and breathtakingly reimagines its past, present, and future.

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

Outside the Land of Israel, we add an extra day to several holidays. Michael Kurin wonders: why not on Hanukkah?

Michael Broyde offers a new theory for why halakhah obligates women in some time-bound positive mitzvot and exempts them from others.

Tzvi Sinensky comments on the pitfalls of being overly dependent on the "Talmudic reid."