Talmud and Halakhah

Noah Marlowe offers a personal reflection on the experience of simultaneously studying Hilkhot Aveilut and coping with loss from a clinical social work perspective. He explores the similarities and differences between the two lenses and how they could each benefit from being in conversation with each other.

  Mark Glass I. A long time ago in a galaxy far far away. … Growing up, that’s how the gabba’im of my youth minyan would determine if...

Zackary Sholem Berger Reviews Rabbi Jason Weiner's Jewish Guide to Practical Medical Decision Making.

In this piece, Rabbi Dvir Cahana and Rabbanit Shalhevet Cahana illustrate different methods of relating halakha and aggadah in Talmudic analysis through the lens of the Talmudic narrative of the Oven of Akhnai.

What does the Torah mean when it says to "guard your nefesh (soul)"? Lehrhaus editor David Fried reevaluates the common understanding of a Torah mandate for healthy living.

What do the wisdom of traditional Jewish texts and the recent findings of modern psychology have in common? Marc Eichenbaum finds commonalities in both to promote a character-driven approach to Jewish education.

Chaim Twerski contributes to the Lehrhaus Symposium on the recent OU statement regarding female clergy.

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."

Sharon Galper Grossman and Shamai A. Grossman, leading doctors writing from quarantine, explain why even the Noda be-Yehuda, who requires that the sick person be before us, would agree that a public health crisis is subject to the leniencies of pikuah nefesh.

Are today's rabbis allowed to initiate new prohibitions? Aryeh Klapper analyzes a responsum on the issue of halakhic innovation regarding new technologies.