Talmud and Halakhah

In tribute to his son's hanahat tefilin and Bar Mitzvah, Lehrhaus Consulting Editor Jeffrey Saks explores a little-known, mysterious practice that appears in Agnon's short story Two Pairs.

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

Leead Staller argues for a more nuanced approach to euthanasia in Halakha.

Aryeh Klapper explores the Mikvah leniencies of Rabbi David Miller and what led one of his opponents to accuse him of making an obvious grammar mistake.

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.

Jeremy Brown discusses some remarkable Talmudic and historical precedents for social distancing during pandemics.

David Moster explores the meaning of Peri Etz Hadar.

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.

Alan Jotkowitz disagrees with Sharon Galper Grossman’s and Shamai Grossman’s halakhic argument that wealthy nations should provide booster shots to their own populations before contributing doses to poorer countries.