Talmud and Halakhah

Francis Nataf argues that the Jewish ethics of mutual aid force us to re-examine our obligations to non-Jews within and outside of our communities.

Sara Tillinger Wolkenfeld offers a reflection on the role of imagination in bringing about the recent women's Siyyum ha-Shas.

Alan Jotkowitz shares insights into Rambam’s Hilkhot Teshuvah

Shloime Schwartz looks at the numerous lessons about Teshuvah that the commentaries derive from the story of Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya.

Lawrence Kaplan In his recent Lehrhaus essay “Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein and Academic Talmud Study,” Professor Avraham (Rami) Reiner proves himself to be a genuine disciple...

With Hoshanah Rabbah today and the theme of repentance in mind, Jack Cohen explores the role that outsiders play in one's teshuva process through an enigmatic midrash instructing one to return a person to themselves.

In a rare piece of Lehrhaus Purim Torah, Mark Glass explores—with surprising halakhic rigor—whether the Pokémon named Bulbasaur’s use of a Solar Beam attack would constitute cooking on Shabbat.

Joshua Yuter considers rabbinic conceptions of justice in the age of #metoo.

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.

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."