Talmud and Halakhah

Amitai Bin-Nun provides a fresh and intriguing perspective on the story of the Golden Calf by reading it in light of the Talmudic passage in Menahot detailing an encounter between Moses and R. Akiba on Mt. Sinai where God is tying crowns to the letters of the Torah scroll.

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.

Chaim Saiman comments on the nature of Simhat Torah.

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.

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

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

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.

Reading R. Eliezer b. Hyrcanus and Shammai through an autistic lens, Liz Shayne explores how uncompromising, righteous anger can find a place in the beit midrash.

For Parshat Naso, Lehrhaus editor Yosef Lindell compares three twentieth-century rereadings of the Sotah ritual that make the passage more palatable to modern audiences.

Lawrence Kaplan responds to AJ Berkovitz’s article on the many conflicting interpretations of a passage in Midrash Tehillim, highlighting two different approaches advanced by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik.