The Lehrhaus Editors
As 2025 comes to a close, the Lehrhaus team is proud to feature some highlights from our contributions this past year. Since its inception in 2016, the Lehrhaus has been on a mission to provide thoughtful and engaging Jewish content. We continue to offer quality studies on history, parshah, Jewish thought, halakhah, and more, as well as to serve as a platform for passionate yet respectful debate on issues facing the Jewish community. This past year, we have once again produced at least one hundred original pieces across a wide variety of genres. We have published many popular articles addressing contemporary issues, and have shared more short fiction than ever before.
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This year marked the fifth anniversary of the passing of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. In honor of his yahrzeit, we published two works that compared Rabbi Sacks to other Jewish leaders: Steven Gotlib studied Rabbi Sacks’s criticism of the religious worldview of Rabbi Dr. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, and Aryeh Solomon studied Rabbi Sacks’s lifelong engagement with the thought of the Lubavitcher Rebbe.
In addition to examining Chabad though the lens of Rabbi Sacks, we also published pieces about Chabad coming from other angles. Litvacitus wrote a poem about the impact of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. We published an excerpt from Eli Rubin’s new book about Chabad, as well as a review of that book by Chesky Kopel. Most recently, Elisha Price examined several possible interpretations of the Tanya’s description of the Godly soul.
The Lehrhaus was proud to publish several pieces related to mental health. Meir Ekstein reviewed Yonatan Rosensweig and Shmuel Harris’s recently translated book on mental health and halakhah. Also, Shayna Herszage published a piece proposing that the category of asthenes encompasses the condition that is today diagnosed as contamination-focused OCD, and Ariel Goldstein drew on her experience as a therapist to expand on the hardship of being a Jewish woman.
As is the case with much of the Jewish people, the war in Israel has been on our minds. In early 2025, we shared an exchange between Hillel David Rapp and Ethan Zadoff about what Israel education in our schools should look like post-October 7. Later in the year, we published the differing perspectives of Zach Truboff and Roy Pinchot, one calling on Israeli society to confront the spiritual and moral cost of the continuing conflict, and the other celebrating the fact that Israel is strong enough to defend itself from its enemies.
The Lehrhaus again played an active role in fostering Jewish fiction in 2025. We announced the results of our first ever Short Story Contest, won by Devorah Talia Gordon, with Joseph Helmreich as the runner up. A posthumously published short story written by Leo Taubes demonstrated the rarity and power of human connection. Tchiya Froman examined her father-in-law’s fiction, and Akiva Weisinger explored the boundary between fiction and drasha.
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