Timely Thoughts

Yaakov Taubes examines three hypothetical “What if?” books and what they can teach us about history, science, and halakhah.

In advance of Tisha Be-Av, Tzvi Novick annotates and interprets the kinnah of a’adeh ad hug shamayim by the master poet R. Eleazar ha-Kalir, unlocking its complex acrostic to determine who its speaker is meant to be.

In 1927, Rabbi Boruch Ber Leibowitz wrote a poem, an ode to Rabbi Hayyim Soloveitchik of Brisk. Nati Helfgot provides the background and a translation.

  The Lehrhaus Editors Over the course of another tumultuous year, we have once again taken refuge in our Torah. We at The Lehrhaus are proud...

David Schwartz explores thematic similarities between the Hanukkah miracle and Pharaoh’s dreams.

It has been six years since Rav Aharon Lichtenstein passed away. In reviewing a 2018 collection of essays by Rav Lichtenstein’s students, Alan Jotkowitz reflects on what we have lost and the void that remains.

  Aton M. Holzer The fifteenth of Av – among the most minor of minor festivals on the Jewish calendar – is marked in the diaspora...

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.

What inspired Azariah de Rossi to take a work that cut against the grain of rabbinic views of the Septuagint and make it accessible to his Hebrew-reading fellow Jews?

Chana Chava Ford explains what Sukkot might teach us about real religious change.