Timely Thoughts

Ari Lamm offers a retrospective on the music of Steely Dan and its significance for Rosh Hashanah.

Rav Moshe Feinstein does not praise the United States for not having fascists and communists, but for having a system of government that is particularly resistant to what came to be known as totalitarianism.

Those of us who feel deeply connected and indebted to Hasidism should ask ourselves a difficult and perhaps painful question: Is Netivot Shalom the sefer that we want to represent us to the rest of Am Yisrael?

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.

Ezra Sivan presents a new analysis of Shabbat and how it throws light on so much more in the Torah.

Ayelet Wenger offers a creative, intertextual reading of the story of Rabbi Akiva and the Wolf on the Temple Mount.

In commemoration of Rav Amital's seventh Yahrtzeit, Shlomo Zuckier shares Rav Amital's teachings on Jewish continuity, in Derasha form.

For Eve Grubin, Bilam's hidden messages is a lesson for the Torah and for life.

Yakov Z. Mayer reflects on the life of a remarkable Hasidic academic.

Chaim Saiman analyzes how the Torah's two introductions to the revelation at Sinai correspond to two perspectives on the nature of halakhic civil law.