Timely Thoughts

Yosef Lindell offers a brief history of Pesah guides.

In honor of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks’s 70th birthday, Ari Lamm explores his legacy as a biblical commentator.

For Parshat Zakhor, this short story by Shira Eliaser richly imagines the world of King Saul and the clandestine encounter that brought Haman’s Amalekite ancestors into the world.

Judah Kerbel explores how differing approaches to listening to music during Sefirat ha-Omer balance the appropriate role for subjectivity in halakhic decision-making.

  Zach Truboff In 1933, as the month of Elul approached, the Jewish people faced a frightening array of dangers. That year, Hitler consolidated power as...

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.

Did the Founding Fathers study Kabbalah? Yisroel Ben-Porat reviews Brian Ogren’s new book Kabbalah and the Founding of America.

Leead Staller argues for a more nuanced approach to euthanasia in Halakha.

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.

Leah Sarna argues that this is the Passover to tell the stories of enslaved Jewish women: of the victims of October 7, who were and likely still are subjected to sexual violence, and of the heroic women in the era of the Exodus, who fought to ensure the perpetuation of the Jewish people.