Author: Meghan Froy

When the rabbis tackle big ideas, they rarely signal they are doing so. This means that you never know when a mundane halakhic argument will suddenly reveal a much deeper clash. Such is the case on today’s page, when a deceptively innocent debate about a tiny turn of phrase in a blessing reveals a major philosophical divide. […]

Many Jews have the custom of singing Shabbat songs, or zemirot, after the festive meals every Shabbat. One of my many favorites is an early modern onecalled Yom Zeh L’Yisrael (“this is a day for Israel”), traditionally sung after Friday night dinner. The second stanza reads: “Hearts’ desire for a broken nation, for ailing spirits an […]

There were two major centers of the late antique rabbinic world: Roman Palestine and Sasanian Babylonia. The rabbis in these two communities were subject to different empires and had different cultural contexts that shaped their lives. While they all saw themselves as part of the same rabbinic Jewish community, their differences were also important and […]

Today the Gemara continues its discussion of the labors that would ordinarily be prohibited on festivals but are permitted because they allow one to prepare food. There turn out to be a number of interesting facets here. For instance, preparing food wasn’t just about slaughtering animals or preparing grains and then cooking them. It also inevitably meant […]

In his commentary on the Torah, the medieval Jewish thinker Nahmanides (a.k.a. Ramban) refers to the types of work permitted on festivals as melekhet hana’ah, “work of pleasure.” These are the actions which are forbidden on Shabbat but permitted on festivals because they offer more opportunity for good, fresh food which will enhance the pleasure of the celebration. But just […]

It’s easy to mistake Yom Kippur for a somber occasion. Many of the traditions observed on Yom Kippur — abstaining from eating, drinking, and marital relations, or swapping out leather shoes for sneakers or Crocs — are also prohibited on Tisha B’Av, the saddest day of the Jewish calendar, and other days of communal mourning. […]

Here’s an irony: Yom Kippur is among the most widely observed of the Jewish holidays, yet for a majority of Jews, it’s also the most alienating. Consider: Shabbat is largely about rest, Sukkot is about the cycles of ecology, Passover is about freedom. All relatable and relevant concepts that don’t depend on a belief in […]

Khoreshte beh is a classic Persian dish of quince and beef shank stewed slowly in a pomegranate base and served over steamed basmati rice. Iranian Jews commonly eat it as a pre-fast meal for Yom Kippur. Quince and pomegranate are both in season, as the holiday lands at the transition from summer to fall. Its […]

Doves aren’t a part of my family’s holiday celebrations, but they seem to have been for the rabbis. If you had to gather doves to eat on the day of the festival itself, you might have to climb a ladder to reach them in their dovecote (a shelter for domesticated birds). But what if the […]

Halakhic decision making can be, at times, a bit convoluted. New rules are sometimes born awkwardly from older ones, and rabbinic thinking can fly in the face of contemporary logic or knowledge. But on today’s daf, we find one of those occasions when you can trace a rule directly from Torah through the Mishnah to […]