Category: Science and Health

Consider the gazelle, the beautiful and swift creature that we encounter frequently in the eight chapters of Song of Songs: “Hark! My beloved! There he comes, leaping over mountains, bounding over hills. My beloved is like a gazelle or like a young stag.” (2:8)  Why is the gazelle accorded such a prominent place in the […]

Having wrapped up its conversation about using an elephant as the wall of a sukkah, the rabbis now consider an even wackier use for the side of an animal: to write a divorce document. I kid you not. The rules and procedures for a Jewish divorce (about which we’ll learn in Tractate Gittin) are derived by the […]

I love today’s page because it reads a bit like something dreamed up by Dr. Seuss:  Can you build your sukkah on a boat? Can you build it on a goat?  On a cart or in a tree?  Sukkot is so much fun you see! OK, the goat one is not on today’s page — […]

Once in a while, we come across an unfamiliar word in the Talmud that makes us sit back and think: “Ooh, I wonder what that means!”  That happens in a mishnah on today’s daf: A sukkah that is meduvlelet and whose shade exceeds its sunlight is fit.  So what does meduvelet mean exactly? The Gemara attempts to figure that […]

If Israel does not take the necessary steps to stop the spread of COVID-19, the pandemic could spiral out of control again and put Israel right where it was last September – a step before lockdown, senior health officials told The Jerusalem Post. And some experts are warning that Israel has only a two-week window […]

Chef Rebecca King loves being a bad Jew. She has done so since her days at Jewish summer camp. “We [my friends and I] were like, ‘We want to be bad Jews! We want to get bacon,” she told The Nosher recently via phone interview. “I just remember always, like, calling myself a bad Jew… […]

Eating at a Jewish delicatessen engages all your senses. You taste the juicy pastrami bursting between two slices of rye, smell the sweet scent of schmaltz, hear the hot dogs sizzling on the grill, and feel like you’re eating with family — welcomed, yet your privacy is invaded by the tad-too-nosy waiter. But what exactly […]

Today’s daf begins a new chapter of our tractate and a new series of questions about how to fulfill the mitzvah of dwelling in the sukkah, and it starts with the following mishnah: One who sleeps below the bed in a sukkah has not fulfilled their obligation to sleep in the sukkah. The Talmud never tells us why […]

The possible existence of aliens is one of the most intriguing subjects on the fringe of military and scientific communities, and has become more mainstream in recent years. But now, a groundbreaking new scientific initiative is creating a unified telescope network to see if mankind is truly alone in the universe. Dubbed the Galileo Project, […]

In a breakthrough for cardiology in Israel, doctors repaired a heart defect in a 38-year-old woman at Shaare Zedek Medical Center without implanting a foreign object in her body. The defect was corrected on Sunday with a stitch, and without putting the patient under full anesthesia, the hospital reported. The procedure, the first done in […]