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 […]
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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 […]
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As we saw on the first page of our tractate, Hillel and Shammai disagree about whether it’s permitted to eat an egg laid on a festival. The Gemara has since established that such an egg is in fact prohibited. But on today’s daf, we find a teaching from Rav Mari that implies the opposite: If one examined a chicken’s […]
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Outside the Land of Israel, Jews are commanded to observe an extra day for every festival. The idea was that certain communities couldn’t know exactly which day the holiday fell, so they would celebrate it for two days to ensure they celebrated on the right day. You might suppose, therefore, that both days would need to […]
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When I first got to college in Massachusetts in the late ’90’s, I learned that alcohol was never sold in the state on Sundays. This rule was a kind of vestigial law left over from some combination of the state’s puritanical roots and the fervor of the Prohibition Era — and it no longer made […]
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(JTA) — If you find your synagogue’s prayerbook a little dull at Rosh Hashanah services next week, you may be able to buy a livelier — and much older — alternative for next year. That is, if you have $4 million lying around. Sotheby’s announced Thursday that it will be putting a 700-year-old illustrated Rosh […]
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(JTA) — The law school of the University of Buenos Aires has launched a watchdog institute to monitor antisemitism. The Observatory on the Fight Against Antisemitism will advise local and international institutions, educate legal professionals and provide legal tools to combat antisemitism. It aims to find and analyze antisemitism in the press, social media, public […]
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(JTA) — Meryl Jaffe says she’s like any Jewish parent keeping track of her kids on social media, except it can be terrifying. When she heard President Joe Biden deployed 3,000 Marines to Afghanistan, she had a gut feeling that her son Matt — she calls him Matthew — was among them. Her family was […]
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(JTA) — Birthright Israel is resuming its trips after a month of cancellations over Israeli COVID-19 quarantine rules, the organization announced Thursday. Participants who have been fully vaccinated in the past six months will not have to quarantine on arrival for the trips, which will likely resume Oct. 3. However, they will still be subject to […]
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(JTA) — In a significant move, Israel and the United States have set up a joint team at the national security adviser level to contain Iran, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett told U.S. Jewish leaders in a Rosh Hashanah call. Bennett and his predecessor Benjamin Netanyahu have vehemently opposed negotiating a deal with Iran to contain […]
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