Moadim/Holidays

Let’s Try to Be a Little Less Focused This Coming Year

by Rabbi Dov Linzer
Posted on October 3, 2022

We are so often told that the way to success is to set our goals and then work to achieve them with single-minded focus. Indeed, for Ramban, the word het, sin—a word that dominates our Yom Kippur prayers—means to miss the target, not to stay straight and fully directed towards what we aim to achieve in our religious lives. …

An Electric Light for Havdalah After Yom Kippur?

Rabbi Zachary Truboff
(Posted on October 3, 2022)
From the Lindenbaum Center for Halakhic Studies

With the advent of electricity in the last century, halakha has faced many new questions unknown to our ancestors. Countless teshuvot and books have been written attempting to analyze the nature of electricity and how it should be conceptualized within halakhic categories.…

Between Shabbat and Teshuvah

The One Where Adam Discovers Teshuva

Let me tell you about the day that humanity first discovered teshuvah. As the midrash tells it, it all happens on the day Kayin killed Hevel. After that first murder, Kayin accepts HaShem’s verdict as just—he is to be exiled from the land. …

Elevation, Not Fear

by Rabbi Dov Linzer
Posted on September 23, 2022

Kingship, malkhut, is one of the most central themes of Rosh HaShanah. But what does this mean to us? How does proclaiming and imaging God as King impact our religious lives or shape the way in which we relate to Rosh HaShanah?…

Speaking During Mussaf: To Correct or Not To Correct?

Rabbi Zachary Truboff
(Posted on September 22, 2022)
From the Lindenbaum Center for Halakhic Studies

On each day of Rosh HaShanah the shofar is blown no fewer than one hundred times in synagogue. The first thirty blasts before the mussaf service are known as tekiot d’meyushav, while the last seventy blasts blown during and after mussaf are known as tekiot d’meumad.…