TRADITION: Year in Review

Dear TRADITION Reader,

If your inbox is anything like mine it’s no doubt overflowing with end-of-year donation requests for worthy causes. Please accept this note not as an appeal for your support but as a year-end inventory of what TRADITION has contributed to you, our readers. In 2023 our Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought undertook important new ventures, made new achievements, and delivered the four numbered installments of Volume #55, totaling 750 pages of print content. Among this year’s highlights:

• Winter (55:1): Yoel Finkelman’s richly illustrated “Cultural and Material History of Talmudic Page Layout”; J. David Bleich’s first installment in a multi-part exploration of “Above-Ground Burial”; Gila Fine on Honi the Supersleeper.
• Spring (55:2): TRADITION’s special issue marking Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s 120th birthday and 30th Yahrzeit with contributions by Shalom Carmy and Zev Eleff on the Rav’s Messianism and Zionism; Tovah Lichtenstein on the life of her mother, Dr. Tonya Soloveitchik; Mark Smilowitz and Levi Morrow on new aspects in “The Lonely Man of Faith”; plus eight other important essays.
• Summer (55:3): A special symposium commemorating “The Yom Kippur War After 50 Years”—first undertaken on the presumption this topic would be an exploration of long-ago events, the insights from these essays arrived with renewed force and importance following October 7th. The full symposium is open-access, with noteworthy contributions by R. Yehuda Amital zt”l, and an exploration of his 1973 essay by Yehudah Mirsky; Haim Sabato (and my own examination of his landmark novel, Adjusting Sights); and analyses of modern Hebrew poetry and song as war response, the thought of Rabbis Lamm and Shagar, and the impact of the War on shaping contemporary Religious Zionism.
• Fall (55:4): A posthumous essay on Breslov Hasidism from the recently departed Israeli philosopher, Prof. Shalom Rosenberg; Yosefa Fogel Wruble on Psalm 139 and its sudden resonance with our current and traumatic moment; and Lisa Fredman on Rashi’s divergent treatments of Esau across his commentaries.

TRADITION Today Summit: 2023 saw the launch of TRADITION’s in-person gathering of our community’s thought leaders, co-chaired by Shlomo Zuckier and myself, and convened by the Rabbinical Council of America and its (then) president Binyamin Blau. The event proceedings on “The Challenge of Material Success” will be published in our upcoming Spring 2024 issue.

TRADITION PODCASTS: In this year’s 12 episodes of the TRADITION Podcast we brought you fascinating conversations with writers and thinkers featured in our pages, including Chaim Saiman on the challenges of material success; Aviva Zornberg on her new Leviticus commentary; R. Azriel Hidesheimer’s thoughts on women’s education, with Marc Shapiro; and Emanuel Feldman, our esteemed editor emeritus, who reflected on his contributions to our pages after the Six Day Way and the Yom Kippur War.

TRADITION LIVE: Together with our publisher, the Rabbinical Council of America, we hosted several live and interactive online events: Marking what would have been R. Soloveitchik’s 120th birthday we gathered contributors to our special issue to discuss his pedagogical impact and also with Dr. Tovah Lichtenstein on her parents’ ongoing legacy. Shortly after Simchat Torah’s trauma, authors from our Yom Kippur War issue discussed their essays in light of the current matzav.

TRADITION ONLINE: In addition to our scholarly print journal offerings, TraditionOnline.org published over 120 digital-direct items in 2023. Among these are Chaim Strauchler’s ongoing “Tradition Questions” series, considering big-ticket religious community issues we should be questioning but often overlook, and Yitzchak Blau’s “Alt+SHIFT” column, which seeks to “translate” cultural, communal, political, and religious phenomena in Israel to make them more well-known and available to our English readers abroad. During these weeks of war in Israel the website has been publishing relevant content to help us understand unfolding events from within the perspective of our tradition. In addition, the website featured dozens of book reviews, commentary, deep-dives into our archives, and the fourth yearly installment of our Summer Reading Endorsements. (Sign up to get notified each time the website updates, 2-3 times a week.)

TRADITION E-Books: Aside from the open-access archives going back to our founding in 1958, this year saw several free downloadable TRADITION e-books:

• Rabbi Norman Lamm Memorial Volume
• Divrei Shalom: Collected Editor’s Notes by Shalom Carmy
• The Sea Change in American Orthodox Judaism (1998 Symposium)
• Rabbi Soloveitchik’s Lectures on “Concepts in Halakha as Elaborated Upon by the Aggada and Kabbala”
• The Yom Kippur War After 50 Years

As we turn our attention to the coming year’s Volume #56 (which is technically our 66th year… don’t ask) we look forward to delivering everything our readers expect from TRADITION—and more. So while this isn’t a typical end-of-year solicitation, we ask you to give yourself the gift of a TRADITION subscription, or to gift one to a “thinking religious” person in your life (perhaps a young person who should be joining the ranks of our readers—see special student rates).

With all wishes for peace in Israel and across the Jewish world, sincerely,

Jeffrey Saks, Editor