August 6, 2024

Book Review Bonanza

TRADITION’s recent Summer 2024 issue contained expanded book review coverage—what an array of fascinating topics, authors, and reviewers: How did Hazal read Talmudic women? What results when physicists and Haredim read Maimonides? Military ethics and morality, origins of Orthodoxy, and R. Aharon Lichtenstein’s teachings on halakhic values.  
August 3, 2024

PODCAST: R. Feinstein on Brain Death, Revisited

In the area of Jewish medical ethics brain death is the topic which just will not die. No other rabbinic figure’s opinion has factored in quite so significantly on the subject as R. Moshe Feinstein zt”l. However his position has been intensely debated over the years. In a recent piece of research which surfaces some relevant new points of evidence, Dr. Noam Stadlan offers a re-understanding of R. Feinstein’s ruling, with various implications for end-of-life care and organ donation. In this episode of the Tradition Podcast, Stadlan joins our editor, Jeffrey Saks, to discuss the article, as well as larger trends in the field of Jewish medical ethics, the partnership that should exist between physicians and medical research on one hand with poskim on the other, and why our readers are perennially interested in the field of medical halakha.
August 1, 2024

Unpacking the Iggerot: Responses to Repentance

Can I donate my way out of Divine punishment? Is it un-Jewish to confess to a member of the clergy? In this installment of “Unpacking the Iggerot,” Moshe Kurtz distills Rabbi Moshe Feinstein’s approach to fasting, repentance, penance and much more.
July 30, 2024

The Guide to the Perplexed: A New Translation

When approaching the philosophy of Maimonides, we mustn’t forget that the great follower of Aristotle was “also” a rabbi. So cautions Menachem Kellner, by way of profiling and praising the new translation of the “Guide to the Perplexed” by Lenn Goodman and Philip Lieberman. The new work is destined to supplant the longtime standard English version by Shlomo Pines. In drawing comparisons between the two editions Kellner shows how the Guide guides one to the proper worship God.