Sometimes we forget that others looked at problems we face and sugyot we study long before we arrived. Avraham Stav shares the message of the IDF’s really lousy can openers distributed with the army’s combat rations—and its message for anyone sitting in front of an open Gemara, contemplating how the unfamiliar sometimes appears to our naive or cynical eyes as strange.

Rabbi David Ebner zt”l, who passed away today in Jerusalem, was an educator who combined sensitivity, passion, poetry, and warmth with keen intellectual rigor and profound moral integrity. Read his 1992 contribution to TRADITION’s “Divided and Distinguished Worlds” symposium.

Yosie Levine’s “Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi and the Battlegrounds of the Early Modern Rabbinate” (Littman Library) is an engaging read, leavening impeccable scholarship with colorful anecdotes. Daniel Yolkut’s review shows the value in understanding the book’s subject in his Early Modern mercantile milieu, and praises Levine for championing the role of “rabbi-scholar.”