With the arrival of Elul, Yitzchak Blau focuses our attention on two noteworthy new works on repentance: R. Michael Rosensweig “Mimini Mikhael” and R. Aharon Lichtenstein’s “Return and Renewal.”  By bringing these volumes into conversation with each other he highlights one strong parallel and a number of intriguing contrasts between the works and their authors, offering us insights to the spiritual challenges that lie ahead for us all in the coming month.

R. Soloveitchik challenged us to discover ways that a “new Jewish world view” might be formulated from the sources of halakha. In reviewing Tzvi Goldstein’s “Halakhic Worldviews” (Mosaica Press), Elisha Friedman finds an excellent template for how we might turn our attention to this daunting task.

Join TRADITION and the Rabbinical Council of America for an online Zoom conversation with R. Mosheh Lichtenstein, Rosh Yeshivat Har Etzion, revisiting a classic essay from our archives: R. Aharon Lichtenstein’s “The Ideology of Hesder,” using it as a lens to explore contemporary issues in Israeli religious and civilian life and society, and the particular challenges of the current war. Sunday, September 15 on Zoom (registration at link).

As we prepare to enter the month of Elul, we revisit a classic Elul essay in the TRADITION archives. In 1994 our editor, Rabbi Emanuel Feldman, penned an “Editor’s Notebook” titled “The Shofar That Is Sounded in Elul." It was an opportunity to explore divisions in Israeli society and—even three decades on—remains relevant even as he could not have known how the country would be paradoxically more united and more divided in unexpected ways.