What might R. Soloveitchik have thought about anti-aging interventions? Responding to Jason Weiner’s recent TRADITION essay, Shlomo Zuckier draws on teachings of the Rav to suggest that extending life through medical intervention aligns with his vision of lessening human suffering and approaching redemption.

With the launch of the new “Lamm Legacy Library” we gain access to a treasure trove of archival material from the founder of TRADITION, Rabbi Norman Lamm z”l. Tzvi Sinensky offers a brief guided tour of items in the vast library reflecting on R. Lamm’s concerns and motivations leading up to the creation of our Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought in 1958.

Today’s Daf Yomi (Horayot 13a) implies that halakhic triage obligates one to save a man before a woman. The issue has significant ethical implications for contemporary medicine—who takes precedence for ICU admission in modern hospitals, or who should emergency responders treat first at the scene of an accident or after a terrorist attack? Revisit Alan Jotkowitz’s TRADITION essay surveying a variety of approaches to this complicated case of medical ethics. 

In remembering the renowned educator, R. David Ebner zt”l, who passed away this week, his student David Rozenson paints a portrait of a man who did not “rage against the dying of the light,” but searched, taught, sang, danced, and wrote, and in so doing helped countless talmidim to navigate the Daf of Life.

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.