Ta Shma

Ever wanted to know the answer to some deep and challenging questions in halakhah (Jewish law)? Join R. Avi Killip interviewing R. Ethan Tucker with questions sent in by Yeshivat Hadar alumni and others on all sorts of details of Jewish law. This is a joint project between the Center for Jewish Law and Values and Jewish Public Media.

Ethan Tucker. When balancing these “team” and “individual” conceptions of Jewish observance, we will often have to engage thorny questions about the relative weight of various mitzvot, and the relevance of context for assessing the costs and benefits of trading one sin off another.

Ethan Tucker. To what extent is the enterprise of mitzvot an individual or team "sport"? Is there a notion of a “sacrifice” in the observance of mitzvot? What if I can considerably improve someone else’s religious record if only I take a small hit to my own? Am I permitted to violate a prohibition so long as doing so will prevent another Jew from committing an even graver trespass?

Tefillah Toolkit #3. Joey Weisenberg teaches a tune for the end of Psalm 114 of his own composition.

Ethan Tucker. The Range of Possibilities in Halakhic Interpretation. One way to think about halakhah is to ask a set of practical questions and to attempt to reach practical answers. This is usually most fruitful when we need specific guidelines for behavior. If we want to understand the halakhic material, however, it is often more useful to start with texts and explore the full range of interpretive possibilities that flow from them, a more spectral approach to halakhah. Through a discussion of Jewish priests, kohanim, coming into contact with corpse impurity, we will explore both this issue and this approach.

What does it mean to devote yourself wholly to helping others? Renowned journalist and New Yorker staff writer Larissa MacFarquhar has spent years studying and talking to people who make extreme ethical commitments (adopting twenty children or founding a leprosy colony, to name a few). Join MacFarquhar and Shai Held as they ask: How good dowe have to be? Can there be such a thing as being too good, morally speaking? Is it right, for instance, to care for strangers at the expense of your family? Why are many people repelled by such moral actors instead of being drawn to them? A remarkable conversation about moral philosophy, Torah, and real life.

Ethan Tucker. What Counts as Evidence? Decisions in the area of halakhah are defined not just by laws, but also by facts. Questions of fact are unusually central in discussions of niddah. Even as the laws of niddah are complex, the deliberations surrounding facts, surrounding what counts as evidence of uterine bleeding, are even more so. Discussions of evidence and concluding thoughts.

Tefillah Toolkit #3. Dena Weiss asks: With all the dramatic contrasts in Hallel—that God takes us from death to life, and slavery to freedom—why is the contrast of night and day never mentioned?

Ethan Tucker. The Torah and the Mishnah, in their laws of female uterine bleeding, maintain a strong separation between the normal (niddah) and the pathological (zavah), with different criteria for triggering different periods of abstinence. But somewhere in early Amoraic Babylonia, these boundaries begin to blur, and normal menstruation is treated more and more similar to pathological bleeding. Why is this? And why is this stringent regime still so entrenched today?

Tefillah Toolkit #3. Elie Kaunfer discusses the role of repetition in Hallel. How was it historically recited? Why do we repeat every line at the end of Psalm 118? What does it mean to pray through repetition?