All Episodes
Displaying 1 - 30 of 126 in total
The Dilemma of Handing Over One to Save Many
Can a Jewish community surrender one of its own to save the many? This class explores three cases from the 1600s and 1700s, where this wrenching question was brought b...
The Rabbi Who Couldn’t Quit Gambling
Today, we’ll examine the debate in Venice in 1630 over a communal ban against gambling. Local leaders moved to outlaw games of chance, but Rabbi Yehuda Aryeh Modena pu...
Up High or Down Low? The Battle Over the Proper Trop for the Aseres Hadibros
In 1725, Rabbi Zalman Hena published Shaarei Tefilah and sparked controversy by calling for a complete stop to the use of taam ha’elyon—the unique system of trop tradi...
The Great Semicha Controversy, Part II
Today, we’re picking up where we left off in the story of chidush hasemicha. We’ll look at what unfolded after Rabbi Levi ibn Chabib pushed back against Rabbi Yaakov B...
The Great Semicha Controversy, 1538
After the Spanish Expulsion, a group of leading rabbis in Tzfas, led by Rabbi Yaakov Beirav, set out to revive semichah—the original form of judicial ordination that l...
The Doctored Talmud: Prague, 1728
There’s a long and painful history of the Gemara being censored in Christian lands, but in 1728, a draconian form of censorship led to the publication of a heavily red...
The Marranos’ Secret Pesach
Sometime in the mid-1400s, Rabbi Shlomo Duran of Algiers penned a remarkable teshuvah directed at a group of conversos in Spain. These individuals, who had been forced...
The Machine Matzah Controversy
In the 1850s, a groundbreaking innovation was introduced in Galicia: machines to facilitate matzah production. What followed was a fierce and dramatic conflict that sh...
The Story of the Alter Rebbe’s Script
The Alter Rebbe’s unique script for safrus has a rich and winding history. It has been inked, shelved, revived, and debated—and everyone seems to have an opinion. So, ...
Rambam, the Almohads, and the Secret Jews
In the mid-12th century, the Almohads swept across North Africa and Spain, driven by a vision of a strictly unified Muslim society. For the Jewish communities under th...
Rambam to the Rescue: His Legendary Letter to Yemen
In the 1170s, the Jewish community in Yemen faced an existential crisis: a radical ruler forced them to convert to Islam, an apostate Jew spread anti-Jewish propaganda...
The Regensburg Blood Libel
In the 1470s, a series of outrageous blood libels were leveled against Jewish communities in the Germanic lands, including one in Regensburg. To secure their acquittal...
The Scandalous Marriage, 1348
On the fifteenth of Shevat, 1348, in the city of Tudela, a man named Yosef performed kidushin with a young woman named Belita. What began as a seemingly ordinary weddi...
Taxes and Tensions: The Story of Jewish Tax Disputes in Medieval Spain
Rabbi Shlomo ben Aderes, the legendary rabbi and leader of Barcelona, received countless questions during his tenure, many of which have been preserved to this day. In...
Josephus
The book known as Yosifun, cherished in traditional Jewish circles, and the books of Josephus, preserved in Greek and Latin by non-Jewish hands, spark challenging ques...
Lost Lights of Chanukah: Exploring the Books of Maccabees
The Books of Maccabees tell the dramatic story of the Chanukah revolt and the heroism of the Jewish fighters. But who wrote these books, and why were they left off the...
The Titanic Question: The Halachic Dilemma of Men Lost at Sea
When a shipwreck in the 1500s left families wondering about the fate of their loved ones, rabbinic authorities debated whether the wives of the missing passengers coul...
Benches, Bargains, and Bickering: Shul Seating in the Middle Ages
We kick things off with seven fascinating stories from the teshuvos of medieval Spain, where we discover shul seats being treated like real estate: bought, sold, inher...
The Climate Clash: Rain, Rabbis, and Rulings for the Southern Hemisphere
In the 1630s, pioneering Jewish immigrants in Brazil asked when they should daven for rain, given that their seasons were reversed from those in Europe. Their question...
The Warder Cresson Story
In 1848, a man in Jerusalem on a journey to Judaism was devastated when told he must desecrate Shabbos because, despite undergoing a bris, he wasn’t yet considered Jew...
The Rebbe’s Rashi: Insights from Manuscripts and Incunabula Editions
As we mark the 60th anniversary of the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s sichos on Rashi, we will dive into how the Rebbe engaged with some of the earliest print editions and mediev...
Rooted in Tradition: The Calabria Esrog Story
Why has the Chabad community favored esrogim from Calabria? In this class, we’ll explore the backstory, diving into the halachic debates about grafted esrogim and why ...
Lost in the Geniza: An Anonymous Teshuvah on the Two-Day Yom Tov Debate
From the Cairo Geniza, we uncover an ancient Judeo-Arabic rabbinic essay offering unique insights into the history and development of the Jewish calendar, particularly...
The Vanishing Verses: Curious Cases of Textual Tampering in Our Machzor
In this class, we will analyze four beautiful piyutim that we chant on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, uncovering some structural oddities along the way. As we raise que...
Art of the Blast: Shofar Blowing Customs in Medieval Manuscripts
In this episode, we’re diving into fascinating early 16th-century woodcut images and priceless medieval machzor manuscripts to see how they portray the mitzvah of blow...
Fowl Play: The Great Turkey-Chicken Debate of the 19th Century
In the 1860s, European Jewish communities faced a unique halachic challenge: the arrival of new chicken breeds from distant lands. As these exotic fowl entered the mar...
Dreams of Revision: The Role of Dreams in Altering Halachic Rulings
In the 1970s, a Chabad journal in Israel published a story about the Alter Rebbe reversing a halachic ruling based on a dream, sparking significant controversy. This i...
The Rabbi Who Wouldn’t Wait: A Proposal to Reinstate the Korbanos
In the 1830s, Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch Kalischer penned an extensive letter to one of the Rothschilds, seeking his support for an ambitious plan to reinstate the korbanos on ...
Unconditional Love: A Commemorative Study of a Talk by the Lubavitcher Rebbe
As we approach Gimmel Tammuz, marking the Rebbe’s thirtieth Hilula, we’re doing something different: a text-based class on an important talk by the Rebbe from Shabbos ...
The Provocative Portrait: Unveiling the True Face of Moshe Rabbeinu
Rabbi Yisrael Lifshitz, a well-known commentator on the Mishnah, included a provocative legend about Moshe Rabbeinu in his writings, suggesting that Moshe naturally po...
