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Shamai Leibowitz

Nov 5, 2026, 11:41 PM

Justice and Kindness Aren’t Enough

From New York to Michigan, Kansas, and beyond, voters in the US midterms elected candidates whose faith inspires their public service—including figures like Representative-elect Brad Lander (NY), Senator-elect Dr. Abdul El-Sayed (MI), and Senator-elect Pastor Adam Hamilton (KS). In his...

Nov 5, 2026, 3:17 PM

Book Review – Torah and the Army: The Relationship of Torah and IDF Service

Few issues confronting Israeli society today are as contentious, emotionally charged, or consequential as the relationship between Torah study and military service. In the aftermath of October 7 and the ongoing challenges facing Israel, the question of who should...

Nov 4, 2026, 3:59 AM

How & Why Torah Is Our Greatest Protection. Torah, Free Will, and Science

The advent of modern quantum mechanics, particularly through the Copenhagen interpretation formulated by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, marks a profound shift in our understanding of physical reality. In quantum mechanics, a physical system—famously illustrated by Erwin Schrödinger’s cat...

Oct 29, 2026, 2:51 PM

Book review: New books on the intersection of medicine and halacha

People tend to reminisce about the good old days. For observant Jews, there are certainly earlier times when things really were simpler. Consider visiting someone in a hospital on Shabbat a few decades ago. Getting to a patient's room was...

Sharona Margolin Halickman

Oct 27, 2026, 4:08 PM

The difference between Ninveh and Sdom

Why were the people of Ninveh in the Book of Jonah given the opportunity to do Tshuva (repent) while the people of Sdom were not? The Gemara in Sanhedrin 109b discusses the sins of the people of Sdom: They had beds...

Oct 27, 2026, 1:02 AM

The Torah Holds the Hidden Quantum Secrets of the Universe.

The Zohar condenses an entire cosmology into a single luminous sentence: "God looked into the Torah and created the world; man looks into the Torah and sustains the world" (Zohar II, 161b). The underlying principle is that the Torah...

Oct 21, 2026, 10:42 PM

HalacHUH? Part 1: A Breakdown of Judaism’s Most Puzzling Rules

A Modern Day Chicken Milker Doing What He Does Best

In this new subseries to my America’s Rebbitzman content, I, your faithful Rebbitzman, will be addressing some of the most widely argued and bizarre decisions of our faith. Now, it is important to remember that in bringing you these...

Oct 21, 2026, 9:53 AM

We Perfected the Pause and Forgot the Melacha

Every Friday afternoon, a remarkable thing happens across the Jewish world. Millions of people stop. We have made an art of it. The urn is filled and the hot plate is plugged in. The lights are on timers, the tissues...

Oct 21, 2026, 2:00 AM

The Power of One-Aleph: Perspective, Despair, and the Observer

This week’s Torah portion, Lech Lecha, carries Abraham into the unknown and offers a quiet lesson about how we see the world and how that seeing shapes it. To get there, I want to start with a riddle, move...

Oct 20, 2026, 1:25 PM

Choose Life: The Moral Price of the Moon

Abraham Joshua Heschel. Photo: Peter1c / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0; modified from original || Background image licensed via Canva.

With the advent of Space exploration, rabbinic writers debated whether Jewish law permitted a person to leave planet Earth. Possibly the first voice to be heard on this question was that of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson of Lubavitch (1902-1994)....

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