Rabbi Jacobs provides an overview of the history of halakhah through the different sources of the halakhic corpus. His survey starts with the Bible, the Written Torah, and then expounds on its relationship with the Oral Torah. Indeed, the Talmud, committed to writing in the late Antiquity, became the final authority in Jewish Law despite…...
The Mussar Movement – 1st June 1988
An overview of the history of the Musar movement in Judaism. Rabbi Jacobs reviews the history of musar literature starting in the Middle Ages. He then explains how Musar coalesced into a movement as a response to modernity and the rise of hasidism, under the leadership of the highly charismatic R. Israel Lipkin (Salanter, 1810-1883)…....