Sanhedrin

Embark on a journey of Jewish learning and discovery, exploring the depth of our Sanhedrin resources, where tagged items including audio, programs, and podcast episodes await your exploration.

Sanhedrin 27: I Love to Sin

Rabbi Jay Kelman

Over the last few posts (see here and here) we have been discussing those who are disqualified from giving testimony or sitting as a judge on a Jewish court. These disqualifications have come as a result of monetary indiscretions,…
Article
Aug 29, 2017

Sanhedrin 26: Eating Pork at the Food Bank

Rabbi Jay Kelman

“Rav Nachman said: Those who eat davar acher, the other, are pasul, invalid to give testimony” (Sanhedrin 26b). As is often the case, our rabbis used euphemisms when they did not want to let certain words pass their lips[1].…
Article
Aug 28, 2017

Sanhedrin 25: The Non-Kosher Butcher

Rabbi Jay Kelman

Innocent until proven guilty is a fundamental tenet of the our secular legal system. It finds an antecedent in the rabbinic notion of a chezkat kashrut, that all have a presumption of honesty and hence, are eligible to testify in a…
Article
Aug 24, 2017

Sanhedrin 24: Off to Vegas

Rabbi Jay Kelman

"And G-d blessed them and G-d said unto them: Be fruitful and multiply and fill the land and conquer it” (Breisheet 1:28). These are the first words spoken by G-d to man and are the basis for all human existence. Without people…
Article
Aug 23, 2017

Sanhedrin 24: Down with Bavel!

Rabbi Jay Kelman

We are all products of—and greatly influenced by—our environments, which is why our Sages put so much emphasis on ensuring that we live in a place conducive to our spiritual and physical well-being (see Sanhedrin 17b and here). It is not…
Article
Aug 22, 2017

Sanhedrin 22: A Beautiful Font

Rabbi Jay Kelman

Malcolm Gladwell, in his best-selling book Outliers, delineates how much of one's success in life is dependent on when one is born. Thus, the great innovators in computers – Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, just to name the most famous…
Article
Aug 17, 2017

Sanhedrin 21: What is the Reason?

Rabbi Jay Kelman

I have long thought that far and away the best introduction to and overview of Judaism is the Sefer haChinuch, the great 13th century Spanish work written anonymously from father to son. Trying to convince his son of the beauty and…
Article
Aug 15, 2017

Sanhedrin 19: Cemetery Etiquette

Rabbi Jay Kelman

One of the areas of law that even otherwise non-observant Jews tend to observe are those relating to mourning[1]. Perhaps this phenomenon is based on superstition, feelings of guilt or unarticulated expressions of teshuva that a confrontation with…
Article
Aug 14, 2017

Sanhedrin 17: Where Should We Live?

Rabbi Jay Kelman

Marshall McLuhan, the insightful Canadian philosopher, noted that with the rapid advances in technology and communications, we citizens of earth were living in a global village. If this was true in the 1960s when he coined the term, then today we…
Article
Aug 13, 2017

Sanhedrin 15: The Ox and I

Rabbi Jay Kelman

Perhaps the fundamental difference between the Written Law and the Oral Law is that the former is “spoken” from a Divine perspective, while the latter expounds on the former from a human one. And not everything that is spoken from…
Article
Aug 10, 2017