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Writer’s Guild

The Cardozo Academy Think Tank opens its doors to voices that probe, question, and illuminate. These essays reflect rigorous thought, spirited debate, and deep engagement with Torah and lived experience. Readers will find essays that challenge preconceptions, explore timeless themes, and make meaning out of the complexity of faith and culture.

  • An open letter to Rabbi Cardozo in response to his article on Rav Soloveitchik

    By Tanya White

    Tanya White responds to Rav Cardozo's critique of Rav Joseph B. Soloveitchik's lack of innovation in the Halachic realm. She argues that for many reasons the Rav was halachically strait jacketed. He felt a strong obligation to the tradition of his fathers and perhaps felt it was too early to depart from or radically reinterpret thousands of years of Halachic stringencies and inertia. However, he laid the path for those after him to do the work. His insistence on women’s learning especially of Gemara was an opening of doors for the developments we see today.

  • Musings on Rav Soloveitchik’s Torah

    By DCA Staff

    Rabbi Joseph Ber Soloveitchik thought is greatly indebted to Kantian philosophy. In contenting himself with the philosophical world of Kant, JBS shows himself to be thoroughly unmodern in his philosophical approach to halacha.

  • Innovative Halakhic solutions already exist: Do we have the courage to use them?

    By Yael Shahar

    In the process of adapting from exile to statehood, halachah may need to be uprooted and transplanted, or even cut back to its deepest roots and regrown in a larger pot, where it can flower more freely. This will probably result in the “secularization” of some of our halachot, offset by a cultural “Judification” of our secular society. Can we use the lessons learned during the galut to survive in an increasingly decentralized and globalized world?

  • Shabbat desecration, the Olympics and the dilemmas of a Jewish State

    By E.S.

    Several recent events—the Olympic Games and the proposal to work on the railway line construction on Shabbat—are excellent opportunities to start a conversation on the role of halacha in the Jewish State. The question is: what form should the conversation take? It should not, I believe, primarily take the form of a formal halachic argument.

  • Faith and Truth: A necessary trade-off?

    By Emunah Fialkoff

    Our relationship with God as we know it is not just about what we think or understand. There is also a faith that is not based in intellectual belief. This is a faith that is based on our own inner resonance with the practices and beliefs of our tradition. What happens to our emotional faith when our intellectual faith runs up against facts that seem to contradict that faith? How do we keep our balance?

  • Tisha b’Av: Can we still mourn? A reply to Rav Cardozo

    By Yael Valier

    Rabbi Cardozo writes: "Maybe we should literally go out in the streets and help people, sit down with our ideological enemies and see where we can find common ground, instead of simply reciting more kinot?" And yet, there are reasons why we should continue to fast and read Eichah on Tisha b'Av. Here are just a few of those reasons

  • A Tongue-in-Cheek Tribute to Rabbi Cardozo, from the Think Tank Members, in Honor of his Recent 70th Birthday

    By Yael Unterman

    A light-hearted look at a typical DCA think tank meeting, in honor of Rabbi Cardozo's 70th Birthday. Happy Birthday Rav Cardozo!

  • Hareidi-Bashing, Modesty, and Normative Values: A response to Yael Valier

    By E.S.

    There is a limit to how far we should accommodate Hareidi norms in the public space. A normative system doesn’t simply respond to reality; it actively shapes and influences people’s perceptions of reality. The rules followed by the Hareidi world actively encourage a perception of women as little more than dangerously arousing sexual objects. They do not encourage a perception of women as responsible members of society fully the equal of men in all matters of intelligence and competence. Hence these norms should not be indulged in the public sphere.

  • When religious arguments descend into Hareidi bashing

    By Yael Valier

    Recently yet another opportunity for Hareidi-bashing appeared, with the news that an 81 year-old woman is suing El Al after being forced to switch seats because a Hareidi man refused to sit next to her. Rabbi Marc Angel commented on the incident in a short article, "Thoughts on the Scandal on an El Al Airplane." But Rabbi Angel's critique misses a crucial point. In fact, there's reason to applaud one aspect of the Hareidi worldview.

  • The Inescapable Obligation to Care For the Wicked

    By Yael Unterman

    If you were Abraham, would you have interceded for Sodom? Do you think that he was delighted at the existence of an entire city filled with evil as Sodom was? This man who the midrash describes as cursing the builders of the Tower of Babel for caring more for the loss of bricks than of human laborers? The answer is no, undoubtedly their behaviour nauseated him; yet still he tried to salvage it through the presence of ten righteous inhabitants.

  • Homosexuality

    By Yael Valier

    Dear TT-ers, Recently, I have been wondering if we can used proven halachic methodologies to ease the suffering of homosexuals in Orthodoxy.

  • A Thought on Tisha Be’Av

    By Calev Ben-Dor

    A few years ago, Israeli academic Amnon Rubinstein wrote 'The Sea above us,' a fictional tale in which Tel Aviv, Israel’s first Hebrew metropolis, lies under water. In an interview with Ari Shavit, the author explained the idea behind his novel, describing his deep ‘existential anxiety that our country is hanging by a thread, that one day it may simply cease to be. I haven’t read the book, but I admire Rubenstein and share his anxiety about the future