A Conversation on the Question

◆ What did I instruct an educational institution that had mistakenly bought a large, costly order of non-kosher pizzas?
◆ How did I respond to an egalitarian prayer service organized without my knowledge and held in a public building?
◆ What did I do when I discovered that my halakhic ruling had been wrong?
◆ How did I answer a father who asked whether to pray that the suffering of his terminally ill son be shortened?

The author, Rabbi Uri Lipschitz, faced these and many other questions in his role as the community rabbi of Kibbutz Tirat Zvi, and they are discussed in this book from a personal-halakhic point of view.

A Conversation on the Question is a first-person documentary work that offers readers a fascinating glimpse into the diary of a community rabbi. Each chapter opens with a real event that gave rise to a halakhic question. Following it, the rabbi shares with readers the dilemmas he faced in deciding the question, the halakhic reasoning that guides him, and what issuing a halakhic ruling means in his eyes. Beyond the personal perspective, every story opens the way to a principled discussion of the interface between the decisor and the community, and between halakha and life.

A Conversation on the Question is a rare opportunity to get to know the world of halakha from the inside, to “enter” the mind and heart of the decisor, and to form a position on fundamental questions that surround our halakhic lives: relations between neighbors, coping with mourning, marriage and domestic harmony, relations between parents and children, the place of women in the synagogue, halakha and science, memory and destruction, and more.

Rabbi Uri Lipschitz is one of the Roshei Yeshiva of Yeshivat Siach Yitzchak. He holds a doctorate in Jewish philosophy and lectures in various academic settings.