Jewish communities have just concluded the celebration of Shavu Ote, a pilgrimage festival in times of the temple,

the occasion of the wheat harvest in Israel, and according to religious tradition, the time 50 days

after the Jewish people's exodus from

Egypt, when God revealed the Ten Commandments to Moses. One of the distinctive things about God's

revelation to the Jewish people is that our knowledge of the Lord is mediated through his

law-giving. It's as if we approach knowledge of his ways and his essence by living according to the rules

and commandments that structure the Jewish nation.

That entire system of rules, commandments, obligations, restrictions, compulsions, all of this

invites even more philosophical reflection when you consider that it has remained the basis

of Jewish life for millennia

and has retained its initial force, despite the fact that the Jewish people themselves have

experienced very different sorts of living, wandering in the wilderness, a loose confederation

in the land of Israel during the years of the judges, the rise and fall of a monarchy, civil war,

dispersion, return, exile into every corner of the earth, the revolution of rabbinic Judaism,

and then the return 75 years ago of Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel. Through all of this,

traditional Jewish lives continue to be structured through something

called Halakha, Jewish law. But what is that? Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host,

Jonathan Silver. Back in 2018, my friend Rabbi Mark Gottlieb sat down with the distinguished scholar of

Halakha, Chaim Seaman, the author of a then-nuly

published book, by now, a kind of established classic, entitled Halakha, the rabbinic idea of law,

published by Princeton University Press. This week, in honor of the Jewish holiday that celebrates

lawgiving, we think together with Mark Gottlieb and Chaim Seamen

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