Halakhah Intensive

Hadar’s Halakhah Intensive features a week of rich, rigorous, and meaningful learning on a halakhic theme.

This program requires prior experience with learning halakhic texts, and it will be tracked by level, from intermediate to advanced. The brief application form includes a skills assessment to place participants in the appropriate level for their skills and background.

• The advanced level is designed for those with fluency in Talmud and rishonim and who have extensive yeshiva background.
• The intermediate level is designed for those who have spent time in a beit midrash and feel confident working through a sugya independently.

This year's theme is "S'feik S'feika: Living with Doubt?"

Th Halakhah Intensive will explore the concept of s’feik s’feika, the notion that sometimes a situation involves multiple axes of doubt. For instance: Imagine a person with doubts about their lineage as a kohen. They generally assume restrictions such as not walking near graves. But if this person confronts a field that might have a grave in it, there are now two axes of doubt: There’s a doubt about the person’s status, and a doubt about the environment they are coming in contact with – the field might not have a grave in it, and even if it does, perhaps this person is not a kohen. Does this s’feik s’feika overwhelm the prohibition against walking past the field? We will trace this classic conceptual topic from its earliest appearances in rabbinic sources and watch how it expands and contracts over time. We will ask more general questions emerging from the cases we encounter: What role does doubt play in halakhah? How much are halakhic norms grounded in factual assumptions? What are considered two different axes of doubt? Can you remain blissfully doubtful, or do you need to pursue certainty?

We will trace this classic conceptual topic from its earliest appearances in rabbinic sources and watch how it expands and contracts over time. We will ask more general questions emerging from the cases we encounter: What role does doubt play in halakhah? How much are halakhic norms grounded in factual assumptions? What are considered two different axes of doubt? Can you remain blissfully doubtful, or do you need to pursue certainty?