Questions of halakhah, Jewish law, never matter in the abstract. It’s where the rubber meets the road that legal questions actually matter.
Consider a debate I’ve had with my spouse for several years.
Living in our kind of world, I try best to enter Shabbat on Friday ready and on time. But I do work a job known for irregular hours, and despite the grace of my coworkers and the tireless support of my wife, occasionally work continues past sundown. The question is not whether or not I am now in violation of Shabbat: I am. The beginning of Shabbat is a settled debate, not an open question.
But unclear to me is what the best compromise is once you run behind on sacred time. If Shabbat begins at 5:32, and yet I know I will not be able to put work aside until 6:15, what do I do next? My impulse is to wait, and light the candles and say Kiddush at 6:15 since the essence of Shabbat is the entry into a time and space where the laws of the universe are suddenly frozen. The candles and prayers are the entry fee; you brush the light into your eyes, close them gently and imagine exiting your surroundings while thanking Adonai for the privilege to do so. The light remains separate from the darkness.
My wife, however, is adamant that this is incorrect. Instead, she insists, you should light the candles at 5:32, say the Kiddush, then return to work until you are finished and can resume with Shabbat. Her argument is that Shabbat exists as it does regardless of what I do. Shabbat does not wait for me to be “ready.” That’s simply not what Shabbat is. It is fixed in time. If I want to be compliant, then I can ensure my readiness, which may ultimately mean massive life changes to ensure dependability, but putting off Shabbat is not an option.
So here’s the question: Do we wait until we can participate in Shabbat to light the candles, or do we light the candles at its official start time and then return to the obligation of Shabbat when we are able?
For some liberal Jewish congregations, this may seem like an anachronism since this is clearly not an Orthodox halakhic (Jewish legal) framework we are discussing. This assumes, however, that halakhah is only relevant when it is observed as a singular thread and that to hold shifting opinions means we have no obligation to tradition. Reconstructionism is often framed as a rejection of halakhah as such, suggesting that its “post-halakhic” perspective makes it even less likely to observe the mitzvot than Reform, a form of Judaism created specifically to imagine our religion apart from that obligation. But while there are few studies analyzing the observance of non-Orthodox Jews, there is every reason to believe that Reconstructionism is deeply entrenched in debates over the applied science of halakhah, even if Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan’s vision of Jewish tradition walked away from the conclusion of Orthodox scholars.
Reconstructionism Is About Re-Engagement With ‘Halakhah’
There are two primary reasons why you might understand Reconstructionism as a distinctly “halakhic” form of Judaism. The first is built into the name: Reconstructionism. The purpose of this movement is to “reconstruct” Jewish tradition in a modern world where obligation has been stripped from our daily lives. When we left insular Jewish communities, movements like Reform reimagined Judaism largely without obligation, assuming you could retain Jewish spiritual and ethical teachings without the lawfare that created distance between Jews and gentiles.
For most Jews, a lack of obligation is our starting point since there is no assumed authority dictating whether Jewish law will remain meaningful and binding. For most people engaging in halakhic obligation, whether just sticking a toe in or becoming a ba’al teshuvah who assumes the traditional “yoke” of the commandments, we do so as an act of rebuilding our relationship to the mitzvot. When Kaplan’s student Rabbi Jack Cohen introduced the term post-halakhic, he did not mean “without halakhah,” but instead a form of Judaism occurring after the obligation to observe halakhah — whether in terms of cosmic motivation or communal authority — has ceased to be binding.
In terms of ritual practice, Kaplan lived his life mostly as an Orthodox Jew would. He kept Jewish traditions intact while acknowledging this was not the reality for most, even in earlier generations of the Conservative Movement. The theology that Conservative Judaism depended on — particularly codified at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) where he taught — was quickly losing fundamentalist believers. Instead, Kaplan knew intuitively that the Jewish religious propositions about God would have to be understood in broader metaphorical, syncretic and symbolic terms. These are texts and traditions authored by humans that offer a particular way of living, perhaps Divinely inspired, though he doubted that the spark came from something particularly supernatural (though some Reconstructionists today do).
Kaplan regarded traditions as meaningful whether or not one was compelled by God to follow them. He saw that what binds Jews to Judaism is not an external authority but the value of connection and transcendence that we derive from it as an embodied tradition. This remains the starting point for most non-Orthodox Jews exploring observance, who are bringing rituals back into their life for reasons far different than scriptural compulsion. This realization distinguishes Reconstructionism from other strands of liberal Judaism because it views that little in Judaism exists without the ritual and tradition itself; you cannot disentangle the philosophic, ethical and spiritual ideas from its embodied performance. And if we consider what that work of Judaism is composed of, it immediately returns us to the 613 entry points to religious physicality: Torah is a container not just for ideas spoken at Sinai, but the pathway to operationalizing those ideas. That embodiment is the essence of halakhah.
This sense of the centrality of ritual is part of why Reconstructionists did not have the same disregard for halakhah like those in the Reform movement, which wanted to dispel with these old-world regulations. As Rabbi Deborah Waxman, the current president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, writes in her doctoral dissertation,
Unlike Reform ideologues, the Reconstructionists were unprepared to set halakhah aside entirely, given how rich of a resource it was for the Jewish people, including as a storehouse for Jewish national and particularistic elements that Reconstructionists wanted to bolster and make available for modern Jews. [Reconstructionists] aimed to establish a system that would draw from the richness of halakhah but that would not be based on supernatural authority, would derive from the consent of the governed, would take into consideration the realities and demands of modern life without being overwhelmed by them, and would accommodate diversity of belief and practice rather than promote a single, totalizing standard.
Torah is a container not just for ideas spoken at Sinai but the pathway to operationalizing those ideas. That embodiment is the essence of halakhah.
Kaplan did not agree that modern Jews had been absolved of their obligations. Rather, he wanted us to make obligation relevant again to lives that no longer felt its commanding yoke. Not all halakhic authorities, Orthodox or otherwise, have made the same assumption of their constituencies. Orthodoxy itself is an invention of modernity — a reaction to modernity’s effect on Jewish life and a re-interpretation about how to hold together what is most dear about the Jewish experience. But what distinguishes these different approaches to halakhah, whether Reconstructionist or Orthodox, is not the acceptance of halakhah itself but its application. Waxman presents Kaplan as moving beyond halakhah to consider the other elements of the Jewish tradition and experience, but if we understand halakhah in a more expansive light, as a word for how Jews do Judaism (and Jewishness), then it might be fair to say that Kaplan was simply roping in folkways into the halakhic discourse, understanding them as minhagim (traditional customs).
Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan did not agree that modern Jews had been absolved of their obligations. Rather, he wanted us to make obligation relevant again to lives that no longer felt its commanding yoke.
While Jewish tradition often distinguishes between minhagim (customs) and halakhah (law), it can be a distinction without a difference. Minhagim are “customs” that Jews do that are not necessarily legally required, but some minhagim end up as halakhah over time. The wearing of kippah was a minhag that later became standard, including in legal authorities, undermining the difference between its position as minhag rather than halakhah. The 16th-century Shulkhan Arukh, the compendium of Jewish law that sits underneath contemporary Orthodoxy, declares head covering a necessity, saying that “[it] is forbidden to walk in an erect posture. And a man should not walk four amot with an uncovered head.” Many rulings also determined whether or not the minhagim are an essential protectorate for the rest of Jewish life, both its particularism and, ultimately, its ability to help enforce the submission to halakhah.
We can mirror Kaplan’s observations about folkways by noting that many customs considered minhagim are just as important to the entire enterprise of Jewish life, both in preserving its distinctiveness and creating the infrastructure that allows for halakhah to remain accessible, with both so intertwined that they are perhaps of equal importance. [1]This gets back to the word halakhah itself, which emerges from the Hebrew root for “to walk,” as in walking the path of Jewish life. Minhag and halakha are two tracks needed to walk that path.
This kind of debate is part of why Kaplan considered Reconstructionism a halakhic movement of a particular variety. Kaplan saw his halakhah as Talmudic — an egalitarian debate where all voices hold validity — as compared with the medieval halakhic discourses that culminate in the larger halakhic framework outlined in the Shulkhan Arukh. The 1920 platform of the Society for the Jewish Renascence states:
We accept the halakhah, which is rooted in the Talmud, as the norm of Jewish life, availing ourselves, at the same time, of the method implicit therein to interpret and develop the body of Jewish Law in accordance with the actual conditions and spiritual needs of modern life.
For Kaplan, debate was essential to halakhah. So in “reconstructing” it, we bring our own faculties with regards to reasoning, Jewish text and the role of tradition, acknowledging that we are constantly encountering social forces that are not accounted for in classical legal sources and that necessitate new interpretations. “[Post-halakha] was a recalibration of halakha on a horizontal plane of communal life, rather than the vertical axis of divine commandment,” writes Professor Shaul Magid, noting that it simply moves the assessor of the yoke from the sages to the pews.
Early on, there were discussions about Reconstructionists creating an alternative guide to halakhah[2] Kaplan proposed a new Sanhedrin (the “Organic Jewish Community”) where Jews of different perspectives would debate living halakhah), but this was ultimately sent back to the synagogues as the site of the debate. This doesn’t make halakhic dictates optional, but normative to a specific context, the community in which they occur.
More recently, Reconstructionist leader Daniel Goldman Cederbaum theorized how localized halakhic observance could work, with communities dictating how to interpret these commands, perhaps making distinctions between public and private decisions as it pertains to unlawful behavior. Indicating that this observance of halakhah, however individualized, remains fundamentally driven by a sense of obligation he writes:
We are too squeamish about using the word “must” rather than the word “should” when we discuss these and similar issues within our communities. “Must” is appropriate, not because we believe that the obligation is literally ordained by God, but because it has its source in a democratically determined social contract, informed by our people’s evolving understanding of how best to make Godliness manifest in the world. That should have the force of law for the community.”[3]
If Reconstructionist halakhah was not discussed and accepted at the local level, it would eventually become just as stilted and irrelevant as Reconstructionists felt other definitive claims to halakhic authority had become. The disagreement was not with the degree of application or even the authority of the halakhah but the process by which this obligation was revealed. Minhag hamakom, which is the minhag specific to a particular community (consider whether or not to eat kitniyot [rice, peas, corn, lentils, etc.] on Passover), may also be binding in a way that is functionally similar to halakhah. That specificity provides its own kind of relative localism, not unlike the vision Kaplan offered for the regional application of binding pronouncements of minhag and halakhah: an organic vision for how to continue this project of the evolving Jewish civilization. This could result in a halakhah that looks acutely Orthodox (as it did for Kaplan), or another that brings in all kinds of modern political or ethical considerations. It depends on how those engaging in the discourse read the application of the law. This idea has been carried on through other generations of progressive Jews, from “eco-kashrut” to feminist applications of taharat hamishpakhah[6](Jewish menstrual law).
Related to this is Kaplan’s discussion of “sancta,” objects or activities of Jewish life that are imbued a sanctity that Jews can access when they interact with them This is true of all cultures and civilizations, in which sacredness, access to transcendence, occurs through these spaces, instruments or moments in time. The “folkways” of Jewish civilization functions in an equivalent way. Halakhah — understood as how Jews do Judaism — is a process that instructs the Jew in how to access that sancta.
The break between Reconstructionism and the Conservative movement is often framed as one of Kaplan’s rejection of halakhah, but it is not so simple. Conservatism’s approach to halakhah had its own inherent flexibility, but also its own “orthodoxy”: It broke with the traditionalists in some ways, but had its own lineage of “correct” interpretation. Kaplan asserted that this still depended on some kind of coercion, implicitly or explicitly, something that was simply unthinkable for the modern American Jew. Instead, as Jack Cohen pointed out at a 1958 Rabbinical Assembly convention, traditionalist halakhah was largely a myth in the lives of Conservative Jews; it was rather a sign of what he called “semantic sophistry.” His proposal was phrased in the language of its time, to let halakhah inform the ritual, but we might today calibrate that phrase to understand it as letting “tradition” inform the application. What we do is halakhic if we can trace it to the mitzvot, motivated with kavanah (sacred intention), and the creation of the sancta.
This approach is not completely alien from the larger halakhic world when we consider the teaching that both mitzvot de-oraita (commandments explicitly commanded in Torah) and mitzvot de-rabbanan (those that are not explicitly commanded but are nevertheless necessary to the construction of a coherent halakhic way of living) are both obligatory. Reconstructionist halakhah could put both on an equal playing field if the mitzvot in question are seen as relevant and necessary (meaning the vote of tradition wins). As Reconstructionist rabbis Jessica Rosenberg and Ariana Katz write in their 2024 book For Times Such as These, “halacha is multivocal” and not a singular tractate. As they write,
[Halakhah] is not a single set of laws. It is a way of relating to Jewish practice, a commitment to a set of processes about how that practice is determined, and the tradition in which Jewish practice is rooted.
Halakhah is not a fixed and static set of tractates but an evolving assessment of the Jewish world, just as Reconstructionism understands itself to be. Engaging in halakhic debates is, ultimately, a way of engaging in halakhah itself, as long as a sense of obligation drives it. We are bound to the tradition we are a part of, which demands things of us, and the work is in discovering what those demands mean.
And if we look at the types of expressions of Jewishness the Reconstructionist movement is often tied to, it would be hard to assume that this obligation is not broadly felt across the movement or those influenced by its Torah. An example of this is SVARA, the queer and trans yeshivah, which often reads essential Jewish texts though a queer lens.
“Transing” texts like the Talmud may offer new interventions into its meaning, but the process of flipping these texts backwards and forwards to find new resonances is nothing new. The history of Jewish thought and practice in the modern era — and in earlier periods — is built around reinterpreting an established statement of halakhah, seeing it from every possible angle, including considering whether its value is found in reading the opposite of what it appears to say on the page.
We are bound to the tradition we are a part of, which demands things of us. The challenge is to discover what those demands mean.
The Zohar, for example, is itself a radically deconstructive machine, taking the text of Torah (and Talmud) and dismantling it before rebuilding it, establishing a model by which the interpretative act itself becomes the primary focus of the user’s engagement with the text. When SVARA students tear into Talmud, they are doing halakhah, just much differently than those who often claim halakhic authority. To call this “less halakhic” is to assume a monopoly on interpretation, to accept some types of textual “queering” while rejecting others and to project bad faith onto those engaged in the deconstructing, assuming they are looking for a path out of, instead of into, obligation.
Increasing Ritual Observance
The second reason to consider Reconstructionism a halakhic movement is its role in actually increasing Jewish people’s access to Jewish tradition and, ultimately, mitzvot.
Reconstructionism’s founding ethos is that many Jews will have to “reintroduce” Jewish ritual and obligation into a life that does not have it, rather than simply intervening on an existing practice. If we look at a sobering assessment of halakhic observance, we find that this applies to the overwhelming majority of Jewish people, who require introductions to how to engage in Jewish ritual if it is to become relevant to their lives. At the same time as politics in Israel leave many left-leaning Jews estranged from many mainstream Jewish organizations, there is an increasing openness to elements of Jewish custom and law that may have been an anachronism for older generations. Kosher eating, Shabbat and holiday observance and tefillah (prayer) all present ways of performing Jewish identity apart from Zionism or other elements of Jewish life that have become conflicted. The same was largely true for why Reconstructionism made its way into the counter-cultural landscape of the Jewish New Left, whereby a sort of “anti-assimilation” was revived where Kaplan’s vision of ancestral practices resonated. In a similar way, Kaplan’s naturalism and lack of an adherence to supernaturalism can also provide an easier entryway to some by presenting traditions, even halakhah, as built on an entirely different conceptual framework than “belief” (a concept often projected on Judaism in a Christian hegemonic society). So while the Reconstructionist model may ultimately appear as less observant than the Orthodox, it is built around the observance of Jewish rituals in lives that largely began as free from obligation.
When I was recently holding a series of book events we had to wrestle with whether or not to hold any of them over Shabbat, considering the fact that we all have limited availability. My wife offered what she called the “Chabad intervention.”[4] The event we were planning could start in the early evening and end at Shabbat by collectively lighting candles and saying the kiddush, or doing the event on Shabbat but only allowing the commercial elements after we collectively say havdalah. While doing it this way may play fast and loose with some halakhic prohibitions, it would ultimately bring more people to either the kiddush or havdalah who would not otherwise observe them. So, with this in mind, it was an ultimate good in that it brings more Jews to mitzvot. When discussing this with a rabbi friend, she reminded me that this idea was also a Reconstructionist one, calculating how to spread tradition to the most Jews given the limitations offered by the modern world.
This is the pragmatism of Reconstructionism, and of Kaplan himself, whose goal was not necessarily to meet the expectations of a transcendent third party but to bring people back into Jewish folkways as much as reasonably possible. The “evolving civilization,” the tradition holding a “vote not a veto,” is an effort to construct a Jewish practice that people will actually participate in because we have not lost the forest for the trees. If we have to break some rules to allow others to be followed at scale, then so be it.
So even if we were to think about modern, non-Orthodox Jewish communities as “less halakhic,” Reconstructionism still presents a pathway for halakhah to return to the lives of Jews. That observance does not all come at once, but rather requires a forward and backward entry of traditions and the application of halakhah, but this is, even if incomplete, a good in itself. When considering Chabad again, it’s worth understanding that their Mitzvah Tanks are not there to get Jews to join Chabad communities, but to just engage in mitzvot: one mitzah is better than none. So if Reconstructionism proves itself a viable pathway to mitzvot, to have a Jew follow a dictate of halakhah, is it actually harmful if it fails to meet the traditional legal expectations?
One criticism of this approach is that it gives Jews a false picture of what their obligations are, which is how Orthodox authorities may view this work.[5] But if we observe the actual demographics of the Jewish world and the limited number of secular Jews moving into Orthodoxy, it’s unlikely that this “return” to Orthodox observance is actually a viable pathway to halakhah. If we assess success by the total number of mitzvot performed, giving people access, then even while people are negating other laws, it can still be worth it. Rigidity could even have a further deleterious effect on observance, leading to the idea that obligation is caustic and irrelevant to the modern search for meaning.
But this also opens the question as to what specifics we are willing to compromise to bring the larger whole back into the fold. When the Conservative movement was coming into its own, perhaps its most profound break with Orthodoxy was the question of driving on Shabbat. The reason was simple: Jews were leaving the Jewish neighborhoods and moving to the suburbs. So if we prohibited these newly affluent Jews from driving on Shabbat, we were likely to lose them entirely from synagogue life, a stepping stone to their complete exit from the Jewish collectivity. So, in classic Conservative halakhic fashion, the rule was bent so as to serve the greater good, which was then understood as halakhically honorable. The Orthodox rabbinate saw this much differently and claimed that this would allow for the breakup of the Jewish neighborhood and the tight-knit communities they fostered, which they believed was the center of Jewish life. History has borne out this prediction, haimishkeit (a sense of “home”) has been destroyed, and there are few “Jewish neighborhoods” (outside of Israel) that wouldn’t best be described as “Orthodox neighborhoods.”
So who was right? They likely both were, but the Conservative movement was making a calculation, and we have yet to see its ultimate consequences. This is likewise the equation many Reconstructionists make, making alterations to tradition in ways that keep Judaism relevant and accessible so as to prevent the exit of so many from active observance, or at least to reduce its frequency. There were places when this has been obvious, particularly in making queerness a celebrated part of the tradition, but it is likely also in ways that the flexibility shows that you can actually live a Jewish life, including wrestling with halakhah, even if circumstances prohibit certain elements of traditional observance. Only by breaking the rules can we create a Judaism where any of the rules can be followed by a plurality of Jews, thus allowing that heretical position to inspire greater piety. “By owning the heresy, and also arguing that Judaism is not being transgressed by the abrogation of the normative, but is being fulfilled by the transgression of the normative in order to create a new model of Jewish life,” described Shaul Magid at a recent YIVO conference, discussing primarily the innovations of Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, whom he says carried Kaplan’s post-halakhic discourse forward next.
So if we turn back to the original debate: When do we light candles? Both stated opinions are relevant, engaged in a Talmudic debate for how to keep our tradition alive. As Waxman notes, this is where we actually move beyond the approach offered by many Orthodox halakhic authorities, where we try to understand exactly what these commandments meant and what they were driving towards. Waxman writes:
[These] commandments were, in the broadest possible sense, the recollection and interpretations of the Jewish people‘s encounter with God at Sinai, and a series of generations‘ understandings of how to recapture that holy moment, as well as the moment imagined as creation, through the sanctification of time. The practices themselves, like all of halakhah, were means toward this end rather than ends themselves.
Obligation is the center of what Jewishness has meant across the generations, and the maintenance of that binding nature is the essential piece for the continuity so many claim to protect. Mitzvot certainly contain a mystery, but that cannot remain unexamined if we want anyone to voluntarily turn back to the demands of a tradition that connects across thousands of years. Judaism is obtuse — it creates barriers and divisions and hoops to jump over — and if we treat these as self-evident, then we are unlikely to bring anyone back into the ecstatic joy of fulfilling the commandments. But by making halakhah a living debate and asking the question of what these mitzvot hope to encapsulate, we acknowledge that an obligation-driven life continues to offer a path of incredible meaning. What are the ends here? Is it simply to customize a life so as to fit with a code of law, or is it to engage in the question and the building of rituals that drive after the same transcendent force that has guided the Jewish people for thousands of years?
Only by breaking the rules can we create a Judaism where any of the rules can be followed by a plurality of Jews, thus allowing that heretical position to inspire greater piety.
There is a joke I often hear that all Reconstructionists believe all Jews are actually Reconstructionists, either in that we have always been redefining Judaism or every person actually conforms halakhah to what is doable for them. This has a kernel of truth, and if we look at the Conservative movement of today, it often sounds like Cohen’s proposition from the late 1950s. Several decades later, Tikva Frymer-Kensky about the liberal halakhah of the Conservative movement, which she asserted was foundationally about evolving the interpretation rather than the rigid tradition that some often project onto it:
To fully accept ol malkut shamayim, the yoke of heaven, is to accept the difficult task of envisioning heaven and finding ways to live toward that goal. The Halakha delineates the pattern of actions that defines community behavior. It situates us in our history (on the path from Sinai) and cosmos, and enables us to recognize each other as part of the same destiny. It is thus our homos, the way we conceive alternative (ideal) reality and the bridge that links our reality to this vision. The community has a shared vision – standing with God at Sinai, being God’s partners in the world – that requires a roadmap for reaching and attaining it. The Halakhah provides the ‘map’ to follow to approach that shared vision.
This reminded me of a beit din I sat in where a cantor asked me how I square anarchist politics, the rejection of higher authority to apply coercive laws, which the halakhic dictum. I felt unconflicted about this apparent contradiction: The word law is insufficient; it never had the same application as the laws of sovereign states and prison sentences. The observance of mitzvot is its own reward.
Ultimately, Judaism is a process of reading and debating text and ideas, of considering how to capture the beauty and decisiveness our tradition provides, and it is that engagement, rather than a predetermined outcome, that is the core of the Jewish project. Halakhah remains its key expression, and simply because we deviate from some halakhic authorities, it doesn’t mean that we have abandoned the struggle entirely. There’s no reason to assume that Kaplan, or later Reconstructionists, had halakhah down correctly, but that was never the point. Halakhah is in the doing, and whether or not we are able to pass that practice down to the next Jewish generation depends on whether or not we can give it the significance it had for the lives of our ancestors.
[1] In the Mishneh Torah, Maimonides, for example, recognizes that widely accepted customs, when practiced consistently by a community, have binding authority.
[2] See a series of articles, “Towards a Guide to Ritual Usage,” in The Reconstructionist, Fall 1941, later collected and published as a pamphlet with that title in 1962. Rabbi David A. Teutsch edited the three-volume A Guide to Jewish Practice (Reconstructionist Rabbinical College Press) beginning in 2011.
[3] “The Role of Halakha in Reconstructionist Decision Making,” in The Reconstructionist 2001.
[4] Chabad Hasidism is a movement that has found ways to introduce bits of Jewish practice to large numbers of nonobservant, formerly uninterested Jews by introducing practices our of context — in Sukkah mobiles, by coaxing Jewish passersby to recite the first line of the Shema or to wrap themselves (if they are men) in leather tefillin straps and prayer shawls. Their belief is that helping a person light Shabbat candles and mouth the unintelligible Hebrew words of the traditional blessing, for example, can ignite a spark in their soul that can then be fanned.
[5] In his study of Kaplan’s understanding of kedushah, Waldemar Szczerbiński outlines the “traditional preclusion of any change as far as the law is concerned is harmful to Judaism because it leads to neglecting the Jewish sancta.” If we do not allow Jewish tradition to evolve (another way of saying allowing halakhah to evolve), we are concerned that we may lose its capacity to lead us to the sacredness, to which it was constructed to provide access. Judaism is constructed precisely on the separateness of the sacred and the profane, and this requires not just an adherence to the law but the symbiosis that the law has with effect experienced by the lawful.
[6] “Jewish Menstrual Law.” See the Evolve essay, Are Trans Women Obligated in Niddah? By Rabbi Xava De Cordova.
