June 26, 2026
What Role Should Tanakh Play in Jewish Education?
Join Chaim Saiman, Rabbi Ya’akov Trump, and Jonathan Silver for a conversation about how and why Tanakh was sidelined in Jewish education, and why it’s now making a comeback.
Jews are the people of the Book. And yet for nearly two millennia, the Hebrew Bible—the Tanakh—quietly receded from the center of Jewish learning, displaced by the Talmud and its commentaries. How did this happen, and why is it beginning to change?
In his June essay, Rabbi Ya’akov Trump traces the answer to the conditions of Jewish exile. The Tanakh is a national book, written for a people with a land, an army, and a destiny. The return of Jews to their land has brought with it a return to their Scripture.
To continue the conversation, Mosaic is hosting a live webinar on this subject. Joining Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver will be Rabbi Trump and Chaim Saiman—chair in Jewish law at Villanova University and author of Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law—who has spent his career exploring how halakhah became not merely a legal system but an entire civilization: a way of thinking, being, and knowing.
