Dr. Orit Malka, Faculty of Law and the Talmud department, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Research interests include History of Rabbinic Law, Rabbinic Law and Legal history, Early Rabbinic Literature, Rabbinic law and Ancient Near Eastern Law, Rabbinic law and Roman law.
If religious norms are considered to be rational, how are they different from secular ones? This essay revisits this question through the prism of the Jewish discourse of the reasons for the commandments.