Dr. Elana Stein Hain is the Rosh Beit Midrash and a Senior Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. She holds a PhD in Religion from Columbia University, where she studied with Professor David Weiss Halivni z”l. Elana is the author of Circumventing the Law: Rabbinic Perspectives on Loopholes and Legal Integrity (Penn Press, 2024), as well as a chapter in the upcoming Oxford Handbook of Jewish Law (Oxford, 2025) on the rabbinic penchant for decontextualized interpretation, called “Close, Yet Creative, Reading: Understanding Rabbinic Interpretative Strategies.”