About
About Ask Torah
Ask Torah answers everyday questions about Jewish law and custom in plain language, with every source checked against Sefaria's library. No background assumed, and no question too small to bring.
Who it is for
If you did not grow up with this, this is for you. So is growing up with it and never having had it explained. So is having no rabbi to ask yet, or having one and not wanting to bother them with something this small, or being the person at the table who nods along and looks it up afterwards.
You do not need to know which words are Hebrew and which are Aramaic, or how to spell the thing you are asking about, or what any of it is called. Ask it the way you would say it out loud.
No question here is too basic, and there is nobody on the other end forming an opinion about you for asking. That is not only a posture, it is how the site is built: what you ask is private, and nothing you type can become a public page.
Answers that fit where you actually are
Most places that answer these questions answer from one tradition, because they belong to one. That is honest of them, and it is useful if you happen to belong to the same one. It is less useful if you don't, or if you are not sure what you are.
Ashkenazi, Sephardi, somewhere in between, raised in it, new to it, or still working it out: where practice genuinely differs, the answer says so and gives you the range, instead of quietly handing you one community's custom as though it were the only one. Where serious authorities disagree, it names the disagreement rather than picking for you.
Who writes this
Ask Torah is built and run by one person who spent many years learning in yeshiva. Not a rabbi, no semicha, and not in the business of ruling on anyone's question.
That background is here so that you do not need one. Years spent with this material is what makes it possible to say plainly what a source actually says, and to tell the difference between a question with a clean answer and one that only looks like it has one. The absence of semicha is why an answer here stops short of telling you what to do.
Independent and unaffiliated
Not connected to any synagogue, movement, yeshiva or kashrus agency, including the ones behind that learning, and not connected to Sefaria, whose open library we check citations against. No rabbi has endorsed these answers, and we will not imply otherwise.
That last point is deliberate. Claiming rabbinic backing we do not have would do more damage than having none.
What gets published, and what never does
- Every answer in the public archive is read by a person and edited before it goes up. Nothing publishes itself.
- Questions readers ask here are private. Archive entries are chosen from a hand-approved list, and nothing a reader types can create one.
- Every answer says how settled the question is, and cited sources are dropped rather than shown if they don't resolve. How we answer explains both in full.
If an answer is wrong
Tell us. This is the single most useful thing a reader can do here, and it is taken seriously: the answer gets checked back against its sources, and it is corrected or taken down. A correction is not an embarrassment on a site like this. An answer left standing after someone flagged it would be.
How it pays for itself
Asking is free. There is one paid tier for people who ask a lot, and it buys room to ask, not better answers or more lenient ones. The answer to a question does not change with what you pay.
Some answers link to supplies, and we may earn a commission if you buy through one. Two rules on that, which hold regardless of what they cost us: we never link a ritual item whose kosher status cannot be verified from its listing (tefillin, mezuzah scrolls, lulav and etrog, a shofar), and a product link never appears inside the ruling itself, because a link there reads as part of the halacha.
Educational, not a halachic ruling, for your situation, ask your rabbi.