Halacha, Drawn From the Daf
A distinctive part of Rabbi Gershon West's teaching is his running series of "Halachic Insights Into the Past Week's Daf Yomi." Rather than only translating the Gemara, he mines the week's pages for the practical halacha living inside them — so a stretch of Talmud becomes a source of real, usable guidance for the coming week.
He also teaches the Gemara directly, as in his classes on Maseches Makkos, working line by line through the sugya. Between the two, his nearly four hundred and eighty recorded classes keep one foot in the text and one foot in the kitchen, the calendar, and the questions a household actually faces.
The Shabbos Table and the Yom Tov Kitchen
Much of the practical material lands where families need it most. A class specifically on blechs and hot plates is exactly the kind of everyday Shabbos question that comes up in real kitchens and rarely gets a clear answer — and he gives one, grounded in the sources.
That is the through-line of his approach: take a live, ordinary situation and rule on it clearly. He is less interested in the halacha as an abstraction than in the moment a person is standing in front of the stove, or the counter, wondering what is actually permitted.
A Full Hilchos Pesach Arc
Come the spring, his library turns into a practical Pesach handbook. There are classes on the halachos of baking matzos, on cleaning the house and kashering the kitchen, and on mechiras chometz together with the status of medicine and cosmetics — the whole sweep of what a family actually confronts before the seder.
Taken together it is a genuine seasonal resource. A household could work through these classes in order in the weeks before Pesach and come out with clear, sourced answers to the questions the holiday reliably raises every single year.
Finding kosher Torah video for your family
FilteredTube is a kosher video service built for Jewish families — every single video is approved against one written standard before it can appear, with no open feed, no comments, and no surprises. It is a calm, safe place to look for the Torah and Jewish music you love.
If your family enjoys teachers like Rabbi Gershon West, search FilteredTube for the speakers and topics that matter most to you. With a daf yomi shelf, a weekly parsha shelf, topic shelves, audio-only listening for the car, and a kids mode with a PIN, kosher Jewish video is easy to reach — and the approved catalog keeps growing every day.
At a glance
Key takeaways
- Rabbi Gershon West runs a weekly series drawing practical halacha out of the daf yomi.
- He answers live Shabbos-kitchen questions, including a class specifically on blechs and hot plates.
- His Pesach arc covers baking matzos, cleaning and kashering, and mechiras chometz with medicine and cosmetics.
- He also teaches Gemara directly, such as his line-by-line classes on Maseches Makkos.
- Search FilteredTube for kosher, approved Torah video — the catalog grows every day.