Technologies of Transmission: From Sinai to Sefaria

Max Grossman: It's my great pleasure among some of my responsibilities, to have the opportunity to invite people to come in and share their knowledge, research, and wisdom with us. We have a commitment in the Meyerhoff Center to reaching widely out, not only to scholars from a wide range of approaches to the study of Judaism, but also scholars with a wide range of areas of expertise. Max Grossman: I am really really delighted to welcome Rabbanit Sarah Wolkenfeld to our Forum to speak to us today. She is the Director of Education at Safaria, which many of you know about, and some of you have probably used a nonprofit organization working to expand Jewish learning by providing access to Jewish texts in the original languages and in translation through digital means. That's already a lot of languages mixed together. Max Grossman: I was pleased and and impressed to see that safaria describes their mission as serving not merely as an archive for preserving Jewish texts, but as a platform to give these texts new life. Max Grossman: I also am extremely jealous that your title there is chief learning officer. I want that I would like to have a little plaque that says that for my desk Max Grossman: Rabani Wolkenfeld's credentials precede her. She has been involved with so many of the core communities for advanced Jewish learning that it's hard to list them all. The Drisha Institute, Midrash at Lindenbaum, Nishmat, and Beit Murasha. She's a graduate, as I said a moment ago, of the University of Pennsylvania. Max Grossman: and she served as Director of Education at the center for Jewish life, Hillel at Princeton as part of the ous jlic Jewish learning initiative on campus. She's been a rabbinic fellow at the David Hartman Center, and has held a Wexner fellowship as well. I think I've listed pretty much everything a person could do. I think you even had some connections to pardes.

Max Grossman: You've lived widely in the field. But more than all of these credentials, which are truly remarkable, robinate Wolkenfeld has a gift for making complicated ideas accessible, which might, in fact, be among the most important missions of safari. Today. We've brought her here today to help us think about the recent history of Jewish text study, and to ask how the changes wrought by safari might shape the future of Jewish textuality. Max Grossman: We look forward to your talk, and we have many, many questions for you. I now present the floor to you. Sara Wolkenfeld: Thank you so much, and thank you all for being here. I am really excited for your questions, and so I'm going to try to keep the lecture part relatively brief, because I would much rather answer your questions and hear about your interests, and you should feel free to put questions in the chat as we go, just as they occur to you. I can answer them as I speak, or come to them at the end, but definitely don't hold back. Sara Wolkenfeld: As you said, right weather weather doesn't get in the way of zoom, and zoom is also where we've all learned to multitask. So Sara Wolkenfeld: I'm happy to see what you have to offer. Sara Wolkenfeld: I am assuming that everyone Sara Wolkenfeld: presence has at least heard of safaria, and the very gracious introduction gave a little bit of an overview. But I want to start from talking about the organizational mission and vision, so that you'll understand how I came to this area of study.

Sara Wolkenfeld: Safaria's mission is to bring Torah into the digital age, to make Torah accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. We define Torah both, I'd say, broadly and narrowly. So we're really looking at the Jewish textual tradition. Sara Wolkenfeld: which is maybe to some a narrow definition. But it's also broad in the sense that we're really looking at literature that developed over generations. We're looking at everything from the Bible going forward. And our vision is a world where these texts are alive and resonant. Sara Wolkenfeld: And that vision piece means that part of my role is to be in dialogue with other organizations, other institutions, other thinkers, teachers, schools, etc, so that we can be in conversation and and be part of building this vision together. And so I'm especially excited that you're all here. So Faria's question has always been, what might Torah learning look like? What might Jewish text study look like when we bring the power of cutting edge digital technology to bear on ancient texts. Sara Wolkenfeld: And I want to engage that question in 2 ways today. 1st of all, I want to look a little bit at past Jewish media shifts.

Sara Wolkenfeld: looking at them primarily through the lens of Jewish texts. So I'm not a historian. Presumably some of you on this call are, and my interest is less in the history which I've also had the opportunity to study a little bit, but more in thinking about Sara Wolkenfeld: how the Jewish sources themselves narrate these shifts. And that's important to me, because I have been here in real time, as the Jewish community has narrated the shift to digital. I would say it's ongoing. We're not done yet, but I've definitely been there for Sara Wolkenfeld: a chunk of it, and at the beginning of safari I used to receive a lot of what I lovingly call safaria hate mail, which were emails from people who usually people who knew me, although sometimes people who didn't.

Sara Wolkenfeld: And we didn't even have safari email addresses. Yet it was just my personal email, usually, and people would email and say, I can't believe you're digitizing the Jewish canon. How could you do such a thing. Do you hate books? Don't you know that we're the people of the book? And it was really shocking to me Sara Wolkenfeld: that that was the narrative that people were constructing to me. It was obvious. 1st of all, I do love books in case you were wondering. You're all invited to my home. You can see we have many books in our house, and also people don't generally invest deeply in digitizing and preserving Jewish texts unless they actually love those books and want them to survive for a long time. So I was interested in that narrative, and I was interested in seeing where that narrative had Sara Wolkenfeld: either echoes in the past or Sara Wolkenfeld: where the narrative had gone differently in the past. That's 1 part of the conversation I'd like to have with you today, and Sara Wolkenfeld: and then also to talk about the current story. So the current narrative, the current shift to digital media Sara Wolkenfeld: and talk about how I think that safari's tools that currently exist, but also some of the tools that don't yet exist. Maybe maybe we'll go there a little bit. Speak directly to some of the ideals that we might have around studying these texts, and how these technologies can serve us in our desire to preserve and spread and enrich our understanding of these texts. Sara Wolkenfeld: So I'm going to share a source sheet in the chat, actually.

Sara Wolkenfeld: okay. And you'll let me know if you can't see this for some reason. But I'm hoping I'm gonna do that rather than share my screen, because that way I'll still be able to see all of you Sara Wolkenfeld: and also see your questions. Sara Wolkenfeld: Okay, great. It's there. Wonderful. Sara Wolkenfeld: I think that it's actually built in to the very early layers of Jewish texts that, as I put it on this sheet. The medium is the message. Now, that's a more modern phrase. The Talmud did not say that, unlike you see, all these like quotes on the Internet. It says like this came from the Talmud, and most of them really did not. So this one I'm definitely not claiming came from the Talmud. But I think that's a big part of what the Talmud Sara Wolkenfeld: ultimately has to say about the ways in which texts are transmitted.

Sara Wolkenfeld: and the foundational story that I like to use mostly because it is widely taught in Jewish circles, is a piece from the Talmud, Shabbat. 31 a. It's a story about the great sages. Hillel and Shammai. Sara Wolkenfeld: Hellel and Shammai lived at the end of the last century BC. The beginning of the 1st century Ce. And they were famous. They were sort of famous for disagreeing with each other and for arguing about all sorts of matters of Jewish law. In this story it's unclear whether the argument is about Jewish law, or whether it's a matter of temperament or something else. But Sara Wolkenfeld: but here's the story. I'm going to tell you the 1st part of it, and then we'll read kind of the punchline. There's someone who's not Jewish who comes before Shammai and wants to convert to Judaism.

Sara Wolkenfeld: And the Gentile says to Shammai. How many Torahs do you have? And Shammai says to him, We have 2 Torahs, the written Torah and the Oral Torah, which is just interesting, because I think that if you stopped I was going to say a Jew on the street, probably even a rabbi on the street nowadays. And you asked how many Torahs do you have? Sara Wolkenfeld: I'm not sure, unless they've read the story. I'm not sure the answer would be 2 like, it's not an instinctive answer. I think my answer would probably be one that we have. I would want to sort of emphasize the Sara Wolkenfeld: the cohesiveness of the experience of Torah study, and I would say we have one, Torah. It has lots of different ways of studying it. Lots of different aspects. Shammai's answer is that there are 2 Torahs. One is written, and one is oral, which is to say that what differentiates between the 2 kinds of Torah the 2 kinds of law or teachings is that one is delivered through writing, and one is delivered Sara Wolkenfeld: through speech.

Sara Wolkenfeld: The Gentile says back to him, with regard to the written Torah, I believe you. But with regard to the oral, Torah, I do not believe you convert me on condition that you'll teach me only the written Torah. Sara Wolkenfeld: Shammai rejects this prospective convert and sends him out. So the next day the same man comes before Hillal, who converts him and starts teaching him Torah. Sara Wolkenfeld: At this point we have to ask what went wrong in the story? Why. Sara Wolkenfeld: like 2 things, why would the Gentile not accept the oral, Torah? And why would Shammai not convert this person if they didn't accept the oral, Torah? Sara Wolkenfeld: Neither of these questions is answered in this story.

Sara Wolkenfeld: It does, though, point to something about a belief system that is very deeply held about the ways in which transmission of texts matters. So there's something either more authoritative or less authoritative or equally authoritative about a text depending on how it's transmitted. Sara Wolkenfeld: and if you are doubtful about whether this applies in our own society, then I would encourage you to think about the phrase screen time, which is a phrase that didn't exist when I was a child, but is a very big feature of my children's childhood and screen time means. Sara Wolkenfeld: and it's like, I think, like perfect form as it originated time spent on a screen. It doesn't distinguish between what you might be doing on the screen. Just that there is screen time, and we don't talk about book time. We talk about screen time. So if you are reading a book on a screen, that is screen time. And if you are facetiming with a friend, that is screen time. And if you are playing video games, that is also screen time. And if you're watching

Sara Wolkenfeld: old episodes of Sesame Street, that's also screen time, because all of those things happen on a screen. And so actually, I think it is still pervasive to. Certainly in our culture, where screens are a big concern, to talk about Sara Wolkenfeld: things in terms of the medium rather than in terms of what you're getting through that medium. And of course there are more nuanced conversations. It's just not like our 1st go to. We start from the point of this is the medium, and we have judgments about the medium. And I've Sara Wolkenfeld: and done experiments with high school students just giving them pictures of someone their age.

Sara Wolkenfeld: sitting on a couch with a book versus someone their age sitting on a couch with a cell phone in front of them. That person could be doing the same things. The students immediately have associations about how they would judge each of those people what they think those people are doing, and sort of personality traits that match with those people. So Shamai has some kind of hangups about written versus oral Torah, and you have to accept both and oral. Torah is so fundamental, whatever that whatever exactly, it means to him. But it's so fundamental that you can't convert Sara Wolkenfeld: to Judaism without accepting it. And the convert has some kind of, or the prospective convert has some kind of bias against oral Torah, maybe right. Something that makes that medium subpar for them that makes them resist. Hill, of course, converts this person, and on the 1st day shows him the letters of the alphabet, and says, names. The 1st 4 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Sara Wolkenfeld: The next day he reversed the order of the letters, and told him that an aleph is a taf, and so on. The convert said to him, but yesterday. You did not tell me that, Hillel said to him. You see that it is impossible to learn what is written without relying on oral tradition. Didn't you rely on me, therefore you should also rely on me with regard to the matter of Oral Torah, and accept the interpretations that it contains, which is usually read as a kind of triumphant Hillel story. Look. He successfully taught this

Sara Wolkenfeld: this prospective convert what it means to Sara Wolkenfeld: to trust a teacher to take in Oral Torah, the importance of Oral Torah. All of that. I think it also teaches us something about the way that at least these rabbis are thinking about Oral Torah as something that, let's say, maybe fills in the gaps for written Torah as something that's transmitted from a teacher to a student. I think the fact that he says, Didn't you rely on me Sara Wolkenfeld: gives this very strong, I think, mental image that is actually true to the experience of learning through the parts of the Jewish canon that we call Oral Torah. So the Talmud Sara Wolkenfeld: is considered Oral Tarot. We still use that term for it, even though Sara Wolkenfeld: everybody encounters it as a printed book, the same as they do the Bible or any other Jewish text. That's how you encounter. We still think of it as Oral Torah, and it is full of people talking to other people. It's full of quotes one person talking to another, talking to another, and ideas that are transmitted across generations. And so that idea of being in conversation with someone else, reliance on a teacher of something passed down over the generations. It seems that something about the medium of oral. Torah is

Sara Wolkenfeld: is Sara Wolkenfeld: a home to that idea. It's kind of embodying that ideal of what it means to study Torah. And it's that ideal that Hillel and Shammai, maybe Shammai, even more than Hillel want to preserve in this story. So I think it's just a starting point for thinking about. Sara Wolkenfeld: What is it about a medium that we like or don't like? I don't think that the people who were sending me safari hate mail were necessarily thinking that deeply about it. I think they had like a gut reaction to the idea of digitizing Torah. But Sara Wolkenfeld: but that's maybe the best possible litmus test for how we think about a medium is, what's your gut reaction? You see the picture of the kid reading from the phone on the couch. What's your gut reaction to that. That is a kind of test for how you think about different media.

Sara Wolkenfeld: And so their gut reaction here is that if you don't accept oral. Torah, that's bad. And the Talmud actually throughout Sara Wolkenfeld: preserves this kind of discourse. I called Part 2 on this sheet. Those who write Jewish law are like one who burns the Torah, which is a quote from Sara Wolkenfeld: the Talmud, the Jerusalem Talmud Sara Wolkenfeld: in Shabbat, which again is, I'm not sitting in front of the most picturesque bookshelves in my house, but that I want to make sure everyone can understand what a crazy statement that is for somebody who was, let's say, born in the last 100 years even, and is accustomed to the idea that, as all these people who emailed me told me, Jews are the people of the book. Books are pieces of paper bound between 2 pieces of cardboard, and the Talmud takes up

Sara Wolkenfeld: more than one bookshelf. It's like a multi-volume work depending on which edition you have would determine how many volumes it is a large large set of books. The idea that all of that was oral Sara Wolkenfeld: is shocking for those of us who at this point I will say, at least in my life, I don't even memorize phone numbers anymore. I can't remember the last time I really tried to memorize a phone number. I don't know all my children's phone numbers by heart. The idea that all of this was oral and was preserved orally, is shocking for a written culture, but the opposite the flip side. The idea that all this would be written down Sara Wolkenfeld: is an idea that the Talmud emphasizes again and again as being shocking to them. Whether or not this is historically true. There's really great scholarship about how real this was that basically, scholars think that a lot probably was written down, and I would say that that is experientially true. You don't get headlines about how terrible AI is going to be until you have AI. You don't get Sara Wolkenfeld: a lot of reaction to new technologies until those new technologies exist. So I would say, the fact that the Talmud spends time talking about how terrible it is to write down texts of oral law probably means there was a lot of writing down, of texts of oral law. That's just my common sense approach again. There's really good scholarship about this. Also. Sara Wolkenfeld: The Talmud in Gitten is kind of the for me. It's the most central text for thinking about the ways in which the Jewish community thinks about and deals with new technologies.

Sara Wolkenfeld: The Talmud in Gitten is talking about the possibility of, or the impossibility of writing down the oral law. Again, this text, which is meant to be transmitted orally. The end of this is source number 2 on the sources. The end of that text actually says matters that were written. You may not express them orally, and matters that were taught orally, you may not express them in writing. Sara Wolkenfeld: which, 1st of all, I would say that there is a kind of there's a kind of marking of this as an oral text. I think in the fact that this statement comes at the end of this text, and not at the beginning, because Sara Wolkenfeld: if we were writing an academic article together about Jewish. The history of Jewish approaches to writing down oral law. This would be like the top of the article. You'd want this to be in your introductory paragraph. This is a grounding piece of information. If you do not know this, it is hard to understand the rest of it. But if you contrast the experience of writing an article, the experience of telling a story. Sara Wolkenfeld: when you tell a story, you can be more associative, and you can kind of stick in pieces of information as you go, and if the person doesn't understand, they'll just ask. And so it takes a while for the Talmud to actually get to this rule. But this rule is actually what they have in mind, and the story that they tell is that Rabbi Yochanan and Resh Lachish, who were Rabbis early in the Talmudic period, were accustomed to read from a scroll of Agadah a scroll of Rabbinic stories on Shabbat. Sara Wolkenfeld: which sounds like a very reasonable activity. But actually, the Talmud is kind of horrified at the idea, because it says Sara Wolkenfeld: this scroll was not allowed to be written down because you're not allowed to write down oral law. Rabbinic stories are part of the oral Torah.

Sara Wolkenfeld: But then the Talmud does seem very interesting, and says, actually, it wasn't possible any other way Sara Wolkenfeld: just impossible, to not write things down if you like me, are somebody who likes to write down to do lists, whether you actually physically write them on paper with pens, or you have some kind of app or like digital system. But if you're someone who likes to write things down. Then this piece of the Gemara will resonate with you. Sara Wolkenfeld: There's something impossible about having all of this orally and not writing it down. That's what the Gemara says. That's what the Talmud says, and they're willing to go so far as to midrashically interpret a verse from the Book of Psalms and create a kind of Jewish legal loophole. Sara Wolkenfeld: The verse in Psalm says it's that it is. It's time to act for the Lord because they've nullified your Torah. It's time to act for the Lord, because people have acted against God's law, and the Talmud understands that to mean, in a case where there is Sara Wolkenfeld: a nullification of the law. That means that you can or sorry. In a case where where there is a challenge to Torah, there's a there's a problem going on, you can act and even go so far as to nullify Torah in this case. That means abrogating the law that says that you're not allowed to write it down. Sara Wolkenfeld: the Rabbi said. It's not possible any other way. We've thought about this. We've tried learning it orally for a really long time. And actually, there's this great new technology called writing. And we'd like to give it a shot. We think it could really be a boon to the system of Jewish text study, and Sara Wolkenfeld: and lo and behold, the Talmud defends that move.

Sara Wolkenfeld: and that is, in fact, what happens Sara Wolkenfeld: and source number 3 I'll just mention. I'm not going to read. It is from Maimonides writing about Sara Wolkenfeld: the kind of process of writing down the oral Torah, and I think, as a matter of historical fact, he kind of oversimplifies. But his story, his story of Jewish media is, no one had thought to write all these things down before they were shared and taught orally. And then he says. Sara Wolkenfeld: from the days of Moses, our master, until our holy Master. So from the days of Moses in the Bible, until Rabbi Yehuda Hanasi, who is purported to have written down the entire Mishnah, the early layer of Jewish law. No one had written it down. He wrote it down. And

Sara Wolkenfeld: and that was great essentially is what he's saying, that maybe there were fears, or there were fears. There were real concerns about what would happen if we wrote down Torah. But actually. Sara Wolkenfeld: it turns out to have been a great thing for the Jewish people. Again, as evidenced by the many emails that I got Sara Wolkenfeld: there are real pros and cons, I would say, of both oral and written text I already mentioned, memorization. Memorization is both challenging. Sara Wolkenfeld: and I think I mean, I assume that many of you I know some of you on the call, and maybe many of you on the call are professors are educators. There are times when we actually want our students to remember things. There are tests that I have given that rely on some amount of memorization. There is something to that skill of having things Sara Wolkenfeld: encoded in your brain. Sara Wolkenfeld: And yet there's also a reason that we write things down. There's a sense that they are better preserved if they're written down.

Sara Wolkenfeld: Oral traditions. Oral transmission also has the advantage of being more fluid. Sara Wolkenfeld: It's something that's more changeable. So I can change what I'm saying to you, based on my facial expression, based on my pauses. And and just the way that I, the way that I choose to convey that information has a very personal touch Sara Wolkenfeld: in a way that a book or written text, let's say, does not. That's much more set. It's much more fixed, and it doesn't have that kind of quality of being changeable.

Sara Wolkenfeld: And I think very important to the Talmud is the idea that oral Sara Wolkenfeld: transmission involves relationships. It involves some kind of face to face contact right back then, because they weren't talking about like we were not zooming. So something taught orally was something taught person to person. Sara Wolkenfeld: and that also, I would say, is both a pro and a con. You can argue one side or the other if you want to. I'm open to comments in the chat, and we can talk more soon. But I would say that there's definitely a plus to face-to-face contact, and to those relationships with teachers. I value those very much in my own life. Sara Wolkenfeld: and I know my students do, too. At the same time, I think that I'm

Sara Wolkenfeld: pretty confident that when Rabbis, like Rabbi Yochanan and Rish Lakish, talked about Sara Wolkenfeld: teaching things orally to their students, I am not the kind of student that they had in mind. And so I would have been left out of that study hall experience. And so, without written texts, someone like me would have had no access to those teachings. And that's that's the way the Oral teaching works where you're either in or you're out. Sara Wolkenfeld: And I would say that that is something actually sort of jumping ahead a little bit. But that's something that we hear a lot about. Safari is that having these texts available in this way gives access to people who couldn't or wouldn't enter spaces where Jewish books are available. But this is a 1st step towards democratization. Writing things down. You can then pass around written texts. And so that's a 1st step. Sara Wolkenfeld: Texts get written down. We survive, and we enter the manuscript phase of Jewish history. Texts were handwritten, very expensive. Interestingly, we know from other other Rabbinic writings that there were Rabbis who, even at this stage, resisted the idea of having their ideas written down. They're not very famous Sara Wolkenfeld: widely because they didn't write their ideas down. Interestingly, we see this also. There's a parallel to digital text where we have. There are now books printed books that you can buy Sara Wolkenfeld: where the authors or the publishers actually don't want them spread on the Internet. They don't want them spread far and wide. And I'm like worried. I have fear for those books which are some of which are amazing books. What will happen when so many people are accessing text digitally. And and there's a real resistance to making these resources available digitally like, will it be great because they'll have like a cult following? Or will they fall out of popularity because they're so much less available. Sara Wolkenfeld: So these are patterns that repeat again and again and Sara Wolkenfeld: and again, starting from this idea of oral to written.

Sara Wolkenfeld: written as manuscripts, and then, of course, the printing press is invented Sara Wolkenfeld: by and large. The printing press is well received in the Jewish world. And again. That's both true historically, although there were certainly detractors, but really interesting to see what the Jews themselves, especially Rabbinic scholars, were saying about their experience of the printing press. This is Part 3, the printed word and I have a kind of teaser quote from Professor Alhan Reiner. He's a professor at Sara Wolkenfeld: Tel Aviv University, I think, who does the cultural history of Ashkenazi Jews, and particularly the history of the book. Sara Wolkenfeld: and you can see there that there was this idea that printed books would freeze and rigidify Halacha or Jewish law, which must remain fluid. Sara Wolkenfeld: This is a downside to books. It's not a downside to books that I find most people think about today. So again, when people were contacting me because they were worried about digitizing texts, they were definitely thinking about books as the best possible technology printed books as the best possible technology for taking in Jewish texts. But every technology has affordances and limitations. And so this is one of the limitations. But, as I said, there were a lot of Rabbinic scholars who really leaned into the affordances.

Sara Wolkenfeld: I have this quote here just because I think it's so great from Abraham Connaught, who was a. Sara Wolkenfeld: He wrote the the colophon. He was a printer in Mantua, and so in this colophon, which is like the introduction for the kind of title page to the Tour a Halakhic work printed in 1476, Sara Wolkenfeld: he describes. He's like a poem. It's kind of like an ode to the printing press. Almost. I mean, it's about the book, but it's also about printing more generally, and he calls printing. It's like writing with many quills, without miraculous intervention, which I think is a rare window into the way that Sara Wolkenfeld: somebody newly faced with the technology experienced it. It's very similar to the way that I related at the beginning of safari to the engineers who were doing the work of digitizing these texts and putting them online. If you don't know how to do something. If a technological tool is new to you, and you don't know how to operate it, it's basically synonymous with magic. Sara Wolkenfeld: and that's what he's saying here that this is really magical, and and you can see that again echoed in a lot of rabbinic writings of the time. I gave one small example from Raviakov Emden, who died in like, I think, the mid 17 hundreds. And he Sara Wolkenfeld: he wrote a lot of different works. He basically put in a printing press in his basement at great personal expense, because he was so excited about this. What he calls

Sara Wolkenfeld: the ability to spread Torah in Israel. He saw that this was a great tool for democratization. So if writing down texts allows you to spread Sara Wolkenfeld: those texts a little bit further, printing them right is even even stronger, because then copies become much cheaper, and you can a lot more. People can own these books. Sara Wolkenfeld: and that, in fact, is what happened again. Not everyone was a fan. I put in this longer quote from an article by Professor Reiner, which is somebody reacting to the print version of a book called the Shulchan Aruch is the paradigmatic

Sara Wolkenfeld: canonical Jewish law code, and it had the Sara Wolkenfeld: happy, happy fortune to be produced right around the time when print was becoming big. And so it was. It was a book that went kind of like right to print. Sara Wolkenfeld: and some people thought that was great, like everyone who came later, but some people resisted it because there was this feeling of you're kind of shoving your opinion down my throat. It's different when I have a relationship with you, and you're teaching me, Torah. But Sara Wolkenfeld: if you're putting it in writing and you're printing, you're distributing it far and wide. That kind of flattens Jewish law. Sara Wolkenfeld: and makes it like a 1 size, fits all experience which the writer who here is Chaim Ben Batsal of Friedberg, who's the brother of the Prague. He felt that was a terrible thing, and so he has this like fun, play on words. He says, a person only likes food he prepares for himself in accordance with his own appetite and taste. And so the pun is to the Sulchan Arach, which is this law book which literally means a set table. It's like, Don't set my table. I'll set my own table. Sara Wolkenfeld: And so there is resistance to the idea of Sara Wolkenfeld: the Prince book, and especially for as a way of promulgating Jewish law. But it does really it does really catch on. I would say again, I think that the resistance to digitization kind of reveals that. And again, we could kind of pro con. There are real advantages to books. I already mentioned some of them there are some disadvantages, it is much more set and rigid. It is much easier to promulgate mistakes and harder to correct them.

Sara Wolkenfeld: and there is a sense of having kind of decontextualized knowledge. Once you have books widely available, it's possible to be an autodidact and learn all these things and not actually have any Sara Wolkenfeld: real meaningful interaction with the community that that produced or that practices these texts. And sometimes we do see downsides to that. I see. The Jewish community was also worried about the ways in which Christian printers could use the printing press to proselytize. So that was another kind of downside Sara Wolkenfeld: and that gets also to the financial aspect and the power dynamic here, which is something that Sara Wolkenfeld: again, I don't think that I thought about it a lot in terms of books when books were the dominant medium. Don't feel like it's something I heard a lot about in in the early stages of my career is like we were concerned that publishers were dominating and controlling the information that we took in. Now, when you're talking about big tech companies when you're talking about AI when you're talking about digital technologies. I think we have returned to this fear, which Sara Wolkenfeld: also resonates with the idea of publishing. If you've ever tried to get a book published, and it's difficult. Then, you know, publishers are also gatekeepers.

Sara Wolkenfeld: and they decide what goes out into the world and what doesn't. That's part of what was so exciting. Initially, we can talk about whether it still is. But what was so exciting initially about the Internet was that anybody could have a blog. And so you could share your information. You didn't need to wait for someone else to decide that your material was worthy of sharing. So it's always a power dynamic and a financial dynamic when it comes to spreading information through new media. Sara Wolkenfeld: And again, maybe that's nowhere more manifest than in thinking about the digital revolution. Sara Wolkenfeld: So I want to share a few thoughts about where we are now, and then open it up to your comments and questions, and I'll show a little bit from safari in this regard as well. Scholars across Sara Wolkenfeld: across religions have been thinking and writing now for a lot of years about what it means to digitize these texts like, if you want, like a mashup of kind of like religious, secular, etc, in terms of a timeline. The Barilan project, which has digitized a huge quantity of Jewish books of traditional Jewish texts started in the early 19 nineties

Sara Wolkenfeld: accordance which is a really important website for Christian, for the Christian Bible and different versions of the Christian Bible also started in the early nineties. In 1994 Google books started in the early 2 thousands and Sara Wolkenfeld: one of safari's co-founders came out of Google and worked on Google books. And that was sort of what inspired him. And safaria was founded in 2012 Sara Wolkenfeld: And so. Sara Wolkenfeld: as this has been becoming possible, people have to think about, what does it mean to take something that we've all experienced for so long as a book and make it into a digital experience. We talk a lot about how many books are on safari. I'm not even sure. Sara Wolkenfeld: I don't think I don't have better language, but it's hard to say that that's the right language. It's getting increasingly hard to say that that's the right terminology to talk about how many books we have on safari, because it's really how many words or how much data we have

Sara Wolkenfeld: and how powerful that is is less a question of, can you read it all? I think there is some number of millions of words. At which point the answer is, no, you're not going to read it all. And the question is, how powerful is it really as data? And I'll talk about that in a minute. Sara Wolkenfeld: So I have a quote from a book called Liquid Scripture, which is, was really interesting to me. Coming from this very Jewish space, he talks about how the Bible as a book or the book, has lost its covers, that it's sort of come unbound. And we that image resonated for me because we do think Sara Wolkenfeld: often of safaria, we being my team, we talk about ripping the binding off the books and kind of setting the information free. And what happens when you let that information go free?

Sara Wolkenfeld: I've had the opportunity, because of all the Sara Wolkenfeld: the kind of pushback that I've gotten, I've had the opportunity to think about. What are some of the ways that Jewish sources themselves, encourage the study of texts that resonate with the affordances of digital technology. And so, for example, Source Number 9 is a piece from the Talmud in Tracti Sara Wolkenfeld: comparing the Torah to a tree, or words of Torah to a tree, because just in the with the Talmud Sara Wolkenfeld: learns from this comparison is that just as a small piece of wood can ignite a large piece, so 2 minor Torah scholars can sharpen great Torah scholars. I think this is what we would now call democratization essentially without them having that word, and that from the beginning was an important part of what safaria had in mind. The idea that multiple people would be able to both Sara Wolkenfeld: access Torah and also share Torah and Sara Wolkenfeld: Share insights to Jewish texts. And I'm going to share my screen momentarily, so that if you're not

Sara Wolkenfeld: a frequent safari user, you can see a little bit about what that looks like. Sara Wolkenfeld: This is safari's homepage in English, you can switch back and forth between the languages Sara Wolkenfeld: and one of the things that we offer. In addition to. I'm just going to open up the Book of Genesis for argument's sake. Sara Wolkenfeld: 1st of all, we have the text in translation, and we have multiple translations Sara Wolkenfeld: as a way of including multiple voices. And we also have Sara Wolkenfeld: sheets as one of the resources in this side panel. That's an opportunity for people to share their particular perspectives on texts and share what they think. Sara Wolkenfeld: And and so even just the idea of having one central website, with all these different texts, was a way of kind of bringing in different voices, and then allowing people to create materials and share those materials, was another, or is another aspect of that vision. And again, I think it is sourced to the Talmud itself. The idea that part of what can be great about Sara Wolkenfeld: about the study of Jewish texts is the ability for one person's thoughts to influence another person's thoughts in a way that again, just wasn't necessarily previously possible or not easily possible. So that's 1 piece.

Sara Wolkenfeld: another another favorite story of mine to talk about is from the Talmud in Chagiga. It's kind of a long story. I won't read the whole thing the beginning, though. Sara Wolkenfeld: There was an incident involving Rabbi Yochanan, bin Baroka, and Rabbi Elazer ben Khusma, who went to greet Rabbi Yeshua and Pik'in 2 students one teacher Sara Wolkenfeld: the students have just spent the day studying, and they go to greet their teacher, and their teacher asks them a version of what my partner and I ask our children when they come home from school, which is, what did you learn in school today? Sara Wolkenfeld: And the students give the same answer that my children always give, and maybe yours too, which is nothing Sara Wolkenfeld: essentially, I mean, they don't say nothing. They say you're our teacher, and we couldn't possibly have learned anything that you didn't teach us, and he says, No, no, there's always something new in every bitrash and every study hall. There's always something new. That's a very beautiful idea. He pressures them. They eventually spill the beans and tell him what they learned. And then, at the very end of this text, Yeshua said to them, This good pearl of wisdom was in your hands, and you tried to conceal it from me. Sara Wolkenfeld: I think that idea of siloing information is maybe a way in which Sara Wolkenfeld: in which book culture got kind of carried away Sara Wolkenfeld: that once you could publish a book so you could essentially get paid for your ideas. And then that's what people wanted to do is get paid for their ideas, so much so that if you couldn't pay, you couldn't access those ideas. And so this is really core to the experience of safari, is being able to access these texts, and as much as possible, being able to use and reuse these texts because we believe that they belong to everybody. Sara Wolkenfeld: and maybe the best way to see this is, if you look at Sara Wolkenfeld: just go back into the text. Any

Sara Wolkenfeld: any version of the text will have information about Sara Wolkenfeld: about the copyright status and where it comes from. Well, those are just all our different translations. But you can see? Sara Wolkenfeld: You can see the different versions that we have. Sara Wolkenfeld: and as much as possible we try to make text available with open licenses so that they can be used and reused. And there's a sense that these texts are there for everyone to use, to study from, to create new things with going back to the previous source and not to silo information. Sara Wolkenfeld: When safaria started. I. My 1st task for safari was to call up educators and see if they would contribute materials to the site, either translations or source sheets. Sara Wolkenfeld: I contacted almost a hundred people, and all, except for one said, No. Sara Wolkenfeld: and it's actually a miracle that I didn't get fired because my boss did not really believe me. When I told him that

Sara Wolkenfeld: it was almost exactly a year later we convened a focus group of Jewish educators and leaders in New York, and there were maybe 15 people in the room. We went around the room and one after another after another explained that no, they would not share the materials on safaria, that actually, this is what they do. They get paid for it. They expect to keep getting paid for it Sara Wolkenfeld: again. One of our co-founders came from Google. I think it was a little hard for him to wrap his mind around. I think the scale at which a Google engineer gets paid for code is maybe not the same as the scale at which a Jewish educator gets paid for pulling together resources. And so he actually he just could not take in that information. It took him a little while, but that was really like a very prevalent feeling. And I do feel actually that there's been a tremendous shift in that regard, because I think that people. Sara Wolkenfeld: because I know that now there's so many resources available on safari. And we did make progress with so many publishers and authors and translators. So that's been, that's been really an amazing thing. Sara Wolkenfeld: And and then also I would say, the idea that Sara Wolkenfeld: Jewish, the canonical Jewish texts, contain multiple meanings and multiple interpretations. I brought one source for this from the Talmud and Shabbat, but that's also like a very deeply held belief. I would say in Jewish text, that's maybe not, maybe not intuitive. Sara Wolkenfeld: Maybe you have to study Jewish text to know that that attitude is there. But once you're inside those texts, it's really, really a very dominant idea that text can have multiple meanings. When you look at a book that is harder to convey and a good way to envision that problem, you could call it a real estate problem that if you look at. Sara Wolkenfeld: let's say, a traditional printed page of the Talmud, developed by Devorah in the 18 hundreds, that that has a central text, and it has text around the side, and things are very squished. You're trying to squish a lot of material onto one page because there are many different interpretations. You want to convey the idea. There are multiple interpretations. But you have limited real estate to work with online. You don't have that limit of real estate.

Sara Wolkenfeld: You have links and the ability to link kind of forever, or to just to just keep going with what's offered. And so that's something that safari has really capitalized on as well. And so we've both put in many, many links to texts. Again, going back to the website one more time. Sara Wolkenfeld: These every text here is linked to many, many other texts. Sara Wolkenfeld: This side panel experience will tell you how much commentary there is, as well as links to other genres within the Jewish canon. That reference in this case, Genesis 1, 4. Because that's what I happen to have clicked on, and that ability to read texts and conversations with other texts gives you interpretations over the course of generations.

Sara Wolkenfeld: And in addition, as I already mentioned, we have sheets. So that's people who are currently adding their ideas as well as web pages where we've aggregated from across the Internet. I mean, we don't Sara Wolkenfeld: websites install this software and then we link back to them but organizations that are creating Sara Wolkenfeld: blog posts and articles and people who are putting up modern interpretations. Those also can link back to these texts so that we have this Sara Wolkenfeld: ongoing conversation around the texts.

Sara Wolkenfeld: And finally, I'll just mention one other piece that I think is important to this idea about multiple interpretations. And then I'll open it up to your questions Sara Wolkenfeld: because safari takes all these texts and makes them fully. Digital we're not dealing with Pdfs. Sara Wolkenfeld: We are taking everything and making it into data.

Sara Wolkenfeld: And Sara Wolkenfeld: because we have that data, we can also present that data in different forms that don't don't look like books. And they're not linear like text. And I think this is also a way of opening up Sara Wolkenfeld: space for multiple interpretations. So as one example, this visualization shows all of the connections between the Talmud and the Jewish Bible, and each one of these lines is a time where or an instance where the Talmud quotes from the Bible, and if you click on any one of these lines you'll get to the text, and it gives you a picture of the ways in which these texts are interrelated. That was Sara Wolkenfeld: was kind of always there. We didn't invent anything. It's just a new way in to understanding and and sort of comprehending what those relationships actually look like. So I think I'm going to pause there or stop there so that people can ask questions and and share comments, because I'm really curious to know what your questions are and what you're thinking about. Max Grossman: Thank you so much for sharing this wonderful presentation with us. I'm especially grateful and delighted that you came to a university audience prepared to talk about your material in a way that is especially stimulating for students, staff faculty and our larger community. It looks like Adele Berlin has a question to start things off other folks. Please raise your hand, or if you don't want to raise your hand, do put your questions in the chat. Professor Berlin.

adele berlin: Yes, thank you. Thank you, Sarah. It was a pleasure to hear this, and I have to say that safaria keeps getting better and better. I I use it a lot. adele berlin: One of the accomplishments of safari is to get the Jps Bible translation online because they had been resisting that a lot of Christian Bible translations were there, and there's a site called Bible Gateway that that has them. adele berlin: But the Jps, I think, is still not there, but it is finally on safaria. adele berlin: Being an antiquarian, let me mention that before there were books there were scrolls. adele berlin: and when the rabbis are talking about what can and can't be written. They were not talking about books.

adele berlin: The Jews were also late to accept books, or a codex, as it's called formally Christians wrote their things in books with pages while we were still using scrolls. In fact, we're still using a scroll for the Torah for the Megillah adele berlin: so I guess we had the same, you know, problem adjusting to a new technology. Then adele berlin: my question is about how you make references to things. And this is where we're still dependent on books. We cite pages in the Talmud. We cite, you know, a fixed daf and and Amud adele berlin: and we're still using that, I mean scrolls also had the same problem. Jews adopted a Christian mode of citing Bible chapters and verses, because it's just very hard to to quote words, or a Parasha or something. So what do you see happening? adele berlin: As everything gets digital? adele berlin: How are our references to specific texts or lines going to be made.

Sara Wolkenfeld: It's a great question. I actually am hoping that you all will be the ones to answer it. So thank you, Professor Berlin, and I should say, for those who weren't on at the beginning that I was lucky enough to study with Professor Berlin at Penn many years ago, and I still benefit from that experience. Sara Wolkenfeld: I think the question of citations is a really interesting one, and is evolving and going to continue to evolve. Sara Wolkenfeld: I will say that. Sara Wolkenfeld: You mentioned scrolls, scrolls, and just the lack of Sara Wolkenfeld: scrolls. And then and then I'd say manuscripts or the lack of standardization of pagination

Sara Wolkenfeld: historically made citations very hard, but I don't know if the people who Sara Wolkenfeld: had to cite experienced it as difficult, or if that's just our experience reading back, it's very relevant to the work that we're doing with AI and machine learning. Now Sara Wolkenfeld: to give an example, if you, if you study, or if you study the Talmud. Sara Wolkenfeld: the Talmud will quote the Bible and Sara Wolkenfeld: Bible. I mean it is. There are Christian references, but at least it's like easy to. It's easy to cite. Chapter 10, verse 3, Sara Wolkenfeld: when later sources medieval sources quote from the Talmud, and they didn't have the printed text of the Talmud. So those citations, or I don't even know if it's right to call them citations. Those references are kind of all over the place, so they'll say every chapter in the Talmud has a name which is it's a it's a word. Name like the chapter could be called Sara Wolkenfeld: the one who the one who marries. And so in Chapter one, the one who married at the end of the chapter like that's a perfectly standard. Quote unquote reference. Sara Wolkenfeld: If you're referencing the Talmud so.

Sara Wolkenfeld: and then you, if you're the one studying it many years later, you got to be able to find that that's something that AI can now do for us more and more Sara Wolkenfeld: turn those kind of opaque references into actual citations. Now that we have books. So that's just to say, I think it's been a challenge for a long time, and we're finding new ways to surmount it. I do think I know in terms of what I'm seeing. One of the Sara Wolkenfeld: almost unwitting innovations that safaria pushed forward is to assign line numbers to the Talm Sara Wolkenfeld: not really so innovative. When I was in Yeshiva I don't know. Sara Wolkenfeld: It was a long time ago when I was in Yeshiva in 1997. The 1st thing we would do when we started a new page of Talmud was to write little line numbers in Talmud every 5 lines we would be labeled Line one line 5, right like that, because otherwise, how was the teacher supposed to tell you where in the page you were. It turned out that within safari's system the only way to link one text to another was to give the system a citation, and the smallest unit of Bible Sara Wolkenfeld: in standard citations is chapter verse, so you can link at the verse level. The smallest unit for Talmud Citations was Daf was one half of a foliate.

Sara Wolkenfeld: that's not so great. That's like, not a great user experience. So we assigned line numbers. And now I do often see people making reference to this is, instead of you know you used to be, you would say, this is getting 60 a. Now people will say this is getting 60 a 1 through 6. I do think that that is a change like I am willing to accept the blame for that. Sara Wolkenfeld: but I'm not sure. I mean, not me personally, but safaria also. Me personally. Actually, I worked really hard on that project. I don't. I don't know. I'm like open to the open to the argument that that might not be a good thing ultimately. But I think we are going to need better systems for Sara Wolkenfeld: for citations. And I think we're just beginning, and it's possible that URL is one of them. But I'm not sure yet. I think it's a really important question.

Sara Wolkenfeld: Are there other. Max Grossman: You like to open the floor to other questions. I have about 15, but I'm trying to withhold Max Grossman: my enthusiasm.

Max Grossman: Okay, so so please do put up your hand or put questions in the chat. But Professor Lapin would like to ask you a question. Hayim Lapin: So Hayim Lapin: this 1st of all, I'm I'm sorry to Max. I I couldn't find my hand raising button in in zoom, so I I wave I I actually just wanted to jump. 1st of all, I wanted to to acknowledge the incredible work that safaria has done. I I was one of the naysayers early on, not because Hayim Lapin: I didn't want digital books, but because or or digitization of books. But you know, it was. You were working with stuff that was out of copyright often, you know. popular popular editions, right? And and you've done an amazing Hayim Lapin: work both in collecting and in raising the the quality of of the stuff. But I did want to just piggyback onto the conversation about about references that it becomes that it's it's significant. Not only, you know, in in traditional study, you want to know where in Tractate Bhavatra, something is and how it relates to a Biblical verse or something else. But but I know in my own work that

Hayim Lapin: that my own digital work, that that actually creating correlations between chunks of stuff unless you want to use. You know, character offsets is really very complicated, and manuscripts vary considerably, but the Bavli, at least has a standard pagination. Hayim Lapin: There's more than one standard pagination of the of Jerusalem, Talmud. And when you look at manuscripts of these works, they're subdivisioned into units. There's spacing on the page are all over the place. So so it is a real problem. And I actually think this is one of the places where computers? Hayim Lapin: solve a problem, right? Because you can create a, a, basically an alignment table of all these different things. Sara Wolkenfeld: Yeah, I think that's I think there is a lot of potential there. Computers can align things again, linking. Sara Wolkenfeld: I think that that is true, I think. Also, I hope, okay, this maybe hasn't. 100% happened yet. But I think it's getting better. I think there is. Sara Wolkenfeld: I think, the metadata that we collect and the ways in which we can surface. You know, this is this is a translation. This is a version, etc. I think actually, that

Sara Wolkenfeld: that that is also a kind of service to like the kind of phenomenon you're describing. We want to know where something is. We want to situate it, but we also want to situate it more broadly. So I want to know that this is the GPS translation, and I want to know what year it was published in at the beginning of safaria. We put up the GPS. 1917 translation. Sara Wolkenfeld: and then we put up the the one from the eighties. And we would get emails saying, there's a mistake. There's a mistake on safari. There are mistakes on safari, 100%. But usually those emails were like essentially saying, I disagree with that translation and Sara Wolkenfeld: part of our Sara Wolkenfeld: yes part, part of our mission or part of our our idea is that we can train people to look for that information to check themselves in that way. So that's also, I think, a part of like the contextual awareness that you're talking about.

Max Grossman: I must say from my vantage point that I do see some of the computer and math stuff is pretty close to magic. But the idea of having Max Grossman: more than 3 or 4 dimensions, and being able to think about a given word, a given line, a given anything as being multidimensionally connected makes me very, very happy. I'm happy to call on Jay Miller, who is a longtime student University of Maryland, and then Matt Siriano, next. Jay Miller: Yeah, I don't have a question. Just have a comment. I'm taking a course at my synagogue online course on Mishnah, and just wanted to point out that we. We rely heavily on safari. Jay Miller: We use them quite a lot. Sara Wolkenfeld: That's really great to hear. Max Grossman: That feeds into a question I'll ask in a little while. But, Matt, would you like to jump in? Thank you, Jay. Lovely.

Matthew Suriano: Yeah, I'd love to. Just. Matthew Suriano: you know, along that theme of Jay's comment. I want to begin with just a little share with you. A little anecdote. I teach Hebrew Bible here at the University, and I love using safari. And I love your website. And I will hyperlink it to, you know on the online syllabus on our canvas course website. And I'll tell my students because I teach in Jewish studies. You know, I have students Matthew Suriano: who can read Hebrew, and I'll say, you know, we're reading all these texts and translations, but I'm going to link the Bible passages to safari, and you have the option of looking at Hebrew. If you want to read the Hebrew and I've got, I've had several instance instances. Matthew Suriano: or at least a small handful of instances, in the last 2 years where I've had students say, Oh, yeah, I'm familiar with safari. I've been using safari, and maybe they they used it in day school. Maybe they've used it in other college classes. So the wonderful thing about what you're doing is that it's building up maybe not a reputation. But people are becoming more and more Matthew Suriano: familiar with it. And I think that's a wonderful thing like like Max. I have about a dozen questions. I'm gonna lim

2025-02-18 22:59

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