“A few years into Sefaria’s history, we realised that putting up the texts digitally and even making them searchable and even when we could get them in English, that wasn’t really sufficient to allow everyone who might be interested to engage with the text,” she explains.
“People don’t know where to start. Or the text don’t really make sense to them, maybe sometimes even in English.”
Some may have come for a specific purpose, for example to prepare a talk or to help their child with a bnei mitzvah dvar Torah, and are looking to be steered towards useful sources..
While developed on Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant, it is not the kind of chatbot that is designed to have a chat but acts more like a librarian that quietly shows you the books you need. “We purposely didn’t build it to be an engaging conversation partner. We built it so that it would give you sources that you’re looking for.”
It’s also not an ask-the-rabbi substitute – “it will not give you an answer to your halachic questions. That is not what it is designed to do.” But it can help you understand how rabbis reached their rulings.
Care has also gone into avoiding the problem of hallucination – when AI facilities come up with details that turn out to be invented.
“We wanted to be sure that we could put something out into the world that would not be a distraction from study… that wouldn’t take people to sources that don’t exist or into ideas that aren’t relevant, but that would really help them focus on getting the information that would speak to their Jewish curiosity,” she says.
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Sara Wolkenfeld of Sefaria[Missing Credit]
One handy feature is that the library assistant can also translate on request passages for which there is not a pre-existing translation. “Previously it was certainly an impediment that somebody who was looking for a text on Sefaria who didn’t have the language skills to read them in Hebrew would only find the text that happens to be available in translation,” she says. “And it’s really important to us to open up the library so that people even with no background or without those text skills can still access [it].”
Sefaria has around a million users a month across the world of whom 287,000 are registered. Its team noticed a spike in growth after October 7, which “never went back down to pre-October 7 levels”.
Its users include people “who are not necessarily affiliated with a movement or don’t necessarily have a go-to place for Jewish content and they are happy to have access to Sefaria. We’re not telling you how to enact your Judaism. We’re just giving you the tools to build your Jewish life the way you want to.
“We know from past surveys that we’ve done that people who self-describe as not having a strong Jewish educational background tell us that Sefaria is the place that they come to to find Jewish resources. We expect that trend will continue to grow with the library assistant. And from the questions that are being asked, we can tell that people are coming with little to no background knowledge.”
Once the library assistant, which was launched in August, becomes available on mobiles, that will accelerate its use, she believes.
AI is also being used in other ways. Sefaria has created a full English translation of the Kli Yakar, a Torah commentary by the 17th-century scholar Rabbi Shlomo Efraim Luntschitz of Prague: the AI-produced version was then refined by an editor. Another tool is an AI-generated guide to Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers, which is “not so much to help people get answers, but help people think about what questions they might pursue.
“One of the things that I hear from people who are not experienced learners of Jewish texts is that the whole idea of reading a text and asking questions about it is not necessarily intuitive.
“That kind of deep reading, where you’re supposed to question the ideas you’re encountering, is a very deeply Jewish idea. It’s not instinctive for people who have not been educated in that way.”
When I first tried out the library assistant, I asked it about a verse from my son’s barmitzvah sidrah that had long troubled me – I had looked up commentaries in a library but remained unsatisfied. The assistant almost instantly came up with some useful suggestions and invited me to explore the topics more deeply.
I also asked it a question about which minor prophets do not feature in a haftarah, to which it first gave a wrong answer – a reminder that AI is not infallible (one can’t say “only human”). When I pointed out the error, it apologised and added some fresh information that was new to me.
To learn more, visit www.sefaria.org
There are also tutorial videos on the site’s YouTube channel
