It could fairly claim to be the most important Jewish website in the world. But when Brett Lockspeiser first approached potential backers with the project – to put the corpus of classic Jewish texts online, the Tanach, Talmud, rabbinic commentaries and more – he was met with the scepticism that typically greets audacious ideas.
“We wanted to make all the Jewish texts available for free all round the world in translation,” he recalled at Limmud. “People told us it would be way too expensive.”
Undeterred by the doubters, the former Google product manager and the writer Joshua Foer (brother of novelist Jonathan Safran Foer) pressed ahead and produced a prototype. “We wanted to show people what it would feel like.”
And now in six years sefaria.org has grown to a vast library of Jewish literature, a digital resource of 183 million words – 143 million in Hebrew and 40 million in English – with a million users a year.
Not only can you open the book of Bereshit, Genesis, and summon up a parallel English translation – but at the same time you can also look up what classical commentators such as Rashi or Ibn Ezra had to say on a particular verse.
In this experiment in digital democracy, they were driven by the principle that the texts “need to be free” for the user. “They don’t belong to anyone.”
They had to find translations that would not be restricted by copyright or else raise money to buy licences from publishers.
One of the breakthroughs was to negotiate use of the English translation of the Babylonian Talmud by the great Israeli scholar Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz.
Raised in Denver and now living in San Francisco, Mr Lockspeiser started himself becoming interested in the study of Jewish texts as a teenager and went to yeshivah in Israel.
“The Torah tradition is one of the great gems of human culture,” he said.
The literature of Torah represents “a single interconnected conversation” spanning continents and millennia and now it is accessible to the Jewish public in a way that it was never before.
“You don’t have to spend years and years in yeshivah to feel that you can navigate all the texts in our tradition,” he said.
On the website you can find sources in philosophy, or kabbalah, or Jewish law, or musar (ethics).
While English is the principal language of translation, there is some in French and Russian and plans to add German and Spanish as well.
Digital technology is also providing new aids to learning. One extraordinary diagram presented by Mr Lockspeiser displayed the thousands of citations from biblical books made by the Talmud.
Sefaria is also building up modern educational resources. It has 200,000 source sheets developed by educators on different subjects.
For the Limmud Festival, participants have been able to go to sefaria and access background material to study sessions at the event.
If you search for material under “Trump,” you will find passages that educators have included in various classes. The top citation is a quotation from Proverbs, “Speak up for the dumb/ for the rights of all the unfortunates.”
for more, see www.sefaria.org
