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Foundation Advances Bill Davidson’s
Commitment To Jewish Education

continued from page 14

Nobelist Robert Yisrael Aumann and his granddaughter studying
Talmud in Uri Rosenwaks’ documentary series, The Nobelists

middle of the page, its commentaries wrapping around it.
Like all Sefaria’s texts, which range from the Bible to
Chasidic texts and works of Jewish law, the Steinsaltz transla-
tion is published sentence by sentence in a mobile-friendly
format, with the translation appearing below the original. The
format also allows Sefaria to link between the Talmud’s text
and the myriad Jewish sources it references, from the Bible to
rabbinic literature.
Click on a line of Aramaic, and a string of commentar-
ies, verses or parallel rabbinic sources will pop up. An algo-
rithm Sefaria uses, which just added 50,000 such links to the
Talmud, is also reverse engineered: Click on a verse in the
Bible and you will see where it’s quoted in the Talmud or
other books.
“This entire web of connections opens up to you just by
clicking and touching,” said Sefaria’s co-founder and CTO
Brett Lockspeiser. “It’s so clear that the structure of Jewish
learning had this network-type experience. This sense of
interconnectedness was already there and just needed to be
brought out.” The other co-founder is the author Joshua Foer.

FREE AND DIGITIZED
The project is the biggest step forward in Sefaria’s larger goal
of democratizing Jewish religious scholarship by making it
digitized, free and intelligible to everyone. The site also has
a tool for Jewish educators to create source sheets or short
study aids with quotations from a range of Jewish books.
Users have already created 50,000 such sheets.
“We have no idea what kind of devices people are going to
be learning Torah on in 10 years, but we know those devices
will be chomping on digital data,” Septimus said. “So having
a database of these texts that’s open, flexible, free for use and
reuse is a good thing.”
Another site which shares that goal, the Open Siddur
Project, provides Jewish prayer text for free so people can put
together their own prayer books. Its founder, Aharon Varady,
said the modern-day emphasis on intellectual property clash-
es with the Jewish tradition of sharing knowledge openly and
freely.
“It’s the idea that Torah should be transferred without limi-
tations,” Varady said. “Copyright is an innovation with fairly
different interests than that of a living culture that is growing
by educators sharing material, by teachers making source
sheets with others.”
The site already offers thousands of books in open-source
code, so anyone can use them, and hopes to add thousands
more — the entirety of Judaic literature. Lockspeiser, a former
Google software engineer, said that compared to indexing bil-
lions of web pages, the Jewish canon is no tall order.
“People can’t get into the Talmud because they don’t know
it’s there,” Lockspeiser said. “If it’s not in English and you type
in English words in the [online search] query, it’s not going to
come up. We’re opening this up just in the sense that people
will find it that didn’t even know they were looking for it.” •

16

February 16 • 2017

jn

Rabbis Find Online Version Very Useful

LOUIS FINKELMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER

A

Rabbi Robert
Gamer

JON KARDWICK

COURTESY RUTH DISKIN FILMS

T

Sefaria approached the foundation in 2015,
he William Davidson Talmud is made
McKeever says. “Once we were assured that
possible through a partnership with
this Talmud would be truly open and acces-
the William Davidson Foundation to
sible to anyone, it didn’t take board members
commemorate the life of its founder and
long to know this was something the
extend his spirit of generosity.
Foundation wanted to support,” he
William “Bill” Davidson was an
said.
internationally recognized busi-
Ethan Davidson, Bill’s son and a
nessman and former owner of the
member of the Foundation’s board of
Detroit Pistons; he was also a life-
directors, added, “Wrestling with God
long philanthropist who cherished
and the tradition is what we Jews
his family and Jewish heritage
do. The Talmud preserves centuries of
above all else.
wrestling over the meaning of God’s
Throughout his life, Davidson
William Davidson messages to us. Now Sefaria is accom-
supported projects and orga-
plishing the remarkable task of digitiz-
nizations that preserved and
ing the Talmud and making its precious
enhanced Jewish life and continu-
ity. In the early 2000s, he was a
contents available to everyone with an
major funder of a new chumash
internet connection.
for the Conservative movement,
“My father lived by the directive
from Pirkei Avot (Ethics of Our Fathers):
Etz Hayim, which had special fea-
tures that made it meaningful for
‘You are not obligated to complete the
lay people as well as clergy.
work, but neither are you free to desist
Darin McKeever, chief program Ethan Davidson
from it,’” Ethan says.
and strategy officer of the William
“What he liked to say was, simply,
Davidson Foundation, says board members
‘Just start.’ I’m proud we’ve started this in his
do their best “to honor Bill’s lifelong commit- name and, in doing so, we’re making it easier
ment to advancing cultural and educational
for future generations to wrestle with and
opportunities for future generations of the
advance the Jewish tradition.” •
Jewish community.”

Rabbi Aura
Ahuvia

Howard
Lupovitch

lthough Sefaria’s online Talmud has been accessible only since
Feb. 7, local teachers of Talmud have already formulated glow-
ing reviews.
“Sefaria.org brings the full impact of the digital revolution to the study
of rabbinic texts; as such, it is one of the most significant study aids since
the printing revolution,” says Professor Howard Lupovitch, director of
the Cohn-Haddow Center for Judaic Studies at Wayne State University.
Lupovitch especially likes the format of this internet Talmud, interweaving
Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz’s translation with the original text, and so inviting
“readers to engage in the texts in the Hebrew original.”
Rabbi Robert Gamer of Congregation Beth Shalom in Oak Park says,
“As a pulpit rabbi, I teach a number of adult education classes as well as
individuals in informal settings. In the [time since] the Davidson Talmud
has been available, I have already begun to incorporate these texts into
the source sheets I hand out to classes.
“For the individuals who study Talmud with me, the Davidson Talmud
is a wonderful resource to check their understanding of the text as
well as to see an interpretation of the text in the commentary of Rabbi
Steinsaltz. The accessibility of this particular translation and commentary
will only strengthen the study of Talmud in the English-speaking world.”
Rabbi Aura Ahuvia of Congregation Shir Tikvah in Troy has been using
other services of Sefaria for about two years.
“I instantly found it a useful teaching resource because it not only pro-
vides readable translations of many Jewish sources, including large por-
tions of the Talmud, but also enables teachers to format teaching sheets
that can include teacher-generated questions and comments,” she says.
“I found Sefaria to be useful not only because of the access to Talmud,
but also to innumerable other sources, spanning millennia of Jewish
thought. Broadly speaking, I think Sefaria helps make our amazing
Jewish heritage more accessible and even more tantalizing by introduc-
ing readers to sources they may not have known existed before.” •

