36 | SEPTEMBER 29 • 2022 
 
 
 
 

Chanukah people will innovate 
menorahs or on Pesach peo-
ple will innovate seder plates; 
on Yom Kippur, they want to 
innovate liturgies,
” Kalman said. 
“What else are you going to 
innovate? You literally can’t eat 
anything. So it’s this.
”
Reboot, the Jewish arts non-
profit, offers 10Q, an annual 
online questionnaire that stores 
responses securely for a year, 
then returns them by email 
the following year to facilitate 
respondents’ reflection on their 
personal growth. And the Yom 
Kippur-themed eScapeGoat 
(also known as @Apologybot) 
appeared on Twitter in 2013 
and would “collect” users’ sins 
when tagged.
That bot was created by 
Russel Neiss, a Jewish technol-
ogist and educator who coded 

Repentance Bot and worked 
with the Jewish digital consult-
ing company Tiny Windows 
to produce it on Ruttenberg’s 
behalf.
Repentance Bot, as with 
many similar bots, has a sense 
of humor. It is meant to be “fun 
and funny,
” while also serving 
as an educational tool, said 
Ruttenberg, who last month 
announced that she would 
be donating to the National 
Survivor Network to begin 
to make amends for person-
ally benefiting from a Jewish 
foundation tied to sex offender 
Jeffrey Epstein.
“People will engage with it to 
have a little fun with it as well as 
trying to do meaningful public 
education,
” she added.
In one meta-example, 
Repentance Bot had published a 

tweet in a robotic font that was 
not compatible with ALT text, 
an HTML attribute that allows 
for verbal image descriptions. 
Visually impaired readers may 
rely on a program that reads 
ALT text aloud, and if there’s 
no ALT text, they may not be 
able to interact with the text or 
image at all. 
Repentance Bot learned of 
the incompatibility and wrote 
an apology note for the error, 
along with an updated version 
of the previous tweet and a 

promise to “teach other bots 
this important human factoid.
”
Those vows reflect the to-do 
list in the bot’s comic strip, 
which begins with taking 
responsibility without making 
excuses and ends with making 
a different choice in the future.
Repentance Bot is about “dis-
tilling [apologies] down to real-
ly oversimplified, easy steps,
” 
Ruttenberg said. “
And they’re 
not easy. None of those steps in 
real life are easy.
” 

OUR COMMUNITY
HIGH HOLIDAYS

continued from page 35

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