My Primary Sources

When I started the JHacker project, there were 3 books that inspired me. Some of them may seem a bit dated, but they’re classics still worth reading.

Back To The Sources by Barry Holtz: This is the book that introduced the idea that making Jewish sources accessible to the modern Jew would be good for the Jews. Open Source as a licensing model is just a means to that end. Published in 1984, I was introduced to it in 1995 and didn’t read the whole thing until the 2010’s and it’s still relevant. I later found out it’s still the textbook for my synagogue’s adult bar mitzvah program.

The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary by Eric Raymond: Published by Open Source luminary Tim O'Reilly, this is the primary text for the idea that open collaboration among people practicing their craft can rival central control and planning. The best part? Judaism has always been the religion of the bazaar, not of the cathedral!

The Cluetrain Manifesto: 10th Anniversary Edition: This one is the most dated and it dates me, back to the start of the dot-com revolution where people’s individual voices (on what we now call “social media”) would become as, if not more, important than traditional authority. Read it if you want to know the history of how global culture has changed in the past 20 years.

Finally an honorable mention to Douglas Rushkoff’s Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism . I only learned about this book last year and haven’t read it yet. From what I’ve skimmed, it goes a bit further in deconstructing Judiasm than I really want to do. But sometimes this work means smashing idols, and Rushkoff provides good food for thought.

I had the joy of traveling to Israel with my family just over a month ago. The trip had been many years in the making. You can see all about it on my wife’s blog and Flickr stream. But what did I learn about Open Source Judaism?

A highlight of the trip for me was visiting to the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum. What I didn’t know was that since my last pilgrimage there over 20 years ago, they’ve put on display, in a small gallery almost like a crypt below the dome housing the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Aleppo Codex.

And comparing and contrasting the stories of these two scribal artifcacts gave me some interesting insights relating to my project of making engagement with Jewish learning accessible.

The Aleppo Codex, a book over 1000 years old, is the most authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, was canonized in the early centuries of the common era: not only its words, but also the specific spelling and vowels and cantillation. The earlist manuscripts from then are lost but there are references over the centuries to a manuscript which came to be safeguarded in the synagogue of Aleppo, Syria. The Codex was for much of its history kept hidden by by the authorities of the Syrian Jewish community who seemed to feel that keeping it all to themselves would protect their community. Only after the synagogue was burned down during antisemitic riots in 1947 and subsequent cloak-and-dagger operations (detailed in Matti Friedman’s 2013 book) did it make its way to a museum in Israel–but by that point, pages were missing. It was the ultimate example of a single point of failure.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, on the other hand, are the opposite of authoritative. They were written by the Essenes, a sect which had their own, idealistic way of doing things away from either the Temple priests or the mainstream rabbis. There are exhibits about their life in a hall leading to the Scrolls, and they sound a lot like an alternative intentional community living on a farm of recent history. They, too, were probably regarded as too “crunchy”, impractically idealistic, or just plain boring, and they disappeared without ever fulfilling their vision. But a couple thousand years later, it is their work, left for anyone to find, that is the oldest Hebrew Bible text that has been found.

The truth is, Jewish history is both Qumran and Aleppo. It is the Pharisees and the Saducees, Jerusalem and Babylon (or Tel Aviv), Israel and the Diaspora, clergy and laity, peace and war. What I learned seeing the Scrolls and the Codex together (and more generally from my trip) is that in Judaism there’s always another perspective and maybe both are needed. It’s not all or nothing. I can live in two different worlds and be happy about it.

The good news about the future of the Aleppo Codex is that just last year, Rabbi Dr. Seth (Avi) Kadish has published Miqra `al pi ha-Mesorah, an online free-culture edition of the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), in Hebrew, based on the Aleppo Codex and additional scholarship. (And I think it goes well with my more limited efforts to make original mainstream American translation available online as a free culture resource.)

To Israel, to the Rabbis and their disciples to the disciples of their disciples, and to all those who engage in the study of the Torah… may there come abundant peace, grace, lovingkindness and compassion, long life ample sustenance and salvation from the Father who is in heaven (and earth); and say, Amen.

–from the prayer Kaddish D'Rabbanan (as translated on Wikipedia)

Ever since I’ve been using social media, the relationship to “traditional” media–like newspapers and their web sites–has been one way. We fill our feeds with links to news stories, and sometimes we comment on them. Remember that blogs were originally “web logs” of things we’ve read online. But it’s a one-way conversation: social media stories react to real journalism, but “real” journalism doesn’t react to specific social media stories (except for the occasional man-on-the-street or human interest use case).

Well, that just changed, at least for the English-speaking Jewish media, with three very traditional (newspaper-era) organizations making news out of social media posts from my network.

First, Julie Weiner from JTA wrote about Russel Neiss’ online reactions to a new Jewish education website.

Russel Neiss, a Jewish educator and ed-tech gadfly, isn’t buying it. He dismisses Mercava’s rhetoric as “wild claims & marketing mumbo-jumbo.”

Now, inspired by the launch of Mercava, Neiss has created a satiric Twitter handle called @iJEdRevolution.

Then, the Jerusalem Post’s editor wrote an op-ed in response to the Daniel Sieradsky’s panning on Twitter of their own (apalling cruel and racist) editorial.

In particular, one Daniel Sieradski – a left-wing blogger critical of Israel who observes from the safety of the US – launched a Twitter campaign against the editorial and the Post, posting items like “If your newspaper burned down & you all got cancer it would be too good for you.”

I wouldn’t have said it that way, though I agree with the politics. But more interestingly, since when does it matter for a newspaper of record that someone (not an elected politician, not an A-list celebrity) said something unfiltered on Twitter?

Finally, on a lighter note, the Jewish Journal (which is part of the Forward, so we’ve got a trifecta of English-language Jewish media now) ran a story consisting entirely of…my friend Nanette’s Facebook posts.

✡ Aroma is still the best coffee.

✡ Attention people coming with kids: Netflix does not work in Israel but you can use iTunes.

Russel, Dan and Nanette are regular faces in my online Jewish community that I take with me everywhere; and while Nanette is also a friend in “real life” I see her online even more.

This reminds me of when I got my first job, and e-mail, which had always just been this fun fluff now suddenly had the status and seriousness of a business letter (this was 1996, now who sends business letters?). In other words, social media has suddenly gotten a lot more complicated, for better or worse.

Maybe someone will write a newspaper story about this blog post? :)