Promoting Jewish Literacy for the Information Age Ideas at the intersection of Judaism and computer technology, with a focus on open cultural resources. JHacker.org was created by software developer and Jewish community lay leader Marc Stober to pitch an idea for translating software and technology innovations to benefit Jewish organizations. Read the original proposal
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.
Qumran and Aleppo: Or, what I learned about Open Source Judaism while visiting Israel
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, isnât buying it. He dismisses Mercavaâs rhetoric as âwild claims & marketing mumbo-jumbo.â
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 â a left-wing blogger critical of Israel who observes from the safety of the US â launched a Twitter campaign against the editorial and the Post, posting items like âIf your newspaper burned down & you all got cancer it would be too good for you.â
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? :)
We have agreed to the reasonable and proper request of the worthy and honored Master Salamone Rossi of Mantua . . . who has become by his painstaking labors the first man to print Hebrew music. He has laid out a large disbursement which has not been provided for, and it is not proper that anyone should harm him by reprinting similar copies or purchasing them from a source other than himself. Therefore . . . we the undersigned decree by the authority of the angels and the word of the holy ones, invoking the curse of the serpentâs bite, that no Israelite, wherever he may be, may print the music contained in this work in any manner, in whole or in part, without the permission of the abovementioned author. . . .
Thank you to those of you who came to my LimmudBoston 2013 presentation "Open Source Judaism 2.0." Click the image below to download the presentation in PDF format:
It's also available in ODP (LibreOffice Impress) format: Limmud Presentation.odp
Finally, I also mentioned kevah.org as an online way to connect with Jewish learning.
A New, Free Online Edition of the Hebrew Bible (JPS 1917)
Read this version of the Hebrew Bible online
As a âpreliminary complete version,â this release contains the full Tanakh, but there are still things that need work. Itâs an âalpha versionâ in software terms. Iâd like to hear from you if you have questions, comments, suggestions, corrections; or if you want to help.
This edition started as a PDF made available in 2011 by JPS. I built a completely automated set of scripts for processing it into a website. Once the process is started, the source PDF is magically unfolded into an organized set of XML and HTML files. Since PDF describes print layout, but not logical structure, scripts analyze the layout to find chapter and verse numbers, headings, footnotes, columns, line and paragraph breaks, etc.
Details You Wonât Find Anywhere Else
This is not the first version of the JPS 1917 Tanakh posted online, but it has some advantages.
A book is more than a stream of characters. Footnotes, paragraph breaks (line breaks in poetic passages), front matter (title page, preface, etc.), and small typographical and editorial decisions (use of small caps, the Hebrew verse letters in Lamentations, or repeated verses at the end of certain books probably reflecting public reading customs) contribute to the readability of a book and its value to the student. This edition reproduces those details faithfully.
Free Culture, Ready for Sharing
This project is driven by a belief that Jewish texts are a valuable cultural legacy, and making them accessible to people who are more comfortable searching the Web than studying traditional Hebrew texts (most of us!) is my contribution to the Jewish future.
Because of its age, the JPS 1917 translation is in the public domain. In case there is any concern that while the text is in the public domain, the PDF, being recent, is not, the Open Siddur Project has confirmed with JPS that should not be a problem. (JPS also has wonderful more recent translations and commentaries. As you go further in your Tanakh study, by all means support them with a purchase!)
Looking to the larger internet community, Iâve found the idea of a Free Culture license matches my goals and, specifically, that the Creative Commons Attribution license gives this work the broadest possible reach. Its requirement to acknowledge sources is a longstanding principle of both academic and Jewish scholarship. Some would say this means losing control; I say that looking at Jewish history, the key to our survival is the wisdom of our ongoing tradition, not anyoneâs ability to control how the next person uses it. (Though the tradition seems to be for every generation to debate that!)
In addition to legally allowing reuse, Iâm supporting reuse on a technical level with simple web standards. The final output is HTML files. There will also be XML files optimized for further processing into other formats. (The XML files are there now if you change the extension of the â.htmlâ files to â.xmlâ, but the final format is expected to be different from this alpha version. See below.)
The Advantage of an Automated Approach
It might have been faster to manually edit the text with cut-and-paste and search-and-replace. The advantage of an automated approach is that every step is specified and reproducible. You might not set up a Linux machine like mine and rebuild itâbut you could if you wanted to (and even change things) using freely available Open Source tools. Also, my hypothesis is that bugs in automated scripts will lead to different errors than mistakes in manual editing. An eventual goal is to cross-check the output of this project against other versions to produce a more accurate text.
Of course, even the PDF released by JPS must be a transcription: there is no computer file archived from 1917! In fact, the PDF might have been made from a Microsoft Word document. (Iâm basing this on mistakes in âcurlyâ quotes which can be explained by quirks in Wordâs algorithm. Unfortunately, if there was a Word document, it wasnât available.) Still, it makes sense to use this as an authoritative starting point. Some corrections that have been identified *** by others by comparing the document to a scan of the actual 1917 printing and I plan to incorporate those into this text.
For techies: These scripts were XSLT 2.0 run with Saxon, which was already part of the Open Siddur development stack, plus PDFMiner and a Makefile. Makefiles and XSLT are both high-level, declarative programming languages and somewhat dated. A procedural script might have been faster to both write and run, and in some cases I fell back to writing Python scripts. But the declarative approach imposes architectural discipline, plus it was an interesting intellectual and artistic challenge. You can find the scripts on Github.
Acknowledgements
Aharon Varady, Efraim Feinstein, Zeâev Clementson, and others whose names I canât remember on the OpenSiddur-Tech mailing list were instrumental in getting this project started. The fact that it took so long and still isnât complete is entirely my fault. Brett Lockspeiser and the Sefaria project in general also provided encouragement, and got a simpler version of this text online sooner so that I could take my time fussing over details. Also, while Jewish confirmation ceremonies have fallen out of fashion, the synagogue leaders who gave me a small 1985 JPS Tanakh for my mine, and who gave my mom an even smaller 1917 JPS Tanakh for hers, inspired my love of this text.
More to Come
Here are some things youâll notice in this version of the files that are known issues Iâm working on. If you notice other issues or have suggestions, let me know:
Cyan boxes surround areas which I've logically identified but still need formatting. You'll see the original footnotes currently look like this.
âThe Twelveâ minor prophets are grouped as one book in the JPS. I need a way to split up these books, while still reflecting the grouping. A practical challenge in breaking them out automatically that, unlike all the other books in the Tanakh, these books do not necessarily begin at the top of a page in the PDF.
There are broken links on the index page, and that page needs to be improved overall.
The XML version should be âwrapped.â What I mean is that, instead of the beginning of a chapter being marked by a chapter-number element, the chapter will be wrapped in a chapter element. Same for verses, etc.
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