After digitizing Talmud, Sefaria eyes democracy

Could democracy take a page from the Talmud?

The creators of Sefaria, a project to digitize Jewish texts, think so.

Since 2012 Sefaria, a database of Jewish writings that allows users to read two texts side by side with an eye to the connections between them, has offered free access to classic Jewish texts to millions of users each year, establishing itself as an invaluable resource for teachers, students and writers.

Now it’s applying the same approach to foundational texts from a different system of thought: that of American democracy. It launched the project, fittingly, on July 4 with a small library of texts including the U.S. Constitution, the Federalist Papers and a selection of presidential addresses — all laid out connected by hyperlinks and the ability to read them side by side.

The project is just a prototype for now, but one Sefaria is hoping to replicate as the organization thinks through how to apply its approach to connecting and presenting texts to other bodies of knowledge beyond the Jewish canon.

JTA spoke with Brett Lockspeiser, Sefaria’s chief technology officer and a co-founder, about the power of new technology to reinvigorate old texts, what makes the Constitution like the Talmud (and why it stands apart) and what Jewish texts have to say about civil discourse.

JTA: What makes Sefaria different from other databases of texts?

Lockspeiser: The real magic of Sefaria — and this is the real magic of the Torah tradition, it’s not something we invented — is in the interconnections. Just putting texts on websites is not particularly novel and not particularly interesting in itself. It gets exciting when you click on a line of text and then a sidebar opens and you get this whole array of voices that are talking to that point and you open things up side by side.

Doing that for the Jewish case has actually been a lot easier than we found it to be in this case because our tradition has so firmly baked in this idea of citing sources and relating everything you do to texts that came before and this idea of having commentaries that are really line-by-line commentaries. So many texts in Sefaria are structured, so you know this particular Rashi or Ramban is talking about this line of Talmud. … In the democracy texts is you’re not necessarily sitting on thousands of years of very clearly specified citations of interconnections.…

JTA: Do you think there’s anything that people who are focused more on non-Jewish texts could learn from the way Jewish texts interact with each other?

You want to appreciate the tension between multiple voices. We do that often by printing them side by side. … A principle of the democratic process … is wanting to to respect different voices playing a role. The text can serve as a model of what we want our society to look like.

JTA: How much are you thinking about who is represented in these democracy texts, which are largely written by white men?

It’s kind of haphazard what we’ve added in there. We sort of tried to start from the Constitution and just pull out from there everything that we could throw into it. … Going forward with the project … that’s going to be an important consideration. …

JTA: What are the other applications that you’re thinking of for the Sefaria software and its unique approach to text?

We think about other areas in literature, American poetry … about Shakespeare … about Christian texts. We get a lot of requests from people who want to have a Sefaria for Christian texts or Muslim texts, other religious traditions. We’ve gotten requests from people in science and medical fields to be able to read medical journals in this side-by-side experience.

JTA: What about Jewish texts that aren’t, strictly speaking, Torah texts? Like Jewish literature?

There’s a whole world, like Yiddish literature, Zionist literature, not necessarily in the Torah tradition but it’s really close to it. So we’ve definitely thought about it, and then the question becomes should it be a separate library, a separate site, that’s all about Zionist literature or Yiddish literature? Or should it be a corner of Sefaria? .

JTA: What do you see as the long-term future of Sefaria?

The process of dealing with data and creating software doesn’t end because software is always changing and the technologies we have are always changing. … Just to keep the digital experience relevant is an unending process.

I think that adding texts to the library and adding features to the library is also somewhat of an unending process, and changing the kinds of experiences that people are capable of having with our texts, I see that as an ongoing process that we have to keep up with.

And then there is this vision that maybe it’s not just our organization but maybe it becomes this federation of organizations that are responsible for different libraries of content. That we are the organization that specializes in the Jewish text, and maybe there’s another organization that comes up that is responsible for the constitutional texts or for the Muslim texts and being able to federate the technology that we’ve built so we can spread this idea that these texts want to be available to people and they want to be in conversation now. That’s a beautiful vision and that’s what we’re dipping our toes into right now.