Enlightenment in 140 characters or less?

The Twitter Torah Revolution

By Michael Orbach

Issue of November 20, 2009/ 3 Cheshvan 5770

Hundreds of years ago the high cost of parchment forced Torah commentators to write as succinctly as possible. The famed Rashi, like others, wrote in the margins of his Talmud. Now, a new generation of sages is writing as concisely as possible for an entirely different reason: Twitter, the popular social networking site that allows users to post  messages with one catch: each must be under 140 characters.

The lure is obvious, according to Rabbi Ben Greenberg, the orthodox rabbi of the Harvard Hillel and the director of the Seif Jewish Learning Initiative on the Harvard University campus.

“Twittering a piece of Torah into 140 characters or less, you can reach people whose attention span has shrunk over time,” he explained. “Considering the medium of Twitter, Torah has reached an audience  of Jews between the ages of 18-24 that wouldn’t have been reached.”

Twitter reaches even where other websites don’t, he said.

“You have to go to a blog and look up a Dvar Torah post; here’s a short thought, quick, it might trigger something — but that alone has reached someone. It’s pretty incredible.”

Last month, Rabbi Greenberg and six other rabbis self-published Twitter Torah, an anthology of the tweets (as individual Twitter posts are called) that were featured on their individual Twitter feeds. The effort was cross denominational and included both Orthodox and non-Orthodox Rabbis.

Rabbi Greenberg finds thoughts of chassidus the easiest to write in short posts, he said — citing the Sfas Emes or the Kedushat Levi as two examples — but he also explains that twittering isn’t that new for the Jewish community.

“Rashi takes Midrashim and condenses them; he finds the pearl of the Midrash Raba. Rashi was twittering Torah hundreds of years ago in Troy, hundreds of years ago, before Twitter was invented,” he said with a laugh.

Sometimes the challenge draws them to post, says Rabbi Greenberg’s co-contributor, Rabbi Andrew Pepperstone.

“I wanted to see I could regularly convey a big Torah idea in 140 characters or less,” he explained via email.

Rabbi Pepperstone, currently the Rabbi-in-Residence at the Gross Schechter Day School in Ohio, agrees that while the medium is new, the idea behind twittering Torah is not.

“Jews have always embraced whatever means were available to get their work published. We moved from tablets to parchment to hand-written books to the printing press to CDs to podcasts to Facebook and now to Twitter. Whatever works to get Torah out there,” he said.

In between twittering about a recent Israel Night at HANC, Rabbi Michael Green, another of the Torah Twitter contributors and the Overseas Director of Sharfman’s Seminary in Israel, tweeted a quick explanation.

“Avraham refused receiving ANY gifts from Sodom (14:23) Sotah (17a) says that b/c of this we received the Mitzvos of Tallis Tefillin.”

Binyamin Jolkovsky, editor-in-chief of Jwisdom.com, a website that features shortened lectures by Jewish thinkers, said he thinks the move to brevity is a positive one.

“I’ve seen articles that say that Twitter is dumbing down communication and I disagree. It’s hard for a person to be able to figure out something to say in 140 characters, that you wouldn’t be embarrassed to say. I think it increases the ability to communicate. A lot of ideas that wouldn’t see the light of day are being articulated,” he said. “Genius is the ability to condense complicated ideas into easy thoughts.”

Torah Twitter is available on Amazon.