by Tani Levitt in the Forward

Across the United States, conservative parents, advocacy groups, and lawmakers have pushed school districts to ban books and defund libraries, claiming that they promote ideas unsuitable for children. Among the banned works are the Diary of Anne Frank and other books about the Holocaust. Now, this battle for control over which ideas and perspectives are welcome in the public square has arrived at an unlikely place: an online Torah library.

Sefaria, a nonprofit dedicated to making accessible the entirety of the Jewish canon and many other theological texts, was founded in 2012 by author Joshua Foer and Google alum Brett Lockspeiser. Since its launch, Sefaria has added texts, translations, and other Jewish sources to its website and app. The site is free to use, and since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has enjoyed a significant uptick in users as Jews looked to the Internet to replace their in-person studies.

In May, the online library added a new translation of Prophets from the Jewish Publication Society (JPS), its first update to the translation in 40 years. Sefaria has long included JPS texts on their site, but JPS’ branding of the new translation as “gender-sensitive” caught the attention of some of Sefaria’s Orthodox users, who spoke out in opposition to Sefaria’s choice to add the text.

Notably, the CEO of the Jewish emergency medical service Chevra Hatzalah, a news editor at Mishpacha magazine, and the managing director of the Coalition for Jewish Values, all tweeted criticism of Sefaria. On the same day, Rabbi Avrohom Gordimer published an essay in Cross-Currents, an online journal of Orthodox Jewish thought, outlining the reasons why Orthodox Jews should not use Sefaria. (Nearly half of Sefaria’s users are non-Orthodox, according to the 2018 data.)

Gordimer noted that among Sefaria’s user-curated lists of religious texts, there are collections of texts about gay Jews, texts from non-Orthodox rabbis and scholars, and that Sefaria encourages women to teach Torah, most recently with Word-by-Word, a fellowship for women Torah educators.

Despite widespread support for the inclusion of LGBTQ+ Jews and women Torah educators in many sectors of the Orthodox community, Gordimer and his fellow critics believe that these ideas are antithetical to Orthodox Torah study, and therefore Sefaria should not be used by Orthodox Jews. Another article, in which an Orthodox rabbi compared Sefaria to a Torah scroll with a letter askew, circulated on Twitter. With one letter wrong, the rabbi wrote, the whole scroll is not kosher.

The critics don’t speak for everybody

This reaction, however, has been met with significant pushback, with many bristling at the idea that the self-described “Living Library of Torah Texts Online” should be censured for its inclusion of a single text.

Rabbi Judah Kerbel of the Queens Jewish Center tweeted that those who decide not to use Sefaria “based on certain things that are included, when the reality is that there’s plenty on there that’s worth using,” should refrain from complaining about cancel culture. He also called into question the likelihood that critics of the added translation had even read the work itself. Speaking by phone, he wondered if “the majority of Orthodox users of Sefaria really worry about this.”

Netanel Zellis-Paley, a Philadelphia-based Orthodox Jew, sees this as the latest example of institutional Orthodox rabbis acting as if they “have a monopoly on interpretation, and everything else is just completely illegitimate.”

Yeshiva University, the flagship Modern Orthodox institution, was recently in the news for petitioning the Supreme Court for permission not to recognize the YU Pride Alliance, a student LGBTQ+ club, and for shortchanging women who wanted to learn Talmud at Stern College, the women’s branch of the university.

For those Orthodox Jews who want equity for all people in their community, this attempt to paint anything associated with queer Jews and women educators as treyf (not kosher) is nothing new. On the other hand, the attempt to convince Orthodox Jews to boycott Sefaria, said Zellis-Paley, has “parallels in general culture with the book banning and that type of reactionary exclusionary approach.”

Joshua Waxman, in his Substack newsletter Scribal Error, analyzed the new JPS translation, noting the gendered biases of Hebrew and English, and the purpose of a translation, to “meet the English speaker where he/she stands, and give them something more intuitive, that captures the actual meaning of the Hebrew text.”

Akiva Weisinger, an Orthodox middle-school Judaics teacher, also addressed the criticisms of gender-sensitive translations in a blog, noting that considering the history of Jewish philosophy, it is “literal nonsense” to say God is a gendered being.

For those Orthodox educators who hope to make the Torah accessible to all of their students, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, the calls to boycott Sefaria only make their jobs harder. “I have to go and explain to my students why the Jewish world is so biased against some of these kids’ identities,” said Weisinger.

“I can look at these kids and explain to them why they can achieve anything they want in their life, except religious authority,” he continued. “I have no patience for people who don’t have to deal with the consequences of their communal pronouncements, and leave me to clean up their mess.”

Originally published in the Forward

Photo Credit: גמלאי עיריית טבריה on Wikimedia Commons