The Unique Mission of AlHaTorah.org

Revitalizing the Torah Learning Experience

• Panoramic and 3D View of Torah – AlHaTorah.org's wide array of lenses and modes of analysis helps the learner appreciate the breadth and depth of the Biblical text and its commentaries. By employing everything from Ancient Near Eastern documents to medieval commentaries to modern art and literature, the text of Torah is brought to life.
• Empowering – AlHaTorah.org provides the resources, tools, and replicable methodology for active learning, allowing the user to act, react, and interact.
• Harnessing Modern Technology – The dawning of the new age of the electronic book has enabled the reimagining of how knowledge can be organized, personalized, interconnected, and continuously expanded. With its tree structured, customizable, ever editable and expandable, hyperlinked, and audio-visually integrated commentary, AlHaTorah.org begins to capture and realize some of this incredible potential.¹
• Bonding with our Heritage – The reader explores a vast spectrum of commentaries, ranging from the Second Temple period to modern times, all presented in their historical and exegetical contexts. Biblical study becomes a way of reconnecting with the plurality of cultural riches of the thousands of years of our history.
• Addressing Fundamental Issues – AlHaTorah.org confronts the challenges posed by classical questions such as the relationship between peshat and derash, and modern issues such as textual criticism and source criticism.

Connecting People through a Social Torah Network

• Communal Participation – AlHaTorah.org provides a platform which allows ongoing worldwide collaboration and input from people on all levels and with various types of expertise, in creating the Torah equivalent of Wikipedia and beyond. As the editorial team builds the underlying foundation and structure of the comprehensive Torah commentary, the wider public of all ages will contribute additional sources, insights, translations, and novel interpretations. Vigorous debate and discussion via the Forum will stimulate and foster close bonds and contacts.
• Reaching Every Individual from Beginners to Scholars – With the range and richness of its approaches and the customizability of its levels, AlHaTorah.org is becoming a central Torah clearinghouse, offering a product from which every person can gain, and an online learning community in which every person can contribute, discuss, and find meaning.

Impacting Jewish Education Worldwide

• Providing Resources for Professional Educators – A good teacher never has nearly enough time to prepare for their classes. The wealth of distilled information, sources, and visual aids on this site will be invaluable in saving countless hours of time, in making material available which otherwise would be inaccessible, and in helping to sculpt better structured classes.
• Learning as a Family – Animating the Shabbat Table – Through Shabbat table discussion topics and puzzles for both children and adults, AlHaTorah.org piques one's curiosity and leads one step by step down the path to deeper exploration of the Torah topics. The family Shabbat table experience will be greatly enhanced.

¹ The following quote from Prof. Robert Darnton, "The New Age of the Book," New York Review of Books (March 18, 1999) encapsulates what AlHaTorah.org aspires to achieve (with thanks to Prof. Haym Soloveitchik for the reference):

Instead of bloating the electronic book, I think it possible to structure it in layers arranged like a pyramid. The top layer could be a concise account of the subject... The next layer could contain expanded versions of different aspects of the argument... arranged as self-contained units that feed into the topmost story. The third layer could be composed of documentation, possibly of different kinds, each set off by interpretative essays. A fourth layer might be theoretical or historiographical, with selections from previous scholarship and discussions of them. A fifth layer could be pedagogic, consisting of suggestions for classroom discussion and a model syllabus. And a sixth layer could contain readers' reports, exchanges between the author and the editor, and letters from readers, who could provide a growing corpus of commentary as the book made its way through different groups of readers.
A new book of this kind would elicit a new kind of reading. Some readers might be satisfied with a study of the upper narrative. Others might also want to read vertically, pursuing certain themes deeper and deeper into the supporting essays and documentation. Still others might navigate in unanticipated directions, seeking connections that suit their own interests or reworking the material into constructions of their own. In each case, the appropriate texts could be printed and bound according to the specifications of the reader. The computer screen would be used for sampling and searching, whereas concentrated, long-term reading would take place by means of the conventional printed book or downloaded text. Far from being utopian, the electronic monograph could meet the needs of the scholarly community at the points where its problems converge. It could provide a tool for prying problems apart and opening up a new space for the extension of learning.