,/meta>

Thursday, June 30, 2011

Wiki-Spirit: Open Source Judaism

So there's a story coming out of Israel of a computer program that identifies authorial styles in a text with multiple authors:

http://news.yahoo.com/israeli-algorithm-sheds-light-bible-163128454.html

The test case - jumbling Ezekiel and Jeremiah passages and seeing if the program could sort them out - was a rousing success. So now they use the program to distinguish "priestly" from "non-priestly" authors in a single book.

The idea of the Scriptures being a composite work is nothing new, of course. There truly is nothing new under the sun. The Talmudic rabbis theorized that parts of books popularly credited to one author were the work of another. The classic example is the conclusion that the last twelve verses of Deuteronomy were not written by Moses, but by Joshua after the leader's death. The awareness that the Psalms are the work of multiple hands even though they were widely called "the Psalms of David" was also an accepted idea among scholarly Jews before the modern era.

It has also been discussed in Western academia for almost two hundred years, most famously in the form of the "Documentary Hypothesis" of Graf and Wellhausen. Many of the Bible teachers at my seminary, Hebrew Union College, labored for decades to identify glosses and distinct hands in the books of the Bible, working with all the fervor that medieval kabbalists once devoted to detecting the sefirot they believed were being allegorized by different Biblical narratives. Now their work can be done in minutes.

What is new, therefore, is not what we know -- all Jewish texts until just a few centuries ago, including Talmud and crucial Kabbalah texts like Bahir and Zohar were subject to this multi-author process --- but how we think about this fact. Because before the internet age, we didn't have an ideology of "Open Source" writing.

Now we have people advocating a way of working, for some a philosophy, for creating new knowledge through collaborative writing. It's the idea of "hive" knowledge that has driven things like Wikipedia. This alternative to the valorization of the heroic single author is an interesting one, a different way of thinking about information and about arriving at a wise and useful text. And it seems Jews were doing it to shape and grow our spiritual understanding from the very beginning of our quest to know and understand the Blessed Holy One. God's voice finds expression through the creative tension resulting from multiple contributions and POVs.

Call it "Open Source Spirituality" or "Wiki-God," but Jews have been its first and perhaps greatest practitioners, proving once again that that we are the oldest-newest people in the world. Perhaps too, it reinforces, in a small way, our ancient claim that Torah is, and will continue to be the faith of the future.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home