By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
When the Kavana Cooperative began two and a half years ago, one of its goals was to use technology to better serve its participants. Even since then, the technology landscape has changed. The rise of microblogging, or telling the world what’s happening with your life in 140 characters or fewer, has been meteoric on sites like Facebook and Twitter.
It’s with that in mind that Kavana has begun its own spin on this phenomenon: Torah study for the attention-span-challenged. The group has begun to release short Twitter postings with a lesson from each week’s Torah portion.
These are not canned snippets, however.
“What we’re trying to do with the Torah tweets is grow the content out of the discussion of the Living Room Learnings,” said Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum, Kavana’s executive director, referring to Torah study that takes place in a different member’s living room each week.
Danyel Fisher, a frequent attendee of Living Room Learning, pointed to one of Jewish history’s most famous microbloggers, Rabbi Hillel, whose wisdom was concise if not brief: “When asked over 2,000 years ago to explain the Torah while the requestor stood on one foot,” Fisher said, “he took the challenge and came up with the ultimate and probably original tweet: ‘That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.’”
Other examples cited by Kavana organizers might best be understood by a 16-year-old with a cell phone and sore texting thumbs: “G-d mad @ most. Tells Noah ‘Build boat with 2x all animals.’ 40 days of rain l8tr: all but Noah gone.”
The TorahTweet is actually one of two ways Kavana uses Twitter to communicate to the outside world.
“Around the same time we rolled out the new Web site, which was pretty recently,” Nussbaum said, “we were trying to think in a more comprehensive way how we communicate everything that we do as effectively as possible.”
The weekly e-mail the organization sends out is generally so packed with information she said, that using Twitter has helped them to better communicate using smaller nuggets of information while allowing them to “have Jewish things constantly on people’s radar screens.”
The tweets are available to anyone for short digestion (follow them at www.twitter.com/TorahTweets), and each microblog also links to a larger d’var Torah on Kavana’s Web site.