When I was in my final year of rabbinical school I had a remarkable opportunity to spend a weekend in a very small Jewish community in the deep south. It was a beautiful experience with a warm and engaged community and yet I left understanding that there exists a profound inequality of resources and access to Jewish opportunities depending on geography, ability to travel and other factors. I had spent most of my formative Jewish educational life in New York City, one of the largest hubs for rich Jewish learning and growth. I was fortunate to have access to some of the top educators anywhere in the Jewish world. This is not the case for many Jews throughout the world.
What can we do to address this inequality gap? Thankfully with constantly improving technology and the emergence of an entire e-learning sector there now exists the opportunity to put forth a Jewish digital learning platform that is uniquely a Rabbis Without Borders experience. The learning experience will merge Jewish wisdom in all of its depth with openness and pluralism. The educators will be borderless, coming from all walks of life and life experiences. The technology will enable seamless integration of multimedia and real time conversation not just one-directional from the educator to the students but between the educator and the students and between the students themselves.
It is precisely because Rabbis Without Borders pushes its rabbinic participants to think in new ways and to conceive of new tools for bringing Jewish wisdom public that this project is beginning to bear fruit. I was so fortunate to be in the second cohort of the Rabbis Without Borders program when Rabbi Irwin Kula, Rabbi Rebecca Sirbu and Rabbi Brad Hirschfield urged us to consider the blending of technology with tradition and to reflect on the egalitarian access to learning that new media can provide.
It is therefore with great excitement that I am able to share the beginning of a new initiative: OpenSinai.com.
OpenSinai.com is about offering Jewish learning everywhere. It is not about blog posts or articles but about facilitating real-time classes utilizing the best in digital learning technology that allows for meaningful conversations. No matter whether someone lives in the heart of New York City and is looking for a radically pluralistic borderless Jewish learning space or lives in a small community in the Midwest and is looking for Jewish enrichment, OpenSinai.com aims to provide those classes that fills that need.
We are in the beginning stages of the project and each week brings new developments. Visit the website, like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter and join our e-mail list to get the latest updates and find out when the first classes will be live. If you are an educator thinking about what it would mean to teach in this new space find out more on the website. If you are thinking about this project let us know what you think and get involved and help make it a reality. Let us continue to close the gap between big Jewish centers and Jewish communities throughout the world so that the small southern Jewish community I visited several years ago and all Jews everywhere can grow and deepen their spiritual, religious and intellectual lives.
