Miami, FL · building both of these myself
Why does a Goldman Sachs engineer get up for yeshiva at 5:50? Why does the manager behind MetaMask's websites spend thirteen years saving Torah classes to disk? Two things ran side by side for twenty years - a career in engineering, and the work I actually wanted to be doing. This is how they became one thing.
The story
One of them paid. The other one I paid for. Around 2018 they stopped being separate.
The Jewish work
Growing up
Born and raised on the island. Through high school I was vice-president of a 200-member Jewish youth movement in San Juan, running the activities, the budget and the fundraising with a fifteen-person board. Summers at a heritage camp in the North Carolina mountains, which taught me my roots and answered a lot of questions I had. And one trip to Israel, in 2006, that stuck.
The engineering career
At fourteen
Building and programming computers for people in San Juan who paid me for them.
The engineering career
Four years, then one more
Engineering, then a master's. Information science is the study of how to represent the physical world in a digital one, which turns out to be a fair description of everything I have done since. I taught calculus to other students and kept the books for the Hispanic engineers' chapter.
The engineering career
Three summers running
The same trade-processing team three years in a row, building the tools that check the firm's trade records against its own risk system. Somewhere in there I also started running the mentoring program for the incoming interns.
The engineering career
Then the job itself
Software engineer in Securities technology, on the systems that double-check trades and file the firm's regulatory reports. I built a data-lookup library the whole firm could use, and helped stand up a round-the-clock operation that catches trade errors and fixes them.
The Jewish work
2013
In 2013 I started saving Torah classes to disk. Shiurim, essays, short teachings, anything I could keep. I did not know why I was collecting, and I did it for thirteen years.
The Jewish work
Every morning, 5:50
Yeshiva from 5:50 to 8:30, then the floor by nine. The résumé I was writing in those years lists the outreach I was doing with MEOR and Chabad, and one line about what I wanted: to improve Jewish learning “on and offline.” I had no way to do it yet.
June 2015
I gave up the “perfect job.” That same month I started two companies - one that takes client work, LazoffTech, and one called TorahTech LLC. The first one has been paying for the second one ever since.
The Jewish work
The next two years
Senior engineer on a learning platform built with a team in Israel and shaped around the Orthodox way of studying, then a rebuild of a Torah video platform. Two years of being paid to build the thing I had been doing for free.
A NOTE I WROTE MYSELF, ONE MONTH BEFORE MY FIRST DAY IN BLOCKCHAIN
“These books look like any other. But they are actually the records of our sages, generation after generation on the same source, the Torah. It's like the blockchain of history, it's been copied exactly, generation to generation, with very specific rules.”
I then spent six years learning the technology that could test that idea.
The engineering career
Six years
I came in through the education arm, building its online learning platform, and stayed six years - ending as the senior engineering manager for every website behind metamask.io and consensys.io.
The Jewish work
Nights and weekends
Web copy, program pages and ad campaigns for MEOR, the campus-outreach organization I had been volunteering with five years earlier - including a campaign aimed at my own alma mater. Alongside the day job.
The engineering career
Three and a half years
Contract engineer inside Chainlink - a company that feeds real-world data like prices and events onto blockchains - building the sites and tools its developers rely on. The contract ran through TorahTech LLC: the blockchain income flowed through the Torah company.
The engineering career
2023
Everything the career taught - connecting information, making it findable, running systems that do not lose things - pointed at one product: private AI on hardware you own, sitting on your own shelf.
The Jewish work
Now
The archive that started in 2013, rebuilt as a graph you can question. Every rabbinic teaching in it carries its Hebrew source and a reference you can look up, linked to the verses it turns on - and the AI voices on top of it cite what they say or say nothing at all.
The test came back
It held, and it bit. At one point I fed the AI roughly 134,000 extra texts with no citations attached. More material, better answers, right? The answers got worse. Then I looked closer: the graph had named Rashi 3,017 times and stored not one sentence of what he actually wrote. So I enforced the sages' own rule in code - report a teaching in the name of the one who said it, or say nothing. That rule is what made the machine honest.
The discipline that makes a machine cite a 900-year-old commentary, or admit it doesn't know, is the same discipline inside the box I now ship to customers. That box is Digital Twin Pro.
Now
Same graph, same rule: every answer arrives with the source it came from, or it does not arrive.
Private intelligence
A private AI assistant in a box that ships to your door and lives on your shelf. It learns your files, your mail and your records, and answers you with sources. The recurring work, it just handles.
$1,699, once. 30-day home trial, send it back for any reason. Local-first by default, no required subscription. Assembled in Miami, FL.
Torah, grounded
Torah study over a knowledge graph of the classical Jewish canon - conversations with AI sages where every answer is cited to its source, and the model stays silent rather than invent one.
Live now: the Rabbi Akiva avatar, answering out loud from a machine in my house.
Underneath both: machines in my own house. Nothing goes to a cloud, which is the whole point - a system built to show you where its answers came from should be one you can open up and look inside. The research behind the Torah side is at jew.tech.
Built and running
49 live sites. Every one of them started as something I wanted to understand well enough to explain out loud. Here are six to start with; the rest, with what each one is for, live at jew.tech.
Torah study over a knowledge graph. Every answer cited to its source, or the model stays silent.
openrabbi.com Talk to itA speaking avatar grounded in the graph, running on a machine in my house.
app.openrabbi.com The productThe private AI appliance. $1,699 once, 30-day home trial.
digitaltwinpro.com The researchWhat the Torah is, and its connection to computer science and AI. One page, ten links.
jew.tech The reasoningThe thirteen rules of Talmudic inference, explained plainly.
talmudiclogic.com The playgroundHebrew letters and numbers, explorable as a graph.
gematriagraph.comConnect
Want serious AI running privately inside your own organization? Building where Torah and technology meet? Write to me. I answer every one!
[email protected]Not ready to write? Start with the appliance: $1,699, 30 days at home, send it back for any reason. See Digital Twin Pro