The personal work

The Torah side of the story

The main page tells the engineering story. This page is the other strand - the decade of personal work that taught me what grounded AI has to be, funded by the career and run on nights and mornings. It is personal, and it is also where the research discipline came from.

  1. Growing up

    San Juan

    A 200-member youth movement

    Through high school I was vice-president of a Jewish youth movement in San Juan - 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.

  2. 2013

    The archive nobody asked for

    In 2013 I started saving Torah classes to disk. Recorded classes, essays, short teachings, anything I could keep. I did not know why I was collecting, and I did it for thirteen years.

  3. Every morning, 5:50

    The best part of the day

    Yeshiva from 5:50 to 8:30, then the trading 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.

  4. June 2015

    TorahTech

    The month I left Goldman I started TorahTech LLC, and for years my work email was [email protected]. The client work - learning platforms, a video platform rebuild, then six years in blockchain - kept turning out to be the training for this.

  5. 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.

  6. Nights and weekends

    Campus outreach

    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.

  7. Now

    The archive became a graph

    The collection that started in 2013 is now a knowledge graph you can question. Every teaching carries its Hebrew source, linked to the verses it turns on, and the AI voices on top cite what they say or say nothing at all. It answers out loud, from a machine in my house, at app.openrabbi.com.

    The full research - what the Torah is, how it meets computer science, the evidence, and the experiments I want to run next - lives at jew.tech.