Pulling The Torah Rather Than Pushing

David Siegel would have us believe that the era of pushy salesmen and invasive marketing is coming to a close. With the dawn of the Semantic Web, pulling will become the more active verb (and business strategy) of the 21st century.

Siegel is an entrepreneur, typographer, and technologist and is one of the biggest proponents of the semantic web (aka Web 3.0). If you’re looking for a simple explanation of how the semantic web and its business applications work–check out this post Siegel recently composed for American Express or this post that discusses his work.

What does this have to do with Jewish educational technology? How does the idea of pull affect Jewish publishers, educators, and other community leaders?

Anyone who suffered through Hebrew School as a child knows, that if you don’t have a gifted teacher, interacting with Torah is generally a less than pleasant experience. As we grow older, we become more removed from the Bible, unless we decide to become a “professional Jew” or “adult learner.” For most American Jews, contact with the Bible is limited to uncomfortable encounters with Bible-thumpers, talking vegetables, or alienating conversations with supposedly more learned Jews. The Bible is repeatedly “pushed” onto people without clear and apparent justification beyond, “Did you know that the Bible says X about Y?”

I am often asked how the Tagged Tanakh will attract new readers to the Bible or at least engage audiences in new and innovative ways.

The Tagged Tanakh offers structured data associated with the Jewish Bible, blending vetted content with user-generated-content.

People seem to expect the Tagged Tanakh to push the values and ideas of the Torah onto unsuspecting noobs just like Hebrew School and other old-school institutions were supposed to. In fact, they couldn’t be more mistaken. The Tagged Tanakh will instead pull together students of all ages who seek out the wisdom of Torah. Passions, questions, and communities of practice will PULL people to the Tagged Tanakh because it caters to a wide range of needs and interests.

The Tagged Tanakh is a reflection of the Power of Pull in tandem with Torah study. On ReadWriteWeb.com, Jeff Stein sums it up perfectly:

“At the technical level, the Semantic Web has a lot of complexities. But the whole point of the Semantic Web is that with open data standards non-technical people can easily publish, link, mesh and look up data. Just like it doesn’t take a Computer Science degree anymore to build a good website.”