#Torah: Using Twitter to Comment on Torah

I’m a geek and a rabbi. It’s actually not a particularly common combination. But I like being special:)

With my blog in the doldrums, Twitter surging in popularity, and feeling a bit disconnected from my rabbi persona, I decided to launch a new Twitter account in which I would make comments on the current Torah portion… in 140 characters or less (the size limit of any post on Twitter).

I was recently at Drupalcon in DC where I saw the power of collecting Twitter messages using a form of categorization that was invented by Twitter users themeselves.

The most common way to filter the gazillion messages being relentlessly posted to Twitter is to follow people. But what if I want to follow a lot of people but for a short time? And what if I don’t even know their Twitter names? Or what if I’m more interested in the kind of content being posted than the author who is posting it?

In the case of the Drupal conference, some folks put out the word, and it spread virally, that folks wanting to Twitter conference participants should include “#Drupalcon” in their tweets. And then, using search.twitter.com or any one of the mobile phone Twitter applications like Tweetie or Twitelator, one can filter all those tweets down to the ones that include, “#DrupalCon.” By applying a hash symbol (#) to a fitting category word, the 1400 conference attendees could promote sessions, informal meet-ups, drinking expeditions, real time commenting on sessions…

So I wondered, is anybody using “#Torah” to filter Torah related content on Twitter? Yes, one Rabbi Moshe Goldberger, who daily tweets with a hyperlink to his “Gems of Torah” where he provides a few Torah trivia questions. So this is fairly unclaimed space in Twitter world. Of course, different than an Internet domain name, which you claim and pay for, a hashtag name space is taken up by people who use it at any given time. There is no controlling authority.

So in addition to writing my own 133 character Torah comments (140 characters including the 7 that are used up in “#Torah”), I’m campaigning to get other people to write Torah comments on Twitter and include “#Torah.” It seems like one of the simplest ways for folks, Jewish and not Jewish, to engage in real-time shared Torah associations that are tied to the weekly readings. No moderation, no control… no guarantee of anything interesting coming out of it. But I think it is worth a try.

Join me —> lets see if we can create a flow of Torah tweets that enriches the discourse of Torah. You don’t need to create a new Twitter account for this purpose like I did. Just use your current Twitter account and put “#Torah” anywhere inside it when you comment on Torah. (My sgluskin account is so totally geekish I was afraid of confusing my audience.) Or if you don’t have a Twitter account, create one–I’m sure you’ve been hearing all about it.

My bet is, if this is successful, that the Tagged Tanakh will pull this content in and make it part of its database.