When I hear the word “hacking,” I think of the 1983 film “War Games,” in which a young Matthew Broderick takes over the U.S. weapons system from his home computer, nearly causing a nuclear war. I know that there’s “good witch” and “bad witch” hacking — it can refer to any kind of exploratory exercise, not just criminal activity — but it still makes me uncomfortable. Maybe I’m just not hip enough.
So I didn’t know what to expect from “Hacking Jewish Tradition,” a panel discussion organized last week by the Jewish Federation of the East Bay as part of its Ideas of Late conversation series.
The video projected on the back wall of the Magnes auditorium clued me in a little. There were images of famous Jews, with captions describing what they’d hacked: Louis Brandeis, who hacked the law; Albert Einstein, who hacked physics; Dr. Ruth Westheimer, who hacks sex. OK, so hacking can mean looking deeply at something and offering new insights into it.
U.C. Berkeley professor Ken Goldberg, who thinks about robotics, automation, new media and art basically all day long, told us that hacking comes from the same root as science — the Latin scindere, which means to cut. If you want to understand something, you have to open it up and discover how it works.
The original intention of hacking was to learn, not destroy, he said. “So I submit to you,” he told us, “that hacking is quintessentially Jewish. The Talmud is a beautiful example of hacking,” of questioning, pulling words apart, discovering the hidden tunnels, making connections and creating meaning.
Sara Bamberger, founder of Berkeley-based Kevah, which fosters living-room Jewish text study, picked up Ken’s thread, saying that the idea of Judaism “as a hacking tradition” is an “interesting lens” for understanding our history. The Mishnah, she said, “could be seen as hacking Torah, taking the tradition apart in order to put it back together” in a new way that made sense for people 1,800 years ago. Then 800 years ago, Maimonides hacked the seminal Jewish texts again, taking them apart to create his Code of Jewish Law. And so on until today, when Jews continue to parse Torah, unpacking it in a way that is meaningful to them.
You can’t just “read” Talmud, Bamberger said. “The reality is, it’s an incredibly difficult tradition to penetrate,” what with the arcane Rashi script, which only one guy used but which every student of Talmud has to know; the language (Aramaic), the writing style (no punctuation!), and the fact that it’s all based in a kind of hyperlink network of text, commentary and commentaries on that commentary.
Kind of like the Internet. As Jonathan Rosen pointed out in 2001 in “The Talmud and the Internet,” both involve conversations between many people that take place over time and space, like a giant three-dimensional spider web. And you can only be part of the conversation if you know how to open that first door.
“You can’t build something if you don’t understand the materials,” said Sarah Lefton, founder of G-dcast, which creates animated versions of Torah and Jewish rituals. “You can’t hack the synagogue if you don’t know halachah.”
So hacking Jewish tradition isn’t about going in with a chainsaw and wreaking havoc. It’s about building on the historically Jewish way of approaching intellectual inquiry — Torah li’shmah, or Torah for its own sake, studying not for any practical gain but just in order to know.
As Goldberg put it, hacking Jewish tradition “is the idea of changing things around, but with the deepest respect.” That, he said, is very Jewish.
By this time, more than an hour into the conversation, my head hurt from all the thoughts colliding into one another. Making connections in new ways. Subverting the authority of my conscious brain. I was hacking my own mind! Maybe I was hipper than I knew.
Sitting next to me, Sheldon Rothblatt shook his head and smiled. A retired history professor from Cal, Sheldon knows a thing or two about what’s new and what’s not.
“Hacking,” he whispered to me. “It comes from the Yiddish, from hakh mir nicht kein chainik,” literally don’t bang my teapot, used to mean going on and on, or being disruptive.
“I wonder how many of them know that,” he said.