In mid-October, 25 Jewish parents will begin a three-month journey of collective inquiry into essential questions about the meaning of being Jewish - and raising a family in the Jewish tradition in the modern world - on the Web.
Billing itself as "a community of learning," the program, called Mishpacha (the Hebrew word for family) will combine discussion groups, chats, and other tools for online schmoozing with traditional study of sacred texts, guided by a rabbi. What distinguishes Mishpacha from the hundreds of Torah study groups and sites that have flourished on the Net in recent years is that participation in the program will be limited to a small group, in the hopes that participants will weave a fabric of shared experiences that will continue after their completion of the course of study.
"We're trading off being a closed group to attain a deeper degree of intimacy," explains Larry Yudelson, a Web consultant and former editor of the Jewish Communication Network who is acting as technical director for the project. "The idea is that, come next Rosh Hashanah, parents will be able to return to the site and find the people they know." (Yudelson also edits a site called Tangled Up in Jews, which examines the relationship between Jewish culture and belief and the music of a songwriter whose Hebrew name is "Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham v'Rachel Riva" but is better known as Bob Dylan.)
Mishpacha is the first outreach into the online world by the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, which was established in 1965 with reparation funds from the government of West Germany to nurture Jewish religious, cultural, and educational organizations. The foundation has sponsored seminars for Jewish families in Sweden, the former Soviet Union, South America, and other countries where Jews can feel isolated from the global Jewish community. That expertise, says Yudelson, will help shape the online program, which hopes to someday host Mishpacha programs in languages other than English.
"There are so many Jews who feel like they can't see the door or find the knob," says the program's rabbi-in-residence, Dianne Cohler-Esses. "This is a way of giving them a knob so they can open the door."
Beginning with a collective exploration of the most basic questions of Jewish identity, the program will engage issues related to observance of dietary laws, holidays, the Torah, commitment to social justice, and the milestones in Jewish community life from birth to death. Mishpacha is only open to those with children, but non-traditional families - such as single parents and gay couples - are welcome. "When people start having children, the questions get more serious for them," Yudelson says.
Unlike such no-cost educational sites as Project Genesis and Virtual Jerusalem, Mishpacha will require users of the service to pay a fee - in the US$18-$25 range - but participants will receive the equivalent of twice that amount in reference books and sacred literature, Yudelson says.
Mishpacha will open its doors to Jews of all denominations, from Orthodox to Reform, and even to non-observant Jews. That inclusiveness comes naturally to Rabbi Cohler-Esses, who was raised in the Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn. "Kugel and matzo balls are not Jewish food for me," she explains. "Lakhmajin and kibbeh are. That Orthodox/Reform dichotomy is a thing of European Jewry, not the Middle East."
Rabbi Cohler-Esses says that one of her roles in the program will be to "connect major Jewish concepts with the events in the lives of those in the group.... If you know someone who is ill, the traditional concept of visiting the sick suddenly becomes very important." To communicate the richness of the Jewish idea of shabbat, she says, "I'll talk about shabbat as a way of expanding consciousness, stopping work for a day to allow the world to come in, and not just being a couch potato."
Eric Simon, a criminal justice researcher for the Federal Bureau of Prisons who edits a comprehensive index of online resources called Torahnet, gives credit for the flourishing of online Jewish study sites to the fervor of Orthodox Jews, for whom spreading the passion for learning about the Torah is paramount. "They're fanatical about it, and I mean that in the most positive way," he says. There's a "tremendous amount of written material" from centuries of scholarship being ported to the Web, says Simon, "because of the long tradition of study and respecting those who studied before."
Launching a Jewish community in a virtual world made of language is natural, says Rabbi Cohler-Esses, relating the Jewish love for the study of texts - in books or on the Net - to the fact that "text" and "textile" share the same root, a Latin word meaning "to weave." "When you study a text, you start to weave your life into it - you become a part of it. It's a holy activity. Some kind of transformation can happen there. 'Transformation' is a big word, but I believe it's possible."
