I am fascinated by the role of new media in the world of multifaith relations.
Take the events of yesterday morning…
Rabbi Ira Stone
At 9 a.m. I received an email from my colleague Rabbi Shai Gluskin that informed me that my teacher, Rabbi Ira Stone, was now posting about the Mishnah on Twitter.
Not yet Twitter literate myself, I repaired to Facebook where I posted a “status update” announcing this news.
An hour later, I received an email from Hussein Rashid, a scholar of Islam in New York City, who will be teaching for RRC next spring. He indicated that he was planning to check out the Mishnah tweets.( twits? twitters?)
Later that day, I saw Rabbi Stone. He was delighted to have noticed that someone named Hussein Rashid was already partaking of the Mishnah study. He was wondering if I might have had something to do with it.
The speed with which we make connections takes my breath away! Now, if we can only use all this connectivity to heal the world…
What a wonderful story. R’ Shai and Hussein are both dear friends; I love that they’ve crossed paths in the twitterverse!
Rabbi Stone’s tweets on the Mishnah are great – I have already begun to enjoy them.
Nancy, you got it right the first time… “tweets.” Cool thing about all this is that others can tweet on Mishna and have Mishna comments aggregated with others by including “#Mishna” (don’t include the quotes, and leave off an “h” at the end) in your tweets.
Anyone can see the aggregated results of everyone’s Mishna tweets at search.twitter.com.
I’ve also created an experimental site that aggregates those Mishna tweets and also Torah tweets. At the site you can sign-up to receive Torah and or Mishnah tweets by old-fashioned by email.
On my blog I’ve written, Six Reasons to Write Torah Commentary on Twitter and a rebuttal to an article published at the Forward decrying the whole Twitter phenomena.
During a hectic day with way too many things on the to-do list, I find commenting on sacred texts via Twitter to be a not over-whelming way to connect with both ancestors and contemporaries.
Shabbat shalom.