Recently I had an opportunity, thanks to Rabbi Mark Gottlieb and the smart and generous people at the Tikvah Fund, to speak with a group of Orthodox rabbis about religious reading. In the process I, surprisingly enough, learned something quite interesting about how to think about technology.
The other visitor to the group was the wise and learned Michael Fishbane of the University of Chicago, so I was the only Gentile in the room and the only person who couldn't read or speak Hebrew. Each of the sessions shifted rapidly back and forth between Hebrew and English, which meant that I would often have been utterly lost -- in sessions I wasn't leading -- had it not been for the kindness of those sitting around me, who would whisper translations of key terms or point me to online translations of the relevant Talmudic passages. Thanks to that assistance, I was able to follow the arguments fairly closely. Those were enlightening sessions indeed.
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