Evidence
Modern AI has a provenance problem: a machine states something true-sounding and cannot tell you where it came from. This tradition solved that on paper - report a teaching in the name of the one who said it, keep the losing argument, record what is unresolved - and this page holds the receipts for every claim the site makes about it. A site that argues you should be able to check where an answer came from does not get to make claims you cannot check. Everything below points at something outside this site - a public record, an archive, a live page - that a stranger can open in under a minute.
Links verified 11 August 2026. Anything that could not be verified on that date was removed from this page rather than left standing. The Internet Archive links were live when verified; the Archive itself has been intermittently offline in mid-August 2026, which you can confirm at archive.org - the citations stand.
The record, held by other people
These are not hosted here and cannot be edited from here.
| What it shows | Where to check it |
|---|---|
| Building in the open since August 2015 - the account creation date, straight from the API | api.github.com/users/jlazoff |
| A Torah technology company operating in 2014, two years before the platform work | themercava.com, archived June 2014 |
| torahtech.com over the years, as captured by a third party | Internet Archive, torahtech.com |
| Work on MetaMask’s website, in the public issue tracker | MetaMask/website issue #5 |
| An early public experiment applying machine learning to biblical text | huggingface.co/spaces/jlazoff/biblical-summarizer |
| The intention written down years before the system existed - “train the AI to continue tracking, uploading, and enhancing the site” | joshualazoff.com, archived May 2021 |
| The answering system, running right now, citing as it goes | app.openrabbi.com |
The collection, counted
Every figure here comes from a query against the live database, run on the date shown. The query behind each one is written out in the methodology.
| What | Count | Counted |
|---|---|---|
| Pieces in the map | 135,483 | 2026-08-18 |
| Teachings carrying a reference you can look up | 34,671 (all of them) | 2026-08-18 |
| Of those, carrying the Hebrew source text | 34,665 - six do not | 2026-08-18 |
| Lines of the Bible they are joined to | 21,605 | 2026-08-18 |
| Teacher-to-student links | 4,848 | 2026-08-18 |
| Teachers in that chain | 3,470 | 2026-08-18 |
| Of those, joined into one connected web | 2,015 | 2026-08-18 |
| Teachers reached from Moses by teacher-to-student links, walking twelve generations out (twelve is where the walk was stopped, not where the chain ends) | 400 | 2026-08-18 |
| Distinct commentators on Rashi - the most-commented figure in the graph | 177 | 2026-08-16 |
One honest note about the chain, because it matters more than the counts: this is what the sources say about who learned from whom. It is not a verified lineage, and it contains the errors you would expect of anything assembled from text - it will happily assert that Moses taught Abraham. It is described that way everywhere it appears.
How answers are checked
Every answer is checked for a source before any voice here is allowed to speak - in written tests, and again in live conversation, because a voice can pass everything on paper and still need watching in the room. Every teaching the system can draw on carries both its original words and a reference; material without one is not available to it.
Where it runs
On machines in my own house. Nothing has to leave the building for a question to be answered, which is the point - a system built to show you where its answers came from should be one you can open up and look inside.
The Hebrew text comes from the open Torah library; the collection is predominantly CC BY-NC, with a CC BY minority. Original writing here is CC BY 4.0.
What I would build next, and the first experiment for each, is on the agenda.