Tachlis Forum

Hi everyone,

Here is a place we can talk about what we are looking for out of participating in this community. Here is something I wrote in a yet-to-be-published blog post to get us started:

I was discussing with @zx the things I am looking for in online interaction that I'm not getting from traditional or federated social media. A lot of different things came up, but the most important and central is this: the need to be able to have deep, complex conversations with people I trust, in a way that those conversations are not ephemeral, lost in the endlessly scrolling feed, like an infinite dark plain in which attention is but a circle of candlelight—but permanent, archived, accessible. This is because I want to be able to collaborate with people to create ideas, with complexity and nuance, for which it's necessary to be able to build on the past and plan for the future.

So, we identified some key needs:

• To build a trusted community,
• To build and enforce community norms,
• To keep some discussions private, and some public,
• To keep past conversations easily findable and accessible.
• A few other important pieces are:
• A good mobile experience,
• Inexpensive to operate,
• Extensible with new features that might be needed.
• And, finally, it would be nice, but not mandatory, to be able to achieve some level of federation with the Fediverse, so long as it's strictly limited and controlled.

Given those requirements, an Internet forum was what suggested itself. Forums are encapsulated communities, with both technical and social norm-building and enforcement features. Good forum software provides both private and public spaces (although typically it's necessary to sign up to post and reply), and forums are archival, in that conversations aren't lost but categorized and saved, in formats that are designed to be accessible to referral and long-term interaction.

Some more questions

• What do we want to talk about? How do we want to organize discussion? Categories, etc.
• Do we want private areas? Which?
• NodeBB has federation abilities. I turned them off. Do we want to turn them on? Under what parameters should this forum federate?
• What are the (abstract) things you are looking for in online community? How can we concretize them?

Pirke Ovos 2:2

(English follows)

רַבָּן גַּמְלִיאֵל בְּנוֹ שֶׁל רַבִּי יְהוּדָה הַנָּשִׂיא אוֹמֵר, יָפֶה תַלְמוּד תּוֹרָה עִם דֶּרֶךְ אֶרֶץ, שֶׁיְּגִיעַת שְׁנֵיהֶם מְשַׁכַּחַת עָוֹן. וְכָל תּוֹרָה שֶׁאֵין עִמָּהּ מְלָאכָה, סוֹפָהּ בְּטֵלָה וְגוֹרֶרֶת עָוֹן. וְכָל הָעֲמֵלִים עִם הַצִּבּוּר, יִהְיוּ עֲמֵלִים עִמָּהֶם לְשֵׁם שָׁמַיִם, שֶׁזְּכוּת אֲבוֹתָם מְסַיַּעְתָּן וְצִדְקָתָם עוֹמֶדֶת לָעַד. וְאַתֶּם, מַעֲלֶה אֲנִי עֲלֵיכֶם שָׂכָר הַרְבֵּה כְּאִלּוּ עֲשִׂיתֶם:

Rabban Gamaliel the son of Rabbi Judah Hanasi said: excellent is the study of the Torah when combined with a worldly occupation, for toil in them both keeps sin out of one’s mind; But [study of the] Torah which is not combined with a worldly occupation, in the end comes to be neglected and becomes the cause of sin.

There's a debate between Rambam and Abarbanel about this mishna. Rambam says:

ר"ל בדרך ארץ הנה העוסק בפרנסה ואמרו וגוררת עון כמו שבארנו במקום אחר אמרו סופו שהוא מלסטם את הבריות

By derekh erets (the way of the world), he meant involvement in a livelihood. And his saying, "and leads to sin" is as I explained it in another place [about] their saying (Kiddushin 29a), "In the end he will steal from the creatures."

Abarbanel counters:

'דרך ארץ ומלאכה' לא כיון אומנות הידיים כי אם על החכמה המדינית וידיעת המדות המשובחות והנהגתם. כי על זה נאמר באמת "דרך ארץ" ושם "מלאכה" עליו נאמר גם כן, לפי שהידיעה המדותיית תכליתה המעשה.

"derekh eretz and melakha" doesn't mean labor with the hands, but political wisdom and knowing the virtues and attaining them. For on this it is truly said "derekh eretz" and there "melakha" is also said, because knowing of virtues its essence is in the deed."

On the one hand, as a working class Jew I've always felt strongly drawn to Rambam's interpretation, that a Torah teacher must also work in a trade and not be reliant on payment for Torah lest he is corrupted, and so that he would have experience making a living.

But Abarbanel's position that Derech Eretz means that a leader of the people must understand politics in addition to knowing Torah so that he would be able to deal with the malchus—and (my addition) not mislead the people into the arms of charlatans and con men, especially appealing today...

I do really think that the dialectic of Torah-Derekh Eretz can contain both interpretations, they're just applicable in slightly different areas of the responsibility of a leader.

@ellie said in Meta Topic—What do we Want?:

For myself I'd like somewhere which can afford at least some respite from politics, but recognise I'm in the minority on this. I don't live in either the U.S. or Israel and my bandwidth for both of those never has a chance to recharge.

We can definitely try to keep politics somewhat contained in its own section. It might be worth looking into just how compartmentalized we can keep this space; maybe you can subscribe to some categories and just ignore—or even hide—others.

My biggest concern is that it might be difficult to keep politics out of Torah discussions. To me Torah is intensely political and it would be inappropriate to ignore that. But I'm using the broad definition of politics: the question of how do we live as a society.

Mostly I'd just like to engage with more Jewish subjects, teachings, religion, music, literature, language, humour. Liberal arts rather than poli sci if you will. I'm very isolated that way.

How granular do you think this should be? We can have levels of categories on here; lots of granularity has pros and cons for sure.

Another question is religion and how do we handle the radical differences between different frames of reference (i.e. Orthodox, Reform, etc)? I'm Orthodox, for example, which means that I need to either stay out of some conversations because my understanding is going to be straight up not welcome, or participate in some kind of bowlderized way, or risk serious conflict. One of my goals is to enable a space where people of different FoRs can interact, because I know Jews who for example have never knowingly spoken to a Reform Jew, or an Orthodox Jew, or a Queer person.

In the old Facebook group I was on back in the day they would tag discussions with a FoR, and people would have to handle themselves. We could do that, or use the categories... What do you think?

As for federation, I'm 100% on board with people federating their posts out but am wary of bringing fedi in. Or more properly, bringing arguments from fedi in.

This sounds to me like we keep Fedi out for now, and people can share links the old fashioned way, via copy and paste. I agree with that, at least until we get something going.

The abstracts I'm looking for are safety, a sense of comfort and home, somewhere that's nurturing of us as Jews.

I love this list!

@ellie said in Meta Topic—What do we Want?:

(Oh, can we have a rule that positive, supportive emojis are read as positive and supportive? Had a bit of trouble with someone reading : ) as passive aggressive. I'm too old to remember all those hidden meanings )

figuring out if you're dealing with someone who would use a smile emoji as a passive aggressive or genuine under any particular circumstances is a full time job

@alter_kaker said in Meta Topic—What do we Want?:

Another question is religion and how do we handle the radical differences between different frames of reference (i.e. Orthodox, Reform, etc)? I'm Orthodox, for example, which means that I need to either stay out of some conversations because my understanding is going to be straight up not welcome, or participate in some kind of bowlderized way, or risk serious conflict. One of my goals is to enable a space where people of different FoRs can interact, because I know Jews who for example have never knowingly spoken to a Reform Jew, or an Orthodox Jew, or a Queer person.

I created a topic for this discussion.