PARDESWho is behind this, and how we make sure it's right
A few people in Israel who think the page should be in everyone's hand, and who are more afraid of publishing something wrong than of publishing nothing. This page is the part of that fear that can be written down.
Who we are
PARDES is built by Ariel and a small group of friends in Israel: engineers, and people who learn. It is not a yeshiva, a synagogue or a religious organization, and it is not affiliated with the Pardes Institute in Jerusalem, whose name we share by coincidence of the Hebrew acronym and whose work we respect. It is an education project that happens to be about Judaism's central texts. There is no congregation, no rabbi on staff yet, and nothing to join.
The name is the four levels of reading a text, pshat, remez, drash, sod: the plain sense, the hint, the search, the secret. We work mostly at the first one.
Which texts these are
Naming the edition is the oldest form of honesty in this literature, so: the Gemara, Rashi and Tosafot are the Vilna edition. The vocalized Aramaic is the William Davidson Edition (as is the English elucidation in the browser reader); the Hebrew elucidation is Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz's; the Mishnah commentary is Bartenura with Tosafot Yom Tov. All of these reach us through Sefaria, under a Creative Commons non-commercial licence, which is why the app is free and sells nothing. The Tanakh is the Leningrad Codex text. Every version and its licence is listed in the app, under Me › מקורות ורישיונות (sources and licences), and a text whose licence we cannot establish is not shown.
What is made by machine, and how it is checked
The texts are the editions named above, as published; none of them is written or altered by AI. Two things in the app are machine-written, and both say so where you read them: the short summaries on the Context sheet, written in advance, and the chavruta's answers, written when you ask. The schedules, the Daf Yomi, the Parasha, Tehillim and the dates of your own plan, are calculated from the Hebrew calendar, and the links between a line and the places that quote it are found by code.
Our videos are different: they are made to reach people, and their narration and illustrations are produced with AI tools. We say so on every video and here, and every quotation in them is checked against the source text by code before one is published.
When we get something wrong
We fix it in public. A corrected explanation says it was corrected and what changed. If you find a mistake, tell us from inside the app or by email, and you'll see the fix and your name on it if you want it there. One visibly fixed mistake is worth more to us than a hundred pages nobody questioned.
Why the videos show no faces of the sages
Illustrated stories in our videos never depict a named rabbi of the Talmud. Unnamed figures and non-Jewish figures may be shown; Rabbi Akiva may not. That is a decision about respect and about not fixing in your imagination a face that nobody has.
The lab behind the app
Underneath PARDES is a research project on the letter structure of these texts, run under strict rules: every hypothesis fixed before the search, every result checked against a control text that should show nothing, nothing claimed from a single witness. None of that is in the app by default, and it will never be on our channels. The daf is the app; the research is the lab. If you're a scholar and curious, write to us.
Things we decided on purpose
- Quiet on Shabbat and Yom Tov, by the city you choose. No reminders, nothing pushes, nothing sells.
- Hebrew dates first, everywhere.
- No ads. Not beside the text, not between pages, not ever.
- Free means free. Everything that teaches is in the free app, with no account to make. The paid plans add one thing, the chavruta you can ask.
- Both languages are written separately, not translated from each other.