Apropos of my recent posting on Torah on Twitter, I figured I will give it a go for a limited time, especially since there are various reasons to do so. I figured also that it would be a good experience for me to try my hand at brief Torah thoughts (no rabbi is good at this).
While I am still thinking about how best to do this task, I am planning on doing one tweet per day on the topic of ברכת החמה (the blessing over the sun (not the sun) (more info)) - if it goes well, great; if not, also fine. Either way, it's a specific short amount of time.
While I am on the topic, there was a posting today entitled "A Preliminary Bibliography of the Recent Works on Birkat ha-Chamah" (give it kavod here (like I did)), which makes for an interesting juxtaposition - the posting there speaks of many books written on this blessing said every 28 years, some of which are hundreds of pages long. On the other hand, Twitter limits messages to 140 characters long. Some of those books were way over 140 pages! Anyways, shabbat shalom and I look forward to embarking on this new opportunity next week.
On Monday, Rabbi Irwin Kula came to speak at our school and brought up the issue of tweeting Torah, suggesting that it will likely elicit in people one of two responses: either one of nauseousness or of opportunity (mine was the latter). (Granted, not many of my fellow YCTers are on Twitter, and, after passing around Rabbi Kula's tweet about it, there was some backlash against Twitter (not too different from this amusing video), although Twitter has not been a rabbi magnet [yet], so it's not confined to my school.) My first thought was that although there is some Torah on Twitter, most, if not all of it, is simply a providing of links to Torah elsewhere. For instance, @RabbiGreenberg tweets self-containted Torah Tweets, as well as, to some extent, @TorahTweets and @TorahToday. However, most of the Torah Twittering is not self-contained, such as @WebYeshiva, @YUTorah, @JewLearn, @JewishTweets, and @JewItYourself. While this is, to some degree, helpful, it is not confined to Twitter. For me, who gets a lot of tweets to my phone with URLs, if I'm actually interested in checking out the content of the referred link, I can forward that tweet to my email, where I can check it later (unless I am using my computer at that moment, then I can just open up the Twitter page and go from there (meta-comment: looking back in a few years, how outdated/obsolete will this aforementioned be?)). However, what I believe Rabbi Kula was suggesting was a challenge for more divrei Torah (or, what I'm thinking is more manageable, divrei halakhah) on Twitter, itself (without reference for external links). With divrei halakhah, for instance, a very manageable possibility is to do a daily devar halakhah, perhaps for people to stick with a given topic for awhile or to topically do more consistently.
Oh well, we'll see if this is taken up at all. (I held off the entire post about rabbis struggling to limit themselves time-wise, even to 140 seconds, let alone 140 characters, phew.)
