User:Zabek/Policies for Miqra

Welcome to Miqra, a multilingual website for the production and dissemation of free resources (audio, images and text) related to the liturgical reading of Tanakh with cantillation ("trope"). Anyone who has logged in may help build this website in accordance with its policies, as described on this page.

Point of view: Halakhic Judaism

This website will produce resources on the topic of Miqra from a particular point of view, namely from the pespective of traditional halakhic Judaism. The website is open to all, but the validity of Judaism and the halakhic process are not acceptable topics here. Contributors are asked to respect this point of view; those who do not will have their changes reverted and may be asked to leave the site.

Specific Policies

Miqra’s policies are based upon those of Mail Jewish, one of the oldest and most successful of the many halakhic mailing lists on the internet, and a community which has for many years been characterized by open, thoughtful and respectful discussion of the entire range of Jewish topics within a framework of respect for halakhah (widely defined). As on Mail Jewish, here on Miqra we will enforce the following policies:

• Submissions may not advocate actions that are in clear violation of halakhah.
• Whether it is appropriate or not to follow halakhah in modern times is not a valid topic for discussion.
• The boundaries of what is or is not "halakhic" are often open to valid debate. In general, the website’s policy on this will be a liberal one (i.e. allowing repectful contributions from all of these points of view), but clear violations will be reverted without discussion. It is the responsibility of the website’s administrators to determine what the bounds of acceptable discussion are, though all participants are invited to respectfully discuss borderline issues to help in making such decisions.
• We welcome contributions from Jews who are not personally comitted to the halakhic system, as long as they respect our policy. There is no need for non-observant Jews, or members of the various synagogue movements, to "hide" who they are or what they do just in order to participate (which actually happens on other websites). Please contribute openly, but at the same time with respect to the values reflected in our policy.
• We recognize and respect the fact that many people in all the synagogue movements are very interested in cantillation and Tanakh. Cantillation is part of synagogue life. However, this website is not the place to debate the validity or the lack of validity of the various "movements" in modern Judaism. The great Orthodox-Conservative-Reform wars of the 20th century need not be fought here, nor will we permit them to be fought here.
• The synagogue services participated in by some of our contributors may or may not be valid for halakhic reasons, but we will not debate their validity on this website. This is not the place to advocate egalitarian services or reforms in the liturgy, nor is this a place to attack them (and neither will be tolerated). This website is for Miqra. So let us rather study together and learn from each other with mutual respect while we build this website. We can do this despite the very real disagreements that we are all well aware of, and with respect for halakhah.
• Furthermore, we welcome non-Jews who are familiar with the Masoretic text and/or the Jewish liturgical tradition to take part and contribute to the site, adding to it from their expertise in ways that respect the traditional Jewish point of view.

Neutral Point of View

When there are valid debates within the halakhic framework, all contributors are asked to adhere at all times to a Neutral Point of View policy (similar to the one aspired to on Wikipedia). In brief, this means presenting all points of view fairly, and especially presenting the positions of those you disagree with in the same depth – and with as much respect – as the person holding those positions would explain them. Always remember that the students of Hillel were praised for explaining the opinions of Beit Shammai before they stated their own views.

Point of View: Masoretic Text

Miqra is devoted to the ancient Jewish tradition of liturgical reading of the Bible, and we are open in principle to the entire range of traditional Jewish interpretation of the Tanakh.

• The history of the masoretic text in its manuscript and printed versions – both its overall history and the history of its millions of small details – is of central importance here. Oral, spoken, and musical traditions for the masoretic text are central as well.
• Detailed explanations of grammar, syntax, phonology and pronunciation, lexical issues, etc. – are all appropriate here, especially when related to reading with cantillation.
• Explanations and discussions related to traditional Jewish biblical interpretation of the Bible are always welcomed.
• In general, this is not the place for material on other (non-Masoretic) versions of the Bible. However, if and when such material can shed light on the Jewish (masoretic) tradition and help us understand it better, while at the same time respecting the website’s policies, then it is certainly appropriate.
• Miqra is devoted to the Jewish Bible (Tanakh), its use in Jewish liturgy, and its Jewish interpretation. This is not the place for material on Christianity or the Christian Bible (New Testament). Any changes to the site that onstensibly deal with Tanakh, but actually promote a missionary agenda, will be reverted without discussion.

Interpretation of the Bible

Even though we are concentrating initially on cantillation, in principle Miqra is also open to the study and discussion of the entire range of traditional Jewish biblical interpretation. We would love to upload and edit texts of the traditional commentaries, study aids, and of course contemporary discussions of what the Bible means, with respect to a traditional Jewish perspective.

Scribes (soferim)

If there are contributors who are interested in doing so, Miqra is open not just to the subject of reading Tanakh, but also of writing it, i.e. to the topic of scribes and the work they do writing Torah scrolls, Megillot, Tefillin and Mezuzot.

Who May Contribute

Everyone may browse this site and make free use of all its materials (according to their open source licenses), even without logging in.

Editing pages (text)

As initial policy, all logged in users may edit pages in accordance with the policies on this page.

If needed, in the future there will be a membership policy, and people will need to be accepted as a members in order to edit pages (though talk pages will always remain open to anyone). This will not be a draconian change; anyone who can demonstrate even a modest ability to contribute positively to the website will be immediately accepted. In any case, if the current open system works well, then no membership policy will be implemented at all.

Submitting Recordings (audio)

Audio submissions will be subject to more oversight than text contributions. When you make your initial audio contribution of a text read with cantillation, please first notify an administrator. You will be asked to provide some basic background about how you learned to "lein" and about your specific style (especially: your system of pronunciation for reading Hebrew, and which musical tradition you follow). Anyone who shows the ability to provide recordings of reasonable quality and a moderate level of expertise can continue to upload more recordings from then on with minimal supervision.

Miqra reserves the right to reject recordings by beginners. However, rather than simply rejecting them, administrators are encouraged to work with beginners to help them improve their recordings, so that they can eventually become part of the website.

Each and every audio recording that is accepted for uploading must be categorized within each of the following categories:

1. Text (exactly which text is being read, e.g. category:mishpatim-4 = the fourth aliyah in Parashat Mishpatim)
2. Reader (the full real name of the person whose voice has been recorded)
3. Pronunciation (the system of pronunciation for reading Hebrew that has been used by the reader, e.g. Ashkenazic, Israeli, Morrocan, Iraqi, Yemenite)
4. Accent (the country of origin that can be detected in the reader’s voice, e.g. Israeli pronunciation but with a British accent :-)
5. Melody (which traditional melody has been used for the cantillation)

Each Reader’s User Page should describe the kind of "leining" he/she records in detail, and also list the recordings already submitted.

Women’s Cantillation

Since this website operates within the framework of halakhah (see above), we must explicitly state that we welcome and accept audio contributions from women and men alike.

Why must this be stated at all? The reason is that throughout most of Jewish history, "reading" the Bible with cantillation was something done by Jewish men alone. Nevertheless, despite this clear historical fact, there is still a great deal of room for discussion within halakhah as whether – and to what degree – cantillation may be an appropriate field for women too.

Today, even within the Orthodox world there is a wide range of opinion and policy on liturgical situations (e.g. megillah readings, women’s prayer groups) in which women read publically with cantillation. Besides this, it must be emphasized that cantillation is no less a pedagogic tool than a liturgical one, and it is central to the study of Tanakh. It is for this reason that many Orthodox women’s seminaries teach cantillation today, and many Orthodox women study it on their own.

Therefore, in keeping with the policy spelled out above that, when the halakhah allows for a range of opinion we allow all views, and especially because cantillation goes beyond the liturgical as an intrinsic part of Torah study, we will welcome recordings from women and men alike.

We ask those contributors who oppose women reading with cantillation to nevertheless respect those who approve of it, and to respect this policy. (Remember that the female contributors largely see what they do as part of their Torah study and service of God, so give them the benefit of the doubt while at the same time stating your opposition respectfully.)

We ask women who submit recordings to be sensitive to the fact that other contributors may find it disturbing. (Remember that such people do mean well, and that contributing good material is a more effective response to critics than engaging in polemics.)

How we relate to Wikimedia

Scope

Wikimedia projects are universal in scope, with the ambition (and potential?) to literally embrace the entire sum total of human knowledge. The projects are divided not by topic but types of materials: An encylopedia project, another for schoolbooks, another for quotations, another for source texts, etc.

We differ in two ways:

On the one hand, Miqra is the product of a much smaller, limited community building resources that are confined to a single area of knowledge (namely Miqra).

On the other hand, Miqra embraces all kinds of materials related to its limited topic on the same project: encyclopedia and dictionary articles, source texts, audio and other multimedia, etc. All of them are together here.

Respect for Expertise

Unlike Wikimedia, here on Miqra we will formally recognize and respect the expertise of people with rabbinic and academic credentials, and contributors will have to defer to them at times.

It is true that experts can err, and they often do. It is also true that dedicated amateurs can often do better volunteer work that people with advanced degrees, and that they can sometimes improve upon the work of the greatest experts. Nevertheless, years of formal, supervised study must count for something, and they should give extra weight to that person’s contributions.

Therefore, if and when serious experts feel that other Miqra contributors are lowering the quality of our material, and the differences of opinion between them and the other users cannot be easily resolved, the experts will be deferred to without prolonged debate and without the need for a vote.

Encyclopedia articles

Here at Miqra we will encourage participants to help build an encyclopedia of Tanakh and cantillation in accordance with our policy guidelines. Rather than a universal encyclopedia with an absolutely neutral point of view, we will create only articles relevant to our topic, and written from a perspective that accords with our policies.

Policies on how our articles will relate to Wikipedia articles will have to be developed as time goes on and we gain experience. A few initial thoughts:

• Every article must be linked to its parallel(s) on Wikipedia, not just for copyright reasons, but because we want to both learn from Wikipedia and continue to contribute to it.
  • Learn from Wikipedia: Changes should be monitered so that useful additions can be incorporated into our articles. We will maintain a "Recommended Wikipedia Watchlist," which will moniter changes in all the Wikipedia articles that are relevant to Miqra.
  • Contribute to Wikipedia: We will develop material here that would often be much harder to build within the Wikipedia community. But once our material is ready, some of it will be useful to Wikipedia (as one important perspective out of many) and we should update related articles there ourselves. Thus we will also give, and not just take.

• Some Wikipedia articles can more or less be easily adopted "as is" – e.g. Haftarah or Ketuvim. But we will have to write others separately, on our own, such as articles on the biblical figures or the biblical books, which are very difficult to write in the Wikipedia environment because of the insistance that all articles must contain all possible perspectives (which in this case means from the perspectives of all religions, cults, academic theories, popular ideas, etc.). Once we create quality material from our own perspective, here at Miqra in a far more supportive environment, then afterwards such material can be transferred to Wikipedia as well, thus adding already developed sections on the traditional Jewish view of biblical topics.

• On some topics (e.g. Ketuvim or Haftarah) the title of our article can be exactly the same as the parallel Wikipedia article. But on other topics the names will differ. For instance: We will have separate articles on each of the cantillation notes, but in Wikipedia the community would probably deny each of them a separate article. In any case, at the end of each article there will be links to all of the related Wikipedia articles, even those with different titles.

• Suggested note at the end of articles: "This article may be based on the following Wikipedia article(s) in part or in whole. The following Wikipedia article(s) may also incorporate material originally written for Miqra. All articles from both projects are freely available under their appropriate open source licenses." – followed by a list of the related articles along with a direct link to "recent changes" on each of them.

Documentation

WikiMedia is outstanding software. One of the very few disadvantages in has in terms of texts is that it doesn’t allow the easy use of footnotes (or endnotes), the use of which is discouraged in Wikipedia.

We will encourage full documentation in our articles on the same level as in good academic writing. We will make do the best we can despite the techical limitations of the software in this regard (there are some ways to get around them).

External Links

We encourage the use of external links at the end of articles. Links must bring the user to quality sites that provide useful information relevant to the article, and further our policies.

Licenses

Our materials will be free for all to use under two dual open source licences, namely the Creative Commons share-alike attribute license and the GNU FDL. Users can use the material according to whichever one they prefer. Materials based on Wikimedia, however, will be GNU FDL.

Universalism and Particularism

In Judaism there is an intrinsic, built-in tension between universalism and particularism. In fact, this inner tension has been central to the very nature and identity of Judaism and Jews throughout our entire millenia-long history.

On the one hand, Wikimedia is an outstanding project that reflects the powerful potential inherent in a completely universalistic framework that lets everyone take part in everything, and makes no special exceptions for any particular point of view or outlook. Wikimedia is perhaps the ultimate embodiment of positive, open universalism, and it is a powerful achievement that has already benefitted many people, and has the potential to change the world for the better.

The universalistic pole on Judaism’s axis of tension (between universalism and particularism) acknowledges the outstanding achievements of humanity as a whole, and tries to learn from them and contribute to them. The opposite particularistic pole, however, never ceases in its struggle to maintain that the particular experiences of individuals and groups – in this case the people of Israel – create particular monuments of the spirit that cannot (and need not) ever be fully understood from an outsider’s perspective, but only within the particular context of the group.

In the case of Miqra, we recognize and appreciate the universal significance of the Bible to mankind as a whole, and the value of an open encyclopedia dealing with Bible. At the same time, however, there is no less value in also having "a room of our own," i.e. tackling the same subject from within our own more supportive environment. We think that by doing so, we will be able to achieve a level of excellence in our own small corner that would be very hard to build inside Wikipedia. When our materials, developed from "within" are ready, they can also serve to enhance Wikipedia as well.

How we relate to other projects

Leining discussion group on Yahoo

The idea for Miqra was first raised on the Leining discussion group run by David Grossman on Yahoo. This is an active group with about 350 members, and David has been its volunteer moderator since the year 2000. We do not want to interfere with any extant community, only to contribute new options.

Therefore, on our website we should refer detailed questions on leining – the kinds of questions usually discussed on the Yahoo Leining group – to David’s group. As a wiki, we cannot stop people from asking such questions on our own website. But when people do raise such questions, we can and should refer them to David’s excellent discussion group, stating that it is the best place to ask such questions, instead of answering them on Miqra. (Even better, if we have something to reply then we should post our own answers on David’s site and ask people to read them there, not here.) By refering people with questions to David’s group, and by David’s group refering people to us for other resources, we can help each other grow.

Please Add Your Comments

I invite the initial group of people who have expressed interest (via private communication) in setting up a website of this type to add their comments! Simply click on the "discussion" tab at the top of the webpage, which will bring you to the "talk" page. Then click the "edit" tab at the top of the "talk" page to add your comments.

If you find things that need to be corrected or changed on this page too, you may of course do so.