Jerusalem is the world capital of contradiction - not so much a city as a neurosis. The normal functions of space and time operate in a different way here, as past, present and future collide in a cacophony of competing ideologies. In Jerusalem, there is no such thing as normal. This city has no concept of the everyday. Here, you cannot simply take the bus somewhere; you must make a moral decision.
A left-wing, secular Israeli will not take a bus that passes through Arab East Jerusalem, while his right-wing religious nationalist brother will specifically choose that bus over other routes. No one will actually stop a woman dressed in a way that Orthodox Jews consider immoral from taking a bus that passes through an Orthodox area, but as the Orthodox community consolidates its colonisation of the north-west of the city it is increasingly unlikely that there is anywhere that she would want to take that bus. Take into account the fact that some authorities on the halacha consider that trousers are immoral for women and you may begin to grasp the extent of the tensions and traumas that make up a large part of daily life in Jerusalem.
I am a secular Hebrew-speaking Jew, and I feel distinctly uncomfortable as I board the number eleven from the secular city centre. The eleven goes directly through the ultra-Orthodox quarter of Mea Shearim and continues north-west to the suburb of Har Nof, never once leaving the Orthodox part of the city. This bus has signs reminding men and women that they must sit separately, and passes through areas of town where every other building has a banner flying from it proclaiming that "Israel is in danger", or that "The people are with the Golan". The fist symbol of the outlawed, extreme-right-wing Kach party is a common graffiti here, sprayed in red among fading proclamations that "Rabin is a traitor" and the ubiquitous posters announcing local funerals, religious bans and book sales.
I am the only male on the bus who is not wearing a kippa. When I ask the guy sitting next to me which stop I should get off at, he is helpful, but there is a distinct coldness. He is wearing a dusty black suit, a white shirt, a fedora and glasses. I am reading a copy of Ha-Aretz, the Israeli centre-left broadsheet daily. We both know already that we disagree with one another on everything, so he eyes me suspiciously. It is because of Jews like me that the Messiah doth tarry. It would be better, I decide, not to tell him that I am a journalist on my way to investigate an ultra-Orthodox multimedia software house. He wouldn't mind about the software house, for Orthodox Jewish culture is as positive about new technology as it is negative about new ideology, but I don't want him to know I am a journalist. Journalism in Israel is very like busking on the Tube in London. There's virtually no room to manoeuvre. Most people would rather you weren't doing it, and the ones who don't mind you doing it want you to do what they want, not what you want.
Mea Shearim is an area made up entirely of closed courtyards and narrow alleys, and populated exclusively by the most ultra of ultra-Orthodox communities. Signs on all entrances to this quarter warn the daughters of Israel in Hebrew, English and Yiddish that immoral dress will not be tolerated. The warning is both meant and taken seriously - this is a place where fist-fights between students of rival yeshivot can be sparked by disagreements over abstruse points of Talmud. Here, all women wear ankle-length skirts, while the men wear a range of traditional garb from 15th century Polish dress complete with dinner-plate-sized beard, knee-length white stockings and buckle shoes, to the more common 1920s bearded gangster look. Although the physical buildings of Mea Shearim have only been there for a century or so, life inside seems to carry on in much the same way as it did at any point during the quieter interludes of the Middle Ages. But modernity does have a precarious foothold here.
Inside a shop called Torah Scholar Software, a huge, stocky, red-haired man bends intently over a PC. Sweating profusely in his long gaberdine coat and lamp-shade-shaped hat, he makes tentative gestures with a mouse to manipulate several windows full of fully pointed Hebrew text. Demonstrating the software to him is Hayim Mor, Torah Scholar marketing manager, whose duties also include minding the shop. Mor is one of the people who I have come here to see. As I stand there, shifting uneasily from foot to foot, waiting to talk to Mor, I watch several small boys crowding round their father at the demonstration PC. While their father is not so sure of himself, they are as computer literate as any secular child. Mor quickly closes the sale.
The red-haired guy disappears in a cloud of small boys, and leaves Mor to show me around his bewildering range of products. Designed for users from young children to vener- ated Torah scholars, they include a Gemara Tutor program, "guaranteed to increase your Talmud comprehension." Who indeed would not want a talking Old Testament with both Hebrew and English translation, maps, pictures, a concordance and a word processor? Not just Orthodox children but anyone with a taste for the nightmarishly twee could enjoy the various multimedia games on offer, with titles like My Hebrew Colouring Book, Torah Rhymes and Riddles, Family Bible Rhymes and Judaic Wizard.
The Where in Israel? quiz game turns out to have been designed by the Ohr Somayach Tenenbaum College, Jerusalem, an institution whose political orientation - somewhere to the right of Ariel Sharon - dominates both the geography and history sections of the quiz. Where in this Israel, I wonder, are the Palestinians? It is bad manners to think such a thing in such company, but also inevitable. There's no point in me having the argument about it with Mor, though, for neither of us will budge. Israel is a country where you have to make the small moral cop-outs in order not to make the big ones.
For the mystically inclined, Mor tells me, Torah Scholar produce two programs, Torah Codes and Torah Gematrias, which promise to detect patterns of letters and numbers in the text of the Torah. By discovering hidden patterns, scholars of the cabbala claim that they can predict the future, and unlock other mysteries of the universe not available to lesser men. Needless to say, the computer can easily spot patterns that even the most patient and dedicated human eyes might miss.
Torah Scholar Software was founded by a guy called Jeff Milgram. Mor says that Milgram had been a "top programmer at IBM", who was Jewish and living in California but knew nothing about his background. After spending some time in a yeshiva, he became religiously observant, and left the States to live in Jerusalem. At the same time, he began writing programs to help him learn about Judaism. "Big West Coast computer industry guys wanted him to stay in the US and work just on a consultancy basis," said Mor, "but he said no." He wasn't interested any longer.
In the yeshiva, Milgram had studied with a guy called Fishman whose son Emanuel, a jeweller, had a gemacht. Milgram had approached the younger Fishman for a loan, but Fishman had said, "No. No loan. I'm going into partnership with you." They rented a basement bomb-shelter in the Orthodox suburb of Har Nof and started to develop software. During the three years since then they have released a steady stream of software packages, and more recently opened up the shop in Mea Shearim. Har Nof means "hill of the elevated view". I try not to read too much high-minded ness into that location. Somewhat ironically, when I go to visit Milgram and Fishman I find them in their basement, the Israeli equivalent of a Silicon Valley garage.
There wasn't anything to speak of in terms of Jewish educational games on computers before," says Milgram earnestly. He and Fishman make an impressive if slightly surreal double act, sitting before me in a basement full of CD-ROM-equipped, multimedia PCs. I am the only one not dressed in white shirt, dark trousers and Orthodox haircut. As we talk, conversation is repeatedly drowned out by the sound of children playing in the stairwell, and by sampled trumpet voluntaries from a PC in the corner where a guy called Yitzhak is tweaking errors out of something still in production.
Milgram and Fishman interrupt one another continually. Milgram tries, "Our products sell to people across the board," but Fishman cuts in, gesticulating admonishingly, "We have many non-Jewish customers as well." Milgram, unabashed, ploughs on, "...but I must say, the things we have are common to all Jewish people. All Jewish people are interested in Israel, all Jewish people are interested in the Torah, and that's what binds us together. It's not even aimed at a specific segment, it's just Jewish education."
Torah Scholar is a fortunate company; it has a market for its idealism. Milgram says nothing about having worked for IBM; he is far more interested in talking about what he's doing now than about the past. Eventually, he admits that he had done a lot of work for the insurance industry in California, and was one of the two programmers of the Aldus package Persuasion. Now, though, his priorities have changed more or less completely. Jewish education and Jewish scholarship are the two principal aims of Torah Scholar. "Most other companies have a philosophy to make money. We didn't have roots like that. The roots of Torah Scholar are really to spread out Jewish education." Nonetheless, the company is doing unexpectedly well. In three years, it has expanded from the original partnership to a firm employing 20 people, with a marketing division in New York, where the software finds its major market outside Israel, and a development division in Har Nof.
We're going along two paths in terms of development," says Milgram. "One is children's games, all multimedia with nice music and graphics, and the other end is the more serious schol- arly type of work, like Bible Scholar and the Bar Ilan project." Indeed, it turns out that the Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv does not just produce fanatics like Yigal Amir. Over the last 20 years, more than US$5 million (£3 million) have been spent on the Bar Ilan project, for which Torah Scholar has the distribution rights. This project is nothing more or less than the simple but enormous task of putting the entirety of Jewish sacred literature onto a computer, including not just the Hebrew Bible and both Talmuds, but all the Bible commentaries, Talmud commentaries, homiletic literature, commentaries on commentaries, codifications, responsa literature and so on.
The hypertext features are more limited on Bar Ilan than on the Bible Scholar or Torah Scholar packages, but I still find it fascinating, new and profoundly exciting to follow the thread of an idea through thousands of years of religious commentary and argument. Try as I might, though, I cannot get either Fishman or Milgram excited about it. It isn't that they don't grasp it, it's that they take it for granted. For over 2,000 years, the concept of non-linear text has provided the fabric of a halacha where questions asked in the 14th century often turn out to be answered in a text written in the 5th century. The Hebrew Bible is the core text to which all other texts con- stantly refer, but to understand rabbinic literature it is necessary to be familiar with both the Talmud and the major commentaries before plunging into the complex web of responsa. Orthodox Judaism is a two-thousand-year-old hypertext project, written largely in Aramaic.
Given the depth of its traditions, newfangled, computerised hypertext is unlikely to make much of a change in the ways in which Torah scholars pursue their knowledge. Mem- orisation of both Torah text and the commentaries rabbis have made upon it over the centuries is a core part of understanding the Torah. For only by packing all of that information into the mind is it possible to navigate comfortably through the maze of analysis, argument and counter-argument created by generations of scholars struggling to relate good, evil and eternal truth to the vagaries of their changing world. The practice of memorisation survived the advent of printing in the 15th century, and it will survive the computer. Mouse clicking cannot fill an unprepared mind. What it can do, however, is to make a prepared mind more effective.
Rabbi Shmuel Boteach, a writer and lecturer based in London and Oxford, and leader of the L'Chaim student society, is dismissive of attempts to "reduce Judaism to a computer program". But his CD-ROMs full of Jewish text have become invaluable. In Orthodox tradition, almost all writing and sermonising is a process of linking related quotations from scripture and elsewhere. Using fast text searches, Boteach can find quotations on virtually any combination of subjects that he wants - with perfect accuracy. The problem of the half-remembered reference is eliminated. But he stresses that there is still no substitute for "having it all in your head" to guide the searches which the computer then executes. Indeed, no one I spoke to sees any likelihood of a methodological revolution in Torah study. "It's no different than the aeroplane," says Fishman, "or for that matter the gun. God gave us the knowledge to create these things, and depending on the way that they're used, that's what the benefit will be."
Fishman, for his part, reckons that computers can help scholars to look beyond the text of quotations, into deeper mysteries. "The secrets that the rabbis have," he says, "that some people call cabbala, those secrets can be uncovered with the computer." The computer, according to him, "gives you a chance to peer behind the curtain." He explains, "the sages in previous generations, with their understanding of what the Torah is all about, were privileged to see things that we, as regular readers, don't see. We read the word as a word, and they see the meaning behind a word."
Computerised cabbala? I gape at him, and ask him to tell me more, but he refuses. In halacha, you are only permitted to study the cabbala if you are over 40 years of age and married with at least two children. Four went into the orchard, says the Talmud, but only one returned. Only those who are firmly rooted in this world can safely experience the heady occult sphere of cabbalistic ritual and practice. Evidently Milgram and Fishman do not consider me worthy of further knowledge - although they can't resist tweaking my curiosity by hinting that someone using their Torah Codes program has found oil.
It's easy to see, though, why computer nerds should take so naturally to the cabbala. It's basically a form of cryptography. Because of the Torah's unique place in Jewish metaphysics, the puzzles of the cabbala promise to reveal far more than the ordinary code. Orthodox Jews believe that the entire text of the Torah is one long extended name of God; it has had neither a letter added nor one removed since the time of Moses. Not merely is the Hebrew language holy, but it was using the Hebrew alphabet itself that God created the world. Adding the numerical values of the letters in Hebrew words can reveal mystical connections between words or phrases. The study of these connections is called the Gematria.
But the Gematria is not the only cabbalistic tradition. Orthodox culture believes that everything is in the Torah, somewhere. So Torah cryptography has evolved over the past 800 or so years as a way of decoding the secret messages encoded in the text of the Torah. For example, reading every 49th or 50th letter from the tav at the end of the word "Bereshit", the first word in the Hebrew Bible, spells out the word "Torah". A similar phenomenon occurs in the opening chapters of all of the five books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) except for Leviticus, where the holy Name of God is spelt out in jumps of seven or eight letters, beginning from the second letter of the first word. The word "Germania" (Germany) has been found similarly coded in passages relating to the destruction of the Jews by their enemies. Milgram and Fishman claim that tests run with texts such as the complete works of Shakespeare prove that this is more than a simply random phenomenon. For them it constitutes, quite simply, proof of the divine origin of the Hebrew Bible - and, though they don't say it, indirect proof of the wondrous ways in which computers can work God's will.
Already rabbis and scholars have extended the halacha to encompass some of the new moral and ethical questions posed by computers. Computers are machines, so they cannot be used on the sabbath, a fact that, in Fishman's words, "makes the book people very happy." However, during the week there are no problems with faxes, telephones or email, and in general, halacha approves of new technology. According to Milgram, "The Jewish world in general and the Torah world in particular have always been very up-to-date technology-wise." The basic Jewish philosophy is that "if something exists in this world it exists in order that people should understand better God's word. If we have questions, we can answer them."
While printed texts containing the sacred name of God are considered holy objects, and must be buried rather than thrown away, this does not apply to text on the computer screen or to data on disk or CD-ROM. "Data on a CD-ROM," explains Boteach, "is not visible to the naked eye. Therefore, it does not count. This is in line with other halachic rulings, and it is for the same reason that Orthodox Jews need not fear accidental ingestion of micro-organisms, another problem thrown up by technology. According to halacha, Jews may only eat animals that chew the cud and have cloven hooves. Micro-organisms in the air or in water don't usually do either, so strictly speaking, they are not kosher. Halacha says that it doesn't matter, because you can't see them."
Milgram argues that "people have this feeling that 'traditional' means 'old and ancient', and the whole idea of having the Torah and the Bible and putting it on a computer is kind of a contradiction to them, but it's not a contradiction." The phrase "it's not a contradiction" rings in my ears as I sit on the bus back into the city centre. Milgram has said it at least six times. And as the bus chugs back to secular Jerusalem, I try to pull together all the intellectual threads that form Torah Scholar Software to make a whole cloth. It's not easy.
Jeff Milgram believes the Earth is less than 6,000 years old. He has made one CD-ROM denying the existence of a people, another allegedly allowing the initiated to predict the future and a third containing 5,000 years worth of continuous Jewish religious law and scholarship. There are so many contradictions here that they all cancel one another out in a kind of ethical white noise. But then again, Judaism has been absorbing and reconciling apparent contradictions through the millennia. As it says in the book of Kohelet: "There is nothing new under the sun." And there is no contradiction.
Torah Scholar Software is distributed in Europe by Seloserv, 23, rue Felix Faure, Enghien-les-Bains, 95880 France, +33 (0)1 39 64 09 45.
Wayne Myers is a freelance writer based in London. He was previously editor of The Brussels Sprout and The Jerusalem Artichoke but has been unable to think of a London-based vegetable.
halacha - a Hebrew word meaning literally "the way"; a term used to describe the vast body of religious law and teaching adhered to by Orthodox Jews.
kippa - the traditional skull cap worn by obser- vant Jewish men.
Talmud - the second most sacred book in Judaism after the Torah. The Talmud is made up of two parts, the Mishna and the Gemara. The Mishna, written in Hebrew, is a codification of halacha as at around the year 200CE. There are two texts of the Talmud, the Babylonian version, used by Orthodox Jews, and the Jerusalem version.
pointed Hebrew text - The Hebrew alphabet, like all semitic alphabets, consists entirely of consonants. There are three ways in which to deal with vowels: certain of the letters (alef, heh, vav and yod) can act as vowels, a system of dots and dashes can be used, or, as is most usual, the vowels can be omitted and the meaning of the word inferred from context. The system of dots and dashes is known in English as pointing, and is rarely used outside prayer books, poetry, children's literature and road signs.
Torah- the Hebrew Bible.
Gemara- literally "finishing" - is the second and major part of the Talmud, consisting of a huge collection of commentaries on the Mishna compiled in the 500 years after 200CE.
Ariel Sharon - Israel's answer to Pat Buchanan.
yeshivot - plural of yeshiva, a traditional institution of Jewish learning. They also function as quasi-monastic communities where young men can spend a concentrated period of time studying Jewish law, principally Torah and Talmud, before getting married.
Yigal Amir - 25-year-old student at Bar Ilan University who shot the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, in the first major political assassination of a Jew by another Jew to take place in Israel since that of Chaim Arlossorof in 1933.
gemacht - free-loan society, or a sort of kosher venture-capital fund. Like other aspects of ultra-Orthodox culture, this is presumably a remnant of the secular Yiddish culture which was destroyed in World War II.
gematria- from the same root as the English "geo- metry"; the slightly occult Jewish cabbalistic science of numerology.
responsa literature - the post-Talmudic development of halacha. In the centuries since the Talmud was completed, communities of Jews who were unsure of a particular point of halacha sent questions to eminent rabbis. This vast body of correspondence, spread over more than a thousand years, constitutes the responsa literature.
Aramaic - a not-quite-extinct Middle-Eastern language. Still spoken in two remote Syrian vil- lages, it is the principal language of the Gemara, as well as three books of the Hebrew Bible. It was the lingua franca of the Middle East at the time of Christ, and almost certainly his mother tongue.
Cabbala - literally "thing received"; the occult school of Jewish mystical tradition.
Kohelet - the Hebrew name of the book of the Bible that Christians call Ecclesiastes.
tav - one of two letter "t"s, the 22nd and last character in the Hebrew alphabet.