What did I make?
I made Sh’elah (shelah.org) — the Torah Encyclopedia, literally. a searchable library of Torah and judaic texts and commentary (all powered by Sefaria’s texts and made to feel easy to use), an AI assistant that answers questions on Jewish law (halachah) by pulling information from primary sources like the Torah and judaic texts instead of just guessing, and the practical stuff people actually need everyday — live prayer times (zmanim), a Hebrew calendar, and how different communities observe different customs. The AI is built to always point you back to your own rabbi for anything that’s actually a different based on community and needs a ruling, and it steps out of the way entirely for anything medical or safety-related, and has safeguards to protect it from answering strange or unrelated questions or from being prompt injected (because we don’t want our site to get hacked lol). The prayer-times/calendar run off of your exact location, and the calendar shows the weekly Torah portion and candle lighting times too.
What was challenging for me?
Getting the AI to have safeguards, not hallucinate, follow judaic law and texts, and all set up took way longer than I had originally expected. It’s easy to make a chatbot that sounds confident; it’s much harder to make one that cites where an answer actually comes from, doesn’t quietly make things up, and knows when to deflect a question or malicious prompt. I also spent a lot of time on things nobody will ever see directly — locking down who can access what in the database, making sure a runaway request can’t rack up a huge AI bill (because this site is made for the public to be free, and not to make me go broke °~°), keeping the site fast and not-broken in English and Hebrew, light and dark mode, and working/looking well on phone or tablet-sized screens. Giving the AI real tool-use so it reaches for live prayer times/calendar/texts itself was its own project, and I found out at one point my login system and database weren’t even linked correctly, silently breaking database reads/writes (was a pain to fix…). There’s also a bug where the page jumped up by 5-10 chapters at once which I fixed (and have been trying to fix that issue for MONTHS!)
What am I proud of?
That it actually exists as an actual product and as a solution instead of just an idea living inside someone’s head. Every page has a real link you can share — a specific judaic text, an AI answer, a specific calendar day— and it opens back up exactly the way you left it. The commentary and translations are genuinely fast now (they were super buggy and slow before), the calendar actually gives candle-lighting times and areas in my app where the torah portions are and had a huge glow-up. I also went from 60% test coverage to over 99%, with nearly 4,000 tests passing cleanly. Keep in mind the whole thing was built by myself (yes ofc was built using ai but without that it would’ve taken years to make), end to end, including a real test suite, real security practices, accessibility support, and full legal documentation and copyright license, and not just a prototype held together by hopes and prayers.
What should people know so they can test it?
Try asking it an actual halacha question (but since most of you guys aren’t Jewish ask it a question you’ve had on the old testament or on Judaism maybe) that you may have wondered about and see if it gives you a real answer with sources instead of a vague and incorrect answer. Open a Torah portion and look at commentaries or a translation of a specific word. Switch it into Hebrew and make sure nothing breaks. Try it on your phone. See the prayer times based on location. Look at the calendar. Go bananas! Just know that if there is any issue at all, contact me through my email [email protected] and I’ll try my best to fix it as soon as I can.
