The same passage, set beside its witnesses.
Free, public-domain, apparatus-bearing source sheets for Jewish learning — one verse or passage laid beside the translations and tellings that diverge from it, in Hebrew and English, so the places the tradition disagrees with itself become visible. Built with the Hekhal Targum engine and brought to rabbinical review. For study, not for ruling; the readings are kept open.
Set the Selichot prayer beside the verse it quotes and you can see it stop one word early — mercy where the Torah keeps going into justice. Set three translations of the Shema in a row and the same four words become three theologies. The teachable moment is not in any single text; it is in the gap between them, and a comparative source sheet is built to make that gap legible on a single page.
It is a format the standard curriculum publishers do not produce. Every text here is public-domain or freely licensed and quoted verbatim, so a classroom can reproduce it without permission — the one thing a copyrighted translation will never allow. Sized to print on a page or project on a wall, from a child’s first Shema to a seminary seminar on the same verse.
Each one turns on a real crux. The contested Hebrew sits at the center of the card; the witnesses that disagree are set beneath it.
one theme · every level The Selichot prayer recites only part of Exodus 34:6–7. It stops at ve-nakeh — and the Torah’s own sentence keeps going.
Four Hebrew words, three theologies — the same echad parsed three ways.
Almost every word is contested — tohu va-vohu, and the ruach that hovers over the deep.
The chain of tradition runs through prophets and sages — and does not name the priests the Torah itself entrusts with the scroll.
one passage · across its witnesses The Haggadah and its older witness, the Jerusalem Talmud, disagree with each other in teachable ways.
The famous “do not say water, water” warning is absent from the two oldest tellings and enters in Babylonia.
A topic ladder teaches a single theme across the whole age range. The engine supplies the primary-source spine and the comparison; the educator adds the pedagogy and the leveling. The Thirteen Attributes runs from a child learning the High Holidays to a seminar on the Zohar — one sheet, every tier.
The first words, the picture, the chain said hand to hand. The theme in its simplest register.
What do the words actually say? Why do the translations differ? The first real look at the seam.
The crux in full — the parsing, the counter-text, the question the verse leaves open.
The passage read against the tradition: the history of interpretation, the academic reading beside the classical one.
The whole reputation of the project is editorial integrity. These are not aspirations; they are the production standard each sheet is built and checked against.
Every text is a named public-domain or freely-licensed edition — JPS 1917, the King James, the Masoretic text, the Jewish English Torah — extracted word-for-word, never paraphrased from memory. In-copyright translations (NJPS, ArtScroll, Pritzker) are named and characterized, never reproduced.
Each sheet turns on a genuine, teachable seam: a verse-versus-liturgy gap, a translation that forks, a manuscript history, a chain that omits a link. No crux, no sheet — the divergence is the lesson.
The competing readings are set side by side and left open, not resolved. For study, never a halachic ruling. The places the tradition disagrees with itself are shown, not smoothed away.
No sheet goes live without a cold-context adversarial review that re-verifies every translation and every claim against authoritative sources, to a zero-critical-error bar. We publish only what survives it.
Built with the Hekhal Targum engine, reviewed by a human editor and brought to local rabbinical review. Where a rendering is machine-assisted it says so; nothing is dressed up as more settled than it is.
Every sheet is CC-BY-SA 4.0 — print it, project it, fold it into your own packet, no permission needed. The reproducibility is the point: a school can build on these where it cannot reproduce a copyrighted translation.
The sheets are drawn from the same engine that produces Hekhal’s translations. See the Targum engine →
Every sheet here is free and CC-BY-SA — use them in adult-ed, day-school, or your own learning, print or project, no permission needed. They are also a sample of what the engine can build to order.
Want a comparative source sheet for a passage or theme you teach — a bespoke packet, a teacher guide, a multi-session unit? That is exactly what this is for, with community rates for under-resourced settings.
Name the passage or the theme and the level you teach. Reviewed and answered personally.
[email protected] · or write with the details above.
Free to reproduce under CC-BY-SA 4.0. For study, not a halachic ruling — the readings are kept open, not resolved.