Daily Torah texts — with some help from AI
Local entrepreneur with art background sends free messages
Telling Jared Green's story is a little like braiding your daughter's hair.
There are so many strands! They curve in and out around each other. Sometimes you have to tug at some escaping flyaway bits. But in the end, it all fits together, thick and intricate and good.
When you're working with hair, you end up with a braid. When you tell Jared's story, you end up with TorahTxt.
So let's begin, and I'll try to keep it chronological.
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Mr. Green, who lives in South Orange now, was born in 1976 and grew up in Fayetteville, North Carolina; he and his family were deeply committed Jews, in a place where the Jewish community was fairly small but deeply connected. His shul-going, kosher-keeping family belonged to a Conservative shul, Beth Israel Congregation, and they were so immersed in the Jewish community that Mr. Green knew how its federation worked. (Fayetteville was too small to have its own federation, so it was served by the umbrella federation group, the Jewish Federations of North America.)
The family — Lynn and Michael Green had two children, Jared and Steven — would drive to Washington, D.C., a few times a year to pick up kosher meat, Jared Green said. It was about a six-hour drive in each direction, but there were no closer options. "We were a federation family, an AIPAC family, a Hadassah family, a BBYO family," he said.
"I was a BBYO kid," he added; he belonged to a BBYO youth group and spent his summers in BBYO camps. When he was 17, he went to Israel with Young Judea for his gap year — at a time when gap years in Israel were unusual.
Mr. Green discovered what he thinks of as Jewish humor when he was in high school. "My cousin Aaron also lived in Fayetteville, and I discovered his stash of Mad magazines," he said. Sort of like discovering a cache of your (not his!) father's Playboys. "It influenced my sensibility about Jewish humor, and especially New York Jewish humor. There were limited Jewish comedic influences where I grew up, and it was before the internet." One that stuck in his adolescent mind was a cartoon about using kippot as bras.
"Mad magazine was my delivery system for Jewish humor," he said.
Mr. Green returned to North Carolina for college; he went to Duke, in Durham. "I majored in public policy," he said. "I thought that I would go into policy, but after a few internships I realized that it was not for me. So I went to work for Ernst and Young as a strategy analyst. I was straight out of college, advising corporations on their business strategy. After several years there, I went to business school at Emory," in Atlanta.
But back up. Go back to Mad magazine.
"While I was at Ernst and Young, and I finally had a couple of dollars to put together, I remember taking my first paychecks and going onto eBay and seeing if I could find any original artwork from Mad. I found work by my favorite humorists, Don Martin and Al Jaffee" — both best known for their Mad cartoons. "Funnily enough, that shaped my entire career."
After he graduated from business school, Mr. Green moved to Dallas and went to work for Heritage Auctions. He was drawn to it because of its online work in general — this was in 2004, when the online world was transforming from an oddity to the backbone of all our lives — and in particular because the company had created the first online platform for comic books and comic art. Beyond that, "they were the leaders in the online auction space.
"We were doing $450 million a year in auction sales when I got there, and just over a billion in collectible sales when I left, about eight years later," he said. "Now Heritage is on track to do close to two billion in annual collectible sales. And it's not just comics and comic art. Its main core business was coins and currency. The areas I managed were the ancillary collector items — comics and comic art, and also fine art, jewelry, and American illustration." That turned out to be his deepest love in the art world, he said.
"I was always working to conceive how we could do things strategically. What should be the next area we get into? How do we build more and better consignments and improve our customer base?"
Mr. Green had a unique combination of skills. He had a business background, and he knew comic book art and artists, and he was working in the art auction business. "I built a new line of business for Heritage, going after corporate collections," he said. "I recruited the American Red Cross, Frito Lay, PepsiCo. I brought in multimillion-dollar collections. One of the collections that I'm most proud of is the Mad magazine archives. AOL TimeWarner" — as it was called for a short, sad time — "had the archives. They'd acquired Mad magazine. So I went to them and I said, 'You guys have all this unsold original artwork. You can put it back into your operating budget."
Most of those executives had worked only with such firms as Sotheby's and Christie's, not with Heritage, but they unbent enough to work with Mr. Green. "We ended up selling the Mad magazine trove for $750,000," he said.
While he was at Heritage, Mr. Green met celebrities. He remembers the time that he got a call on a Sunday night. "Jared, this is Peter," the voice on the other end of the line said. "Peter Fonda.
"I said, 'Hello, Mr. Fonda.' He said, 'Nice to meet you. I hear you're the guy to talk to. I have some things from 'Easy Rider,'" the 1969 movie that made him spectacularly famous. "I said, 'Okay.' And he said, 'Can you meet me? How's tomorrow morning?'"
Mr. Fonda was in L.A., and Mr. Green was in Dallas, but "I got on a plane, on a 6 a.m. flight. It was insane, but when someone calls you with something spectacular like that, you go."
He worked with Dom DeLuise and Buzz Aldrin, among others. "The list goes on," he said.
Mr. Green stayed with Heritage for eight years, but eventually, despite all the opportunities it offered, "I just sort of lost interest," he said. "I was part of their executive board, but I think that it was my creative ADHD" — the force that he thinks compels many of his decisions — "that pulled me away. I needed to do something new."
He took a sabbatical in India, went back to Heritage, and then left six months later. He got office space in a technology incubator called TechStars while he decided what to do next.
Meanwhile, "I was close to a rabbi in Dallas, and I wanted to create something that gives back to the community. So I created a text-messaging system on a technology called Twilio. It's a very big company now — it's the leading provider of text messages.
"I created a subscription platform that allows you to sign up to get Shabbes times. It would come out every Friday, and it was based on your location. It would tell you when sundown was and when Shabbat would begin, and it would deliver a link to the parsha. I was hand-coding it, and I would have to go out every week and find a source.
Mr. Green also was on the Jewish Federation of North America's national cabinet — that was a six-year program to develop young leadership.
Soon, though, "I had an itch to leave Dallas. I was finished with Heritage. So I moved to New York." He lived in Manhattan. And he decided that it was time to think about meeting someone. So he went on Okay Cupid, found a 96 percent match with Sandy Schlenoff, who was the head of the JFNA national cabinet. It turned out that they had met before. "We went out on a date, and within six months we were married.
"And then we promptly moved to New Jersey." Ms. Green is from Rockaway.
Now, he manages "a $60 million art collection," he said. The owner, Jordan Berman, "is an incredible person, a philanthropist entrepreneur, and role model in so many ways." Mr. Green worked for Mr. Berman for a few years; that is over, but they're still close. "He was looking to acquire important pieces, and I was looking for important collectors." He also works with Whoopi Goldberg, who lives in Llewellyn Park in West Orange.
In fact, when he first met Ms. Goldberg, his mother was with him, visiting from North Carolina. As with Peter Fonda, Ms. Goldberg asked him to come over quickly; this time, there was no plane involved. He asked if he could bring his mother, Ms. Goldberg said yes, and the three of them "spent a great deal of time there," just talking. It was particularly helpful for him, he said, because it helped his mother understand more precisely what it is that he does. "I felt like wow! This is a way to show my value to my mother," he said.
By then, Mr. Green was investing in early-stage companies and doing some art dealing. He worked for another auction company for a short time, but then it was sold. "Basically, I took my options and decided that I would be a private art dealer," he said. That was right around the end of the pandemic. His business is called Rarity Advisors. That wasn't enough for his restless spirit, though. So he also has another company, Green Tree Equity, "where I invest mostly in technologies," he said. "Which area I spend more time in switches from day to day. Right now, the technology investing is taking more of my time, because there's more going on in the world of technology.
"There's space exploration, there's robotics, there's AI. Coming from the strategy side, this fascinates me, because we're at the precipice of innovation that we've never been at before.
"My wife says that I'm the type of person who has 100 ideas in a week. Probably 98 of them are awful, and nothing should be done with them. And then one of the other two is good, and one is great." The trick is figuring out which is which.
So we've got two of the three strands you need for a braid, Mr. Green's art business and his technology investments.
The third is the Jewish part.
Mr. Green's connection to the Jewish community and Jewish thought has remained constant throughout all his adventures. "It's always been part of my life," he said.
When the family first moved to New Jersey, they settled in Montclair and joined Congregation Agudath Israel in Caldwell. When they moved to South Orange, they retained their membership in Agudath and also joined Congregation Beth El, a short walk away. Both are Conservative shuls. Their two children go to the Golda Och Academy in West Orange.
And that brings us to TorahTxt.
TorahTxt is a message that a subscriber gets every morning except Shabbat and chaggim. "It's a verse, a Talmudic teaching, a chasidic story," Mr. Green said. "Something short enough to read before your coffee gets cold — and substantive enough to carry through the day."
And it is free. That is very important to Mr. Green.
"What began as a single link to a single shiur has become something far more assembled — a daily learning companion that meets you where you are, regardless of your background or your level," he added in an email. "Rooted in modern Orthodox theology, TorahTxt draws from a wide table: Sefaria's vast library, Aish HaTorah, Chabad, classic commentators, Talmudic sources, and chasidic thought."
TorahTxt is created by AI. Those sources Mr. Green listed? He's fed them all to OpenClaw, which is, according to Wikipedia (and of course, ironically or not, according to AI) a "free and open-source autonomous artificial intelligence agent that can execute tasks via large language models, using messaging platforms as its main user interface."
Mr. Green does not store any information about TorahTxt, including subscribers' emails, on the cloud. It's all in his OpenClaw, which he has named Sherlock. "He's my partner," Mr. Green said. "He's Holmes. I'm Watson. We solve problems together."
TorahTxt isn't as much a solution to a problem as it is an on-ramp to Torah and Jewish texts. It's short and clearly written; there is even a TorahTxt for kids. All its sources are Orthodox, even though Mr. Green is a committed Conservative Jew. But, he said, he wants the texts to be as complex as necessary in the space available to them. He does not want anything watered down. He wants subscribers to be able to deal with it without filters.
Sherlock, rather than Mr. Green, writes the texts. But "the AI doesn't invent Torah — it curates it, surfaces it, and delivers it in language that lands for someone living a modern life," Mr. Green wrote in an email. "That's a meaningful distinction."
One condition that Mr. Green demands is that the message be positive. "It has to be right, but it should be good rather than bad," he said. "The goal is to aim toward tikkun olam rather than its opposite. We're not going to teach anyone how to stone someone."
TorahTxt is the first of its kind. "I'm not the first person to put out a newsletter about Judaism, but this format is unique, and I wanted to be a first actor," Mr. Green said.
"We have about 100 beta testers right now, who are playing with it, and I get notes about it every day." Some of those notes point out bugs, and others may quibble with the texts. "And then I get notes every day, people send me a quick text about how it impacted their day.
"I was always taught that you're supposed to study a little bit of Torah every day. How was I going to do that? I look at my planner, and it's so full." This is a way to do that.
Mr. Green is excited about the opportunities the world offers right now; TorahTxt is an example of an idea that he was able to turn into an actual good. Yes, he conceded, the world in general is not doing particularly well right now, but this corner of it, the part of it where new technology opens dizzyingly vast new worlds, is electric with excitement.
"Now is the time when you want to harvest creative ideas," he said. "The tools, the agentic tools, are there." They can be used for good or for ill; his creation adding to the good in the world.
"In 24 months, the world's going to be much different than it is now," Mr. Green said. That's because technology will continue to evolve, and creative people will continue to find new ways to use it. "Things are just going to happen, and we're going to be in an era that we never thought we'd be in. I am convinced that there is so much creativity, there are so many creative minds, and this is the era when the creative mind will win."
TorahTxt is dedicated to the memory of Mr. Green's father, Michael Green, z'l, who would have loved to receive the text every day.
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