Using RebbeRoulette.com on My I-Thou-Phone

“When I found the right teacher I felt like I hit the jackpot!” – Most Jews (-:

RebbeRoulette.com uses Chatroulette.com as its jump-off model. “Rebbe” comes to us from the Chassidic movement of the 18th century. Responding to the alienation of the Jewish masses, Baal Shem Tov, and the many schools of Rebbes after him, held out the wisdom they brought to their torah to find, and then compete for the most promising students within their reach. By force of these personalities and the heft of their torah, one of three Jews turned to Chassidism over the next century, little regional pockets of teachers and students.
Rebbe Roulette imagines what it would happen if the great teachers, the MCs of torah and of words, were placed before the glass eye of the webcam to vie for students and for students to clamor for them. Rebbe Roulette pushes the interactivity of the digital classroom by forming a social network from pupils who, using the ‘like’ and ‘follow’ buttons, make pilgrimages to find their teacher who conversely are searching for students to place, by order of their commitment and intelligence, into seating arrangements like the times of old.
Rebbe Roulette uses the forward-pointing arrow of digital technologies to fire a shot backwards where the virtual classroom finally enables us to address the problem of alienation, the self-same problem faced by the Chassids, with the self-same solution. A return to the House of Study under whose roof, tradition teaches, there is more holiness than even the House of Worship.
But let’s let the Rebbes speak for themselves:

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