Software
MishTok
Jewish Law, Mapped
Growing up observant, I noticed something that bothered me: people in my community were following rules they couldn't trace to a source. Was it actual halakha? A family custom? Something a teacher said once that calcified into obligation? The only way to find out was years of yeshiva study or finding a rabbi willing to walk you through the texts. Most people did neither — they just kept doing what they were told.
MishTok exists to fix that. It maps who said what, when, and why — across the entire halakhic tradition. Every opinion is attributed to its source, plotted in time, and contextualized against the broader conversation. The primary sources become accessible without requiring a decade of specialized training to navigate them.
The platform is non-denominational and non-prescriptive. It doesn't tell you what to do. It shows you what the tradition actually says, and who said it.
The Opinion Map
The core feature: every recorded opinion plotted on a lenient-to-strict axis, grouped by era, and sized by the scholar's influence on later decisors. Patterns emerge that are invisible when reading individual texts.
May one recite Shema after dawn but before sunrise?
Live interactive element from the platform
Prayer / Laws of Shema
May one recite Shema after dawn but before sunrise?
8 opinions across 4 eras · 4 Ashkenazi · 4 Sephardi
Question page with synopsis and metadata
Scholar Profiles
Every scholar in the dataset has a dedicated profile page — biography, geographic origin, active period, decisional tendencies, intellectual lineage, and the full list of their recorded opinions across all topics.
R' Yosef Karo
Early Acharonim · Sephardi · 1488–1575 CE
847 opinions · 156 topics
Author of the Shulchan Aruch, the most widely accepted code of Jewish law. Born in Toledo, Spain; settled in Safed, Israel after the Spanish expulsion. His Beit Yosef is a comprehensive commentary on the Tur.
Decisional Profile
Works
Shulchan Aruch, Beit Yosef, Kesef Mishneh, Maggid Meisharim + 2 more
Lineage
Teachers: R' Yaakov bei Rav
Students: Rema (R' Moshe Isserles), R' Moshe di Trani
Scholar Timeline — Interactive SVG from the platform
Topic Coverage
698 topics spanning the entirety of Orach Chaim — daily Jewish law covering prayer, Shabbat, holidays, blessings, and the structure of the day. Each topic maps to a siman in the Shulchan Aruch, the primary code of Jewish law.
Topic density heatmap — interactive
Muktzeh on Shabbat
14 questions · 89 opinions
Cooking and Shabbat preparation
11 questions · 72 opinions
Carrying in a public domain
9 questions · 64 opinions
Lighting Shabbat candles
8 questions · 53 opinions
Havdalah and Motzei Shabbat
7 questions · 48 opinions
Kiddush and the Shabbat meal
12 questions · 71 opinions
Permissible activities on Shabbat
10 questions · 66 opinions
Shabbat boundaries (techum)
6 questions · 38 opinions
Topic browser — interactive
Technical
Built with React Router on Cloudflare Workers backed by a D1 database. The data pipeline uses NLP-powered extraction that processed hundreds of primary halakhic sources — identifying scholars, opinions, reasoning, and relationships between rulings. Deployed globally on Cloudflare's edge network with sub-100ms response times.