After a “hot” Shabbat last week, when Jews around the world sit in synagogue this Saturday, they will hear a Torah reading, Parashat Va’era, that is comparatively lukewarm. At least that’s according to a “heatmap” of the Torah created by Rabbi Daniel Bogard that shows users which chapters of the Torah have the most commentary using a color-coded map. Last week’s Parashat Shemot — the first reading in the Book of Exodus and one of the top 10 most-commentaried parashot — was cornflower blue. This week’s is a pale sky blue. The start of the Book of Genesis, Parashat Bereishit, the most discussed parasha, is a deep azure. 

A self-described geek since birth, Bogard, the rabbi at Central Reform Congregation in St. Louis has long been drawn to technology — and to helping others with it. During the pandemic, he leapt into action, holding Zoom tutorials for fellow rabbis and writing a free Guide to Live Streaming for the Perplexed. His work supporting other clergy drew attention from Rabbi Geoffrey Mitelman, the founding director of Sinai and Synapses. Mitelman invited him to apply for the organization’s “Deepening Jewish Education in the Digital Age” grant, allowing Bogard to dive deeper into his geekdom. 

Last month, Bogard released his latest tool, Torah Heatmap.

“I have always wanted, for a really long time, a quick way of seeing in a given Torah portion where the Jewish conversation has centered around,” Bogard told eJewishPhilanthropy. “There are always a handful of verses in every Torah portion that get the vast majority of the Midrash and the commentary and where Rashi focuses and so on and so forth, and there wasn’t an easy way to see where those places are.”

Launched in 2013 and incubated at Clal—The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, Sinai and Synapses provides classes, programs, grants and fellowships at the intersection of science and Judaism.

“The challenge in the Jewish community is not getting Jews excited about science, it’s getting them excited about Judaism,” Mitelman said.

For a decade, Sinai and Synapses has supported traditional scientists with initiatives that overlap with Judaism, but in 2025, the group launched the “Deepening Jewish Education in the Digital Age” grant, providing support and guidance to communities, schools, camps or synagogues creating digital initiatives and tools for Jewish education.

As new technology enters the equation, rabbis and educators need to make sure technology is rolled out correctly, Mitelman said. “The way in which, for example, social media developed over the last 10 years was problematic, so how do we make sure that we don’t make the same mistakes with AI?”

That said, he added, social media has many positives, including being the method many people found out about Sinai and Synapses. “In the same way that email made communication so much easier, the printing press made dissemination of information so much easier, what are the ways in which AI can be used effectively?”

Sinai and Synapses is funded by the John Templeton Foundation, whose founder was Christian, but who adopted a pluralistic view of religion. The foundation has supported many Sinai and Synapses initiatives, including Scientists in Synagogues. In 2025, Sinai and Synapses received $671,879 of the $8 million offered to initiatives as part of the foundation’s Cultivating Character in the Digital Age funding. It was the only Jewish organization of the nine projects that were funded.

Bogard was a perfect fit for the grant. At the age of 9, he staked out at “Star Trek” conventions and built his own computer. At age ten, he ran a pre-internet dial-up bulletin board to chat with other geeks, and today he teaches faith and “Star Trek” classes at St. Louis’ Eden Theological Seminary.

If Bogard didn’t go into the rabbinate, tech “was the other world I could have gone into,” he said. “I probably would have a larger bank account.”

He had already been tinkering with AI when he received the grant. “What I ended up coming up [with as a project] was just an idea to help fund what I was already doing,” he said, “to essentially give me…a slush fund to experiment with emerging AI technologies and tools and then pass on those learnings and best practices to rabbis and educators and Jewish professionals of all stripes.”

Torah Heatmap came about during a Wednesday staff meeting, when Bogard was playing with the AI-coding program Google Antigravity, and within 15 minutes, the program was born.

Two years ago, creating a program like Torah Heatmap would have cost $10,000-$20,000 and taken months to build, Bogard said. The pro-version of Google Antigravity that he used to create the program costs under $20 a month, and registering the web domain cost $22. Since launching on Dec. 10, the site has over 10,000 hits.

It’s “nice to feel like I’m contributing to the endeavor of Torah study,” Bogard said. “It’s so cross-denominational. It’s not like this is a tool for Reform colleagues or Orthodox colleagues. Anyone engaging in Torah study and not just the study of the source text is going to find this to be a useful tool for them.”

The program creates heatmaps based on different commentaries, which are pulled from the Jewish text website Sefaria. If you click on the chapters on the Torah Heatmap, it takes you directly to the corresponding verses on Sefaria.

“Making our data available for others to use creatively has always been a core part of Sefaria’s mission,” Sara Wolkenfeld, chief learning officer at Sefaria, told eJP. “Our developer portal allows people to easily access our data and use it the way Torah is meant to be used – to create more Torah and more learning opportunities.”

Often the first lines of a Torah portion have the most commentary, but it’s not always that obvious, Bogard said. Putting different commentaries next to one another provides a snapshot of what people were talking about during different generations. 

So users can see, for instance, that while there are far more Midrashic commentaries on the narrative-focused Books of Genesis and Exodus, Talmudic and legal commentaries are more interested in the rules-filled books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy. The medieval biblical exegete Rashi dedicated the largest number of his commentaries — 550 of them — to Exodus’ Parashat Mishpatim.

Users can also reach out to Bogard to add different commentaries. Within 20 minutes, he can put them on the site.

“Sometimes we make the mistake, particularly in the United States, of making the Protestant move when it comes to Torah and treating the source text as the end-all, be-all,” he said. “And I very much understand Torah instead in an expansive sense. It is a conversation through time between generations of Jews about how we are supposed to live these very limited days that we have, and what Torah Heatmap gives anyone is the ability to immediately see where that conversation is happening and jump right in.”

Bogard expects his latest creation to be just one of many, once more people get access to and comfort with technology. “This is just the very beginning of how AI is going to impact our world and the conversation that is Torah,” he said.