About Wellsprings

Wellsprings is a free public tool for exploring how Jewish ideas developed — across Kabbalah, Halacha, and the customs of Jewish life — over time and place. It complements Sefaria's source-text reading experience by focusing on understanding: what the central ideas mean, who shaped them, where they were developed, and how they traveled.

The site is built around five main doors: The Jewish Spring (the unified map of Halacha, Minhag, Kabbalah, and the sages — multi-select pickers let you trace how any combination of ideas developed across time and place), Concepts (the central ideas of Jewish thought with layered explanations), Meet the Sages (745 figures from Moshe Rabbenu through the present, each with a clickable life-journey scrubber that names the empire ruling each city at the time the sage lived there), Places (the cities and yeshivot where these ideas were developed), and Etz Chaim (the whole mesorah as a single zoomable vertical tree).

For the long view, the Etz Chaim page renders the whole mesorah — Torah miSinai through the modern era — as a single zoomable vertical tree, with every sage hanging off their generation and their most-identified concepts as leaves on each branch.

The story here is how ideas developed— how they were elaborated, refined, re-read, applied, and re-interpreted across generations. Where there are genuine differences of reading, we record them, but we don't frame the story as a string of disputes. The kabbalistic tradition is a conversation across centuries, and that's the conversation we're trying to surface.

Source texts come from Sefaria. Every passage on this site links back to its source there so you can read it in context. Where original manuscripts or significant writings are available at the Baal Shem Tov Center library, you'll find a deep-link there too.

Place locations, life-journey stops, lay-friendly summaries, and the composition dates anchoring works on the map are curated by hand and reviewed before being published.

The connections from passages to ideas — “this paragraph discusses tzimtzum” or “this Mishnah discusses shechitah” — are identified by a language model (Anthropic's Claude Haiku 4.5) analyzing the Hebrew text of every passage in the corpus against a curated list of concepts. Each tagged passage records a confidence score and whether the concept's name appears explicitly in the text.

The map shows ideas in strict chronological order — pin 1 is the earliest work in which the concept is identifiably discussed, then successive pins trace where the idea traveled. Each pin's popup shows how many passages in that work explicitly use the concept's term versus develop the concept without naming it directly, so you can see at a glance whether a work coined the language or carried earlier groundwork forward.

Known limitations: machine extraction may miss subtle treatments, over-tag passages that mention a concept incidentally, or apply the wrong category label. Lurianic doctrines in particular have a long tail of conceptual antecedents in earlier kabbalah that may show up as early pins — these aren't mistakes per se, but they do mean “first pin” should be read as “earliest discussion the extractor identified,” not necessarily “the figure who developed the doctrine.” We're continuously improving the underlying prompts and rules; if you spot a passage that's clearly tagged wrong, please reach out via the Baal Shem Tov Center and we'll review.

The site is a work in progress and the underlying data evolves as extraction passes complete and curation deepens. If you cite it in a paper or syllabus, please include the access date and the data version so a reader can return to the same snapshot.

Wellsprings (Baal Shem Tov Center).
Data version 2026-05.
Accessed YYYY-MM-DD.
https://torah-graph-ten.vercel.app

Corrections, additions, and methodology questions are warmly welcomed via the Baal Shem Tov Center.

Wellsprings is being developed as part of the Baal Shem Tov Center for Jewish Studies and Digital Humanities suite of tools for learners. Feedback welcome.