a remarkably lame smart search fail ...
QUERY: talmud on creating and destroying multiple worlds
I know this exists in some from
SYNOPSIS: The provided articles do not contain sufficient information to address the query about the Talmud's perspective on creating and destroying multiple worlds. While one article mentions the concept of "multiple worlds"[1], it is in the context of a chaplain's role and does not relate to the Talmud or Jewish teachings. The other articles primarily focus on the concept of destruction in various contexts[2][3][4][5], but do not provide any information about the Talmud or the creation and destruction of multiple worlds. Given the lack of relevant information, it would be advisable to try a different query or search for sources that specifically address Talmudic teachings on this topic.
[1] Christopher Swift, Hospital Chaplaincy in the Twenty-First Century, 2nd Edition: The Crisis of Spiritual Care on the NHS (Routledge, 2016), 129.
[2] John Peter Lange et al., A Commentary on the Holy Scriptures: Jeremiah (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2008), 421.
[3] H. D. M. Spence-Jones, ed., Index, The Pulpit Commentary (London; New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1919), 101.
[4] D. A. Carson, ed., NIV Biblical Theology Study Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2018), 2416.
[5] R. Albert Mohler Jr., ed., The NIV Grace and Truth Study Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2021), 1870.
Come on - chaplaincy, an index … the Commentary on Jeremiah is the only potentially relevant source. The key word Talmud appears to be completely ignored.
Perplexity provided a reasonable answer with a reference; asking a follow-up question on the reference I get:
The reference to the creation and destruction of multiple worlds in Midrash Rabbah can be found in Bereishit (Genesis) Rabbah 3:712. This specific passage is part of a larger commentary on the book of Genesis, which is the first book of the Torah.
In this Midrash, Rabbi Abbahu discusses the verse from Ecclesiastes 3:11, which states, "He has made everything beautiful in its time." Rabbi Abbahu interprets this verse to mean that God created and destroyed various worlds before creating our own1.
The exact text of Bereishit Rabbah 3:7 states:
"Rabbi Abbahu said: This teaches that the Holy One, blessed be He, created worlds and destroyed them, created worlds and destroyed them, until He created these [i.e., our world and heaven]. He said: 'These please me, those did not please me.'"2
This interpretation suggests that God engaged in a process of creation and destruction before arriving at our current world, which met His standards. The Midrash does not specify the exact number of worlds created and destroyed, leaving room for various interpretations and discussions among Jewish scholars and mystics.
This concept has been influential in Jewish thought, particularly in mystical traditions, and has led to further explorations of the nature of creation, divine will, and the purpose of our world in God's grand design.
Citations:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10520201/
Which proves that the information I was looking for exists and that Logos somehow went wildly astray answering a Jewish question. No, I don't expect Logos to match Perplexity … but I do expect it to stay on topic. I wonder if this is a bug rather than the normal difference in intended functionality
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
Comments
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This search would have worked great had there been an article anywhere in our 200,000 book catalog that discussed creating and destroying multiple worlds in the Talmud. But, so far as I can tell, no such article exists in our entire ecosystem, so we could not answer the question.
There are lots of ways we could solve that problem:
- We could change the behavior of Smart Synopsis so that if it couldn't find the answer in the Logos ecosystem, it would fall back to the AI's own "knowledge" to answer the question instead. Synopsis is deliberately conservative and sticks rigidly to content in the library, so it won't do that currently.
- We could recognize that "talmud" equates to resource(s) in our library, and we could carry out a search both for secondary and primary literature (let's say one search for "creating and destroying multiple worlds in the Talmud" across the whole library, and one for "creating and destroying multiple worlds" restricted to Talmud resources). We'd love to do this, but that would require us "teaching" the AI to search our Logos catalog, which is a lot harder than it sounds.
- We could put more weight on searching for the meaning of the query rather than the words in the query. We already use AI to rank articles according to their meaning, of course, but Smart Search and Synopsis is a multi-step process, and if we can introduce AI assistance earlier in the process, that could improve things significantly. I think it would lessen the problem of finding references to multiple worlds outside the Talmud, for example.
- We could include more content in our database, either by adding more books to our ecosystem or by integrating external sources such as Wikipedia. We have 250,000+ books, which is a lot, but by searching the entire web, Perplexity has the equivalent of about 200 billion books from which to get its data. That said, restricting our search to published books certainly helps make its output much more reliable.
Of these improvements, we've been actively working on (3) for the last couple of months and will hopefully be able to deliver that improvement in the next month or two.
We'd love to build a tool closer to Perplexity, although Perplexity has spent about $500 million trying to solve that problem, and the company is valued at about $9 billion, so we can't compete on tech or the quantity of data. However, we do have a more consistent quality of content.
We're putting considerable energy into trying to figure out how to introduce these kinds of features while making the most of the Logos ecosystem and guarding against hallucinations, and that work is ongoing. There are very hard problems, and the technology is constantly changing, so it's hard to predict how successful we will be. But these are problems we absolutely want to solve and are actively working on.
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MJ,
The following Smart search produced a nice synopis:
Jewish tradition on God creating and destroying worlds.
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Thanks for your explanation. What bothered me was the apparent ignoring of the term "Talmud" in the search which allowed it to weave wildly through options. Your work on 3 should help keep it focused in the right direction.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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Thank you. It does do better.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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FWIW, I tested your query with one of our internal prototypes, which might one day develop into something that improves Smart Search/Synopsis. It came back with this.
Based on the sources, here's an explanation of the Talmudic perspective on creating and destroying multiple worlds:
The Talmud indicates that God created and destroyed multiple worlds, saying, "I am satisfied with some of these, but those others do not please me." This suggests a process of progressive improvement in creation, with worlds becoming more nearly perfect over time. [2] The Jewish tradition views the succession of worlds as having an indefinite extent, with the future always portrayed as an improvement upon the present. This principle of advance to a higher state governs the birth, development, end, and rebirth of successive universes. [2] As Rabbi Abbahu noted, God would say to each world He created before ours, "This one pleases me, though the others did not!" - highlighting the progressive nature of creation. [2]
Interestingly, many critics believe the Bible itself accepts the idea of a sequence of worlds. Some interpret the "tohu va-vohu" (formless and void) in Genesis as debris from an old world, from which God created a new one. Judah Halevi even declared that from a religious perspective, a believer in this succession of worlds is blameless. [2]
The footnotes are all to Elijah Benamozegh, Elijah Benamozegh: Israel and Humanity, ed. Maxwell Luria and Bernard McGinn, trans. Maxwell Luria, The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York; Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1995).
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fantastic response
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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