Introducing Bavl

Learning Across Boundaries

Translation has always been one of the hidden engines of Jewish life. Every page of Torah we learn in other languages exists because someone carried it across a boundary of words. Translation is not just substitution—it is the work of making thought breathe again for new readers.

Over the past four years, I’ve poured myself into research, experimentation, and teaching at the intersection of Torah and new technology. That work has taken me deep into the frontiers of AI and opened doors to Torah learning that I never imagined I could walk through.

Bavl is one fruit of that journey.

Bavl.pro is a next-generation translation tool that processes long texts—tens or hundreds of thousands of words at a time—producing professional-grade drafts of surprising strength, reliability, and efficiency.

My father, Jerry Weinberg z”l, was a master educator who taught high school history in Jewish schools for most of his career. A lifelong bibliophile, a love that was passed down to me, taught him to recognize clear patterns across history, which led to one of his more memorable sayings: “If you don’t learn and understand history, it’s bound to repeat itself.”

Looking at the history of technology and innovation across centuries—where often Torah learning has benefited from the outset—we find that:

when speed rises, cost fall, and quality holds steady—or even improves—we stand at the threshold of enormous change. Economies shift, societies shift, cultures shift. We are living at that threshold now.

While the world is aflurry with new tools, AI-hype, and an endless stream of “potential”, what makes Bavl different is your “voice”. Bavl learns your gold standard from your previous work, so that drafts come out already aligned to your style, language, and formatting. That means translators, editors, publishers, and other professionals can skip the most tedious early stages of a project and focus instead on what really matters: sharpening, clarifying, and making the text resonate.

Far from replacing translators, Bavl makes their expertise more valuable and their time more efficient. It does the heavy lifting of the first draft so that the human mind can spend its time where only it belongs: in judgment, nuance, and meaning.

An intense labor of love, Bavl was built in collaboration with my dear friends, Rabbis Elli Fischer and Nate Fein, along with the advice and guidance of experts from various fields, including translation, technology, publishing, and Torah, such as Fred Goldman and Dr. Elan Barenholtz.

Rabbi Fischer, a professional translator and editor himself, has already utilized Bavl multiple times in both halakhic and academic works, and it has reduced his workload by more than half while preserving his high-quality translation style, terminology, and nuance.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been pushing Bavl’s limits by drawing on Sefaria’s free database to produce full-length translations of classic, public-domain sefarim. These are works I’ve always wanted to learn, but never felt my Hebrew was strong enough for. With other tools—Google Translate, Gemini, even ChatGPT—the process would have been painfully slow, requiring line-by-line babysitting, and plagued by resets, hallucinations, and generic “model” language. Bavl, by contrast, holds steady across an entire book, producing drafts already tuned to my style—or yours—with remarkable speed and reliability.

Next week, we will be launching a beta program for a select group of translators, publishers, and other professionals who frequently require reliable first-draft translations. Beta users will receive complimentary credits to start, discounted rates based on potential commitments, and early access in exchange for honest feedback over the next few weeks. Today, Bavl supports Hebrew-to-English and will soon add English-to-Hebrew, followed by expansion into other global language pairings.

The promise here is not abstract. Bavl is already saving translators and editors hours of work. Beyond translation alone, it is helping to enrich Torah study and accelerate the pace at which learners can encounter, understand, and appreciate the breadth of our texts.

If you’d like to be part of this first cohort or have any questions, please reach out to me at dave@bavl.pro.

Shabbat Shalom,
Dave