Talmud Scroller

Inspiration

The Talmud is one of the great books of the world, and one of the hardest to start. A full page is dense Aramaic with no punctuation. Every day, learners around the world read the same page together (Daf Yomi), and many more would like to join but don't know where to begin. We wanted a daily habit that takes five minutes on a phone.

What it does

Talmud Scroller turns the Talmud into a short daily feed. Each card shows a line of the original Aramaic or Hebrew with our own plain-English explanation, and a "Go deeper" note on key words, context and related sources.

• Daily reading: a short set of cards, swiped like a feed.
• Daf Yomi: today's page of the worldwide daily cycle, in English, free for everyone.
• Reading plans: multi-day plans, one day unlocking after the last.
• Library: every tractate of the Babylonian Talmud plus Pirkei Avot, one passage per swipe.
• Common Ground: a free daily page showing what the Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Greek and Stoic texts say about the same theme, side by side.
• No account, no ads, no tracking. Works offline.

How we built it

Expo and React Native with Expo Router, RevenueCat for the Plus subscription, and EAS Update so new readings and features reach phones without a new build. The Library books are served as static JSON from Cloudflare Pages and cached on the phone. The Aramaic comes from the open Wikisource edition via Sefaria (CC BY-SA); the English explanations and the Daf Yomi English are our own, written ahead in batches and checked by a scholar pass.

Money strategy (HAMM Award)

A free ladder that earns trust before it asks for money:

• Every day's reading is free.
• Day 1 of every plan is free.
• The opening of every book is free.
• Today's Daf Yomi page is free for everyone.

Plus, sold through RevenueCat (monthly, or yearly with a 7-day free trial), opens every plan day, "Go deeper" on every card and the whole Library. A second, non-subscription income comes from a "Get the printed edition" link on each book (Amazon Associates, UK or US store by the phone's region), so readers who prefer paper still support the app.

Peace Prize

Talmud Scroller, Gita Scroller and Scroll the Gurbani share one free Common Ground page. Each day it takes one theme (kindness, forgiveness, the stranger, anger, honesty, humility, contentment) and shows what the Jewish, Hindu and Sikh texts say about it side by side, each in its own script and words, with the source, alongside ancient Greek, Norse and Stoic writing. A Jewish reader of the Talmud app, a Hindu reader of the Gita app and a Sikh reader of the Gurbani app meet the same page on the same day, so each learns from the others' tradition in its own words rather than second-hand. Every passage is quoted from the text itself, never paraphrased into agreement, each links back to where it comes from, and the page is never behind a paywall.

Challenges

Writing plain English for a text this hard, and keeping the Daf Yomi English ahead of the daily cycle. Common Ground needed a careful, respectful choice of passages: every one is cut from the Library's own files and was checked in a scholar pass.

What's next

Daf Yomi English for every tractate as the cycle reaches it, more plans, and Android.

For judges

Plus has a 7-day free trial, so you can open everything without paying.

Built With

• cloudflare
• expo.io
• react-native
• revenuecat
• typescript