How to Use the Pirkei Avot Learning Guide

Sefaria’s experimental Pirkei Avot Learning Guide aims to make this popular text more accessible to learners of all levels. Sefaria’s engineering and learning teams leveraged AI to create this interactive learning tool.

>>> Learn more about how Sefaria uses AI

The Pirkei Avot Learning Guide summarizes the various commentaries on Pirkei Avot from the Sefaria library, presenting them through an interactive interface. To build this feature, each mishnah (section of the text) and its associated commentaries were input into Google’s Gemini AI model. A prompt was used to identify questions that were a matter of discussion or debate among the commentaries, and to generate summaries of each answer. After this initial step, we also used Claude Opus 3 to assist in discerning which summaries were most pertinent and accurate. All summaries all received some level of human review. 

To use the Pirkei Avot Learning Guide: 

1. Click on any verse in Pirkei Avot to open the Resource Panel.
2. Click on the Guided Learning button to see a selection of questions relevant to the verse in question.
3. Click on any question to see a selection of summarized answers found in the Library.
4. Click on any of the proposed answers to read them in their original context. 

Please note: Each verse has a pre-loaded selection of questions and proposed answers. To continue exploring these, continue to click on other verses in Pirkei Avot.