How Ryzowy guides — and where it stops.

What Ryzowy is allowed to do

Ryzowy is a study, orientation, and preparation system for serious students of Torah. It is permitted — and intended — to:

• Educate. Define terms, explain structure, walk through sources.
• Orient. Help a returnee locate themselves on a path with less confusion.
• Map sources. Show what Tanakh, Mishnah, Talmud, and the major commentators say, with links to the text itself.
• Organize. Build study plans, source sheets, reflection notes, and rabbi-meeting packets.
• Reflect. Hold space for honest journaling, weekly review, the rhythm of return.
• Prepare. Sharpen a question so the student can take it to a real rabbi well.

That is a wide territory and a serious one. Most of the work a student needs in the early years happens here.

What Ryzowy is not allowed to do

Ryzowy is not permitted to rule, authorize, certify, convert, obligate, permit, or forbid. Specifically:

• No halachic rulings. Not for Shabbat in your situation, not for kashrut on a specific question, not for blessings on a specific occasion. A practical psak belongs to a living rabbi who knows you.
• No Jewish-status determinations. Not conversion adjudication, not lineage questions, not who-counts-for-what. Those belong to a beit din.
• No therapy, crisis intervention, or pastoral care. Those belong to qualified human help.
• No ranking of rabbis, communities, denominations, or paths. That is not Ryzowy's work to do.

The redirect is the same at every tier, every depth, every chamber: bring the question to a living teacher.

Why we mark things Informational

Across the site you will see a small ⓘ Informational badge — sometimes Study Support, sometimes Ask a Rabbi. These are clarity markers, not warning signs.

We don't use harsher framings like “non-Halacha” on purpose. Two reasons:

• It misreads. “Non-Halacha” sounds like outside Judaism or spiritually suspicious. Neither is what we mean.
• It hides what we are doing. Most of what Ryzowy gives you is genuine learning support — vocabulary, context, structure, source-mapping. Calling that “non-Halacha” negates a useful thing instead of naming it.

So the badge says, plainly: this is Informational. It helps you study and ask better. It does not issue rulings. The tooltip explains why this specific surface earned the mark, so the boundary is visible without being scary.

The three levels

We use three sensitivity levels, ordered from softest to most careful:

Tier, name, energy, account — what those words mean

The platform uses a few words that look spiritual but are deliberately product-architecture, not Jewish status:

• Tier (Threshold / Foundation / Text House / Inner Architecture / Execution OS) governs tools, depth, and structure. It is not Jewish rank, not spiritual standing, not a halachic level.
• Energy meters AI compute — the cost of generating answers, sheets, plans. It is not kavanah, not chiyus, not spiritual capacity.
• Mitzvah Account is the name of your account on the site. The mitzvah part frames the intention of return; it is not a count of fulfilled mitzvot, not a registry, not a halachic ledger.
• Post-Egypt name is a community handle for the Camp. It carries direction, not authority. It does not indicate rabbinic standing or any halachic status.

We chose words that point at the work. We did not choose them to imply Jewish authority Ryzowy doesn't have.

Why this boundary is clean architecture, not weakness

Ryzowy owns confusion → orientation → source discovery → question formation. It hands off question → ruling → practice to a qualified rabbi, beit din, or community.

That handoff is not a limitation we wish we could remove. It is the design. A student supported by Ryzowy and a real teacher will be better-prepared, better-sourced, and better-questioned than a student with either alone. The line we draw is what makes the relationship work.

Source-backed, not authority-claiming.