A discussion about whether the Jewish community is ready for AI
Excerpted and edited for length from the 18Forty and American Security Foundation summit on Artificial Intelligence held this past September. The summit featured a panel discussion—moderated by Rabbi Dovid Bashevkin, host of the 18Forty Podcast—with Dr. Moshe Koppel, Dr. Malka Simkovich and Tikvah Wiener.
Moderating the conversation, Rabbi Dovid Bashevkin framed AI as a communal challenge, akin to the advent of the printing press in the fifteenth century, and pressed the question of how the Jewish people should respond.
Dr. Moshe Koppel is a computer scientist, Talmud scholar and political activist. He is a professor emeritus of computer science at Bar-Ilan University and a prolific author of academic articles and books on Jewish thought, computer science, economics, political science and other disciplines. He is the founding director of Kohelet, a conservative-libertarian think tank in Israel, and he advises members of the Knesset on legislative matters.
Dr. Malka Simkovich is the director and editor-in-chief of the Jewish Publication Society and previously served as the Crown-Ryan Chair of Jewish Studies and director of the Catholic-Jewish Studies program at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. She earned a master’s degree in Hebrew Bible from Harvard University and a doctoral degree in Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism from Brandeis University.
Tikvah Wiener is the CEO of Kadima Coaching, a professional development organization in student-centered learning. Previously, she founded and co-directed The Idea Institute, which, since 2014, has trained close to 2,000 educators in project-based learning and innovative pedagogies. From 2018 through 2023, she was also the head of school of The Idea School, a Jewish, project-based learning high school in Tenafly, New Jersey.
Rabbi Dovid Bashevkin: AI is slowly but surely becoming a part of most of our daily lives, and undoubtedly all of us are wondering: Where does this take us next? How will artificial intelligence shape the future of our lives and the lives of our children?
We are often described as the People of the Book, and our tradition has long been shaped by how we engage with and interpret the written word. At the same time, Judaism makes a unique distinction between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah. So when the printing press emerged in fifteenth-century Europe, it raised a very real and practical question: What does it mean to speak of an Oral Torah when suddenly anything we say can be written down and passed along to future generations? How to understand and respond to the printing press became a major debate in Jewish law.
The Rema Mi’Fano, Rabbi Menachem Azariah da Fano, a kabbalist, was probably the first to weigh in on this, but the debate lasted for centuries: Does “printing” legally qualify as “writing”? This distinction was critical for a get (divorce document) as well as for sifrei Torah, tefillin, and mezuzos, all of which the Torah explicitly requires to be “written.”
Mechkarim BeSifrut HaTeshuvos—a collection of responsa published in 1973, which addressed questions facing the Jewish people over time—cites from the responsa of Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Chajes (19th responsum), where he acknowledges the fact that technological innovation is disruptive. Rabbi Chajes writes that every generation faces its own struggle to adhere to our mesorah while determining how new technological advancements should be understood and integrated.
There are times when there are bursts of innovation, and he says, “ve’ein lecha davar she’ein lo zeman u’makom—there’s nothing that doesn’t have its time and place”: everything is given its time to disrupt the world, and the Jewish people need to figure out how that aligns with Yiddishkeit. Do we retreat, do we move forward, or do we integrate? Throughout history, we’ve had different responses to these challenges.
I would like to start the conversation by asking how your work and life have been affected by the advent of AI.
Dr. Malka Simkovich: There’s a huge panic in academia right now, as well as a stagnancy, as a psychological response to what’s happening with AI. A colleague of mine put in the following to ChatGPT: “Use my own scholarship (and he put in his name) to write a new article on a topic that I am an expert on, in the voice of Malcolm Gladwell.” What ChatGPT put out was so outstanding, so intriguing and well-written with such a good introductory hook that my friend said, “I’m done; I am never writing again. I’ll teach and I’ll engage with my community, but I will not write anymore. It is simply not worth my time. The algorithm has exceeded my own creative capacity.” And he hasn’t written anything since. This was some months ago.
Historian Dr. Malka Simkovich compared the advent of AI to other disruptive technologies such as the introduction of mail and highways in ancient Persia.
On the other extreme, you have older generation academics refusing to use AI, and that’s myopic. It’s unrealistic to think they can get through the next few decades of their careers and just ignore AI. The big question is going to be what happens to those of us in the middle who want to use AI as a tool but also want to believe that we have the capacity for our own creative ideas and that we have something unique to contribute.
I ask myself this question very often, and I’ve tricked myself into thinking that I do have something unique to contribute. And if you sincerely believe that, then you must work outside of AI before you turn to it as a tool.
Tikvah Wiener: For the past ten years, I’ve been focused on student-centered learning, an approach that seeks to change education so that students have greater agency in the classroom. It involves many different components; it’s not one single method or philosophy.
In my work, I am already seeing just how artificial intelligence can simplify this process. Work that took so long without it can now be done quickly, making student-centered learning easier and giving students greater agency.
If you’re any kind of educator, general or Jewish, you can see how differentiating lessons can be made much easier using AI tools. If you go to Khanmigo, Khan Academy’s AI platform, for example, or Magic School, you will find numerous tools available to educators. So one thing that’s already become de rigueur in our workshops is asking how participants are using AI tools for their own work. And then, of course, the conversation shifts to how the kids are using AI tools themselves.
I remember when everyone flooded schools with iPads, and in many cases, the iPads just ended up in a drawer. Now we know that the iPads were not the best idea—because there was no plan. So how do we go into this new technology with a plan? For example, consider a teacher who really doesn’t want to use it. You’re the administrator. Formulate a comprehensive plan for the school. When you ban cell phones, that’s freedom from. What’s freedom to? How do you develop a proactive plan that moves everyone along with you? That’s what I would love to see happen in the field of Jewish education today.
Rabbi Bashevkin: Moshe, I was wondering if you could speak about the genuine panic, almost like the fear of watching a computer do what you have spent your entire life distinguishing yourself by. What is your position on the angst that people feel when they see the magnitude of what is coming?
Dr. Moshe Koppel: I think that angst is completely justified. For those people, and that is most people, who find meaning through the creative work they do, AI is going to be an absolute catastrophe.
There are many potential dangers from AI, but I’m not a crazy “doomer.” The one issue that I think is very frightening is the fact that most people will have absolutely nothing to do with themselves. And I’m not talking about people whose jobs are drudgery in the first place—people who would be perfectly happy to be relieved of them.
I’m talking about people who are doing creative and interesting work and find satisfaction in it. Young people will not be in those professions—whether it’s law, computer programming, medicine, education, all the white-collar jobs. It’s not that the current employees are going to get fired; it’s that the people who are up and coming and learning those things now are not going to get hired. And I’m not talking about the economic effects of this, which I think are minor. The real effects are psychological, in terms of people’s sense of purpose and meaning in life.
This is going to be an absolute catastrophe.
Rabbi Bashevkin: How do you personally use AI in your work?
Dr. Koppel: I use AI essentially in the same way that I used Google until now, except it’s better. Instead of putting a search term into Google, I ask a question to Claude and get back a much better answer. But for the most part, I find that, for me, AI does more harm than good.
For those people, and that is most people, who find meaning through the creative work they do, AI is going to be an absolute catastrophe.
I used to just sit down and write an essay—and I was pretty good at it. Now, I write something between an outline and the full text, quickly and informally. Then, I’ll throw it into ChatGPT and say, “clean this up.” I iterate because it often doesn’t sound like me, so I repeat the process a number of times. By the time I’m finished iterating, A) it has taken me more time than if I had just thought it through more carefully and written it myself, and B) it still doesn’t sound like me. That’s one of the main ways I use it, and it’s bad. It actually is harmful. It saves me nothing, and it makes things worse.
Rabbi Bashevkin: When internet use first began to spread, there was a large gathering within the Chareidi/Chassidic community known as the asifah about the dangers of the internet. If you were to imagine an asifah for the broader Jewish community about the advent of AI—one that fills a baseball stadium with Jews from every stripe and background who are concerned about this question—what should the messaging be?
Tikvah Wiener: If I were to attend the asifah, I would say this: I hear what Moshe is saying, and I hear others who say that AI can be harmful, but I’m a big acolyte of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, zt”l.
And Rabbi Sacks was not a person who spent time in despair. He talked about having hope (which also happens to be my name). Hope is an action verb. Aside from the dangers of AI, we are all living, post–October 7, in very challenging times. I don’t think it’s helpful to live in fear.
Moreover, when we make decisions out of fear, we tend to make bad decisions. So I think if I were gathering the Jewish people, I would remind them that we’ve been in moments before that challenged our notion of what it means to be human. Imagine being a Jew when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. You would have been thinking: What about Bereishit, the story of Creation? But now we have responses to that.
I love this discussion because it’s proactive. And we have an important role to play—to say clearly that we have the Torah, and that everything we do is filtered through that lens.
If I were convening a gathering of the broader Jewish community, I would remind everyone of that and urge us not to live in the darkness.
Panelist Dr. Moshe Koppel warned that once AI becomes a part of daily life, “most people will have nothing to do with themselves.” Pictured, Dr. Koppel seated next to Rabbi Gil Student, OU director of Jewish Media, Publications and Editorial Communications.
Rabbi Bashevkin: I really appreciated that response. Malka, I’m curious specifically about historical precedents from your vantage point as a historian how Jewish communities have responded to moments of disruption.
Dr. Simkovich: In ancient times, when writing first appeared, it threw the world into upheaval and eventually changed society in fundamental ways. (Many view writing as a form of technology). But in my view, the second great technological development in this early history is more important, and that is the advent of mail.
The Persians introduced mail at the end of the sixth century BCE and into the fifth century BCE when they built roads for the emperor’s postal system. When the Persians built those highways and used them specifically to dispatch edicts and official statements of the emperor, suddenly people were held accountable to a higher voice than their local homes, neighborhoods and immediate communities. They had to think about a world beyond their immediate reality. Of course, this is way before there was any social media, but the mail of that time was the social media of its day.
This caused people to contend with very big questions about human freedom and accountability and whether they had a unique contribution to make, knowing that there was a higher authority they had to answer to in a much more immediate way. Of course, there were always rulers and emperors, but with the mail system, there was closer connectivity and a sense of more immediate obligation to the host country under which people were living. Also, the concept of mail led people to think about others that they would never have direct connection with. Maybe they’re producing something that threatens us. Or maybe they’re producing something that perfectly aligns with us, and therefore we no longer have anything new to contribute.
Now, there must have been some panic when mail started to show up, but the Jews living under Persian rule in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE used it as an incredible opportunity. Certainly, Jews responded right away to this technology by producing their own writings and disseminating those writings. The end of the Book of Esther is a great example of this, but it’s one of many examples of Jews writing, dispatching, transposing, sharing and translating. It’s not a mistake that the end of the Book of Esther provides a lot of detail about this dissemination and the reaches and the extent to which these letters made their way through this vast empire.
This is what Jews have done for centuries. They have faced massive changes with resilience and creativity. And I don’t want to be too optimistic—it would be against my nature—but the willingness of the Jewish community under Persian rule to adopt this technology and then incorporate it into their own frameworks of thinking really ensured their survival and their unity.
Rabbi Bashevkin: That’s absolutely fascinating. I’ve been thinking about how the human body adapts when it loses one of its senses. G-d forbid, when someone loses sight, their sense of hearing is often sharpened. As AI begins to reshape writing and other creative work, what kinds of training or skills do we need to cultivate in a world where certain forms of thinking and writing are no longer giving people the same opportunities for exercise?
Tikvah Wiener: If you’re standing in front of a classroom and suddenly ChatGPT can provide the information more effectively, then you have a problem. But one of the things we do a lot in our schools is teach the Socratic seminar, which is a student-led discussion in which participants use open-ended questions, close reading and evidence-based dialogue to deepen understanding of a text or idea. It’s an approach guided by thoughtful questioning rather than direct instruction.
We’re Jews, so we like to talk and discuss. When you give students agency, and you teach them how to have conversations, that is actually the antidote to social media and even the antidote to AI, because students have to engage with texts in evidence-based, text-centered ways. So you’re teaching them how to do the research. You have to show them that they have to come to a conversation with both knowledge and skills, and then they have to discuss and take on someone else’s perspective.
So having students collaborate, communicate and be creative with each other is the perfect antidote to AI, which says, essentially, just let me do it all for you. And you as a teacher can now say, “Actually, I need you students to be in this room and present and bring all of you to this conversation.”
Rabbi Bashevkin: Moshe, I’m curious as to which human skills you think are most at risk?
Dr. Koppel: Thousands of years ago, communities consisted of just a few hundred people, and altruism was enough to keep those communities functioning reasonably well. Once you had things like mail and roads and other forms of infrastructure, the size of the community became much larger. And there’s what’s called the Dunbar number. According to British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, people can “handle” up to about 150 relationships. Once you’re in a group that has more than the Dunbar number of about 150, altruism no longer functions sufficiently to keep a society together. At that point, you need to develop social norms—particularly norms regarding commerce and so forth—that make it possible for people who don’t have any kind of kinship relationship with each other to function as a society. In fact, everything that we call social norms developed as a result of communities getting bigger because of transportation and communication.
What’s happening now is that transportation and communication are becoming much more refined, so that essentially you can interact with billions of people. As a result, the communities we have now are generally divided along other lines than we were accustomed to. Once it was proximity. Now people are dividing up into virtual communities—you can be in a community of left-handed knitters, for example.
The algorithm has exceeded my own creative capacity.
We need to start developing new social norms that are appropriate for billions of people. And I don’t think it’s possible for those norms to develop very slowly. The speed with which these changes are happening is on a completely different scale than the scale at which norms generally evolve.
Aside from all this, social skills are getting worse. If people are interacting mostly virtually, walking around with their faces in their phones all day, this leads to really poor social skills. Intellectual skills are also going to get worse—we are growing lazy. Instead of thinking things through, we outsource our thinking to AI. And when that happens, it’s like what happened when we got Waze. Nowadays, even when I drive to the corner, I turn on Waze. I can’t get anywhere without it.
The same thing is going to happen with our intellectual abilities, because we’re farming them out. We’re losing essential skills, and at the same time we’re fundamentally changing the way we interact with people. We’re going to have to evolve norms that regulate the way we do these things so that they don’t end up catastrophically—and I don’t think we’re going to be able to do that in time.
Dr. Simkovich: One thing that AI doesn’t do well right now is express doubt and humility. When you ask AI a question, it might invite you to refine the question, but what the chatbot will ultimately give you is a highly confident answer that leaves you with a sense that it has reached the objective threshold of truth. AI, in that sense, is very unhuman-like, because when we’re in dialogue with another individual, you can gauge, even if you’re speaking over Zoom, facial expressions, body language, intonations, hesitation, doubt and also all those infinite gradations of humility. And then you have many more tools of discernment to assess critically whether you’re going to accept the information you have received.
AI right now is not very insecure. Over time it could become more humanized and say, “I’m not sure this is my answer, but I advise you to go to Claude and Grok.” But that’s not where it is right now.
Rabbi Bashevkin: Tikvah, what do you want to see developing further in Jewish schools to respond to the skills that we need most in the era of AI?
Tikvah Wiener: We don’t really work with curricula. We’ll take any curricula or any hashkafah that a school has, and we’ll ask, “How can we help make your school more student-centered?” It doesn’t really matter what the content and skills are.
You can just tell us, “This is the content I want to teach in this grade; these are the skills I want to develop.” What we’ll actually then encourage is, “How are you also developing the skills of collaboration, communication, creativity and social skills? How are you actually embedding social and emotional learning into the curricula?” If I’m having a conversation with someone, I need to learn that I shouldn’t interrupt them. So these are the kinds of things we’re working with in schools.
Dr. Simkovich: When we discuss whether Judaism is ready to face AI, I wonder to what extent any of this is really specific to Judaism. Much of our discussion has assumed a kind of Jewish exceptionalism that I’m not convinced is relevant here. Other communities—especially communities of faith—are grappling with many of the same questions, and I don’t see that they are less—or more—equipped to confront them.
Rabbi Bashevkin: My answer to Jewish exceptionalism, particularly as it relates to AI, is a one-word answer, and it is Shabbos. You read op-eds every six months in the New York Times and the Washington Post citing people saying, “Wouldn’t it be amazing if we just unplugged for a little bit?” And we are living in communities that are doing just that. We still engage with technology, but we have a day where we really just focus on being, and on our own humanity.
AI can teach us a lot about our own needs, especially the need for Shabbos.
My wife and I put a lot of effort into how we educate and introduce Shabbos, making Shabbos something that is so undeniably awesome. We have even brought back Shabbos parties. My kids wake up every Shabbos morning to cupcakes and cake waiting for them. Interestingly, when we first introduce Shabbos when my kids are young, they react with resistance. They don’t like Shabbos. I’ve had conversations with every one of my children, asking, “Why are you scared about Shabbos coming?” And it’s always the same answer: “We don’t get to watch TV.” So I ask, “What do you get to do? What do we do differently? Am I ever on my computer? Am I ever at work?” And we really put in a great deal of our parenting energy into intentionally transforming Shabbos not just into a fun and exciting time, but into an educational experience.
Dr. Koppel: Shabbat is just one example of how Jews have already developed tools for dealing with the coming crisis well before that crisis ever existed. Here are two more examples.
One of the things I’m worried about, as I mentioned earlier, is intellectual outsourcing. Conveniently, we actually have a tradition of arguing, as in the machloket between Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai and between the Amoraim Rav and Shmuel. We also embrace the idea that learning for its own sake is a value; we think about moral dilemmas, et cetera, and all of this serves us well. We have a tradition of dealing with moral dilemmas, arguing about them, and pondering them. Even with the concerns of outsourcing our moral and intellectual thought, we are in a very good position.
I also mentioned earlier that we won’t have anything to do, and we won’t find meaning in our jobs. But it so happens that there is a Jewish solution: It’s called a kollel. The kollel really does anticipate a society in which there is so much leisure that people won’t find meaning through their professions but will instead find meaning through learning lishmah. It is an institution that will serve us very well. If we adapt the Shabbat model, the Torah learning model, and the kollel model, we will mitigate a lot of the problems we are facing with AI.
Dr. Simkovich: A lot of what we’re talking about right now concerns the need to create real community. Across religious faiths, people agree that it is very hard or impossible to build genuine, authentic communities through a screen. AI can present a false sense of community, but really it’s narcissism when you’re engaging with a robot.
A recent New Yorker article discussed how hundreds of thousands of people are now in the process of “marrying” their chatbots, and millions more report being in “romantic relationships” with them. They’re able to curate the chatbot’s personality to correspond exactly to what they would imagine would be an ideal partner. But that really is narcissism because you can’t get beyond your own preferences, your own projections and your own imagination.
Jewish tradition understands that community is not built based on monolithic ideas. It is built through relationship and dialogue. There’s a shared higher purpose. Judaism doesn’t tolerate monolithic ideas; it demands tension, discussion and debate. And that shared higher purpose is what keeps us together. And for reasons I can’t fully articulate, in-person gatherings that happen on Shabbos take us even further in terms of community building, far beyond what we can accomplish on a screen.
Public Shabbos observance is really the fabric that ties together the Orthodox Jewish community across the board—whether in the Chassidic community or in the Modern Orthodox community. As an Orthodox Jew, I wish there were greater pride in the fact that we have sustained public Shabbos observance—not in a triumphalist way, but in a gracious, suggestive, curious way. How can we share with the rest of the world the wisdom we have accrued through Shabbos observance?
Shabbos is a vehicle for self-acceptance, for familial acceptance, for communal acceptance, for learning to spend time without changing, just being. It is a skill we so desperately need to rediscover.
In This Section
Torah in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
How to Use AI (And How Not to Use It) by Dr. Moshe Koppel
When Rabbis Meet AI by Rachel Schwartzberg
AI in Medicine: Halachic Reflections on Emerging Challenges by Rabbi Dr. Jason Weiner
Spotify for Shiurim? The OU’s AI-Powered App Provides Customized Torah Learning by Sandy Eller