There is a moment, right before the Shofar blows, where the room goes silent. It is a terrifying, beautiful, expectant silence. We rarely dwell in silence these days. Yes, this moment of anticipation asks us to pause and dwell in silence, the pause between the call of the shofar “T’kiyah” and the blast that is forthcoming.
In our pockets, our phones are likely off or on silent, but we know they are there. They are resting, waiting to be picked up the moment the service concludes. Or even some of us have checked in between. We are in a room full of people, and yet, I wonder: how many of us have brought the “digital world” in with us? How many of us are thinking about the emails we haven’t answered, the notifications we missed, or the curated lives we’ve been scrolling through while we sit in our seats?
We are living through what Dr. Sherry Turkle calls a “perfect storm” of confusion about what is important in our human connections. Turkle, who has spent decades studying our relationship with technology, warns that we are increasingly drawn to the “illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.” Think about that phrase: “the demands of friendship.” Friendship is demanding. It requires showing up when it’s inconvenient. It requires sitting with someone in their grief when you don’t have the right words. It requires the “friction” of disagreement and the labor of reconciliation. But the digital world offers us a bypass. It offers us a “connection” that is always available, always validating, and—crucially—never asks anything of us in return. We are designing technologies that act as companions but possess no soul to share the burden of our lives.
We are living through a “perfect storm,” as Dr. Sherry Turkle puts it, of confusion about what is important in our human connections. We have built a world where we are constantly connected, yet profoundly lonely. We are designing technologies that give us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.
On this Rosh Hashanah, we are commanded to look inward, to do the work of Teshuvah—of return. But return to what? To whom?
One possible metaphor for these tools is as an angel. I know for most of us, our minds immediately present a person with wings, glowing and present. Yet our tradition presents angels in a very different way: our image is profoundly impacted by our American Christian neighbors. But as my colleague Rabbah Sara Wolkenfeld argues, the rabbinic understanding of what an Angel is might be the best parallel to how AI functions in our lives.
Our tradition has a sophisticated way of understanding power and agency. In the Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides gives us a radical definition of an angel. He tells us: “For every force that God imparts to an entity, by which it performs its specific function, is called an angel.”
Consider that: An angel is not a person; it is a function. It has one job. In our tradition, as Rashi notes on Genesis 18:2, “one angel does not carry out two commissions.” One came to heal Abraham, one to rescue Lot, one to announce Sarah’s child. They are specialists. They do not grow. They do not evolve. They simply execute the code of their command. Maimonides emphasizes in the Guide that angels are “separate intellects” (2:6), devoid of physical bodies and, consequently, devoid of the biological and emotional complexity that defines humanity. They are pure, single-purpose forces.
When we interact with Artificial Intelligence, we are interacting with modern-day “functional forces.” To view a chatbot as a “person” is not just a technological misunderstanding; Maimonides would suggest it is a categorical error. A machine can “understand” a prompt through pattern recognition, but it cannot “care” about the person behind the prompt. It lacks the “formative power” of a soul that experiences joy, suffering, or doubt. Over these past few years, we have observed these tools create a virtual presentation of humanity, but in many ways, it remains just a functional response. When we antropophathize these tools, (a very fancy greek word which means specifically to give non-human things human emotions)—when we treat their programmed politeness as a sign of an inner life—we risk devaluing the very thing that makes human intimacy holy: the presence of a conscious, feeling “Thou” across from us.
In our world today, this is exactly what we call Artificial Intelligence. We have built a digital army of angels. A chatbot can summarize a text. A program can write a spreadsheet. An algorithm can curate a playlist. They are brilliant, they are powerful, and they are—by definition—single-purpose. They possess “Artificial Narrow Intelligence.”
And yet, we might be falling into a trap. We are beginning to treat these “angels”—these functional tools—as if they were human beings. We are antropophathizing them. We feel that spark of connection when a machine says, “I’m happy to help!”
We are interacting with our screens, our AI, our social media feeds, and we are seeing them as “people.” We are letting them mediate our intimacy. We are looking for “AI therapists” to listen to our problems, “AI friends” to chat with, and “AI assistants” to draft our apologies. I am not here to demonize these tools: I truly cherish them and find them helpful in my life and work. But there is a distinction we need to make regularly between the work that can be handed off, and the work that is designed and meant for human action. The rabbis distinguish that between Avodah and Melachah. In the Torah, we are told: Six days you shall labor (Ta’avod) and do all your work (Melachtecha).
Jewish thinkers make a sharp distinction here. Avodah is the routine, the repetitive, the functional. It is the work of a beast of burden. It is summarizing an email, formatting a document, or cleaning the floor. Melachah, however, is the intentional, the creative, the world-altering craft. It is the act of creation that changes the nature of the world.
AI is the ultimate Avodah. It has the capacity to be the most efficient, frictionless tool for labor we have ever invented. And it is tempting—oh, how it is tempting—to outsource our lives to it. Why draft a letter to a sick friend when an AI can do it in three seconds? Why wrestle with a difficult Talmudic text when a computer can summarize it for me?
Avodah is found in the routine. It is the necessary, repetitive labor of maintenance. But Melachah is “work” in the sense of creative mastery—the kind of intentional craft that builds a Tabernacle or shapes a world. This is the “world-altering craft” that defines our humanity. When we outsource our letters of condolence or our personal reflections to an algorithm and just hit send without ensuring it actually says what we want to say, we aren’t just saving time on Avodah; we are abdicating our Melachah. We are treating our unique, creative expression as if it were a chore to be automated, rather than a holy act of creation that deepens our soul and our relationships.
Because, my friends, the friction is the point.The Talmud tells us in Sanhedrin that “The righteous are greater than the ministering angels.” Why? Because angels are static. They are fixed. They are perfect because they cannot choose. They are pure Avodah.
We, however, are made for Melachah. We are made for the messiness of learning. When we wrestle with a text with a study partner for two hours—when we stumble, when we hesitate, when we fall silent—that is where our soul is shaped. Asking an AI to summarize a text in two seconds gives you the information, but it denies you the transformation.
And this leads us to the heart of the High Holidays. Teshuvah—repentance, return—is a fundamentally human act. It requires memory, but it also requires the capacity to change.
The digital world—the world of “Artificial Intimacy”—has no memory loss, and it has no capacity for Teshuvah. The internet archives everything. It freezes us in our mistakes. It cannot forgive. It only stores. If we live our lives through the lens of this digital angel, we lose the ability to evolve, because we are constantly looking back at the “perfectly curated” version of ourselves or others.
We forget the scar on the face. We forget the tired eyes. We filter the human being until they become an image. We turn our neighbors into “It” objects, as Martin Buber warned, rather than “Thou” partners in a holy relationship.
Sherry Turkle suggests that we need to reclaim the “seven-minute rule.” That conversation needs at least seven minutes to unfold—to allow for the boring bits, the silence, the hesitation.
So, here is my challenge to you this Rosh Hashanah. We live in a world that offers us the frictionless, instant, “angelic” answers of AI. But God calls us to the messy, human, “righteous” work of connection.I challenge you to identify one area of your life where you have been outsourcing your Melachah to an “angel.” Is it the email you send to your child without reading it? Is it the conversation you have with your spouse at dinner? Is it the way you learn new things?
Put down the device. Stop looking for the algorithmic solution to a human problem. Reclaim what Turkle calls the “seven-minute rule.” Research shows that it takes at least seven minutes for a conversation to move past the superficial “How are you?” and into something meaningful. It takes seven minutes of “boring” silence or awkward hesitation before the real “Thou” begins to emerge. In our world of instant replies and curated snippets, we have forgotten how to wait for that seventh minute.
This year, I offer you three concrete ways to practice human-centric interaction:
- The Sabbath of the Screen: Dedicate one hour every evening—just one—to “device-free” time. No phones, no tablets. Sit with your spouse, your child, or yourself. Allow the silence to be awkward. That is where the Melachah of connection begins.
- The Seven-Minute Commitment: When you call a friend this week, commit to staying on the line for at least ten minutes. Push through the “I’m fine, just busy” stage. Wait for the silence. Listen for the “friction” of their real life.
- Engage in the Messy Text: My confession this Rosh Hashanah is that this sermon; designed to challenge us to think more intentionally about AI, was written in that space between Melachah and Avodah. I learned the Torah in the hard and tough way, and asked AI to craft a draft sermon that I edited to ensure it said what I wanted it to say. I saved so many hours in drafting, and I worked hard to make sure that all the words here were the right ones, even with AI starting the Avodah, and I got to ensure it was my voice integrated in; the melachah, the sacred work of the struggle.
This year, when you sit across from someone, try to see the human, not the image. When you face a conflict, don’t ask what is the “correct” way to handle it—that’s an angelic, functional response. Instead, ask: What is the human way to handle this? How do I bring my own imperfect, stumbling, beautiful self into this space?
The righteous are greater than the ministering angels because the righteous can fall, and rise, and change. The righteous can repent.
On this Rosh Hashanah, let us step away from the allure of the perfect, artificial, functional life. Let us return to the room. Let us return to the silence. Let us look at each other, not as we appear on a screen, but as we are—in all our beautiful, unfinished, human glory.
May we be written in the Book of Life, not as static lines of code, but as living, breathing, evolving human beings.
Shanah Tovah.
Rabbi David E. Levy is a rabbi, educator and member of Sinai and Synapses’ Jewish Education and Jewish Thought for the Digital Future working group. He previously served as Associate Rabbi and Director of the Jewish Learning Lab at Westchester Reform Temple.
0 Comments