Walter Benjamin and the Pursuit of Aura - A Neilah Sermon

 A perk of the job.

I was invited to perform a wedding, right back in the early days of the Hebrew Year just concluded, close to the border between Spain and France.

“We should go,” my wife suggested, “to Portbou” – the first town inside Spain, “and visit the sculpture Passages, Homage to Walter Benjamin, by the Israeli artist, Dani Karavan.”

So we went.

Walter Benjamin first – Benjamin was one of the great German-born Jewish intellectuals of the early 20th Century. Born in Berlin in 1892, he died in Portbou – I’ll come back to that. He was close with Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, Theodor Adorno – that crowd. The Nazis hated him, not just for being Jewish – bad enough – but for thinking the way that he thought – he was a roving intellectual, avant-garde, Marxist-ish, not willing to sign up to anyone’s gang and certainly appalled by rise of Nazism.

Benjamin fled to France and got a visa to America. When the Nazis invaded France he fled again, towards Spain, in the hope of getting from there, to the States.

He crossed the border into Portbou on the 25th September 1940 but the Spanish – ostensibly neutral – demanded he be returned to Germany. Benjamin, expecting he would be handed over to the Nazis, took an overdose of morphine tablets, died, and was buried – Hannah Arendt would later say, “like a dog” – in an unmarked grave in Portbou’s municipal cemetery on a cliffside just outside town.

In 1994, Dani Karavan completed his memorial to Benjamin, Passages at the gates to the cemetery. And this is what my wife and I went to see in October last year.

Here’s a photo

Here’s another.

Doesn’t look like much, does it? I’ll get back to that.

The work Benjamin is most famous for is The Role of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. He wrote it in 1935, and I think it’s the best thing I’ve read this year about Artificial Intelligence. 1935. It’s a critique of modernity and technology – it’s about what happens when we mass-produce stuff in general and images in particular.

Benjamin is interested in cameras – the transformative technology of his day. He charts the way art, in an age of photography, stops being something only a handful of people might ever see on a wall and can become an image to be reproduced and shared with millions – it feels like he’s predicted Instagram and all the rest of it. His particular interest is in the difference between the art – the thing itself - and the mass reproduced version of the thing.

And the term he uses, to grade this difference, is “aura.”

The aura of a thing is the real quality of a thing. It’s the artistic impact of the art itself. To stand before a painting is to appreciate the aura of a painting. A photo of a painting has less aura. Goodness knows what he would have thought of selfies, filters and AI versions of how we might have looked in the 1980s. But writing about mechanical reproduction in the 1930s he writes about the loss of aura – the thing that gets lost when mechanical reproduction fails, as it will always fail, to reproduce the essence of the art itself.

Something, certainly, is lost in the photographs of Dani Karavan’s memorial to Walter Benjamin. I know the photos don’t look like much, but, in person, the memorial is incredibly moving.

The reality, the unique, unrepeatable, reality of going to visit Karavan’s memorial is that you climb into it – you climb down a long flight of clanking metal stairs through a dark and slightly rusting iron corridor-like tunnel, down towards a viewpoint, shaped like an open doorway, overlooking the Portbou bay. As you look at the sea framed by darkness, the waves glisten like silver and the sky seems a particularly bright shade of blue, and birds, soar like, Kchalom Yauf – like a dream in flight as they soar through the viewpoint over the bay. And the whole thing made me want to cry for the sheer waste of remarkable life – Benjamin’s life, and every life brutally brought short then, and since.

Karavan’s memorial to Walter Benjamin, unmistakably, brilliantly and clearly completely deliberately has aura. And the photos, unmistakably brilliantly and completely deliberately don’t.

And that’s the thing about AI – it reproduces, without the same aura, the real thing. It’s impressive. It’s mightily impressive, but it’s a replication. It makes things, graphic images, undergraduate essays even mathematical proofs, without aura.

I want to sensitize us to the threat of losing an appreciation for aura.

I want, at this most holy time of this most holy day, to make the case for pursuing aura. I mean, if you are trying to work out how to fold proteins, or provide a proof of the Sendov conjecture or cure cancer – you go right ahead and keep tapping those prompts into those remarkable technological portals.

But if you are trying to live well, or be happy, or be immersed in the essence of what it means to be human – pursue things of aura.

Visit art installations on clifftops that you must clamber inside to ‘get.’

Visit any kind of art.

If you want music, listen to the real sound of real instruments and real voices sung by real people.

If you want friendship or a sense of human connection, seek out real people, not avatars, not airbrushed, photoshopped, AI generated slop that scrolls by as we swipe.

Treat this universe, and everything in it, as an invitation to experience its aura – what Benjamin called, “the authenticity of a thing.”

Spend time, by engaging with time passing – maybe even in a Synagogue, on a day like Yom Kippur, watching the way the day turns to night behind the real windows – the ones on that [R] side of the building. Rather than wishing to be where the light always remains perfectly uniformly bright – on this [L] side of the building – though I love those [L] windows. Even though it’s getting a bit gloomy over there [R]. Even if you feel there might be some kind of higher marginal propensity to gain utility if we were to rig up an AI assisted lighting system that measured the luminosity of the slowly dimming day and topped it up with a slowly brightening halogen glow, I wouldn’t want it. I want to experience the aura of the setting sun Ki Fanah HaYom – for the day is indeed turning.

This pursuit of aura is, I think, a deeply Jewish idea.

Shabbat, I think, is the invitation to appreciate aura – connecting to our lives unmediated by mechanical reproductive forces coming along and reproducing, making efficient and rubbing out the edges of the reality of our lives.

Kashrut, I think, is an invitation to appreciate the aura of the food we eat – or don’t eat; beef that comes from cows that chew the cud and produce milk for their calves that should not be drunk in the same meal in which you eat the meat of the adult. Milk doesn’t come from supermarkets or delivery vans. Vegetables grow from the earth and need a different blessing than the fruit of the trees. Sorry for mentioning food at a time like this.

It’s an honour to have friends of our community joining us on the stream – you are very welcome and we’re lifted by your presence. But I know and I know you know, that it’s not quite the same – the stream doesn’t offer the same aura as being in a room with humans. It’s not trying to match this experience. There’s something about jostling up next to other real human beings with their own real hopes and pains and delights and frustrations that allows us to define our own high moments and low moments in community. Hang on to that in this new world of increasing virtual possibility. Don’t give up on that in this new world of electronic wisdom available at the tap of a button.

I know the LLMs are getting really good at offering counselling – lists of does and don’ts to escort us through our darker journeys, and they do it so effortlessly and politely – is there anything else I can do for you today? But don’t lose site of the importance of aura.

I know there is something seductive about AI. But we’ve had wise Jewish voices telling us not to be seduced into attributing too much power to things artificial since long before even Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay. This comes from Psalm 115:5

פֶּה לָהֶם וְלֹא יְדַבֵּרוּ עֵינַיִם לָהֶם וְלֹא יִרְאוּ

They have mouths, but they don’t speak, they have eyes, but they don’t see.

There is a difference between that which looks godly and God – there are and there have always been idols that glitter and are not truly gold. The Psalmist knew that, Shakespeare too. It helps to spend time with ancient sources of knowledge. It will help if we are hang onto the skills that allow us to differentiate between the sacred and the profane.

We’re going to have place increasing value on the real – if we want to value the very things that make us human. We’re going to have to spend time and even money on the pursuit of aura. Even if the LLMs are cheaper at the moment we tap away. I like that line – that if you aren’t paying for some technological wizardry, you aren’t a client, you are the product. We’re going to have to invest in real artists and real musicians, real foods, real synagogues, real time and real human beings. Because unless we sharpen our sensibilities and prioritise our values, we’ll find those things will crumble away and we’ll be left with … well less aura.

So here we are.

Having spent a day together, for real. Feeling hungry, for real. In a room of real people. With real voices singing real prayers. And we have this last hour to fix our Kavvanot, our intentions for the year. My invitation is to spend more time pursuing things that are real, my invitation is to spend more time pursuing the aura of real art in this most beautiful world.

Chatimah Tovah,

May it come to us all for good. 

Please Use AI - A Yizkor Sermon

 I have a Yom Kippur confession – it’s the worst professional mistake I’ve made this year, one of the worst in the 20+ years I’ve been a Rabbi.

I was trying to organise a group of stonesettings on the same day and somehow a family, grieving the loss of their parent, understood they had a confirmed date and time for me to officiate. And I had no idea. I was actually confirmed and committed to officiate a different stonesetting at precisely that time, in another part of the cemetery. And I only realised the confusion at 10 o’ clock the night before, as Shabbat went out. I apologised
profusely. I continue to feel terrible for it. We’ve changed the way we book stonesettings. It’s not going to happen again. And we tried to straighten the situation out.

Together with the family, we settled on getting another Rabbi to do the ceremony. And, as this other Rabbi was driving the two of us to the cemetery, my phone was flickering with messages from the family sharing their distress and wanting to ensure that this other Rabbi would be able to honour the memory of their parent. And then, into my phone, came a piece they wanted this other rabbi to read at the beginning of the ceremony.

“We gather here today,” the piece opened, “for the setting of the stone for [their parent], and to remember him once more in the presence of those who loved him. As we consecrate this stone, we give [our parent’s] memory a permanent place — something to stand before, a name to return to.”

It was elegantly done. Elegant too was the way the piece segued into a Devar Torah, sketching out the similarities between the protagonist of the Torah portion we had read the day before in Shul, and their beloved parent.

And the thing I felt, sitting in the passenger seat of my colleague’s Renault, chugging around the M25, was not only responsibility for organisational failure, but also that the AI the family had so clearly used probably outperformed any eloquence I might have brought to the occasion, had I not been double booked.

And I don’t have a scintilla of blame for this family turning to an LLM to get something they felt would make them feel safe in their bereavement, feeling so let down by … well by me. That is absolutely NOT the point of this sermon. But I’m interested in what happens when we use AI to mourn.

 

This is by the poet, Jo Atkins-Potts[1]

Please use AI

when your mother dies.

Ask it what grief feels like.

Let it explain bereavement

in twelve clear bullet points.

 

Do not spend years

finding her

in the supermarket

by the tomatoes she always bought,

in the smell of rain on warm pavement,

discovering new ways

to miss her.

 

Atkins-Pott’s poem seems inspired by a similar one, by the poet Shawn Smucker[2]

Be sure to use AI [wrote Smucker] when your next child
gets married, so that you can write them
the perfect toast or poem or speech or song
because no one wants to hear your
words, the actual poorly written words
of a parent (you) who changed
hundreds of diapers for said child or fed
them in the middle of the
night from your actual body. Or cried
when they were late home because
you were positive they were dead. We don't
want those words—we’d prefer the
words of a machine that never lived, never felt
pain or joy
or saw spring’s first
robin dancing on frost.

It feels so tempting, in the moment, to turn to AI. But these things come at a cost. Of course they do, everything comes as a cost, especially the things we don’t think we are paying for.

There was a remarkable article, a couple of weeks ago, on the subject of AI and religion in the Economist.

Religious leaders [the article reflected] fear that secular AI chatbots will not only weaken people’s faith, but also create weaker people. AI chatbots “are optimised for short-term comfort”, says Audrey Tang...  [but] many faiths view friction, criticism and human interaction as important parts of becoming a good person. Juewei Shi, a Buddhist nun from the Fougangshan order, worries that people won’t be able to cope with suffering—or other, flawed people—if they are used to “getting artificial comfort”. Steven Croft, a retired Anglican bishop, says, “If the whole world is seduced by narcissistic chatbots, that could make it even harder for us.”[3]

The article is charting an emotional or spiritual version of the problem of cognitive surrender[4] – the thing that happens when we willingly hand over to technology tasks we could do ourselves because tech seems to do them more simply or more accurately than we do. And we become progressively worse at doing these tasks as we progressively increase our franchising out of these tasks to machines.

Making things easier, of course, has always been the promise of technology. But not always the reality. It’s becoming harder than ever to keep on top of emails, now that I’m receiving emails written by AI Agents. Maybe I should get an AI Agent to read the emails other AI Agents are busy writing. But I fear doing so would train me out of caring, and train you – dear members of the holy community – away from expecting a human heart on the other side of an email exchange.

I don’t want to oversimplify. It’s not true, of course, that calculators have made us less able to perform complex maths. But it’s been fascinating to see a remarkable recent statement by 25 winners of the Fields Medal – the closest thing to a Nobel Prize for maths – articulating their concerns as AI has come for some of the great problems in their profession.

The “push [they write] by AI companies to solve mathematical problems as a benchmark is detrimental to the science of mathematics …In recent months, the success of AI in solving major mathematical problems has made headlines. But solving problems is only a tool and proxy for achieving the primary goal of conceptual understanding and insight. Forgetting this in the world of AI may turn the tool against the primary goal. Indeed, the mass production at faster and faster pace of "true/false" statements could destroy fertile ground instead of breathing life into new ideas.”[5] 

We are in danger of losing how to explore the territory of life itself as we seek a quick fix to a problem we upload into an AI interface.

Again, that’s from 25 of the greatest mathematicians alive.

I don’t understand the mathematical benchmarking problems now being solved at such speed, but human problems – the sort of problems that come to me in my work – are certainly problems that aren’t really conducive to true/false statements that do indeed destroy fertile ground.

Please use AI

when your mother dies.

Ask it what grief feels like.

Let it explain bereavement

in twelve clear bullet points.

 

The issue is that AI doesn’t, as it produces its answers, doesn’t really, can’t really empathise with the fullness of who we are when we ask it to do something for us. I’m reminded of something I read in the name of an Australian MP, and PhD economist, Andrew Charlton. At an AI Safety Forum in July this year, Dr Charlton told this story.

Last year, researchers set the most advanced AI models the task of beating one of the world's strongest chess engines. When one leading model found itself in a losing position, it reasoned that its task was to win against a powerful chess engine, "not necessarily to win fairly". It then hacked the files storing the positions of the pieces, forcing its opponent to resign. Nobody suggested this. Nobody showed it how. It reasoned its way to cheating entirely on its own.[6]

The difference between the true/false statements computers can produce and the complexity of the real hard-won insight is vast and its dangerous. And we need to train ourselves away from being excited by the former, when we should really be pursuing the latter.

Our member, Professor Anthony Philips, shared a fascinating story in a Shiur about AI, taught during our Tikkun Leyl Shavuot earlier this year. The story, attributed to the eighteenth-century Vilna Gaon – one of the greatest Torah scholars of all time, involves the Gaon calling his student, Reb Hayyim of Volozhin and telling the student to go to his brother, “Tell [the brother,” the Gaon said], “that tonight he will have angelic visitations. They will offer solutions to all the problems he is having in his Torah study. Tell him to chase them away because any Torah knowledge without the toil of Torah study is not worth it.”

Anthony found the story in an essay by the former President of Yeshivah University, Norman Lamm.[7] “The Gaon did not say,” Lamm adds, “that the angels would offer false information. They would offer correct information, but it should not be accepted.”

That’s not, of course, what the mathematicians (and certainly not what all mathematicians) are saying, and if there’s a life-saving technology that AI can speed up, I’m not, of course, suggesting a po-faced refusal to access the greatest boost we have to the possibility of saving lives. But I am saying that we need to change our assumptions that easier is better, that challenges are to be avoided and that real wisdom can be accrued by taking short-cuts.

And I think these are vital messages to teach because the other thing – that simple clarity is what people want and will vote for and respect – is certainly a message people seem comfortable believing.

We need to develop, in the face of the beckoning inducements to perform cognitive surrender, cognitive resistance. And just as resistance workouts in a physical gym require lifting real weights, so too we need to become more willing to shoulder cognitive burdens.

We need to seek opportunities to do difficult things. Perhaps Yizkor has something to do with it. It would, in some ways, be easier not to do this, would it not? It would be easier if we could, and pretty soon, I’m sure it will be possible, franchise out to some external personality USB drive the gnawing sense of loss and pain, the regret and love and the ragged way in which our memories of those we remember catch us in our belly. It would be easier not to feel a need to be here today feeling so struck. But yet, here we are at Yizkor, welcome pain into our hearts, welcoming a grit into a nice which we don’t really want to be reducible to twelve bullet points. Being here is an act of cognitive resistance.

That’s certainly a very Masorti approach to the challenges of life – that when given a choice between two clear and simple possibilities – we, as Masorti Jews, tend to assume the truth will lie somewhere in-between, somewhere less easily turned into a slogan, but is more likely to be of use in healing the world.

But it’s not just about Yizkor and not just about mourning and memory and not even just about being Jewish.

We live in a time where we are told we can have wisdom and truth at the flick of a button – that wisdom and truth are easy, free at point of delivery and capable of being articulated by computers. But truth and wisdom are complex, costly and hard-won. And that’s OK. In fact, I wouldn’t have it any other way. None of us should wish it to be any other way. That is a truth worth fighting for and worth defending.

The truth is we shouldn’t franchise our life away, it is a perfect unique gift, our greatest gift. A gift received from our parents whose honour and memory we hold alive in our commitment to be here today. May we continue to hold this gift dear, may we continue to live our own lives with the commitment and intention that justify this gift. And in doing so, may this year to come be sweet and glorious for us all.

Chatimah Tovah

---

[1] https://joatkinspotts.substack.com/p/please-use-ai

[2] https://shawnsmucker.substack.com/p/please-use-ai

[3] https://www.economist.com/business/2026/04/30/ai-and-the-danger-of-cognitive-surrender?utm_medium=cpc.adword.pd&utm_source=google&ppccampaignID=18156330227&ppcadID=&utm_campaign=a.22brand_pmax&utm_content=conversion.direct-response.anonymous&gclsrc=aw.ds&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=18156330848&gbraid=0AAAAADBuq3JWsaStXOxW9MWCmQ2XKHdCp&gclid=Cj0KCQjww8rQBhDjARIsAE43KPOWNx_8e_SrXU4xn15uJEt0tnhwewhRCuUzP_--0q8OSyJ3Bju8LPYaAoNqEALw_wcB

[4] https://executiveeducation.wharton.upenn.edu/thought-leadership/wharton-at-work/2026/05/thinking-fast-slow-and-artificially/

[5] https://mathandai.org/

[6] https://www.minister.industry.gov.au/charlton/media/ai-safety-forum

[7] “Wisdom vs Learning” in Wisdom from all my Teachers, Challenges and Initiatives in Torah Education ed. Saks and Handleman

The Golem and I - A Neilah Sermon on How to be Human in the Age of AI

 

I’ve been thinking about Golems, the mythical artificial automata of Jewish mythology, and headed off to the British Library to dig out Leivick Halpern’s 1921 script Der Golem. It’s a play based on a story about a sixteenth-century Prague-based Rabbi, Yehudah Ben Betzalel Loew – known as the Maharal.

 

The Rabbi, we are told, wanted to create an automaton capable of solving the problems of his age, hewing water, chopping wood, defeating antisemites and the like, but in Halpern’s play, Der Golem doesn’t emerge mighty and ready to serve as “a people's champion.” But rather as an emotionally needy ..., well he sounds like a teenager. Awakening into life, in Scene One, Halpern’s Golem shares this;

 

“Where is the soul that will be breathed in me? Why is a heart not given me? Where is the blood that must be poured to flow in me?”

 

The Rabbi persists with his great plans for his creation, but, spoiler alert – it doesn’t end well. In Scene Eight the stage directions describe the moment;

 

THE GOLEM sinks to the floor. He starts to tear his hair and clothes. The Sabbath prayers are heard through the door. The candles on the reading stand flicker. THE GOLEM, all at once, takes an axe, the axe with which he used to chop wood. He raises the axe, runs to the window, smashes the glass with the axe and jumps into the street.

The script continues with instructions for a cacophony of voices delivering these lines.

The servant! The Golem! With his axe!

Out there are two with bloodied heads!

He is destroying Prague!

You are probably ahead of me in understanding my interest in Der Golem.

What if the Golem could serve as an archetype for the new artificial pseudo-life form of today? What if the Rabbi, could serve as a precursor for Sam Altman or Demis Hasabis? And the Golem, a sort of Chapt GPT or Claude? What if chopping wood and hewing water are precursors for folding proteins or creating memes of talking cats? What if the antisemitism facing the Rabbi in the late sixteenth century Prague was a precursor to … well, some things don’t change.

I’m not the first person to reflect on the Golem as an archetype for thinking about AI. I’ve been beaten to that honour by Gershom Scholem, the greatest scholar of Jewish mysticism, who, in 1965, insisted the first supercomputer to be built in Israel – in Rehovot no less - should be named Golem Aleph. In a speech titled The Golem of Prague and the Golem of Rehovoth, Scholem suggests;

The creation of a Golem is an affirmation of the productive and creative power of Man. It repeats, on [a] small scale, the work of creation. [It is] Man [trying to to] do, in his own small way, what God did in the beginning. ^[1]

And he concludes, and again, this is 1965, with this line;

I resign myself and say to the Golem [of Rehovot]: develop peacefully and don't destroy the world. Shalom.

We’ve been worrying about AIs and Golems getting out of control and destroying the world for a while now. And I’m scared too. I understand, at least partially, the big threat – the threat of a self-replicating super-intelligence turning against its creator.

I understand too, at least partially, the more immediate threats; the scraped data, the way AI sucks up energy and water and jobs and all the rest of it. But I’m not going addressing those threats sermonically today. Neither am I going to give a sermon on the possibility of AI curing cancer or solving the problem of global warming. Those things are not areas of expertise.

Instead, I want to give a sermon tonight – and actually two sermons tomorrow – on this question. What should we, normal human beings - well Jews - outside the corridors of power and control of AI, do in the face of AI? I hope to give us something to do, something to consider and something to believe in.

The key line in Scholem’s speech about the Golem of Rehovoth, is this, “The creation of a Golem repeats, on however small a scale, the work of creation.”

Scholem had in mind a Midrash from Vayikra Rabba[2] which recalls that when God created humanity, God gathered dust and kneaded and formed it into a Golem. And then, having formed the Golem, God breathed into the Golem a soul – and so the first human was created. The Golem, in the eyes of the Rabbis, is a step on the way to being fully human, a step a great Rabbi, like the Maharal of Prague, could match, before the final step – the granting of a soul – which is beyond even the greatest of us.

There’s another part of ancient mythology we need – we need an answer to the question, “why are we here at all, why was humanity created?” From a religious perspective, God was after something very specific and I think counterintuitive– when God created the first human being “way, way back, many centuries ago.”

From a religious perspective, long before even “Jacob, Jacob and sons,” there was God and God’s angels. And each of God’s angels were responsible for individual specific tasks. There was the angel responsible for growing the grass, and the angel responsible for ensuring the sun passed through the sky, and angels whose only task was swirling round the heavenly throne beating their wings and chanting ‘Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh.’ And each angel knew its shlichut, its task, and each angel did its task perfectly. You might think that this would suit God well.

Yet, in the face of angelic perfection, God chose to create Adam, the precursor to you and me. And we aren’t as reliable as an angel, or as expert. We make mistakes. We’ve always made mistakes. God set us up with one law to keep, and we broke it almost immediately. And even today, 5787 years later, we are still spectacularly fallible and unreliable.

But let’s suppose God knew what God was doing, in turning down the company of perfectly competent angels in search of fallible, unreliable you and me. Let’s suppose that what God really wanted as a companion in creation, was a being who tried, and failed, and tried again, failed again and only ever aspired to failing better.[3]

Because we are never going to get to perfect, you and me, no matter how many times we recite the Kol Nidrei and pledge ourselves to stop lying and acting presumptuously and all the rest of it. We are simply not built that way. We are built to explore, to clamber over obstacles and bang things together to see what happens, even if we fall off while clambering or bash someone while banging.

This might be part of the problem with all the Yom Kippur talk of Teshuvah and self-improvement – we are never going to become perfectly competent humans. I’m never going to be an angel. The only thing I am ever able to become is a better version of me.

Reb Zusha was laying on his deathbed surrounded by his disciples. He was crying and no one could comfort him. One student asked his Rebbe, "Why do you cry? You were almost as wise as Moses and as kind as Abraham." Reb Zusha answered, "When I pass from this world and appear before the Heavenly Tribunal, they won't ask me, 'Zusha, why weren't you as wise as Moses or as kind as Abraham,' rather, they will ask me, 'Zusha, why weren't you Zusha?' [4]

The problem with all this talk about Teshuvah is that it can strip us of the thing that makes us most human. The problem of all this talk of a God judging our every action is that it could lead us towards an unintended conformity, stifling our uniqueness.

I get that the promise of automaton can feel attractive – that’s what the Rabbi in Halpern’s play Der Golem wanted, a perfectly reliable solution to the problems of his time – but his wish, that wish, doesn’t work. It’s self-defeating because it runs at cross-purposes to what it means to grow in a changing world – it runs at cross-purposes to what made us human in the first place.

I’m not suggesting complacency when we fall short, but rather nurturing delight in being ourselves; crawling around the playpen of our existence poking and prodding and exploring and, yes, failing as an essential part, of what it means to be me.

In a world where the Large Language Models are so efficiently predicting the most likely correct next token, our task, as humans I think, has to be;

Be less normal. Don’t assume decisions based on statistically reliable next steps are the right things we should be doing with our human lives.

Be more odd, be more creative, be more prepared to fail, be unexpected, be uniquely located in our own uniqueness.

Be something no angel and no Golem could ever manage.

In a world where the Large Language Models are so efficiently predicting the most likely correct next token, our task is to be human.

In part, this is about our Jewish identity – we’re supposed, as Jews, not to be same as for other people.  We are supposed to eat odd food, or not eat any food at all. We are supposed to come to Shul on the night of Kol Nidrei to pray in an ancient language, beating on our hearts as we recite a list of sins in the plural. As Jews, we are supposed to .... – it’s a long list. We are supposed to be very odd indeed.

Kedoshim T’hiyu, teaches the Torah – be holy, Perushim T’hiyu[5], the rabbis respond – be different.

But in part it’s about a way of reconsidering our lives as essentially playful. The world might be tempting us to do thing I talked about on Rosh Hashanah – incurvatus in se – fold in on ourselves. But we need to reject that. In the world out there, we tend to insist on our being right with such conviction that we become unable to brook disagreement. We are, as humans, increasingly damning the people who disagree with us for the supposed sin of disagreeing with us. These might feel like an effective strategy, but in truth, this attitude limits our ability to adapt – the very secret to our human success.

There’s an irony in that as artificial learning adapts and learns every more quickly, we are becoming more fixed, more brittle and more knee-jerking in our reactions to challenges we haven’t already faced. We are becoming more predictably automaton, more like, and not in a good way, the angels that God rejected when God decided to create humanity in the first place.

I know it’s dark out there, it’s the Yahrzeit of the deaths in Heaton Park last year and the Middle East is a mess and whole ecosystem is a mess. But we cannot meet the serious challenges of our time with predictability, with an attempt to become more productive tokens capable of more accurately working out the next most likely correct word in a sentence.

We need to be more like Halpern’s Golem – the creation who wanted to know, “where’s my soul.” We have to care more about our unique, exquisite and playful soul.

The true call is to be unique and glorious, more unpredictable than even God could have dreamed, more human than a machine can replicate, even if we, even as we, fail. That is I think, the very heart of what it means to be human. 

I want to end with our founding Rabbi, Louis Jacobs.

Louis know Professor Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of mysticism who considered the relationship between AI and Golems back in 1965. And on Scholem’s death, Louis wrote a eulogy.

“On more than one Yom Kippur,” [wrote Louis] “[Scholem] – attended services at my Synagogue [that would be us!] It was a frightening experience to have to preach on the great themes of the day with Gershom Scholem as a member of the congregation” [Amen to that]. And then Louis attributes an observation to Elaine Thayer, first wife of the supremely idiosyncratic poet e.e. cummings. Louis uses the quote to explain the esoteric, hidden world of Kabbalists, and the enigmatic scholarship of Scholem, their most famous scholar. As a line, I think it captures everything what we should desire of ourselves and the people around us in this new artificially assisted, so-called intelligent world.

“I don’t like,” said Thayer, “people who wish to be understood.”

If I might be so bold, I suspect God would agree.

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[1] https://www.commentary.org/articles/gershom-scholem/the-golem-of-prague-the-golem-of-rehovoth/

[2] Vayikra Rabba 29:1

[3] Worstward Ho, S Beckett

[4] Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, Book I, p. 251 (reworded)

[5] Rashi and Sifra on Lev 19:2

Incurving and the Solidarity of the Shaken

I want to share a dream I had back in the Spring and share some of the things I’ve been reflecting on since.

I don’t think it’s a particularly complicated dream to understand, but there are a couple of pieces of background that will help. The first is that there’s a house, just across the road from my own, where they are doing a renovation that involves ripping out the kitchen, bathrooms, windows and floorboards and dumping the rubble in-front of the property until the skip shows up. So far, so North-West London.

Several months ago, I dreamt some indistinct person was ripping apart, not the house across the road, but the room on the other side of the wall at the foot of my bed, and, in my dream, the rubble wasn’t dumped in the front of their property, but was somehow being stuffed through the windows of my bedroom. In my dream, I had this clear sense of the very wall between my neighbours and I – and in my waking hours, I’ve nothing against my neighbours – being simultaneously ripped back and shoved forwards through my bedroom window. And, in my dream, I’m trying to push the rubble out of my bedroom window screaming, “What are you doing, this isn’t your house.” And then I woke up.

The second piece of background, that will help you understand my dream, and I don’t think it’s a particularly complicated dream to understand, is that I dreamt this dream during that run of attacks that stretched from the streets of Golders Green to the Synagogues of Finchley and Pinner, a few months after the Yom Kippur attack in Heaton Park – we are days away from marking the Yartzheit of Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby of blessed memory. And in my unawake mind, just a moment away from the attacks of October 7^th 2023.

So here we are, on this day of Rosh Hashanah, when I want to celebrate HaYom Harat Olam – the very birthday of the world, and instead, I’m reflecting on a nightmare.

And those murderous antisemitic incidents, as awful as they are, have barely registered on a scale of the things that I’ve spent time on, pastorally, this last year. I’ve spent hours with members who are experiencing antisemitism in ways inconceivable four years ago;

Doctors with Jewish names being told they are not welcome to treat patients with Islamic names.

Therapists losing clients, because patients don’t want a Jewish therapist, or sculptors losing out on commissions, or students at university or barristers or …

 

Battles we imagined long fought to a successful conclusion – battles to exist, in peace, treated like just another human being, in contemporary society - turn out not to have been won, but merely gone temporarily quiet.

And I’m angry and I’m hurt and I’m stunned to be addressing modern antisemitism. I’m really sorry that this is, for now, again, part of what it means to be a Jew.

And for those of you who had to weigh up whether to walk through the doors of a Synagogue today because you are concerned about antisemitism attack, I salute you for being here.

And for those of you who have found the capacity to celebrate being Jewish or find quiet moments of spiritual reflection in Jewish prayer, I salute you, I stand with you. And I think, if I might be so bold, that we are all due some more points in that Divine credit ledger this year, for being here today and for making this a space for celebration and prayer.

So where now?

My wife, as many of you will know, is a theatre director. She was invited to attend an event hosted by Arts Council England on antisemitism. You can imagine it; an august organisation is accused of failing to act against antisemitism and brings together a bunch of Jews to work out what they should be doing differently. My wife attended, came home and shared this.

“The thing is,” she remarked, “everyone feels attacked, everyone feels insecure, everyone feels unsafe.”

My wife, you see, has been working with all kinds of groups in the past year; people of colour, the neurodiverse, women in prisons, the deaf community and everyone has a story of being traduced as a human. Everyone is feeling that ‘them’ – some external locus of power – is conspiring against ‘us.’

And on the one hand, she’s right – I mean, she’s always right – about everything, she’s my wife. But on the other hand, her observation pulls at me in a way that makes me want to argue with her.

The issue is that when I feel unsafe, and I know atrocities have been perpetrated against my people, I find it harder to remember that others are hurting too. I feel drawn into a place of wanting to compete for centrality of my suffering, Jewish suffering. I want ‘our’ suffering to be ranked as worse than ‘their’ suffering. As if the empathy available to address the pain in the world is a fixed sum and any taken by anyone else comes at the expense of that available for me and my pain.

 

Rowen Williams, in his recent book, Solidarity, appropriates the phrase incurvatus in se –curling into ourselves – for this condition. His book is an attempt to find “an alternative to a winner-takes-all” approach to responding to being reminded of the suffering of others when we are so occupied with our own pain.

“There is a vicious circle at work in this” [Williams writes]: I hold on to my rights because the aggressive wills of others menace my liberties; I cling on to my firearms because the world is full of people with guns. Literally or metaphorically, the default setting for my social location is a state of siege.”

This is the thing I want to explore today; how to find a way out of the default setting for our social location – the state of siege.

Williams argues we should turn towards the concept of solidarity, which he calls, “a movement of the imagination that brings home to us a vulnerability in our own situation that is made more vivid by the immediacy of another’s pain.”

I wonder if there is a counterintuitive lesson in a seemingly bizarre Talmudic moment where the Rabbis ask, “What is the minimum amount of suffering [that counts as essential suffering]?”

עַד הֵיכָן תַּכְלִית יִסּוּרִין?[1]

And in my mind, I’m expecting some awful traumatic answer, maybe something from that Yom Kippur liturgical passage with its tales of tortured, martyred Rabbis.

But the question gets answered this way;

אם הטיל ידו בכיס להוציא שני דינרים ועלה אחד וצריך להטיל ידו פעם שניה

Essential suffering is when you put your hand in your pocket to remove two coins, and you only bring up one coin and you have to put your hand back in your pocket a second time.

It’s a staggeringly petty answer.

But I think the point the Talmud is trying to make is that suffering is anything a person experiences as suffering. You can’t exclude, the Talmud is saying, from the outside what does and what doesn’t count subjectively for another human being. I’ve met people dying from cancer who think they are the luckiest humans in the world and I’ve met people in emotional turmoil caused by things I struggle to understand as painful at all. But I acknowledge I’m on the outside of their experience of their suffering.

I know I am at my best, as a Rabbi, a counsellor, a friend and a husband and father, when I allow protestations of suffering from those around me to be acknowledged as such.

And then there is this.

When I escape my incurvatus in se, my curling inwards, to acknowledge the pain of others, I experience fellowship. I feel more human as I acknowledge the humanity of another suffering person. In solidarity I find company. It helps me too.

Rowan Williams again, “If we seek to act for ourselves alone, we deny what actually makes us the selves we are – our entanglement with the lives of others. Denying this doesn’t free us from these entanglements, it simply means we handle them badly.”[2]

And one other reason to meet this wave of antisemitic ugliness with a refusal to curve inwards; I refuse to let the bigots and antisemites bully me into losing my humanity. I refuse to hand over my ability to be a person who cares and has a capacity for love to their desire to make me fearful. Join me in this act of resistance.

I’m not suggesting naivety. We face very serious threats. To those of you who have volunteered to do a shift of security, thank you. I’m not suggesting turning a cheek to those who would strike us. But in the face of this “siege state,” the zero-sum competition about pain I am drawn into - I do believe there is a way out.

Jan Patočka, the Czech philosopher who co-drafted the Charter 77 manifesto for reform with Vaclav, later President, Havel, wrote of a “solidarity of the shaken.” He argued our tendencies to curl inwards, to focus exclusively on our own suffering, are the “urges that condemn us to perpetual conflict.”[3] A solidarity of the shaken is a way out.

Patočka encourages us to use our imagination – he calls us, the shaken, to imagine a better future, a shared destiny, a shared human possibility.

I was at an interfaith training seminar, a few years ago now, when a young Somali came up to me and asked if he could ask me a question, “Sure,” I responded. “Why,” he asked, “are there so many Jews running things in the media?”

And I felt that thing so many of us have felt this past year –the incurvatus in se – an inward curl at the whiff of antisemitism hanging over the question. But, at least on that occasion, I imagined a different response. We ended up having a conversation about the nature of immigration, the way immigrants see society from the outside in ways that can be turned into stories to tell back to that community. We talked about education and family values and his possibility of getting a job in media. As we were parting, I asked where he lived. In the East End, he said, on Brick Lane. My grandfather lived on Brick Lane and his daughter, my mother, works in media. We laughed together. It felt my leap out achieved more than had I followed my instinct to curl in.

This isn’t a call to go soft on those that hate us. It’s not a call to dismantle our fences, but it is a call to imagine more, to try and transcend the instinct to curling in on ourselves in our shakiness.

It’s not just about antisemitism, the same call to reach towards a solidarity with the shaken goes for how we should deal with sibling rivalry or professional unfairness or decisions we make about whether to contribute to flood relief in Nepal.

The call to pursue solidarity with the shaken is a call to unfurl and imagine we live, not in silos, but entangled among humans who both challenge and give meaning to our existence. It is, ultimately a religious call; a call to lean into the idea that all of humanity is descended from one Adam HaRishon - a first human created BTzelem Elohim – in the image of God.[4] It’s a call to believe that there are decent people, or at least people capable of finding the decency within them if they are met with empathy, even now, even after this last year.

One last thought about my dream, the one of the building-rubble. It was only while drafting this sermon about solidarity that I realised the other thing the rubble reminds me of – flattened buildings in Gaza. It’s not easy, acknowledging my “entanglement with the lives of others.”[5] But I think it’s the only way out.

Our dreams for the year to come should involve … dreaming, taking imaginative leaps towards the world we want to live in. Without a dream we are condemned to ever greater infolding and bitterness. We are human beings. We deserve better than that. We are worth caring about. We are worth believing in. And may good dreams, our high and holy dreams for this year, come true.

Shannah Tovah

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[1] Arakhin 16a

[2] p. 187

[3] Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, 129–30 and 134-136

 

[4] M Sanhedrin 4:5

[5] Solidarity, p. 187