A Response to the Green Party’s Anti-Zionist Policy, An Open Letter

 

I am a Zionist; that is to say, I believe in the right of Jews to live in self-determination, in peace, in the Land of Israel to which we have been bound for millennia.

I also believe in a free Palestine; that is to say, the right of Palestinians to live, in self-determination, in peace, on land to which they have also been bound for millennia.

It’s not going to be easy, neither practically nor emotionally, for both ‘sides’ to get what they wish. But I don’t accept these statements are either mutually exclusive or beyond the realm of possibility. In fact, I believe the only way to have either is to have both.

Some self-describe as ‘Zionists’ or supporters of a ‘free Palestine,’ for whom the statement they adopt requires, either explicitly or implicitly, an eradication of the humanity of the ‘other’, or worse, some kind of ethnic cleansing. There are certainly those on both, supposed, sides of this too-often lethal argument who seek to deny that either Jews or Palestinians have meaningful connection to the land of their ancestors. This seems preposterous, again, in both directions.

It’s heartbreaking that voices of performative dehumanisation and exclusion have come to seem so popular in these extreme and populist times. And I’m saddened to feel that the Anti-Zionist policy, adopted by the Green Party, falls into the category of this kind of posturing, heartbreaking public statement, both in its own terms, and even more so in terms of the failure to show empathy for both Jews living in Israel, victims of despicable violence perpetuated in the name of ‘Palestinian resistance,’ and Jews living in this country, for whom a prayer in the direction of Jerusalem, or for the sake of Jerusalem, now stands to be condemned as racist by a party they might otherwise support or find holding the mandate to represent their democratic interests.

Jonathan Freedland, writing in the Guardian, perfectly captures the problem with the policy’s claim that it is not antisemtic.

[The policy] reveals a wilful misunderstanding of Jews and Judaism. Social media has been full in recent days of supposedly progressive non-Jews telling Jews what Judaism is and what it is not – with an arrogance that, I suspect, they would find unacceptable in a majority group addressing any other minority – and the same error recurs. Breezily, we are told that Zionism is merely a political ideology, wholly separate from Judaism, which means, happily, that one can denounce the former without expressing any animus towards the latter. If only it were so simple.

It’s possible to articulate an anti-Zionist position without being antisemitic. This wasn’t it. A rabbinic colleague, writing as "Lev Saul", a self-described “activist on the Jewish radical left since childhood,” has analysed clearly the historical connection between the language of the Green Party policy and century-old Stalinist and related antisemitic attack. I commend his article.

These aren’t just matters of historical interest. These kinds of statements and the culture which organises towards them, is used deliberately to shift the ‘Overton window’ of acceptable discourse about and actions towards Jews in this country. They range from the extreme, and thankfully rare – murderous violence- to the almost daily – verbal abuse, loss of professional opportunity and the like. The thing that I see and feel most often is a sort of social recoil as Jews become ‘non-grata’ in liberal circles.

These waters are intemperate and nasty. There is a sense that a distaste for the abuse of Palestinians’ rights in the land of Israel permits and even mandates a nastiness directed in increasing circles towards any Jew who shows any empathy with even a basic, non-racist and non-supremacist, empathy for a Jewish state.

Rabbi "Lev Saul" wrote;

A couple of weeks ago, my suburban Jewish community was baselessly accused of being at the heart of a Zionist plot to control the Green Party. Members of my synagogue’s council (most of whom are not even Greens) were doxxed. I felt many emotions since my congregants were accused of being part of a conspiracy. There is fear: for what it means to have members suddenly on this watch-list. There is bafflement: that people whose values I share, some of whom I have protested with for human rights, should stand charged with such offences.

We have reached a point where there are British Jews, including members of the community I serve, who share that they no longer feel safe in this society. My sense is that this dis-ease is not principally driven even by the murderous attacks in Heaton Park or Golders Green, but rather the social poison that seeps out from the public performances of policies and platforms such as that passed by the Green Party conference.

Freedland, in his recent Guardian article, analyses the difficulties in claiming, as the (Jewish) leader of the Green Party has suggested, that Jews could be ‘left alone’ if they (we) denounce Israel with sufficient condemnatory clarity and I don’t disagree with his analysis in that opinion piece, but it is – as Freedland knows – complex. I think it is reasonable for someone who wishes to know whether a Jew’s connection to the land and State of Israel is or is not racist or ethno-supremacist (and what a Shanda – embarrassment - it is that this is even a question) to expect of a Jew, either in Israel or this country, to show an awareness of how Jewish self-determination has impacted Palestinians. For what it’s worth, I expect the same from those who articulate a ‘pro-Palestinian’ position. Does such a person, in Palestine or beyond, show an awareness of the pain caused by those professing an affinity to Palestinians towards Jews?

If a person wishing to speak on this issue is capable of expressing something that feels genuine, I would argue, it would behove us to give ear, try to learn, find points of meeting, growth and a future that is free of violence for all. If, however, the voice is one only of bombast, accusation and a denial of responsibility, I’m not sure what is to be gained by even seeking engagement. Part of the problem of the Green Party policy is its blindness to that reality – October 7^th isn’t mentioned, no Israeli is considered a good-Israeli etc. I mean, I’ll talk to, almost, anybody, but I’ve spent enough time banging my head against walls to know when I’m wasting effort that could be spent more profitably on healing.

There is an annoying insistence on ‘whataboutery’ in our current approach to public discourse. You say anything about how much pain Israel has suffered and get ‘whatabout the Palestinians’ and vice versa. It’s easy to discount almost every statement about the situation in Israel / Palestine for a failure to sufficiently invoke one thing or another. We need to be gentle in allowing partial acknowledgements from those who wish to show they do indeed understand that this is complex and pain is felt on both sides. Perhaps we can lift a trick from the extremists – what about a good kind of ‘dog whistling’? Extremists use dog-whistling to let others know what side they stand on. We – protectors of empathy and demanding of complexity – should be able to get away with something similar.

So, for what it’s worth, I am a Zionist, that is to say, I believe in the right of Jews to live in self-determination, in peace, in the Land of Israel to which we have been bound for millennia. I also believe in a free Palestine, that is to say, the right of Palestinians to live, in self-determination, in peace, in land to which they have also been for millennia. Bringing both hopes to reality isn’t easy, but I believe the only way to have either is to have both.

As Theodor Zeldin, the great historian of ideas (born in ‘Palestine’ or should that be ‘pre-state Israel’) wrote in the conclusion of his magisterial An Intimate History of Humanity;

It is in the power of everybody, with a little courage, to hold out a hand to someone different, to attempt to increase, even by a tiny amount, the quantity of humanity in the world. But it is careless to do so without remembering how previous efforts have failed. History, with its endless procession of passers-by has so far largely been a chronicle waste. But next time two people meet, the result could be different. That is the origin of anxiety, but also of hope and hope is the origin of humanity.^[1]

On Heroes and Humanity

 

Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog, was interviewed on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning. He spoke of the heroism of the Indian pilot, Captain Smit Machchhar – may he heal speedily – and passengers on that fateful flight who took such heroic measures to save lives; the woman who raised the alarm, the plumber who dragged the co-pilot away and pulled up on the yoke because he had watched a TV show about distressed planes, the man who …

The interview concluded and segued into news of the passing of Dame Ester Rantzen – founder of Childline and Silverline and consumer rights hero and campaigner on so many issues (including assisted death, about which I take a very different view).

The producers played a clip of her greatest TV moment (the greatest TV moment I’ve ever seen, I’ve watched it scores of times and always cry). Rantzen, invites anyone in the audience at a recording of That’s Life!, to rise if they owe their lives to the retired stockbroker - Nicholas, subsequently Sir Nicholas, Winton. The entire gallery rise in honour of the diminutive and utterly heroic man who saved Jewish children from the Nazis.

There are heroes in our midst – human beings, ‘just normal’ human beings, who are revealed, in moments of awful and awesome importance, to be willing to do things that are, and deserve to be remembered decades after their death.

And yet, it feels society isn’t really up for heroics at the moment, thank you very much. In part, surely, that’s because there have been too many clay-footed pseudo-heroes, subsequently revealed to be frauds or worse and we are all, rightly I think, sceptical. We Don’t Need Another Hero, is, certainly from the mouth of Tina Turner, a reasonable reaction to the false Messiahs and self-serving charlatans and crooks of our time.

Moreover, and I think this is the major part, we seem to be in a time where there is something approximating to a crisis in humanity. The challenges of the world feel so real and so significant, that there is a kind of Yeiush gnawing at our human souls. Who of us can cool the overheating planet, bring peace to the Middle East, tame the dangers of AI? And so, perhaps, we just fold inwards a little, giving up on tasks that seem so beyond our ability.

A current dataset: I’ve been reading my way through the Booker Long (and now Short) List of, supposedly, the very best contemporary fiction. I’ve been struck by the number of anti-heroic protagonists – people who take steps away from leaving their mark on the world. I’ve seen critics write about a crisis of masculinity in the nominated books, but it’s not just the men. Helen of Nowhere, Dilara in The Renovation and Laura in The Palm House join the King in May We Feed the King and the man in The Black Bag in the books shortlisted as protagonists of books, but barely even protagonists of their own lives. These characters evoke empathy as they look at the possibilities of being heroic and … decline. But it’s not enough.

BMakom SheAin Anashim, Histadel Lehiyot Ish – taught Hillel (Avot 2:5), in a place without humanity, strive to be a human.

It’s the best advice. Not only does it create a possibility of saving plummeting planes, abused children and those who would have otherwise perished in Nazi-fuelled abominations, but it’s pointing at the very essence of who we are and who we are called to be – humans! These heroes, the real heroes, aren’t doing it to fatten their bank balances or for the fame, but because it feels compulsory. Their heroism wasn’t pre-meditated or driven by ulterior motives. They felt obligated to use the gift of their existence to be worthy of the gift of their existence. Thank God!

There is a wonderful idea in Mishnah Sanhedrin (5:4) about the nature of human beings, each created in the image of God, but each unique – so unlike a coin minted by a King of flesh and blood, where each coin comes out the same. That’s the source of the ineffable, desperate significance of each human life. It’s also teleological – it speaks to our purpose. When Mordechai attempts to persuade Queen Ester to go to the King and tell him that the Jews are to be slaughtered, he says, “Who knows, maybe it is for this precise moment that you became royal.” Rav Kook avails himself of this remarkable verse in a comment on a line in the Yom Kippur liturgy. “Before I was created, there was nothing in the boundless history of the Universe, that required my existence. Since I was not created until now, it is a sign, that I was not, until now, worthy of existence. I am only needed “for this very moment.” For now, the very moment has arrived for me to fix some element of complete reality has arrived. If only I could dedicate my actions towards this purpose of my creation, I could say “here I am – Hineini.”

We are called to respond to the moment with the answer, “here I am.” And the problem with training ourselves away from an interest in heroes is not merely that good people will die and bad people will triumph, but we will fail to be the human we are created to be.

May we all be saved from having to make the brutal decisions faced by those on that plane, and in so many other arenas where heroism has been needed and shown. But may we not back down if we are called.

There is a Time for Kohelet (Ecclesiastes)

 

For the past four years, I’ve been writing (and publishing) commentaries on the great Megillot of our tradition.

They are available at www.izzun.com. Ester and Rut are complete; Song of Songs will be out in time for Pesach.

Kohelet is stunning in its refusal to hold by conventional religiosity. It’s corruscating and utterly glorious. I’m reproducing here the essay commentary to the first chapter, a reflection on the central word of the Megillah - Hevel.

As will be clear, I’ve been hugely inspired by Prof Michael Fox, of blessed memory.

The art, specially commissioned, is by Sarah Lightman.

Chapter One

Kohelet as Hevel

The Megillah opens with this brutal salvo; ‘Utter Hevel - said Kohelet - Utter Hevel. All is Hevel.’ (1:2) Twelve chapters and twenty-eight mentions of this same word later, he concludes with the slightly briefer, but no-gentler, rejoinder ‘Utter Hevel - said Kohelet - All is Hevel’ (12:8).

In Isaiah, Proverbs and Psalms, Hevel, means vapour, insubstantial and ephemeral – like Propsero’s actors, liable to melt into air, thin air. But we first meet the word as the name given to Cain’s ill-fated brother. Hevel, in Genesis, is usually translated / transliterated as Able. The English name seems so jarring and misplaced; named Able and achieving nothing. And so to Kohelet.

Michael Fox’s definition of Hevel, as it appears in Kohelet, took my breath away when I first read it. In this Megillah, he claims, it means ‘absurd. The absurd [being] a disjunction between two phenomena that are thought to be linked by a bond of harmony or causality, or that should be so linked.’ Gevalt.

On the one hand, Kohelet stubbornly expects good actions will be met by a good response and evil actions will bring evil, see 8:10-13. This is the great nexus of cause and effect that dominates Jewish, and indeed most other, ethical doctrines religious or otherwise. But, on the other hand, In my days of absurdity, I’ve seen it all; the righteous perishing in their righteousness, and the wicked thriving in their wickedness. (7:15)

In Deuteronomistic theology, there is a bridge between the good action and its reward and the evil action and its punishment. Evil action does not cause punishment directly, rather it is supposed to anger God who, in turn, is supposed to decree punishment. Kohelet knows this and expects this, but it just isn’t his experience, and he refuses to sacrifice his experience to a dogma unfit for purpose. Fox puts it this way, the ‘distortions warp the larger pattern rather than fading into it.’

Absurdity arises in the dislocation between expectation and experience. That explains why we laugh at sketches about dead parrots. But not here, here the stakes are too high. Kohelet’s absurdity threatens our entire existential condition. What is our purpose, what is moral and how do we find meaning in a world where everything is absurd?

If this absurdity gnaws at you too, dear reader, if you have the courage to look into this abyss with Nietzsche’s eagle-eyes and grasp the abyss with his eagle-claws, then this is the Megillah for you.

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

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[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