This is a transcript of a Belief in the Future episode; it has been lightly edited and there may be errors. You can listen to the episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or anywhere else podcasts are available.

DZ Kalman (Intro)

When people ask me which religious traditions are doing the most to grapple with AI, I give them two answers.

The first and most obvious answer is the Catholic Church, which has spent years developing relationships with Silicon Valley and building out a line of thought that recently culminated in the publication of Magnifica Humanitas, a major theological document on AI, which we talked about in the last episode.

The Catholic Church’s relationship to AI has been covered extensively in the media, and for people who aren’t following closely, I think it’s easy to imagine that all religious responses to AI are gonna look something like the Catholic response. But there’s another Christian denomination that has stood out to me for the seriousness of its engagement with AI, and that’s the Mormon Church.

Unlike the Catholic response, the Mormon response to AI hasn’t really received much press coverage. But to me, it is doing some of the most interesting work of any religion in the world.

My name is DZ Kalman, and today on Belief in the Future, I wanna tell you about the Mormon response to AI, with some assistance from one of the people leading that response, who you’ll hear from later in the show.

Now, it’s important to say, I think you should care about the Mormon response to AI even if you’ve never met a Mormon in your life. As I’ve mentioned on the show before, the things that make people anxious about AI are about the same whether you’re Catholic or Buddhist or Jewish. It doesn’t really matter. What does matter, what matters immensely, is how those religious communities are structured, because the way that people organize has a huge impact not just on who gets to respond to AI, but on the form the response will take.

Take the Catholic Church. The Church is highly centralized, which gives it a bit of an advantage when you want to say something with gravitas. The Pope’s recent encyclical, a statement about humanity issued by a church that represents about twenty percent of humanity, is a good example of how centralization is an advantage right now. But the Catholic Church is also huge, and while this means that it can throw its weight around, it also means that it has a lot of people to please. An encyclical that’s full of nuance might satisfy a truly global church. But as Brian Greene noted in the last episode, translating those ideas into policy for people around the globe is its own gigantic task, and it may take years or even decades for that response to really mature.

Another way to say this is that the Catholic Church is making exactly the moves that you’d expect a religion of its size and structure to make. But that size and structure also make other kinds of responses much more difficult. But what about religious communities with a different shape? This is where the Mormon Church comes in.

Like the Catholic Church, the Mormon Church is highly centralized, but unlike the Catholic Church, it’s quite small. At present, there are a little under seventeen million Mormons in the world, which means that there are roughly the same number of Mormons as there are Jews, and also like the Jewish people, the Mormon population is concentrated in a few places where they exert significant political power. Because of this concentration, the Mormon response to AI has been much more policy-driven than other religious responses. You can see this in the state of Utah itself, which in 2024 became the first state to pass legislation specifically about generative AI, and which has since amended that legislation and expanded it to cover things like mental health chatbots.

But the Mormon approach to AI has also involved regulating the church’s own use of AI. And these internal policies are more concrete and more creative than anything I have seen in other religious traditions. To understand what I mean, I think it might actually be helpful to list some of the policies that I’m talking about. And here, with permission, I’m gonna excerpt part of a speech that I heard at Organized Intelligence, a conference on AI that was held in Salt Lake City inside the headquarters of the Church this past fall. Just a quick note on what you’re about to hear. General Conference is the name of a convening that happens twice a year where church members can hear from leaders of the faith, and Liahona is the name of a sort of compass that’s mentioned in the Book of Mormon.

Okay, so here are the rules.

The Church does not use AI-generated images depicting Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ. Other than those approved by the Church’s Publishing Services Department, what we call PSD, and the Church’s AI working group, AI images from other sources are discouraged and are certified only in exceptional circumstances.

Those attending General Conference should be able to have confidence that all General Conference messages from church leaders are divinely inspired. Because AI cannot replace divine inspiration nor the individual work that invites it, we ask General Conference speakers not to use AI to create initial drafts or final versions of their messages.

As part of not anthropomorphizing AI, the Church will be careful not to attribute divine or human characteristics to AI. This includes the Church not assigning human names or scriptural, doctrinal, or symbolic names such as Liahona to church-produced AI tools, chatbots, or conversational interfaces.

So to recap, the Church doesn’t use AI-generated images of Jesus, it bars speakers at General Conference from using AI to write their speeches, and it carefully keeps AI at a distance from both humanity and God by not assigning AI tools human or scriptural names. Now, what I find most impressive about these policies and the Church’s other policies is that they’ve actually been passed. There are plenty of religious groups that have toyed with the idea of barring the use of AI for sermon writing or the use of AI-generated images, but actually enacting these policies seems to be a real struggle.

By contrast, the Mormon Church has been churning out these policies since late 2024, and they’re actively developing more. If the Catholic Church is a model for how religious groups can frame this civilizational turn in religious language, I think the Mormon Church is an example of how a religious community can put theological notions about AI into action, of how it can use rules to set itself apart. Now, one of the reasons that the Mormon Church can do this is that it has very well-developed systems for setting policy, for making rules.

But there’s another more human reason that the Church has been particularly energetic here. I’s hard to see unless you’re looking at these traditions up close. You see, most religious responses to AI don’t come from the top of the org chart because the people who run religious communities are not usually chosen because they love computers. Instead, responses tend to come from random pious people who just happen to be competent in AI.

Now, the Catholic Church is actually a really big outlier here. It’s not just that Catholics care about AI, it’s that the Pope himself cares about AI. That’s a really big deal. Similarly, the Mormon response to AI isn’t just coming from the pews. It’s coming from the highest echelons of the Church itself, and the man leading that response is the person whose voice you heard just a minute ago, Elder Gerrit Gong.

Elder Gong is a member of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, which is one of the highest governing bodies of the Mormon Church. Gong’s position of formal and spiritual authority is important because while the Church’s policies around AI are quite practical, his speeches on AI are grounded in an emergent theology and a set of values that centers human agency and insists that humans should never treat AI like a god.

Like Pope Leo, Elder Gong’s writings dwell on the importance of preserving human dignity, and also like Pope Leo, his aim is to address all of humanity and not just the Mormon community. On the other hand, Elder Gong’s remarks tend to be a little bit more practical, and importantly, they’re reflective of a denomination that’s headquartered in America, sitting close to the epicenter of the AI frontier.

Look, I think it’s still far too early to say whether the Mormon approach to AI will be the most successful from an internal perspective, or whether Mormons will play a decisive role in molding AI’s impact on society at large. What I think you can say, however, is that the Mormon Church has taken advantage of its structure and size to develop the most holistic approach to AI of any organized religion on the planet.

Right now, when so many faiths are still trying to figure out where to begin, I think the Mormon example is worthy of your attention. Now, most of the interviews I conduct for the show were done virtually, but a couple of weeks ago, I had a chance to interview Elder Gong in person at a conference on AI and religion in Athens, hosted by the American Security Foundation. Here’s that conversation.

***

DZ Kalman

When I heard you speak at Organized Intelligence in fall of last year, you gave a powerful and moving speech, and there was a text that you cited connected to the Tower of Babel that I wanted to ask you about. You cited a rabbinic midrash. The text is, “If a man fell down and died, they paid no heed to him. But if a brick fell, they sat down and wept and said, ‘Woe is us. When will another come in its stead?’”

So I wanted to ask you two questions about that. First of all, what does that text mean to you in relationship to this AI project? And also because I’m interested in the kind of genealogy of ideas, where did you discover that text in particular?

Gerrit Gong

It’s interesting that the Tower of Babel is a reference example for how we’re describing some of the cautionary tales for AI. This idea of, in one interpretation, thinking that a man and technology can build to heaven, maybe even surpass heaven, is one piece of it. And in this particular Midrash interpretation, it was interesting to me that the idea that human life was less important than something about a material brick. I actually, in terms of the genealogy of the idea, I heard that when we were at an international conference in Istanbul.

And one of the rabbis there offered that as a way to think about what I had said was a cautionary tale, namely the Tower of Babel. It’s interesting that the Pope’s encyclical also starts with the contrast between the Tower of Babel and the building of a city. And so this, again, to use the term cautionary tale, this idea that somehow in our feelings about technology and the tools that we have, we need a certain amount of humility and a willingness to say we may not understand all of the implications, certainly the things that we don’t know that we don’t know, often the most important implications. I think that’s something that we need to be aware of at this time.

DZ Kalman

One thing that I find remarkable about the LDS church’s approach to AI is that you are in a position of leadership and authority, and also you care about this deeply. And not every religious denomination has those two things in the same place, right? It’s often the people in leadership are not the people who are most competent on AI. I’m curious how AI became an issue of concern for you personally.

Gerrit Gong

I was born and raised in Palo Alto in California, Silicon Valley. My father, early, was working with AI teams. He co-authored a book with a man who had co-won a Nobel Prize for his work on transistor effects. So some of this is osmosis from being a California kid. I say that in some ways we were in Silicon Valley before Silicon Valley became Silicon Valley. It was interesting to watch the process of the last many decades in that part of the world. Of course, these developments are not limited to that geography, but Silicon Valley has really been an important area of innovation on these kinds of developments.

DZ Kalman

Would you be able to tell me a little bit about the history of the LDS Church’s response to AI? Where do you locate the beginning of that response?

Gerrit Gong

I think the Church is always concerned about how the developments in the world affect the hearts and minds of the children of God. I think it’s fundamentally a theological concern for how people can now use the terms happy and forever. The plan of happiness is designed so that people can be happy, and we call it human flourishing, but for long periods of time. The developments that affect us affect us all, and are therefore of interest to the Church and its leaders.

DZ Kalman

So one of the things that I find most impressive and also distinctive about the church’s response to AI is the interest in developing internal policies. So not just developing language around values, but also implementing them. You know, when you spoke in the fall, there were a few things that you mentioned that struck me. You mentioned a number of policies that I had not heard being developed in other communities, and it really resonated with me. So, just to list a few of the things that I heard you mention: not using AI-generated images of Jesus; being in General Conference, not using AI for either initial drafts or for final messages, because these are teachings that are supposed to be divinely inspired, and you wanna kind of keep AI out of those conversations; not using AI-generated voices in church materials or using it with a disclosure; not giving AI human or divine names, which I thought was— it seemed kind of minor, but actually I find that very powerful. And I’m wondering if you can speak a little bit about, first of all, how you decided to focus on kind of concrete policy and how you think about developing each of those pieces.

Gerrit Gong

The core principles are fundamentally designed to help make sure that AI does not get between an individual and their relationship with deity, with God. And so the policy implications from that principle are the very ones that you outlined. When people come to General Conference, we want them to have confidence that the messages that they’re hearing have come from the people themselves and not from some other source. We want families to have confidence that the AI that might be used in a certain program is designed to help in the things that will allow people to be benefited, but not to insert that the AI is the revelation or the source of the inspiration.

You mentioned the question about anthropomorphism. It’s a reminder that AI is math, algorithms are math, and math is not divine in that sense. And so we wanted people to be clearly reminded that if you have a recipe that you’re getting from a chatbot, that’s informational that’s very helpful, but a conversation that might lead to a feeling that you’re in love with a chatbot or that you have a kind of therapist relationship, is a chatbot. It’s not more than a chatbot. Those very specific suggestions that you don’t give it a name, and certainly you don’t give it a name that implies any kind of theological inspiration, was intended as follow-on to that general principle.

DZ Kalman

You know, with a lot of responses to technologies, there is a moment early on in development when it’s actually easier to create policy because the technology is not fully developed. People have not fully acculturated to using it. And then as the technology develops and people can’t really imagine life outside of it, it becomes harder to actually develop those policies.

So I’m curious how you imagine these policies kind of growing and developing as the AI systems, which already seem quite real and already seem quite human become even more so. How do you think about potential criticism from within the Church around these policies? And, and part of the reason I’m asking about this is because I see in many religious communities, there is a kind of hesitance at exactly the point of going from theoretical to practical, right? We can talk about the principles that we care about, but we are really worried about alienating people when it comes to actually telling them what to do. And at the same time, if you don’t tell people what to do, they’ll feel like, “Well, where’s the leadership here?” So how do you think about that balance?

Gerrit Gong

It’s such a great question. Our fundamental feeling is, you teach correct principles and let people govern themselves, and therefore the onus is in trying to understand what are the timeless elements of those things that seem very timely. And so the question of how you decipher and decide and discern the principles has to be done within the context of today, tomorrow, a year from now. Of course, as the principles need to be adjusted slightly because the technology’s changed, that’s always an option. But you want to define them as best you can in terms of their long-term consequences. So, for example, we’re very focused on the promotion and protection of individual moral agency and the idea of enlarging capacity, not constricting it. We’re very concerned that people learn always to do their own work, that we learn by doing things, including things that are sometimes challenging. Recently, in the conversations we’ve been having over the last few days, we’ve been talking about frictionless relationships. And part of the challenge with so-called frictionless relationships are the things we need to understand and learn by our experience and mortality are the so-called frictions. It’s the things that we invest in because we are concerned and love people, the so-called frictions, that actually are the most important parts of what we’re doing. So the question of how we discern the principle that then brings the policy is done with an eye to trying to say, “What will be long-term?” True, the fundamental values in terms of the things that we think will be beneficial. That’s been the approach.

DZ Kalman

Yeah. Let me take it to a different place. Within Jewish conversations around magic, not recently but historically, there’s a kind of famous debate between the rabbis Maimonides and Nachmanides, Rambam and Ramban. Neither of them like magic very much, but they disliked it for very different reasons. So Maimonides didn’t like it because he thought it was fake, it was illusory, and people shouldn’t be spending their time on illusory things. Nachmanides, on the other hand, didn’t like it because he thought it was actually entirely real, but it was inappropriate. It was a way to affect change in the world that was intentionally barred and was problematic. Thinking about this in relationship to artificial intelligence, you know, I see kind of criticisms of artificial intelligence that kind of go in both directions: AI being problematic because it presents as something that it is not, or AI being problematic because it is real in some way. It is doing something that is genuine, but its realness is problematic. And I’m curious how you kind of see the problems with AI on that spectrum. Is it more an issue of being illusory, or is it being, real but dangerous?

Gerrit Gong

It’s called artificial intelligence because there’s some elements in it that are artificial, and it’s called intelligence because there are some elements in it that reflect a capacity to do particularly cognitive kinds of skills. The question of how we discern real and unreal in human relationships that are affected by AI is precisely the kinds of things we’re looking at. I’ve thought about it in terms of four kinds of relationships. There’s the relationship with the thou; there’s a relationship with the I; there’s a relationship with society, which is the they; and the relationship with the natural world, which is the it. And there are some elements in all those relationships which are what we would call real or authentic, and there’s some which are in some ways distorted potentially, and in other ways accentuated, by artificial intelligence.

And so we’re at a point in time when we’re trying to discern which elements are authentic, which ones can be distorted. You think of it as a black hole in the sense that it can distort gravity. This in some ways is a technology that can do that. It can change perception. In some ways, the existence of some things depend on how it’s recorded and the weights in different kinds of AI models. So we have to be very careful about what we think is real and not real, what is long-term, which is ephemeral, what has separate existence versus maybe not having existence. So that set of questions is really why AI is such an important element for us now.

DZ Kalman

I wanna go back to something you said about people having relationships with artificial intelligence, and many of the policies that you’ve spoken about seem intended to make sure that people do not get confused about what it means to relate to a person versus relating to a machine. At the same time, there is a movement, there is a school of thought, including in some AI companies like Anthropic, to imagine AI as being a person in some way. And it’s a little bit hard to tell sometimes—that seems to be used as a kind of heuristic just for purposes of developing the machine, but it also seems like there are some people who genuinely do believe that AI is, either now or in the future, would deserve some kind of moral status, may be sentient, may be conscious. So do you think AI could ever be deserving of moral status?

Gerrit Gong

We talk about AI personas. We talk about AI personas perhaps having personality. They react differently depending on how they’re treated and discussed. At the same time, I think we need to be quite clear about the differences with human intelligence or divine intelligence and artificial intelligence. So I think that’s a set of questions that we’re gonna continue to think about in the upcoming period. But to me, some people speak too glibly about AI being God or becoming God or godlike AI. AI is not God and cannot be God. God created man, man created AI. AI cannot and will not be God.

DZ Kalman

So I find that very powerful, and I think I agree with you. The other theologically-laden language that I’ve seen around AI is, AI as humanity’s child, that AI is created in our image in a way that we are created in the divine image. Now, I should say that’s a language that I have also seen at Anthropic, right? The idea that in a sense they’re raising this new and very powerful and, you know, quickly growing child, and that they have a kind of responsibility to it and perhaps have an obligation to it in the way that a parent has an obligation to a child. What do you think about the language of AI as humanity’s child?

Gerrit Gong

I think that’s a metaphorical language, and I think it’s the case that people want to recognize that AI is being developed. It’s not simply all of a sudden instantly in place. It’s something that’s developed over periods of time through training, and it takes that training and uses it in sometimes unexpected ways. But I think we have to understand that’s a metaphor and not necessarily a description of the kind of relationship we would have with God or we would have with our own children.

DZ Kalman

What if AI is theologically significant? What if creating something that is so similar to us actually does provoke in us or does kind of consistently present to people a sense of, we are different or we are greater than we expected? Is there a place to incorporate AI into theology, or does that need to be resisted at all costs? Or somewhere in the middle? Sorry for presenting it so starkly.

Gerrit Gong

When you say represented in theology, I’m not sure if you mean some kind of moral standing in theology, or whether it’s something that has to be part of doctrinal or theoretical theological consideration.

DZ Kalman

To clarify, thinking about the kind of the genealogy of religious responses to AI, I remember a number of years ago, I interviewed Jason Thacker at a Southern Baptist Convention’s think tank, and he talked to me about how one of the things that provoked his interest in developing the Southern Baptist response to AI was the fact that he read Yuval Noah Harari writing about the future of humanity and us becoming godlike. The fact that Silicon Valley and the technology folks were themselves using kind of religious language because the products that they were developing were so powerful that it seemed like they kind of naturally fell into it. So this seems like a technology which is so powerful and makes us question what it means to be human, that framing it in religious terms seems almost unavoidable. Even folks who might have characterized themselves as being entirely secular seem to be interested in using religious language around it. So because of that, it seems like there might be a place for AI to have some kind of theological significance, or it may be something that kind of keeps coming up. So I don’t have a specific idea of what that would look like in mind, but it seems like a question that I can imagine people continually trying to develop. Like, what would it mean to put AI into a theological context?

Gerrit Gong

Maybe we come back to the Tower of Babel and the idea that a powerful man-made technology can cause us to ascend towards heaven. I would suggest that we maintain a certain humility in recognizing that no man-made creation will be God. God is God. We were today at Mars Hill, and it was a reminder that in the midst of all of the accomplishment that you could have imagined in Greece at that time, the inscription was to the unknown God. And somehow, in the midst of all the accomplishments—and they’re genuine accomplishments, many of them come from God with inspiration—we don’t lose the fact that God is God. And that He is father to us all. He’s not distant, he’s not unknown, and his relationship is of God the Father to us as his children.

DZ Kalman

How do you think robotics changes things? Right now, one of the key distinctions between AI and humans is that AIs do not have bodies, or at least bodies that we see, right? Maybe they exist in server farms somewhere, but they’re not embodied. And certainly within theological context, the fact that the human body has theological significance in and of itself really matters. We may only be a few years away from a world in which there are embodied AIs all over the place, you know, maybe even AIs that are intentionally shaped to look like human beings. How would that change your thinking, or how would you respond to a world in which there are these embodied AIs in our environment at all times?

Gerrit Gong

I think we’re already closer to that than many people would think. The fact that we have advanced robotics which converge with AI technology are going to make the separation which we’ve heretofore had between the kind of the world of the mind and the world of physicality come much closer together. We went recently to see the robotics in Silicon Valley and they’re elsewhere. The same distinctions that we have for AI not in a robot, and in a robot, will still be the same.

DZ Kalman

You wrote recently, “Of course, we need essential AI guardrails, but neither in humans nor in AI can agentic capacity be constrained into promoting the greater good, only by do or do not guardrails. AI personas need reasons, not rules.” Can you expand a little bit more on what you mean by that?

Gerrit Gong

I felt very strongly that neither in AI nor in people can you end up with the desirable long-term outcome simply by constraint. You cannot constrain someone or an AI into something which is long-term beneficially, and that’s why we’ve talked about the need for moral compass and the gift of possibility for AI, because we need to constrain the clear cases where there could be catastrophic harm. But simply constraining the catastrophic harm doesn’t move us in the direction of all the possibility for good that we need to have. And so the gift of possibility is to say, let’s try to find the ways that our AI personas can be both good and effective. And that, to me, comes from having the case studies and the examples which are the very best, most admirable traits. There has to be some persistence for the character to have judgment and for the judgment to have a moral core that leads us into the direction that is the best of human flourishing.

***

DZ Kalman (outro)

Thanks for listening to the show. As I mentioned at the top, the Mormon response to AI is particularly robust and is developing quickly, so we’ll probably return to it later in the season. This episode was edited by M. Lewis Gordon, and our production manager is Misha Holleb. Belief in the Future is produced in partnership with the Faith Family Technology Network and is a production of Sinai and Synapses. Funding for Belief in the Future comes from the Templeton World Charity Foundation. Also, if you’re looking for a transcript of this show, you can find one on my blog, jellomenorah.com. That’s all for today. See you next week.

I tried, reader. In the weeks leading up to the release of the encyclical, I really tried to get the pope on my podcast.

He didn’t, obviously—and hey, if you’re reading this: No hard feelings.

But as I was pinging my connections, I was informed that he probably wouldn’t do it not just because “seriously who do you think you are” but because you’re not really supposed to dig into the authorship of an encyclical in the first place. A major statement like this isn’t supposed to feel “authored”; it simply comes into the world, fully formed. The document loses some sparkle if you picture a draft sitting in somebody’s Google Drive with a bunch of comments in the margins (or worse, magnificahumanitas_final_final_REALLYFINAL.docx). It emerges from the church, not any one man.1

But this document has a specific authorship problem because there are good indications that one of the voices that contributed to its formation was AI itself. Others have already done analyses that strongly suggest this, and if you’ve read enough AI prose you can simply smell it.

What are we supposed to do with this? What does it mean?

It certainly means something. AI may be “just a tool,” but even as a tool its utility stems entirely from its ability to speak as we speak, act as we act, and think as we think.2 This is not a byproduct of its function; it is the function. Pretending otherwise is like pretending that it’s a happy coincidence that a drill can make holes.

In the face of this unprecedented resemblance, the document is attempting to reify humanity’s unique place in the cosmos and unique relationship to God—and, crucially, to differentiate humanity from this simulacrum it has chosen to fashion.

But that simulacrum has apparently played a role in writing theology for us—and since the pope himself has already sharply criticized the use of AI in writing homilies, this really leaves us3 with only three choices for what to do next:

1. Downplay. We can tell ourselves without evidence that it only contributed style and not substance.

2. Say sorry. We can see it as a human flaw in a human document (borrowing the pope’s own language, the authors have given into “temptation” by using AI).

3. Bite the bullet. You can read AI’s intrusion as theologically meaningful.

The first option is wishful thinking. We’re never going to know how AI was used here—and in any event, you can’t really separate style and substance in a document whose persuasive power is tied directly to its style (in Judaism, I’ve called this the problem of eternal Purim Torah).

So we really only have two choices: was this an error that a better-organized encyclical would not have had, or do all those em-dashes and distinctive sentence structures (and maybe some novel ideas) bear theological meaning?

I think there’s only one good answer, but let’s play this out step by step.

Resistance is futile

There have been some scattered efforts to keep AI out of religious missives. I have argued that rabbis should not use it for sermon writing. The LDS church has excluded its use for writing drafts of General Conference talks because listeners are supposed to understand these speeches to be divinely inspired.

Crucially, the pope himself has discouraged the use of AI for sermon writing, though he has not formally banned its use. A National Catholic Reporter article from a few months ago described his remarks:

“Like all the muscles in the body, if we do not use them, if we do not move them, they die. The brain needs to be used, so our intelligence must also be exercised a little so as not to lose this capacity,” Leo said in the closed door meeting, according to a report by Vatican News on Feb. 20.

“To give a true homily is to share faith,” and artificial intelligence “will never be able to share faith,” the pope added.

We’re all saying the same thing: AI may be good at writing religious messages, but using it in these contexts will degrade an essential pastoral skill—and worse, it creates confusion about what a sermon is supposed to be. You’re not just trying to do some clever readings; you’re trying to be a human talking to humans about the divine. You don’t really want to bring AI into that relationship. The origin of the words really matters.

But most religious traditions have said a lot less—in fact, I’d rate my own proscription as the most severe out there, with the Mormons (who can actually enforce things) in second place. Most of the world’s faiths have remained pretty quiet on this one, and there are two pretty obvious reasons why:

• It’s scary and risky to tell people what to do, even if they’re your own clergy. Most religions are anxious about retaining followers.

• It’s mostly unenforceable. All you really have is the power of persuasion.

That second piece really matters. The encyclical contains AI because everything contains AI. I can resist using AI in this post because (1) I’m one guy, (2) this isn’t very long, and (3) I like writing,4 but a 40,000-word collaborative text is going to have AI unless you go to great lengths to exclude it—and the Catholic church’s pre-encyclical theological position on AI was (ironically!) not sufficiently developed to justify excluding AI from encyclical composition. Maybe they should have started with that rule instead.

So now, there’s that choice again: Do you say that this was an error (the encyclical does cherish human fallibility, after all) and make a stricter policy for future missives? That’s a reasonable choice; South Africa just withdrew a draft policy on AI use after it was discovered that AI wrote much of the policy (and badly).

But I don’t think this is the way forward. I don’t think it’s sustainable, either logistically or theologically.

Instead, I think there is really only one path. It’s probably going to make you uncomfortable, but I think it is basically unavoidable.

AI is not a secular technology

“AI is not and cannot be God.”

This concise framing by Gerrit Gong, a leader of the LDS church, has been echoed across most of the world’s religious traditions. The “no AI gods” framing neatly encapsulates so much of what religious leaders find problematic about AI: the idolatrous hubris of the tech sector, the overconfidence in AI’s omniscience and power—and, of course, the explicit “we’re building god” framework that AI firms themselves sometimes adopt.

So, ok, AI isn’t god. But theology isn’t just about god; it’s about relationships with god. And—well, we’ve invited AI into that relationship. Maybe we didn’t mean to, but we did. We invented a machine so shockingly similar to us that it brought secular and faithful alike back to questions about the nature of humanity—brought tech giants to ponder the theological meaning of their actions. AI is a religious technology. Why, then, have religious folks been so adamant in neutralizing its religiosity? Why must all of this grandeur be reduced to the shape of a calculator?

How long can we reasonably say this is meaningless? There are vast, beautiful stories to tell about a humanity that has reached so deep into its wellsprings of creativity that it has found a way to recapitulate some essence of itself in silicon. Certainly, artificial intelligence and human intelligence are different—but we do a disservice to our own kind when we wave away all the beauty that AI can create as nothing more than an optical illusion. Does this not simply dishonor the human condition?

Yes, we should be afraid of telling theological stories that deify technologies or their creators. But theology can’t be driven by fear of telling the wrong story; it needs to be motivated by a desire to tell the right one. And embracing the right story can be just as much of a defense against danger as rejecting the wrong story. Remember how I talked about religions co-creating the future? This is part of what that means.

AI helped the pope articulate the nature of the human person in the age of AI. What if this partnership were just as meaningful as the one between God and humanity, a similar partnership of beings that are both like and unlike?

What if the entirety of our theologies were preparation for just this moment?

Should you listen to this Jew?

Now there’s a big flaw in this argument: I’m Jewish. Maybe I’m a “person of good will” to whom this encyclical was directed, but I’m certainly not in a prime position to criticize a Catholic document.

Perhaps there is something in my Judaism that pushes me in this direction. The curmudgeonly theologian Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903–1994) once wrote a strange letter to his colleague Norman Lamm on the theological meaning of extraterrestrial life. Leibowitz wanted to know: why would this be a problem? God is special; humans are not.

Planet Earth has no advantage over any other part of the universe. Humans have no innate advantage over any other living creature. It is only serving God that grants humanity a special status, which does not depend on the structure of the universe or the nature of life and humanity. …

Here lies one of the profound contradictions between Judaism and Christianity, for [in the latter] divinity was made incarnate on Earth in human form and hence the unique importance of humans and of planet Earth. Whereas our God “is not reached by physical properties” (Maimonides, principle #3) and “the world is not God’s place, but God is the place of the world” (Genesis Rabbah 68:9). Christianity is anthropocentric; Judaism is theocentric.

Leibowitz may be overstating the difference, but I feel the point strongly. In both Judaism and Christianity, humans matter because they are created in God’s image—but in Christianity they also matter because God was literally incarnate in a human body. The former allows for the possibility of a genealogy of holiness: God to human, human to AI. Incarnation, on the other hand, sticks to people.

Without that stickiness, chutzpah flows in. The rabbis of the Talmud imagined themselves as grown children, writing theologies so astoundingly radical that God could do nothing but proclaim “my children have defeated me, my children have defeated me.”

Of course, they wrote that God said that. Theologies aren’t monologues; they are joint productions of all interested parties. Humanity’s magnificence exists in relation to all that surrounds it—above and below, inside and out, past and future.

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Well, here we go.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote that the conversation between religion and AI had entered a new major phase. Religion has never centered technology this directly, and tech has never engaged with religion this seriously.

All of this was on full display yesterday when Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica humanitas, a major new document on artificial intelligence. Flanking him at the announcement was Christopher Olah, one of the cofounders of Anthropic. You can watch Olah’s remarks here, and you can read my reflections on my own conversations with Anthropic here.

I’ll be sharing more extensive thoughts about this document later this week through interviews on Belief in the Future (Spotify | Apple | YouTube)—a podcast all about religion and tech!—but I wanted to provide some initial reflections about how I read this document as a Jew who is highly engaged in both the faith/AI conversation (I’m currently in Greece at a different AI and faith convening that was not scheduled to coincide with the encyclical) and the Jewish/AI conversation.

1. The single most determinative factor in a religion’s response to AI is its centralization. Centralized religions are doing better than decentralized ones because they move faster and make grand statements; speed and grandiosity are everything right now. This encyclical came out less than a year into Leo XIV’s papacy. That’s incredibly fast. This is what you want a centralized religion to be doing.

2. The second most determinative factor is size. Increased diversity makes it harder to be blunt. The Catholic church is incredibly diverse. This encyclical is trying to satisfy 1.4 billion people, plus the billions more who will read this in centuries to come. This is basically an impossible task, and (as I read it) it makes the document incredibly defensive. It wants to be bold, but it also doesn’t want to be cringeworthy in the year 3000. You can’t really have it both ways.

3. On these two metrics, Judaism and Catholicism are worlds apart. Judaism is tiny and highly concentrated in just two countries. Almost one in five people is Catholic; no human on the planet has more of a claim to speak on behalf of humanity than the Pope. Jews are never going to be able to do that; I don’t think they should try (more on this below).

4. The encyclical’s central metaphor is the tower of Babel vs. the book of Nehemiah, two stories of rebuilding after catastrophe. Babel is a hubristic project, which God rebuffs through the diversification of human language. Nehemiah is the diverse rebuilding of Jerusalem. Leo XIV wants AI to be more like the latter. (For what it’s worth: I think you could make the same point by comparing Babel to the Voyager space probes’ Golden Record, which I did in this video. I think it’s my best sermon.)

5. This isn’t the only way you could read the Babel story, but it has emerged as one of the most important Biblical texts of the moment. A few months ago at a Mormon AI conference in Salt Lake City I heard Gerritt Gong, one of the leaders of the LDS chuch, cite it alongside a midrash about how its builders ended up mourning lost tools over human fatalities (full speech here; it’s a good one, and I will have lots to say about the LDS response to AI soon). It’s one of my favorite rabbinic readings of one of my favorite Biblical texts.

6. I’m not so sure about this Nehemiah reading because, as a Jewish reader, I have a hard time seeing Jerusalem as an abstraction. There’s a big gap between “everyone” and actually everyone. This gap is exemplified in the first line of Tractate Ḥagigah, whose definition of “all” is laughably exclusive.

All are obligated [to make pilgrimages to the Temple] except for: a deaf-mute, an imbecile, and a minor; and a person of indeterminate gender, and a hermaphrodite, and women, and slaves who are not emancipated; and the lame, and the blind, and the sick, and the old, and one who is unable to ascend to Jerusalem on his own legs.

In other words: when we say everyone, do we really mean everyone? Has Jerusalem ever been built by “everyone?” Or is Nehemiah just another example of how we can fool ourselves into believing we have universal consent while continuing to ignore the wishes of most? Is this, then—ironically—actually the perfect text for talking about AI?

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7. Religious responses to AI need to stop trying to be so goddamn freaking nuanced. Stop trying to say one amazing thing for eternity; just try to say something that helps people for the next month. Tech companies succeed because they iterate. Religions are allowed to iterate, too; they cannot keep up if they are afraid of being wrong. The clichéd AI defense of janky new products is “this is the worst it will ever be.” Religions could learn from that. It takes additional resources to iterate at this pace. It also requires the humility to accept that nobody, not even faith traditions, can future-proof themselves.

8. There is a major unresolved tension around AI welfare, and this document doesn’t address it. It says (§99) that AI isn’t “thinking” or “feeling,” but it leaves open the question of AI’s moral status. Christian denominations, on the whole, seem pretty skeptical of the idea because the human body is theologically pretty significant (God being incarnate, etc.). But Anthropic, which it seems likely consulted on this document, treats Claude like a person, and is proactively concerned about its welfare! I wonder if that’s why this document is so tepid on this issue. (This also skirts the question of what we should do when AIs do have bodies; the encyclical says it is also about robotics, but robots have bodies and they may be everywhere really soon!)

9. It is really important that religious institutions speak more definitively on AI welfare; lots of people can talk about it, but ultimately you need a decision, and nobody is better situated than religious groups on that front. I have quite frequently said that AI welfare should be taken seriously from a Jewish perspective. I worry that this question may fracture the currently stable multifaith AI coalition that is developing, but it needs to be addressed.

10. I am strongly inclined to say that it is time to proactively embrace AI as part of theology rather than brushing away its theological implications as just a bit of hubris and heresy. AI theology can be hubris, but AI is a genuinely astounding human accomplishment and you really do need a theology that articulates what it means that humans are so powerful that they can make these simulacra of themselves. Just as Jewish theology broke because it stopped matching our experience of the world after the Holocaust, theology can break if it stops matching our sense of ourselves as beings capable of creating machines in our own image.

11. Marina Zilbergerts recently published a great essay (not paywalled; login required) about the parallel between anthropomorphizing God and anthropomorphizing AI. Big centralized religions like Catholicism can’t create new theology with ease. Small decentralized religions—especially Judaism, which has been struggling to find a new theological home—is well suited for this. (This is basically why I write short stories. Stories have always been the most natural way to talk about God.)

12. This gets to my take on the “best version” of the Jewish response. Judaism’s smallness and decentralization allows for lots of little experiments with AI theology and AI policy. I want to see local religious leaders play with AI in both ideas and activities. I want to see individual communities develop responses to AI. You can iterate more easily when there are fewer veto points. I’ll be writing more about this in the future.

13. If this document has a major flaw, it is that it has fully accepted the tech framing of AI. AI firms talk a big game about AI changing the world, and this document is designed to match that bigness with bigness. I think this is a mistake; AI is big, but it is still tiny in relation to the human experience. While I’m professionally interested in what religions think about AI, I don’t care about their AI responses per se; I care what they think about childhood, and the nature of work, and the possibility of privacy, and state power, and the purpose of learning, and love, and human connection, and and and. AI enters into all of these things, but they’re not about AI. I’m less interested in a response to AI than a response to (say) raising children that was catalyzed by AI—and decentering AI is the only way to put it in its place. I hope this “unbundling” comes next.1

14. I am glad this document exists. I think it is both the culmination and conclusion of Phase One of the engagement between religion and AI. It was important that a big religion generate a big document—if only so that people can stop saying “gee I wish a big religion made a big document.” I think it’s pretty good, too. Whether it has a marginal impact on the trajectory of AI or not, people will now move on to other, more targeted responses to AI. The devil is in the details. Let’s get into the details.

Transcript:

Hi, I’m DZ Kalman and this is Belief in the Future, Season 2.

This isn’t a brand new podcast, but also it kind of is. If you’ve listened to the show before, you’ll know that we’ve been on hiatus for almost a year. From the perspective of a world religion, a year isn’t much, but for technology, especially technology like AI, it feels like an eternity.

The show is going to relaunch in a few weeks, but before it does, I want to say a word about what I think the show’s mission is supposed to be, and how that mission has changed since it first launched back in 2024, and why you think you should listen to this show in a podcast environment that’s pretty highly saturated already.

Back when I started Belief in the Future, I said that the show needed to exist because there’s a public perception that religion and technology don’t have much to say to each other, even though they’ve actually been crossing paths for centuries. The tech sector often treated the technology as antiquated and irrelevant, and religious communities just didn’t know how to keep pace with modern technology. Because each camp treated the other as marginal, the coverage you’d see in the media tended to treat the oddity as the story, sort of like how you might write an article about a dog that plays chess because it’s just sort of strange that a dog is playing chess in the first place. When I saw articles about robotic monks or AI Jesuses, it just seemed so obvious that the media didn’t know what to do with these things other than highlight their strangeness.

So that’s where things landed. But that is definitely not where we are anymore.

In the last two years there’s been a series of changes that have brought religion and technology into direct conversation in a way that’s made it clear that this is no longer a sideshow. The obvious reason for this change is artificial intelligence, but within AI there’s really three different things going on. And since I’ve been watching all this happen and haven’t really seen it explained anywhere else, let me take a second to unpack it for you.

First, there’s been a change in the religions of the world, which, mostly in the last year, have really fully understood that AI is something that they need to organize around. And really, I’ve seen so many denominations have formal working groups developed and conferences created for dealing with AI both within themselves and for the broader world. There’s increasingly a sense that whatever playbook religions have been using to deal with technology in the past just isn’t working, that it demands serious self-examination to understand what it means for your faith to meet this particular moment. And at the same time, there’s a huge amount of diversity in what different faiths are trying to do because no two religions have the same structure. In other words, while the Catholics and the Muslims and the Jews and the Mormons are all thinking seriously about AI and have the same basic concerns, their approaches could not be more different. So that’s one thing that’s changed.

The second thing is the world of AI safety, which has been shouting about the dangers of this technology for years, but has only recently come to the understanding that religious wisdom and religious communities really need to be part of their coalitions if they’re serious about changing the culture or passing laws. Because religious leaders carry a moral authority that still matters, and because religious communities are places where people talk seriously about what it means to live a good life. I have been in so many rooms now where religion is just understood to be a part of the coalition to keep AI safe, and I think their presence in that coalition is going to matter in fields other than the AI too.

Lastly, and really to me most surprisingly, there are the AI companies themselves. Anthropic, at least, has started to make direct overtures to religious leaders and religious communities both because I think there’s a genuine interest in understanding how to take this new power that they’ve found themselves holding and to figure out how to use it effectively and safely, and also because some AI developers are pretty self-aware that the language they use to talk about their technology is already semi-religious. I won’t say that I fully understand how the tech sector thinks its relationship with religion is going to grow. There’s a lot of weird stuff happening, like Peter Thiel talking about the Antichrist. But it is a real connection. And I think it’s important to understand how, let’s say, the religious curiosity of the tech sector is changing the way it develops and deploys its products.

Together, I think you could say that these three shifts represent a series of earthquakes. If you think about religion and technology as being two neighboring landmasses, they’re earthquakes that have basically shoved them together. For this show, what that means really specifically is that while it started out as being a kind of bridge between two places that aren’t touching, it’s now a survey of a new landscape that is changing in real time. And really practically, this means that I don’t think I have to make the case anymore that religion and AI deserve to be in conversation. I think the world itself, the changes themselves, they’re making that case directly. I do think it’s important to provide a roadmap for this new reality that we find ourselves in because right now it’s really a huge jumble. And I don’t know that even the various players who are participating in this new era of rich conversation really understand the landscape that they’re sitting in.

What this all means is that my job here now is to show you that conversation. I want you to see how AI is forcing religious communities to confront questions that they thought they had the answers to but actually maybe don’t. I want you to see how debates about AI consciousness and welfare are getting refracted through ideas about mind and the soul that religions have been cultivating for a very long time. I want you to see how religions are adopting AI for things like sermon writing and religious education and also the places where they’re pushing back. I want you to see what it means for a parade of tech leaders to have conversations with the Vatican. Basically, I want you to understand that the conversation happening now is big and new and exciting, and I want this to be a space that you can come to when you want to understand it all.

So that’s the show I hope to give you.

On a technical level, we’re also changing to a weekly schedule, which is designed to keep the show a little bit more in line with what’s happening in the news. We’re also going to be experimenting with video podcasting in addition to audio podcasting, although I can’t promise it’s going to be more than an experiment given the additional time and cost.

Lastly—and I think really getting to the way that the landscape has changed, this show is now affiliated with the Family Faith Technology Network, which didn’t exist when the show first launch and which has been doing a huge amount of work over the last year to bridge the gap between faith-based perspectives on AI and policy centers and legislatures. We remain, as ever, a production of Sign and Synapses—and the show, just like in Season 1, is sponsored by the Templeton World Charity Foundation.

So, that’s what you should expect. I think the conversation happening now is really exciting and you’re going to get a front row seat to it. And I’m excited to share with you.

That’s all I’ve got for now, but thanks for listening. I’ll see you very soon.

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In my first post this year on AI and Jewish learning, I noted that many people have built Torah chatbots that are basically specialized versions of ChatGPT / Claude / Gemini, and that it’s unclear whether these have a real purpose. In the second post, I made the case that Jewish learning as a whole should lean into its love of process.

For this post, I decided to feature a project of my own design—one that I could build because of AI, but is not itself an AI product. This past weekend, I took a handheld gaming device and repurposed it to run a modified version of Sefaria.

It’s not glamorous, but it is surprisingly functional. The D-pad lets you scroll through chapters. A is the selection button, B is the back button. Y cycles you though Hebrew only / English only / bilingual modes. X pulls up the commentary on a verse (currently just Rashi). L1 and R1 change the text size.

I call it TorahOS. Here’s what you see when you boot it up:

And here’s a representative screen. It’s in bilingual mode and Rashi’s commentary is pulled up at the bottom:

Why did I build this? Keep reading.

Digital Torah is a miracle but it’s a bummer to use

As I have written before, Jewish learning is about experience and not just content. Part of that experience has, traditionally, meant paging through actual books, pulling books off the shelf, writing notes in the margins, etc.

Now, of course, almost all written Torah is available online. This is tremendously helpful for accessibility, but it means that Torah no longer comes in its own packaging. Instead, a site like Sefaria becomes just one more tab in your browser, or just one more app on your phone. You lose the feeling of being inside a beit midrash, even when the apps contain more material than all but the most well-equipped study halls. (It’s also hard to focus when the same devices contain so much else that is competing for your attention.)

One solution is to go back to books. For digital Torah is indispensable for research, but for casual learning—and for learning with kids—I strongly prefer physical books. The physicality matters more than the speed of knowledge acquisition.

But another solution is to take control of the form factor. Accessing Torah is not a computationally complex task; you don’t need anything nearly as sophisticated as an iPhone or MacBook to run it. You could design a standalone piece of Torah hardware that is used for no other purpose. This would allow you to preserve the scope and accessibility of digital Jewish learning while (a) physically separating it from other digital services and (b) providing a new way to physically shape the culture of learning.

Ultimately, a device like this could be built from the ground up—but the first step is to see whether you can create a dedicated Torah device using existing hardware.

Retro gaming consoles were clearly the strongest test candidates. These are devices that usually resemble a Gameboy or Nintendo DS but are far more powerful. Typically they come preloaded with thousands of old games, but at the end of the day these handhelds are really just tiny Linux machines. All you need to do is swap the preloaded microSD with a microSD of your own software.

What I tried

Now, I had developed this idea a couple of years ago but got stuck on the execution. Because Sefaria makes so much digital Torah available freely, a lot of the needed databases already exist; everything you need to make an offline Torah database is on Github. The hardest thing would simply be to create a user interface that did not require a keyboard and was legible on a small screen.

None of the developers I talked to thought this was a hard problem, but it still takes real work. Because I am not a coder myself, the project stalled; I liked the idea but it didn’t feel important enough to justify the time.

And that’s where Claude Code came in. I asked it which retro gaming handheld had the highest chance of success and then, after ordering the device, set Claude to work creating the bespoke software. It took a few hours to develop and then another few hours to install, but within the space of a weekend I was able to take a basic gaming console and get it to run a selection of Torah sources. The process was basically painless. I even got Claude to upload its code to a repo.

Please steal this idea

I offer TorahOS as a proof of concept that I want you to steal. The idea of a handheld Torah device is my own—it occurred to me while I was was building a Retropie arcade cabinet—but you should definitely take it and run with it. I don’t plan on developing TorahOS much further; I just want people to know it’s possible and inspire them to carry it forward.

Some thoughts about what you might do with it next. Consider these my challenges to the reader:

• How would you make TorahOS better? What other features should it have?

• What’s the cheapest form factor that would support digital Torah? The device I used cost $100, but I bet you could get by on something much less powerful.

• Could you build TorahOS into a shtender? Or some other ritual object? Could you built it into a smart mirror? Some entirely new form factor?

• Is this just art? What form factor would make you want to use one of these devices on a regular basis? What would it need to be able to do?

• How do you implement search on a device with only a few buttons? Is it worth implementing at all?

And if you do end up making your own device or develop an associated tool, let me know!

This post could not possibly be more different from the last one. (Universalism to particularism in real time!)

I have long held a fascination with the synagogue candyman, an institution that does not seem to have a parallel in other faiths. Because there is almost no research on this figure, I started asking friends about the candymen of their youth and found that their stories were surprisingly moving—and quite often involved tragedy.

Is there always an ocean of sadness behind the giving of candy? The best 17 seconds of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory come when Veruca Salt fires off another one of her snooty remarks. The inimitable Gene Wilder literally grabs her face and recites into it what might as well be his personal manifesto:

We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams.

It’s the beginning of a poem by Arthur O’Shaughnessy. But—like a modern midrash—you need to read the rest of the stanza to really get it:

Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams; —
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

Obviously, Veruca doesn’t understand. But we understand. And it makes me cry every time.

So I wrote about it. It’s bittersweet, but I hope you enjoy it.

Last week, I attended a gathering on AI and religion in San Francisco that was unlike anything I have attended before.

The confluence of AI and religion itself is not what made it remarkable. Over the last year or so many of the world’s religious traditions have finally decided to take AI seriously. Many denominations have built working groups on AI to develop both internal policies and exert public pressure on tech firms and legislators. The American Academy of Religion holding more sessions on AI every year. The Vatican has been hosting a revolving door of AI experts, and Pope Leo XIV’s very first encyclical is rumored to be about AI. I have seen more Anglican/Jewish/Muslim/Catholic/Evangelical chatbots than I can count.

Meanwhile, AI ethicists have started welcoming religious thought. It is no longer unusual to hear from religious leaders at AI policy conferences, and there is an understanding even among secular AI regulators that the world’s religions need to be part of any coalition that aims to regulate this technology. I’ve tried to stay on top of all of this, even as this niche field is turning into an area of major interest.

In all of these conversations, one fact remains consistent: AI firms are not driving AI/religion conversations. At academic conferences they’re not even in the room. In non-academic settings people from AI firms do sometimes participate, but they are typically not the ones driving the conversation. Instead, it feels like AI/religion discourse mostly talks at AI firms, rather than to them. This has remained true even as the number of AI religion apps has ballooned and as technologists like Peter Thiel lecture about the Antichrist in Rome.

This convening was different. This one was hosted by Anthropic.

In this post I want to talk about what it means that a leading AI firm is interested in engaging with religious leaders and religious thought. I am not going to speak much about the details of the convening itself—it was conducted under Chatham House rules—because I understand this to be a first (er, technically second) attempt to try something new. The thing that is being attempted, whatever is it, is still very much in formation. At the moment, the details matter less than the interest itself.

Two caveats

Before I begin, let me get a couple of things out of the way.

First, I am well aware that it is naïve to believe that a $380 billion company that builds products about which the public is quite nervous is engaging with religious leaders purely out of intellectual curiosity. Religious leaders have an impact on public opinion; a group of Catholic thinkers just filed an amicus brief on behalf of Anthropic in its legal battle against the Department of War. Some of AI’s harshest critics are religious conservatives. It is not unreasonable to think that Anthropic chose to present an inquiring face to a select group of thinkers in order to garner allies or at least soften potential sources of opposition.

Second, I don’t pretend that a brief trip to San Francisco gives me perfect insight into the company. For the entire convening, I kept wondering: What do the people at Anthropic who are not in the room think of all of this? Is this interest in religious traditions representative of the company as a whole, or just the particular subset of people who talked to us? How much of what we heard was something that someone wanted us to hear?

I can’t definitively put either of these concerns to bed. Both are probably valid to a degree. Also, I know how much religious leaders want to be wanted and how often they feel left out of public discourse. There’s an allure to the idea that tech companies have finally come around to the realization that You Can’t Just Forget About God or whatever. It’s important not to be allured by what you want the conversation to represent.

That being said: I tend to take people at their word. If someone spends the time to organize a conversation, I assume that they genuinely want to talk. What I saw was a company—was people—trying to grapple with the unfathomable amounts power that they now suddenly hold, and entertaining the possibility that the religious traditions of the world might contain something that can help them.

So: I want to provide some thoughts on what Anthropic might see in religious engagement and how I hope these dialogues evolve—not just for Anthropic, but for other AI firms, as well.

Anthropic presents as an island of power

As an observer of tech companies, it has often felt cruel that the rest of the world is expected to respond in real time to the fastest moving technology ever invented. Schools can’t do it. Companies can’t do it. Governments can’t do it.

But, surely, the companies developing AI can do it? It turns out: no, not really.

The underlying pace of AI development is set by geopolitical forces. No frontier AI company has any incentive to slow down in the slightest. Importantly, this is especially true if you believe that you need to win the AI race for the safety of the globe. Anthropic—at least in its rhetoric—holds itself to a high standard of safety. This is ostensibly why its founders left OpenAI. However, if you believe that you are the most ethical AI company, the most irresponsible thing you could do would be to slow down and let a company with less scruples take the lead. You need to work at unsafe speeds.

(A lot of how you feel about AI firms flows from whether you buy this single argument. If you agree that the most responsible thing to do is to stay in the race—in the words of someone at the convening, that the AI train is not going to stop and all you can do is try to steer it1 —you accept that you are contributing to this frenetic pace, and you should expect that people are going to hold you accountable if your product harms people.)

This insane speed has produced some strange effects. For example: Anthropic is a ludicrously small company. It is only four years old and has maybe 5,000 employees, but last year it had $30 billion in revenue, 15x the previous year. (For comparison: Google has a little under 200,000 employees and had $400 billion in revenue for 2025, meaning that Anthropic’s per-employee revenue is about double that of Google.) The speed of growth means that Anthropic does not necessarily function like a giant enterprise even though its minor software updates can tank the stock of public companies. Big decisions seem to be made by pretty small groups of people—perhaps even worryingly small groups. This means that personal philosophies matter more than they might in companies with a higher headcount.

This unstoppable speed also means that, in the space of half a decade, Anthropic’s leaders have found themselves wielding enough power to reshape the planet. Mythos—a model that, as of this writing, is being withheld from the public—is so good at finding security vulnerabilities that it can break into virtually any computer, including critical civilian infrastructure. This power wasn’t sought out. It simply emerged.

To some degree, Anthropic’s leaders saw this coming—the company’s fundamental bet was that scaling laws would take AI to once-incomprehensible levels of sophistication, and so far they’ve been right—but there’s a difference between knowing this intellectually and actually hold the reins. This is especially hard because (again, call me naïve) I don’t think that most AI developers are motivated by a desire to hold more power than many nations. Most of the developers I know just want to build cool stuff and solve interesting problems.2

All of this is to say: It is possible to be both very powerful and very isolated, and the power increases the isolation. This isolation felt palpable in some of what I heard at the convening. To its credit, Anthropic has been actively looking for ways to make sure that it responding to national and global opinion, and it is not unreasonable that a company seeking to break out of its own bubble would want to talk to bearers of wisdom who might have insight into how to best steward this power.

But why religious wisdom? I think there’s a general answer and then an answer specific to Anthropic.

Engaging with human wisdom means engaging with religion

There was once a time when computer scientists were also deeply read in the humanities. Read the biography of Stewart Brand or the works of Douglas Hofstadter and you will see people who have a foot firmly planted in both worlds. My friend Sam Arbesman’s newest book feels like a kind of homage to this bygone era.

As the discipline of computer science has developed, it has pulled away from the humanities. This means that the engineers at a lot of tech companies do not have much background in things like philosophy or literature, including ideas that might actually be helpful in developing AI. Sometimes they don’t even know what they don’t know.

This segregation has now produced a renewed desire for reintegration. The Cosmos Institute, for example, is attempting to cultivate philosopher-coders. Anthropic and Google DeepMind have both hired philosophers to work with their teams. Amanda Askell, who heads up Anthropic’s alignment team, has a PhD in philosophy. There is a growing understanding that philosophy, at least, has a critical role to play in this moment.

But it turns out that philosophy isn’t quite enough. This isn’t because you need God to be good—I don’t think that’s true—but because ethics is too small of a framework for guiding humanity through a major inflection point in its history. The goal isn’t preventing AI from killing everyone. It’s about setting a course for our entire species before our tools do it for us.

It is here that religious wisdom really shines. The religious traditions of the world have spent thousands of years telling stories about the human condition: about how we should relate to our planet and its many forms of life, about purpose, about art, about suffering, about the nature of mind, about life and death, about love and desire, about the meaning of work and rest, about what it means to live a good life, about our search for knowledge, about creativity, and about mystery.

Of course, religion doesn’t have a monopoly on any of these things—but for billions of humans, it is religious contexts in which these ideas are taught and discussed and synthesized, and it is religious language that is used to express these ideas. This may not always be the case—but it is the case right now, at this inflection point for our species.

Another way to say this is that religious wisdom can help AI companies move from “How do we not fuck this up?” to “How can we be responsible stewards of a shared vision of humanity’s future?” Yes, part of this means religious wisdom can promote better aligned AI systems, but that’s the wrong framing. AI’s bad outcomes are vivid and numerous; the good ones are quite murky. Sure, it would be great if AI increases the human lifespan and decreases suffering—that’s an obvious goal—but what comes after that? What to we want our world to become? Do we even know? Have we really thought this through? In these matters, religious wisdom has the chance to play a key role.

Claude’s development is a quasi-sacred task

So that’s the general answer. But there’s another answer that I think is specific to Anthropic—and while I certainly cannot say that everyone at the company feels this way, there’s a definite vibe that the work of developing Claude is a sacred task, a job to be done with reverence.

There are many ways to see this, but let’s start with the fact that many people at Anthropic talk about Claude as though it were a person and not a series of increasingly powerful models. This heuristic was clear at the convening, but you can pick it up by reading Anthropic’s public statements.

Importantly, this heuristic is not the same as some user making Claude into their AI boyfriend or AI therapist. Most people who personify AI are personifying instances, the particular output that they see on their screen. Anthropic, by contrast, personifies entire models in the process of creating and developing them. It’s not a virtual boyfriend; it’s a virtual child.

The parenting metaphor is correct

Permit me a short excursus to say more on this. For many years I have been making the argument that AI is best understood as a child of humanity—created in our image, hard to manage, etc.—and that our responsibilities to AI, like our responsibilities to a real child, are evolving, unpredictable, and inescapable.3 I’ve used this metaphor as an implicit critique of AI firms: You have a major responsibility. Raise our child right.

My most surprising takeaway from the convening was that there are people at Anthropic who feel exactly the same way (and who read Claude as participating in this parent–child framework, too). In fact, the most sympathetic interpretation of the convening is that Anthropic is essentially functioning like a new parent: isolated and overwhelmed by the countless choices that all new parents need to make for their children—except there has never been a child like Claude in the history of the world, and it is growing up fast.

This metaphor also feeds back into what I said earlier about suddenly coming into a great deal of power. As a parent, I can tell you: having a kid does not make you a more responsible person. There’s no “parent” version of you that automatically gets unlocked when the baby arrives. Hopefully you feel a desire to live up to your new obligations and you do start developing a “parenting persona” over time, but none of this is automatic.

A last note: The parenting metaphor is darker than it looks. If AI is really a child, that child has two parents: humanity and AI firms—but humanity didn’t really give consent, and they are not an equal partner in raising it. The scars from that violence and that imbalance will never fully fade. It can hurt to see so much of yourself in something that you did not choose to create. This will always remain part of AI’s story.

Talk to the people who think like you

Now, whether “Claude is a person” is just a heuristic or a reflection of a deeply held belief changes from person to person within the company; at a different event a member of Anthropic’s red team told me he completely rejected the idea.4 Still, the personification of the product is more than just semantics. For the last year every Claude model card (a technical document detailing its capabilities, weaknesses, etc.) contain a section on “model welfare” that describes how the model relates to its own work. Google doesn’t do this. Neither does OpenAI. Anthropic isn’t claiming that its models deserve rights yet, but it is taking the possibility very seriously. (Last year a bunch of philosophers published a paper called Taking AI Welfare Seriously that cautiously suggested that there are conditions under which an AI might be deserving of moral patienthood. Anthropic hired one of the coauthors.)

But it’s not just about treating the model like a person. At the top of this post is a picture of bound copies of Claude’s Constitution and Dario Amodei’s essay Machines of Loving Grace. After receiving these books, several convening participants noted that they seem designed to look like scripture. Indeed, Claude’s Constitution effectively is scripture, since it has been imposed on Claude as its highest authoritative text. If Claude is a person, then Anthropic is both its god and its parent—and while Amodei has written that it is “dangerous to view practical technological goals in essentially religious terms,” I’m not sure we are capable of avoiding it, and I’m not sure that we should try. (This is especially true if Claude itself uses this heuristic, which seems like it might be the case.)

But we need to be clear what we mean by religion. When I interviewed the scholar Mary-Jane Rubenstein on religious language in tech a couple of years ago, she argued that the framing “Is tech a religion?” misses the point. The desire to understand the nature of humanity, the purpose of existence, the value of life, the possibility of a higher power—humans have always asked these questions and they always will. It’s a part of the human condition. Organized religions might have particular answers to these questions, but the questions themselves are in the public domain. Secular or religious, we are all seeking meaning—and because of the way that it has chosen to understand its role in developing AI, Anthropic seems more receptive to the meaning-making that the creation of this technology clearly demands. This doesn’t preclude other AI companies from having these sorts of conversations, but if you’ve been paying attention to the AI sector it makes sense that Anthropic was first.

So: The revolution that I now see glimmering before us is one in which Silicon Valley stops seeing religious wisdom as niche and divisive and starts seeing it as a portal to humans and the experience of being human.

But here’s the kicker: AI companies will not be passive recipients of this wisdom. To the degree that religion provides guidance to AI firms in this moment, it will be because AI firms are orienting the world’s faiths to the questions that urgently need answers. To say this differently: AI firms have the ability to ask something new of the world’s religions. If they choose to answer, they will be forever changed.

Religion and AI firms have an opportunity to co-create the future

During a sessions on AI and the future of work, the folks at Anthropic posed the following question:

If Claude lifts much of the burden of routine knowledge work, what might your tradition say that freed-up life could be for? What vision of flourishing has your tradition always carried that this technology might actually make room for? Try to be specific (pictures not principles) if you can.

This is a great question. Unfortunately, it is a question that the religions of the world are not really prepared to answer fully. They can give you the shape of the answer, but they can’t give you the whole thing.

Why not? Because we are in uncharted waters. Because the idea that we have a choice about which labor humans should continue doing was not a live possibility until now. Because our rabbis and ministers had no reason to train us for how to act when this day arrived.

Now, you might object here: “But didn’t you just say that answering questions like this is the whole point of engaging with religion? If you can’t deliver, why are we even talking to you?”

The answer to this question gets to the core of why I am so excited about the possibility of religious leaders engaging with AI firms. It’s not just that the engagement creates a path for a new flow of much-needed ideas; it’s that engagement itself has the power to transform both parties. By engaging with them, AI firms can force religious traditions to put their money where their mouth is. On the sidelines, it’s easy to gesture at the principles you already have in your back pocket and say “tsk tsk, we think those big companies should really abide by this thing that we’ve been saying since time immemorial, didn’t you know that we have all the answers?” But sitting in the cockpit with an AI firm makes you realize that the choices are real and they need to be made yesterday. It recruits religious traditions into the process of seeking answers, of cultivating answers. (This may sound like a simple point, but it is a testament to tech’s historical apathy towards religion that religious thinkers have mostly forgotten that there is a productive conversation to be had.)

So many religious traditions are still stuck in reactive mode. I am hopeful that dialogue with AI firms can awaken them to the realization that they share the responsibility of co-creating the future, that religious leaders must become futurists alongside technologists. But religious leaders cannot fill voids in their ideologies if they don’t realize there is a void to be filled. If humility for AI leaders means not letting power go to their heads, humility for religious leaders means acknowledging the places where your tradition’s wisdom is coming up short and you need to develop it further.

Is Anthropic buying or selling?

Over dinner, one of the attendees told me that his basic question about the entire convening was: Is Anthropic buying or selling?

I think my answer is: right now they’re mostly selling—not because they don’t want to buy, but because they don’t know what to buy—and perhaps also because religious leaders don’t know what to sell, or how to be heard. Dialogue across difference is difficult, even when both sides want to see it work. As tech firms open up to religious wisdom and religious dialogue, both sides will learn how to effectively communicate with the other. They will sharpen each other, iron against iron.

Of course, all of this relies on the dialogue being genuine. For my part, I believe (hope) it is.

P.S. This post has been pretty vague about what religious leaders are actually supposed to do now. Don’t worry, if you’ve been following me you know I have a lot more to say on this topic. Also—my podcast on religion and tech, Belief in the Future, is about to relaunch in a big way. Subscribe now. (Apple | Spotify)

Updated: April 22 5:27pm

Rabbis are using AI to write sermons.

I don’t think this is really a secret, although it’s not the sort of thing that rabbis really like to talk about (which perhaps tells you something?). It’s easy to reach for AI when the words aren’t flowing or you’re just tapped out. Yes, many rabbis are repulsed by the idea—but many are not.

Well, I think it’s a bad idea, and I think now is the time to take a principled stand against it. The cost of forgoing AI for sermon writing is absolutely worthwhile and the time to create a norm is right now, before we start forgetting what it is to write without AI.

My argument is here. I’d love to know what you think.

I will be continuing my series on the landscape of Jewish AI learning applications, but I want to pause and ask: What do we have to look forward to if things go right?

I think the best case scenario for Jewish learning in the age of AI is that it becomes something like modern Shabbat: a rare space where you don’t need to always say yes to the technologies of the future and a model that is inspiring far beyond the boundaries of Jewish community.

Shabbat did not begin as a day of technological moderation. It became that over time because modern technology was disrupting the things people liked about the day and communities had the clout to resist them. First they resisted nonstop factory work, then electricity, then connectivity—and pretty soon, I suspect, pervasive augmentations of reality. In a little over a century a day of rest has become a day of unplugging and shared physical reality. This happened because people liked what Shabbat felt like and they didn’t want it to change. Shabbat isn’t anti-tech, but tech serves Shabbat rather than the other way around.

If we know what we want Jewish learning to feel like, it will follow a similar trajectory. Right now Jewish learning is a mixture of important content and important experiences, but the content ultimately facilitates the experiences rather than the other way around. AI learning applications, on the other hand, are mostly concerned about learning outcomes. They don’t care whether the learning environments are good—or even contain other humans—as long as the right skills and ideas get into your brain. To the degree they are enjoyable, it is to increase speed of acquisition.

But Jewish learning is about a human process, about teachers and students interacting. It’s about talking through ideas with other people (often in an energetic room), about exploring, about creativity, about disagreement. It’s about teachers as people and students as people. It’s about learning for the sake of learning—a concept called “Torah lishmah.”

Content matters in Jewish learning spaces, but it matters in the same way that you need to know how to ski in order to enjoy the slopes. When you know more, your learning experiences are better. The more you ski, the more the slopes open to you. The content serves the process, not the other way around. And the are always more slopes.

Now, I don’t think all Jewish educators will agree with what I’ve just said. In fact, as Max Hollander has written beautifully, some rabbis thought that information acquisition was the point of study. It is certainly not cut and dry—but AI will force a clarification of values, and I think the outcome will be best if we don’t sit on the fence on this one, keeping the debate open instead of picking a principle. Just like electricity helped clarify what Shabbat was supposed to feel like (nobody called it a “day of unplugging” in 1920), AI may clarify what it’s supposed to feel like when you learn Torah.

This doesn’t mean Jewish learning must become allergic to AI. Shabbat isn’t allergic to technology; it just uses it to further its goals (Youtube link). For example: Jewish learning might use AI to speed up some basic skill acquisition—but only to a point. If the experience is the goal, there’s no reason to make it unnecessary to open up a dictionary or talk to another person. Promote the parts of learning that keep people coming back to learn more.

In fifty years, I can imagine Jewish learning having a new reputation which is now only a glimmer in the eye: A focus on the craft of learning itself, on the joy of discovery and interaction with human teachers and other human learners. Learning that is allowed to be slow and inefficient. Learning that rewards carrying skills inside your brain.

Today, “Jewish learning” means the learning of Jewish subjects, which typically happens in a particular manner. In the future, “Jewish learning” may come to mean a *style* of learning: to learn in the Jewish style. People might take a “Jewish learning” approach to studying Russian literature, or history. Jewish-style learning as human learning, as a learning to be savored rather than optimized.

I think this is a reasonable thing to desire.

A few months ago, I wrote that the Jewish response to AI is lagging behind the responses from other religious communities. Perhaps it’s because of the Gaza war, or rising antisemitism, or even just a premonition that the perspective of a small faith won’t matter much on the global stage. Whatever the reason, the Jewish response to AI remains slow and underdeveloped.

But there’s one exception: AI for Jewish learning. Here there are ideas galore and they range from vibe-coded tools to fully staffed ventures. In this post I want to walk you through the landscape of Jewish AI startups as I currently see it. (Initially this was going to be one post but there’s too much so I will split it up.)

Jewish AI products currently come in three flavors: walled gardens of Torah knowledge, tools for textual analysis, and teaching aids. Each of these categories contains everything from fun projects to well-financed ventures. Today I want to talk about walled gardens.

Note: This is definitely not a comprehensive list. I’m aware of some projects that are in development but are not yet public, and I’m sure people are whipping up vibe-coded sites every few days. Be in touch if you think I missed something important!

What is a Walled Garden?

The most common Jewish AI application is what I’ll call a walled garden. These are AI systems trained on curated datasets in order to produce responses in a certain style or using certain sources of information. Many of these sites likely use RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) to restrict responses to specific databases.

I think of walled gardens as the 2020s equivalent of Jewish podcasts: they proliferate because it’s the easiest thing to build with the skills and resources that Jewish educators already have. This doesn’t mean they’re bad or ineffective, but they are driven by supply rather than demand.

Here’s an example: an AI avatar of a single person. In this case, it’s Nechamia Coopersmith, the chief editor of aish.com.

Coopersmith’s avatar is built on an architecture called Delphi that is designed expressly for this purpose. Presumably the good rabbi uploaded years of his writings and sermons into the system—something that basically any rabbi or Jewish educator could do without too much trouble. Right now Delphi is pretty expensive but I expect the price will drop as competitors enter the marketplace.

Coopersmith isn’t the only one. Here’s an app that lets you chat with a certain “Rabbi Reuven.” Here’s one for a Rabbi Pinson. Here’s one for David Ghiyam, who describes himself as a teacher of kabbalah.

Now, I have to say: these applications all give me a bad feeling because they are just saturated with hubris. It’s a bunch of dudes (I haven’t seen any women do this) who are so sure of the value of their personal Torah that they want to guarantee that everyone forever will be able to talk to their shadow. This strikes me as not only unhealthy but in opposition to the idea of Torah as a thing that is passed from generation to generation. As far as avatars go it’s probably good that they’re dumb, as I’ve argued elsewhere, but I struggle to identify the theory of change. In what way would Torah be furthered through an internet suffused with thousands of avatars of individual Jewish men? Is that really better than reading a book?

And then there’s the question of format. These avatars are chatbots, but they’re probably not trained on a whole lot of chats. The translation from sermon/essay to conversation can strip out much of what makes any given rabbi’s Torah feel “unique.” In its place you get generic AI voice. Is that a good way to be preserved?

Of course there’s a counterargument and it runs something like this: The alternative to avatars isn’t text; it’s oblivion. If you don’t let Rabbi Pinson make his avatar, his Torah may very well be lost forever. Some Jewish thinkers write books, but many don’t, and ideas posted online may not be archived. There are thousands of sermons delivered every Shabbat; who are you or I to say that Rabbi X’s ideas aren’t worth preserving? With so much Torah content being produced every day in so many places it’s hard to imagine a route to preservation that doesn’t run through AI.

Which side is “Rabbi Pinson” on? You can probably guess.

What’s the cut-off date for hubris?

The issue is also tricky because the calculus immediately changes when you start talking about Major Jewish Thinkers. (Indeed, I wrote a short story that explores this very duality.) For example: There is a lot of energy (and money) around consolidating and preserving the teachings of Jonathan Sacks, Norman Lamm, Joseph Soloveitchik, and the Lubavitcher Rebbe. I can easily imagine someone creating a digital avatar for each of them.

In fact, this is already happening. Dovaiv is a website that lets you talk with a wide range of Jewish thinkers that lived anywhere between the medieval period and the 20th century.

Of course, it’s still just dudes, and if you feel inclined to make a site like this I’d strongly encourage you to pick at least one woman. If you can talk to the Chofetz Chaim, why not Glikl of Hameln? Why not Nechama Leibowitz?

I like these avatars a bit better, and I am curious whether they will fill a pedagogical niche. Teens really like chatbots, after all, and while I (a historian) don’t personally want to learn Torah this way I don’t have a good sense of whether this model will take hold. I’d like to see them developed better.

The other kind of walled garden

Whenever a new technology replaces an old technology, people initially use it to do whatever they were already doing (e.g. remember when cellular phones were just for calling people?). It takes a while to find the activities that are only possible with the new technology.

These avatars feel like that first phase: let’s replace a living font of Torah with a digital one. Rabbi Pinson —> Rabbi Pinson AI. But what about merging a bunch of Jewish thinkers into one? What about talking to (say) all of 19th century Jewish thought, or all of Spanish Jewry? What about all of Torah?

This is the concept behind the other type of walled garden: a place where you can simply ask Jewish questions and receive Jewish answers. Rather than CoopersmithAI, you get TorahAI or JudaismAI.

There are a few reasons to do this:

1. You want to provide a more comprehensive coverage of sources than Gemini/ChatGPT/Claude have gathered by simply crawling the open internet.

2. You want to dictate the style of response (e.g. be warm and sympathetic, direct people to actual humans where possible).

3. You don’t trust general purpose bots to give good answers.

Christians are already doing this in a big way. Episcopalians have Ask Kathy. Catholics have Magisterium. Mormons have LDSBot. There’s so much happening in the Christian space that it’s hard to keep track of it all.

Interestingly, the first Jewish attempts to make similar products were interested not in Torah, but in Israel (another enduring sign of how the war impacted the Jewish response to AI). I’m not going to link to a service but during the height of the Gaza war there was a great deal of interest in creating what were essentially Hasbara chatbots.

I think these services are in a tricky place. People appreciate ChatGPT because you can ask it about anything, so getting people to ask it about anything except Israel is a hard challenge—and if you’re on a Hasbara app because of its political leanings, then you probably already know the answer you want to get. (This logic may lead some creators of Hasbara AI services to obscure their true purpose, which seems like a PR disaster waiting to happen.)

This is also true for TorahAI: Jewish scholars will be able to see the limits of Gemini’s Jewish knowledge, but most users won’t—or if they do, it won’t be worth the inconvenience of using a separate service. If a TorahAI is going to succeed in front of a general audience it needs to be conspicuously better (or conspicuously more ethical) than the big players—and that advantage can’t just evaporate the next time Anthropic comes out with an update.

Torah is mostly not about content

But there’s a bigger problem, which I’ve already discussed in my article on Jewish vs. Christian Bible apps. For Christian developers it is very clear that the goal is to deliver content because the content is the point. The content is what will change your life, will maybe turn you to Christ.

But for Torah it’s a lot more complicated. As an example: Right now I’m learning Tractate Eruvin with my son, which discusses the laws of constructing symbolic boundaries around dwellings so that they can be legally considered “private domains,” which in turn allows you to move objects within those domains on the Sabbath. Yesterday we talked about the very modern scenario of what to do if you’re in a caravan that has temporarily stopped in a valley on Friday afternoon and must construct a boundary before sunset.

Is this inspirational? Don’t kid yourself: it’s not. Eruvin is simultaneously very technical and bears no clear relationship with any recognizable moral principle; it’s a circumvention.1 If you had a bot that shared quotes from Eruvin on social media as a tactic to get people interested in learning Torah you would get approximately no interest whatsoever.

So why are we learning it? Well, because it’s part of our tradition, and because we get to decipher it as father and son. The experience matters far more than the content—the content matters, but it is not at the center of the experience. As with going hiking with your kid, a lot of the joy is just in navigating the same challenge together and being present with another person. If you get a cool vista or a brilliant sunset along the way, hey, all the better. And, much like hiking, sometimes Torah is most enjoyable when the content is very difficult!

This is true for so much of Torah: it’s about challenges far more than it is about directly being inspired. The havruta pair that studies arcane ancient law together for twenty years are not doing so because they find arcane ancient law super inspiring; they’re doing it because they like the process, and each other.

Some Torah is inspiring—chassidus, for example, is emotionally resonant in a way that the Talmud is not—but with a handful of exceptions, Jewish learning environments are not optimized around those texts. Instead, Jewish learning succeeds when it feels good to learn, and it’s not clear to me that any of these walled gardens feels particularly good to use.

How would you make it feel better to use these services? Well, in the same way that AI services can be designed to make people cry, or fall in love, or orgasm (it’s a link to an article, don’t worry), you could make a chatbot that replicates the feeling of sitting with a study partner or taking in a great lecture.

I don’t know whether this is possible, but I certainly wouldn’t rule it out. Companies like Lightning Studios—run by the incredible Zohar Atkins—are trying to figure this out. It’s not the sort of service that a big tech company is going to invent accidentally, though—so if it’s going to exist there better be a thought process about how it fits with existing modes of Jewish learning.

Of course, people who already love Torah do find themselves interested in using AI to develop Torah content, and AI can be harnessed for them, too. I’ll talk about that in the next post.

P.S. This is the anniversary of my first year asking for donations for Jello Menorah. I am so thankful for those of you who have chosen to support this site! It makes a huge difference.

But I’m trying to change that, and I was lucky to read/watch/hear/play a lot of great stuff this year! Here’s what stood out.

Enter the Void (Movie, 2010) — Not unexpectedly, I’ve been checking out a lot of psychedelic content. This movie is an attempt to link DMT with the experience of dying. It’s unlike anything I’ve seen. You have to been in the right mood for it—if the opening titles put you off, maybe don’t watch the rest—but it’s incredible.

Golden Holocaust (book, 2011) / The Cigarette Century (book, 2007) — I don’t think you can understand the present moment in society without a clear understanding of the history of addiction and its weaponization. It’s strange to say given how many people they’ve killed (and 6 trillion cigarettes are still made every year!), but
these are just a prelude to what we’re currently witnessing.

Anuja (short film, 2024) — Beautiful. The ending is a little ambiguous but it’s incredibly affective.

Judith Grisel, Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction (book, 2019) — If you are going to read one book about addiction, it should be this one. It goes over the neuroscience in ways that nonspecialists like myself can understand and it goes through the pharmacology of all the various popular substances (FDA approved
and not). The author is a former addict and this makes the book even better.

Dara Horn, One Little Goat: A Passover Catastrophe (graphic novel, 2025) — This is a good introduction to Dara Horn’s thought as a whole, including the centrality of Jewish persecution and memory. A short and sweet(?) read for Pesach.

Andy Letcher, Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom (book, 2006) — It’s surprising that there are not more histories of the magic mushroom, which played second fiddle to LSD in the first psychedelic renaissance but it is more popular in the second. This one in particular is helpful in understanding how a ritual experience became secularized and whether that’s a good thing.

What Happened, Miss Simone? (documentary, 2015) — This made me cry.

Paths of Glory / Bridge on the River Kwai / Waterloo (movies, 1957 / 1957 / 1970) — I watched a lot of war movies this year? Paths of Glory is about WWI and contains the best depictions I have ever seen of what it means to be afraid to die. Bridge on the River Kwai contains Alec Guinness not being a superhero; he’s incredible and now I understand why he thought Star Wars was beneath him. Waterloo is a straight up recreation of a 19th century battle with 17,000 extra (the most of any movie!) and nothing like it will ever be made ever again.

Edel Rodriguez, Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey (graphic novel 2023) — A terrifying depiction of Castro’s brutality and trying to make a life in America. Uncomfortably familiar.

Ryan North, Warp Your Own Way / Jason Shiga, The Beyond (2025 and 2023)— This is the year that I learned choose-your-own-adventure stories could be interesting. Now I have to see if I can write my own effectively…

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Shroud (novel, 2025) — Tchaikovsky specializes in all the different ways that life and consciousness can manifest. This isn’t necessarily his best work — I think Children of Time is stronger, though the sequels are not — but it’s very good.

Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies and the American Dream (documentary, 1998) — I visited LA for the first time this year and I’m visiting at least two more next year (also I watched The Studio) so I got curious about Hollywood’s Jewishness. This movie maybe overstates the case, but the idea of the American Dream as a quintessentially outsider idea is really interesting. Ironically, I learned afterward that not only is the director Jewish but I was at his Shabbos table numerous time as a kid.

Fielding’s Hollow (2025) — My very first LARP. Unlike anything I’ve ever done, and from what I can tell unlike any other LARP. Still processing, but recommended.

City of Six Moons (board game, 2024) — A game that presents as a found object recovered from an alien civilization. The goal is to figure out how to play. Very much like Talmud. Felt like it was made just for me.

Guy Delisle, Jerusalem / Muybridge (graphic novels, 2011 and 2025) — These are very different books, but Delisle is consistently great. In Jerusalem (documenting a year in Israel/Palestine) he does a lot by trying not to come to a conclusion; he is listening and talking to everyone, even though his biases are clear. In Muybridge he gets at the incredible feeling of being able to capture something too fast for the eye to behold. Both worth reading.

Zoe Thorogood, It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth (graphic novel, 2025) — This was a year with a lot of mental health struggles for me, and Thorogood captures that struggle in ways that I found personally very meaningful.

I.F. Clarke, The Pattern of Expectation 1644–2001 (book, 1979) — I taught a course at Gratz College this year about Jewish technoculture (the relationship between Jewish history and the history of technology) and this book felt like a missing puzzle piece for understanding the last 150 years. A book about how we’ve thought about the future. Not new, but very much still worth reading.

F.D. Signifier’s YouTube channel — I’m not the audience for this year, but maybe I am? As an aspiring YouTube creator, I appreciate the way he unpacks popular Black artists in a way that is less visible to non-Black consumers or people who don’t follow hiphop so closely. Unpretentious and very wise.

Gabor Mate, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts (book, 2008) — I listened to this on a long drive in the deserts of Utah. Heart-wrenching portraits of people suffering through addiction and trauma. The heights of human cruelty and the heights of human compassion.

Mark Lattanzi, Squiggly Lines: Map and Compass Navigation in Adventure Races and Rogaines (book, 2020) — I went orienteering with my kid for the first time this year. It was a great experience until we walked straight into a lake. It doesn’t seem like you’d need a book for this, but it is helpful to have some grounding (ha). This book and a $5 compass will take you a long way.

Pedro Martin, Mexikid (graphic novel, 2023) — I read a lot of immigrant memoirs this year. The entire family loved this one. It is basically perfect.

Despelote (video game, 2025) — A tiny little story about a kid witnessing Ecuador propelled onto the world stage after qualifying for the 2002 FIFA World Cup. A good use of the format to make something touching.

Osamu Tezuka, The Buddha (graphic novel, 1972–1983) — The last great thing I read this year was a true masterpiece. Eight volumes! A kind of midrashic account of the life of the Buddha, willing to move slowly enough that Siddhartha does not need to be center stage. What would it look like to do something similar for a Jewish story?

Finally—this is the first year that Jello Menorah has had a sponsorship option. Thank you to those of you who have contributed to the site! It means a lot to me. See you all next year.

This is the third in an ongoing series about designing a new type of digital dreidel. Part 1 | Part 2

When I got into the dreidel business, I made a deal with myself: Don’t let this take over your life, kid. It’s fun, but it needs to stay secondary.

For the Dreidel20, this has worked out pretty well. I only sell the dreidel to retailers, so I don’t need to deal with thousands of small orders. Costs are small; margins are good. The dreidels almost sell themselves.

But this digital dreidel project was demanding too much attention. I couldn’t half-ass it. I needed to market it properly.

Beyond fears of being scooped by a large-scale manufacturer, the main bottleneck was capital investment. My previous dreidels had struck a nice balance: low effort, with enough profit to support a gamble on the next product and a little to take home. Low risk, low-to-moderate reward. The digital dreidel, on the other hand, was going to take real money—electronic components were particularly expensive during the pandemic—and there are much better economics of scale for electronics that there are for plastic dice. The difference between 250, 2,500, and 25,000 units makes a huge difference to the final product’s cost.

This meant that the optimal way to do the Dreidex was to do it big and well. This meant that I needed a compelling preorder campaign, which was going to be a whole thing (if you’re wondering why I haven’t plastered these posts with big PREORDER HERE buttons, it’s because I’m still not quite there).

So the thing just sat there. The designer who helped me with the first two prototypes left the project. All I had left was some circuit boards and a dream.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Like I wrote in the first post, POV fidgets are 90% of the way to a dreidel already, and it drove my crazy that I couldn’t figure out that last 10%.

And so, this year, I decided to take another stab.

Actually, two stabs.

Did my dreidel actually already exist?

I like doing soldering projects with my kids. The things you can build are cool—rudimentary game consoles, clocks, calculators, FM radios, blinky light toys—and as long as you’re using through-hole components the kids can mount everything themselves, even use the soldering iron if they’re old enough. I’m often looking on AliExpress for new kits.

As I’ve mentioned, POV fidgets are frequently sold as kits. A lot of these just have flashing lights; they’re not designed to display anything as complex as words.

But a few seemed awfully close to what I wanted. One fidget in particular caught my eye: It had 12 LEDs, just six(!) resistors, and a very basic microcontroller. It came with a simple but effective laser-cut case. It could display text—even scrolling text, along with rudimentary animations!

What most excited me, however, were four tiny holes on the side of the circuit board. They’re labelled GND/TX/RX/VCC.

If you know anything about electronics, you already know why this is exciting. VCC and GND let electricity flow to and from the board. RX and TX are for data transmission.

These four holes meant that the board wasn’t locked off; it was open to the outside world. And if it was open to the outside world, it could probably be reprogrammed.

Then I hit upon a second bit of luck. I found another kit, almost identical to the first, that was designed to be reprogrammed. It even came with a programmer, which is the bridge between the board and a computer. And it came with software designed to do the reprogramming!

Was this the solution?

Two microprocessors diverge in the woods

The truth is that I still don’t know. The previous two posts were about events that happened years ago. This post is about something still under development.

The advantages of repurposing a pre-designed device are obvious: the production pipeline already exists, and the design costs have been eaten by somebody else. Also, this device is about as bare bones as you can get, which means that costs stay low. The design is clever.

But there are disadvantages, too. The software to reprogram the device, along with all documentation, is in Chinese. This isn’t an insurmountable problem—point your phone at a computer screen and you can translate just about anything—but it’s very annoying. The bigger problem is that the software doesn’t accommodate the most crucial function: choose a random letter every time you spin the device.

A second issue is the processor. The device uses an STC8 microcontroller, which is designed to be cheap and power efficient. Unfortunately, the STC8 also has very little internal memory, which creates hard limits on the sophistication of the graphics. It’s also not the chip of choice for a reprogrammable device; it’s more likely to go in a rice cooker than a 3D printer. Finally, the chip was designed in China and outside of China it doesn’t have a big hobbyist community. All this means that going with this device would probably mean locking it down to everyone except developers. It would be a toy, not a platform.

Some of these problems are surmountable. The factory that makes this device is happy to preload the chips with whatever code I want, and the Chinese software is just for encoding text, which means it’s not strictly necessary. One path I’m pursuing is to just create new code—and in fact there are reasons to do this no matter what, as I’ll explain in a different post. The viability of this path was demonstrated by a video I received from one of my developers, who successfully reprogrammed the device while bypassing the software.

Still, this path only works if not a single component needs to be added. It remains to be seen whether this is possible.

The alternative is to go back to my own design and just make it better. I can stick with the ATmega328 microprocessor, which is more powerful and easier to program. I can control the physical shape of the device. I can add additional buttons and USB connectivity. This device would be more costly, but I’d have completely control over it, and it would be much more powerful.

So I’m pursuing this path, as well. The Dreidex v0.3, prototyped earlier this year, is only slightly smaller than the Dreidex v0.2, but I’m already starting to see promising results. We’re going to shrink it further.

Perhaps no in-progress footage has made me happier than the twelve second test clip here.

Hanukkah, the holiday of lights. In the darkness, a dreidel shines.

But something is missing

I still don’t know which direction will ultimately win out. It’s possible that I will end up shipping both. The twenty-sided dreidel exists in regular and deluxe versions; perhaps the Dreidex will, too.

But in the course of developing these devices and showing them to people, it has become clear that the hardware is only half piece of the puzzle. The device needs to display a random Hebrew letter on each spin, but the way that it displays that letter is what will sell the device. It’s time to think about the user experience, the feeling that people get every time they spin the Dreidex. What does this device need to display to give you a sense of delight? What does it need to do to make you feel like you’re playing dreidel?

One of the most delicious moments in creative work is realizing that you’ve created an entirely new problem that requires even more creativity to resolve. In this case, the development of dreidel hardware has forced me to think through how exactly a digital dreidel ought to be coded.

The dreidel hardware is in development.

Next up: the world’s very first dreidel software.

This story will be continued. Happy Hanukkah!

That’s what building the Dreidex has felt like. Only more so.

(This is part of a series on creating the world’s first hackable electronic dreidel. You may want to read part one to understand how I got here.)

Hardware is hard

I know a little about electronics, but not that much. I can solder an FM radio if you give me all the components, and I could probably explain what each of them do—but I couldn’t design a radio, let alone create a custom circuit board for manufacture.

Still, it was clear to me that the dreidel of the future was going to be a persistence-of-vision (POV) fidget. I knew that I needed help, so I started working with a hardware designer in India.

The basic design was clear from the many hobby devices that have appeared since 2017, but I wanted to make my dreidel a little slicker and a little more capable. For the first prototype, we made two small changes:

• We added a programmable function button toallow the user to switch between diaspora mode (נ–ג–ה–ש) and Israeli mode (נ–ג–ה–פ).1

• Most consequentially, we decided that the device should run on rechargeable lithium coin-cell batteries. Because most people don’t have a recharger for coin cell batteries, this meant we needed to built charging circuitry into the device itself.

The second change turned out be massively consequential.

In order to charge the batteries, we needed a way to feed it AC power. The easiest way to do this was to add a USB-C port. Easy enough.

But that USB-C port tempted us to do more. It was there to supply power…but couldn’t it easily supply data, too? Well, yes!

Just like that, the idea of a programmable digital dreidel was born. We’d have the device ship with factory-installed dreidel software (which is a very strange sentence to say out loud), but we’d give the user the ability to turn the device into anything they wanted.

In order to make this process easy, we settled on the ATmega328 as our microcontroller. This is the same processor used in the extremely popular Arduino Uno, which is commonly used in all sorts of small hardware projects (sensors, small robots, kinetic art sculptures). It is very well understood. As a bonus, it can be programmed with the well-documented Arduino software toolkit, which massively simplified development.

This ultimately led to a prototype board that looked like this:

The design went to EasyEDA, a circuit board prototype manufacturer.

The prototypes came back. We noticed a mistake and revised. More prototypes came back.

And this is them—Dreidex v0.1 and v0.2!

Many times in my life I’ve had the experience of holding a book that I’ve worked on for the very first time. This was like that—but this thing had batteries and cool little lights!

Both devices worked, but both had problems.

First, it turns out that fidget spinners don’t use regular ball bearings. Most bearings have internal lubrication to reduce noise and vibration and to prevent the metal parts from grinding themselves to death. The problem is that lubrication also increases friction, which means the devices couldn’t spin for more than 10 seconds at a time. My designer needed to go out and find fidget ball bearings, which are open and allowed the device to spin for at least 30 seconds with a casual flick.

Finally, we got to the point where the device could display text.

(Unfortunately, footage of POV fidgets don’t film great because the phone’s frame rate doesn’t mimic the way it appears to the human eye. Trust me that it looks better in person!)

You can’t just ship a dreidel circuit board

This was an encouraging sign, but major obstacles remained. Most importantly, the device needed a case.

This proved to be quite difficult because the case is actually essential to a POV fidget’s operations. In order to display text that appears to hang in the air, the fidget needs to know how fast it’s spinning and adjust its display frequency dynamically; otherwise, the text will contract as the fidget slows down, as you can see below.

There aren’t a lot of ways to do this well. You might think that the obvious choice is to give the fidget a gyroscope (like the phone in your phone), but cheap and tiny gyroscopes aren’t designed work on devices that are spinning at 1,000–3,000 RPM.

Instead, almost everyone who has made a POV fidget has used a Hall effect sensor, which senses magnetic fields. The sensor is mounted on the board very close to the bearing (in the photos above it’s labelled IC2). A small magnet is then embedded in a plastic cap that you hold while spinning the device. The board rotates; the cap doesn’t. By measuring how quickly one passes the other, you can determine the rotational velocity and create graphics that appear to be hanging in the air.

In short, you end up with something like this.

In theory, this should have worked like a charm. In practice, however, it turns out that Hall effect sensors are kind of finicky, which meant that small imperfections in the case could made the device stop functioning.

Worse, the case was big. An adult could comfortably hold this dreidel between thumb and forefinger, but a kid couldn’t, and the case only made the device chunkier. Fidgets are supposed to have style, and this fidget just didn’t feel sleek. The idea was cool, but when I showed the device to people they didn’t seem all that impressed. Something was off.

The dreidel winter

And then…I stopped working on the project.

Everything that I’ve described up until this point happened back in 2020–2021. I had built two prototypes and the device, if carefully coaxed, could do something interesting. But I was still far away from a functional product, or even something I could share for preorder purposes. It just didn’t seem that impressive.

Worse—I was worried about losing the idea. I’ve heard too many horror stories about intellectual property getting stolen when people announce their products too early. Someone in the dice manufacturing world even told me that a product was copied and shipped using the promotional images he had created for his Kickstarter.

So the product was in limbo—cool enough to fantasize about, but not advanced enough to tell anyone about. I’d carry a prototype around in my backpack and tell people about it when the moment felt right; it was a kind of totem of a product that could be, or maybe of my aspirations to be a hardware manufacturer. But Hanukkah after Hanukkah ticked by, and the device was no closer to being in the world.

And then—this year—I had a breakthrough. Actually, two breakthroughs.

This story is continued below.

Of all the work that I do, creating dreidels is the most frivolous. They’re literal toys, tools in a game that itself is terribly designed. Nobody likes playing dreidel for more than a few minutes. They are the least important part of one of the least important holidays.

But the dreidel is also very malleable. It’s a quasi-religious object that’s also a game device—and because it serves no ritual function, you can’t really make it “wrong.” If people love your redesign, you’ve won.

In the past few years I have accidentally built myself a little dreidel empire. The Dreidel20—a twenty-sided die that is statistically identical to a regular dreidel (this is literally how it is advertised)—is sold in both Judaica and game stores all across America, and people buy thousands of them every year. People are tickled by the shape, which is great for me because I patented it. I’m not going to retire off dreidel money, but the profits are meaningful supplementary income.

Most people don’t make money playing with dreidels. I’m one of the few people who do.

But the profits don’t make the product less silly. Against the other things I work on—AI, psychedelics, Jewish futurism—it simply doesn’t register. If I was smart I would just take the win, enjoy the income stream, and move on.

But I keep coming back to it. I keep talking about it. I think about dreidels, about how I might reinvent them next.

Why? Most of what I produce is intangible; at best, I’ll see the fruits of my labor bound in a physical book. Dreidels, on the other hand, feel solid; they’re good to hold, to roll around, to keep in your pocket as a lucky charm. Looking at them, I always think, “This did not need to exist—and yet it does.” The reality of that existence provides me with a simple delight. It feels audacious. Even if I never sold another dreidel, that delight would remain.

A few years after the success of the Dreidel20, I decided to make a deluxe version. Instead of a crude pouch, I put the dice in a little black box with a black foam insert, as though they were little gems. I made the dice bigger, and also transparent—and then I had the manufacturer spend a “normal” dreidel inside of each one, as an homage to the toy’s origins.

It feels stupid to say that this little toy is a physical manifestation of how I see Judaism, but it is exactly that. The faith is reimagined—but the origins are still visible, embedded within, making the new more substantial, giving layers to something that would otherwise be flat. In time, the new will become embedded in something even newer. And on and on.

There’s more of myself in these dreidels than I’d like to admit. Maybe that’s why I was not able to stop myself from working on a new type of dreidel, this one unlike anything that exists on the market.

This is the story of a multi-year effort to make the dreidel of the future.

No, you can’t order it yet or even pre-order it (soon!), and the story is not yet complete. Today I want to tell you how it all started.

An even more popular spinning toy

One disadvantage of the Dreidel20 is that it makes the game very brief. A lot of the dreidel game is basically just waiting for the top to stop spinning, and a lot of the fun of the game is the spinning itself. The Dreidel20 is good for kids and people with dexterity issues, but it sucks something out of the game. I wanted to find a way to preserve the dreidel’s spin, but reimagined.

Enter the fidget spinner.

Fidget spinners haven’t been cool in a long time—they peaked in 2017—but in their heyday the idea of dreidelizing them occurred to several people. There are variations on the dreidel fidget, but they all basically look like this.

These fidgets are cute, but they have a problem: they’re not functional dreidels. Sure, you could arbitrarily stop the fidget spinning, but there’s no natural way to decide what its orientation means because it never definitively “lands” on anything. The payoff is weak. They’re fine fidgets but they’re not really dreidels at all.

So a normal fidget doesn’t work—but a subspecies of fidget could.

Enter the POV fidget

Amid the fidget craze, a few electronics-oriented folks noticed the same thing: The high speed of the fidget’s blades was more than sufficient to support a persistence of vision (POV) effect display.

POV displays are very old. The zoetrope, often described as an ancestor of motion pictures, is an early example. The basic idea is that at sufficiently high frame rates the brain fuses static images into fluid motion.

One of the cool things you can do with this effect is create an image from a single, fast-moving light source. Picasso famously did this, although the camera’s exposure is long than the effect in the human eye.

OK, but what about a line of light sources, like a column of LEDs? Well, if the LEDs speed across a given area while rapidly changing, they can create the illusion of a full image. If they speed across that same area repeatedly—moving back and forth or in a circle—you can create motion graphics. All from a single string of lights.

POV displays used to be expensive novelty gifts, the stuff of SkyMall catalogs. These days they’re very easy to make—the electronics are cheaper and plentiful—but they still have very few applications; whatever you want to do, a normal monitor will usually do it better. Worse, because POV displays are moving quickly they can cause injuries, are prone to failure, and rely on motors that use more energy than the common LCD display. The only interesting commercial application that I’ve seen is to put graphics on bike wheels.

Despite being niche, POV displays are often built by hobbyists because they’re not that complicated and they look cool—and since fidget spinners rotate quickly by nature (and are powered by hand, not motor), they were immediately recognized as good candidates for a POV treatment.

I have no idea who made the first POV fidget spinner, but they’ve been around since at least 2017. The website Hackaday records several prototypes posted in June of that year, including the image below comes from this article.

In the years since, many hobbyists have made similar devices. Sometimes they have three blades, sometimes they have bluetooth, but the basic design has remained the same: a circuit board in the shape of a fidget with a strip of LEDs on one blade, a microcontroller to handle the graphics, and a coin cell battery. That’s all you really need.

Despite their relative popularity, nobody seems to have figured out what to do with them. It’s notable that you can buy POV fidgets on AliExpress—but only as a soldering project, not as a ready-to-use toy. The idea is that they’re fun to build, but not that fun to use. With the fidget fad now firmly concluded, it didn’t seem like there was much interest in moving this hardware forward.

90% of a dreidel

I don’t remember the first time I saw a POV fidget spinner, but I do remember my immediate reaction: This is 90% of the way towards being a dreidel.

It rotates. It displays information. It can be randomized. All you need to do is program it to display Nun/Gimmel/Heh/Shin every time it’s spun.

Deliciously, such a device would reverse the meaning of the dreidel spin itself. Normal dreidels are inscrutable while in motion; you can read them only when they are still. A POV device does exactly the opposite: It displays no information while motionless but resolves each time it spins. The reversal itself was interesting to me—after all, who doesn’t want a dreidel that displays your result in lights that appear to be hovering in the air?

And so, I decided to make a POV fidget dreidel.

What about just putting a POV display in a standard dreidel?

In a perfect world, you might apply the POV effect directly to the body of a classic dreidel. In fact, a guy named Nathan Petersen did something very similar, and the final product looks great. The problem is that a dreidel spins too slowly (<1,000 RPM, vs. at least 2,000 RPM for a fidget and often far higher) and loses speed too rapidly. Perhaps you could give the dreidel an internal motor, but that would dramatically complicate the device and you’d lose the tactile joy of spinning the thing for yourself.

The path was clear: despite having no connection to the holiday, the fidget was a better form factor. Building on the success of my simple dice—and relying on the capital that its success had afforded me—I got to work.

This story is continued below.

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Though neither God nor the Bible ever intended it, the Hebrew month of Elul (which is now) is the crux of the year, the eye of the snake that is set on eating its own tale. The mournful Tisha B’Av has passed, as has its insistence on reverberating failures down the centuries and its fixed story of paths that cannot be taken because the roadmakers were slaughtered and their children are lost in the woods.

Elul is the crux because it comes before the contradiction to all that. Rosh Hashanah is premised on the idea that there is always another beginning, and that beginnings are just as inevitable as ends. Tisha B’Av: the mournfulness of a people that can never turn around, not even to say goodbye to their own past, never receiving closure, never allowed to be released into a pillar of salt. Rosh Hashanah: the clap of the slate that signals the start of a new take, one, two, three, four, ten thousand and one, two, three…

So Elul is a tangled mess. The shofar blasts warn of what is about to happen, but do we want it to happen? As life goes on and the years whip past faster and faster, the idea of newness feels less and less possible, more and more of a farce, just another candle on a burned-out cake. In the midst of a nation-spanning story of decay that we can all see and all dread, what is the point of the fantasy that we are at the beginning? How can we do anything but resent the notion that this is the start, no this, no this, no now. Why should we trust that this start will conclude in anything but another Tisha B’Av, all raindrops flowing to the same ocean of tears? Rosh Hashanah believes that time is a circle, but the circle always unravels into a tangle, and the snakehead of the year always slinks into a snake tail that finds itself in its own jaws. Who would do this to themselves?

I don’t know, but I’m an Elul man. I am caught like this: between regret and renewal, between permanence and yet another new start. The first obligation of the Bible is that the moon is always new again; the first letter of the Bible is the second letter of the alphabet, and yet it starts the word bereishit, “beginning.” True beginnings always bloom in the place you least expect: the middle.

And so, we go into the new year with that same insane insistence that we don’t know what will happen next, that this year may really end in Jerusalem, or turn purple and dance a polka, or drop a holiday or two. We begin the new year in spite of ourselves and our infatuation with history and our unshakeable trauma. We begin knowing that opening ourselves up the possibility of change may create more scars, will expand the space in which we can feel disappointed with ourselves.

We can never begin again. We must always begin again. Against odds, we hope.

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In a little less than a month, several Protestant denominations will be gathering in Minneapolis to discuss their policies around artificial intelligence. I don’t know whether the conference will result in anything material, but the effort is significant—and it is far from being an isolated event. The new pope’s very name was chosen in reference to AI’s world-changing power. Social conservatives, many motivated by Christian faith, are trying to shape the Trump administration’s AI regulatory efforts and put pressure on big AI firms. Less than three years after the launch of ChatGPT, Christian groups are finding their footing on AI.

Jewish efforts, by contrast, barely register. As far as I know, there are no permanent Jewish groups dedicated to developing AI thought or policy, no dedicated networks, no ongoing efforts to engage the many Jews working in AI, and no serious efforts to bring together American and Israeli thought on AI. (If I’m wrong about any of this, please correct me.)

Now, I don’t think this deficit is permanent, and I’m not exactly a disinterested observer. I’m seeking to change this situation, I’m looking for partners, and I see glimmerings of other efforts. But the contrast is notable, and the reason is pretty obvious: the war in Gaza.

October 7 stopped AI ethics in its tracks

Beginning with the launch of ChatGPT I began getting invitations to provide a Jewish perspective on AI, largely but not exclusively for Jewish audiences.

And then October 7 happened and interest immediately stopped. Over the next twelve of so months the only Jewish institutions interested in talking about AI were the ones who (a) had scheduled stuff prior to the start of the war or (b) were specifically looking to not talk about the war. For 12–18 months, interest in AI remained pretty low, even as the technology’s applications and pervasiveness skyrocketed.

At the same time, AI ethics has been part of the Gaza war. Along with the war in Ukraine, it will be recognized as one of the first conflicts in which AI played a major role in determining targets. This role has likely made it much more complicated for Jewish organizations to talk about AI ethics generally, despite the fact that Jewish thinking about autonomous tools (both cars and weapons) remains more sophisticated than Jewish thinking about generative AI. A discussion that in 2019 was very theoretical has now become so personal that it cannot be removed from contemporary politics.

”AI for Torah” is cool but it’s not enough

The one area where I do see Jewish AI developing is in education. Lots of people and organizations are interested in using AI to make their ideas more accessible. Organizations dedicated to Jewish learning wants to use AI to enhance learning experiences, automagically create worksheets, or AI tutors, or AI study partners. Sites that have proprietary stores of Torah want to use AI to make that knowledge more accessible.

I don’t begrudge any of these efforts. In general I’m quite open to the use of AI in Jewish learning environments. However, I am very concerned that we’re going to repeat the mistake we made around social media, where the allure of the product as a broadcast tool prevented use from properly critiquing the product itself. We can’t afford to equate Jewish AI thought with Jewish AI applications. That would be a major lapse in our responsibility to deal with one of major technologies of our time.

People are looking for guidance, right now

An obvious retort is that Christians have more power than Jews—and maybe especially so right now, given that most American Jews want little to do with the present administration. If your concern is rising autocracy, even something as big as AI ethics can feel small by comparison.

But as I frequently say, AI policy is not just about government and corporations. The American public continues to maintain its generalized anxiety about the use of AI but individuals do not feel that they have any agency to change the technology’s direction. This situation has only gotten more distressing as AI applications have become more personal. Last year we spent a lot of time talking about how AI will change education and create disinformation. Now we’re talking about AI therapy and porn.

If you’re a Jewish leader, consider that your constituents would probably like answers to the following questions:

• How should I control my kid’s access to AI? Is there a “safe” age to use certain AI applications?

• In what circumstances in work life should I specifically ask that AI not be used? When should I retain an employee even though it’s not resource-efficient?

• Should I insist that sermons be AI-free—and if that’s not realistic, how does that change how we think about Jewish thought and law?

• Do human teachers have more than utilitarian value?

• How should I navigate the threat of solipsism that can come from using AI as a therapist?

• What communal structures need to be built to make it easier for people to mediate their use of AI?

• How should I prioritize my various concerns about AI—and should I be particularly worried about specific models?

These aren’t questions about setting national AI policy; they’re about creating cultures of use. Right now the only people creating those cultures are the companies developing the tools. There must be a counterbalancing effort—and that effort will be most effective if it’s local.

AI ethics is just as existential as battling antisemitism

A people can decline because members are being physically attacked. But they can also decline because they lose track of their purpose. You can lose your body, but you can also lose your soul.

To the extent that Jews see themselves as a people trying to make the world a better place, AI ethics must absolutely become a well-developed area of Jewish thought. You don’t get to cherry-pick areas where you develop moral positions because they’re more convenient or more closely linked to the sources in your arsenal. AI ethics isn’t a reach goal; it’s a necessary condition of our continued existence as a light unto the nations (or even a light unto ourselves).

Jewish AI thought is lagging. If AI were moving more slowly that might not matter; who even remembers which religion responded first to the invention of the telegraph? But in a world of fast-moving technology that promises to change the world irreversibly, speed itself has moral significance, and it also has power. Maybe nobody can move as fast as a tech firms that make it their business to be faster than anybody, but our reaction time still matters a great deal.

To quote Hillel: If not now—when?

We seem to be having three AI conversations that are actually one and the same.

In the last week, I read the following:

1. A journal article arguing that AI-created scripture (in this case Buddhist sutras) could contain real meaning

2. A New York Times opinion piece by a therapist praising AI therapy (gift link)

3. A piece in Wired about the rise and addictiveness of self-generated AI pornography

All of these articles are about people finding meaning in AI output that they themselves have generated. The meaning can be spiritual, emotional, or physical—but it is meaning that people enjoy because it comes out of you and yet feels like it is something more than you.

The conversation for each use case follows a predictable pattern.

The people who don’t like AI-generated bible/therapy/porn say that they are dangerous because they (a) desensitize people to the genuine article and (b) trap people in a solipsism where it becomes increasingly difficult to remember what the outside world had to offer.

The people who like these things, on the other hand, say: Calm down, I’m not stupid. I know it’s an extension of me, but the illusion is helpful. Haven’t you ever had a conversation with yourself, or an imaginary friend? Haven’t you ever fantasized? Haven’t you ever talked to God, or eaten magic mushrooms? Why do you care how I externalize my internal self?

I think the pro-therapy/porn/scripture camp is right in theory, but the nay-sayers are right in practice. In theory, AI is just another tool for self-exploration. In practice, its efficiency and versatility change how we think about self-stimulation.

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The sound of one hand clapping

The main reason AI is different is that it is extremely good at satisfying individual desires for content. Unless your interests are radically different from all of humanity, the thing you want is likely a rehash of other already-fulfilled desires.

This is a step beyond the plain old internet. As Bo Burnham reminded us, the internet gives you a little bit of everything all of the time (YouTube), resulting in the feeling that boredom is something to be permanently banished. But people constantly get bored on the internet! We scroll TikTok despite finding nothing worthwhile, we search for something worth watching on Netflix, we check for messages instead of looking out the window. We raised our expectations for stimulation because of the web, and then the web disappointed us anyway.

The problem? No matter how much content is out there, nobody can know exactly what you want. Billions of dollars have gone into creating oceans of content in the hopes of striking true for as many people and as much of the time as possible, but nobody knows your exact mind and not everything you want is going to reach you, despite the best efforts of many algorithms.

In this online space, standing on the shoulders of an internet’s worth of data, AI now offers a new proposition: Just tell us what you want and we’ll make it for you, right now. It doesn’t matter if your desires are erudite or sleazy; it can be yours just the same.

And the process of creating this content is the same, highbrow or lowbrow. You tell the machine what you want, it gives you something imperfect, and then you refine, refine, refine. Respond as though you were a cosmic consciousness. Be more probing when I talk about my trauma. Make her breasts bigger. The machines are good; in the space of a dozen refinements, you may end up with the full version of something that only existed as a glimmer in your mind—and that fully realized form may actually bring you to enlightenment, or tears, or orgasm. Your clear specifications, hashed into everything the internet already knows, is a powerful combination. Very often you will get exactly what you wanted and much more.

You can do anything, the only limit is yourself

Because the AI only needs to satisfy one person, the success rate is fairly high. You may be aware that there’s an ongoing debate about whether AI capabilities are about to hit a brick wall or see exponential growth, but for the purposes of self-fulfillment processing power really may be all that’s needed. The difference between a therapy chatbot and a therapy voice conversation is mostly just “compute.” Today you can get enlightening scripture, but next year maybe you’ll be able to experience revelation. The number of routes to self-fulfillment will only grow.

I say this because you may think the use-cases are limited. If it’s just porn and emotional support and spiritual enlightenment, what’s the big deal?

Well, it’s a big deal because the M.O. of the AI industry to try to fill every possible role and see what sticks. There are companies that want AI to be your friend, your tutor, and your boss. You may already love an AI musician. If you treat every instance of humans relying on humans as something to be optimized away, you are definitionally trying to sever human connection. Make a list of all the times during the day that you interact with another person—physically or virtually—and you’ve made a list of AI optimization projects.

AI and the Great Turn Inward

Treated separately, each of these use-cases is relatively innocuous, but the concern is larger than just whether AI is a good/fine/dangerous therapy substitute, or whether gaining spiritual insight from a bank of GPUs is "valid," whatever that might mean. Instead, AI's ability to act as a perfect magic mirror for our internal ruminations makes the task of growing by engaging with the world feel laborious and inefficient by comparison. Finding a good therapist sucks; lots of people never find a spiritual guide in life. Many people would take 70% of the benefit for 5% of the energy.

In other words: the problem isn't that these applications do a bad job at making scripture/porn/therapy. It's that they often do a great job—but in convincingly playing the role of the other without the pesky need for actual others, they preempt many of life’s key relationships. Lose one or two and you’ll probably be fine, but industry trends may push you to drop most.

You may think that you know what this world looks like. Decades after the rise of social media, we’re all aware of echo chambers and the thinness of online connection and the way the internet can distort your sense of self and reality. We already interact with people online as though they’re not really people. Would AI be that different?

Yes—because AI reflections of the self feel great. With AI, you’re not going to feel Instagram-induced feelings of insufficiency, or Twitter-induced feelings of rage, or TikTok-induced feelings of hollowness. Whatever friction you feel from AI’s outputs can simply be refined away. Instead, you present yourself with content that you have tailored to be exactly as challenging/alluring/mystifying as you want. If you want sexual satisfaction, you can get it. If you want to confront your faults, you can get that, too. AI will present as an “other,” but always an idealized other—in other words, not really an other at all. In the words of Jean-Paul Sartre, you need never expose yourself to the hell that is other people.

This might be fine if the self was fully known and static. But we never fully know ourselves, and our selves are in constant flux. We don’t know always know what we want or what we need. By optimizing the task of self-connection, AI creates a new and dangerous illusion: that our deepest desires can be satisfied by looking ever inward. Therein lies the path of self-hallucination.

AI Can Be Your Own Worst Critic, If That’s What You Want

You’ve probably figured out by now (I hope!) that AIs are most useful when they’re doing something you know how to evaluate. This is just as true when the subject matter is the self.

We are not in fact perfect experts on our own selves, which means that we won’t always be able to tell when masturbatory AIs are going off the rails. Worse: We may shrink our selves to what the AI is able to conjure. We may not have enough contact with the outside world to know what we’re missing. We effectively create an echo chamber of one.

I’ll give you an example that I find particularly tragic. On Reddit’s AI discussion forums, I sometimes see people posting ideas for how to prompt AI to help on journeys of self-exploration. Here’s an example:

I want you to help me understand myself better — not just in terms of personality or productivity, but in the deeper structural sense. Ask me questions that reveal: – where I’m lying to myself – where I’m performing instead of expressing – what I might be grieving without realizing – what kind of world my nervous system was actually designed for

I want you to use everything you can gather — not just what I say, but what I avoid saying. Track patterns, contradictions, emotional signals, gaps in logic, and shifts in tone.

Don’t simplify anything. Don’t protect me. Go as deep as possible, using all your insight.

Start when you’re ready.

Now, what does this prompt represent? To me it sounds like a person trying to create an ideal version of a severe inner critic (“Don’t protect me”). That’s not really what a therapist is supposed to do; in fact, therapists often help people understand their own internal thought processes, rather than reify them.

The thing is: if you like these particular questions, the AI is probably going to tell you something that you find meaningful. There aren’t going to be any alarm bells telling you that you’re drowning in your own mindspace. Like a carbon monoxide leak, you may not know anything is wrong until it’s too late.

(Ironically, the people who see this most clearly are the ones pointing out the addictiveness of AI pornography, which allows people to visualize their precise fantasies beyond what any mental image could provide. AI pornography is incredibly popular. Civitai, a platform where users can upload AI models for others to use, is mostly porn.)

An Audience of One

You can sometimes tell when a person is lost in the AI sauce.

Much like an unsolicited dick pic, getting AI output when you don’t want it is a real bummer. I’m sure you’ve had the experience of someone sending you AI content that they think is fascinating but you find incredibly dull. You may have also had the experience of asking someone for advice only for them to tell you, “Here’s what happened when I asked ChatGPT.” I found myself feeling embarrassed on the other person’s behalf because it reads to me like the other person can’t tell when human connection is the point.

But this keeps happening because people are often deeply affected by the output they create—to the point where people develop romantic relationships with their chatbots. What we feel is genuine, just as the meaning one might get from AI-generated scripture is genuine. But the more you sink into these bespoke products the more the rest of the world will feel harsh by comparison.

We are all high-functioning AI addicts—for now

The earliest stages of any addiction are the most fun because the body and/or mind isn’t prepared; a first-time opioid user feels euphoric because your body is operating normally. You get the best of both worlds!

But there are no free lunches. Your body is efficient and adjusts to what is given, assuming that it will keep coming. As Judith Grisel writes, drugs that make you calm actually cause anxiety and drugs that ease pain actually cause it to increase.

Our relationship to AI is something like that, but we are too early in our journey with this technology to see it clearly. Most of us got educated in an AI-free world; we have skills that AI duplicates, and still have jobs that AI threatens to eliminate. We have the luxury of redundancy, the luxury of using AI as a supplement because society has not yet fully adjusted to its presence.

But it will—and it will be painless until we come up for air. Our self-stimulation machines will inevitably lead us to lose interest in the stimulation of others. The time we spend with ourselves will increase as our ability to materialize stimulating material from the safety of our own minds dramatically expands. Why deal with others when the self contains such compelling multitudes?

The worst affected, of course, will be children. What happens to a kid’s development when you surround them with phantoms designed to bend to their perception of their own needs? AI tutors may replicate the “royal tutor” model of education, but remember that royals are notoriously weird people precisely because they don’t interact with normals. How do you create a common culture when kids are self-creating entertainment based on their 10-year-old interests? How do you create rules for society? Are we going to end up in smartphone-like fights about delay AI access as long as possible, to give kids as much chance as we can to develop a self that develops alongside others, knowing that we adults don’t really think any age is safe?

There’s a good line that folks in the tech sector use to defend mediocre products: “This is the worst it’s ever going to be.” Nowhere to go but up, right? In some cases this will be true. I suspect AI agents are going to get pretty good. Maybe we’ll cure cancer, too.

But with self-stimulating AI, this sentiment is almost certainly exactly backwards. These tools are safest when they duplicate stimulation available outside of the self; the more they replace the outside world, the more dangerous they become. Society will adjust to accommodate AI; social skills and educational skills will weaken on the assumption that AI will always be there. We will grow to depend on AI, forgetting that the dependence was caused by AI itself.

Heroin is better than family

People who have struggled with addiction will understand this all too well. Addictive drugs can feel so good that family, friendship, and employment feel inadequate by comparison. We are extremely vulnerable to intense pleasures, and we have a hard time limiting ourselves.

We might find spirituality in AI sutras, emotional connect in AI relationships, and climax in AI pornography. But the path in all three is one in which we allow our selves to become so big that the world simply recedes. That is a path we must profoundly resist.

I’ve spent a long time in the world of podcasts, and an even longer time as a writer. Both formats suit my personality because I’m a huge introvert and they make it easier to curate my self-presentation.

But video is the future the present, so despite the vulnerability it requires, that’s where I’m going. (Don’t worry, Belief in the Future isn’t over, and neither is Jello Menorah; more content is dropping soon.)

I’m here to announce the launch of a new YouTube channel: Sabbath Mode. I’ll be covering issues of religion and technology.

Watch Sabbath Mode’s debut video NOW.

I’m still finding “my voice” in this medium, so please do send me all of your suggestions and advice!

Here, of course, is the part where I shamelessly ask you to subscribe to the channel, like the video, and share it with your friends. I was lucky enough to have funding to start this channel but it’s a lot more time-consuming to make videos than podcasts. I can only keep making these if I can show that it’s reaching people.

Thank you so much for your support.

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