Who has not made AI a woman

A guest post by Rabbanit Sara Wolkenfeld

Gloria Gordon Bolotsky and Ester Gerston (both Jewish) working on ENIAC. (Source)

In the last fifty years, the lines around learning and authority in the Orthodox Jewish community have been marked by pitched battles over women’s Torah learning and leadership.

In 1977, Rav Joseph Soloveitchik taught the first women’s Talmud class at Stern College for Women, demonstrating strong support for women’s learning. In 1979, Rabbi David Silber founded The Drisha Institute in New York City, to provide advanced Jewish learning opportunities for women, and in 1984 Drisha began to offer women the opportunity to study Talmud and Jewish law full-time. The elite cadre of women who managed to carve out space for themselves in the male-dominated world of high-level Torah learning were often met with opposition, skepticism, or outright hostility. The backlash against Soloveitchik included an attempt to excommunicate him formally from the Orthodox Jewish community.

For those who persisted regardless, there was religious fulfillment in the learning, but there was no clear career path and few available jobs that would take advantage of these women’s expertise in Talmud and Jewish law. Men could be rabbis, legal decisors, and communal leaders. Women, on the other hand, were considered constitutionally unfit for such roles. Rabbi Aharon Feldman, as part of an exchange of letters in Tradition from 2000 about “halakhic feminism,” called training women to be legal authorities a “reckless venture,” given the Talmud’s statement in Tractate Sotah that women’s minds are simply not designed for such study. Prominent Orthodox rabbis also raised questions about women’s place in the social order. As the Rabbinical Council of America noted in a 2010 statement, women’s roles must be “halakhically and communally appropriate,” suggestive of the larger conversation around preserving gender roles in the Orthodox community. Feminism, already something of an ugly word among many Orthodox Jews, was invoked as a way of casting aspersions on the motives of women who professed a desire to devote years of their lives to learning.

In more recent years, institutions to train and ordain Orthodox women have opened and flourished, and some modern Orthodox communities welcome women’s religious leadership in one or another form. Though the battle lines have shifted and the arguments over women’s Torah leadership have receded from the headlines, the issue has not been forgotten, and the pain felt by those of us who encountered these obstacles is never too far from the surface.

Since 2022, this ongoing tension has been disrupted by a new player: artificial intelligence, particularly large language models (LLMs). LLMs represent a new cohort of sharp minds with the ability to master huge quantities of information. They can read Hebrew and Aramaic fluently, make connections across centuries worth of material, and can deliver in a matter of seconds a compelling analysis of any Jewish legal question. They have been heralded as a transformational force in Torah education at all levels, and are capturing attention and securing funding across the Jewish denominational landscape.

LLMs are not men and they are not women. They are also not in a position to lead (at least, not yet). Still, they have largely been welcomed into the world of Torah study in a way that resembles male inclusion, even as women with similar knowledge continue to be shut out. That AI has “leapfrogged” women is a painful reminder of women’s treatment in the world of Torah learning. It raises new questions about what exactly the Orthodox community values when it comes to expertise in Torah study.

A bitter study in contrasts

The contrast between attitudes to machines and women is clear if you have followed both conversations. As far back as 2023, Dovid Lichtenstein, host of the Headlines Halacha podcast, aired an episode interviewing and challenging major Jewish legal thinkers to opine on whether or not AI could be a Jewish legal decisor. Opinions were mixed, and the rabbis seemed to struggle to understand the technology, but the discourse never rose to the level of indignation that women’s Torah leadership so often elicits. The Orthodox Union devoted a 2023 volume of their Jewish Action magazine to considering the transformational power of AI in Torah learning, and in recent months, launched their own chatbot and learning app to help people “explore any Jewish question with confidence.” There are even Hasidic groups working with the Israeli think tank Dicta to build custom AI models.

Not everyone in the Orthodox community is an AI enthusiast, but no one has suggested that those who champion it are importing a corrupting force from the secular world. Women’s motivations have long been questioned due to suspicions about the toxic influence of feminism, but no one has pushed back on the core idea that machine learning can be productively integrated into Torah learning. Progress by women has often been treated as a movement that can be resisted and minimized, whereas the progress of AI is accepted as an inevitability to which rabbis and learners alike need to adapt.

Furthermore, those who are excited about the potential for AI learning and teaching have not attempted the kind of gatekeeping that some of those same leaders championed when it came to women’s leadership. AI models did not toil over the Talmud for six years in a high-level yeshiva, or spend long stretches of time gaining wisdom from (all male) teachers, and yet their Torah is still taken seriously. Those of us who lived through so much upheaval around the previous gender-demarcated frontier of halakhic decision making can’t help but take note of this double standard.

What do chatbots have going for them that women do not? There’s a cynical answer to this question that I know will resonate with some of my fellow women Torah scholars, who have faced obstacles to our leadership and scholarship: LLMs are not women, and so they carry none of the baggage of the religious and communal expectations around women’s roles. Women’s inclusion in ritual and in religious leadership has become a demarcation line not just for the boundaries of Orthodoxy but for subsections within Orthodoxy. Introducing a machine that can do things that previously only humans could do may threaten humanity, but it does not obviously harm the balance of power between men and women in religious communities. It may reshape Jewish life, but at least not along gender lines.

Better no body than a female body

The enthusiasm for AI is particularly apparent in the conversation around AI’s lack of a human body, which is frequently flagged as a feature that continues to distinguish humans as worthy of dignity. At the same time, the fact that AI lacks a human woman’s body might actually free it from some of the concerns that have weighed on religious authorities. Books being seamlessly integrated into a brain, with no bodily concerns, is a kind of Maimonidean fantasy of pure intellect. There are no physical needs or individual distractions to the purity of the “learning” process.

Consider the concept of tzelem elokim, the idea that humans are created in the image of God, which is frequently invoked as a religious argument for preserving humanity’s status. In a 2011 essay, Rav Hershel Schachter, an outspoken opponent of many forms of religious leadership for women, invoked this very concept as part of an argument for why women cannot be rabbis.

One aspect of Elokus [Godliness] is the fact that Hashem is a “Keil Mistater“ [a God who is hidden]...Therefore we assume that part of our mitzvah of preserving our tzelem Elokim [image of God] is for all of us to lead private lives.

Despite this mandate, men must sometimes “compromise on their tznius [modesty]” in order to exercise leadership; women cannot. On this argument, machines would be afforded a more public role than women; their lack of bodies frees them from the obligation of modesty. The absurdity of this argument reveals a terrible double standard in the theology of embodiment: Male bodies typically confer privilege to their owners, while women’s bodies only confer limitations.

In fact, a synthetic disembodied brain could be seen as a dream come true for those who value Jewish textual knowledge. In his podcast, Dovid Lichtenstein describes future LLMs in almost transhumanist terms. Entire databases of seforim (religious texts) could be downloaded into these systems, more than a single person could ever read in a lifetime, instantly comprehended and analyzed. This is the key transformation of LLMs: They are not just delivering what Lichtenstein calls “yedios”—established knowledge—but actually producing new ideas in answering questions that have not previously been considered, without being weighed down by the concerns of any one human being.

Where do we go from here?

Torah study used to be almost exclusively the domain of human men, but that is no longer the case. We should not erase the history of the past half century of women’s learning, nor should we ignore the past half decade of AI’s increasing role in learning. And so, bracketing the (well-warranted) cynicism and sadness over what is now transpiring, the question is what we might learn from the contrast.

In a paper presented at a 1999 Orthodox Forum conference, Rabbi J. David Bleich wrote:

It is not sufficient for a halachic decisor to have a full command of relevant sources. If so, in theory at least, the decisor par excellence would be a computer rather than a person.

More than a quarter of a century later, we are watching that hypothetical play out. No person of any gender can hope to compete with the amount of knowledge they will amass, or the speed and ease with which they can work to manipulate that information into answers and insights. If we adopt the kind of halakhic formalism that Rabbi Bleich warns against, we will have AI chatbots—with a full command of all source material—taking the place of rabbis and obviating the need for learners of any gender.

Nobody wants this. Instead, the halakhic virtuosity of AI systems reminds us to consider what humans—men and women alike—bring to halakhic conversations. Not only is Torah flexible enough to accommodate embodied life, it was designed with embodied study and observance in mind. In the words of the Talmud in Tractate Shabbat, the Torah was not given to the ministering angels, precisely because angels lack bodies and the associated physical needs and desires. Torah was designed for human beings, with all our flaws and limitations. Before considering the merits of disembodied Torah, we should make sure that the Torah of all bodies is being heard and championed.

Rabbanit Sara Wolkenfeld is a PhD candidate at Gratz College and a recipient of the Walder Fellowship. Her current research and writing focus on the intersection between Jewish ethics and advancements in technology.