Being Human in the World of AI

In this morning sermon Rabbi Lea Mühlstein asks how we define humanity amid the rise of artificial intelligence, contrasting machine efficiency with Jewish ideas of wisdom, responsibility, and repentance. She weaves together a poem about AI‑generated meal plans, Pope Leo XIV’s take on the Tower of Babel, and the Talmudic debate between Hillel and Shammai to argue that a "heart of many rooms"—welcoming diverse voices and our own failures—is the true measure of a good life. Listeners will leave with concrete ways to let Yom Kippur’s call for teshuvah shape their relationship to technology and community.

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What is Kolot: Voices from The Ark Synagogue?

Welcome to Kolot, the podcast of The Ark Synagogue, a bold, experiential and caring Progressive Jewish community in Northwood, London.

Through sermons, reflections and conversations from across our community, Kolot explores Jewish life, learning and values in the world we live in today. Rooted in tradition and open to new perspectives, these episodes bring together voices that inspire thought, connection and belonging.

Whether you are Jewish, exploring Judaism, or simply looking for meaningful reflection, you are warmly welcome.

To learn more about The Ark Synagogue, visit arksynagogue.org.

What makes us human?

The question is, of course, not a new one. But it has taken on new urgency in light of the rapid speed at which artificial intelligence is developed and even if the doomsday scenarios don’t come to fruition, as applications of artificial intelligence are becoming more and more ubiquitous and our use of the technology expands further and further, we must return to this question. Not just in order to evaluate whether a machine could ever truly replace us but also so that we might understand what we actually value in one another.

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As I was preparing for this sermon, my Substack algorithm (AI in action) decided to highlight a poem for me, which captured some of the unease that I feel whenever I use AI.

Let me quote just a short passage, and I’ll make the link to the full poem available in the written text of the sermon.[1] It begins:

Be sure to use AI when making
your next, I don’t know, meal plan,
for example. Definitely do not call
your friend who loves to cook and ask her
for her favorite recipes or tips or ways
to save time making meals,
because you will end
up talking for longer than you had hoped,
hearing, perhaps, about her father’s cancer
diagnosis or how lonely she’s been or even
what she’s planted in her spring
garden and then lost with the early frost.

What I love about this short passage is that it captures so perfectly, the reality in which we live. It doesn’t claim that there is anything in principle wrong about using AI to make a meal plan but invites us to reflect on what we get and don’t get from a machine. Yes – the machine will give us what we asked for. The conversation with our friend might achieve the same goal but it also has the potential for so much more – to give us things we never even thought to ask for.

One of the extraordinary privileges of being a rabbi is that I am invited into people’s lives at moments when the categories by which we normally measure ourselves shift drastically. In much of life, we are encouraged to think about the next qualification, the next job, the next promotion, the next achievement that can be added to a CV. As a rabbi, I frequently meet people when all these things have become irrelevant.

When people remember a loved one or reflect on how they might want to be remembered, they don’t speak about promotions. They speak about the person who showed up, the person who made them laugh, the mother who always answered the phone, the grandfather who still “fixed things” around the house even when he was in a wheelchair, the friend who remained loyal when life became difficult, the person whose curiosity or generosity or stubbornness changed the people around them.

Judaism teaches that we should not wait for the end of life or a moment of crisis to think about life in this way. Yom Kippur invites us each year to think about what we hope somebody might one day say when we are no longer around to score points on our CV.

I think one of the biggest dangers of the technological age is that we become so focused on performance that we begin to judge ourselves solely by that measure too.

How quickly am I able to complete the task? Which deadline did I miss? Can I be faster, bigger, better than others around me?

But is that really all that matters?

Can we really answer the question of what it means to be human by comparing ourselves with machines and listing the things we can still do better? We call this brave new technology artificial intelligence, but can a machine ever truly become intelligent?

If intelligence — or as Judaism calls it, chochmah and binah, wisdom and discernment — were to consist mainly of processing information efficiently and producing the expected answer in the fastest way possible, I have no doubt that a machine could indeed become intelligent. And I am confident that by these measures artificial generative intelligence could develop on its own to surpass the purposes set for it by human beings.

But I think Judaism teaches us that being an intelligent human being is something much more difficult. It is not simply about finding the answer but rather requires discernment about which questions are worth asking, which purposes are worth pursuing (and which are better not pursued), what responsibilities we owe one another, and what kind of life deserves to be called a good life.

To be intelligent in the way our Jewish tradition understands, we must resist the temptation to judge ourselves by the standards by which we judge machines. A machine is assessed by its output. A human life well lived is not.

Earlier this year, Pope Leo XIV devoted his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, to precisely this question. I do not often quote papal encyclicals from the bimah, but in exploring what it might mean to be human in the age of artificial intelligence, he employs two biblical images which are informative also for our reflections.

The first is the Tower of Babel. The people of Babel share, as the biblical story tells us, one language and one purpose, and decide to build a tower reaching towards heaven so that they might “make a name” for themselves. Pope Leo sees in the story the danger of a world in which a single language, a single technology and a single direction promise efficiency at the price of human difference, eventually translating the mystery of a person into “data and performance”.

The problem with Babel is not only that everyone speaks the same language. In Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer,[2] a collection of midrashim from the 8th century, we read:

“The tower had seven steps from the east and seven steps from the west. Bricks were hauled up from one side, and the descent would be from the other. If a man fell down and died, no heed was given to him. But when a brick fell down, they stopped work and wept, saying, ‘Woe unto us! When will another be brought up in its stead?’”

For the author of the midrash the true sin of Babel was that a focus on performance, on completing the task, resulted in a disregard for human life. It shifted the focus from seeing each person as making a unique contribution, to a world-view where everything is optimised to move in one direction only. Once the task matters more than the person, difference becomes an obstacle to be eliminated.

Pope Leo selects as his contrasting image a passage taken from the Book of Nehemiah, when Jerusalem is rebuilt after exile through shared responsibility, with different people taking responsibility for different parts of the wall, a society restored because everybody has a part to play.

By putting the two texts into dialogue, Pope Leo arrives at the important conclusion that the dignity of the individual human being has to remain at the centre of our technological future. I fully concur with this conclusion, but if I were to choose a contrasting image to the story of Babel, I would not turn to Nehemiah but rather to the Houses of Hillel and Shammai.

In the Talmud,[3] we are taught that the disciples of Hillel and Shammai argued for three years, each insisting that the law followed their interpretation, until a heavenly voice declared: Eilu v’eilu divrei Elohim chayim — “These and those are the words of the living God” — before nevertheless declaring that the halachah, Jewish law, should follow the House of Hillel.

The Talmud then asks the obvious question. If both opinions are the words of the living God, why should the law follow Hillel? The answer of the rabbis is enlightening: it was because the disciples of Hillel were patient and forbearing, and because when they taught an issue they taught the opinion of Shammai alongside their own; indeed, they even taught the position of Shammai first.

I have always loved that passage, because the rabbis are not suggesting that Hillel and Shammai discovered that they did not really disagree. They disagreed profoundly and not just on theoretical matters. They discussed real life situations that required decisions.

When compromise was not possible, one argument eventually had to determine the practice of the community. Yet the capacity to reach a conclusion did not depend upon erasing the argument that had lost.

Beit Hillel were worthy of having the halachah follow them because their conviction was spacious enough to contain the voice that contradicted it.

The Mishnah describes the disagreements of Hillel and Shammai as machloket l’shem shamayim, disagreement for the sake of heaven.[4] I think maybe this is the greatest insight of rabbinic Judaism: that disagreement need not represent the failure of community. Sometimes it is precisely how a community searches for truth. The task is to create the kind of relationships in which the argument can remain serious, passionate and consequential, while the person with whom I disagree remains someone whose voice I need to hear.

The rabbis offer us another powerful image to think about what it means to be human, when they teach: make yourself a heart of many rooms, lev hadrei hadarim, and bring into it both the words of the House of Shammai and the words of the House of Hillel, both the words of those who forbid and the words of those who permit. [5]

This does not mean a heart without convictions. The rabbis recognised that Hillel and Shammai disagreed in profound ways. But a heart of many rooms invites us not to shut the door on everything that challenges us.

That has never been emotionally easy, even if it was once technically simpler. We have access today to more information and more opinions than any previous generation could have imagined, and yet increasingly the information that reaches us has already been filtered through systems designed to predict what we will agree with, what will engage us and keep us looking at the screen. More and more, we inhabit worlds in which the next voice we encounter is remarkably similar to the one we have just heard, which in turn sounds remarkably similar to our own. Artificial intelligence can intensify that experience because it is extraordinarily good at giving us answers shaped around the questions we ask and the assumptions contained within them.

There is an irony here: technology gives us unprecedented access to the wealth of human experience and knowledge but also makes it increasingly easy to avoid having to encounter any views or perspectives that would challenge our own convictions.

I know myself how tempting it is to withdraw into my own bubble. But our Jewish tradition has always challenged us to embrace the full complexity of the world.

The pages of the Talmud preserve the argument the rabbis rejected right beside the argument that they accepted, preserving minority opinions for generations after a decision had been reached. Judaism teaches us that the voice which disturbs our certainty may still carry divrei Elohim chayim, words of the living God.

And our tradition doesn’t just invite us to make room for those who challenge us. On Yom Kippur especially, we are asked to turn that same instinct inward, making space for the possibility that the story we tell about ourselves is incomplete.

Our prayers for this day are not designed to affirm the self we already know. Ashamnu does not flatter us. Al chet does not ask which sins we feel comfortable discussing. Our liturgy keeps placing words in our mouths which ask us to imagine that we might be at fault, that something we have done requires repair. Teshuvah, repentance or renewal, depends upon our willingness to hear a voice that interrupts the story we like to tell ourselves.

Recognising our own shortcomings is not failure at being human. In fact, the courage to take responsibility for them and to change is one of the highest expressions of our humanity.

Far from considering it a flaw in our performance, our tradition teaches that this is part of the essence of what it means to be human: to examine and re-examine the distance between the human being I imagine myself to be and the human being revealed through my choices.

Yom Kippur gives us no algorithm to search our souls. But it reminds us that we are not machines measured by our performance. Instead, it offers us the possibility of teshuvah and a reminder that a heart of many rooms doesn’t just mean making space for the diverse views of others, it also means making space for the truth about our own failures so that we can acknowledge what needs repair and begin the work of teshuvah. Because that is what makes us human.

And so, as technology develops further and further, even as it outperforms us at tasks we once thought only humans were capable of doing, let us remember that the beauty of human life is not found in perfection but in cultivating a heart of many rooms: a heart enriched by human diversity, by the courage to admit our own failures, by the humility to make repair and by the faith that we are capable of change.

Ken yehi ratzon - for such is God’s will.

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[1] Shawn Smucker, Please Use AI, https://substack.com/home/post/p-196249275

[2] Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer, chapter 24.

[3] bEruvin 13b

[4] Pirkei Avot 5:17

[5] Tosefta Sotah 7:12