Be a Person: Judaism, Humanity and the Sacred Demands of our New AI World
Yom Kippur Morning Sermon, September 25, 2023
By Rabbi Mark Glickman
Shalom, dear members of Temple B’nai Tikvah, friends, and guests. On this sacred day of Yom Kippur, we gather here in the heart of Calgary, Alberta, to seek forgiveness, renewal, and spiritual transformation. As we stand together in this sacred space, let us reflect upon the profound significance of this day and the journey of self-discovery it offers us.
Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is a time for deep introspection and reflection. It is a day when we pause to consider our actions, our relationships, and our connection to the Divine. It is a day of both solemnity and hope, a day when we confront our imperfections and strive to become better versions of ourselves.
Here, I’ll pause and ask you what you think of this sermon so far. And, don’t worry, I won’t be hurt if you don’t like it because, until a moment ago, the words of this sermon were words that I didn’t write. No, this sermon wasn’t a Rabbi Mark Glickman sermon – it was a Chat GPT sermon. Creating it was simple. I just set up an account, and then typed in “Write me a Yom Kippur sermon for Temple B’nai Tikvah in Calgary,” and within about five seconds…
…I had a sermon.
(I assure you that, from now on, the rest of my words will be ones that I wrote myself. I … promise.)
Now, Chat GPT did a passable job of writing this sermon, I suppose – it’s got lots of Yom Kippur sermons at its virtual fingertips, and it knows what they’re supposed to sound like. But, if you responded to it at all the way I did, you’ll agree that it fell kind of flat. For starters, it didn’t really sound like me. In the first sentence, for example, it had me referring to you as “dear members of Temple B’nai Tikvah community.” You are dear to me, of course, but that’s not the way I talk. It also wasn’t very creative or innovative, it was more like a bland regurgitation of sermon formulas from countless boring sermons of years past. The kind that other rabbis give. Not me. I hope.
But still, if you’ve been paying any attention to recent discussions, you’ll know that these new technologies – artificial intelligence, they’re called, AI – are likely to bring huge changes to rabbinic work in the years ahead, especially as it grows stronger. One of the biggest challenges in being a rabbi is of coming up with something new and interesting to say every week at services, and my colleagues and I put huge amounts of energy into our sermons – especially because some of those Torah portions are rough to get anything good out of. Now, we can write those sermons – at least mediocre ones – in mere seconds by just telling Chat GPT and other similar programs to write them for us, allowing us to use the remaining time for other things.
And of course, it’s not just rabbinic work that will be affected. I asked Chat GPT to suggest an itinerary for a two-week trip to Vancouver Island, and it gave me a pretty good one. It’ll compose poetry for you if you want. It will translate between languages, give you restaurant suggestions, choose birthday gifts for your friends, and write a poem for your beloved in the style of William Wordsworth if you want.
The technology is still new and highly imperfect. When I asked Chat GPT to write a biography of Rabbi Mark Glickman, it got the titles of my books right, but it made me three years younger than I actually am, and it made me a conservative rabbi.
But as the technology improves, many are concerned about what it might do. When it gets stronger, and I want to, say, purchase a certain stock at an affordable price, an AI program could conceivably spread fake news – negative news – about that company, making the price of that stock tank for just long enough for that program to buy the stock for me at a low price. Then, I would just need to wait a little while, let the market correct its value, and sell that stock for me at a profit. I’ve been on TV and radio several times over the years, and, with those recordings of my voice in its toolbox, that same AI could place a call to my mother, and, in my voice say, “Mom, my interfaith work has backfired and I’m now being held hostage in the basement of a United Church – send money to this account, or they’ll make me convert.” In all seriousness, it is possible – and most say likely – that bad actors could get their hands on this technology and do bad things with it.
Of course, our fear of technology gone bad is nothing new. For a long time now, it’s been the stuff of science fiction. You’ve seen Jurassic Park; you’ve seen or read Frankenstein; and many of you have seen 2001: A Space Odyssey: “Open the pod bay doors, Hal.” “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.” Those movies are all about what happens when the work of our own human hands grows so strong that we can no longer control it.
We Jews have been aware of these dangers for centuries. When humans first developed a newfangled technology called brickmaking, their first big project was to build a tower to the sky – the Tower of Babel – and it had horrible consequences. Centuries later, according to legend, in the Spring of 1580 Rabbi Yehudah Loewe Betzalel of Prague (commonly known as the Maharal of Prague) got a couple of helpers, went out early one morning to the banks of the Moldau River, took some clay, and formed it into a “golem.”
The Golem of Prague was a large, hulking figure. It looked like a person; it walked like a person; it could listen and understand like a person, but it couldn’t talk. The Maharal named him Yosef and affectionately called him Yossele.
Some traditions say that the Maharal animated the Golem by writing one of the names of God on his forehead, or by putting one of those names on a paper that the Golem carried in his mouth. More common, however, is the tradition that the Golem carried with him not the name of God, but the seal of God – the word Emet, which means truth. To turn the Golem off, all they had to do was to erase the first letter of the word emet – an alef – and the word would become met, which means dead, and the Golem would stop and become a statue.
At the time, life was difficult for the Jews of Prague. Christian neighbors and authorities often accused them of blood libel – of using the blood of Christian children to make their matzah for Passover – and expulsion, imprisonment, and even death were very real possibilities for them every day. As a result, they needed somebody to protect them: somebody strong, somebody courageous, somebody who could manifest holiness amidst the evil that surrounded them. They needed a golem.
Indeed, the Golem protected them for a time. During the week, he would guard Prague’s Jews from all evil, then, on Friday afternoon, the Maharal would remove God’s name or the aleph in emet from his forehead to give him a little break for Shabbat, and after Shabbat, the Marahal would put the name back on the Golem’s forehead, and the Golem would get back to work. One Friday, however, the Maharal forgot to remove God’s name, and the Golem ran amok, causing all kinds of trouble. The Maharal then confronted the Golem, recited some incantations, and the Golem disintegrated into little pieces. The Maharal stored the Golem dust – the little pieces that used to make up that monster – in the attic (the genizah) of the Altneuschul in Prague, and warned that, for their own safety nobody should ever go up to the Genizah again.
You can still visit the Altneuschul in Prague, but if you do, I don’t suggest you go up to the attic.
The problem we have with all of these technologies – whether you’re talking about a golem, or you’re talking about a computer that’s supposed to help you on your spaceship, or you’re talking about new artificial intelligence programs – is that they put machines in places where we would ideally like people to be. That golem protected Jews, but unlike a person, it didn’t know when to stop getting into people’s way. Only a person, not a lump of clay, can know when the job is done.
Similarly, I don’t think you want to hear computer-composed sermons on the Days of Awe. You want a person up here – a person who, like you, finds the world baffling sometimes; a person who, like you, has things that bring him or her joy, and others that make them feel anguish; a person who struggles to learn important truths, and who maybe has something to teach every once in a while. And if you knew ahead of time that your Days of Awe services would be led by a machine, its contours determined not by human hands but by computer algorithms, I have a feeling you’d probably stay home.
We’ve all had this experience, and we’ve had it often. You buy a new whozeemawhatz, it doesn’t work; you try to get it to work, and nothing works to get it to work. Finally, in desperation, you call customer service, and there you find yourself trapped in automated voicemail hell. “For instructions in Swahili, press one; in Flemish, press two. For whozeemawhatz insights, press three; to hear the Whozeemawhatz Choir, press four.” And all you want is to talk to a person – a person who can express a little sympathy for what you’re going through, give you some wisdom, and hopefully even share a little joy with you when you fix the problem. Even if the person can’t fix your problem, when you get through to a person, at least you have a human being to share the frustration you have. But often, all they let you do is listen to recordings and press buttons on your phone, making you feel the howling isolation of modern, high-tech life.
Yes, the central challenge of this bold new AI world of ours is one of dehumanization, of striving for efficiency and perfection by taking the person out of the equation. Human beings can be inefficient by nature, of course. We’re finite, we can only do so much; we make mistakes, and some of them are doozies; and from time to time we can even be cruel. But even with all of these shortcomings, what we humans need most as we navigate the challenges of life are other humans. Even when we can’t do everything. Even when we screw up. Even when we’re mean and offensive. This, I would suggest is the great challenge of the 21st Century. We are more connected than ever; we are more advanced than ever; and in these days of voicemail labyrinths and malfunctioning webpages and Chat GPT, we need other people, in some ways more than ever before.
Even though our sages never had artificial intelligence software, I think they were aware of this problem. For proof, I’ll draw your attention to a phrase from the ancient Rabbi Hillel that comes from Pirke Avot.
“In a place where there are no people,” Hillel taught, “strive to be a person.” I’ll say that again: “In a place where there are no people strive to be a person.”
I first learned that passage decades ago, and I always understood it to refer to our moral and ethical behavior: In a school cafeteria where one kid is sitting alone, be the kid to sit with her. In the American Jim Crow South, be the diner-owner who serves food to African Americans. In World War II Poland, be the farmer who hides Jews from the Nazis.
But today, in our world, Hillel’s ancient teaching has a new meaning. It speaks, of course, to a place in which there are no people. Where is that place today? It can be anywhere! You’re in that place when you call customer service and can’t get through to a living human being. You’re there when you get a “friend request” on social media only to realize that it’s not a person but just some bot trying to get your money. You’d be there if you came to services and heard a sermon not by your rabbi but by a really smart and highly unhuman computer. In fact, you’re there whenever this increasingly efficient, increasingly machinated, increasingly high-tech world of ours takes a person out of your field of contact and replaces it with a machine.
In a world such as this, the challenge of Hillel is a challenge for us all: Be. A. Person. Do things that are quintessentially human. Do things that machines can’t do. Be human because we all need humans in our lives, and these damned machines are chasing humans away.
What does that mean? Well, you know what it means. It means: Call up an old friend when something happens to jog a memory of them. It means: Make a point of kissing your loved ones when you come home…because machines rarely kiss, and when they do, I’m told that it’s highly unsatisfying. It means coming to Temple – in person when you can – because we need to sing with you. It means celebrating and laughing and crying and doing all of those old-fashioned things that all of the algorithms computing daily life nowadays are trying to marginalize.
Indeed, one of the great gifts of Jewish life is the clarion call to being a human – to doing things that only human beings can do. It calls upon us to pray in a minyan – to find other Jews who will sit together with us to worship. It calls upon us to love one another, and love is a human emotion, not a machine emotion. It calls upon us to show compassion, pursue justice, visit the sick, and do a host of other things that can only be done by people, not machines, even in this age of growing technological gadgetry.
In a place where there are no humans, strive to be a human. Hillel uttered those words more than 2,000 years ago. Think of how ancient that teaching is, and think of how modern it is, too.
I don’t fully know what the future will bring with these new technologies. But what I do know is that they all tend to dehumanize our world, and it is up to us to keep it human. For many of us, I think that at some level it is this very desire that brought us here today. You could have stayed home and watched services online, but you chose to sit in a room with hundreds of your fellow Temple members – to connect with them, hopefully, as individuals and as a community. And maybe to connect with generations past and future. And maybe to share something in your heart with God, in the hope that God will share back. You came here, in other words, because it is what your humanity has called you to do.
Let’s all continue to respond to that call. Because in this decreasingly human world, when machines stand in places formerly occupied by people, we as Jews and as humans, are much better off when we maintain our humanity. And being truly human is something that only we humans can do.
Shanah Tovah.