Yair Robinson
Rosh Hashanah Morning 5787
“Be a Human”
Years ago, when I was an assistant Rabbi in the Philadelphia suburbs, somewhere in my first couple of months I heard from a friend who was biking up the East Coast and wanted to meet me at the Philadelphia Art Museum. I mentioned this to a congregant who got all excited and proceeded to give me directions, which was a very kind and helpful gesture. I hadn’t been to the Art Museum before, hadn’t driven into Center City yet, and this was long before there was GPS in any meaningful fashion. But as she outlined how to get there, it became clear that something was off. Somehow it involved taking all kinds of back roads through Northeast Philadelphia. When she had finished and left, another congregant who had been listening in came over smiling and said, “let me give you different directions, she forgot that route 95 exists”.
6 years later I’m settling into my then-new position here in Wilmington and getting ready to go to one of several summer meet-and-greets that were being hosted by various congregants. Only this time, the office was printing out directions from MapQuest. Suddenly we had this brand-new tool that mostly worked, though it really tried to put me in the Brandywine when it was supposed to send me to Connie Kreshtool’s. But slowly it improved and we moved from websites and stand-alone devices to apps on our phone that told us where to go and how to get there. Which was great, and in fact, many of us live by them. But an interesting thing happened as we became increasingly dependent on tools like Google Maps and Waze. The part of our brain that dealt with direction started to atrophy. What had been important, in fact, an essential survival skill was being handed off to our phones.
Now, most of us aren’t too upset about that. If anything, it has spared us getting directions drawn haphazardly on the backs of envelopes or given verbally that involve landmarks that don’t exist anymore or just getting lost. Sure, we have a giggle when Waze sends us on a ‘short cut’ through a parking lot or someone’s front driveway occasionally, but most of us, I think, would argue that the good outweighs the bad most of the time, even if we don’t read maps the way we used to, or actually know where we’re going half the time.
That was then. Today, we have become increasingly dependent on technology: for entertainment, for social interaction, to get our news, for activism, and increasingly our critical thinking. We have watched social media go from being a way to connect with long-lost friends and cousins to becoming a constant stream of outrage and misinformation. Our data is tracked and catalogued, sometimes to sell us a sweater, but most often to sell us fury: who we should be mad at, and why, and when, and how. And now that data is also being mined to teach so-called Large Learning models how to pretend to be us. To make ‘better’ decisions than human beings can, or so we’re told. Every article, every book, every sermon and speech, every video and film and TV show is being fed into programs, lines of code, to try to teach it how to be human, or at least plagiarize humans. Not for some gee-whiz science-fiction breakthrough, but to create ‘efficiencies’. I don’t need to repeat so many of the news stories coming out about AI and its dangers: everyone from screen writers to automobile designers to paralegals to programmers losing their jobs, rare books being scanned and shredded to put the information behind paywalls, data centers draining power and potable water and sanity from local communities, AI services that hallucinate court cases and misidentify suspects when applied to policing. And then we hear of the ways it’s helpful, and to be sure, AI is a remarkable bit of technology: it can sometimes catch a misdiagnosis or write you a line of code to make your job easier, or a novel in the style of Louis L’Amour, or a short film, or even replicate a particular actor promoting this or that cause. I have used it exactly once: to turn a paper I had already written into a PowerPoint Deck, because I HATE creating PowerPoints, and then edited what Microsoft’s CoPilot extracted aggressively. It probably saved me a couple of hours. Meanwhile, the possibilities for good and ill are seemingly endless.
What has me most worried in this moment is how quickly we have ceded own critical thinking, much as we gave up our sense of direction to GPS. Lawyers who use AI to do research for cases, students at all ages having Chat GPT or Claude write or rewrite their term papers, HR departments using AI to filter job applications and applicants using AI to optimize their resumes, and managers using AI to write their quarterly reviews. I have been shocked and saddened by how many of my colleagues use AI to write or edit sermons and bulletin articles, or even to do research. They are wowed by the power of technology, and some of them have gotten accounts and fed their entire sermon library into the system so it would ‘know’ their voice. Aside from all the ways it harms our environment, contributes to plagiarism, and all the other ills we have previously described, it means that, when we use AI, we are no longer doing the thinking. We are no longer engaged in creativity, no longer applying all the lessons we have learned in our lived experience, no longer listening and processing and making connections. We ask AI and it gives us an answer, one we accept as authoritative. The kids of course have a word for this, “slop”. But mere rejection isn’t enough, because now we see something and we aren’t sure if it’s real or slop. AI detectors used by teachers and journals often raise false positives; so how do you prove that it’s your clever turn of phrase, use of vocabulary, or em-dash, and not a machine? And what does it mean when you can’t believe what’s in front of you, that you start assuming that everything is fake? I remember years ago being told by a middle-school teacher that, after showing Schindler’s List in class, the students asked if the events were real, because it’s a movie and movies are always fiction, or exaggerated. Now multiply that suspicion a hundredfold. Now what?
Friends, this is a catastrophe. This accelerates what was already happening with search engines and social media and it is doing us profound harm. It is causing us to accept pablum as art, superficiality as depth, and magnifying all the ugliness and pettiness of online discourse. And it is increasingly foisted on us in every search engine, every Microsoft document, every corner. I’ve spoken with educators who despair, spending classroom time monitoring multiple screens to see if their students—each with their district-assigned Chromebook—is wandering off to use AI. I’ve heard political discourse, already long at the point of needless and senseless outrage and hatred, as I’ve said last night, revert to nonsensical talking points repeated, without any processing of what is being typed or said. These are not abstract concerns: when we lose the ability to think for ourselves, the ability to be creative, to express in our own words and actions our sense of love, or grief, or joy, or righteous indignation, we lose the ability to make choices for ourselves. We lose our free will. We lose our humanity.
This is not the first time, of course, we have feared that technology, the machine, would force us to be more like it even as we tried to make it more like us. We have all seen the scenes from the Charlie Chaplin film “Modern Times”, which was released in 1936, as Chaplin’s Tramp is literally fed into the gears of the machine he’s trying to service. The invention of the cotton gin and the railroad in the early 19th century created the industrial revolution, and with it came both newfound wealth for many, but also the hardening of enslavement and the near disappearance of skilled work. When you watch Fiddler on The Roof do you share in Mottel’s joy as he show’s off his sewing machine and exclaims “no more hand made clothes!”, or do you think of how many of our landsmen ended up in sweatshop factories in New York, the victims of the Triangle Shirt Waist fire, or the numberless people, including children, who now do that work in windowless buildings all over Asia? The Television was decried as an idiot box, its programming a vast wasteland. And social media, for all its good, was accompanied by warnings of what it might do to our sense of relationship and loneliness with one another. Hen Mazzig, who comments on Israel affairs, recently pointed out that when the Iran war started and they lost electricity, suddenly thousands of supposedly American and British anti-Israel accounts stopped posting, and the journalist Yair Rosenberg has frequently run experiments exposing various accounts, especially on X, as being bots, more slop. So, the complaint isn’t new. And it’s easy to roll our eyes at the new luddites in our midst. But instead of dismissing these as the enemies of progress, we should be careful to look back at their warnings and refract our experience today through the lens of theirs.
So, what do we do? We are hemmed in by all this slop, and all its dangers. Unless you’re very careful, you can’t do a google search without encountering AI. The insurance company, the car dealership, everyone seems to be using it as their phone service system—when you make that appointment the next time, ask yourself if that person you’re talking to really exists. It’s even on Sefaria, the website that collects so much of Jewish textual tradition. Even if we refuse to use it, if individual communities ban or states regulate data centers, AI is already here and it’s not going away. And while we may now sympathize with the luddites of old, smashing the cotton gins didn’t stop what they called ‘progress’. So, what do we do?
The answer seems obvious, perhaps even cliché: when everything tells us to be more like the machine, we must strive with all our might to be more human. But what does that mean? What makes us human? So many of the ideas of what makes us human: the use of language, tool-use, problem solving, dreaming, emotion, companionship, empathy, even play, have been observed in other creatures, from ants to crows to chimpanzees to elephants to whales. So, at this moment, what do we mean by being human? As Jews, the answer is often to turn to our sacred texts, and this morning, I turn to that most accessible of texts, Pirkei Avot: in chapter two, verse five. Hillel would say: a brute is not sin-fearing, nor is an ignorant person pious, nor can a timid person learn, nor can an impatient person teach, nor will someone who engages too much in business become wise. In a place where there are no humans, strive to be human.
You’ve almost certainly heard the last verse I quoted, I would be surprised if you were familiar with the rest of it. Generally, we prefer to read only the last piece of that text, because it feels good and pithy, and because it doesn’t run the risk of insulting anyone: who are you calling a brute, or an ignoramus, or timid, rabbi?! And it’s not how we’re used to thinking of Hillel, who’s always the nice guy in the stories, who teaches the golden rule while a person stands on one foot wanting to know all Jewish knowledge. But it seems to me that this moment demands that we speak plainly, and I believe the whole text is essential to understanding what it means to be human. Let’s look together.
First, a brute is not sin-fearing: one of the things that separates us from animals is our understanding of the consequences of our actions. We can anticipate what our choices might mean. We do not merely react: we can think ahead and plan. And after we have chosen, we can reflect on our actions and seek to correct them. We can feel shame when we do wrong and use those experiences not to do some complex mathematical equation to determine the most efficient or effective choice, but the kindest and most generous choice. After all, Teshuvah, repentance, requires us to reflect on our actions and not repeat those that hurt or offend the other. Everyone in this room has, at some point or another, felt the need to fix what we broke, correct what went wrong, explain our intentions and restore the relationship to the best of our ability. And everyone in this room has, at some point, felt the urge to double down, go on the offensive, play games with logical fallacies, to protect the ego rather than acknowledge the pain. Our society, especially online, puts too much value on always being right, even when one is wrong. To be human is to correct one’s actions and repair the breach, to act with grace.
Nor an ignorant person pious: Judaism has always called upon us to be curious. To ask questions, to learn more and deeper. To sit with the subject matter. The question is always asked why the Jewish people produces so many scientists and doctors and Nobel Prize winners and the like, and we could spend all day exploring the ways in which epigenetic trauma and the refugee experience informed our ancestors. But it also stems from growing up in a culture that valued questions not as a chance to win a debate but a chance to know more. The way we learn traditionally in Judaism is through chavruta, partnered learning, sitting across, face-to-face, from someone different from ourselves, and learning the text together, discussing each other’s experiences. It’s a slow process, methodical, without short cuts, but it does inspire relationship building, seeing the world through someone else’s eyes. It is as if the rabbis of old asked, how could one call themselves pious if they never asked a question, never got to know the other people around them, never got curious, and through that curiosity, grew in empathy.
Nor can a timid person learn: to be curious means to take risks, including the risk of being wrong and corrected. Asking questions means sticking one’s neck out, exposing ourselves. To be the one who doesn’t know, to invite vulnerability in ourselves and others. It’s hard to be vulnerable when the culture around us is screaming with righteous indignation from a place of knowing, where you can get the answer, even if that answer is wrong, or unsatisfying, or unfulfilling. Timidity and fear lead us not to build relationships but to hide behind certainty, to dim our own voice and substitute the voice of the other, the voice of the mob. Timidity forces us to seek approval rather than real connection.
Nor can an impatient person teach: Think for a moment about your beloved teachers and mentors, the ones whose wisdom you still rely on this day. Did they push you for answers or results irrespective of capability? Or did they challenge you to grow and develop, to try again and try harder the next time, to take failure and turn it into a starting point, rather than an end point? Did they want the outcome to be more than the right answers, but a better person, a better human being? The teachers I loved didn’t coddle or give the answer, nor did they treat their learning as a cudgel to beat me with: they didn’t lose patience when I fell, nor did they dismiss those outcomes as irrelevant. They provided a secure base to allow me to try again, to experiment, to reflect, and to grow. In a world of instant results and responses, where the quick fix is ever present.
Nor will someone who engages too much in business become wise: My father’s father ran a furniture store, started by his father. My mother’s father was a banker in Egypt before fleeing to Israel, where he worked for Bank Discount the rest of his career. This is a room full of people who are accomplished at business, often starting from nearly nothing. And before the generation that worked for DuPont and the banks and the law firms and the hospital and the university, this congregation was one of teachers and businessfolk, whose parents had been peddlers themselves. No one is dismissing having seichel, having some sense of how to make a living and provide for their family and the community. And you and I know plenty of people who know the price of something, but not its value, who sacrifice short term gain for long term development. Who are so fixated on the bottom line and the ledger books that they drive their health to destruction and their relationships to disarray. There is much to be lauded in making a living, and more. But there must be more to life than that, and that our sustenance must lead to greater acts of tzedakah, charity, and gimilut chasadim, lovingkindness, and the opportunity to learn Torah from one another.
What are we left with as we process Hillel’s words? Compassion and empathy, loving-kindness and mercy, patience and faithfulness. Which are the attributes of God we will recite before the open ark in just a few moments. Which is to say, what Hillel says makes us human is to strive to embody God’s divine aspect of mercy and lovingkindness, of patience and grace. I am not so naïve as to believe that if we fulfill Hillel’s words, we will somehow undo the damage done or change everyone’s minds. But we will make our world and our lived experience kinder, more just, more loving, more patient, more discerning. We will strive to live as God instructs us to live, as Torah commands us to live, as our tradition obligates us to live. And no machine can teach us that. May we therefore strive toward our humanity, and toward the holiness God offers us, and let us say, Amen!