In our age of information overload, it is almost unimaginable to think that two stone tablets could contain the entirety of what was to be known on any topic. Today, in the digital age, Torah is not only accessible to anyone with an internet connection, it has expanded: it is vaster than our sages could ever have imagined, even if, in digital form, it takes up less physical space than ever. The gains of artificial intelligence (AI) now offer us another powerful tool. How might we use these tools today?
In The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention, technology critic David F. Noble argues that technology and religion evolved together, and as such “the technological enterprise has been and remains suffused with religious belief.” The reverse is also true: our religion has come this far and succeeded as it has because its adherents leveraged technologies to bring revelation from a far-off mountain into our libraries, and, more recently, onto our laptops, and smartphones. Techno-optimism and Judeo-optimism should co-exist, helping us to lean into a future illuminated by the fires of Torah and the sparks of innovation
I found a version of this idea in a midrash from Shir Hashirim Rabbah. This commentary tells us that these commandments were only a drop in the ocean of the massive amounts of divinely revealed material:
Rabbi Yohanan, when he was explaining verses and would arrive at the verse (Song of Songs 5:14): “Studded with beryl (glilim),” would say: The nephew of Rabbi Yehoshua taught me well. Just as regarding waves (galim), between one large wave and another large wave there are small waves, so too, between each commandment and [the next] commandment, the portions and the details of the Torah were inscribed. (Shir Hashirim Rabbah 5:14:2)
The Torah is both vast and dynamic, asserts the midrash, playing on the Hebrew word glilim that can refer to a gemstone and can also mean “waves.” Just as gentle ripples might follow the crash of a huge wave, larger points of Torah like the ten commandments are accompanied by the details of how and when to properly fulfill them. Torah is water—nourishing and life-giving—but the ocean of Torah is immense and ever-moving.
Oceans are not the only way to conceive of the challenges presented by Torah. The midrash in Shir HaShirim Rabbah goes on to present a series of analogies designed to express how difficult it can be to navigate Torah. According to the ancient rabbis, King Solomon, the wisest person ever to live, was the first to create analogies enabling just how impactful Solomon’s teaching strategies were:
Rav Nahman said: [This is analogous] to a large palace in which there were numerous entrances, and everyone who would enter it would stray from the path of the entrance. One clever man came and took a skein of yarn and hung it on the path of the entrance. Everyone would enter and exit by means of the skein. So too, until Solomon arose, there was no person who was able to understand matters of Torah. Once Solomon arose, everyone began discoursing regarding matters of Torah…
Rabbi Yosei said: [This is analogous] to a large basket filled with produce, but it did not have a handle, and it could not be moved. One clever man came and crafted handles for it, and it began to be moved by means of the handles. So too, until Solomon arose, no one was able to understand matters of Torah. Once Solomon arose, everyone began discoursing regarding matters of Torah. (Shir Hashirim Rabbah 1:1:8)
Torah is a palace, beautiful and intricately constructed, but also a maze, sometimes labyrinthine. Torah is a basket full of nourishment and flavor, but impossible to pass around or serve to others. How you frame the problem determines the exact shape of the solution, but in both cases, there is a clever technological solution that allows people to find meaning and draw on the teachings to fill their souls.
Technology is at its best when it solves problems, allowing us to find our way to new places, and it has helped Google refine its web searches as well. Today, whether we are new to it or seasoned readers, Torah is its own overwhelming landscape: commentaries upon commentaries, written over centuries, in many languages. Increasingly, AI can point us towards the sources we seek when we come to Torah with only our curiosity to guide us. Ask a Large Language Model (LLM) like ChatGPT to give you a list of Torah sources about a question today and, well, it will likely make up at least some of the answers. But don’t be fooled; as AI technology improves, there is no doubt it will be more and more useful for locating Jewish sources that speak to our needs. For example, the tools that allow Sefaria to topically tag and sort sources and to generate sound links between sources that reference one another have become incredibly powerful in just a few short years.
From that first fateful day at Mt. Sinai, when the voice of the Divine overwhelmed the sense of the assembled crowd, language has been an obstacle to Torah study. Here, LLMS are already helpful. They can translate sources with an incredible degree of accuracy, bringing us closer to a world in which Torah speaks to us in our mother-tongue, regardless of what that might be. In more niche technological news, Dicta, the Israeli machine-learning think tank, has spent the last several years perfecting their tools for adding correct vowels to any Hebrew text.
Rabbis and educators, authors and scholars alike tend to hate the idea of getting feedback from a machine, despite many of us being comfortable with tools like Google search, spell check, or Grammarly. Like those tools, AI is not creative. By definition, it provides ideas that exist, not new insights. It cannot empathize with your emotional condition. AI is like is a skein of yarn, charting a path, or a convenient handle, easing the lift of understanding Torah. Or, perhaps it is a flotation device, designed to help us feel confident about keeping our heads about water as we wade into the waves of Torah. It is a tool that, used correctly, will help us all engage. AI is the quick fix, a Torah tool that can quickly answer a question (“help me think about what to learn next…”) or refine an idea (“does this sound right?”). AI can help everyone who values Torah understand what it will mean for this ancient gift to continue to be a part of people’s lives in the future that is rapidly approaching.
Revelation isn’t limited to the grand gestures of a smoking mountaintop and miraculously inscribed tablets of days long gone. Our own moments of epiphany might come when a Hebrew text is presented to us, for the first time, with full vocalization, or a cogent English translation. It might be that the power of natural language search—the ability to type in a heartfelt question and receive Torah sources in response—is what turns Torah from an impenetrable castle to a welcoming home. Imagine how helpful it might be to have an LLM that can explain what a source means, an AI system that can gamify a learning experience, or even just a customer service chatbot that sends you personalized invitations to real-life Torah experiences. Any one of these might make the difference for someone who has been standing at the edge of the ocean, wondering how the water is.
