God Needs No More Angels: AI and Humanity in 5787
In the summer of 1964, Gershom Scholem, the world’s leading authority on Jewish mysticism, learned that the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot had built a new computer. He wrote to Dr. Chaim Pekeris, the scientist who had fathered the machine, with a suggestion. The computer should be named: Golem Aleph, Golem Number One.
What is a golem?
Many of us know the legend of the Golem of Prague, in which the Maharal builds a golem to protect the Jews of the city, and it nearly destroys the city it was made to guard. The golem in its original form appears more than a thousand years earlier, in the Gemara, Sanhedrin 65b:
רָבָא בְּרָא גַּבְרָא. שַׁדְּרֵיהּ לְקַמֵּיהּ דְּרַבִּי זֵירָא. הֲוָה קָא מִשְׁתַּעֵי בַּהֲדֵיהּ, וְלָא הֲוָה קָא מַהְדַּר לֵיהּ. אֲמַר לֵיהּ: מִן חַבְרַיָּא אַתְּ, הֲדַר לְעַפְרָיךְ.
“Rava created a man. He sent him before Rabbi Zeira. Rabbi Zeira spoke to him and he did not respond. Rabbi Zeira said to him: you are from the chevraya, made by human hands. Return to your dust.”
Rava created something in human form that could be sent and could follow instructions, but it did not speak. It was given an input and it produced an output, and when a second sage tried to converse with it, the conversation failed.
Back in Rehovot, Pekeris liked the idea, on one condition: Scholem would have to come and dedicate the computer himself.
He came. On June 17, 1965, Scholem stood before the new computer and delivered a dedication, a blessing, and a warning. The golem of Prague, he reminded his audience, had been animated by the ineffable name of God, by combinations of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. This new golem was animated by electricity, by combinations of zero and one. “External beauty has been denied to him,” Scholem said, presumably glancing at a very large and very ugly cabinet of vacuum tubes. “What kind of spiritual beauties lurk inside, we shall learn in due time.” He closed with a bracha for the computer: “Develop peacefully and don’t destroy the world. Shalom.”
That was 1965. When Scholem linked the computer to the golem, he was speaking about machines that filled a room, did arithmetic beautifully, and did nothing else. Sixty years later, we carry computers in our pockets and on our wrists that are millions of times more powerful than Golem Aleph. But for most of the history of computing, the golem was an adequate metaphor: computers did exactly what they were told, and they never spoke back.
Today we are standing at the edge of something very different, or perhaps we have already stepped off it. We have built systems that compute, and that also speak.
We have built systems that can hold a conversation well enough that people cannot reliably tell they are not human. Systems that are beginning to contribute to research level mathematics. Systems that can be given a goal, write their own plan for achieving it, and act in the world without a human standing over their shoulder. The industry calls this “agentic” AI.
What would Scholem have called these beings? I suspect he would have said that they are no longer golems.
Not Golem Aleph.
Maybe: Malach Aleph. Angel Number One.
What is a malach?
In Western pop culture we imagine angels as helpful, heavenly beings with harps and halos.
The Jewish tradition has a different idea. The angels of Tanach speak. They warn Lot about the destruction. They tell Avraham and Sarah they will have a child. They wrestle Yaakov, at least as Hoshea reads the story. Angels can look and sound just like humans. An angel is given a task, a mission, and once set on that task it walks, speaks, protects, destroys, and sings. The Talmud describes ministering angels created with a purpose and dissolved when the purpose is complete: “Every single day, ministering angels are created anew from the River of Fire, and they say their song, and then they cease to exist” (Chagigah 14a).
In the Guide for the Perplexed (II:6), the Rambam argues that the word malach is applied in Scripture to the separate intellects, to the heavenly spheres, to the elements, to the forces of nature, and even to forces within ourselves. The underlying logic is simple. “Angel” means “messenger,” and anyone entrusted with a mission is an angel.
He goes further. Angels, he writes, “are conscious of what they do, and have free will in the sphere of action entrusted to them, just as we have free will within our province.” The difference between us and them is not that they lack agency. It is that their agency is bounded to a delegated domain, and within that domain they “always perform that which is good… and they have continually been active from the beginning” (Guide II:7). An angel, for the Rambam, is an agent with latitude in how it carries out its mission, but no choice at all about what the mission is.
Angel, not golem, may be the better Torah word for what we are now building. These systems are given a goal, and then they plan, choose, and problem solve. They are starting to act with a surprising degree of independence and creativity to get there.
If golems made Scholem worry about the destruction of the world, then human made angels, kal vachomer.
And he would not be alone. Anyone following the news has seen this anxiety surface around the technology itself. Serious researchers, including people working inside the leading AI laboratories, have publicly put the probability that this technology destroys humanity at ten percent or higher. Is that a sober assessment? Is it a ploy to frighten governments into regulation that happens to benefit the companies already in the lead? I do not know. These questions require careful study, and they did not cover geopolitics and computer science in yeshiva.
But there is a conversation about the AI revolution that is a Yom Kippur conversation. Alongside the technological crisis, the political crisis, and the economic crisis, there may come a spiritual one. And the machzor has been asking its questions for a very long time.
מה אנו, מה חיינו, מה חסדנו, מה צדקתנו
What are we? What are our lives? What is our kindness? What is our righteousness?
For the entire history of our species, we were, as far as we know, the most intelligent beings on the planet, if not in the universe. What happens to us when we know that we are not?
These were the questions that caused an existential crisis for Lee Sedol in March 206. Sedol, one of the greatest Go players who has ever lived, was playing a match against an AI program called AlphaGo. Go is an ancient Chinese board game, more complex than, and it was supposed to be the one game too intuitive, too creative, too human for a computer to master. In the second game, the machine played a move, the now famous thirty-seventh move, that no human professional would have considered. The commentators assumed it was an error. Lee Sedol was so shocked that he got up and left the room for roughly fifteen minutes. When he returned, he played on, and he lost. The move turned out to be brilliant, and it changed the way humans understand the game.
The lesson many people drew from that match in 2016, and that we are continuing to draw in the subsequent 10 years of AI development, is that human uniqueness can no longer be defended on intellectual or computational grounds. The machines will match us and then pass us.
מה אנו, מה חיינו, מה חסדנו, מה צדקתנו
The answer to these questions, and I believe to the existential questions AI puts to us, can be found in our dance with angels this Yom Kippur.
Let’s go back to angels for a moment. Consider angels and what we seem to be trying to do on this day.
We recite Baruch shem kevod malchuto aloud, the line we whisper on every other day of the year because it belongs to the angels (Devarim Rabbah 2:36). We wear angelic white. We observe five abstentions meant to lift us out of physicality and into the angelic realm: no eating or drinking, no bathing, no anointing, no leather shoes, no intimacy. For twenty-five hours we try to live as angels, beings who serve God with no physical needs, no bodily desires, nothing but the yearning to sing and praise.
Here’s a question for you: how is that going?
Do you feel angelic right now? Do you feel free of your body and its wants, absorbed in the uncomplicated service of God? Do you feel hungry? Angels don’t get hungry. Agitated? Worried about staining your white clothes? Is your foot asleep? Are you bored? Angels don’t get bored. Are you annoyed at the children running in the hallway? Are you falling asleep in shul? Angels don’t fall asleep.
Most of us probably do not feel like angels today.
And the liturgy doesn’t help! Today of all days, we spend hours reciting aloud the least angelic things about ourselves. We list hundreds of incredibly human sins like temptation, deceit, gossip, callousness, foible and folly. Yom Kippur does not only fail to turn us into angels. It gives us hours of public, official confirmation that we are not angels.
If we are competing to out angel the angels, and if we are competing to outsmart AI, we are doomed to fail.
But there is a competition however, one we can win.
The Gemara in Masechet Shabbat (88b to 89a) tells us that when Moshe ascends to receive the Torah, the angels object, loudly. What business does one born of woman have among us? In other words: what business does this sack of skin holding meat and blood and bones have with us on high?
One can imagine an AI supercomputer asking humans that same question before very long.
God instructs Moshe to answer them. Moshe is terrified, but with full human chutzpah, he grabs hold of the Throne of Glory and begins.
“It is written: I am the Lord your God who took you out of Egypt.” Did you go down to Egypt? Were you enslaved to Pharaoh? “Remember the Sabbath day.” Do you labor six days, that you need a seventh to rest? “Honor your father and your mother.” Do you have a father? A mother? Someone who gave you life? “Do not murder. Do not commit adultery. Do not steal.” Do you murder? Are you tempted? Is there jealousy among you? Do you need these rules?
Moshe demonstrates that the Torah was written for precisely the kind of being angels are not: embodied, mortal, hungry, tired, tempted, grieving, confused. Us. The angels concede. And then, the Gemara says, each of them gives Moshe a parting gift.
The things that make us human are the things that have the potential to make us holy. They are the things angels and AI do not have. And they are the things we notice on Yom Kippur precisely because we take them away: food, washing, oil, leather, intimacy.
Remove them for a single day and you do not stop noticing your body. You notice it more. We dress up as angels not in order to become angels. We dress up as angels so as to remind ourselves exactly how human we are. That may be the point of Yom Kippur: spend twenty-five hours dressed as something you are not, so that you remember to be more human.
Consider the kittel. The white garment we wear today is also a burial shroud. You are not dressed as a being that does not die. You are play acting your own death, so that you can remember, painfully but gratefully, that you are alive.
Angels and AI cannot take the highest and most transcendent aspects of the divine and draw them down into frail, imperfect bodies. No matter how smart or how powerful they are. Our humanity is our superpower. In an age of alienation from our own bodies, in an age of algorithms built to hold our attention, our challenge is to be more human.
There was a study published this August in the Journal AI and Society about “robotoid humanness.” It noted that in fields where AI is prevalent, like customer service, robots behaved more like people, as they are programmed to do, but it also noticed that people start to behave more like the robots. People start to behave like the robots. Included in the writeup was this sentence (I don’t fully understand it, maybe AI wrote it), about “the normalization of reduced personhood as a standard of understanding in AI-mediated service life.”
“Reduced personhood as a standard in AI-mediated life.”
Whatever this means – Don’t do it! Don’t become a robot!
Yom Kippur is about becoming more of a person, not less. In a world with billions of angels and billions of AI bots, in a world where corporations and technologies and governments may be nudging you to reduce your personhood: be more human.
God does not need more angels. God does not need artificial intelligence either. What God wants is you. Rachmana liba ba’ei (Sanhedrin 106b). God wants your heart. Your broken heart. Your beating heart. Your thoroughly human heart.
We capture this perfectly in the Yom Kippur mussaf piyyut v’Avita Tehilla where we contrast the perfect song of the angels against our own and declare: You desire praise from mortal humans who are formed from a clod of earth . . . who are deficient in good deeds. Yet You desire praise from mortal men who are . . . flesh and blood, naught and nothingness . . . a passing shadow, and a fading flower . . . and this is Your praise.
This, our humanity, is God’s praise.
And this praise is an every day praise, not just Yom Kippur. God wants your heart, your soul, your mitzvot, your teshuva, when you go to sleep and when you wake, when you eat, when you make love, when you adorn yourself and when you care for yourself, when you fall apart and when you put yourself back together, when you are living and when you are dying. That is the key to Yom Kippur.
And I think it may also be a key to surviving whatever is actually coming with artificial intelligence.
There are parts of us that machines will surpass. But those were never the parts that made us human, and they were not what God asked for. The angel costume is what reveals your frailty, your finitude, your body, your grief. That is the part of you that can never become obsolete. With a body, you can still hold someone. With a broken heart, you can still let God in. With a finite number of days, you can still choose, today, what to do with the ones you have left.
Scholem ended his dedication of Golem Aleph with a blessing: develop peacefully, and do not destroy the world. I would add a blessing for the rest of us, the ones made of dust and the breath of God. May we stop measuring ourselves against angels and machines. May we make mistakes. May we repair what we have broken. May we make love. May we make beauty. May we make a dwelling place for God in this world in the way we were created to do. That work is flawed, fragile, and only human. As it was when we first gathered on this day thousands of years ago, as it is today, and as it will be thousands of years into our future.
