I Prompt, Therefore I Am… Not

A confession: I use AI. A lot. It drafts my emails, organizes my calendar, and once suggested a Purim costume I’m still recovering from. It’s brilliant. It’s fast. And it just proved a point the Tanya made 230 years before the first chatbot said hello.

Chapter Five of Tanya — the foundational book of Chabad philosophy, published in 1796 — makes a bold claim about what happens when you study Torah. It’s not information passing through your ears on its way to nowhere. When you wrestle with an idea until you truly grasp it, your mind wraps around the idea and the idea wraps around your mind. The knower, the knowing, and the known become one. And since Torah is God’s wisdom, you’re not just learning about God. You’re becoming one with His thought.

Now contrast that with how I “write” these days. I type a few words into my AI. Out comes six hundred polished words — good ideas, clean structure, maybe even a decent joke. Impressive? Absolutely. But none of it became me.

Because here’s what actually happens when you write an article yourself. You live inside every word. You swap an adjective, delete a sentence you loved, argue with a paragraph at 11 p.m. And somewhere in that wrestling match, something shifts — you don’t just have the idea anymore. The idea has you.

Prompting skips all that. It’s like hiring someone to do your pushups. The workout gets done. Beautifully, even. But your muscles don’t know about it.

And now, full disclosure: I didn’t exactly write this article. I spoke the idea into my phone, an AI shaped it, and I edited from there. Which means this article proves its own point. The idea is mine. But the hours of struggle that would have fused it into my bones? Outsourced. And I feel the difference.

That’s the Tanya’s deeper message. Torah study was never about information transfer. If it were, AI would be the greatest Torah scholar in history — it “knows” more than any human ever will. But knowing about isn’t becoming one with. The sacred act of study is the process itself: the effort, the confusion, the breakthrough, the way an idea rewires you from the inside.

AI will keep getting smarter. It will generate insights faster than we can read them. Wonderful — I’ll keep using it for emails. But when it comes to Torah, there’s no shortcut, no prompt, no app that can do the becoming for you. God didn’t ask us to have His wisdom on file. He asked us to make it part of who we are.

So here’s my invitation: pick one idea this week — a verse, a teaching, even this article — and don’t skim it. Sit with it. Argue with it. Turn it over until it turns you over.

I prompt, therefore I am… informed. I study, therefore I become.
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Full transparency: I didn’t edit this article at all. It was all from the 30 second voice prompt into Claude.

Which means I put 0 effort into this article. How does that make you feel about reading it? Don’t worry, I won’t be insulted. By tomorrow I will have forgotten that I even wrote this, because I never really connected to it.