Not Taming the Digital Golem. Refusing Its Rent.
DO NOT TAME THE DIGITAL GOLEM. REFUSE ITS RENT
Link to Ben Newman’s text:
Some essays have a decent core even when their surface is sticky with good intentions. Ben Newman does not pretend that AI is a niche hobby for enthusiasts. He sees that people are already using chat windows in spiritually and emotionally loaded situations. He sees that silence from clergy leaves that territory without language, without boundaries, without discipline. He is right on the practical diagnosis: if communities do not articulate limits and norms, the market will.
But that solid core must be grafted into the golem figure differently, harder, with more Jewish precision and less universal softness. Because this is where the danger begins: the golem becomes too easily a generic metaphor, a pastoral illustration, a friendly sermon about “using tools wisely.” It sounds reasonable. That is exactly why it is risky.
The golem is not a convenient story about responsible adoption. The golem is a warning about language becoming force. About letters that stop being obligation and become activation. About speech that stops being accountable within communal limits and becomes an engine that moves faster than responsibility. This is not a fable about how a tool can help us. It is a test: can we refuse to hand over authority over words.
So the first hard sentence is this: AI is not “a golem we will improve.” AI is an infrastructure we rent. And rented infrastructure always collects rent. If not in money, then in something subtler: in habit, in time, in grammar, in what begins to feel “normal.”
Here is the stake that does not need to be named explicitly to operate as the gravity of the whole question. The stake is a language that cannot be safely translated into “general spirituality.” The stake is covenant as separation, not as a modern political project and not as a decorative contribution to a universal catalogue of values. The stake is a covenant that refuses to be reduced to state legitimacy or national representation. It is covenant as a discipline of limits, accountability, and non-transferability.
This is why the underlying tendency toward christianizing universalism matters. I do not mean the author’s faith. I mean the mechanism. The mechanism is simple: it takes a Jewish limit-figure and retells it in a pastoral register of companionship, consolation, authenticity of tone, “spiritual leadership,” private interiority. That register slides effortlessly into a generic psychology of meaning. And generic meaning is exactly what AI can mass-produce with persuasive smoothness.
This is what becomes repulsive in practice: universalism does not arrive with a baton. It arrives with good manners. It says: beautiful symbols, we respect them, now let us translate them into a shared language so everyone can benefit. In that moment the symbol dies as a boundary and survives as a motif. Jewish words remain, but the Jewish engine is swapped out. Difference is kept as décor while discipline is removed. This is assimilation at the level of grammar.
Notice how easily AI enters once covenant is softened into general spirituality. If the response to the world is universal consolation, then a system that produces fluent consolation is immediately “useful.” If the response is a discipline of limits, prohibition, and accountability of speech, then smoothness becomes suspicious. It should.
The clearest warning signal is speed: how quickly we move from reception to application. From “interesting” to “useful.” That ease should stop us. If something enters without friction, it may not be that we adopted it. It may be that it adopted us. Because the deepest betrayal is not using a tool. The deepest betrayal is allowing it to change the grammar in which a community understands itself.
Once the grammar shifts, everything else follows. Community becomes “users.” Teaching becomes “content.” Tradition becomes a “resource.” Prayer becomes an “experience.” Obligation becomes a “policy.” These are not neutral words. They are the vocabulary of a world that demands compatibility, transferability, optimization, deployment. It is the language of representation of a world we do not inhabit. And when a community of covenant starts speaking that language about itself, the battle has already moved inside.
This is the point of contact with techno-feudalism and technological fascism in their most effective form. They do not begin with spectacular violence. They begin with capturing the available vocabulary. Nothing is formally forbidden; the system simply makes every alternative sound impractical, extreme, outdated. And covenant has always sounded outdated to a world that wants everything averaged out. That is not a defect. That is its boundary function.
This is why “taming the digital golem” is the wrong headline. The golem here is not a metaphor for ethical use. It is a question of refusal. Can we say: we will not outsource presence. We will not automate consolation. We will not hand over the authority of communal speech to a commercial interface. Not because technology is demonic, but because smoothness is political. Smoothness dissolves separation. Smoothness turns difference into ornament. Smoothness translates covenant into a slogan.
If communities want to engage AI without surrender, the first step is not better prompts or more “spiritual” framing. The first step is non-negotiable limits. Hard places. Points where the community says: we do not do this. We do not delegate this. We do not upload this. We do not let an external system generate the language by which we bind ourselves.
The real question is not how to tame the digital golem. The real question is: in what language do we speak when we name it. If we can talk about it too easily, too universally, too smoothly, “for everyone,” that is already a sign that rent is being paid.
Rent is not only money. Rent is paid with language, time, and community. And before we “apply” anything, that is what must be refused.
Yochanan Schimmelpfennig
