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Sep 7, 2026, 4:41 AM

Two Demons: Why “Is AI Conscious?” May Be the Wrong Question

What is the question

Bu Joe Nalven + Claude + Gemini Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? — Job 38:2 What This Essay Claims, and What It Does Not This is an argument from plausibility, not a proof. I am not going to...

Sep 4, 2026, 3:47 PM

It is a chilling prophecy. The brutality of its truth is written across the tear-stained pages of Jewish history. All nations will ask, “Why did God do this to this land? Why the (sheer) wrath of this great anger?” They...

William Goloboy

Sep 2, 2026, 11:53 PM

Prophets not Diplomats: Ahad Ha’am and the Vision of Cultural Zionism

How would you define Zionism? If I polled the average Times of Israel reader on this question I’m sure I would get a huge variety of responses. Zionism is support for Israel. Zionism is the nationalist movement for Jewish...

Aug 31, 2026, 12:33 AM

Prophecy, AI and the Preservation of Original Thought

The sages teach that prophecy left Israel at around the end of the First Temple period and that now the vestiges of it are to be found with children, the insane and dogs. I imagine that prophecy entails an...

Aug 28, 2026, 10:29 AM

The Altneu Beginning

The Jews stood on the cusp of the realization of a dream, first envisioned over a quarter of a millennium earlier. Whether as drifting strangers in the Land of Canaan, beaten slaves in Egypt, or weary wanderers in the...

Aug 26, 2026, 4:58 AM

Rabbis Have a Moral Imperative to Use AI

Why Rabbis Should Use AI This High Holy Day Season Every year around this time, rabbis begin disappearing. We disappear into books, notes, drafts, abandoned openings, half-finished sermons, deleted paragraphs, and the peculiar anxiety that comes with knowing that more people...

Binyamin Jayson

Aug 21, 2026, 9:53 PM

The paradox of self-care: The self beyond the self

Two weeks ago I was speaking with an atheist about religion. She said to me that faith exists because it provides people comfort. My instinctive reaction was to push back. I replied by stressing Judaism’s intellectual tradition, its thousands of years...

Aug 20, 2026, 9:19 AM

Us vs Them, Part III

Living With “Them”: If human beings will always form groups, how can we live together? Image © Ivan Bassov, 2026. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Living With “Them” In Part I, we examined how people create “us” and “them.” In Part II, we followed those boundaries as they became social and political realities—shaping identities, institutions, borders, and ideas about who belongs. But if group boundaries are...

Aug 20, 2026, 9:18 AM

The Illusion of the Jungle: The Quantum Physics of Chassidic Oneness

We live in a culture profoundly addicted to conflict. Look at the headlines, algorithmically driven feeds, or daily social commentary, and a depressing pattern emerges: what commands our attention is discord, the clash of egos, power struggles, and the...

Aug 18, 2026, 9:00 PM

Us vs Them, Part II

When Belonging Becomes a Boundary: How do group boundaries become social and political institutions? Image © Ivan Bassov, 2026. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

When Belonging Becomes a Boundary In Part I, we examined the psychological origins of “us” and “them.” We saw how easily people form groups, how arbitrary an initial boundary can be, and how differences can acquire meaning after that boundary...

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