Is your AI Jewish?

From Rabbi Mordechai Lightstone of Tech Tribe:

From DALL·E 2’s menagerie of marvels to the excitement around LaMDA AI and the debate of its quasi-spiritual sentience, there’s a chance to look at the Jewish nature of bots and AIs and if they can have Jewish souls.

After all, there is a very Jewish origin to the term robot: The golem of Prague, the guardian of Bohemian Jewry created by the Maharal, may have inspired Czech playwright Karel Capek’s R.U.R., the play that gave us the word “robot.”

But can you make a minyan of droids?

In typical rabbinic fashion, the answer to this question is another question: What is it that makes us Jewish?

The Torah begins with the creation of Adam, noting that G-d “blew into his nostrils a soul of life.” It is that innermost “breath” of the Creator that makes us all human. For Jews, that ineffable spark also makes us Jewish.

Rava, the Talmud notes, created a man, a golem, using forces of sanctity. Rava sent his creation before Rabbi Zeira. Rabbi Zeira would speak to him but he did not reply. Rabbi Zeira said to him: “You were created by one of the members of the group, one of the Sages. Return to your dust.”

The golem, the robot, then was able to be destroyed - for despite its facsimile similarity to a human - that divine spark, blown into the nostrils of Adam, was not there.

The robotic body, devoid of any soul, is but a shell—what Maimonides calls in his magnum opus the Mishneh Torah “matter,” or in Hebrew a golem.

While a robot could never be Jewish, there is a Jewish lesson.

In 1975, the Lubavitcher Rebbe taught that just as a computer can apply its processing power to untold uses by applying its source code to whatever new case may arise - by using spiritual machine learning to accomplish something startlingly new ] we Jews have the ability to adapt to changes in the world—robotic or otherwise—by looking to our source code: the Torah.

Rabbi Mendy & Mussy

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📖 Read:

Dalle AI image generator is fun to play with - see some of the funny Jewish creations people have come up with twitter.com/frumdalle

Although the most popular way to depict the Luchot (Tablets) is with rounded tops, there is actually no authentic source in Jewish tradition for this. What shape were they? How did this mistaken shape come to be? 

Read more about it here

Inside the Effort to Restore Synagogues in Venice's 500-Year-Old Jewish Ghetto. The new project focuses on three 16th-century synagogues in the Italian city.

In the US, some fading Reform and Conservative synagogues go Chabad to stay afloat.

Jewish Birthday Initiative:

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If you would like, we can send you a notification regarding your Jewish birthday with the traditions and ideas on how to celebrate. Please fill out your information in this form and we will take it from there. (All information remains confidential and secure within our database.)

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Here is the link again:

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 Watch:

Inside the Yiddish Book Center

Aaron Lansky runs the Yiddish Book Center in Massachusetts. Over the past 40 years, it has gone from an idea that many dismissed, to an institution of higher learning.

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  Jewish saying of the week:

If I am I because I am I, and you are you because you are you, then I am I and you are you. But if I am I because you are you and you are you because I am I, then I am not I and you are not you!

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