By Rabbi Josh Beraha
I still remember the sound of our first dial-up modem in the early ’90s. It began with a burst of static, like the sound a radio makes in between stations, followed by quick, high-pitched beeps that felt both hopeful and chaotic. Then the screech, and suddenly, a connection, and we were online. Connected to what, exactly? No one really knew. The World Wide Web, as we used to call it, was full of promise, but the promise of what was unclear. We sensed it would shape our lives, but we didn’t yet know how.
My generation has lived alongside this transformation—from a time when our attention was largely our own, to one in which it’s constantly pulled outward by a glowing screen. As I recently learned from a quick Google search, TCP/IP—the technology that carries our digital world—arrived right around my childhood, which means my generation and those older than me are the last who remember life before the internet, before screens became the background hum of our days. This vantage point gives me a sense of responsibility—as if to say: there was once another way to be human, another kind of attention, another rhythm to our lives!
Recently, one of my children read All-of-a-Kind Family, which takes place in the early 1900s, and there’s a scene in it where the children can barely contain their excitement about going to the library. That detail struck me: do kids still go to libraries with that kind of wonder? Are there still librarians who play important roles in children’s lives—as mentors, friends, guides?
Neil Postman—who seems to have taken up permanent residence somewhere in my head—warned that new technologies don’t simply enter a culture, they assault it. Some days, that feels exactly right. My phone isn’t optional; it is literally my way to open the door at Temple Micah. We are constantly reachable, endlessly nudged, always half-aware of the next notification. And we all know the rest of the list—the countless small ways our lives have been reshaped by new technologies.
And now—suddenly, everywhere—comes AI. Overnight the conversation ignited and spread like (artificial) wildfire. And the questions AI brings are enormous. What even is artificial intelligence? What are ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok? What does a “large language model” mean? What happens to the power grid as data centers keep multiplying? What happens to the environment when a single facility is projected to release up to four million pounds of carbon dioxide every hour, the equivalent of four million idling cars?
Then there is the creative world: AI-generated music, art, sermons, scholarship—who owns the words, and who owns the ideas? How will children learn? How will teachers teach? What happens when we develop relationships with AI, as a therapist, a friend, or even as the digital reincarnation of someone who is dead? What becomes of truth? And trust? And, most unsettling of all: what becomes of us, when our tools begin not just to answer our questions but to imitate our minds? As Heschel taught us to ask: “What is a human being, but also, what is being human?” What, actually, is a relationship?
Much like that first modem sound, it feels like it’s still too early to even know what to ask. But as a rabbi, I know that learning to ask questions, and finding the right questions, is the beginning of wisdom. Jewish life has always tried to meet the world as it actually is, while keeping an eye on what’s coming next. Questions are how we stay awake, how we keep ourselves alert to the horizon.
If being Jewish is about questioning, then the synagogue is, too, which means Micah can be a place where we begin to ask about AI. (And as an aside, maybe this is a moment when our intergenerational community can really shine—kids, teens, adults, elders—each bringing their own memories, instincts, and ways of making sense of the world to the conversation.) And if we’re going to ask these questions together, it helps to have a place to start.
One frame I keep returning to is this: Torah blesses the “work of our hands.” It affirms human agency, even celebrates it. Our creativity is meant to signal partnership with God, the ways we extend God’s presence through our own actions in the world. But that same freedom carries danger, for what is Torah’s deepest anxiety about human agency? The answer: the ways it might lead to idolatry, the fear that something we make could become an object of devotion, something that claims our loyalty. In many ways, the internet already functions like such an idol—demanding our attention, shaping our desires, offering information disguised as knowledge. A well-worn path back toward Egypt.
In Deuteronomy, God clearly warns: “You must not return that way again.” The deeper meaning is not geographical but spiritual.
Don’t go back to the place where you surrender your agency. Don’t go back to the systems that own your time, your imagination, your dignity.
AI will be powerful and transformative. We might not know what it is, but it’s coming. The question—the Jewish question, or at least the first one I know to ask, is simple: Will this tool serve human flourishing, or will we end up serving it?
This is where our conversation might begin. Down the line, I hope we can take up these questions together, because they are not abstract or technical. They go to the heart of who we are, and what we are becoming. They press on the limits of technological encroachment and call us back to the one truth we dare not lose: that human dignity rests on the idea that every one of us is created in the Divine image.
And so we begin, not with certainty, but with questions—our oldest spiritual technology.
This article originally appeared in the Dec 2025/Jan-Feb 2026 issue of the Vine.