Pose the question to an Orthodox Jewish rabbi about permitting AI to issue halachic judgments, and the response would typically be negative. They might worry about the precision of AI-generated answers or its capacity to tailor replies to individual inquirers—potentially favoring varied strategies depending on the person.
He might contend that God intended to empower people rather than machines.
Nonetheless, there is also the practical side: the advantages AI can offer may prompt Jewish communities to decide what actions to take. Some already employ AI for professional tasks or as emotional support—and grow reliant on it as a source of guidance. AI could compel Orthodox Judaism to reconsider who or what should bear religious authority and what form that authority should take—whether anchored in family life, scholarly leadership, or an emergent intermediary in the shape of AI.
Debating who, or what, exercises authority within Judaism is not a novel predicament.
In 1994, historian and Jewish scholar Haym Soloveitchik published a landmark essay, “Rupture and Reconstruction,” in which he charted the arc of American Ashkenazi Jewish life across the 19th and 20th centuries, contending that traditional sources of authority had shifted. Instead of Judaism being handed down by imitation through familial and communal copying as it had in Eastern Europe for centuries, Soloveitchik argued that subsequent migrations and the Holocaust had elevated religious texts to a new, dominant position in Jewish life.
Had you lived as a Jew in the 1850s, within a tight-knit Eastern European shtetl, your Jewishness would have been learned in the same manner as every other skill—by observing those nearby. You would imitate your family’s prayers, clothing, and dietary practices. Your values and everyday behavior would be shaped with what Soloveitchik terms a natural ease and an unmistakable sense that it was meant to be.
Yet a sequence of transformations would begin to undermine shtetl life, propelled by modernization across the Russian Empire and rapid urban growth that displaced communities. State-sponsored secular schooling and the spread of competing ideas strained the traditional social weave. Across Eastern Europe, new Jewish schools and academies started to appear.
But it was among those who emigrated to the United States—in a new milieu—that the mimetic thread tore apart.
A century on, the shtetl world had disappeared, largely due to poverty, violence, and the lure of opportunity in America, which drew over two million European Jews westward between 1880 and 1924, to the United States, upending established ways of living.
The offspring of those who moved to America gradually absorbed the cadence of U.S. life; Jewish life became a matter of choice rather than inevitability. Whereas grandparents in the shtetls perceived God as an immediate, daily force that explained everyday events, American-born generations found the world increasingly intelligible through science and technology. The distinctive shtetl culture—its language, attire, cuisine, and rituals—began to shift. American Jews integrated, to varying extents, in attire, music, and speech. Soloveitchik maintains that for the descendants of the first immigrants, the anchor of religion in sacred texts largely empowered Orthodox Jews to maintain a distinct identity beyond the surrounding American culture.
For those who stayed behind in Europe, the Holocaust would ultimately tear down traditional modes of life, rendering the rupture permanent and breaking the generational lines of mimetic transmission.
America’s esteem for printed books and bureaucratic rationality shaped how Jewish communities responded to their new surroundings. In the 20th century, Jewish newcomers increasingly turned inward to their sacred writings— their “portable homeland,” as a 19th-century poet described, which alone remained untainted by the surrounding influences.
Over time, Jewish authority shifted from mimetic to textual—the chief source of authority now lay in scriptural writings. This shift paved the way for stricter observances, including tighter rules about kashrut. As convention yielded to exacting textual scrutiny, rabbis pressed for stricter measures, invoking religious texts to argue for increasing the minimum amount of matzah at Passover. The same concern had been voiced two centuries earlier by learned rabbis, but then their voices had largely gone unheard because authority still rested largely with parental and communal tradition.
Emphasis on textual study amplified the sway of those skilled in interpreting the corpus. Jewish seminaries proliferated, and education moved further from the home. Mimicry persisted in form, but the objects of imitation now shifted from family to scholarly teachers. Rabbis and other religious leaders gained unprecedented influence, since “few texts are self-explanatory,” and deference followed the interpreters. Those regarded as most learned and adept at elucidating the texts accrued growing authority over Jewish practice.
Growing up in an Orthodox Jewish home in the United Kingdom around the turn of the 21st century, Soloveitchik’s depiction rang true to me. When I was six or seven, I asked whether I could “do stickers” or dig for worms on Shabbat. Unsatisfied with my parents’ answer, I turned to the figure I trusted most on such matters—the local rabbi, who would later become the chief rabbi of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. I recall him explaining that worm-digging on Shabbat is prohibited, yet sticker-playing carried more complexity. Regardless, even as a child I understood that ultimate authority rested with the scholars.
Soloveitchik penned the essay in 1994, just as the internet began to bring texts and religious scholarship online. Even obscure questions could be addressed with a few swift keystrokes.
Some viewed this broadened access to information as a net benefit, while others warned that the internet might undermine established hierarchies of religious learning, since anyone could become an online authority.
Rabbis like David Brofsky pondered whether the internet might entirely supplant tradition as the logical next phase. Even practical skills—such as how to wear ritual garments like the tallit—could be learned by watching a YouTube clip or an Instagram reel instead of learning from a relative, representing another departure from the shtetl model.
Yet advancing, more capable AI systems threaten to intensify pressure on human-centered sources of authority even more than the internet did, while also prompting a reassessment of whether religious texts should remain the main compass for Jewish life.
Among American youths, AI adoption is widespread: about 12% use AI for emotional support, and a similar share rely on AI to complete all or most of their school tasks, per a recent Pew study. The diffusion has been swift, with ChatGPT reaching 100 million users within two months of its late-2022 release. Yet more developments lie ahead. As younger generations excel with devices like smartphones, future cohorts will seamlessly weave personalized AI assistants into their daily lives and work processes, a prospect that may feel unsettling to many today. Some already feel that way.
The pressure on established authorities—teachers and parents in particular—could intensify beyond what the internet wrought, since AI has characteristics that render it plausible as an authoritative figure.
Unlike ordinary browsers, large language models can engage in sustained back-and-forth dialogue, typically requiring less work to arrive at a satisfactory answer. Rather than bombarding you with countless links, AI tends to reply with confidence, coherence, and lucidity. While the internet can assist with homework, AI can feel like a private tutor, sometimes articulating ideas more clearly than a human.
AI might act as an intuition amplifier, or it could supplant intuition itself, much as Waze redirected our sense of direction.
Moshe Koppel
AI can tailor replies to the individual, which helps explain studies suggesting AI models may be more persuasive than humans in debates. There are stories of teens seeking guidance from AI instead of parents—and of parents turning to AI to answer questions their children pose. The option to use “voice mode” to speak with an AI system further deepens this trend. AI developers describe its tendency to feel surprisingly human, training it to simulate human-like traits and personas.
Soloveitchik’s framework posits that both mimetic and textual authority rest on an unspoken foundation: people. Scholars are tasked with composing and interpreting sacred writings for the community, while families and a human-centered social fabric emulate and practice the traditions.
This could prompt what Rabbi David Zvi Kalman describes as a “clarification of values.” Will Jewish learning be valued as a formative, human-to-human exchange, or reduced to an information-gathering process guided by a disembodied AI? Interacting with a rabbi or studying with a scholar are clearly informative, but they are also formative rites—traditions that Jews have engaged in for millennia. As AI lowers the cost and effort of obtaining knowledge, the act of conveying Jewish wisdom may demand far less human labor than in the past.
This echoes Soloveitchik’s question: to what extent should Jewish law and liturgical instruction function as a mechanical, rule-bound manual, and what other possibilities exist? Although AI does not mirror Soloveitchik’s “text-based” framework exactly, its training on enormous bodies of text makes it a potent tool for retrieving written material clearly and efficiently, potentially hastening a move away from human-centered mimetic Judaism because of its nonphysical presence.
When considering a Jewish response, the old adage “two Jews, three opinions” comes to mind.
For some ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities with a history of separating themselves from the outside world, fears of secular influence remain a primary concern that prevents them from engaging with such technologies.
Earlier this year, ultra-Orthodox rabbis in Lakewood, New Jersey, proposed a communal fast in which they would emphasize the dangers of AI before making a communal effort to banish such technology. Similar scenes had occurred before—after the emergence of the internet, 29 ultra-Orthodox rabbis declared the internet “the greatest menace ever to face Jewish culture.”
For modern Orthodox Jews, AI could perhaps present an opportunity to recalibrate the role that texts play in Judaism. Common translations of “Halachah”—a broad corpus of religious text derived from and built around the Torah—as “Jewish law” are wrong, according to Moshe Koppel, a professor emeritus of computer science at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. He argues that Halachah functions more as a language, the rules of which are neither legislated nor enforced, with there being an intuitive sense of how it works that extends mere knowledge of the rules. Rather than a purely law-like proscription, Halachah is meant to be more of a lived experience, sensed by both those in positions of authority and the masses.
AI’s impact could vary considerably. “AI could be an ‘intuition pump,’” he said, “or it could replace intuition, similar to what Waze has done to our sense of direction.” In an ideal environment, perhaps, AI could take out the drudgery of finding sources, while humans can use their sense of intuition to apply them to modern-day scenarios.
Koppel himself has a lab that is building an AI tool to make Jewish texts more accessible, seeing it as a positive democratizing force. He described how he wants the tool to give a broad overview of the literature in response to a question, only offering the answer if the user insists, helping to develop the intuitions that he believes the Halachah holds dear. Other tools are also on the market: Jewish AI learning companion JewPT, and AI research and translation tools aim to support those who feel unsure about talking to rabbis.
Questions around the accuracy of large language models clearly remain. But Judaism must confront these questions as the models continue to improve and more custom tools enter the market.
Negotiating new technologies to preserve the human and relational elements within Judaism has been done before. The Jewish Sabbath “forces us to switch off our tech and to spend time with family and friends, learning, praying, welcoming guests, playing games, and discussing the issues of the day,” noted Commissioner of the AI, Faith and Civil Society Commission Rabbi Harris Bor. “These are all lived communal endeavors.” This could also help act as a bulwark to prevent AI from completely cutting off human relationships. Technology is not totally shunned on the Sabbath (hot plates and specially designed Shabbat lamps are used, for instance), but Jews navigate it in a way to focus on and clarify what human connections and community should look like.
The same clarification is needed when it comes to sharing information with Jewish communities—is what is happening simply an informational exchange, or is there something deeper going on?
My mother would tell me how, as a child, before she and her siblings went to bed, they were each allowed to pick a single word or subject that he would then begin talking about in animated fashion. For 10 minutes, they would learn about topics ranging from books and the printing press, to teddy bears and chocolate—a vivid memory for my mother no language model could ever replicate.
