I saw the headline of an article in The Forward this week that made me stop scrolling. It detailed a gathering of Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox) rabbis making a theological case against Artificial Intelligence. It was a good read.

One quote, in particular, stood out. A rabbi, concerned that AI would make us lazy, said:

“If at the push of a button, I can get a hold of a d’var torah for my Shabbos meal from AI, to us, that’s a problem… I want you to open the book and read it and come up with a question and come up with an answer. That’s part of what’s holy about learning Torah. It’s not just end result. It’s the process.”

“If at the push of a button, I can get a hold of a d’var torah for my Shabbos meal from AI, to us, that’s a problem… I want you to open the book and read it and come up with a question and come up with an answer. That’s part of what’s holy about learning Torah. It’s not just end result. It’s the process.”

My first reaction was: He’s right. My second reaction was: The irony is overwhelming.

The Original “Cheat Sheet”

The deeper irony is that the Haredi world is arguably the most “AI-dependent” community in Judaism. They are adherents to the original AI: The Shulchan Aruch (The Code of Jewish Law).

Before the 16th century, you had to swim through the messy, complex debates of the Talmud to find an answer. Then, Rabbi Joseph Caro wrote the Code. He created the ultimate “Cheat Sheet.” He took the messy debates and boiled them down to binary answers: Do this. Don’t do that.

The intellectual heavyweights of that time—like the Maharal of Prague—hated it. They warned that if people just looked up the answer in a Code, they would stop wrestling with the reasons. He wrote,

It is better for one to decide on the basis of the Talmud even though he might err, for a scholar must depend solely on his understanding. As such, he is beloved of God, and preferable to the one who rules from a code but does not know the reason for the ruling; such a one walks like a blind person.

It is better for one to decide on the basis of the Talmud even though he might err, for a scholar must depend solely on his understanding. As such, he is beloved of God, and preferable to the one who rules from a code but does not know the reason for the ruling; such a one walks like a blind person.

But the Shulchan Aruch won. It became the “button” you push to get the answer. And in doing so, it froze a fluid, living tradition into a rigid one.

Polish Landlords in the Desert

Nowhere is this clearer than in how we dress.

The Torah commands us: U’vchukotiehem lo telechu—”Do not walk in their statutes.” We are meant to be distinct from the nations around us. Yet, walking through Jerusalem today, you see men wearing heavy fur hats (shtreimels) and long black coats.

They claim this is “traditional,” but it’s actually just mimicry of 17th-century Polish nobility. Moses wasn’t commanded to dress like a Polish landlord. Yet today, we have Jews risking heat stroke in the Middle Eastern sun, wearing fur designed for a European winter, all in the name of “piety.” Surely one can still be pious and distinct in climate-appropriate clothing.

That isn’t Torah. That is a costume. It is adherence to a system that has been frozen in time.

The Unsustainable Reality

If this were just about fashion, we could laugh it off. But the refusal to adapt to modernity is no longer just a theological quirk; it is an existential threat to the State of Israel.

This is a community that is growing at an incredible demographic rate, shifting from a small, protected minority into a massive segment of the Israeli public. Yet, the leadership fiercely resists contributing to the very society that feeds them.

You cannot build a modern nation-state when a massive percentage of the population refuses to participate in the broader economy. The math simply doesn’t work. The state heavily subsidizes their study, while the burden of taxes, infrastructure, and innovation falls squarely on the shoulders of the non-Haredi Israeli public.

But the economic disparity pales in comparison to the moral one. Most critically, they largely refuse to serve in the IDF to protect the freedoms that allow them to study in the first place.

When David Ben-Gurion originally granted draft exemptions in the early days of the State, it was for a few hundred scholars to help rebuild the Torah world that had been decimated by the Holocaust. It was a beautiful, necessary gesture. But it was never meant to be a blanket exemption for an entire, rapidly expanding population.

How can a community study the Talmudic laws of Pikuach Nefesh (the obligation to save a life) all day long, but refuse to put on a uniform to actually save the life of their neighbor? They are treating the sovereign State of Israel like a 19th-century European shtetl, acting as if the burden of defense is the job of the local gentile landlord.

Our people have been oppressed so long that isolation has become a virtue.

Our people have been oppressed so long that isolation has become a virtue.

But we aren’t in exile anymore. The cage is open. We are home. And sovereignty means you have to guard your own walls.

God to Moses: “Stop Praying and Move”

When pressed on this, the Haredi leadership offers a standard defense: Our prayers and our Torah study protect Israel just as much as the army does.

It’s a nice sentiment, but it doesn’t hold up to our own sacred text.

When the Israelites were standing at the edge of the Red Sea, with the Egyptian army closing in to slaughter them, what did Moses do? He started praying. He cried out to God for a miracle.

And what was God’s response?

God chastised him. In Exodus 14:15, God says to Moses: “Why do you cry out to Me? Tell the Israelites to go forward!” God does not want us to use prayer as an excuse for inaction. Faith requires our feet. You cannot pray away an advancing army, and you cannot secure the future of the Jewish State by hiding in a Yeshiva while your brothers and sisters are fighting and dying on the front lines.

The danger isn’t Artificial Intelligence. The danger is using a 16th-century legal code as an excuse to be reclusive from life, rather than as a living guide to our lives.

If we use AI just to generate a sermon, we fail. But if we use modern tools to unfreeze the tradition—to find obscure texts, to challenge our assumptions, and to reignite the debate that the Codes tried to settle—then we aren’t bypassing the process. We are reclaiming it.

We don’t need to throw away our tablets (stone or silicon). And we certainly don’t need to dress like we’re in freezing Warsaw when we’re living in a modern world. We just need to remember that Torah is meant to be lived in the reality of the present, not the safety of the past.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)