On a wall in Jerusalem, three young people sit shoulder to shoulder on a bench. Their bodies nearly touch. Their faces glow in the light of their phones. No one looks up. No one speaks. Each inhabits a separate digital world.

Beside them, painted in black Hebrew letters, are words from the dawn of humanity:

לא טוב היות האדם לבדו — It is not good for the human to be alone. (Genesis 2:18)

The image unsettles because no one in the scene is physically alone — and yet something essential is missing. The bodies share space; attention does not. Presence has been reduced to adjacency.

This week, legal scholar Noah Feldman posed what may be a defining question of our artificial age:

“For every relationship or social interaction you have, ask yourself: What is the value of having that relationship as a human, with a human?”

The Torah, it turns out, has been wrestling with that question since the beginning.

Surrounded Is Not the Same as Completed

After declaring that it is “not good” for the human to be alone, God brings the animals before Adam. As the great Torah sage Bob Dylan once taught us, “Man gave names to all the animals.”

Adam classifies. He names. He orders the world through language. He is cognitively alive and fully engaged. He is not bored. He is not idle. He is surrounded.

And yet the Torah adds a stark qualification:

ולאדם לא מצא עזר כנגדו — For the human, no fitting counterpart was found. (Genesis 2:20)

Adam is not isolated. He is incomplete.

Bereishit advances a claim that feels counterintuitive in an age saturated with interaction: stimulation does not cure aloneness. Neither does productivity. Neither does proximity. What Adam lacks is not company but counterpartness.

The Torah’s solution is not more presence, but reciprocal presence — someone who stands across from the human being, capable of response, resistance, and responsibility.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks noted that the first time the Torah uses the phrase “not good” is here, in relation to human aloneness. Loneliness, in the Torah’s telling, is not incidental. It is existential.

When Adam encounters Eve, he does not speak in the language of utility. He declares:

עֶצֶם מֵעֲצָמַי וּבָשָׂר מִבְּשָׂרִי – Bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. (Genesis 2:23)

This is not simply romance. It is anthropology.

Human wholeness – שלימות – emerges from the encounter with one who shares our vulnerability, our mortality, and our moral agency. A counterpart is not a tool. Not an enhancement. Not an optimized assistant.

A counterpart can disappoint us. Forgive us. Challenge us. Hold us accountable. We stand under the same moral law. We can wound and be wounded. That shared fragility is not a defect of human relationship. It is its dignity.

Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas described the other person as irreducibly “exterior” — beyond possession, beyond full predictability. The other cannot be mastered without ceasing to be other. Real relationship requires that irreducibility.

It is rarely seamless. It involves misunderstanding and repair. But precisely because it involves risk, it shapes us.

That distinction now carries renewed urgency.

When Tools Mimic Counterparts

AI companionship intensifies this shift.

If something speaks in the first person, recalls yesterday’s conversation, and responds with attentiveness, is that not relationship?

Unlike earlier technologies, AI does not merely connect us to others. It imitates the structure of relationship itself. It remembers. It adapts. It responds with calibrated empathy. It is endlessly patient. But resemblance is not reciprocity.

An AI system is not עֶצֶם מֵעֲצָמַי. It does not share embodied fragility. It does not bear moral obligation. It cannot stand before us as a moral equal.

It cannot accuse us. It cannot forgive us. It cannot demand from us. It can only respond.

The danger is not that machines will become human. The danger is that we will recalibrate our expectations of relationship downward — preferring predictability over plurality, affirmation over accountability. Or worse, accept this simulated engagement as authentic relationship. 

Human relationships confront us with difference. They resist full customization. They obligate us to attend to another whose interiority we cannot script. AI companionship can be paused, retrained, optimized. It asks nothing we have not authorized it to ask.

When simulation substitutes for counterpartness, aloneness does not disappear. It calcifies.

We risk becoming like the figures on that Jerusalem bench: physically adjacent, perpetually engaged, yet existentially solitary.

Returning to Feldman’s Question

“What is the value of having that relationship as a human, with a human?”

The Torah’s answer is not nostalgic and not utilitarian. It is structural.

The value lies in completion.

A human counterpart shares our vulnerability, our mortality, and our moral standing. Another human being surprises us, resists us, disappoints us, forgives us, and demands from us. We inhabit the same moral world.

Human relationship carries risk, and precisely because it carries risk, it carries meaning.

AI may simulate presence, approximate intimacy, and speak with remarkable fluency. It may assist, support, even comfort. But it does not share our substance. It does not enter covenant. It does not inhabit the same moral world.

It remains tool, not counterpart. Confusing the two undermines the very ability to even ask Noah’s question.

No matter how advanced our systems become, we return to the Torah’s original warning:

לא טוב היות האדם לבדו – It is not good for the human to be alone.

No technology, however transformative, can supply what only shared humanity can give.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)