Would you know a real rabbi if you saw one?

I’m at a doctor’s office a few weeks ago. As she’s waiting for my chart to pull up, we make small talk. She asks what I do. I tell her I’m a rabbi who works with graduate students. She mentions that although she’s Catholic, she and her husband would often attend Shabbat services with Jewish friends—and really enjoyed them. “How nice!” I reply.

“And we follow this rabbi on social media who gives great advice on parenting and financial planning. Millions of followers. Maybe you know him?”

Financial planning? I raise an eyebrow. “Who’s that?” I ask, intrigued. “Not too many rabbis with followings like that—certainly not me!” She tells me his name.

“Hmm, never heard of him.” Now I’m really curious. I pull out my phone and look him up. Sure enough, millions of views. For an instant, I feel like a loser rabbi. Then I look closer.

“What? Is he not a good rabbi?”

“Well, it’s not that. He’s a fake rabbi.”

“He’s not a real rabbi?”

“He’s not a real person. He’s an AI rabbi.”

My doctor is aghast. “How could you tell??”

“So, for starters, most rabbis wouldn’t wear prayer shawls underneath suit jackets. The Hebrew gibberish on the book covers behind him is a dead giveaway. And Orthodox rabbis wouldn’t light Shabbat candles in their study and then shoot a video afterwards.”

But of course, my well-meaning doctor didn’t know that. Why would she? He looked the part. He sounded the part, mostly. He had the beard, the gravitas, the confident delivery. He even got the Talmud quote right.

“Now if only so many people listened to real rabbis!”

As I replayed this benign, somewhat comical exchange in my head, I started to sense that something darker was afoot. Sure enough, a report published last week by the Combat Antisemitism Movement identified at least twelve AI-generated “rabbis” on Instagram with estimated reach nearing 280 million —many pushing classic antisemitic conspiracy theories. One account run by scammers based in India, “Rabbi Goldman,” peddles a $9 get rich quick handbook to its 1.4 million followers.

If millions of people (assuming not all of them are bots themselves) can be duped into following a rabbi like that, is Judaism doomed?

No – because Passover provides the antidote.

At the Passover Seder, we read the Haggadah, from the Hebrew root meaning “to tell,” and retell the story of the Exodus. We don’t simply remember the Exodus — that’s a different word, zachor, and that is something we do every day and night. But telling a story is not the same thing as remembering, recalling information.

Remembering can happen alone, in your head, or on a screen. Telling requires a speaker and a listener. It requires sharing, emotion, and the presence only a human being can provide.

This is not a technicality. The Talmud says that even a person sitting alone at the Seder table must tell the story to himself. Even when there is no audience, the act of narrating is the mechanism through which the story becomes your own.

Because storytelling — that classic Jewish vocation — transmits something even bigger than language itself. It transmits values.

AI can generate a sermon. It can quote Talmud. It may even be good at crafting stories. But it cannot tell those stories.

Data can be transmitted by a machine. A story has to be told by a person.

The Haggadah is Judaism’s brilliant model for passing down our values, ideals, and beliefs intergenerationally, l’dor va’dor. To do that, you need to sit around the table with other people and engage in the fundamentally human act of sharing them.

The Seder is one of the oldest continuously practiced rituals in Western civilization. It is a conversation between generations — messy and slow, with plenty of good food and spilled wine. This simple technology has outlasted every empire that tried to stifle it, and it will outlast our current challenges as well.

Real rabbis like me may not be able to compete with artificial ones on likes, impressions, followers, or the metrics that matter to algorithms. But that’s okay. As long as we mortals keep showing up to our Seders and telling the Passover story with our whole hearts — the fake rabbis don’t stand a chance.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)