A Sermon for the Tech Age

This past Yom Kippur, Rabbi Naftali Citron of the Carlebach synagogue in New York delivered a sermon that stayed with me long after the final blast of the Shofar. His message was urgent: our society is in desperate need of religion, not only for personal faith, but to keep humanity from destroying itself. Over the years, many of the rabbis I have interviewed have voiced this same concern: how to bring balance to a world running amok. Sitting in the synagogue, listening to Rabbi Citron’s caution against the backdrop of the media’s dire warnings that artificial intelligence could threaten our future, I felt a spark ignite. He never mentioned AI, but I could not stop connecting the two.

The challenge of making sure that AI serves human values and well-being is not just a technological puzzle; it is also a spiritual one. There is hope, and our oldest wisdom may help guide our furthest leap forward.

Many would say that they don’t need religion: that our republic guarantees freedom, civil rights, and more, all anchored in our Constitution. To this I say that freedom alone can drift into anarchy. The Constitution is like the rules of conduct aboard a train: it tells us how to behave on the journey, but not where to go. For many of us, religion does. It calls us to balance our inner soul and anchors our life in a set of morals and values. The same is true of AI. We can write rules to govern its conduct, but rules alone cannot tell it what is worth pursuing.

To understand what religion can offer here, we must return to a classic of modern Jewish thought: The Lonely Man of Faith, first published in 1965 by the revered Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. A leading figure of American Modern Orthodoxy, Rav Soloveitchik offered an existential reading of the two creation accounts in Genesis, finding in them two archetypes coexisting within every human being: Adam I and Adam II.

Adam I is the “majestic man.” Created in Genesis 1, he is commanded to populate the earth and subdue it. He is practical and ambitious: a builder of industries, a conqueror of........

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