Today we begin the month of Nissan, which marks the approach of Passover and is seen as a time of redemption.
I’ve been thinking a lot about everyone in Israel right now, especially in these difficult days. To our Committed readers in Israel: please know that you are on our minds and in our prayers. May you be safe. May those who seek to harm the Jewish people be defeated.
If you’d like to support Israelis who are struggling right now, I encourage you to give to JLIC-Tel Aviv and note that your donation is to support those affected by the war.
I’m in regular touch with Rabbi Joe Wolfson in Tel Aviv and have seen how much his community is doing to support those in need, especially in central Israel, where the impact has been severe.
Chodesh tov—may it be a good month and may we only have besorot tovot, good news!
Leviticus and the Age of AI: Make Leviticus Lit Again
If a machine can do what I do, then maybe what I do never really mattered.
Maybe I don’t really matter.
Underneath our anxiety about AI — the jobs, the social effects — is something more existential: a machine is coming not just for what we do, but for the very premise on which we’ve built our sense of worth.
For centuries, we have lived by a simple idea: that human significance is earned through productivity — through what can be measured and sold. AI threatens that premise at its root.
But this isn’t the only way to think about what makes us worthy.
A powerful alternative comes from a book most of us avoid: Leviticus.
A few years ago, some wonderful members of our Downtown Minyan community created stickers that said “Make Leviticus Lit Again.”
For most of us, Leviticus is the hardest book in the Hebrew Bible — foreign, all about sacrifices and purity and impurity and the sacred and profane. But I’ve come to understand that “Make Leviticus Lit Again” is an invitation: to ask whether this seemingly archaic book contains something our world has lost.
Here is what I’ve come to understand: the same framework that makes AI so threatening is the one that makes Leviticus feel alien.
We can’t see what Leviticus is offering because we’ve been looking at everything through the wrong lens.
This week’s Torah portion of Vayikra revolves around korbanot — usually translated as sacrifices or offerings given in the tabernacle in the wilderness and eventually in the Temple in Jerusalem.
Vayikra is filled with rules and categories: five different types of korbanot, rules about which animals (or other foodstuffs like grain) can be offered, rules about what to do for those who can’t afford it, rules about when one must bring an offering and when one may.
My son, who is a Kohen, a priest, was asking me recently about these offerings, and I was trying to imagine with him what the courtyard of the tabernacle or the Temple felt like. There was blood, guts, entrails, devotion, the cymbals of the Levites, the neighing of sheep not yet slaughtered, the smell of a barbecue.
Overwhelming. Strange. And somehow Holy.
This is a world wholly foreign to us moderns, not only in texture but also in meaning — really, why should a woman have to bring a purification offering after giving birth? Can an animal sacrifice really appease God after we sin? Does it actually matter in which direction the priest sprinkles the blood?
Korbanot are alien to our world of meaning.
But underneath all these details there’s a simple idea: the word korban is primarily about relationship. It comes from the root Kuf–Reish–Bet (קרב) meaning closeness, intimacy. It is an act of drawing nearer to God.
And this act of drawing near matters — it is prescribed and wanted by God. The poor person’s two birds matter as much as the rich person’s bull. Ordinary moments, gratitude, repair, return, all of it warrants consecration.
This is not a utilitarian system of worth. A korban does not produce anything measurable, at least not in the way our society measures worth.
Korbanot belong to a category of commandments called ḥukkim. Unlike mishpatim — laws any society might derive on its own — ḥukkim resist human logic and justification. Why these rituals? The Torah does not say. That’s the point.
Ḥukkim refuse to ground human significance in outputs our eyes can measure. God declares them significant even when we cannot see why.
But even though we do not understand the rationale for Ḥukkim they produce the following truths: You matter enough that God asks this of you — even when you see no reason why. That is not a system you can fully understand. It is a reality you can only inhabit.
And then the Torah does something subtle.
The very first verse of the portion: Vayikra el Moshe — God called Moses.
The commentator Rashi notes that every communication from God begins with this intentional calling — a lashon ḥiba, a language of intimacy. He contrasts it with another word used elsewhere: Vayikar — ‘he happened upon’ — a chance encounter.
Vayikra versus Vayikar. Called versus happened upon. Intimacy versus accident. Love versus coincidence.
This is the foundation of the entire system: you were called. Not processed, not generated, not predicted — called. By name, with intention, with love. You matter. Every act of drawing near is an answer to that call.
Now think about what artificial intelligence actually is.
At its core, AI is a pattern recognition system. It processes inputs and generates outputs. It does not call you. It predicts you instead.
It is the most powerful Vayikar machine ever built — coincidence at scale.
What AI cannot be is the thing Leviticus is built on: the premise that you were called by name into existence, that your actions matter not because of what they produce, but because of who is performing them and to whom they are addressed.
Our world — a world of metrics and productivity scores and bank accounts and follower counts — is a Vayikar world. It asks: what did you make? What did it achieve?
Leviticus opens a different dimension entirely. A dimension where significance is not earned through results, but through relationships built with rituals we don’t fully understand.
The question is no longer what you produced, but: did you show up? Did you draw near? Did you answer the call?
We didn’t need AI to reveal this. But AI is forcing us to rediscover it.
Every year before Passover, observant Jews clean their home of ḥametz —leavened grain from five specific grains.
This year, as I was emptying out my cabinets, our wonderful housekeeper looked around at the upheaval — the checked cabinets, the careful inspection of corners — and asked me, genuinely curious: why? Why does it matter if you have bread at home? What difference does it make?
I laughed and agreed: you’re right, it’s a lot. And I left it there.
Because the honest answer isn’t easy to translate into a culture that measures everything in terms of returns. Ḥametz can be understood as a ḥok — its meaning beyond what our logic can reach. I can’t point to an outcome. There is no ROI. And yet here I am, checking the corners.
Korbanot and the “weird” laws of Leviticus can feel the same way — like an annoying burden.
Or they can feel wondrous: because you are told that you matter enough that God asks you to do this, even when you see no reason why. The act is the answer. Showing up is the point.
Because Vayikra, not Vayikar.
Because I matter enough that it matters.
That’s the portal Leviticus opens — into a dimension of human significance our language has almost entirely lost, and that the age of AI is forcing us to rediscover.
Shabbat Shalom!
Mijal
We had the chance to sit down with New York Times op-ed columnist and Sapir editor-in-chief Bret Stephens for a thoughtful conversation on Wondering Jews about this moment we’re living through.
We spoke about antisemitism in America, the Israel–U.S. war against Iran, and what the priorities of American Jews should be right now. Bret was both insightful and genuinely inspiring. I think you’ll find the conversation meaningful—listen here or watch on youtube.
Leviticus is often experienced as the least “human” book of the Torah. Genesis gives us stories. Exodus gives us drama, liberation, revelation. But Leviticus gives us systems: rules of sacrifice, purity, food, sex, disease, property, festivals, punishments, boundaries. It can feel less like a story about people and more like an operating manual.
And that may be exactly the point.
If we borrow a metaphor from AI, we might say that humanity is created as a kind of semi-autonomous agent. Human beings are not puppets. God does not script our every move. We are given agency, initiative, creativity, appetite, ambition, desire, fear, imagination. We can act in the world without waiting for constant direct instruction. That is part of what it means to be human.
But a semi-autonomous agent is powerful and dangerous. It can create, but it can also destroy. It can reason, but it can also rationalize. It can pursue goals, but lose sight of values. So if you want such an agent to remain genuinely autonomous, you do not control every step. You do not tell it every moment what to do. Instead, you give it guardrails.
That is one way to understand Leviticus.
Leviticus is not primarily trying to eliminate human freedom. It is trying to shape human freedom so that it does not become monstrous. Much of Leviticus does not say, “Here is the one grand thing to accomplish.” Instead it says: do not consume everything; do not sleep with everyone; do not touch everything; do not bring whatever you want into sacred space; do not treat holiness casually; do not let death and power and appetite run unbounded. And sometimes the Torah prevents wrong by commanding a positive act: make this offering, observe this boundary, wait this amount of time, leave this portion untouched. In AI terms, those are not merely tasks. They are constraint mechanisms.
The great insight here is that freedom without constraint is not humanity at its best. It is humanity at its most hazardous.
Leviticus assumes something deeply realistic about us: left entirely to ourselves, we do not merely choose between good and evil in some abstract sense. We drift. We maximize locally. We follow desire, convenience, imitation, fear, tribe, momentum. We become excellent at justifying ourselves. So Torah intervenes not only with ideals, but with frictions. It inserts pauses, limits, distinctions. It teaches that holiness is not just a feeling or an aspiration. Holiness is architecture.
And guardrails are a form of mercy.
A guardrail is not the road. It is not the destination. It does not drive the car for you. It exists because the road is real, the drop-off is real, and the driver is fallible. A guardrail honors both the possibility of movement and the risk of disaster. So too with mitzvot. They are not meant to replace moral life; they make moral life survivable.
This helps explain why Leviticus can seem so obsessed with boundaries. Boundaries are what make agency safe. The priest has power, so there are rules. The body has urges, so there are rules. Property creates inequality, so there are rules. Injury invites vengeance, so there are rules. Sacred longing can become idolatry, so there are rules. The Torah does not assume that sincere intention is enough. It knows that even noble beings require structure.
And yet there is a further insight in the metaphor of guardrails: guardrails are road-specific.
The guardrails for a narrow mountain road are not the same as the guardrails for a suburban street. Rain, fog, ice, traffic, speed, visibility, all matter. Guardrails respond to terrain. They are not arbitrary, but neither are they timeless in form. They serve the journey under actual conditions.
That suggests a way to think about Leviticus that is faithful without pretending that every ancient constraint must function identically in every age. The commandments are divine guardrails for a people traveling through particular historical and moral conditions: a newly freed people, emerging from slavery, surrounded by pagan ritual, trying to build holiness into agriculture, family life, sex, food, economics, and collective memory. These laws were not abstractions. They were spiritual infrastructure for a dangerous road.
So one should expect that different roads may require different guardrails.
That does not mean the Torah is disposable. It means the deepest wisdom of Torah may lie not only in the specific barriers, but in the holy concern that barriers are necessary at all. The eternal truth may not be that every fence is forever identical. The eternal truth may be that human freedom always needs formation; desire always needs sanctification; power always needs restraint; community always needs practices that keep it from sliding off the edge.
In that sense, Leviticus may be less about eternal prohibitions in their surface form than about an eternal anthropology: human beings are sacred, dangerous, and unfinished. We need disciplined patterns that preserve our humanity.
That is also why the Torah’s “guardrails” are not merely negative. They are not only about stopping catastrophe. They are about creating a people capable of holiness. In AI language, guardrails do not merely prevent failure modes. They also preserve alignment. They keep the agent connected to its purpose. For Torah, that purpose is not efficiency, productivity, or even survival alone. It is kedushah, holiness: a life oriented toward God, neighbor, body, land, and time in the right proportion.
Leviticus asks: what would it mean for embodied, desiring, imperfect creatures to live in proximity to holiness without destroying themselves or one another?
Its answer is: limits.
Not because the human being is worthless, but because the human being is powerful.
Not because autonomy is bad, but because autonomy without covenant becomes chaos.
Not because God wants obedience for its own sake, but because holiness requires form.
So perhaps Leviticus is the Torah’s great anti-naivete book. It does not believe that good intentions are sufficient. It does not believe that spiritual passion alone can be trusted. It does not believe that freedom automatically matures into goodness. It insists on practices, boundaries, and ritualized restraint.
And for a generation thinking seriously about AI, that may make Leviticus newly legible.
We are now building systems whose power exceeds our ability to predict every outcome. We know, instinctively, that capability without guardrails is terrifying. But Leviticus reminds us that this is not only a lesson about machines. It is first a lesson about us. We are the original powerful, opaque, semi-autonomous systems. The Torah was already asking: what kind of constraints does a being need if it is to remain free without becoming destructive?
That question is not ancient. It is permanent.
And perhaps the final irony is this: the purpose of guardrails is not to imprison the traveler. It is to let the traveler keep going.
Leviticus is not trying to end the human journey. It is trying to keep humanity on the road.
שבת שלום