I spoke about authenticity on in a sermon on Rosh Hashanah. Now, with Israel and Zionism under constant attack, even by Jews, we need to remind ourselves and the attackers just what is at the core of the system of beliefs and values that have sustained our people for so many centuries. And that core consists of authenticity and truth, and the cultivation of our most human qualities.
As I mentioned in that sermon, with our world careening from one radical change to the next, this is our moment of truth. We need to cling to what is human and what is real, or we may lose it forever. For in fact, artificial intelligence as just a very large and dangerous tip of a much larger iceberg.
We must stand up for the primacy of the real.
It’s interesting that the modern Hebrew word “artificial,” (Melachuti) comes from the biblical word “Melacha,” which means “creative work,” the kind of work done by God in fashioning the universe, and that work that was ceased on Shabbat. Meanwhile, the work done by humans who were imitating God in building God’s sanctuary in the wilderness, is also called Melacha. Melacha is godlike work, but when people engage in it in construction the sanctuary, they are not actually creating a cosmos, but an artificial facsimile of it, the shadow of a cosmos, the Genesis Creation in miniature. The name of chief artist who built the sanctuary in the Wilderness, Betzalel, actually means, “In the shadow of God.”
Melacha is what humans do when we are playing God, like angels do – and the word for angel is Mal-ach. There’s nothing wrong with imitating the divine, as long as neither we nor our creations are elevated to divine status. In fact, we are God’s masterpiece and we can’t duplicate that – and there must be safeguards to prevent us from trying.
Because it’s literally playing with fire, and kindling fire is the first Melacha mentioned in the Torah's listing of this godlike work. Starting a fire can be immensely creative or immensely destructive, and either way, that’s why it’s prohibited on Shabbat. God models for us that there are times when we must cease and desist our creative work, lest we go too far. Aaron’s two sons did just that, as Leviticus reminds us, when they were playing with “strange fire” near the sanctuary and they were consumed by it. Perhaps that “strange fire” is artificial intelligence.
In that Rosh Hashanah sermon, I recalled my first encountering Martin Buber’s I and Thou in college, in a class that changed my life, taught, ironically, by an applied mathematician, who was also a great humanist, Professor George Morgan.
Buber wrote about being true to who we are, so that we might reach out and meet our neighbor with complete authenticity. Relationships and professional roles cannot be contrived, fabricated, planned, calculated, or programmed. True relationship cannot be “artificial.” Paradoxically the most difficult of all things to achieve, is to be, simply, oneself. I have always looked at religion from the prism of the humanities, not as doctrine but as lived experience, not as something supernatural, but something very down to earth. Lo Bashamayim hee – it says in Deuteronomy. “It’s not in the heavens.” “This thing is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart.” Religion is right here – in your heart. That’s what’s real – and our sacred wisdom reminds us of precisely that. We are not in the business of keeping a dying religion on life support just because it’s been around for a few thousand years and some people feel guilty about eating a lobster roll. It’s been around so long because it helped human beings who happen to be Jewish to become better human beings. It has helped us to make the world a better place, for all people. To be Jewish, in other words, is to be fully human. To be fully human is to be fully engaged with the universe and with the epic saga of unfolding Creation.
To be Jewish is to be radically authentic, trusting and being trustworthy, being fully present and true to our commitments, trusting sources of inherited and inner wisdom. Jews are covenantal beings. We are tethered to something greater than ourselves. That is what keeps it - and us - real. Perhaps we’ve grown to intuit this difference between the virtual and the real. Perhaps that is why people keep on coming back to their houses of worship, to find guidance as we engage in God’s sacred labor. If we can be the locus of the real, that point of light where “I” meets “Thou,” we will be fulfilling a sacred mission that we are uniquely qualified to do. And perhaps that, in the end, will save Judaism, as it guides us through that most dehumanizing of locales, the real-life battlefields of Gaza. And if through all this, through the fighting and infighting, the real suffering and the propaganda, the feverish emotions and those few moments of measured reflection, if we can just cling to the ideal of our common humanity, that we are all created in God's image, we can get through this. If Israel can thread that needle that separates machismo from menschlichkeit, maybe we can win this war on our terms.
If we do not allow ourselves to fall victim to dehumanizing the other, turning the other into an object, a facsimile of the human - even when the other acts in barbaric, inhuman ways - we will have taken the first step toward a real victory and toward the eventual possibility of real peace. | 
