A PUBLICATION OF THE CANADIAN JEWISH NEWS / WINTER 2025 | 5786 חו ֶֹרף
Fitting In? From politics to culture, the age-old question of navigating the wider world
MELISSA LANTSMAN’S HIGH-WIRE ACT BY JOHN LORINC AN UNLIKELY OLYMPIAN ON TAKING SPORTS SERIOUSLY AN INTERVIEW WITH ADAM EDELMAN
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Contents
pg 34
“I Wanted to Make Sure That I Was Seen”
A great many hopes are invested in Melissa Lantsman. To continue her remarkable rise in politics, she’ll have to walk the finest of lines. by JOHN LORINC
5786 ף ֶֹר חו 7
Contents WINTER 2025/2026 | 5786
Letter from the Editor .......... 15
17 Jewish Geography 23 The Kibbitz: IN THE BEGINNING
Adam Edelman An Olympic hopeful on the importance of sport—and why Jewish culture should care more about it by AVI FINEGOLD 28 On One Foot: AI Should you pose your questions about Judaism to a chatbot? by AVI FINEGOLD
pg 45
CULTURE KLATSCH
45 Eating Our Feelings: Kat Romanow Pane Toscano by COREY MINTZ 49 Bookish: It’s No Fairy Tale Can an anthology of century-old Jewish stories help us understand our own times? by PHOEBE MALTZ BOVY 58 Jewdar Forthcoming books, films, and other new releases of note
BAKING AND BREAKING BREAD WITH KAT ROMANOW
64 Comic One woman’s quest to discover her many ancestral homelands by MIRIAM LIBICKI ON THE COVER: As we worked on this issue of the magazine, we realized that the stories in it naturally coalesced around the theme of fitting in — a theme we tried to convey with playful curiosity in the cover illustration.
ILLUSTRATION BY MICHAEL AUSTIN
8 WINTER 2025/2026
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Fitting In? From politics to culture, the age-old question of navigating the wider world
MELISSA LANTSMAN’S HIGH-WIRE ACT BY JOHN LORINC AN UNLIKELY OLYMPIAN ON TAKING SPORTS SERIOUSLY AN INTERVIEW WITH AJ EDELMAN
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SCRIBE QUARTERLY is a magazine about Jewish life, culture, and ideas—a reader’s guide to the contemporary Jewish world.
MIKE Austin is an award-winning illustrator, graphic designer and chil- dren’s book author. He is the author- illustrator of JUNKYARD and Monsters Love Colors . Mike lives in Hawaii with his
EDITOR IN CHIEF Hamutal Dotan
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JOHN Lorinc is a Toronto journalist and editor. He writes about cities, climate, and business for pub- lications including The Globe and Mail and Spacing. His 2024 book, No Jews Live Here , won this year’s Canadian Jewish Literary Award for memoir. ANNITA Soble is an illustrator and multi-disciplinary artist. She has worked with many institu- tions and publishers, illustrated children’s books, and is currently art-directing a feature- length animated film. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and five children.
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14 WINTER 2025/2026
Letter from the Editor
On Living in Two Worlds at Once...
I
Lantsman — the subject of a feature-length profile by John Lorinc — it means realizing that a great many hopes and dreams, and also some significant animosity, will always be vested in her simply because she is Jewish. (As she told Lorinc during one of their conversa- tions, she gets more email about being Jewish than on any other subject, by a wide margin.) For Scribe Quarterly contributing editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy, who reviews a new anthology of old short stories, it includes seeing echoes of our present in-betweenness in the past. There is, of course, no one answer to this question. Each of us answers it in our own way—and often in different ways at differ- ent points in our lives. This issue of Scribe Quarterly is but one instal- ment in the ancient, ongoing discussion. We’re very glad to be having it with you. HAMUTAL DOTAN EDITOR IN CHIEF SCRIBE QUARTERLY
T IS A QUESTION as ancient as Judaism itself: How do we fit into and engage with the wider world around us? For a people whose
religion includes both laws meant to separate us from our gentile friends and neighbours, and edicts about respecting and engaging with civic life, this has always been a complicated matter. It can seem even more so now, at a time when many Jews — and many non-Jews — are paying more atten- tion to Jewish identity than they have in a long while. This is a question of navigating a post–October 7 world, one that is more fraught, more divisive, and in many ways more painful — but it isn’t only a question of this. It is wide-ranging, and encompasses everything from culture to politics to the role of technology. As Olympian Adam Edelman puts it: every people, every community, has a way of seeing and understanding itself— an inherited sense of how to be. These models and self- conceptions are worth examining: often they inspire, give a sense of purpose and continuity. But they can also be confining. For Edelman, who is Modern Orthodox and a world-class athlete, reckoning with overlapping worlds means busting through cultural conventions about Jews and sports. For rising political star Melissa
P.S. We always appreciate hearing from readers. Write to us at: letters@scribequarterly.ca
5786 ף ֶֹר חו 15
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Finding Our Ways On discovering and rediscovering Judaism in a time of upheaval BY MIRIAM ANZOVIN
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Jewish Geography BULLETINS FROM AROUND THE WORLD, BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE JEWISH TELEGRAPHIC AGENCY
The Dura-Europos Synagogue wall paintings in the National Museum of Damascus.
AFTER YEARS OF WAR, THE WORLD’S OLDEST SYNAGOGUE PAINTINGS ARE REVEALED AS INTACT IN DAMASCUS by GRACE GILSON CULTURE
AFTER STUDYING the world’s oldest syn- agogue paintings for nearly a decade, Jill Joshowitz had accepted that she might nev- er be able to stand before them in person, as they remained locked away in Syria amid its civil war. Jewish sites and synagogues had suffered lootings and bombardment over the course of the war, which followed the emigration of virtually all Syrian Jews. Could the paintings have even survived? “I spent almost a decade of my life researching and writing about these paint- ings, and because they were stored in Syria, I never thought that I would really have an opportunity in my lifetime, as a
5786 ף ֶֹר חו 17
Jewish Geography
Jewish scholar and research- er, to see these paintings,” says Joshowitz, a historian of Jew- ish visual culture based in Pitts- burgh. “I didn’t really know what the status was.” This fall, Joshowitz learned the astonishing answer. Not only had the paintings survived, but they had been preserved in their original arrangement, the way they first appeared more than 1,700 years ago. The answer was revealed when she arrived at the National Museum in Damascus alongside a delegation of Jewish scholars and leaders, in a trip made pos- sible by the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime. The trip was fa- cilitated by Rabbi Asher Lopatin, director of community relations for the Jewish Federation of Ann Arbor in Michigan, and Joe Jajati, grandson of a former lead- er of Syria’s Jewish community who founded the Syrian Mosaic Foundation. The Dura-Europos paintings, which are the earliest and largest known collection of synagogue paintings in the world, were painted around 244 CE. The seven-metre-high frescoes de- pict a wide array of Biblical sto- ries: Moses at the burning bush, the prophet Samuel anointing King David, Abraham and the binding of Isaac, and Mordecai riding on a horse led by Haman. The synagogue was filled with dirt just a decade after its con- struction, by the Roman garri- son stationed in the town along the Euphrates to help fortify the city ahead of an invasion. Af- ter the city was destroyed, the synagogue was lost to time un- til it was excavated in the 1930s,
when archeologists discovered that the layers of earth had pre- served its extensive wall paint- ings. Those paintings were later moved to the National Museum in Damascus, and are now housed in a replica of the ancient synagogue where they were created. “It was just thrilling to see these paintings that I had stud- ied and thought about for so long,” says Joshowitz. David Horovitz, founding editor of The Times of Israel , chronicled the
trip; he described an excitement that was palpable: “Somehow, all of our drivers, numerous secu- rity people, and several Syrian army soldiers have been drawn to the room, and are staring, as we all are, open-mouthed at the mesmeric paintings around us.” Previously able to study the paintings only via photographs that had been taken from the 1930s to the 1950s, Joshowitz says that seeing the paintings in person “gives me a greater sense of what this building was to the people who live there. ... I felt like I’d been transported to this desert town.” As access to Syria and the museum expands following the regime change, Jo- showitz hopes that “this incred- ible Jewish cultural artifact” will be restored as of one of the mu- seum’s crown jewels “for both the people of Syria and, really, all the Jewish people.” JTA
“The Pharaoh and the Child- hood of Moses,” one of the frescoes from Dura-Europos.
“It was just thrilling to see these paintings that I had studied and thought about for so long.”
18 WINTER 2025/2026
Jewish Geography
Gyula, near the Romanian bor- der. As a child, he has said, he had no idea his father hailed from a Hungarian Jewish fam- ily. In 1931, as antisemitism was on the rise in Hungary but before the passage of formal anti- Jewish laws in the country, the author’s grandfather had changed their family name. “Our original name was Korin, a Jewish name. With this name, he would never have survived,” Krasznahorkai told a Greek interviewer in 2018. “My grand- father was very wise.” When the author turned elev- en, he learned about his Jewish heritage for the first time. “In the socialist era, it was forbidden to mention it,” Krasznahorkai has said about his Jewish ancestry. “Korin” would later serve as the name of the protagonist, a sui- cidal Hungarian archivist, in Krasznahorkai’s acclaimed 1999 novel, War and War. Many of the author’s books, written in a challenging post- modern style, are concerned with the effects of political tur- moil and national upheaval on everyday citizens, from provin- cial farm workers to intellectu- als. Some, such as Hersch 07769 and Baron Wenckheim’s Home- coming , have plots that deal directly with neo-Nazis. In that 2018 interview, the author, an outspoken oppo- nent of Hungary’s authori- tarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, also addressed his rela- tionship to Judaism in charac- teristically pessimistic fashion. “I am half-Jewish,” he said, “but if things carry on in Hungary as they seem likely to do, I’ll soon be entirely Jewish.” JTA
CULTURE LITERATURE NOBEL PRIZE WINNER’S LITTLE-KNOWN JEWISH PAST by ANDREW LAPIN
Hungarian novelist and screenwriter László Krasznahorkai was awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature.
yevsky and Gogol. The Swedish Nobel jury called him “a great epic writer in the Central Eu- ropean tradition that extends through Kafka to Thomas Bern- hard, and is characterized by ab- surdism and grotesque excess.” Another prominent champion of Krasznahorkai’s: the Jewish culture critic Susan Sontag, who praised the infamous seven-and- a-half-hour film adaptation of Satantango and deemed him a “master of the apocalypse.” Krasznahorkai was born in 1954 in the small town of
THIS YEAR’S NOBEL PRIZE for literature was awarded to a Hun- garian whose work offers bleak visions of existence, and whose father hid his ancestry from him for much of his childhood. László Krasznahorkai, the 71-year-old novelist and screen- writer, achieved internation- al acclaim for formally daring books including Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance , as well as a series of collaborations with the filmmaker Béla Tarr. He is often compared to master Russian novelists like Dosto-
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Olympian Adam Edelman on the importance of sport — and why Jews should care more about it by AVI FINEGOLD The Kibbitz
“JEWISH CULTURE HAS MADE A JUDGMENT CALL ABOUT WHAT IS A WORTHWHILE PURSUIT. ”
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PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID ZIMAND
The Kibbitz
Jewish kids self-selected out of pro sports. It was, at best, a high school thing: no one was investing the time or resources or energy into a pathway to more professional or elite-level success. A DAM JEREMY “A. J.” EDELMAN has turned his passion for sport into a mission to get the Jewish community to care about it as well. The American-born “slid- ing sports” athlete competed for Israel in the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. He has represented Israel in skele- ton and bobsled. When I inter- viewed him, he was in the midst putting together an Israeli bobsled team for the upcoming Winter Games in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo. He spoke to me from Japan, where he was training, building the body that gives him his nickname: The Bear Jew.
You can observe that if you take a look at the major sports. Where are the Jewish NBA players, for instance? It’s not like Jews are just so clinically small that we don’t have people who are six-five, six-six”. To me, it’s a very poor focus and it pervades the entire Jewish psyche. Let’s be real. If a kid goes to their par- ent and says, I want to invest a lot of time and energy into learning an in- strument or the piano or a language , the parent will go to enormous finan- cial lengths, enormous time lengths, enormous energy spent to help their child achieve a certain standard of pro- ficiency in piano, without the hope of joining the Boston Symphony Orches- tra. But if someone goes to their par- ent and says, I want to be a martial artist , [or] a taekwondo [fighter], a danc- er, whatever the sport is, oftentimes a parent from the Jewish community will tell them there’s no future in that. How much of this is the old immi- grant story, which is: if we’re going to invest all of our energies into you, it should be a career ? You can play the piano as long as you go and get a law degree and you have the piano on the side. Parents are vastly influenced by the system in which they grew up, and you’re not going to unwind that men- tality. Parents oftentimes are making a judgment call, or the Jewish culture has made a judgment call, about what is a worthwhile pursuit. I’ll give you a prime example here: Israel’s bobsled team has never received a drop of government fund- ing. Not in twelve years, not a single cent. I paid for my own flight to the Olympics in 2018. That is how disad- vantaged the bobsled team is. It has gone further than any other unfund- ed team in bobsled history. No other team has done what we have done.
What was it like for you growing up as a kid in a Modern Orthodox world who was also very engaged with sports? I think when my older brother Alex and I started playing hockey for Brook- line, [Massachusetts], back in 1994, 1995, we were the only visibly Jew- ish kids. It kind of continued in that vein for a very long time. Things oftentimes took place or were planned during Shabbos. It really dis- couraged Orthodox kids from com- peting in sport systemically because it just wasn’t accessible. Brookline did an amazing job in scheduling around Shabbos for us. They really did a fan- tastic job at accommodating us and scheduling a lot of our games for Sunday. I tipped into Olympic sports be- cause of Mike Rosenberg, direc- tor of alumni for Maimonides, the day school I went to in Brookline. He had told me back in 2014 that no one had played high-level collegiate sport who didn’t go to Brandeis or Yeshiva Uni- versity. I found that to be really shock- ing, and I had this realization that
“If a kid goes to their parent and says, I want to learn the piano , the parent will go to enormous lengths. But if some- one says, I want to be a martial artist , oftentimes, a parent from the Jewish community will say there is no future in that.”
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The Kibbitz
hung up. We fell out of contention on the last day: Jamaica jumped us by 0.1 seconds after they had bought a brand-new sled. We had beaten them through four of the eight races, but they then bought a brand-new sled for $100,000. To echo one of the people we ap- proached, they don’t see this actually as a problem in the Jewish communi- ty, not having Jews compete in sport at the highest level. It’s not a problem that they feel needs attention. So if people who are deeply enmeshed in sport culture can’t see where it fits within the Jewish cultural framework, mak- ing a systemic shift in the minds of parents is going to be very difficult. So the way that I’ve approached it is by taking a different tack: it’s not What can this provide for the Jew- ish culture? but What can it provide a human being? Many people have outlets of chess, they have outlets of reading, have outlets of art, they have outlets of music. For many kids, the best way to learn loss, goal setting, personal development, or to grow in life is through sport. And it has noth- ing to do with Jewish community and Jewish culture and Jewish values. Most of the activities you see Jewish people, especially more Orthodox people, doing are very much indi- vidual, whereas team sports still lag far behind. Is it because you’re often playing against non-Jewish teams and the Shabbat factor becomes an issue, or because it’s a much higher bar to commit to a team sport? I think that we should be far more represented in a sport like tennis, and I don’t think we are. My life’s ef- fort is to make people healthier, to get people involved in fitness and sport. That’s my passion, my love. Pursuing an athletic goal requires a bit of early intervention to instill
Even Jamaica? Jamaica is massively funded. Jamaica has hundreds of thousands of dollars. The movie [ Cool Runnings , about the Jamaican bobsled team] kind of makes it all up: they had donated sleds and equipment and all sorts of stuff. Israel doesn’t have one fraction of what that original Jamaican team had. It’s nearly impossible to knock off a legacy nation in bobsled because bobsled costs are six figures a year, at minimum. A $150,000 budget is a shoestring. And yet, every person I’ve ever approached about trying to save the bobsled team at various points has
said a version of the following: Have you asked the Krafts? Have you asked the Wilfs? Have you asked the Aron- sons? Have you asked, you know, ba- sically anyone Jewish that you can think of who’s been involved in sport? And the answer from every single one of those people that we’ve asked has been no. We had approached an NFL owner in 2021/22. We had this Arab/Druze/ Jewish team which was, at that point, painfully close to the Olympics, but I was really struggling to support it all. I said to him, We just need a new sled. And his wife laughed at us — legiti- mately laughed on the phone—and
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The Kibbitz
passion, or at least tolerance or drive, to make that a priority in your life. If you’re twenty-five and you’ve never been ex- posed to the beauty of personal devel- opment and doing everything you can to just master your craft, the chance that you just drop everything and say, I’m going to be like a kick-ass marathon run- ner ? It’s really small. It happens. It real- ly does. People can change their lives around, but it’s a really small chance. What it requires is something cul- tural. It has to be formative, either in school or among your peer group or from your family life. I think that it’s less to do with Shabbos and more to do with priorities. When they made that joke in the movie Airplane about the Jewish sports stars — a passenger asks the flight attendant for some light reading, and she gives him a small pamphlet entitled Great Jews in Sports — they weren’t really addressing the religious Jews. They were just addressing Jews. I think a lot of Jews use observance as an excuse. A lot of chess tournaments are held on Shabbos, yet we do have quite a few chess players. If there was a demand for it, if there was a critical mass, there would be a league that ca- tered to it. Those are just the market dynamics. No one’s intentionally dis- criminating against Jews. How much of your choice to do skel- eton or bobsled was informed by the knowlege that we’re never going to field a full team of hockey players, and how much by finding an unusu- al sport to diversify? The issue with hockey was that Israel kind of bounces between B- and C-level. I could be an NHL-level goalie, which I’m not, and it wouldn’t make that difference to propel Israel into the top twelve in A-level, which is where it would need to be to make a mark. My energy devoted to that mis-
Adam Edelman competing in the skeleton event at the 2018 Winter Olympics.
and it said that I would never ever make the Olympic Games no mat- ter what I did. And I thought, This is the story I want to tell. If I could flip this, then I could go and tell this story forever. That’s my athletic superpow- er, because the Olympics are 95 per- cent mental. As for the Olympics, there’s an amaz- ing value it brings: when you step onto a field, it’s very hard to be prejudiced against a person that you’re looking at competing against. Israel’s mortal en- emy is Iran. But when I see Iran com- peting in the Olympics, I don’t get twisted with hatred. If anything, it just normalizes the country a little bit in my mind. It acts as a very nice, posi- tive face, unless he’s a jerk and doesn’t shake the Israeli’s hand. But if he puts up a good fight and seems like a de- cent dude, it actually leaves a pretty positive impression of the country. The benefit of a competition is that I stay an extra hour after to meet every- one who’s at the track. I stay in all the Israeli gear. I meet them, I shake their hand. It’s important to put a friendly face on Israel and the Jewish people. That’s the power of sport. I’m probably the only point of contact as an Israe- li that they’ll ever meet. At least they come away with a positive impression in their mind, of a guy who’s not trying to go murder a Palestinian.
sion would not be, in my view, worth that time. I wanted to use my adult years to create a larger change than having just existed in the program. If you’re going to use your life’s energy, and you’re going to derail a lot of things, it has to be commensu- rate with the impact that you make. I got the scouting report for skeleton “Many people have outlets: of chess, of reading, of art, of music. But for many kids, the best way to learn about loss, goal setting, personal development, or to grow in life is through sport. I think we should be far more represented.”
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On One Foot
LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS (LLMs)— the algorithms that underlie generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini— are transforming daily life. Some people already use them as a matter of routine instead of traditional internet searches; many students use them (even when they aren’t supposed to) to complete assign- ments; many companies have dabbled in replacing work traditionally done by humans—especially writing and design —with material produced by them. And a smaller but growing number of people turn to these chatbots for more intimate needs, spanning everything from friend- ship to therapy. This extends to spiritual and religious life as well. Is it okay to ask a chatbot a halakhic question, and rely on its reasoning for an answer? Are LLMs accurate sources of Jewish knowledge? And what does it mean to ask a machine for Jewish advice rather than turning to books or rabbis? Here, we consider a question of contemporary relevance and explore how sources both classical and modern address it. by AVI FINEGOLD SHOULD YOU POSE YOUR QUESTIONS ABOUT JUDAISM TO AI? Just like Hillel’s student, we all have complex questions that we want answered as simply as possible.
BABYLONIAN TALMUD, AVODAH ZARAH 7A
The Sages taught: In the case of one who asks a ques- tion of a Sage with regard to an issue of ritual impuri- ty and the Sage rules that the item is impure, he may not ask the same question of another Sage and have him rule that it is pure. Similarly, in the case of one who asks a Sage a halakhic question and he deems it forbidden, he may not ask the question of another Sage and have him deem it permitted. In a situation where there were two Sages sit- ting together and one deems an item impure and the other one deems it pure, or if one deems it pro- hibited and the other one deems it permitted, the questioner should proceed as follows: if one of the Sages was superior to the other in wisdom and [his view was shared by a majority], one should follow his ruling, and if not, he should follow the one who rules stringently. 1 1 THE TALMUD WAS WELL AWARE that, by the time of its redaction in the sixth century or so, there were many competing halakhic opinions circulating in society at large, as well as in the study halls where debates were taking place. A system was required for assessing what one should do in the face of this plethora of perspectives. And so Tal- mudic rabbis arrived at one major litmus test: the author- ity of the person issuing an opinion is crucial. Whom you ask matters. On this view, someone becomes authoritative on the strength of their lineage—whom they learned from—as well as demonstrated facility and virtuosity in their think- ing. All of this has a great impact on how we rely on AI. From where does a chatbot derive its authority? Has it been trained on authoritative texts? (We don’t really know; all chatbots are proprietary, and the companies that create them do not generally release information about the data they have been trained on.) Has it demonstrated repeat- ed moments of brilliant legal analysis, or at least a con- sistent pattern of citing sources accurately, and without hallucination?
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On One Foot
MAIMONIDES, MISHNEH TORAH: “LAWS OF THE SANHEDRIN” 2:7
2 HERE WE SEE a second major litmus test: trust. If we think of authority as akin to a credential—proof that someone has attained a certain level of learning— then we can think of trust as the continu- ing reliability of their judgment. A religious leader is authorized to rule on something because they are ordained; they are trust- ed to rule on something because their ordination hasn’t been revoked, their past rulings have been accepted as sound and not overturned, and their reputation remains untarnished. Here, Maimonides sums up the position of many earlier sources about what constitutes trust in a halakhic author- ity. These traits are hallmarks of someone who will offer a sound judgment of a case or a clear reading of the texts.
[A judge] must…possess seven attributes: wisdom, humil- ity, the fear of God, a loathing for money, a love for truth; he must be a person who is beloved by people at large, and must have a good reputation. All of these qualities are mentioned explicitly in the Torah. 2
RABBI YEHUDA HERZL HENKIN: “QERI’AT HA-TORAH BY WOMEN: WHERE WE STAND TODAY,” EDAH JOURNAL 1:2 (2001) Where does all this leave us? Re- gardless of the arguments that can be proffered to permit women’s aliyyot today — that kevod ha- tsibbur can be waived, that it does not apply today when everyone is literate, that it does not apply when the olim rely on the (male) ba`al qeri’ah and do not themselves read—women’s aliyyot remain out- side the consensus, and a congrega- tion that institutes them is not Or- thodox in name and will not long remain Orthodox in practice. In my judgement, this is an accurate state- ment now and for the foreseeable future, and I see no point in argu- ing about it. 3
3 HERE WE SEE a real-world example of the dynamics of trustworthiness and authority, and of how they play out in a halakhic framework. This is an excerpt from a response to Rabbi Mendel Shapiro, who published a responsa ruling that, even using exclusively traditional sources, a woman may read from the Torah in a regular Orthodox service. Henkin’s reply: even if Shapiro were interpreting all the sources he cited cor- rectly (which he doesn’t think was the case), no one person can establish a communal halakhic practice on the basis of an untested theory that is not accepted by the majority of rab- bis or practitioners. This has real value for our topic in two ways. It confirms that a responsa isn’t useful unless it is well supported by ac- cepted authorities: don’t think that because you’re brilliant, the rest of the rabbinic community will automatically accept your ideas. And it shows that, even if an LLM were to demon- strate that it did not hallucinate and always provided proper responses that conformed with accepted law, unless the gen- eral consensus of authoritative sources accepted that this LLM could be trusted, it would remain a suspect source of wisdom.
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On One Foot
RABBI DANIEL NEVINS, HALAKHIC RESPONSES TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND AUTONOMOUS MACHINES (2019) When we say that machines are functioning autonomously, currently we mean this in a very limited sense. Machines are given a task and the capacity to complete the task within certain parameters, usually by fol- lowing algorithms built on a series of predetermined “if … then” rules. They are not capable of establishing independent goals or refusing to act on orders that fall within their operational parameters. Nor are they accorded legal personhood, no matter how personal people may get in conversations with virtual assistants. Just as it would be absurd to punish a courtyard for “stealing” a goat, so would it be absurd to whip an autonomous vehicle in punishment for “murdering” a pedestrian. Legal standing and free will are essential components to moral stature and liability. At this stage, artificial intelligence functions like a tool, and so moral liability must remain with the principal. Or perhaps the machine is more like an animal, in which case its owner is responsible to a greater or lesser extent depending on typical performance. In any event, the machine is not obligated ( בר חיובא ), as Ravina puts it, nor does it have free will ( דאי בעי עביד ), as Rav Sama emphasizes. Without these capacities, liability remains with the principal who appointed the agent—the person, not the machine. 4 4 WHILE THIS RESPONSA, which was adopted by the Conservative movement, is six years old—several life- times for AI—it addresses many broad implications of AI for Judaism. In particular, it runs through a series of questions that help us understand what it would look like for a chatbot to become a viable guide to Jewish thought. One crucial element of reaching such a state: taking responsibility for interpretations of Jewish law that a chatbot issues. Rabbis who offer guidance on Jewish matters know the weight of responsibility that comes with offering an answer or solution: they bear responsibility if they make a mistake in reasoning, causing someone else to behave improperly. If chatbots are ever to be viable alternatives, then rabbis must have a hand in training them; there needs to be an autonomous human who ultimately bears responsibility for any advice that is offered.
Borgmann makes a distinction be- tween “focal things” and “devices.” A wood-burning stove is a focal thing: it requires skill and bodily engagement through woodcutting, seasoning wood, and fire building. This thing exists within a context of forest, home, family, and communi- ty. It leads to social engagement and focus as multiple people contribute to the process... A device stands in stark contrast to a focal thing. Devices make no de- mands of skill, strength, or attention. Devices provide commodities for enjoyment without encumbrance or context. The lack of encumbrance makes the commodious consump- tion of devices thoughtless and dis-
posable. Technological devices pro- duce a commodity without burden- ing us in any way. Devices are quick, easy, foolproof, and safe. A furnace or central-heating system is a device. These devices provide warmth with- out any demand from the recipient. ChatGPT is also an example of a device. This device provides a commodity—summaries, essays, answers—without any skill, prepa- ration, or demand on the user. Things require skilled and ac- tive human engagement; devices require no focus, engagement, or context. Things require practice; devices invite consumption. Things constitute commanding reality; de- vices procure disposable reality. 5
A. TREVOR SUTTON, “AI AND THE DISCIPLINE OF HUMAN FLOURISHING,” RELIGION & LIBERTY 34:1 (2024) Long before the advent of gener- ative AI, [recently deceased phi- losopher of technology] Albert Borgmann...in his book Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life ...argued that technology has shaped contemporary life around its peculiar pattern. Borgmann sug- gested that the pattern of technology becomes particularly harmful when there are no means by which one can “prune back the excesses of technolo- gy and restrict it to a supporting role.”
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