True Immortality – Yom Kippur 5787

Posted on October 29, 2026October 29, 2026 by Michael Fessler

You can download a printable copy by clicking here

Three years ago, some colleagues and I were brainstorming programs to bring to our synagogues. A few months earlier, ChatGPT had come out - so one of my ideas was a series of public conversations on artificial intelligence and Judaism. My colleagues’ reaction was unanimous: “That seems like an awfully niche topic. How many people will really be interested enough to show up?”

How quickly things change. The conversation around AI is everywhere now. I’ve been listening to a podcast recently hosted by David Zvi Kalman, called Belief in the Future, where he discusses the intersection between technology and religion. A couple of years ago, he interviewed Muhammad Ahmad, a computer scientist who had done work in what used to be called machine learning — now usually lumped in with AI. In 2013, he learned that his father was dying. Muhammad did not yet have children, but knew that he wanted kids. And part of his grief at the prospect of his father’s death was not just for his own loss — but for the knowledge that his children would never have a chance to know their grandfather: who he was, what he thought, what was important to him. So right around the time his father died, he got the idea: “Maybe by the time I have children, I can create a simulation of my father.” Just an idle thought, quickly tucked away.

Several years later, after Muhammad married and had children, he was looking over all of the physical artifacts of his father’s life. He possessed a wealth of material in his father’s voice — letters, texts, videos, and most of all, voice conversations that he had recorded. And he realized that these were not just memorabilia. His father’s written words, and even his spoken words, once transcribed, were raw data that he could use to train a chatbot to respond like his father would — so he would be able to type questions to a simulation of his deceased father and get responses that sounded like him. And his children would be able to do the same. And so, he made it.

Now, Muhammad was very clear: he knew this was not really his father. But even so, he found the experience surprisingly emotional. Other relatives reacted differently. You’ll need to listen to the episode to find out what happened next.

But the idea of a simulation of a deceased relative — particularly a more sophisticated one — raises the question: how much of that person is embodied in the program? Is the software just repackaged information? Does it capture some facet of the loved one’s personality — a slice of their life, however incomplete? Or can a person be somehow distilled, captured?

And what if a simulation like that were to be erased?

This scenario raises a fundamental question: in the eyes of our tradition, what is unique and precious about a human being?

Torah’s answer is anchored in the first chapter of Genesis.

And God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.”

וַיִּבְרָ֨א אֱלֹקִים ׀ אֶת־הָֽאָדָם֙ בְּצַלְמ֔וֹ בְּצֶ֥לֶם אֱלֹקִים בָּרָ֣א אֹת֑וֹ זָכָ֥ר וּנְקֵבָ֖ה בָּרָ֥א אֹתָֽם׃

“God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”

In the ancient world, the language of tzelem — image — was not unique to Judaism. In Akkadian texts, royalty was a reflection of the divine. The king was said to be tzalam ili — God’s image. In Akkadian thought, the king, and the king alone, embodies, or channels, or reflects the gods.

The Torah takes this idea in a radical direction. Not just the king is an image of the divine. Not even just the Jewish people. All of humanity is created in the divine image. Every human being is created “in the image of God”; each person bears the stamp of divinity.

The Talmud unpacks the implications of this idea — and they were revolutionary. Sanhedrin 37a asks why God created all humanity from a single human being. Among the answers:

To teach you that anyone who causes one life to be lost, the text accounts to him as if he caused a whole world to be lost. And anyone who sustains one life, the text accounts to him as if he sustained an entire world. (As Rabbi Yitz Greenberg articulates it, we are each of infinite value – no one is expendable, and we cannot quantify the value of any human life.)
And for the sake of peace among created beings — so that none can say to their friend, “My father is greater than your father.” (In Greenberg’s framing: We are all fundamentally equal – no human being is any more important than any other.)

…

And to testify to the greatness of the Holy Blessed One. For a human ruler forges many coins from the same mold and each one is identical. But the Holy Blessed One forges each human from the same mold of the original one and no one is like their fellow. (Greenberg’s summary: We are each totally unique – there is no one else like us, and no one is interchangeable with anybody else.)

Taken together, the Talmud says that being created in God’s image means that we are endowed with universal, non-negotiable dignity.

So we know who bears the image. Every human being. But the tradition leaves a harder question open: what is that image? What is it about us that reflects the divine?

In the Bible, the divine image is bound up with our bodies. Not only living people but human remains are to be treated with dignity. In a startling verse in chapter 21 of Deuteronomy, we read that even the body of someone who is executed needs to be buried the same day — because mistreating it is an affront to God. The implication is that the human body is at least reminiscent of the divine form: God’s dignity is enhanced or diminished by how we treat others.

The Middle Ages brought different ideas, as Western philosophy became part of our thought. Maimonides insisted that God is absolutely immaterial, with no physical manifestation at all. If that’s so, then tzelem can’t have anything to do with our physical bodies. Instead, he says, it must be reason, intellect — the unique quality of humanity.

That’s a profound argument, but also, now, 800 years later, it gives rise to a treacherous question. If the image of God is our ability to reason, then what happens when someone builds a thinking machine?

Silicon Valley is asking these questions, and forcing the world to confront them as well. Some of their answers are unsettling.

Whether what AI does can truly be called thinking is a real question — but the tech industry assumes that it can, and their language feeds that assumption.

Tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, founder of Venmo’s parent company, put it most starkly. In an interview with Bari Weiss, he said, “The irony is that we told stories of God creating us, and I think the reality is that we are creating God. We are creating God in the form of superintelligence. If you just say: What have we imagined God to be? What are its characteristics? We are building God in the form of technology. It will have the same characteristics. And so I think the irony is that the human storytelling got it exactly in the reverse, that we are the creators of God, and that we will create God in our own image.”

I doubt that Johnson is a student of Maimonides. But as over the top as it is, his thinking flows from Maimonides’ notion that reason is the aspect that humanity shares with the divine. If that’s what the divine spark is — if that’s all that it is — then you can see how some AI enthusiasts get to the idea that their reasoning creation could be Godlike.

OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has gone to the opposite extreme — instead of sanctifying rational thought, he speaks of it like an industrial good. In a recent talk, he said, “We see a future where intelligence is a utility like electricity or water and people buy it from us on a meter.” This is so startling that it deserves closer reading: Altman conceives of intelligence not as something uniquely human, or shared with the divine, but as an impersonal, generic commodity, disconnected from any specific human being.

Both of them, though, draw on the notion that intelligence is what ultimately is of value — and if intelligence is what makes us matter, then a machine that outperforms us makes us obsolete.

But there is an older, deeper reading of the human essence, of the core of tzelem Elohim, that doesn’t reduce us to our brainpower. It says something different about what we share with God — one that helps us understand the hollowness of an ideology that treats us as a generic, metered commodity.

Revisiting our Akkadian god-kings, Rabbi Larry Troster of blessed memory writes: “The term (tzalmu) sometimes refers to a statue or an image of the king, which is placed … somewhere in the kingdom as an extension of the king’s presence and the king’s law. In other words, it is as if the king were present wherever the king’s tzalmu is placed. The king rules wherever his tzalmu stands.”

He continues: “Seen in this light, humanity is the tzalmu of God. Wherever humans are, the presence of God is reflected. This cannot be said of any other creature. Indeed, the command to multiply and spread over the earth is none other than a desire to spread the presence of God … It is as if God could not function in the world without humanity …”

And what does that divine presence look like - the presence that we represent, that we extend into the world? It’s not superintelligence on tap. It’s God’s attributes — compassion, justice, generosity — not in the abstract, but as embodied in acts of loving kindness, gemilut hasadim — qualities that our tradition describes as ein lahem shiur, beyond measure, impossible to meter or commodiy. They happen face to face, person to person, heart to heart.

In a recent talk on human nature, Yehuda Kurtzer reflected on an image from the groundbreaking scholar Rachel Adler, who invokes our tradition’s description of how the Torah appears from God’s perspective, and from ours. From our human perspective, the Torah is written in ink, on the skins of animals. But Torah in the mind of God is made of black fire written on white fire. And the miracle is that those two Torahs are the same: that the fire of God’s Torah flickers through our fragile parchment scroll. We are human, mortal, and vulnerable — and yet while we live, we can act as conduits for something beyond us.

When we stand to say Yizkor today, when we rise to remember those who are no longer with us, we bear witness to the fire that flickered in them and animated them. We hold high what was true and essential in their lives — a fire that has been passed down to us. Our loved one’s worth does not lie in their productivity or their IQ score — but in how they made us feel, our history together, the deep lessons they taught us through presence as much as words. Their care, the joys and sorrows we shared — the light they brought into the world and into our lives.

You can’t buy and sell these core aspects of a human being like a commodity. They aren’t generic and interchangeable. We encounter one another face to face — body and soul, frailty and eternity, bound together. A chatbot might remix words and phrases from years of conversations, and come up with something that sounds like our loved one, if we squint really hard. But clever words are too small to contain what makes someone beloved, significant, precious.

And we recall them today specifically, on Yom Kippur, because their fire that flickers in us now helps us to remember what is truly important. How we want to shape our lives — and how we need to change course in order to do that. On Yom Kippur, we remember their fire flickering on a fragile parchment, because today we acknowledge that’s what we are as well. We grieve that fragility as we are reminded of our own. And we stir the embers of that fire in our hearts, so that the blessing of their lives helps us to become blessings in return. So that we remember what is truly important — and turn toward it.

G’mar chatimah tovah — may we each be sealed for good in the book of life for this year.

Further Reading:

On tzalmu:

"Created in the Image of God: Humanity and Divinity in an Age of Environmentalism" by Rabbi Lawrence Troster. Found in Judaism and Environmental Ethics: A Reader.

On divine and human perspectives on Torah:

In Your Blood, Live: Re-visions of a Theology of Purity.” Tikkun 8: 1 (January/February 1993). Reprinted in Lifecycles 2.

On the divine image:

From The Place Where We Are Right – Rosh Hashanah Day 2, 5787

Posted on September 30, 2026September 30, 2026 by Michael Fessler

You can download a printable PDF of this sermon by clicking here

There is a famous scene in Fiddler on the Roof. Tevye is standing on the sidelines of an argument between two men of the town. One of them says, “Why should we get involved in the political struggles in Russia? Don’t we have enough problems of our own?” Tevye turns to him and says, “You know, you’re right.” The second one shakes a fist and says, “You’re a fool - the world is changing. We can’t close our eyes to everything that’s happening today.” Tevye turns to him, and says, “You know, you’re right.” A third person wags a finger and says, “Tevye - you said HE’S right, and you said HE’S right. They can’t both be right!” Tevye says to him, “You know - you’re also right!”

We laugh - Tevye is a lovable fool.

But I’m not sure he’s actually the fool in that scene. Who in that scene is actually open to learning something new? The two people arguing are just staking out positions - they’re talking at each other. The bystander is just looking for a winner - or maybe he enjoys poking holes in people’s arguments. We all know people like that. (Sometimes we are people like that.)

But only Tevya is able to hear - and consider - more than one voice.

He’s not making a complicated argument about pluralism, or complexity, or diverse viewpoints. He’s trying to keep the peace. But he’s able to stand in the middle of two people who are totally at odds, and say, “I hear you. Both of you. I don’t know how to resolve your conflict. I don’t know how close either of you is to being correct. But I’m not just going to assume that one of you is 100% right, and the other is 100% wrong.”

Tevye’s approach is in short supply these days. We’re living in a polarized world, and each of us knows - or is made to feel that we should know - which side is right about a lot of things. In our heads and our hearts, we are often open to some doubt, some nuance. We wrestle with how to think about the news, about our political life, about Israel, about parenting, about how to be healthy; about the future of the Jewish people, the future of our country, the future of the planet. You name it. We might have strong convictions; but at least sometimes, we are able to see the merit in views that differ from ours. We have at least a little bit of inner Tevye.

But in public life, that capacity shuts down. Because we are living in a culture — and increasingly, a Jewish communal culture — where admitting you can see the other side doesn’t make you thoughtful. It makes you suspect. If you acknowledge any merit in a position you oppose, you must not really believe what you claim to believe. If you change your mind about something, your old position gets dragged out as evidence that you were never trustworthy. The price of nuance has gotten very high. And so we pay the price of certainty instead, which is that we stop asking tough questions. And polarized extremes go unchallenged.

Rosh Hashana arrives each year, asking that we cultivate the ability to ask tough questions: not primarily about the world, or about people who have disappointed us, or dysfunction in the public sphere. About ourselves. Teshuvah -- repentance, return -- calls on us to return to our deepest selves and our core values - and from that place, muster the moral courage to reconsider. Being willing to admit doubt doesn’t make us weak. It makes us courageous. And if we won’t or can’t, we become brittle.

The Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai, wrote a poem about what happens when we lose the willingness to listen to one another. He wrote it in Hebrew. I’ll share it in English, but then we’ll unpack some key pieces in the original. He writes:

From the place where we are right
flowers will never grow
in the spring.

מִן הַמָּקוֹם שֶׁבּוֹ אָנוּ צוֹדְקִים
לֹא יִצְמְחוּ לְעוֹלָם
פְּרָחִים בָּאָבִיב

The place where we are right
is hard and trampled
like a courtyard.

הַמָּקוֹם שֶׁבּוֹ אָנוּ צוֹדְקִים
הוּא רָמוּס וְקָשֶׁה
כְּמוֹ חָצֵר

But doubts and loves
break up the world
like a mole, like a plow.

אֲבָל סְפֵקוֹת וְאַהֲבוֹת עוֹשִׂים
אֶת הָעוֹלָם לְתָחוּחַ
כְּמוֹ חֲפַרְפֶּרֶת, כְּמוֹ חָרִישׁ

And a whisper will be heard
in the place where the house once stood,
now in ruin.

וּלְחִישָׁה תִּשָּׁמַע בַּמָּקוֹם
שֶׁבּוֹ הָיָה הַבַּיִת
אֲשֶׁר נֶחְרַב
This poem is tragic, and the tragedy hinges on one of the first words.

מִן הַמָּקוֹם שֶׁבּוֹ אָנוּ צוֹדְקִים

“From the place where we are right.” The Hebrew word Amichai uses for “[we] are right” is tsodkim. It might sound familiar. It shares a root with tsedek, justice, and with tzedakah, righteousness. Being right, and being righteous — in Hebrew, they’re the same word.

That’s the danger.

We arrive at our certainties through real commitment. Through outrage at real injustice. Through our love and desire to protect real people. Through experiences that made us who we are. And then - we stand our ground, unmoving, until the ground packs down. And from the place where we are right — where we are righteous — flowers will never grow.

Pay attention to that image: ground that is hard and trampled, like a courtyard. A courtyard is a shared space. A public town hall, a meeting with a political leader, a Shabbat dinner table, a nonprofit board meeting, a Facebook discussion. It’s the place where we encounter other people. And Amichai is telling us that our righteousness has stomped it flat. The soil is dead.

Not because we were wrong to care. Not because we hold strong commitment. But because we do nothing but stand our ground, and defend it. We speak and don’t listen. We stop being willing to learn.

There’s a cartoon from almost 20 years ago about a man sitting at a computer in his pajamas. (We know it’s an old cartoon, because today it would be a phone.) We hear a voice from the other room - “Honey, come to bed.” He replies, “I can’t! Someone is wrong on the Internet.”

What does Amichai offer as an alternative? Not argument. Not evidence. Not better talking points. No. He says: סְפֵקוֹת וְאַהֲבוֹת doubts and loves, break up the hardened, impervious world like a mole, like a plow.

Doubts. And loves.

Not certainties — doubts. Not victorious arguments — loves. The things that soften packed earth are vulnerability and attachment, not force. The mole works underground where no one watches. The plow turns the surface over, exposing what was buried. Both are necessary. Neither is accompanied by shouting.

Think about the hardest conversations you’ve had in the past year or two. It was probably about politics or Israel. But not necessarily. What made it hard, painful, unproductive? In my experience, those conversations often feature two people marshaling evidence like ammunition: convinced that if only they could overwhelm the other voice, if only they would see the world the way I do, then everything would be OK.

Those kinds of conversations seldom really work. And the collateral damage can be very real. It can leave relationships flat and trampled.

But think about the conversations where someone started from a different place. Not “here’s why I’m right,” but “here’s what I’m afraid of.” Not “how can you possibly think that,” but “help me understand what brought you there.” Those conversations are rare. They’re challenging. And they create fertile earth: the possibility of real understanding. Ground for something new to sprout.

There is a section in the Talmud that speaks to this need to be able to hear those we disagree with. Talmud, Eruvin 13b. It’s in the context of a dispute on a specific issue between two schools of thought - the House of Shammai and the House of Hillel (Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel), who famously didn’t see eye to eye on much.

It says, about this specific argument, “For three years Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel disagreed. One said: the law is according to our position. The other said: the law is according to our position.

Finally, a divine voice emerged to settle the dispute. The voice proclaimed: Elu v’elu divrei Elohim chayim Both these and those are the words of the living God.”

(We hear an echo of Tevye here - you’re right - and you’re right too!)

But the voice continues: “However, the law should be carried out according to the opinion of Beit Hillel.”

The Talmud then asks the obvious question - if both sides are right, if the truth is big enough for more than one honest approach to be valid - then why do we follow the House of Hillel?

It replies: “Because the students of Hillel were nohin v’aluvin — gentle and yielding. And because they taught the words of Beit Shammai before their own.

Consider that for a moment. The House of Hillel ultimately carried the day, because before they stated their own position, they stated the position they disagreed with. They held the opposing view up to the light. They treated it with respect. They made sure they understood it well enough to teach it. And then they gave their view.

That is spiritual strength. The courage to consider the truth of other positions, and to be open to what we might learn from them - even if we ultimately disagree.

David Hartman begins one of his books with this text from the Tosefta, Sotah 7:7:

עשה לבך חדרי חדרים והכניס בו דברי ב”ש ודברי ב”ה

“Make for yourself a heart of many rooms, and bring into it the words of the House of Shammai and the words of the House of Hillel.”

What an amazing metaphor: make within ourselves room for many different viewpoints. Hold them in tension, but let them all live together.

So the question I want to ask of us, and of myself, this year: how many rooms does your heart have?

A heart with one room is a fortress. It keeps people out. It is very secure, and very lonely.

A heart with many rooms is a home where others can visit, or join you. There is a room for what you know. There is a room for what you don’t know yet. There’s a room for ideas that challenge you, or disturb you, or leave you unsettled. In a heart of many rooms, you make space for the possibility that you are wrong about something you feel certain about.

Rosh Hashanah asks us to walk through the rooms of our own hearts and notice which ones we’ve locked. Whose voice have we stopped being willing to hear? Which door used to be open, but is now shut - and why?

Now —let me be clear. I don’t want this to feel like a sermon advocating spinelessness. No one should understand me as saying, “Everyone has a point, all perspectives are valid, be nice to the people who want to hurt you, if we all understood each other there would be no conflict.”

I am not saying that.

Not every room in the heart should be unlocked and flung open. Some walls are load-bearing. Tear them out and the whole house collapses. We are not under any obligation to let visitors take a sledgehammer to those walls.

The room that says all people are created b’tselem Elohim, in the image of God -- with no exceptions — that room is not up for renovation. The room that says equality and the rule of law protect everyone, including us — that wall stays. The rooms that say antisemitism is real and must be opposed; that we cannot hold all members of a group collectively responsible for the worst actions of any one member; that freedom and safety are for everyone— those are rooms with load-bearing walls.

We know, this year especially, that some of these load-bearing walls are under stress -- in our own hearts, and certainly in the hearts of our nation and of our people. We know that there are people and movements that would like nothing better than to tear those walls down. And there are times — Amichai knew this too — when we are tsodkim in both senses of the word. Genuinely right, and genuinely righteous. When we must stand firm, and fight if necessary, and not apologize for it.

The Torah says tzedek, tzedek tirdof — justice, justice, pursue. The word is repeated. One reading teaches that the first tzedek is about the destination. The second is about the road to get there. Pursue justice — AND pursue it justly. You can be right about what needs to happen, and still be wrong about how you go about it. Or you can take hold of the tools of justice and deploy them in working toward an unjust outcome.

So the question is not whether to have commitments. It’s what we do with them. And whether we are pursuing justice, or just certainty.

Amichai’s poem does not end with flourishing regrowth - it ends:

And a whisper will be heard in the place where the house once stood, now in ruin.

וּלְחִישָׁה תִּשָּׁמַע בַּמָּקוֹםשֶׁבּוֹ הָיָה הַבַּיִת
אֲשֶׁר נֶחְרַב

The house lies in ruins. But the plow and the mole have loosened the earth - and there is just the barest whisper of new growth.

In a world where everything is loud - the news, the arguments, the outrage - all stoked by social media that profits from keeping us at each other’s throats; Amichai says that the most important sound may be a whisper.

What whispers can we open ourselves to this year - what places of growth and openness, in ourselves, and among ourselves? What might soften in the common ground between us if we allow connection and listening, love and doubt, to loosen the soil that has been packed rock-hard by everyone standing their ground?

Rebuilding takes time. And what is rebuilt is never the same as it was before. But it can be something new, if we let it.

And everything we can do to foster that process, in our own lives and in the public sphere - to listen and not just declare, to open doors to dialogue where we can do so safely - remembering that discomfort is not the same thing as danger - might be what’s needed to invite others to do the same. We need so badly to cultivate the earth for something new to grow - between us, and within us.

Shanah Tovah.

Sermon from First Day Rosh Hashanah 5786: “Listening, Fast and Slow”

Posted on September 27, 2025September 27, 2025 by Michael Fessler

I was cleaning up my home office a while ago. (Yes, Rabbi Miriam, I admit it was a long time ago.) Part of the process was boxing up old books for donation. Somewhere along the way, it occurred to me to check with the public library to see what they would actually accept — and there’s a list of materials that they don’t want. There were the obvious ones: Magazines. Phone books. Outdated travel guides. Older textbooks. And one that threw me for a moment: encyclopedias. But of course, that made sense. Very few people are willing to devote yards of shelf space to a hundred pounds of secondhand, outdated paper. Even Britannica is a website now.

The major dictionaries have migrated online as well. I will admit to being old enough to experience some nostalgia for the big hardback American Heritage dictionary in my house growing up. The online dictionary sites have some features to commend them, though. Merriam-Webster’s Time Travel page can show you the year that words and phrases were first used in print. (The year I was born yielded such gems as “rest area”, “overdiagnosis”, and “kickboxing”).

Near the top of the list, though, was a word first used in 2020:

“Doomscrolling: to spend excessive time online scrolling through news or other content that makes one feel sad, anxious, or angry.”

Continue reading→

Exodus Study Group, Week 31

Posted on December 12, 2024December 12, 2024 by Michael Fessler

We continue this week in the middle of Exodus 5, discussing the relationship between Pharaoh, the Egyptian overseers and the Israelite foremen tasked with enforcing Pharaoh's policies. I hope to finish Chapter 5 and its commentaries next week. We'll be off for 12/25 and probably 1/1 as well, resuming on 1/8.

Video is below. Please forgive my technical fumblings near the beginning - they were in service of finding a better way to share and zoom in on text sheets during class. Mission accomplished, I believe.