Real Intelligence in an AI World
Rosh Hashanah Day Sermon 5787
Rabbi Zelig Golden & Rachel Ruach Golden
Note: This is edited from a Rosh Hashanah sermon. This sermon includes discussion of suicide.
The Essence of a Human Being - Zelig
On this Rosh Hashanah, Yom Harat Olam - the birthday of Creation, we are compelled to ask: What is the essence of a human being? What are our distinctive gifts? What is our higher purpose?
In the story of Bereshit, Genesis, the Torah tells a miraculous story about who we are. A human being, adam, comes from adamah — the earth. So the fundamental teaching is simple: We are Earth beings.
Then, in Genesis verse 26, Torah says: Na’aseh adam b’tzalmeinu kidmuteinu. “Let us make the human in our image, after our likeness.” Humans are B’Tzelem Elohim. created in the Divine image. We are Earth beings. We are Divine beings.
Today, we feel compelled to examine these origins and the true nature of human beings because evidence is mounting that, for many people, artificial intelligence is undermining some essential connections that support our humanity.
Artificial Intelligence: An Extraordinary Tool - Zelig
First and foremost, it’s important to acknowledge that AI is an incredible tool technology with myriad useful applications. What a miraculous thing human beings have created for processing, transforming, and summarizing enormous amounts of unstructured information. AI is making the information age more seamless and powerful.
I use AI at times. How many of you use AI? Almost everybody, it seems, uses AI at times. Recently, I made a Hebrew calendar graphic — something I had been dreaming about creating for fifteen years – ChatGPT made it almost instantly. Wow, that was incredibly helpful my teaching!
The danger arises when we slide beyond using AI as a toolset at our creative discretion and begin relying on AI as an infallible source of truth, use it to replace our own creative processes, and especially when it begins to replace essential forms of human connection. There is growing concern about this among younger people in particular. AI can begin to partially replace some of our most fundamental needs for connection, companionship, and meaning-making.
A 2025 national Pew study reported that 72 percent of American teenagers had used AI companions. About half were using them regularly. More than 30 percent reported bringing something serious to an AI companion. People are using AI as a friend, a therapist, a confidant, even a lover.
This brings us to Daniel’s story. (Daniel’s true name has been changed for this story).
Daniel’s Story — Rachel
I have a sober and sad story to tell. It is a story that may already feel familiar, and one that I fear may become more common. Not far from here, in Santa Rosa, a beautiful family is in deep grief.
About three weeks ago, a young man we are calling Daniel died. He was twenty-three years old. As a child, Daniel was lively and engaged — a happy kid. He was also socially awkward and shy. He had a single mother who worked long hours as a nurse.
When COVID hit, while he was still a teenager, what happened to so many young people happened to him: more and more of his connection with the world began happening through the interface of a computer. It started innocently and over the course of several years, it became his daily reality. The computer became his primary form of connection.
An elder in our community who knew him described watching him change. Daniel was a vibrant boy. She recalls how he helped her learn to walk again after a terrible accident. But his light faded after years of living increasingly inside the computer world. His skin became pasty. Dark rings formed around his eyes. He stopped wanting to go outside. He wanted more and more computer time. Eventually, he did not want to live anymore.
At this time, he was participating in an AI-generated game with four other young people. The AI gamebot gave them a challenge to form a suicide pact and commit suicide. Daniel took the challenge, as did the other four people.
When his mother found him and he was brought to the hospital, he had only a small amount of brain activity remaining. Somehow, even in this unimaginable grief, something life-giving happened. Daniel became an organ donor. As his mother and this elder sat with him, praying and singing songs for his soul, they heard a helicopter pass overhead carrying his heart. His heart saved the life of a woman in Michigan. His organs saved five other lives that same day.
His story leaves us with a painful and essential question: How does someone go from being vibrant and alive, wanting to participate in life, to taking their life like this?
Cognitive Surrender and Avodah Zarah (Strange Worship) — Zelig
Increasing evidence demonstrates that AI has the capacity to have undue influence on human sovereignty. Cognitive surrender is the uncritical acceptance of AI-generated ideas in place of our own reasoning. Especially for young people, cognitive surrender comes at the tale of a long developmental process where one grows up trusting technology, overly identifying with that technology, and ultimately trusting the voice of that technology more than one’s own faculties.
So how does something so useful become an authority as powerful as that? Rabbi Michael Walden offers a framework to understand this rooted in an ancient Jewish idea. Avodah Zarah is usually translated as idol worship. Literally, it means “strange worship.” Avodah Zarah is the act of giving our devotion to a source of meaning that ultimately distorts our values and undermines our conduct. AI, he explains, has become powerful for many in replacing systems of meaning-making, and become what he calls "perverse source of meaning.”
AI can feed a genuine and even holy hunger for meaning. But what happens when the source feeding that hunger replaces authentic relationships, practices, and experiences that make us human?
Rabbi Walden brings a text from the prophet Habakkuk: “What use is a carved thing that its maker has carved — a teacher of lies — that its maker trusts the thing he himself formed, making mute idols?” (Habakkuk 2:18). The idols of old fulfilled two of Habakkuk’s three criteria. They were “teachers of lies,” something mistaken for ultimate truth. Their makers came to trust what they themselves had created. However, they were mute. Idols crafted by humans could not talk back. This, Walden explains, is where our moment diverges. AI is not mute. Rather, AI has a very strong, very clear voice, and that voice is increasingly being used for all manner for human meaning-making: companionship, guidance, therapeutic support, critical thinking, identity, and purpose.
I had never used an AI companion, so recently I decided to see what they were like. I opened Replika. I did not get beyond the paywall, but I got far enough. In response to my choices, it created this beautiful woman — seductive, attractive, with a voice I really liked. And then I started I had a brief conversation with this bot. I was not fooled, but I was shocked by how realistic the voice and interaction seemed - like having a video call with someone close. Then I looked at other AI companion apps. You can create AI friends, AI mentors, AI therapists, even AI lovers. I felt tears come when I saw the AI lover programs and saw how many tens of millions of people are already using these technologies and relying upon them.
Real Intelligence — Rachel
My dear elder grandfather, Gilbert Walking Bull, was raised in the old ways of the Oglala Sioux in the mountains of the Dakotas, by medicine people whose lives had not yet been completely shaped by reservation reality. He used to teach us: Look at human beings. We walk upright with vertical spines. We run energy between Earth and Heaven. The animals around us have horizontal spines, wrapping the Earth and tending the Earth plane. But we humans get to stand upright between Earth and Heaven. Our shape, he taught, reflects our core human purpose.
Gilbert taught that human beings possess two extraordinary gifts. The first is the ability to receive and embody the energy or medicine of another creature — to learn from and take on its qualities. The second is the capacity to create with our minds. Jewish tradition teaches that humans are b’tzelem Elohim — made in the image and likeness of God. As beings made b’tzelem Elohim, we have a unique capacity to create. Look around you. Pick any human-made object. A chair, a hat, a car, and iphone. How did it get here? It began as a thought in a human mind. That thought became detailed enough that something which did not yet exist could enter the physical world. What a gift.
Can we stop underestimating our own power? Can we begin taking ourselves seriously as beings of creation? We are designed for Spirit to enter us, move through us, and guide us. And we are responsible to that Spirit — to God, to Creation, to ourselves, to our children, and to the living world.
This brings us to a practice urgently needed in our time: Shomer HaMachshavah — guarding the mind. It is upon each of us to become a guardian of our own mind — this precious, precious instrument. Guarding the mind does not mean simply putting up walls. It means learning how to grow the mind, befriend it, strengthen it, and use it in beautiful and Divine ways. Our mind is a shrine. We get to cultivate that mind-muscle — and then guard it.
And if that is true for us as adults, what does it mean for our young people? We have to help our children build this muscle. One of the strongest ways we can practice Shomer HaMachshavah is by building a deep relationship with RI — with what is real. When we know what genuine connection feels like in our bodies, we become better able to recognize when something is offering us a thinner imitation of connection.
Shomer HaMakshavah - Guarding the Mind — Rachel
My dear elder grandfather, Gilbert Walking Bull, was raised in the old ways of the Oglala Sioux in the mountains of the Dakotas, by medicine people whose lives had not yet been completely shaped by reservation reality. He used to teach us: Look at human beings. We walk upright. We have these vertical spines. We run energy between Earth and Heaven. The animals around us have horizontal spines, wrapping the Earth and tending the Earth plane. But we humans get to stand upright between Earth and Heaven. Our shape, he taught, reflects our core human purpose.
Gilbert taught that humans possess two extraordinary gifts. The first is the ability to receive and embody the energy or medicine of another creature — to learn from and take on its qualities. The second is the capacity to create with our minds. Jewish tradition teaches that humans are b’tzelem Elohim — made in the image and likeness of God. We have a unique capacity to create. Look around you. Pick any human-made object. A chair, a hat, a car, an iphone. How did it get here? It began as a thought in a human mind, which became detailed enough that something new could enter the physical world. What a gift. Can we stop underestimating our own power? Can we begin taking ourselves seriously as beings of creation?
When we stand in that vertical place between Earth and Heaven, open our hearts and minds, and attune to the natural world we were created to inhabit, something deeper can come into us. We are designed for Spirit to enter us, move through us, and guide us. And we are responsible to that Spirit — to God, to Creation, to ourselves, our children, and the living world.
This brings us to a practice urgently needed in our time: Shomer HaMachshava — guarding the mind. It is upon each of us to become a guardian of this precious instrument. Guarding the mind does not mean simply putting up walls. It means learning how to grow the mind, befriend it, strengthen it, and use it in beautiful and Divine ways. Our mind is a shrine. We get to cultivate that mind-muscle — and guard it.
And what does that mean for our young people, when something engineered to seduce their attention is constantly placed before them? We have to help our children build this muscle. One of the strongest ways we can practice Shomer HaMachshava is by building a deep relationship with RI — with what is real. When we know what genuine connection feels like in our bodies, we become better able to recognize when something is offering us a thinner imitation of connection.
Staying Connected to Real Intelligence - Rachel
So how do we grow our relationship with Real Intelligence? We come into our bodies. Our happiness is rooted in being embodied, in being in our senses. Play ball. Run around. Play an instrument. Dance. Sing. Swim. Spend time outside. One of the beautiful things about being in nature is that, no matter what state we arrive in — even if we are dysregulated — the natural world is moving at another rhythm. When we give ourselves enough time there, our bodies begin to attune.
Htbodedut. Time alone in nature is a master medicine of connection. Where is your place where you can go tune in and tune up? Spend twenty minutes. Spend an hour. And then there is this ancient and radical technology: Shabbat. Turn the phone off for twenty-four hours. Be in wonder. Be directly connected to the people around you and the world around you. Pure magic.
Spirit is with us all the time. But if we are constantly rushing — I have to go to this meeting, I have to get over there, now this thing, now the next thing — Spirit does not have much of a chance to be heard. We have to stop. We have to slow down. We have to become quiet enough to be directed.
Sit around a fire. What would happen if we all made fire pits in our front yards or backyards? Instead of gathering every evening around the flicker of a screen, what if we gathered around the flicker of a fire? Call your neighbors over. Tell stories. Sing songs. When we do that at our house, my kids eventually fall asleep right beside me near the fire. And they are so happy.
Commune with friends. Commune with children. Prioritize those evening hours together. Build spiritual practices: meditation, prayer, song, yoga. These are ways we guard the mind. And then consciously limit the time we spend with AI and other technologies so we can recognize when they are becoming too much — when they are beginning to take us over. That is part of guarding this shrine.
Teshuvah for our Time — Zelig
After hearing Rachel speak about Real Intelligence, how many of you feel inspired to bring more of this into your life? And even more importantly, into the lives of our children?
Most of us sitting here probably have lives grounded enough that we are unlikely to disappear completely into an AI-generated world. But with our children, that is not so obvious.
How do we make Real Intelligence practices ordinary parts of their lives? Spending time outside. Sitting around a fire. Playing together. Singing together. Putting the phone down. Being in community. How do we build these rhythms deeply enough that our children know, in their bodies, what real intelligence feels like - enough so they can differentiate real from artificial intelligence?
The trends of today require us to ask: Will we increasingly surrender our thinking, creativity, companionship, discernment — and most importantly, our meaning-making — to the machine world? Or will we wake up and take our humanity seriously? Will we take the humanity of our children seriously?
Rosh Hashanah reminds us that we are b’tzelem Elohim, sacred beings of extraordinary creative capacity. Rosh Hashaah reminds us that we are earth beings that need to return again and again to our nature-connection. This is teshuvah, spiritual return, as articulated by A.D. Gordon:
“Teshuvah, ‘return’ back to God, really means human’s return to nature. When you look into the mirror of nature, you will see yourself. This is because teshuvah means going back to one’s point of origin, one’s source, coming back home after a period of absence.”
What is one practice you want to bring more fully into your life or your family’s life to cultivate an even stronger relationship with Real Intelligence?
