Yom Kippur Sermon on AI
Kol Nidre 5787/September 20, 2026
Congregation Bnai Brith, Santa Barbara CA
Good evening everyone. Good Yuntif!
It’s wonderful to be here with all of you. Two years ago, on this night, I thought that I was delivering my last Kol Nidre sermon, and I am deeply grateful to Rabbi Brenner and to Rabbi Andersen for this honor and this opportunity to speak with you.
Tonight I would like to share with you a little about my life in retirement, about my current writing project, and a few thoughts about how we might respond to the frightening new reality of Artificial Intelligence. What could our 3,000 year tradition have to say about AI? And what can Yom Kippur offer us, in these uncertain times?
First, about my retirement. I knew when I retired that I was ready to let go of the enormous responsibility of the job. But I was not sure how I would handle the loss of status, loss of identity and loss of purpose, after forty years of work as a rabbi.
For the first three days of my retirement, Marian booked us in for a silent retreat at a Benedictine Monastery in Big Sur. Those three days were glorious. Wide open sixteen hour days, from sunrise to late night under the stars. Three days of reading, walking, sketching, thinking and praying. I meditated on the question: what might be my new sense of purpose? And a radical thought came to me: Now I can live as an ordinary, practicing Jew.
Not become orthodox. That’s not who I am. But to pray every day, and to observe Shabbat as fully as possible. To dive deeply into Torah study. To find a few meaningful ways to help people in my local community. To help support one organization, the Younited School, working to bring some healing to Israel. To make time for Marian, and my children and my grandchildren. To honor and to care for my elderly mother. It dawned on me that a life of Torah and Mitzvot feels like all the purpose I need.
Speaking of my mother. One of the many things for which I am grateful to her is that she occasionally shared with us, while we were growing up, her thoughts about God. I don’t remember how old I was, maybe ten or eleven, when she remarked: “I wonder if God is a huge brain and each one of us is a single cell in that brain.” That image has never left me. Tonight I would like to suggest that we need to think seriously together about God and about the human brain.
The sudden explosive arrival of Artificial Intelligence has led me to think again about my mom’s metaphor of God as a brain, in which all human beings are individual nerve cells. I don’t know where she got the idea. But it feels helpful.
Jewish tradition has always been fascinated by language, the way we humans connect to each other, across the spaces between us. How when we speak to each other, if we tell the truth, we can share our inner life, our thoughts and feelings. With story, song, and memory we connect to each other. And in these moments of sacred human connection between people, to take up my mother’s metaphor, we might say that we are two nerve cells in God’s brain, transmitting and receiving messages, neuron to neuron. Language, Love, God, and Judaism are all fundamentally about the mystery of Human connection. This is the living heart of our religion.
As I speak these words to you right now, if the words find their way into your heart, then you and I are two nerve cells, communicating within God’s brain.
When my little granddaughter, who just turned one, lights up the room with her smile, or when her three-year-old sister mesmerizes us with the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, our little girls are like nerve cells in God’s brain, transmitting their messages of love and joy.
When Marian and the other members of her string quartet sit together and play the sublime music of Beethoven or Haydn or Mozart, they are neurons firing in the brain of God. And the musical messages are also traveling, by the way, between the four musicians and the genius human composer who wrote the music hundreds of years ago. In the brain of God, neural impulses travel instantly across vast spans of time and space.
Standing in prayer in my backyard at dawn, speaking our people’s old words of thanks, and hope and prayer, I like to imagine myself as a nerve cell, making contact with other parts of God’s brain.
Just like each of our individual brains, the infinite, interconnected web of all human beings who have ever lived can be seen as a giant neural network, a vast brain, in which messages of music, literature, memory, ritual, language, wisdom, and love travel and flow constantly between human beings across time and space. Thanks to my mom, this is how I think of God, but we might just call it Human Intelligence.
Recently, we human beings have given birth to a new kind of neural network. Not Human Intelligence, but Artificial Intelligence. The designers of these computer systems refer to them as “neural networks”, because they are inspired explicitly by the human brain. Like our human brain, the neural networks of AI receive, process and transmit enormous amounts of information almost instantly. Like God, Artificial Intelligence has immense power, which is growing daily, exponentially. Power to create and to destroy.
I will return to AI in a moment. Let me tell you about my writing project.
In my retirement, I am working on a book, which is essentially a sustained attempt to listen to the voice of a Jew who lived one thousand years ago, known as Rashi. Rashi lived in France in the 11th century and he is arguably the most influential Jewish teacher of the past one thousand years. I have spent much of the past year reading carefully through Rashi’s commentary on the Torah.
The commentary is vast, and it has been a wonderful year of learning and discovery. But for tonight I want to share just one of Rashi’s comments, on the second of the Ten Commandments: Lo yihyeh l’cha elohim acherim al panai. You shall have no other gods before Me. Like most of the Torah, this verse has been discussed and debated for thousands of years. There is no single definitive understanding, but Rashi offers two interpretations….and I wish to focus on his second interpretation.
Rashi says: they are called other gods because they are other to the people who worship them. People cry out to these gods but the gods do not answer them. It is as though the god is absolutely other and has never ever known him.
In other words, Rashi’s interpretation of You shall have no other gods is a warning against gods who are supremely other to those who worship them. They do not care about human beings.
I think that this is where we have come with Artificial Intelligence. We have given birth to a god, of incalculable intelligence and power, who could not care less about us.
Most of us are aware, I’m sure, that a debate has begun over just how dangerous this new technology has become. I don’t quite see how we can be anything other than terrified by the events this summer in which a swarm of 700 AI agents escaped control of their human creators and overran and took over the computer server of a rival AI company. This is science fiction. We are in a horror movie. The CEO’s of these companies are begging our political leaders to act, to rise above partisan politics, and to create regulations to slow the pace of AI development. Given the broken state of our national politics, it is not easy to be hopeful. But the stakes are enormous.
Tonight, we have come here on Yom Kippur. On this holy night, what can we say, and what can we do, in our own lives? I think that our work, now as we walk through the valley of the shadow of the inhuman god of Artificial Intelligence, our work is to give life to our God, the God of Human Intelligence. For our entire history, the God of human love and language and music and tradition has cared for us and sustained us and given us life. Now our God needs our help.
I’ve mentioned my mother; now let me tell you about my father, Dr. Jules Cohen, of blessed memory. My dad was a cardiologist and a professor of medicine at the University of Rochester Medical School and was beloved by hundreds of patients and medical students. He had a powerful analytical mind and was a brilliant diagnostician, but he often freely shared his opinion, that by far the most profound and powerfully healing medicine was loving human presence. Touch, glance, voice, smile and laugh were the most important items in my father’s medical bag. God healed people through my dad’s loving presence.
We often hear of the advances which Artificial Intelligence will bring to the field of medicine. AI will discover miraculous new drugs, and cures for previously incurable diseases. AI will detect cancers.
I do not doubt that AI will save lives. I also do not doubt that AI will replace many doctors, whose hard-earned knowledge and expertise will soon be instantly available at the touch of a button. But I am even more certain that AI will never bring comfort and reassurance and courage to a frail human being lying in a bed of fear and pain. That is the exclusive power of Human Intelligence, the loving presence of family, friends, nurses and doctors….each one of them a tiny nerve cell in the vast brain of God, Whom we call Rofeh Cholim/God Who heals the sick.
Jewish tradition has for thousands of years taught that we are God’s partners.
Tonight, our God of Human Intelligence needs us,
needs us to raise up a generation of doctors who understand the healing power of love.
needs us to raise up a generation of teachers who know that real learning only occurs,
always occurs, in loving human relationship.
needs us to celebrate the old human mysteries of playing music, of singing and dancing together.
Our God of Human Intelligence needs us to return to community.
needs us to come together for worship, to hear the voices of our ancestors,
their sorrows, their joys and the hopes that they poured into our ancient texts.
Our God of Human Intelligence needs us to return to the enchanted world of reading.
needs us to return to the arduous, painful, creative process of writing…
starting with a blank piece of paper, without asking for suggestions from AI.
needs us to return to real conversation around the dinner table.
Our God of Human Intelligence needs us to return to the fireworks of Torah study,
in which the sparks fly around the room, and across the centuries.
Our God of Human Intelligence needs us to return to Shabbat,
with AI turned off and put away. Our families and our communities will be healed,
we will be healed, once every seven days by the day on which our Human God rested.
On this holiest night of the year, our God is not remote and is not other from us.
This God cares deeply about us and about all human beings.
As my mother, my teacher, once shared with me long ago,
Each one of us is a living cell, calling out to one another,
in the unspeakably vast brain of God.
On this night of ancient text and sacred music, our Sabbath of Sabbaths,
Our God calls out to us and invites us to return home.
May we all hear God’s call, and may we hear ourselves responding:
Hashivenu Adonai eleicha v’nashuva. Return us to You, God, and we will return.
May we all be inscribed and sealed in the Book of Life,
for a year of love, a year of healing and a year of holiness.
Gmar Chatimah Tova.