Ha’azinu
Deuteronomy 32:1-52
by Jen Smith
Give ear, O heavens, let me speak; Let the earth hear the words I utter … (Deut. 32:1)
Moses is almost out of time.
The Israelites stand on the edge of the Promised Land, and Moses knows that he will not cross over with them. And though Moses faithfully taught the laws to the people and reminded them of their history, he also pleads with the Israelites to remember who they are and their role to be a light unto the nations. And now, near the very end of the Torah, Moses sings.
Ha’azinu is Moses’ great soliloquy of warning and hope – a grand poem written to remain with Israel long after Moses himself is gone. It is reminiscent of a surprisingly familiar question: What happens when human beings become so powerful that they no longer believe in the wisdom that got them there?
Moses imagines the Israelites entering the Promised Land and prospering, with visions of food, security, and abundance. Just before you begin to think you’ve made it to paradise, the Torah interjects with one of my favorite colorful biblical descriptions:
Jeshurun grew fat and kicked. (Deut. 32:15)
In other words: The Israelite People become self-sufficient, powerful, and comfortable. But they also become forgetful and complacent.
This time, it is not suffering, but rather, the success they achieve that causes them to lose their way.
I have been thinking about this verse lately because I’ve been reading news stories lately about Silicon Valley tech leaders, researchers, and executives warning about the potentially catastrophic implications of the artificial intelligence that they themselves are helping to create.
Some believe advanced AI could eventually become an existential threat to humanity, while others think these predictions are wildly exaggerated. Of course, nobody knows what will happen in a decade (much less a month), but the list of those who agree that AI will pose an existential threat continues to expand with some of the brightest minds throughout the world.
And no, I am not suggesting that ChatGPT is secretly plotting our demise whilst helping me find restaurants in Toronto. But, underneath the sensational headlines is a genuinely important question that Ha’azinu has been asking for thousands of years:
What happens when our power expands faster than our wisdom?
The danger of artificial intelligence is not necessarily that someday a machine will become “evil.” A machine doesn’t have to hate humanity to cause irreparable harm. The deeper concern is that we may eventually create systems extraordinarily capable of accomplishing “end goals” without filtering them through an equally sophisticated understanding of the values that should constrain those goals.
What does it mean to tell a sufficiently powerful system to “protect humanity”?
And, what does it mean to protect? Does it mean to strictly protect our lives? Does it include our freedom, our dignity, our privacy, or even our ability to make mistakes?
We can tell AI to “end war.”
Sounds like a great idea; but what if the easiest way to prevent conflict is to eliminate human freedom? Analyze the cost of war against prolonged peace, and the computer identifies Fascism (the real kind, not the perceived kind) is our best bet. Oy givalt!
As human beings, we instinctively understand the morality involves reconciling competing values. Afterall, Judaism certainly does.
We are commanded to pursue justice, but also mercy; to tell the truth but not humiliate another person; to preserve life, but also human dignity; to love wholly, but also to establish boundaries.
Judaism has spent thousands of years arguing about the tension inherent in their coexistence.
And while scientists would probably prefer an algorithm, Jewish mysticism offers a beautiful language for articulating this problem.
Kabbalah describes divine reality through the Sefirot, or expressions of divine energy. Chesed represents expansive love and generosity, while Gevurah represents strength, judgment, and limitation. Neither is sufficient alone. Chesed without boundaries can overwhelm, and Gevurah without compassion can become cruelty.1
The goal is not to eliminate either one, but rather to hold them together in a sacred bond to create balance, which is often expressed through Tiferet, or harmony and compassion.
Kabbalah gives us another metaphor: Ohr and Kli (Light and Vessel)
Ohr is the light, a symbol of abundance, possibility, and creative energy; the vessel, or Kli, can receive and contain the light.
In Lurianic Kabbalah*, there is a dramatic moment in the story of creation when the vessels cannot contain the intensity of the divine light. The vessels shatter, and in that breaking apart, all the divine sparks scattered throughout creation.
Rabbi Isaac Luria was obviously not referring to artificial intelligence, but I can’t help but see the metaphor: Humanity is becoming astonishingly good at creating light.
We split the atom, decoded the human genome, and connected billions of human beings through invisible networks. Today, we are creating machine learning models capable of generating language, images, scientific hypotheses, and code at a scale and speed that was unimaginable a generation ago.
While we clearly have the intellect and resources to abstract concepts to fruition, the real question remains: Are our vessels are developing as quickly as our light?
Are our ethical systems strong enough? Are the tech leaders building AI technologies capable of restraining themselves when conflicts arise between profit and responsibility?
More importantly, are we ready? Because the deepest AI alignment problem may ultimately have very little to do with machines; it might be about us.
In Pirkei Avot 4:1 we read: Who is mighty? One who conquers their inclination.
We imagine Power as the ability to do something, the ability to change the world around us, but Judaism considers this differently. Judaism suggests that the greatest expression of power is having the ability to act – and choosing not to. As we witness the current trends in world news, I wonder if this will become one of the defining moral questions of this generation.
Imagine humanity discovers that it can create intelligence vastly more powerful than anything that exists today, and we aren’t sure that we can control it. Will we have the wisdom and humility to wait?
If we don’t do it, someone else will.
Suddenly Moses’ ancient warning doesn’t sound so ancient: Jeshurun grew fat and kicked.
The warning is universal: We became powerful and comfortable, until we began to forget that our physical and intellectual abilities could outpace our moral wisdom. We confused the ability to do something with the wisdom to know whether we should. Because just because we can do something does not mean we should.
Ultimately, Ha’azinu is not a song of despair. Moses tells Israel to remember:
Remember the Days of Old; Consider the years of ages past. (Deut. 32:7)
We are told to remember that that power without wisdom can become cruelty, and, to quote Spiderman, with great power comes great responsibility.
Maybe Moses teaches these final lessons as a song because he knows that laws can be forgotten, and arguments can be disputed, but songs get inside and become part of us.
Moses knows that someday the Israelites will possess power he can’t even imagine. So he leaves them something deeper than another instruction manual: He gives them a melody of memory, so that it can become like a voice inside them whispering: Remember that you are made in God’s image.
And maybe that is exactly what humanity needs as we enter our this (albeit abstract) unknown land. Artificial intelligence may turn out to be one of humanity’s greatest tools. It could help us discover medicines, understand our universe, educate millions of people, solve problems we couldn’t imagine solving even a decade ago, and perhaps relieve an enormous amount of human suffering.
The light itself is not the enemy.
The question is whether we can become worthy vessels for it.
It is here, I think, Judaism offers something profoundly hopeful, because the mystical story does not end with the shattering of the vessels.
It ends with tikkun – repair.
As humans, we are charged with gathering the scattered divine sparks and participating in the restoration of creation. We are not passive observers of our world – we are partners in determining what becomes of our future together.
Through this lens, maybe the best thing we can do in this moment is not to fear light, nor to blinly worship or follow it. It is to strengthen the vessel and insist that wisdom be nurtured alongside intelligence.
Our responsibility is to become caretakers of our future, ensuring that compassion grows with capacity, intelligence grows alongside wisdom, and to allow Chesed (kindness) to continually remind us why we choose the seek intellect in the first place.
Moses stands at the edge of the Promised Land that he will never enter and sings to the generation about to embark on the transformative journey of settling the land.
Maybe we are standing at such an edge ourselves, and like our ancestors, we cannot know exactly what lies on the other side. Ha’azinu reminds us that the most important question may not be about acquiring the technology but acquiring the wisdom and humility to use it responsibly.
May we have the courage to create extraordinary light, the humility to build vessels strong enough to match, and the wisdom to remember that the purpose of all human knowledge is not simply to increase power, but to increase our capacity for holiness, compassion and repair.
Shabbat Shalom.
* Lurianic Kabbalah is a school of Jewish mysticism developed by Rabbi Isaac Luria (the Ari) in 16th-century Safed. It teaches that creation involved a divine contraction (tzimtzum) followed by the shattering of sacred vessels (shevirat ha-kelim), scattering divine sparks throughout the world. Human beings gather these sparks through mitzvot, prayer, and social action, thereby facilitating Tikkun Olam, the repair and restoration of creation.