Hineini: Showing Up and Staying Human in the Age of AI

Rosh Hashanah morning at Stephen Wise Temple, Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback explores an ancient Hebrew word — Hineini, "Here I am" — through the lens of one of the newest challenges facing us: artificial intelligence.
 

Weaving together the Binding of Isaac, a teaching from the Mussar master Rabbi Eliyahu Lopian, and the work of Israeli thinker Micah Goodman, Rabbi Zweiback asks what AI can and cannot give us — and what it means to keep practicing the very human capacities technology can't replace: listening, patience, forgiveness, showing up for one another when there's nothing to fix.

A personal reflection on loss, presence, and the difference between a tool that serves us and a person who makes a claim on our lives.

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Twenty-seven years ago on Rosh Hashanah, my mother died. September twelfth, nineteen ninety-nine. I was in California. My mom was in Omaha, where I grew up. She had been sick for a couple of years, and I was supposed to fly back to see her the very next day. She died in the middle of the night. I flew home early that same morning, shattered. When I walked into my house, one of my rabbis was there waiting for me. Rabbi Aryeh Azriel. The rabbi I'd worked for the year after I finished college, the rabbi who wrote my recommendation to rabbinical school, the rabbi who had been there for my mom and dad throughout her illness. My teacher, my mentor, my friend. I don't remember what he said to me. I'm not sure he said anything at all. What I remember is that he opened his arms and he held me and I sobbed. Twenty-seven years later, I can still feel that embrace. There was nothing he could really do. He couldn't bring my mother back. He couldn't take away my grief. He couldn't answer my questions about why she had died so young. He couldn't solve anything. He could only be there. Hinani, his hug, said to me, here I am. We heard that word Hinani in this morning's Torah reading. God calls out to Abraham, Abraham, and Abraham answers simply, Hinani, here I am. And when Abraham and Isaac walk together toward Mount Moriah, Isaac calls out to his father, Avi, Daddy. And Abraham answers his son with the same word, Hinani Bni, here I am, my son. So many questions we have about this story. Countless theologians and rabbis and philosophers have tried to make sense of it. What is it teaching us? How could God ask this? Is it about faith? Is it about obedience? And in the end, did Abraham pass the test or did he fail the test? Set all of that aside for a moment and think about the theology that's in that word, Hinani, the word that repeats three times in the story. The first time, Abraham says Hinani to God. The second time, Abraham says Hinani to his son. And the third time comes at the most terrifying moment of the story, Abraham has bound Isaac to the altar. He reaches for the knife, and an angel calls from heaven, Avraham, Avraham. And again, Abraham answers, Hinani, three times. Hinani to God, Hinani to his child, Hinani when nothing makes sense and everything is about to change. And notice, notice what Abraham doesn't say. He doesn't say, I understand. He doesn't say, this makes sense. He doesn't say, I think I know how this story ends. He says, Hinani, I'm here, I'm listening, I am still reachable, I am still with you. And maybe that matters precisely because almost nothing about this story makes sense. There is so much Abraham cannot understand, certainly so much that Isaac doesn't understand. And Sarah isn't even there. The Akeda, the binding of Isaac, is mysterious, it's bewildering, it's troubling. And maybe that's part of why we read it every Rosh Hashanah. Because life doesn't often make sense either. A diagnosis we weren't expecting, a relationship that ends suddenly, a child who is suffering and we don't know how to help. A terrible loss, a phone call in the middle of the night, war with all of its brutality and destruction. Sometimes all the facts are there, but they don't add up to anything that makes sense. I want you to keep that thought for a moment. We're going to come back to it from a direction that you might not expect. But now I want you to listen to Isaac's question in the Akeda. Abraham says, Hine bni, here I am. And Isaac responds, Hineha eish, vaha'aiitzim, here is the fire and the wood. But where is the lamb, the lamb that we're supposed to sacrifice? Hine, here I am. Hineha eish, vaha'iitzim, here are the fire and the wood. Isaac can see everything except the one thing that would make it all make sense. The facts are present, the meaning is missing, and we know that experience. Here's the scan, here are the test results, here's the hospital room, here is the empty chair at the holiday table where the one we loved used to sit. But why? And sometimes there's just no answer. And Judaism does not always respond to the mystery of human suffering with an explanation. Sometimes Judaism only gives us a word, Hinaini. I can't explain your pain, but I will sit beside you in it. I can't fix what happened, but I will not leave you alone. Twenty-seven years ago, that's what my rabbi gave me. Not an explanation, but an embrace. His presence. And strangely enough, I've been thinking about that ancient Jewish word lately because of one of humanity's newest technologies. Artificial intelligence. AI. It can write and reason and translate and create and analyze and diagnose. It can even listen to us, describe our pain, and generate words in response that sound remarkably empathetic. The Israeli thinker, one of my teachers, Mika Goodman, in a conversation about Judaism and AI with journalist Kaviv Redinger, makes an observation that helps explain why this moment feels so different. For virtually all of human history, Goodman says, intelligence created technology. Intelligence created technology. We used our minds to make tools, but now we've invented a technology that creates intelligence. It's a reversal of everything we've come to understand about human progress. And I want to be clear, this is not a sermon about why AI is bad or dangerous. It clearly has potential for good. And I won't pretend that the risks are trivial. Jeffrey Hinton, the scientist whose research helped make modern AI possible, has said he thinks that there's a one in five chance that it ends in catastrophe for human beings. Not everyone agrees with him, but just this past week, researchers inside the very companies building these technologies were the ones raising the alarm, warning us that we may be racing towards something we cannot control. That's not the subject of this sermon, but it's worth mentioning so we're clear-eyed. This technology carries real stakes, not just personal ones. But what I want to focus on is the way AI is forcing us to confront an ancient question. What does it mean to be human? The Torah teaches at its very beginning that we are created Betzelem Elohim in the image of God. And Maimonides, the great medieval scholar, famously connected that divine image to our distinctive intellectual capacity. We reason, we understand, and in this way we are created in God's image. Goodman points out that AI makes that idea suddenly unsettling. If we have located so much of human uniqueness in intelligence, what happens when intelligence is no longer uniquely or exclusively ours? So maybe AI can actually help us rediscover something we should have known all along. Intelligence is extraordinary. But intelligence without true relationship leaves us cold. And there is an amazing teaching from our tradition that helps explain why. It's taught in the name of Rabbi Eliahu Lopian, a 20th century master of the Musar tradition, and he teaches it in the way of a parable. A man is at an inn, and the host comes over at mealtime and asks this man what he would like to eat. And the man says, I love fish. Now there's a woman at the table next right nearby, and she has a tendency of taking things literally. And she overhears him and she says to herself, This man loves fish. I bet they'll bring him a live fish so that he can take it home and he can feed it and admire it and put it in a fishbowl. Instead, of course, a cooked fish arrives at the table, and the man picks up his fork and he cuts into it and he eats it, savoring every bite. And the woman watching this is horrified. And she says, This is what you do to the things that you love. And so the rabbi teaches us the man doesn't love the fish. The man loves himself. And he loves what the fish does for him. Now, real love moves in the opposite direction. It asks not merely what pleasure this other can give me, but what can I do for this other? Not how the other can serve me, but how can I serve the one I love. And suddenly this teaching feels rather contemporary because AI might offer us the most sophisticated version of fish love we have ever created. AI is a companion endlessly interested in you. It listens whenever you want. It remembers everything you tell it. It learns your preferences. It's available at two in the afternoon or two in the morning. It never has a bad day. It never needs a ride to LAX. It never calls when you're exhausted and says, I really need you right now. It never asks you to sit beside it in a hospital room. It never needs your forgiveness. It never says, enough about you. I want to tell you what's happening to me. It never contradicts you, even when you need it to. It gives you answers, it can't give you a hug. It exists to serve you, and that's important. AI, for now at least, serves us. Other tools do as well, by the way: a hammer, a washing machine, even technology like Google Maps. But that is fundamentally different than the relationship that makes us human. A tool serves me. A person can make a claim on me. And that's why they call it artificial intelligence. Human beings are the real thing. And that distinction matters. We exist in relationship with one another, and relationship creates obligation. Your needs can interrupt my plans. Your loneliness can demand my time. Your grief can ask me to sit somewhere I don't really want to sit. Your pain can inconvenience me. Your humanity makes a claim on me. That is real love. That is what a machine designed to serve me does not require of me. Rabbi Lopian's fish love asks, What can you do for me? And Hinaini asks, how can I be there for you? Isaac calls, Abba, Daddy, and Abraham answers, Hinani, my son, I'm here. That is the movement from fish love to real love, human love, Hinaini love. And this is where Goodman makes another observation that I think is enormously important. The urgent question is not whether AI will become more human. The question is: will we continue practicing what it means to be human? Goodman, drawing in part on media theorist Marshall McLuhan, observes that technologies can strengthen one capacity while allowing another one to diminish. Machines freed us from much of the physical labor human beings once had to perform simply to survive. Think about all of the things that we used to have to do for ourselves, like fetch water. And that was progress for most of humanity. But then something happened. We weren't using our bodies enough. And so we invented the gym. And Goodman reminds us of how strange a gym is. We drive somewhere so we can walk on a machine that takes us nowhere. We pick up heavy objects and we put them down exactly where we found them. Why do we do this? Because we realized that just because technology made the use of our muscles unnecessary didn't mean we could afford to lose them. And Goodman wonders whether we now need something analogous for the age of AI. Something like a gym for the soul, a gym for meaning. Because AI isn't automating our muscles, it's automating parts of our thinking, our writing, and our remembering, and perhaps increasingly our relating. So we should be reflecting on the human muscles that we cannot afford to let atrophy. Muscles like listening and patience and empathy and forgiveness. Sitting with someone who is hurting, being inconvenienced, showing up. Hinaini. And where is the gym for those human capacities? Hmm, I wonder. Look around. You are sitting in one. That's what a synagogue is. A bait knesset, a house of gathering. Religious communities are places where we become witnesses to one another's lives. That's what happens here. If we show up, if we pay attention, if we look around, we know whose child is becoming bar bat mitzvah. We know whose parent is sick. We know who's mourning, and we know who's celebrating. We know who needs a meal, a phone call, or a hug. And if none of that is true for you yet, if you look around this room and you don't recognize the faces yet, you don't know who's been sick, you don't know who needs a call, that is not an indictment. It's an invitation. Come be with us. That's how you find out. When you show up here, you give someone else the chance to show up for you as well. Judaism insists that there are things that cannot be done alone. The most important things. A minion requires other people. When someone dies, we don't simply send the mourner some good advice. We show up. We sit, we bring a kuggel or some brownies. We don't have to know what to say. It's better usually not to say anything. The point is that we showed up. Hinaini. This is the gym. Right here. This room, this community, not a metaphor, a real physical space. This is where we actually practice being human together, week after week, year after year. And perhaps that is an unexpected gift that AI offers us. Not by replacing us, but by reminding us that intelligence alone was never able to give us. And what AI tries to mimic, relationships, obligation, people whose lives make a claim on ours. Twenty-seven years ago, my rabbi taught me that. I had questions with no answers, and he came. That's all. He came. And make no mistake, in 5787, there will be people who need you. People in pain with questions that have no easy answers or no answers at all. A friend who's lost a parent, a child who's heartbroken, a spouse who needs you exactly at the moment when you feel you have nothing left to give. Someone who's simply lonely. And you don't have to have the answers. They might not exist. You don't have to explain anything. You don't have to try to make sense of it all, and don't you dare ask AI what to say. Just do this. Show up. Be there for those who need you. Offer and embrace. Give what no machine ever can. And be here in this place. Because it's the gym for your soul, the place you go to learn how to be the best human you can with your community, with your tradition, with your people, and it's wisdom. You're here now. And we thank you for showing up. Here's the ask. In 5787 and in the years to come, be here more regularly. Live the value of Hinaini in your Jewish community. Come to services, not once or twice a year, but as a practice. I want to see this place full every Friday night. Come learn with us. Fill up our Beit Midrash every Shabbat morning. And we gather every Shabbat morning to study and pray. Show up. Join us and travel with us. I'm leading another trip, March of the Living next spring to Poland and Israel. And you can come with me to bear witness and connect to the past and make new friends and connect to community and connect to our people's story. And in your daily lives, wherever you are, look someone in the eyes. Call the person you've been meaning to call. Listen when you would rather speak. Forgive and ask for forgiveness. Show up when there's nothing you can fix. And when there are no words, when there is no answer, when there's no solution, when no prompt can make the pain disappear. Open your eyes wide and embrace. Weep in each other's arms. That's Hinaini. Hinaini, here I am. When someone calls to us, may we be ready in all of our glorious, flawed, and beautiful humanity to answer Hinaini. Well, that's our episode. Thanks for listening to Search for Meaning. If you enjoyed today's conversation, please like, subscribe, and leave a review. It really helps others discover the podcast. And consider sharing Search for Meaning with a friend. They might appreciate the insights and inspiration found here. Special thanks to our editor Josh Sterling and our production coordinator, Raz Husseini. Our theme song was composed by Maestro David Cates and myself, produced by Kenley Mattis, and features a vocal by cantor Josh Goldberg. Stay healthy, stay hopeful, and stay tuned.