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Margie Gutnik, President; Abigail Kutler, Ex-Officio; Seth Feldman; David Finkelstein; Ally Freeman; Mary Sue Grossman; Les Kay; Natasha Kraft; Chuck Lucoff; David Phillips; Joseph Pinson. The mission of the Jewish Federation of Omaha is to build and sustain a strong and vibrant Omaha Jewish Community and to support Jews in Israel and around the world. Agencies of the JFO are: Institute for Holocaust Education, Jewish Community Relations Council, Jewish Community Center, Jewish Social Services and the Jewish Press. Guidelines and highlights of the Jewish Press, including front page stories and announcements, can be found online at: www.jewishomaha.org; click on ‘Jewish Press.’ Editorials express the view of the writer and are not necessarily representative of the views of the Jewish Press Board of Directors, the Jewish Federation of Omaha Board of Directors, or the Omaha Jewish community as a whole. The Jewish Press reserves the right to edit signed letters and articles for space and content. The Jewish Press is not responsible for the Kashrut of any product or establishment.

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The Jewish Press (USPS 275620) is published weekly (except for the first week of January and July) on Friday for $40 per calendar year U.S.; $80 foreign, by the Jewish Federation of Omaha. Phone: 402.334.6448; FAX: 402.334.5422. Periodical postage paid at Omaha, NE. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to: The Jewish Press, 333 So. 132 St., Omaha, NE 68154-2198 or email to: jpress@jewishomaha.org.

Willing to grow

ANNETTE VAN DE KAMP-WRIGHT

Jewish Press Editor Here’s the summarized story: Steve Dettelbach was confirmed as the director of the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Then, a county Republican group in Kentucky in a social media post called Dettelbach part of a “Jewish junta” that “is getting stronger and more aggressive.” The county GOP group attacked the two Republican senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Rob Portman of Ohio, who voted for his appointment, and also attacked two Republican Senators, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and James Risich of Idaho, who were not present for the vote, saying, “It’s obvious they want to move on from having to defend rural gun owners.” The entire Facebook page in question was deleted, but the screen shots are of course easily available—the cat is very much out of the bag. The county’s GOP chair, Karin Kirkendol, said that the Facebook page had been “hacked” and said the party “would not and did not publish anything antisemitic — as some of our very own members have Jewish heritage,” according to Andrew Lapin, who covered the story for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Ha. So we’re going with the ‘we were hacked’ defense? And then, to top it off, ‘some of our very own members have Jewish heritage?’ Let’s focus on the first part, because the ‘Jewish heritage’ comment, I

don’t really know where to start. It’s a missed opportunity to own up and get better. As is often the case when someone says or writes something problematic, more energy is

Steve Dettelbach, director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, being nominated for the position with President Joe Biden in the White House

Rose Garden in Washington, D.C., April 11, 2022. Credit: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images spent on making excuses than on owning behavior and apologizing. I’ve been guilty of it myself- the tendency to make excuses, over-explain why what happened, happened- rather than saying these simple words: ‘I messed up. I’m sorry.’ Why is it so difficult to admit it when we are wrong? We are all human, both as individuals and as institutions and organizations. And so, mistakes will happen. I would go even further: without mistakes, there is no growth. Oftentimes, when we are afraid to make a mistake, we are most at risk of stagnation. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote: “In Tabernacle and Temple times, Yom Kippur was the day when the holiest man in Israel, the High Priest, made atonement, first for his own sins, then for the sins of his “house,” then for the sins of all Israel. From the day the Temple was destroyed, we have had no High Priest nor the rites he performed, but we still have the day, and the ability to confess and pray for forgiveness. It is so much easier to admit your sins, failings and mistakes when other people are doing likewise. If a High Priest, or the other members of our congregation, can admit to sins, so can we.” Holding any politicians to the High Priest’s standards might be too much to ask. We’d definitely be setting ourselves up for disappointment. But how about this: rather than falling all over this one unfortunate and misguided social media post and pointing fingers, what will happen if we use it as an opportunity to take a look at ourselves? We, too, cannot live up to the High Priest, but we can still try. We can remind ourselves we are not perfect, we make mistakes, all the time. Sometimes our mistakes are even intentional. Will we recognize them when they happen, first privately, then publicly? Will we own up to them and apologize? I guess the ultimate question is not who made what mistake and whose fault it was, the ultimate question is: Are we willing to grow?

The James Webb Telescope looks at the universe through the eyes of God

BENJAMIN RESNICK

JTA Back in December, human beings, a weird variety of uniquely frail, lithe and hairless monkeys, launched into space a new, $10 billion dollar telescope, 21 feet in diameter and, like many great temples, covered with golden mirrors. The James Webb Space Telescope is 100 times more powerful than the Hubble telescope. It traveled a million miles from earth with a mission — the first fruits of which we saw last week with the photographs released by NASA — that is almost unfathomably grandiose: to peer out (that is, to look back) at the moment when the first stars turned on and cleared away limitless clouds of primordial gas, seen as light that has been traveling towards us for 13.6 billion years. Readers of Bereshit — Genesis — learn about a time when all was tohu vavohu — when all was formless and dark — and there is a strong chance that Webb will show us the very moment when something happened and then there was light. We will be able to see that moment of creation. The moment when the first stars began to burn, unfathomable vessels of brightness that would create the carbon, the nitrogen and the oxygen that make up 86.9% of our bodies, which would later shatter to create our heavier atoms, which would combine with the hydrogen created during the Big Bang. All of this means, by some alchemy of thermodynamics that is, for me, still shrouded in darkness — or perhaps by some act of primordial grace — we are mostly composed of starlight, our mass coming from some mysterious vibration of immortal and timeless energy, echoing through the universe from the beginning of time. This energy has existed from the moment when the very first lights went on and will exist after the very last lights wink out. When all returns to a formless nothingness, those little pieces of starlight that are me will still be there, perhaps joining in a cosmic dance with those that are you, forming something new, maybe something wonderful. These are and were and will be the very same atoms that now make up my bones and blood, and which through whatever unfathomable, godly magic, fire electricity through my brain, so that one day, also out of darkness, I look out on the world, see its lights and colors, discover the taste and fragrance of milk, come to smile and laugh and walk and speak and eventually (not me but others like me) grow up to build machines to look back in time. We are the universe coming to know itself. We are the eyes of God peering out into endless darkness, lighting fires of imagination and ingenuity that allow us to reach into our bodies to make them well, and to travel to the great orbs in the sky, and to look deep into the past, with a golden vessel like the altar of incense overlaid in gold, burning through time and thick with the fragrance of memory, hiding its illuminations somewhere beneath the smoke. And we come to understand what and where and when we are. And we will see the moment that we’ve been reading out for all of Jewish history: “Vayomer elohim yehi or, vayehi or” — God said, “Let there be light and there was light.” We cannot and perhaps will never be able to see further, into those 250 million years after the Big Bang but before the stars, when all was a dark, hot soup, unformed and void, tohu vavohu. Like you, perhaps, like everyone in the world who has ever looked seriously into the thermodynamics of man, I don’t know what to make of all this. I don’t know what to do with the knowledge that I was forged in starlight or that the space between my atoms is empty, a vacuum, like the void into which, according to the Kabbalists, the Unending poured first light. I don’t know what to make of the fact that every piece of me has existed and will exist for all time. It seems as though the fires of my imagination are endless, that my capacities of love and hate, laughter and tears, are endless and abiding and real. And I believe that I am indeed looking out on

the world through the eyes of God and, as the great Christian mystic Meister Eckart famously said, that “the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.” I don’t know what to do with the knowledge that all the electrons in my body hum and create this divine illusion of being which is the same as the di-

An image released by NASA on July 12, 2022, shows the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region in the Carina Nebula, captured

in infrared light by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI/Handout via Xinhua. vine majesty of nonbeing. But when I imagine myself one day returning to the stars and when I looked at the new images of the universe released this week by NASA I am indeed filled with a sense of wonder and humility and comfort and gratitude. Maybe someday we will build a telescope even more mighty. Maybe we’ll go back farther and marvel at the dark work of creation, the world before the letter “bet” in bereshit, the blank whiteness concealing and revealing all mysteries. Until then, each year, we’ll roll back the scrolls, we’ll read the story again and, with our clumsy and marvelous fingers, we’ll try to touch creation.

Benjamin Resnick is rabbi of the Pelham Jewish Center in Pelham, New York. He previously served as the Rav Beit HaSefer of Solomon Schechter Day School of Metropolitan Chicago.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.

ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL

AMHERST, Massachusetts | JTA Josh Dolgin, the Canadian rapper and klezmer musician who performs as Socalled, was nearing the end of a raucous, crowd-pleasing set last Sunday when he paused to introduce a Yiddish song about a frog, “Di Frosh.” “It’s a children’s song,” he explained. “But because it is a Jewish song it has a cruel twist.” I was reminded of the Passover ditty “Had Gadya” — perhaps the only kids’ song that includes a visit from the Angel of Death — but I was also thinking of my own conflicted relationship with Yiddish culture. Dolgin is part of a postwar generation that wants to remember and resuscitate the explosive creativity of an Eastern European culture that produced music, poetry, literature — in sum, a Jewish civilization. But the unimaginable losses of the Holocaust hang over the project, and a farbissener — a sourpuss — like me finds it hard to forget the cruel twists of Jewish history and, well, enjoy. Dolgin was performing at Yidstock, the festival of new Yiddish music held here at the Yiddish Book Center beginning in 2012. Some 400 people came to the center’s charming Yankeeshtetl campus over the four-day festival this year. The mood was celebratory, and why not: Returning in person after two years of pandemic, the (masked) audiences were primed for concerts, lectures and workshops remembering what Yiddish culture was, what it still is and what it could yet be. And, as it turns out, the pandemic was very good for Yiddish: Secular Yiddish institutions like the book center, YIVO and the Workers Circle clocked record attendance for their virtual Yiddish classes and lectures. Aaron Lansky, the Yiddish Book Center’s founder, noted wryly that a lecture on Yiddish poetry that might have attracted “a minyan” of 10 Jews in person drew more than 1,200 people on line. I was able to feel this quickening pulse even in the half-day I spent at Yidstock. Dolgin’s acoustic performance whiplashed from hilarious to poignant, from Leonard Cohen to Mordecai Gebirtig, the composer killed during the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto. Mostly gray-haired audience members clapped along while 20-something students taking part in the book center’s summer programs danced in the aisles. On the long line at the falafel truck, I chatted with Jake Krakovsky, an Atlanta-based writer and actor who recently performed the puppetry for a trilingual film based on a Yiddish children’s story (itself drawn from a recent collection reclaiming Yiddish children’s literature). I also caught up with Aaron Bendich, not yet 30, who hosts an old-timey Jewish radio show and runs a record label, Borscht Beat, that promotes avant-garde Yiddish artists. Music from its latest release was performed at Yidstock by the duo Tsvey Brider and members of the Bay Area klezmer trio Baymele, and showed the possibilities of reinvention by setting Yiddish poetry to spiky chamber music arrangements.

Tsvey Brider singer Anthony Mordecai Zvi Russell is on the cutting edge of Yiddish reinvention, drawing on his Black and Jewish identities and opera background to make, as he once put it in an interview, “connections through time, space and history.” Lisa Newman, the director of publishing and public programs at the Yiddish Book Center, said Yidstock is very much in keeping with the spirit of the center, which grew out of Lansky’s monumental effort to retrieve Yiddish books that, as their readers died off, were otherwise headed for the dumpster. Today those 1.5 million books are the nucleus of a $50 million enterprise that includes public programs, exhibits, publications and training — beginning and advanced — for the next generation of Yiddishists. “The things that I’m watching our alumni do are fabulous,” she said. “They went on to academic careers. They’ve gone on to become translators. We have a publishing venture. We’ve got a translation fellowship. We’ve mentored almost 80 translation fellows so that there will be a new generation. And we’ve got actors who are on Broadway and Yiddish theater.” Seth Rogovoy, artistic director of Yidstock, said that while this year’s 10th anniversary festival tended to look back on its “greatest hits,” the festival has always been about the future. “All the creative and innovative music that’s gone on, the best of it has been by people who have studied old stuff. And then they take it to all these different places: rock and funk and hip hop, all over the place,” he said. “We knew that we wanted to give a platform for creativity and people who are really not only perpetuating but moving the music forward.” But is he ever preoccupied, as I am, by the mourning that is implied in the recovery and reinvention? “There was always something inside of me that I didn’t know was there, and [Yiddish music] tied it all together,” said Rogovoy, whose mother’s father was a cantor. “So it’s celebratory more than mourning.” “Mourning is not a word I attach” to the work of the students, translators and musicians, said Newman, when I asked her the same question. “We work hard to make sure that they can do this because we recognize that we lost a generation of Yiddish speakers.” As I stepped out of the center into a brilliant New England summer afternoon, I thought of the session given by Eleanor Reissa, the best-known Yiddish singer and actress of this generation. She and Rogovoy discussed her new family memoir, “The Letters Project,” and although her parents suffered in Hitler’s Europe, she doesn’t refer to them as “survivors.” She prefers “fighters.” And perhaps that’s the way to think about the future of Yiddish: not in mourning, but in creative defiance.

Andrew Silow-Carroll is editor in chief of the New York Jewish Week and senior editor of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. He previously served as JTA’s editor in chief and as editor in chief and CEO of the New Jersey Jewish News. @SilowCarroll

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.

A dance workshop at Yidstock, held at the Yiddish Book Cen-

ter in Amherst, Massachusetts, July 7-10, 2022. Credit: Ben Barnhart

Google’s ‘sentient’ AI can’t count in a minyan, but it still raises ethical dilemmas

MOIS NAVON

JTA When a Google engineer told an interviewer that an artificial intelligence (AI) technology developed by the company had become “sentient,” it touched off a passionate debate about what it would mean for a machine to have human-like self-awareness. Why the hullabaloo? In part, the story feeds into current anxieties that AI itself will somehow threaten humankind, and that “thinking” machines will develop wills of their own. But there is also the deep concern that if a machine is sentient, it is no longer an inanimate object with no moral status or “rights” (e.g., we owe nothing to a rock) but rather an animate being with the status of a “moral patient” to whom we owe consideration. I am a rabbi and an engineer and am currently writing my doctoral thesis on the Moral Status of AI at Bar Ilan University. In Jewish terms, if machines become sentient, they become the object of the command “tzar baalei hayim” — which demands we not harm living creatures. Philosopher Jeremy Bentham similarly declared that entities become moral subjects when we answer the question “Can they suffer?” in the affirmative. This is what makes the Google engineer’s claim alarming, for he has shifted the status of the computer, with whom he had a conversation, from an object to a subject. That is, the computer (known as LaMDA) can no longer be thought of as a machine but as a being that “can suffer,” and hence a being with moral rights. “Sentience” is an enigmatic label used in philosophy and AI circles referring to the capacity to feel, to experience. It is a generic term referring to some level of consciousness, believed to exist in biological beings on a spectrum — from a relatively basic sensitivity in simple creatures (e.g., earthworms) to more robust experience in so-called “higher” organisms (e.g., dolphins, chimpanzees). Ultimately, however, there is a qualitative jump to humans who have second-order consciousness, what religious people refer to as “soul,” and what gives us the ability to think about our experiences — not simply experience them. The question then becomes: what is the basis of this claim of sentience? Here we enter the philosophical quagmire known as “other minds.” We human beings actually have no really good test to determine if anyone is sentient. We assume that our fellow biological creatures are sentient because we know we are. That, along with our shared biology and shared behavioral reactions to things like pain and pleasure, allow us to assume we’re all sentient. So what about machines? Many a test has been proposed to determine sentience in machines, the most famous being The Turing Test, delineated by Alan Turing, father of modern computing, in his seminal 1950 article, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” He proposed that when a human being can’t tell if he is talking to another human being or a machine, the machine can be said to have achieved human-like intelligence — i.e., accompanied with consciousness.

From a cursory reading of the interview that the Google engineer conducted with LaMDA, it seems relatively clear that the Turing Test has been passed. That said, numerous machines have passed the Turing Test over recent years — so many that most, if not all, researchers today do not believe passing the Turing Test demonstrates anything but sophisticated language processing, not consciousness. Furthermore, after tens of variations on the test have been developed to determine consciousness, philosopher Selmer Bringsjord declared, “Only God would know a priori, because his test would be direct and nonempirical.” Setting aside the current media frenzy over LaMDA, how are we to approach this question of sentient AI? That is, given that engineering teams around the world have been working on “machine consciousness” since the mid-1990s, what are we to do if they achieve it? Or more urgently, should they even be allowed to achieve it? Indeed, ethicists claim that this question is more intractable than the question to permit the cloning of animals. From a Jewish perspective, I believe a cogent answer to this moral dilemma can be gleaned from the following Talmudic vignette (Sanhedrin 65b), in which a rabbi appears to have created a sentient humanoid, or “gavra”: Rava said: If the righteous desired it, they could create a world, for it is written, “But your iniquities have distinguished between you and God.” Rava created a humanoid (gavra) and sent him to R. Zeira. R. Zeira spoke to him but received no answer. Thereupon [R. Zeira] said to him: “You are a creature from my friend: Return to your dust.” For R. Zeira, similar to Turing, the power of the soul (i.e., second-order consciousness) is expressed in a being’s ability to articulate itself. R. Zeira, unlike those who apply Turing’s test today, was able to discern a lack of soul in Rava’s gavra. Despite R. Zeira’s rejection of the creature, some read in this story permission to create creatures with sentience — after all, Rava was a learned and holy sage, and would not have contravened Jewish law by creating his gavra. But in context, the story at best expresses deep ambivalence about humans seeking to play God. Recall that the story begins with Rava declaring, “If the righteous desired it, they could create a world” — that is, a sufficiently righteous person could create a real human ( also known as “a complete world”). Rava’s failed attempt to do so suggests that he was either wrong in his assertion, or that he was not righteous enough. Some argue that R. Zeira would have been willing to accept a human-level humanoid. But a mystical midrash, or commentary, denies such a claim. In that midrash, the prophet Jeremiah — an embodiment of righteousness — succeeds in creating a human-level humanoid. Yet that very humanoid, upon coming to life, rebukes Jeremiah for making him! Clearly the enterprise of making sentient humanoids is being rejected — a cautionary tendency we see in the vast literature about golems, the inanimate creatures brought to life by rabbinic magic, which invariably run amok. Space does not permit me to delineate all the moral difficulties entailed in the artificial creation of sentient beings. Suffice it to say that Jewish tradition sides with thought leaders like Joanna Bryson, who said, “Robot builders are ethically obliged to make robots to which robot owners have no ethical obligations.” Or, in the words of R. Zeira, “Return to your dust.”

Mois Navon teaches “Ethics and AI” at Ben Gurion University and Yeshiva University. He is an ordained orthodox rabbi and one of the founding engineers of Mobileye who designed the chip powering the autonomous vehicle revolution. His writings can be found at www.divreinavon.com.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.

German actor and director Paul Wegener appears in The Golem, a 1920 silent movie adaptation of the mystical Jewish

tale about an inanimate creature brought to life. Credit: Ullstein Bild via Getty Images