At a recent Deloitte event, “The AI Bottom Line,” Ilan Birnfeld, chairman and CEO of Deloitte Israel, made an observation that stayed with me. “Artificial intelligence (AI),” he argued, “will not change us as human beings. But it will completely change our companies.”
As I listened, I wondered what would happen if we replaced “company” with “the Jewish people.”
AI may not change what it means to be Jewish. But it could profoundly change the institutions through which Jewish life has been transmitted from one generation to another. And once those institutions change, can the people they sustain really remain unchanged?
Birnfeld’s point about companies is more radical than the familiar argument about efficiency. If AI allows an employee to complete in 10 minutes something that previously took three hours, the important question is not simply how much time has been saved. It is why the company should continue organizing itself around a task that once required three hours.
AI therefore forces organizations to reconsider not simply how people work, but what particular jobs, hierarchies, and institutions are for.
THE JEWISH world should begin asking the same question.
Take Jewish education. For centuries, meaningful access to Jewish knowledge depended heavily on access to people. You needed a teacher to learn Hebrew, a rabbi to guide you through religious texts, a scholar to explain Jewish history. Geography mattered enormously. So did language, money, and the accident of being born into a community large enough to provide those resources.
AI is beginning to lower those barriers. A Jewish child in a small community without a Hebrew teacher can have a private AI tutor available every day. Someone who has never studied Aramaic can ask for an explanation of a passage of Talmud, compare interpretations, and then ask follow-up questions. A secular Israeli curious about Maimonides can enter that intellectual world without entering a yeshiva. Jewish texts that were once accessible mainly to specialists can increasingly be approached by almost anyone.
This does not make the teacher or rabbi obsolete. It does something more interesting: it changes what we need them for.
If information and explanation become abundant, the value of the teacher increasingly lies elsewhere: judgment, interpretation, intellectual discipline, example, and human relationship. Abundance, after all, does not guarantee reliability. The question shifts from “Who has the knowledge?” to “Whose judgment do I trust?”
The same disruption may reach one of the foundations of Jewish identity: memory.
Jewish civilization has placed memory close to the center of collective existence. “Zakhor,” remember, is not simply an instruction to preserve information. Jewish civilization repeatedly transforms memory into obligation.
Now imagine a Jewish teenager 20 years from now conversing with an AI system built around a verified archive of thousands of hours of Holocaust survivor testimony. She does not simply watch a recorded interview. She asks questions. The system answers on the basis of the words, experiences, and historical record left behind by those who are no longer alive.
There is enormous educational potential here. But there must also be a clear boundary.
AI should help us interrogate testimony; it should never be permitted to manufacture testimony.
The distinction is fundamental. A survivor’s recorded words belong to history. A plausible sentence generated by an algorithm but never spoken by that survivor does not. The temptation to make memory more vivid could inadvertently make it less truthful.
For the Jewish people, that danger is particularly acute. We have spent generations documenting the past precisely because historical truth matters. AI should make archives more accessible, searchable, and conversational. It should not turn the dead into fictional characters capable of saying things they never said.
In the age of AI, “Zakhor” will therefore require something additional: remember honestly.
This may be where Birnfeld’s corporate analogy becomes uncomfortable.
When AI can perform functions that once justified particular jobs, companies must ask what those jobs are actually for. Jewish institutions will increasingly face the same test. If knowledge, translation, and even sophisticated interpretation become instantly available, what exactly are the institutions that once provided them for?
Consider relations between Israel and Jewish communities in Europe. Language remains one barrier separating Jewish worlds. Israelis inhabit a Hebrew political and cultural universe that many Diaspora Jews encounter only indirectly, while Jewish communities across Europe conduct debates that most Israelis rarely hear.
Increasingly seamless translation can lower that barrier dramatically. A Jew in Berlin may be able to follow an Israeli television debate naturally in German; an Israeli may listen to a Dutch Jewish communal discussion in Hebrew. “But translation solves access, not shared experience.”
An Israeli and an Italian Jew can understand every word the other says and still experience October 7, antisemitism, Gaza, religion, democracy, or Jewish security in profoundly different ways. AI can remove the linguistic wall. It cannot determine which questions Jews consider important, much less make them agree on the answers.
And then there is the institution AI may find hardest to disrupt: the Jewish community itself.
A synagogue distributes knowledge, but that is not why a synagogue exists. Jewish communities teach, organize, and communicate, but those functions do not exhaust their purpose.
Their deeper purpose is belonging. An AI can explain the laws of shiva, but it cannot sit beside a mourner. It can teach the prayers, but it cannot make a minyan. It can generate a sophisticated interpretation of the weekly Torah portion, but it cannot accept responsibility for another human being. It can describe Jewish solidarity perfectly. It cannot practice it.
AND HERE the question of trust returns.
Trust is not simply deciding whichl. It is built by showing up, sharing obligations, arguing, remembering, and accepting responsibility for one another. That is a question of relationship, not information
If a Jewish school understands its purpose principally as transmitting information, AI will challenge it. If a rabbi’s authority depends primarily on possessing knowledge unavailable to others, AI will challenge it. If a Jewish organization exists mainly to transmit information between distant communities, AI will challenge it too.
Perhaps that is not something to fear. Perhaps AI’s greatest contribution to Jewish life will be forcing Jewish institutions to identify what cannot be automated. And the answer may be surprisingly traditional: presence, responsibility, obligation, and belonging.
For much of Jewish history, Jewish institutions helped solve a problem of scarcity. Books and teachers were scarce. Knowledge of Hebrew and Aramaic was scarce. Communication across continents was difficult. Access to Jewish knowledge depended heavily on where one lived and whom one knew.
We are moving toward the opposite world: one of extraordinary abundance.
The great Jewish question of the AI age may therefore change.
For generations, we asked: How do we give Jews access to Jewish knowledge?
Soon, the harder question may be: Why should they want it?
AI may make it easier than at any previous moment in history to study Judaism, encounter Jewish history, and communicate across the Jewish world. But access is not belonging, information is not memory, and intelligence is not responsibility.
Those still require other human beings.
Perhaps this is the real lesson of Birnfeld’s observation. AI will force companies to reconsider the value of human contribution. It may force Jewish institutions to do something even more consequential: rediscover what Jewish community is for.
And the answer to that question, more than the technology itself, may shape the next chapter of the Jewish people.
The writer is a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) and a professor of European studies and international relations in the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
