What Can AI Do for Us?

Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence,” is an important contribution to the growing global debate about AI. By placing artificial intelligence in continuity with “Rerum Novarum,” the landmark 1891 encyclical that addressed the social consequences of industrialization, the Pope argues that AI is the defining technological challenge of our age. Like the factory system in the 19th century, AI is transforming work, education, knowledge and human relationships.

The Vatican’s tone is cautious. It warns that AI can concentrate power, weaken human responsibility and reduce people to data points and economic functions. These concerns deserve serious attention. AI is not morally neutral, and its impact will depend on the values of those who design, regulate and use it.

Yet for Jews, in Israel and across the Diaspora, the conversation should not stop with warnings. Another urgent question is what good AI can do for Judaism, Jewish learning, and Jewish peoplehood. At a moment when so much attention is devoted to apocalyptic predictions and distant scenarios, Jews should also ask how this technology might serve the texts, relationships and responsibilities that have long sustained Jewish life.

Judaism has long been known as the tradition of the “People of the Book.” The study of texts is not a peripheral activity in Jewish life; it is one of its defining features. From the Bible and Talmud to medieval commentaries, responsa literature, philosophy and modern scholarship, Jewish identity has been shaped through reading, interpretation, debate and transmission. Learning is not simply an intellectual pursuit but a religious and cultural obligation, central to the formation of the Jewish person.

As Prof. Moshe Koppel has noted, AI can help scan and digitize old books, correct textual errors, identify citations, expand abbreviations, add punctuation and uncover connections across thousands of volumes of Jewish literature. Much of this work is already being pioneered through Dicta, the nonprofit research lab he founded, which develops digital tools for studying rabbinic texts. Tasks that once required years of specialized expertise may increasingly become available to students, educators and interested readers around the world.

The implications are significant. A student with a limited background could navigate complex rabbinic texts with greater confidence. Researchers could trace ideas across centuries of Jewish writing in seconds rather than months. Teachers could create customized educational materials adapted to different ages, languages and levels of knowledge. A student in Buenos Aires might read a Hebrew source sheet with explanations in Spanish; a rabbi in a small European community might prepare a class drawing on responsa literature that was previously difficult to access. AI has the potential not merely to preserve Jewish learning but to broaden access to it.

This is particularly important at a time when many Jews feel distant from traditional texts. AI may lower barriers that have long discouraged engagement. It can help translate difficult Hebrew and Aramaic passages, explain references and guide readers through unfamiliar intellectual terrain. Used wisely, it could bring more people into the world of Torah study. The goal should not be to make Torah study effortless. It should be to make the first steps less forbidding while preserving the discipline, patience and argument that meaningful Jewish learning requires.

AI also presents opportunities for strengthening Jewish peoplehood. Advances in translation technology may dramatically reduce barriers between Hebrew-speaking Israelis, English-speaking North Americans, European Jews, Latin American communities and others. AI could make Israeli scholarship, Hebrew-language educational resources and contemporary debates far more accessible to Jews around the world, while helping Israelis engage more deeply with the ideas and experiences of Diaspora communities. These tools could strengthen the sense that Jews everywhere are participating in a shared conversation despite differences of language and geography.

None of this means that Judaism should embrace AI uncritically. Translation can carry words across borders without necessarily carrying context, trust or the emotional weight that different Jewish communities bring to the same debate. In education, AI may encourage intellectual shortcuts, weaken the habits of close reading and sustained argument and tempt students to substitute generated answers for genuine learning. In Jewish study especially, there is a risk that the struggle with the ancient text – the very process through which understanding is formed – will be replaced by instant summaries and simplified conclusions.

Likewise, while AI can help connect Israel and the Diaspora, it can also make real connection harder to attain if technological mediation replaces personal encounter. Digital tools can translate texts, summarize debates and facilitate communication across distance, but they cannot substitute for the trust built through face-to-face conversation, shared study, visits, hospitality and sustained relationship.

The Vatican has offered an important warning about what AI may mean for humanity as a whole. Jews should take those concerns seriously. But our task is also more particular. A Jewish response to AI should begin neither with panic nor with technological enthusiasm, but with the question of whether this tool can help human beings become more responsible, more learned and more bound to one another.

Artificial intelligence may be the defining technology of our generation. The challenge is not only to prevent its harms. It is also to imagine what goods it should serve. Used wisely, AI could deepen Torah study, open inherited texts to new readers, bridge Hebrew and Diaspora conversations, and give educators new ways to serve their communities. But it will do so only if we remember that technology can assist learning, not replace it.

This is why the Jewish conversation about AI cannot remain abstract. Jewish communal institutions, universities, rabbinical schools, educational networks, philanthropies and research centers should begin convening this conversation now. We need working groups that bring together rabbis, educators, technologists, ethicists, scholars of Jewish thought and communal leaders to ask how AI should be used in schools, synagogues, yeshivot, Hillels, JCCs and Jewish learning platforms.

Encouragingly, some of this work is already underway. The Jewish People Policy Institute, for example, is developing a book project on the AI and broader technological revolution and the future of the Jewish people, bringing together scholars from different countries and disciplines to reflect on how emerging technologies may reshape Jewish education, identity, peoplehood, religious life and communal institutions. Just as importantly, such work asks how Jewish thought, values and practices might contribute to a more constructive understanding of the technological revolution itself.

That is the kind of effort we need more of. The question is not whether Jewish communities will use AI; they already are. The question is whether we will adopt these tools passively, or shape them deliberately according to Jewish values, Jewish learning and Jewish responsibility.

Dr. Ghila Amati is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Research Fellow and The Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI).