I spent six years of my life as a full-time yeshiva student and one major focus, of at least the first years, was acquiring the textual fluency and Hebrew literacy to open the Jewish bookshelf. I cannot overstate how transformative it has been to my life to have unmediated access to centuries of Jewish wisdom and Torah scholarship. The opportunity to use my yeshiva education to serve as a bridge between the Jewish library and Jews searching for guidance and meaning has motivated my career.
It was therefore with no small sense of irony that I found myself, at the start of my professional life as an educator, making source-sheets for shiurim and spending hours translating Hebrew texts into English. After so much effort invested in being able to access those texts without translation, I found myself tracking down obscure English translations of classic Jewish texts to streamline the process of making source-sheets for my teaching.
This all came to an end about a year ago when I started using AI to translate texts for source sheets. Work that would have taken me hours is completed in seconds. Although I often need to edit, the ability to have a usable English translation of any digital text has represented a dramatic change in the work that I do as an educator. And while using AI to instantly translate Hebrew and Aramaic texts has been a positive change for me, it is no secret that technology is a source of professional instability and cultural anxiety right now in ways that seem significant.
And yet there is a continuity to this anxiety. AI is new, but automation rendered many jobs obsolete in my childhood. Anxiety about screentime and our children is new, but can also be understood as just the latest iteration of concern about television during my generation’s childhood and concerns about excessive novel reading in the 18th and 19th centuries.
While new uses and developments of AI has pushed us to examine what it means to be a human being in ways that seem unprecedented, more than eighty years ago Rabbi Yehiel Michel Tikochinsky, writing in Yerushalayim, called for a fundamental reevaluation of the relationship between the unprecedented power of human technology, and the continued meaningfulness of human life. And, Parashat Ki Teitzei was at the heart of his analysis.
Yehiel Michel Tikochinksy was born in 1871 in Belarus. After the untimely death of his father, he moved to Yerushalayim at the age of ten where he was raised by his grandfather and studied at the Etz Chaim yeshiva. He had a prominent position as a leader of the Orthodox community of Jerusalem through the first half of the 20th century and authored several important works of halakhah, including a groundbreaking treatment of the international date line in halakhah. (The TL/DR version: Jews have no business living in Japan or visiting Australia during sefirat ha’omer). But he is most famous for his Gesher HaHayim, a two-volume encyclopedic treatment of Hilkhot Aveilut, the laws and customs of mourning.
Gesher HaHayim was published in 1944 and remains in print to this day and is a resource that every rabbi should have on their bookshelf. But it also has a remarkable introduction. Rabbi Joe Wolfson, a British rabbi who now serves a congregation of mostly young English-speaking olim hadashim in Tel Aviv, recently drew my attention to the introduction to Gesher HaHayim and he convinced me that it is a piece of rabbinic literature that deserves to be read and studied as a statement of the enduring power of Jewish law to sanctify human life in the face of the potential for despair
Gesher HaHayim is a book about death and mourning. And it was written in the darkest days of the Second World War when human ingenuity, intelligence, and mastery of technology was deployed to kill and destroy at an unprecedented level. If the introduction had been written just a year or two later, I imagine it would have contended with the Holocaust and nuclear warfare, but even before the war had ended, it was obvious that the first half of the twentieth century would be characterized by revolutionary technology, breakthroughs in physics and engineering and chemistry, which would be harnessed by nations to wage war with a ferocity and degree of destruction unknown to history. Rav Tikochinsky believed that modern society was obsessively focused on using technology to make life easier instead of investing energy into what makes life meaningful. Without contending with those more important questions, it was all too easy for our technology to be harnessed for destruction and violence and for civilization to collapse into nihilistic struggle.
When confronted by the inescapable reality of death it can be even easier to succumb to nihilism. Rav Hutner, the great twentieth century Orthodox existentialist, noted that death has a uniquely potent ability to negate our faith in the significance and importance of human life. Warfare, therefore, is the most dangerous time for the human spirit itself. How can one affirm the potential of a human life to have meaning, when one is surrounded by suffering and death on a scale that defies our attempts at meaning making?
For Rav Tikuchinksy, the counter-intuitive response is not to deny the reality of death but to study the reality of death as a halakhic category in such a way that the significance of each human life is reinforced. And his model for this dynamic is found in our parshiot.
The adjacent parshi’ot of Shoftim and Ki Teitzei both contain instructions for warfare. Some details are in Parashat Shoftim. Some details are in Parashat Ki Teitzei. The ancient rabbis and medieval commentaries sort and explain which mitzvot pertain to which types of war and how these adjacent parshiot should be read holistically.
But there is one mitzvah that comes in between the Torah’s two treatments of war, and that is the mitzvah of the eglah arufah, the ceremonial killing of a heifer in response to finding an unidentified victim of a murder. The entire focus of this ceremony is to draw our attention to the loss of one single life. The elders of the city go out to a stream to participate in this mitzvah so that the land itself is purged of the stain of the death of an unknown and marginal member of society.
In Rav Tikochinsky’s words:
Our holy Torah placed these laws specifically in the middle of the laws of warfare at the end of Parshat Shoftim, and the beginning of Ki Tetze, to show us that even, and especially, at a time when you are obligated to protect yourself, and to kill and to spill the blood of enemies, do not let the value of life, even then, be a minor thing in your eyes.
Gesher HaHayim, is a book of mourning but its title literally means “bridge of life” because mourning is a way to indicate the value of life.
In the aftermath of the Holocaust, which was not fully understood and not acknowledged in the introduction to Gesher HaHayim, I feel a certain additional significance and sense of personal meaning whenever a deceased Jew is brought to his or her final resting place with love by their friends and family. So many of our parents and grandparents, our revered teachers and iconoclastic renegades were murdered and buried in mass graves or turned to ashes in the crematoria leaving behind no grave for descendants to visit and, in many instances, no surviving descendents at all. Each Jewish burial, therefore, feels like a tikkun, a small repair, for the violence and hatred of our ancestors while they were alive, and for the neglect and desecration of their bodies after death.
But, truly, all humanity needs a reminder of the significance of every human life. In the twentieth century, so much of our intelligence was harnessed to find new ways of destruction. In recent years, advances in technology have caused many to question what makes human beings unique and irreplaceable.
Tomorrow is the annual visit to the Ohev Sholom Cemetery in South East DC. Visiting cemeteries in Elul is an ancient tradition. There is a sort of blending of generations that takes place during the holidays. A visit to the cemetery can help us set priorities for our lives during a season of teshuvah, and, in turn, we bring our memories with us into the Yizkor dedications that we make on the holidays. Additionally, the way that the life of each deceased member of our community is recalled, by name, carved in stone, echoes the eglah arufah ceremony on behalf of a nameless victim of violence. The elders gather to declare that there is no human being so marginal that their death can go unnoticed. And that can help us remember that we too are not unnoticed.
Rosh Hashanah, in the language of the Mishnah and the language of the Machzor is a day when all creation passes before God kivnei maron, which is a cryptic phrase that seems to suggest that each individual is scrutinized by God. This scrutiny can be frightening, but this scrutiny can also be galvanizing and energizing. There are so many forces that cultivate nihilism and there are so many trends that undermine our sense of humanity. But, a remarkable twentieth century book of halakhah can remind us that if it is worthwhile to mourn a death, it is surely worthwhile to live a life of meaning.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 