Sermons

Erev Rosh Hashanah 5786

You can listen to Rabbi Deborah's sermon here or read it below.

Life throws you all kinds of problems, and like many of us when I run into something I’m struggling to solve - or on a day when I’d be happy to learn from others' mistakes rather than making my own - I turn to Rabbi Google.

Which is what a lot of people do, and mostly it is pretty effective. Google is why my son’s bedroom has wallpaper patterns that repeat at the right intervals, and my Shabbat guests had the right kind of vegan option for their dietary requirements. It’s also why people almost put glue on pizza. 

Somewhat infamously, when Google rolled out its new search features last year, it gave some pretty odd results. Like for instance if you asked it how to make cheese stick to pizza better, its new AI overview feature suggested gluing it in place. Helpfully, it did clarify that this would be using non-toxic glue. 

Where did it get that idea? Well, it’s trained on an information source that is basically the whole internet, including reddit, and it hadn’t quite figured out how to read sarcasm. 

Things go wrong with new technologies all the time, they’re what we call bugs. 

Bugs are part of change, anything new has bugs in it, and only when it is used at scale often over a decent amount of time do we find them and then we can debug them. 

Take the technology that we’re all talking about at the moment - AI - and chatbots in particular. They’re everywhere, as are stories about the hallucinations they are capable of. An AI hallucination is what happens when the chatbot just runs with whatever the person using it gives it. It gives confident, fluent answers that seem to use whatever factual information you either give it or ask for, but the answers it gives aren’t true.

AI hallucinations allow people to become convinced they’ve found a radical new form of economics or mathematics, solved some as yet unsolved mystery of the cosmos, and because they work with whatever you give them they can end up on some pretty heady spirals. The less intense version of the hallucination is simply the extremely sycophantic flattering answer that many of us have been privy to, moments when a chatbot says to you something like ‘that's a great question’, ‘what a brilliant and relevant issue you raise’, ‘this is truly a genius recipe idea’, and so on.

So here’s my question- are these hallucinations, and their flattery, running with whatever you give it and making it sound like it's great and it works, a bug? Or are they a feature? 

Would it surprise you to learn that people prefer flattering and affirmative responses? We know from user data that they do, but only if they aren’t too overt. What we’re learning from the millions of people engaging at this new interface of our society is maybe what we all already know- that it’s really nice to feel secure and right and even better if someone or something affirms that in a way that feels genuine and not so over the top that it seems fake.

The way we choose to get results in some parts of our lives, answers to the things we are searching for or help with our problems is obviously of interest to your rabbi, because although shul and synagogue community are mostly places for different types of questions- we aren’t different people 6 days of the week and unchanged on Shabbat and Chaggim. 
This is about how we are and how we are changing, or maybe about what new technologies reveal about fundamental aspects of who we’ve always been. If increasingly we’re looking for affirmation, someone or something to run with our ideas and just make it all make sense, and immediate answers, where does that leave the deeper difficult stuff and the work of these Chaggim we are about to enter into? 

The Machzor in our hands is designed for something else, it’s not rooted in a model of service, something we subscribe to in order to get something that we want, it’s rooted in the idea of covenant. And, simply put, a subscription gives you content; a covenant gives you feedback. Subscriptions want us engaged and they profit from us doing that, they’ll give us whatever we want to keep us paying. Covenants want us answerable, a trickier business model!

You can see why the service model is challenging to religious communities. If shul becomes a service supplier, clergy become entertainers and congregants customers – flattery or people pleasing becomes a business model. You have very pleasant pretty services and very little substance, deep engagement, or teshuva, change.

Our tradition has an old word for the human version of the “please me” algorithm: חֲנֻפָה  chanufah. Flattery. In particular, it means telling something they are right when they aren’t. So it can show up when someone asks if they’ve made a mistake or commits a sin and we don’t want to be honest with them so pretend its not a problem, or even worse that what they did was the right thing when it wasn’t. Chanufah can be both words, or a well-timed silence. Its falsely offered reassurance, flattery because we don't want to face the truth or someone’s wrath, or sucking up to those with power. 

The challenge with flattery is that its quite effective, people like to be told they are ok, they aren’t doing things wrong, or to be given the version of reality that suits them. I know I do!

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and have become quite enamoured with a little known prophet in our tradition, Mikhayahu ben Imlah (Micaiah) who pops up in the book of kings for an extremely brief, but notable, appearance.
In the book of Kings, King Ahab of Israel wants to go to war to retake some land and he gathers four hundred prophets. They tell him exactly what he wants to hear- that he will win. One of them, Zedekiah ben Kena’anah, even makes iron horns as a battle-prop and says “With these you’ll gore Aram!”. 

Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, who Ahab has asked to join the war isn’t so sure when he hears this chorus of affirmative voices and asks if there is another prophet around. Begrudgingly Ahab says “There’s Mikhayahu ben Imlah, but I hate him; he never prophesies anything good about me.”

The messenger who goes to collect Micaiah tells him what everyone else has said, and encourages him to just say the same, which he does. Ahab knows him better and is suspicious, and asks him to tell the truth. Which he does, and prophesies that it will be a disaster. Ahab says הֲלוֹא֙ אָמַ֣רְתִּי אֵלֶ֔יךָ “Didn’t I tell you,” “that he would not prophesy good fortune for me, but only misfortune?” and promptly sends him to jail to be held there until he returns safely and goes off to war. Ahab is killed in battle, Micaiah is right. Nobody is very happy. 

In a world where everything feels a bit like a battle, it feels quite natural that people want their 400. People who will just say to them ‘I trust you, go for it’. And there’s definitely a place for those voices otherwise we’d all be beaten to an emotional pulp daily. We need people in our corner. What interests me is the imbalance, the self-affirming feedback loop. It is so powerful that it even convinced usually contrary and reliably truthful Micaiah to surrender his judgement. It makes me want to ask: where do we reward reassurance and get stuck in self affirming loops, in human versions of the AI hallucinations, and how do we make proper space for the people who, kindly and clearly, say “I don’t think this is ok”? 

This is where chanufah, where flattery, does its quiet damage. It doesn’t only prop up kings; it hollows out communities. It feels like peace – no ripples, no awkwardness – but it comes at a significant cost. For King Ahab his self affirming loop stopped him being able to hear the thing his survival depended upon.

There is always a challenge with conversations like this because calls for “discomfort” don’t land evenly, and they’re easy to issue from a bimah or to want someone to issue from the bimah for another person to hear. Many of you, many of us, are already carrying plenty and it's often the most uncomfortable and most open among us who take this on, often on the rest of our behalf. 

The feature or bug conversation for me feels like we are at a significant tipping point. We’re going to need to decide whether hallucinations, echo chambers, feedback loops and other service oriented ways of being with each other are a bug we need to observe and then guard against, update our systems to avoid it; or whether they a feature of the world, and the Jewish community, we want to live in.

I can’t speak for you but I can speak for myself when I say that I think the survival of our society, and the survival of our Jewish community and everything that our Torah is predicated on requires us to choose to reject sycophancy and flattery and embrace difficulty as an active choice. If we value our own grasp on reality, and the ability to resist the retreat into ever self-reinforcing echo chambers, I think this  is a moment where we need to start taking the impact of these wider forces on our own ways of thinking and on our expectations of each other more seriously. 

What might this look like in practice? Three things we can all do between now and Yom Kippur:

• Choose covenant over content at least once this week. Rather than chasing likes and approval for our commentary or perspective on the world, seek out conversation with someone who sees things differently. Don’t try and win, just talk.

• Invite one faithful wound. Ask someone you trust, “What truth about me do I tend to avoid?” Don’t argue. Write it down. Decide on one small change before Yom Kippur.

• Open up your ideas space. Make a point of seeking out perspectives from those who see things in a different way to you. Resist the urge to produce a tidy response or an answer, instead see what happens when you see what questions it makes you ask rather than what arguments it makes you want to make. 

There have been moments when its felt like we need to resist difficulty within community because of a fear that we can’t hold it, or that it will break us apart, but the more thinking and the more watching and reading of research and talking to people who deal in the business of community building I do, the more I feel that without breaking through our own little loops and finding a way to join them together, nothing is left to connect the very fabric that our community needs to be made from. 

It’s because of this that I am grateful for the opportunity these Chaggim give us to put the best and the worst of ourselves on the table, the frankness they demand and the relentless reminders that we can’t escape this. It’s good for us, it might feel increasingly counter cultural, but it's a privilege to set off on this journey together to places unknown and questions unanswered. Shana Tova.