A Jewish communal initiative of Intelligere
The Human Question
The Jewish community does not first need a position on artificial intelligence. It needs language precise enough to discover what it is taking a position about.
What becomes of the human being when intelligence is treated as the defining human possession?
That question cannot be answered by celebrating AI or condemning it. Nor can it be answered by placing a Hebrew word beside an English one and pretending the translation settles the matter.
The Human Question is a structured Jewish communal conversation about beneficial AI use, nondelegable human responsibility, and the words through which we understand both. It brings technical language, Jewish texts, contemporary voices, and practical communal choices into the same room—without manufacturing a consensus that does not exist.
Vocabulary before guidance
Communal guidance built on unstable language will be unstable guidance. Before asking whether AI possesses intelligence, knowledge, judgment, agency, creativity, or understanding, we need to ask what each speaker means by those words—and which distinct human or computational acts have been collapsed inside them.
Define the disputed term.
Separate technical usage, ordinary speech, philosophical claims, and metaphor.
Bring Jewish vocabulary and sources into relation.
Use Hebrew and Jewish texts to reopen distinctions—not as shortcuts that end the inquiry.
Show what people are actually saying.
Present verbatim, verified quotations with enough context to preserve disagreement and prevent distortion.
Ask who answers for the consequence.
Move from system capability to authorization, judgment, relationship, obligation, and accountability.
Voices, not a manufactured consensus
There is no single Orthodox, rabbinic, or Jewish view of AI. The aim is not to flatten different approaches into a slogan. It is to make their agreements and disagreements intelligible: Which capacities do speakers attribute to machines? Which human roles do they regard as nondelegable? What goods do they believe AI can serve? What risks do they believe it intensifies?
The developing Sources and Voices map will preserve exact quotations, source links, dates, affiliations, and context. Interpretations and comparisons will be labeled as such. Similar language will not be treated as proof of influence or priority without evidence.
Read the verified Sources and Voices index →
Shared questions
The first public sequence will examine knowledge, understanding, reasoning, memory, judgment, decision, agency, creativity, learning, and truth. It will then turn toward communal guidance: Torah learning, education, rabbinic research, authorship, children, institutional adoption, human dignity, and the responsibilities that should not be delegated.
How this fits inside Intelligere
Intelligere is the broader public platform and vocabulary method. The Human Question is its Jewish communal initiative. What We Mean is the continuing publication. The Substitution Test is the participatory tool that asks readers to replace an abstract AI term with the concrete act being claimed.
Help build the conversation.
Send a source, correction, disagreement, or distinction to elie@intelligere.studio, or subscribe to What We Mean.
This initiative is in its foundational stage. Vocabulary clarification comes first; communal guidance will be published as a developing, revisable body of work.