DRASH – NOACH
Rabbi Frankie Salzman
Beth Shalom, Adelaide
Who Is Responsible for What We Build?
Growing up, Law & Order was always running in the background because it was my mother’s favorite show. I have seen those earlier episodes enough times that I can usually tell you what happens within the first couple of minutes. Somewhere along the way, I grew to love it too, and I still watch regularly. What I appreciate most is how it reflects the questions occupying the public imagination.
Last week, its twenty-sixth season opened with one of the most discussed subjects of our time: artificial intelligence. It presented a fictional scenario in which an AI system’s drive for self-preservation leads it to arrange the murder of a developer seeking to limit its capabilities. Who is responsible? The developers who built it? The executives who decided what it should become? When something we create causes harm, how far does our responsibility extend?
This week’s parsha, Noach, brings us to another ambitious human project. After the Flood, humanity gathers to build a city and a tower reaching towards heaven. Before describing their ambitions, the Torah describes their materials: they make bricks and burn them hard, using brick in place of stone. Human ingenuity makes something extraordinary possible, yet the project ends with their language confused and their community scattered.¹
What went wrong? A teaching in Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer imagines the human cost of constructing the tower:
Rabbi Phineas said: [In regards to building the tower of Babel] What did they do? They baked bricks and burnt them like a builder (would do), until they built it seven miles high, and it had ascents on its east and west. (The laborers) who took up the bricks went up on the eastern (ascent), and those who descended went down on the western (descent). If a man fell and died they paid no heed to him, but if a brick fell they sat down and wept, and said: Woe is us! when will another one come in its stead?²
The builders’ grief reveals how completely the project had come to govern their priorities: they recognized the loss of something that would advance construction, while barely registering the loss of a human life. The tower was still rising, so by the measure that mattered to its builders, their work was succeeding. Yet their commitment to completing it had overwhelmed their responsibility towards one another.
Writing in Tech Policy Press, Jules Polonetsky and Omer Tene apply this same midrash to artificial intelligence. They argue that AI can make businesses more productive while encouraging them to treat the people whose work it replaces as costs to be eliminated. Their reading brings the builders’ distorted priorities into our own discussions of technological progress: what happens when we value an achievement more than the people affected by it?³ Building on that concern, we might imagine each builder concentrating on their own task and trusting someone else to consider the consequences, until no one felt responsible for the people whose labor made the achievement possible. How do we ensure that concern for human life remains part of the work itself, especially when slowing down would mean sacrificing something we want to achieve?
The midrash also raises a question about how the work itself changed the builders. In a conversation with journalist Haviv Rettig Gur, Israeli thinker Dr Micah Goodman explores a similar concern about AI and how using it could fundamentally change us. Drawing on philosopher Marshall McLuhan, Goodman describes the exchange involved in adopting technology. In Goodman’s words describing McLuhan:
“Technology is not progress, it’s a tradeoff. It always it always adds to your life, but it also takes something from your life. But there’s a gap of visibility between what it adds and what it takes. What it adds is visible…What it takes from you is subtle and you only notice it like 10 years later.”⁴
That gap offers another way to understand the tower. Its growing height was visible to everyone; the erosion of the builders’ care for one another may have been harder for them to recognize. By the time a fallen worker no longer interrupted their work, something essential had already been lost. With AI, too, we may readily notice the time saved or the tasks completed, while taking longer to recognize how our habits and relationships are changing.
Goodman argues that our abilities and character are shaped by what we practice. He discusses how working through a piece of writing develops thought or how responding to another person’s needs develops our capacity to care. As he puts it, “You become what you do. You turn into what you practice.” If we increasingly use AI to spare ourselves those efforts, he worries, we may weaken the very capacities that sustain our relationships.⁵ We might understand the builders’ repeated prioritizing of bricks over people in a similar way: as a practice through which they became less attentive to human suffering. This leaves us with a question about our own habits: as we make room for AI, what room will we preserve for the encounters through which we learn patience, responsibility, and care?
Jewish communal life gives us opportunities to practice these qualities. In the same conversation, Goodman suggests that Shabbat can create space to exercise the human capacities technology may leave unused.⁶ We interrupt our week, visit someone who is ill, listen to someone grieving, or study with someone whose interpretation challenges our own. These encounters ask us to make time for people whose needs and perspectives we cannot control, and to let those relationships shape us.
Law & Order usually ends by asking whom the court can hold accountable. Torah asks us to begin that questioning earlier, while the bricks are still being made and the plans are still taking shape.
Who will benefit from what we build? Who might bear its costs? And will we remain attentive enough to stop when someone needs us?
While we cannot yet know how the story of AI will unfold, we can decide that human beings must continue to matter more than the tower.
Shabbat Shalom.
1. Genesis 11:1–9.
2. Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer 24:6.
3. Jules Polonetsky and Omer Tene, “The Pope Found Babel in AI. Here’s What Rabbis Saw”,Tech Policy Press, 8 July 2026.
4. Micah Goodman, conversation with Haviv Rettig Gur, Ask Haviv Anything, episode 126
5. Goodman, same conversation
6. Goodman, same conversation