Artificial Intelligence, Human Knowledge, Divine Wisdom

Where do names come from?

As always, this week’s parasha is rich with themes and characters to choose from, but I’d like to take the opportunity of the naming of Leah, which we’re celebrating in the synagogue today, to speak about naming and about Leah. While there are many positive things to say about this figure, we can sadly see that she wasn’t Jacob’s first choice for a wife. Rachel was externally beautiful, Rachel is obvious, while Leah is hidden, a mystery, with soft, watery eyes. Even when we list the matriarchs in our prayers we probably do her an injustice, placing the younger Rachel before the older Leah. There is a section in the parasha, however, when she leaves this place of silence and rejection, and comes to the forefront: the naming of the children. For his third son, it seems that Jacob was also involved in the naming (“she said, now my husband will accompany me (yelaveni), and he called him Levi”, Genesis 29:34), but otherwise all of the children were named by the mothers, and the majority of them were named by Leah.

Naming children is a big theme in this parasha, and throughout the book of Genesis. One of the first tasks of Adam was to name the animals, and according to the midrash, he named himself, his wife and God too [Bereshit Rabbah 17:4]. In the Torah, we almost never find the common contemporary Jewish practice of naming a child in memory of somebody else. Rather, names are chosen to express a situation that the parents are experiencing, or they are a wish, a hope or an intention. Sometimes God decides on a name, but usually it comes from the parents who seem to be reflecting the divine image in doing so. In this naming cycle, Leah is said to have a prophetic spirit guiding her. But in what way can we say that the names we give to our children are prophetic?

There’s a very bizarre story in the Talmud that discusses judging people by their names.

רַבִּי מֵאִיר וְרַבִּי יְהוּדָה וְרַבִּי יוֹסֵי הֲווֹ קָא אָזְלִי בְּאוֹרְחָא, רַבִּי מֵאִיר הֲוָה דָּיֵיק בִּשְׁמָא, רַבִּי יְהוּדָה וְרַבִּי יוֹסֵי לָא הֲווֹ דָּיְיקִי בִּשְׁמָא. כִּי מְטוֹ לְהָהוּא דּוּכְתָּא, בְּעוֹ אוּשְׁפִּיזָא. יְהַבוּ לְהוּ. אֲמַרוּ לֵיהּ: מָה שְׁמָךְ? אֲמַר לְהוּ: ״כִּידוֹר״. אֲמַר: שְׁמַע מִינַּהּ אָדָם רָשָׁע הוּא, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר: ״כִּי דוֹר תַּהְפּוּכוֹת הֵמָּה״. רַבִּי יְהוּדָה וְרַבִּי יוֹסֵי אַשְׁלִימוּ לֵיהּ כִּיסַיְיהוּ. רַבִּי מֵאִיר לָא אַשְׁלֵים לֵיהּ כִּיסֵיהּ

Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Yehuda and Rabbi Yosei were walking on the road together. Rabbi Meir would analyze names, while Rabbi Yehuda and Rabbi Yosei were not apt to analyze names. When they came to a certain place, they looked for lodging and were given it. They said to the innkeeper: What is your name? He said to them: My name is Kidor. Rabbi Meir said to himself: Perhaps one can learn from this that he is a wicked person, as it is stated: “For they are a generation [ki dor] of upheavals” (Deuteronomy 32:20). Since it was Friday afternoon, Rabbi Yehuda and Rabbi Yosei entrusted their purses to him. Rabbi Meir did not entrust his purse to him… (Yoma 83b)

The story continues, and basically Rabbi Meir is proved right, the innkeeper steals the money of those who left it with him, and Rabbi Meir, who was sensitive to the potential in the name Kidor was saved from this. (I’ll mention just as an aside that when I first read the story Un homme qui dort by George Perec, I thought of this Talmudic passage and didn’t trust the protagonist!) What does it mean that names control our destiny? Apart from understanding it as a kind of hidden prophecy, where God inspires the parents to choose a name that will match the child’s future, there’s a more simple reading: people react to our names in certain subtle ways, and we react to those reactions. Anyone who has chosen to give their child a Hebrew name in a society where Jews are treated with suspicion knows the power and the slight anxiety around making such a choice, which usually (I think) reinforces the Jewish identity of the child. There’s also a sense in which changing one’s own name is a way to take control of one’s destiny, and we know of many such examples from the Torah until today. In the end though, and despite this fantastic story of Rabbi Meir, the Talmud and the Jewish tradition remain ambiguous regarding the predictive power of names. “Some have good names and bad deeds, some have bad names and good deeds.” [Midrash Tanchuma].

Still, to return to the act of naming started by the first human in the first story of the Torah, there’s something incredibly powerful in this ability that distinguishes man from most animals. But that’s not exactly true anymore. Over the last year or two, we’re getting more familiar with artificial intelligence and understanding both its limits and its potential. Those who use models like ChatGPT have experienced it make up information and invent facts. But when it’s used as it’s meant to be, for manipulating language and finding patterns in the data, it can do some incredible things that make what we thought was our humanity seem less unique. Playing around with it this week, I tested its creativity: it was able to name new objects and concepts, it suggested inventions that haven’t yet been patented, and with the right instructions and limitations of sources, it could answer fairly complex questions of halachah. About a year ago, I spoke about how AI couldn’t replace a rabbi, and I repeat that now — but with rather less certainty than before.

At one point, I interrogated ChatGPT about whether it was able to make a chiddush, a new interpretation of the Torah. It said that while it could offer readings that had never been proposed before, it wasn’t a chiddush in the sense that it was just able to see a pattern that humans hadn’t yet managed to, but it didn’t have the sensation of receiving an insight. It was this mention of ‘sensation’ that relieved me, and gave me back a sense that humanity is still worth something. What happens we we have a creative idea? Medieval Jewish philosophy speaks about these insights as a lower form of divine inspiration, this is the case of the mothers in the parasha naming their children, or Jacob in his dream with the ladder, or every time we say aha! It’s also possible to see it as an organic form of what AI is doing: we notice something in the experiences of the world around us, and as that ‘noticing’ rises to the conscious part of our mind we feel that we’ve thought of something new. It’s the emotional aspect of this experience, the sensation of creation, that is and will remain uniquely ours.

Maybe kabbalistic language is the best one for expressing these ideas. Among the higher sefirot (in some systems) are the three that are patterned on the human mind: chochmah, binah, da’at; Wisdom, Understanding and Knowledge. Artificial Intelligence operates in the realm of Binah, noticing patterns and some form of creativity as it responds to them. If it hasn’t surpassed us already in this realm it will soon, and we’re going to have to learn how to accept and make use of that fact. It’s weaker in the realm of Da’at, Knowledge: it relies on what humans have discovered and give it to learn from, but isn’t good at discerning between truth and falsehood, or adding new data to what it was given. It’s also lacking in Wisdom, the divine spark that makes ideas interesting and more than just a new way of formulating what’s been said before, that gives our creativity a direction before it can even be expressed in words. It lacks the life-energy that flows through this whole mental system: curiosity, desire, sensation, hope. It’s the expression of that humanity that we show in every creative act, whether its bringing children into the world and naming them and raising them, or building communities and fighting for their values, or investing in relationships with mysterious people who will reveal themselves over a lifetime and no less, or appreciating a tranquil day without creation once a week.

Shabbat shalom!