There is a chassidic teaching attributed to Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshischa according to which every person should have two pockets, with a slip of paper in each, so that they may draw upon one or the other as circumstances require. When sad or discouraged, one should reach into the right-hand pocket and find the words, “For my sake the world was created.” But when feeling joyful and powerful, one should reach into the left-hand pocket and find the words, “I am but dust and ashes.” Many, however, make the mistake of taking from the opposite pocket to the one they truly need.[1]
I love that last line because it rings personally true. When I am down, I tend to seek readings and songs that echo my sadness and end up bringing me further down. When I am happy, I seek activities that express that expansive state of mind and, in turn, make me happier. We do not always reach for what is good for us.
Members of Bet David know that I am a heavy user of artificial intelligence. Although most of my experience with AI has been benign and very useful, reports about increasingly autonomous systems behaving in ways their designers did not intend have been personally unsettling.[2] What happens when systems we build begin to act in ways we did not anticipate?
If I followed Rabbi Simcha Bunim’s advice, perhaps I should have responded by switching off the computer and going for a hike. Instead, I did the opposite. I started watching stories about technology taking over from humanity: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, Person of Interest, and finally Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent film describing a dystopian reality in the year 2026.[3]
Metropolis is much older than the other films in that list, but it ended up being the one that affected me most. It imagines a city in which the wealthy live above ground while workers descend below ground to keep its machinery running. The workers move in synchronised patterns, their bodies bending to the rhythm of machines. Then a machine is given the appearance of Maria, a human woman. What disturbed me was the movement in both directions. The machine is made more human while, at the same time, some human beings are made machine-like and perceived as less than human.
That feels quite contemporary. We are becoming good at making machines resemble human beings. They speak our languages, imitate our styles, reason with us, produce images and respond in ways that can feel astonishingly personal. Last month, Beijing hosted the second World Humanoid Robot Games, in which a humanoid robot ran the 100 metres in 8.64 seconds, almost a second faster than Usain Bolt’s human world record.[4] In the AI world, I keep reading reports of adults using AI as companions, sometimes romantically, and of teenagers turning to these systems for serious conversations they might once have had with human friends.[5]
To some people these are welcome technological advances; to others, they are signs that technology needs to be reined in. In July, more than 1,300 employees of frontier AI companies signed a statement asking the United States government to support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.[6] Yesterday, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, published an essay calling for the development of frontier AI to slow down. Sam Altman of OpenAI, Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind publicly backed the direction of his proposals.[7] That debate has caught a great deal of attention.
At the same time, and this does not seem to be spoken about with the same urgency, some human beings are increasingly treated as though their humanity carried less weight than ours. Undocumented migrants, demographic threats, burdens, enemies, collateral damage: the vocabulary changes, but the moral move is similar. We know too well where the idea that some human beings deserve less dignity can lead, and we swore that we would never allow it to happen again.
In today’s Torah reading, God says: “Let us make Adam in our image, after our likeness.” The Torah goes on to insist: “God created Adam in the divine image; in the image of God, God created him; male and female, God created them.”[8]
Before Adam has done anything, before Adam has demonstrated intelligence, morality or usefulness, Torah gives humanity its status: tzelem Elohim, the image of God. Precisely what that means has always been open to debate, but the idea of being created in the Divine image stands at the core of Judaism’s understanding of human dignity.[9]
Prof. Nahum Sarna z”l, a Bible scholar at Brandeis University, pointed out how radical that language is. In the ancient world, kings could be described as the image or likeness of a god. B’reshit takes that royal language and democratises it.[9] Not one king, one class or one nation, but humanity is created in the divine image. Human dignity is therefore not something we earn. It is not a prize given to those who meet the correct standard of intelligence, civilisation, morality, citizenship or usefulness. B’reshit makes a different claim: human worth does not depend on anything else we can say about a person.
The Torah does not promise that human beings will show exemplary behaviour. One midrash imagines the angels debating whether humanity should be created at all. Kindness says yes. Truth says no, because human beings are full of lies. Justice says yes. Peace says no, because human beings are full of conflict. While the angels are still arguing, God creates Adam.[11] The Torah knows what human beings are capable of and still insists on tzelem Elohim. Human dignity is not revoked when a person disappoints us, frightens us, angers us or belongs to a people we have learnt not to care about.
Rabbi Akiva famously taught that “וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ”, “Love your neighbour as yourself” is the great principle of the Torah. Ben Azzai disagreed, saying that an even greater principle is the verse: “This is the record of Adam’s line. When God created Adam, in the likeness of God he was made; male and female [God] created them. And when they were created, [God] blessed them and called them Adam.”[10]
Why greater? One possibility is that “neighbour” can always be narrowed. The Hebrew term, רֵעַ/re’a, has often been interpreted as referring particularly to those within one’s own group. But Adam comes before every narrower identity. Before Jew and non-Jew, before citizen and foreigner, before black and white, there is Adam. Ben Azzai’s principle leaves us no category of human being whose dignity begins at a lower level.
There are no degrees of tzelem Elohim. B'reshit does not say that some people bear more of the divine image than others. Human beings may differ enormously in power, ability, character, behaviour and circumstance, but none of those differences creates a scale of humanity on which some lives count for more and others for less.
We are asking increasingly sophisticated questions about machines: whether they can think, create, deceive or feel, and at what point something sufficiently human-like might deserve moral consideration. Those are serious questions. But perhaps the more urgent question is whether we can still recognise the full humanity of people who are already human.
Perhaps that is where Rabbi Simcha Bunim’s two pockets return. When we think about the technological power we are acquiring, perhaps we need the pocket that says, “I am but dust and ashes.” We need humility about what we understand, what we control and what we ought to create.
But what if the other pocket was never meant only for ourselves? When I look at another human being, especially someone whom fear, anger or politics have taught me to value less, I may need to reach into that pocket on their behalf and remind myself: “For your sake, too, the world was created.”
If another person is created b’tzelem Elohim, then their suffering cannot simply become less important because it is inconvenient to me. Their life cannot become cheaper because they are distant from me. Their fear does not become less real because I fear them. Their children do not become less precious because I do not know their names. Dehumanisation works by getting us accustomed to suffering that would horrify us if it happened to people we recognised as fully our own. Eventually, the unequal distribution of sympathy begins to feel natural.
The claim of B’reshit is that it is not natural. Every human life begins with the same declaration. B’tzelem Elohim bara oto: in the image of God, God created the human being. There is no footnote saying “to different degrees”. So the discipline I want to take from this Torah reading has to do with attention. I want to notice the moments when I begin to care less because of who the person is. When another person’s humiliation seems acceptable, when their suffering feels remote, when their death becomes a statistic, that is when tzelem Elohim is supposed to interrupt me.
When the shofar sounds this morning, it will interrupt us. It stops the service, it stops whatever argument we are having in our own heads, and it asks nothing of us except that we listen to it. And after it sounds we say hayom harat olam, “today the world is conceived”, and then hayom ya’amid bamishpat kol yetzurei olamim, “today all the creatures of every world stand in judgement.” Every creature of every world, standing together this morning, and not one of them standing lower than another.
On a day in which we read the story about the creation of the world, that is the world we are invited to create.
Shanah Tovah
[1] Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshischa, via Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim.
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/03/podcasts/the-daily/ai-openai-hugging-face-rogue-model.html; https://www.instagram.com/reels/DdGVDQ0gD3p/; https://www.instagram.com/p/DdDOqn0jJDC
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFdvbf9bomM
[6] https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/
[7] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/12/technology/anthropic-dario-amodei-ai-slowdown.html.
[8] Genesis 1:26–27.
[9] Nahum M. Sarna, The JPS Torah Commentary: Genesis, commentary to Genesis 1:26–27.
[10] Jerusalem Talmud, Nedarim 9:4, commenting on Leviticus 19:18 and Genesis 5:1–2.
[11] Bereshit Rabbah 8:5.
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