Before AI, there was the beit midrash |
Recently, while listening to a conversation between Jonathan Haidt and Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, a thought struck me.
Haidt suggested that Jews were unusually well prepared for one of history’s great technological revolutions: the printing press. When printed books suddenly democratized knowledge in early modern Europe, Jewish communities already lived inside a culture built around intense reading, discussion, and textual debate.
For generations, Jews had developed a civilization centered on books—studied aloud, argued over in pairs, and internalized through repetition. When the information revolution of print arrived, Jews were ready.
Which made me wonder: what does Jewish tradition have to say about the technological revolution we are living through now—the age of the internet, computers, and artificial intelligence?
Over the past few years, many educators have begun sounding the alarm that something fundamental may be changing in how students read. In 2024 in the Atlantic, journalist Rose Horowitch captured the concern when she described what literature professors are witnessing:
“Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998… Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading… Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.”
The worry is not merely that students read less. It is that the very capacity for sustained, careful reading—the intellectual muscle that serious learning requires—may be weakening.
Yet in one corner of the world, a very different educational culture persists.
This year, I had the........