Alone Together: Don't Let AI Push Us To Our Tzara'at Era
Tech Tribe Dispatch #298
💡 Think:
“And the L-rd G-d said, "It is not good that man is alone…”1
In our pockets we cary devices that connect us to virtually the entirety of humanity, we post, share and stream every moment of our lives… or passively consume those moments of others.
Yet we’re more alone now than we ever were before.
Indeed, by all acounts, we’re in the midst of a loneliness epidemic.
“Sixty-one percent of young people—children, teens, and young adults—suffer from serious loneliness in the United States,” says Jodi Halpern, professor of Bioethics and Medical Humanities at UC Berkeley.
Our relationships, connections and the very way we understand humanity, already intermediated by screens and profile pictures, are poised to enter an era where young people interact more frequently with AI agents than other people.
Indeed, as Mark Zuckerberg sees it, the time is ripe for digital companions.
“The average American has fewer than three people they would consider friends, and the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it’s something like 15 friends or something,” he said in a recent interview
“Already,” he noted, “one of the main things we see people using Meta AI for is talking through difficult conversations that they need to have with people in their lives.”
But whatever companionship an AI friend may offer, it’s part of a deeply worrying (and long standing) trend for tech to further drive us towards a sense of existential loneliness.
Even the conversations we do have, the relationships we do build, have the affect of inuring us to reality and driving our focus to a highly curated and filtered version of life - one intermediated by devices that take our focus away from the humans around us.
This week’s Torah portion we read of the person afflicted with tzara’at, the biblical recipe afflicted as a physical portent to spiritual refinement, for lashon hara, malicious speech.
So that one who had outwardly refined themselves, but still needed that deeply negative trait to be expunged from their character, might experience this affliction.
As the Torah relates in regards to the purification process:
”All the days the lesion is upon him, he shall remain unclean. He is unclean; he shall dwell isolated; his dwelling shall be outside the camp2.”
Elaborating on why isolation is baked into the purification, Rashi notes3
”He shall dwell isolated. [meaning] that other impure people [not stricken with tzara’at] shall not abide with him. Our Sages said: “Why is he different from other unclean people, that he must remain isolated? Since, with his slander, he caused a rift between man and wife or between man and his fellow, he too, shall be separated [from society].”
Our negative social interactions can drive us to a temporary isolation, a place of self-reflection… but are not the destination at the end of our journey.
Once purity has been reached, we need to reintegrate ourselves into the world - to live amongst and with other people.
Judaism requires that we engage with the mundane, that we work the land and till the soil. It also requires that we engage with physical items —physical tefillin — not virtual ones, share experiences with humans in the room to form a minyan… and not a quorum in the metaverse, and connect to humans —and not AI substitutes— for our true sense of completion and fulfillment.
As the second Rebbe of Chabad, Rabbi Dovber, once noted4:
”When two discuss a subject in avoda, personal development and purpose, and they study together, there are two Divine souls against one natural soul.”
The nature of material, natural soul, is like an animal - ultimately dominated by its own self-interest5. The transcendent divine soul, though, becomes a spiritual partner…
AI friends can only attempt to patch a void. Human connectivity is the only way to fill it.
🏃 DO:
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📚 Read:
📖 Why Learn Pirkei Avot From Passover and On?
🤫 Meta’s ‘Digital Companions’ Will Talk With Users—Even Children. Chatbots on Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp are empowered to engage in ‘romantic role-play’ that can turn explicit.
👨💻 How People Are Really Using Gen AI in 2025
🔥 Lit:
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🙏 Pray:
Pina Rachel bas Bracha Zissel
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See the footnote Sefer Hasichot 5637 pg 210 fn 16