💡 Think:
Yesterday my new Google Pixel 9 arrived. Key among its features is Google’s AI ‘Reimagine’ tool. Baked into the 9, Reimagine uses generative AI to remove unwanted objects and add artificial elements to photos.
Take a look at a photo I snapped while out in the woods. Which picture here was tweaked with Reimagine?
Is it the small toy houses among the leaves? Perhaps the big frog next to the mushroom?
The answer is, all three photos have been digitally altered. The original one has no frog or houses in it all (Check it out here, on my Instagram)
The feature has already begun to turn heads. While photo manipulation is almost as old as photography itself, the sudden ease further blurs the boundaries between the real world and the imagined.
So much of our shared sense of history, of reality, over the past century has been shaped by iconic photographs…
This week’s Torah portion tells us:
“And you shall know this day; that [I speak] not with your children, who did not know and who did not see… But your eyes, which have seen all the great work of the L-rd, which He did.1”
Judaism views its essential shared truth as one that’s derived from mass experience and shared tradition.
Sometimes called the ‘Kuzari Principle’, after the famed medieval philosophical work of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, it states the mass experience at Sinai and communal tradition stand at the heart of Jewish belief:
[The rabbi] did not say: “The God of heaven and earth,” nor “my Creator and thine sent me.” In the same way God commenced His speech to the assembled people of Israel: “I am the God whom you worship, who has led you out of the land of Egypt,” but He did not say: “I am the Creator of the world and your Creator.”
Now in the same style I spoke to thee, a Prince of the Khazars, when thou didst ask me about my creed. I answered thee as was fitting, and is fitting for the whole of Israel who knew these things, first from personal experience [at Sinai], and afterwards through uninterrupted tradition, which is equal to the former.2
The shared communal experience itself - and the continuity of the Jewish people - that speaks to our truth.
—
Where as a judge in Jewish tradition is obligated to see both sides of an argument (so much so, that a Beit Din could not find a person unanimously guilty), a witness is can not serve as a judge: So powerful is the truth of what his eyes saw, that he can not objectively remove that experience to properly see all sides of what happened.
The truth of the world around us now requires our direct investment in it.
What do you think? How can we confront a world where what we see is so subjective?
🏃 DO:
🍷 Join us for our next #FirstFriday Shabbat meal, on Friday,September 6th.
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✨ SHOFAR + TASHLICH
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🎬 Watch:
Watch the premiere of our first Schmooze Talk! Monday, 10:00am!
🎉 Mazel:
Happy birthday Tech Tribe member Michael Morgenstern!
🙏 Pray
Please say a prayer for my friend and former yeshivah roommate Yosef Shlomo Ben Risha for a complete recovery.
A mitzvah campaign has been launched in honor of his speedy recovery
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📚 Read:
🪦 Blood, Tears, and Stone: Memoirs from the Soviet Union
🇩🇪 A Nazi Villa So Tainted Berlin Can’t Give It Away
🔮 Beware the science fiction bias in predictions of the future
From #ChaiSociety member Nikita Sokolsky
🏞️ My Auschwitz Vacation: On Holocaust tourism
📷 No one’s ready for this - reflections on AI and photography
🔥 Lit:
This week, light Shabbat candles in NYC at 7:23 PM
For Shabbat candle-lighting time in your area click here.
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Kuzari 1.25. English text from the 1905 Hartwig Hirschfield translation