The Rebbe's Mission Statement and The AI Era
Tech Tribe Dispatch #357
💡 Think:
January 1951 in Brooklyn. the Rebbe formally accepted the mantel of leadership for the Chabad-Lubavitch movement. 1955 the term Artificial Intelligence was coined to describe the so called Thinking machines being explored at Dartmouth.
In the 32 years since the Rebbe’s passing, the field of AI has created a sea change in society. Suddenly questions of purpose, of the soul, of what makes us human have become of pressing urgency.
When the Rebbe accepted the mantle of leadership in 1951, he made an “acceptance speech.” Noting how in America everyone asked a new leader to make a statement, to say something, hopefully something novel and surprising, that would speak for his vision and career.
This was the Rebbe’s statement1:
There are three loves: Love of G‑d. Love of Torah. Love of your people, Israel, and your fellow Jew.
They are all one. And since they are one, it is impossible to make distinctions between them.
They are a singularity, an essence-point. When you grab any part of a singularity, you have all of it. In any of these forms of love, you have all three.
So if you see a Jew who has love of G‑d, but lacks love of his people and love of Torah, tell that Jew that this love is incomplete and cannot last.
And, on the other hand, if you see a Jew who has love of his people, but lacks love of G‑d and love of Torah, work with that Jew to complete this love with love of G‑d and love of Torah. Show this Jew that it is not enough to provide bread for the hungry and water for the thirsty, that if you truly love a Jew, you must bring that Jew to love Torah and to love G‑d.
And then, with all three loves complete, they join in one tight knot that can never be untied.
Today, in 2026, as we look to center a society that stands on the precipice of tremendous unprecedented change, we need to ground the technology we build on the foundational love of humanity.
The pursuit of knowledge and purpose can not eclipse or replace the need to love your fellow. Making sure someone has food, has knowledge, has the opportunity to grow as a spiritual being, must stand at the forefront of what we do.
G-d, the profoundly transcendent reveals Himself through Torah. When we ground our actions on uplifting those who G-d loves can then hope to find the success we seek.
A friend of mine recently ran the published corpus of the Rebbe’s torah through an LLM - the hours of public talks, the many Hebrew and Yiddish language letters the Rebbe wrote that have been published.
He prompted the AI to share the most common terms the Rebbe used… They were: G-d, Torah and the Jewish people.
The Rebbe lived his statement. He embodied it through the vision he shared, the movement he built, and through the very words he spoke.
When you love something, you can’t stop talking about it. It drives you in everything you do… The Rebbe did that, paving the way for us.
AI is not the Messiah. But AI gives a taste of the Messianic era.
The world we are striving to build, one founded on the inherently redemptive vision of the Torah is, in the words of Maimonides2:
“In that era, there will be neither famine or war, envy or competition for good will flow in abundance and all the delights will be freely available as dust.
The occupation of the entire world will be solely to know G-d.”
We can enter the knowledge age, when all of our work will be done by others. And the Rebbe left us with the key to make it happen.
As he concluded his statement:
“We were exiled because that love for our people and our fellow Jew was lacking. By healing it, we will bring Moshiach very soon in our days.”
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I spoke with Tablet Magazine’s Liel Leibovitz on his Take One Talmud To Go podcast about the Rebbe, the Myth of Chabad Outreach and what it means to love another Jew.
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📚 Read:
🕵🏻 The Truth About the Truth. Talking to a rabbi about who—or what—in this world we can trust
🤖 The Biggest Tell That Something Was Written by AI. Look closely and you’ll see that every part of the text is not quite right.
💭 Does the Weekend (Shabbos) Prove God’s Existence? Jewish thought is having an analytic philosophy moment with fresh and interesting results
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10 Shevat 1951, translation follows that of Rabbi Tzvi Freeman.
Maimonides Laws of Kings 12:5