Mashiv Haruach U'morid Ha-AI

My grandmother is one of my heroes. She is 97 years old, and this week she's saying goodbye to Flatbush as her home for the first time in her life. Ninety-seven years in one neighborhood. Her best friend passed away, a few other things happened, and she's finally ready to move into a complex closer to family. So this has been her goodbye-to-Flatbush week, a last hurrah, and she invited my sister to dinner at a nice restaurant there as one of her ways to say goodbye.

When I heard about it, I knew right away I needed to pull some shtick. I opened up ChatGPT and started spinning up a certificate to honor the occasion. Very official looking, as if it came from the borough of Brooklyn and Flatbush themselves, congratulating her on 97 years in the neighborhood, thanking her for everything she gave the community, and wishing her luck on her next chapter. It took me maybe five minutes.

She called me to tell me how much she loved it. It's sitting on her table now, and she's showing it to all her farewell tour guests. Then she asked me: "Did you make this yourself, or did the robot AI thing make it?"

I quipped back: "When you make an omelette, did you make it, or did the frying pan?"

She laughed. AI is a tool, I meant. The pan doesn't crack the eggs.

My mother wasn't buying it

When I told my mother the story, she shot the analogy down. A frying pan doesn't create brand-new things from scratch. Maybe if a frying pan followed a whole recipe and made a dish with just some raw ingredients.... that's what AI does.

While I do agree she's right, I couldn't tell her that. But it did get me thinking. When I direct ChatGPT or Claude to make an image, an article, an analysis, and it comes out great, I feel proud. Look what I made. But did I? If I'd built that certificate from scratch in Canva, it would have taken far longer, and I'm not sure it would have been as good. I gave the idea, the context, the direction. The AI did a lot of the rest.

So when someone asks "did you make it, or did AI?", what's the honest answer?

The oldest model of work

Judaism has a concept that I think fits better than any frying pan: parnassah, earning a living. You have to work. You put in hishtadlus, real effort and energy. But you also trust that Hashem turns that effort into sustenance. Work is a partnership between what you put in and what you can't control.

The original picture of this, that the Torah use as the framework for this relationship, is the farmer. From Adam onward, working the land is the quintessential form of labour. You plough, you plant, you water, you tend the fields, you harvest. It's hard, relentless work. And yet none of it matters without rain and sunlight, which are pure divine blessings that man has no control over.

That picture protects the farmer from a trap Chazal names directly: kochi ve'otzem yadi, "my strength and the might of my hand made me this wealth." After a big harvest, it's hard to stand in the field and say it was all you. You know the rain came from somewhere.

Then we all got desk jobs

Very few of us farm anymore. We work in offices, in real estate, in software. And in that world the rain and the sunlight disappear from view. The paycheck comes from a contract. It's much easier to believe the output is purely mine.

This has been on my mind for a while. A year and a half or so, I noticed that the business owners around me seemed to have a stronger bitachon, a stronger trust in God, around their parnassah. Their income depended on whether they'd had a good year. I, a boring old corporate employee, always knew exactly what I was going to make.

So I asked Rav Asher Weiss: should I become a business owner rather than a salaried employee, so I could feel God's role in my work more clearly?

He settled my concern. No, he said, that's not a reason to go start a business. It's up to you to recognize God's involvement in your work, whatever kind of work you do.

I accepted that. But honestly, I didn't know how.

AI brought the rain back

This is the part that surprised me. AI is the thing that's bringing the rain back for me.

When I work with AI, I can see my effort. I bring the idea, the context, the judgement. But there's a second force I don't control. I can give it the best prompt in the world, and it still decides what comes back. It plays the role of the rain and the sunlight.

To be clear, I don't say a prayer to God after every prompt. But when I ship something in a day that used to take months, it's impossible to pretend it was all me. And once I'm forced to admit that this output wasn't only mine, it gets easier to see that none of it ever was. The paycheck, the stable job, being able to provide for my family: there were always other hands involved.

Once I'm forced to admit that this output wasn't only mine, it gets easier to see that none of it ever was.

Rav Weiss told me it was up to me to see God's hand in my work. I didn't expect a chatbot to be the thing that finally helped me do it.

What my grandmother already knew

So, did I make the certificate, or did the robot?

My grandmother answered that better than I did. After my frying pan line, she said: either way, I appreciate that you thought about it. You had the idea, and you made it happen.

She didn't care who held the pen. She cared that someone thought of her, in her last week in Flatbush, and wanted her 97 years to be celebrated. That part wasn't the AI, and it wasn't the rain. That part was mine.