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Faces for God: Commentary on Parashat Terumah 5785
By Rabbi Jonah Rank, Rosh Yeshivah of Hebrew Seminary
“You can have your own personal R2-D2 C-3PO,” said the entrepreneur, skipping over his words amidst the excitement of unveiling his new Optimus robot product. “I think,” he continued nervously and with some indecision in his voice, “this would cost something like, I don’t know, $20,000, $30,000. Less than a car is my prediction. Long term. Y’know, take us a minute to get to the long term.” The businessman nearly repeated his words, committing to the same level of undecidedness, before moving on to the big pitch. “What can it do? It can do anything you want. It can be a teacher or babysit your kids. It can walk your dog, mow your lawn, get the groceries, be your friend, serve drinks. Whatever you can think of it will do.”
Those who attended this talk by Elon Musk on October 10, 2024, were impressed by how Tesla’s faceless black-and-white robots danced limberly, served drinks dutifully, and even responded to people’s questions very casually. Still Ed Ludlow of Bloomberg Technology reported that each “autonomous assistant” was in fact controlled remotely by a human operator whenever interacting with guests. Some had indeed suspected that some homo sapiens were controlling the bots when one Optimus made a comment about where he and his colleagues live and get their bills paid. Regardless, responsible parents and dog-owners would do well to think twice—or more—before entrusting artificial intelligence with their organic loved ones.
As Jews, we have long struggled with how we build trust—and ascertain trust. The very name Yisra’el (יִשְֹרֳאֵל, “Israel”) literally means, “the one who wrestles with God.” Despite the doubts a Jew may feel, and despite whatever traces of skepticism exhibited by the rabbis of old (preserved in the Talmud’s endless debates over how to interpret God’s will)—Jewish wisdom urges us to accept God’s goodness and holiness as a truth. Thus, Rabbi El’azar, citing Rabbi Avina, prescribed that Jews who long for a place in Olam HaBa (“the World to Come”) should recite Psalm 145 three times a day, declaring “God is good to all; God’s mercy is upon all of God’s creations” (Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 4b; on Psalm 145:9).
Even if God may be good and God may be holy, God may feel absent. Even the Shema, which declares that God is Echad (“One”), never asserts that we must believe in God. Our stating that God is One—and presumably real—leads us to articulate our faith in the presence of our fellow Jews, but there appears to be no mitzvah, no command, to believe in God in private. The literalists among us would generally agree that God does not teach us, take care of our kids, walk our dogs, mow our lawns, get our groceries, act as our friend, or serve us drinks. For the believers among us, we may feel God’s presence in the moments when we or others demonstrate responsibility and lovingkindness—but God may remain invisible, inaudible, imperceptible.
When God, in Parashat Terumah, began to instruct Moses to organize the Israelites’ talents and possessions for the sake of creating a physical home for God (Exodus 25–27), humanity and Divinity acknowledged the need for some midpoint between Heaven and Earth. This Mishkan (“Tabernacle”), a portable altar with a variety of sacred accoutrements, would serve as God’s new address (Exodus 25:8–9). The Mishkan would include a special ark to preserve beneath its one-of-a-kind cover the testimony of God’s laws (Exodus 25:18–21), upon which Israelite hands would sculpt two enigmatic figures. English translations of the Bible often call these keruvim (כְּרֻבִ֖ים) “cherubim” or “cherubs,” which medieval and early modern Christian artists got into the habit of depicting as nude babies with wings—but the Hebrew Bible never explains what keruvim look like. For thousands of years, Jews sought a clearer picture.
In the Babylonian Talmud, edited around the 6th century C.E., Rabbi Abbahu responded to the question “וּמַאי כְּרוּב?” (“But what is a keruv [‘cherub’]?”):
כְּרָבְיָא, שֶׁכֵּן בְּבָבֶל קוֹרִין לְיָנוֹקָא רָבְיָא.
Keraveya (כְּרָבְיָא, “similar to a child”). Indeed, in Babylonia, they call a child raveya (רָבְיָא).
Yosef Bekhor Shor in 12th century France wrote in his commentary on Exodus 25:18 that the keruvim were “דומיא לכסא הכבוד ולחיות הקודש” (“similar to the Throne of Glory and to the Sacred [Celestial] Animal-Angels”)—which clarified matters for few readers, lucky mystics aside. In his commentary from 13th century France, Chizkiyyah bar Mano’ach called each keruv both “מין של עוף” (“a kind of bird”) and “עוף גדול בעל כנפים” (“a big bird possessing wings”). The Austrian-Italian Jewish scholar Samuel David Luzzatto (1800–1865) was among the earliest Jewish writers to draw from Christian understandings specifically—in this case, a Latin dictionary (Commentarii linguae Ebraicae) by the exiled French Protestant theologian Jacques Gousset. He—and then Luzzatto, in his Torah commentary—argued that, because the word keruv shared the same root letters (but in a different order) as rakhav (רכב, “rode”), the keruvim were God’s chariot. Whatever that—or any of these figures—looked like.
Though Jewish scholars have never agreed on the visual details of the keruvim, we inherit from Exodus 25:20 a far more evocative nuance about the orientation of the keruvim—that the faces of the keruvim would be angled towards one another. Whether these faces were youthful, beaked, ethereal, wheeled, or whatever—the keruvim were carved into these corners of God’s home where they would never break eye contact with one another. For a people whose eyes could hardly find God, and for a people whose God may have felt all too distant, God designated these two emissaries who would exist in an eternally intimate encounter.
The Psalmist who lamented “Adonai, I seek Your face!” (Psalm 27:8) never knew the luck of the keruvim. The keruvim were far from God. After all, God had commanded our ancestors not to make earthly depictions of their most heavenly concerns (Exodus 20:4). Still, these eternally present substitutes for God’s transcendent Self were, unlike God, always seeing some almost-divine figure and always seen by some almost-divine figure—each other. Two figures who always see each other and are always seen by each other are entrusted with protecting the holiest of God’s writ. Moreover, these keruvim came not only to trust each other fully, but, according to Rav Katina in the Babylonian Talmud, these keruvim came to love each other fully. Rav Katina therefore recounted that, when God’s cherished people would travel to visit Jerusalem on Passover, Sukkot, and Shavu’ot, the pilgrims would always find these keruvim in a romantic embrace (Yoma 54a).
I have many reservations about artificial intelligence, and I have many reservations about faceless robots. Like most humans, I have come to believe that there are many spirits in this world whom we can trust—fellow members of this species, and, of course, God. Through hearing, seeing, or otherwise interacting with one another—as the silent keruvim modeled for our spiritual forebears for centuries—we grow closer to one another when we are in each other’s presence. The way we grow fonder of one another is rarely by merely serving each other or by assigning tasks to one another. Rather, the time we spend together transforms us. We could write bullet point lists of what we do in this world, but our acts alone rarely demonstrate what it is that renders each of our souls unique. There is no better way for us to discover each other than coming into each other’s presence. Spending enough time together to form honest and deep relationships allows us—like the keruvim—to entrust each other to guard what our hearts deem most sacred.
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