We often forget how incredible written language is. In fact, we’re so used to gathering information through books or screens that we often overlook a surprising fact – that spoken human language is at least 100,000 years old (with other forms of sound-based communication even older, and used by other animals). And written language is only approximately 5,500 years old. In other words, for about 95% of human history, memory storage, information sharing, and communication was done only through hearing.
This week’s portion, Va’etchanan, brings up both oral and written forms of communication to share the laws God presents to the Israelites, with one of the most famous verses being Deuteronomy 6:4: “Hear, O Israel, Adonai is our God, Adonai is one.” And yet it also contains a recapitulation of the Ten Commandments, and after sharing those words, Moses says,
“Adonai spoke those words—those and no more—to your whole congregation at the mountain, with a mighty voice out of the fire and the dense clouds. [God] inscribed them on two tablets of stone and gave them to me.” (Deuteronomy 5:19, bold mine)
We talk about texts “written in stone,” and how that often leads to an ossification of ideas. That’s why Judaism has a dynamic between the written text and the oral tradition – there’s a reason that Judaism has both the “Written Torah” and “Oral Torah,” with the first being Genesis through Deuteronomy and the second being the conversations, debates and arguments in the Mishnah and Talmud (ironically, the Oral Torah started to get written down approximately 200 CE). The text is the jumping-off point, but the conversation about the text itself is what actually changes behavior.
The primacy of sound, voice, and conversation actually makes me a little less scared about the rise of artificial intelligence and Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT. There are real concerns (and promises) about just how effective LLMs can be if they are entrusted with writing, coding, teaching, or even thinking. Yet, think about how poorly Siri deals with conversational requests. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve heard my kids trying desperately to get our Alexa to play the one song they requested. Ian Bogost recently wrote a piece in The Atlantic about “The AI Mirage,” and just how ineffective computers have been – and are likely to be – when it comes to simple spoken language, especially in contrast to what humans can do:
When it launched Apple Intelligence (the company’s name for the AI stuff in its operating systems) last year, the world’s third-most-valuable company promised a rich, contextual understanding of all your data, and the capacity to interact with it through ordinary phrases on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. For example, according to Apple, you would be able to ask Siri to “send the photos from the barbecue on Saturday to Malia.”
But in my experience, you cannot ask even the souped-up Siri to do things like this. I embarked on a modest test of Apple Intelligence on my Mac, which can handle the feature. It failed to search my email, no matter how I phrased my command. When I tried to use Siri to locate a PDF of a property-survey report that I had saved onto my computer, it attempted to delegate the task to ChatGPT. Fine. But ChatGPT provided only a guide to finding a survey of a property in San Francisco, a city in which I do not live. Perhaps I could go more general. I typed into Siri: “Can you help me find files on my computer?” It directed me to open Finder (the Mac’s file manager) and look there. The AI was telling me to do the work myself. Finally, I thought I would try something like Apple’s own example. I told Siri to “show me photos I have taken of the barbecue,” which resulted in a grid of images—all of which were stock photos from the internet, not pictures from my library.
So while written language has been – and will be – a crucial way we communicate, and we will be navigating new advances in artificial intelligence for decades to come, our deep evolutionary heritage of spoken language may be what ensures the core of our humanity.
And indeed, the Rabbis of the Talmud said that the Ten Commandments should not be recited as part of our daily prayer services because they were worried people might believe that only that part of the Torah was revealed on Sinai. (Berakhot 12a). In other words, they were worried that the laws written in stone would remain static and unchanging. Instead, twice a day in the Shema, we are to listen. While writing is a fantastic way to share knowledge, ideas, and laws, it’s through listening that we can truly connect to each other – and to the Divine.
Rabbi Geoffrey A. Mitelman is the Founding Director of Sinai and Synapses, an organization that bridges the scientific and religious worlds and is being incubated at Clal – The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. He was ordained by the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and served as Assistant and then Associate Rabbi of Temple Beth El of Northern Westchester. In addition to My Jewish Learning, he’s written for The Huffington Post, Science and Religion Today, and WordPress.com. He lives in Westchester with his wife, Heather Stoltz, a fiber artist, and their daughter and son.