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An 1859 fight over how to make matzah has lessons about the threat of AI today
(JTA) — In the last few months the world has been dazzled by an astonishing sequence of AI systems capable of performing all kinds of difficult tasks — writing code, composing poetry, generating artwork, passing exams — with a level of competence that rivals or exceeds what humans can do. The existence of these AIs has prompted all manner of soul-searching about the nature of humanity. It has also made many people wonder which human tasks are about to be taken over by machines.
The capabilities of these AIs are new and revolutionary, but the story of machines taking over human jobs is not. In Jewish history the most important story of that transition has to do with matzah, and it’s a story that carries important lessons for the present day.
Starting 164 years ago, dozens of European rabbis engaged in a furious debate that would not be fully resolved until the beginning of the 20th century. Matzah, which for millennia had been made by human hands in accordance with the narrow constraints of Jewish law, could now be processed with a series of machines that promised huge savings of time and money. As town after town adopted these machines, opposition began to rise, until it exploded in 1859 with the publication of “An Alert for Israel,” a collection of letters from prestigious rabbis, who adamantly argued that for anyone interested in following the laws of Passover a matzah made with a machine was no better than a loaf of bread.
The arguments for this position were many, but all will sound familiar to anyone following the AI conversation. Like today, some objected to the machines just because they were new and different, but most had more specific concerns. First, there was the matter of lost jobs. In many parts of Europe matzah was made by the poorest members of society, who were given the job as a way to help them raise money before one of the most cost-intensive holidays of the year. Ceding this job to machines would take work from those who could least afford it.
It takes about 20 seconds in a 1,300-degree, coal-and-wood-fired oven to bake shmurah matzah to perfection. (Uriel Heilman)
Beyond economics, there was concern that the machines just weren’t as reliable as people, especially given the rules around matzah-making outlined in Jewish law. What if bits of dough got trapped in the gears, quietly leavening for hours and unknowingly ruining whole batches of matzah in the process? What if the trays warmed the dough too fast? Without proper oversight, how could you trust your own food?
Finally, some objected to the loss of a literal human touch. Jewish law stated that matzah was supposed to be made by people who knew they were baking matzah. A machine, no matter how sophisticated, didn’t “know” anything. How could you eat matzah on Passover knowing that this most important food was made by a mindless machine?
The responses didn’t take long to arrive. “A Cancellation of the Alert,” a collection published the very same yearr, forcefully argued that machine matzah was perfectly fine — and possibly even better than the human product. No, inventions aren’t inherently bad. No, the machines wouldn’t harm the poor, because the machines made matzah less expensive for everyone. No, the machines weren’t prone to error — and they certainly weren’t more error-prone than lazy, careless humans. No, the machines didn’t know what they were doing — but the people who built them did, and wasn’t that enough?
The machines eventually won, but then something happened that I don’t think either side anticipated. With Manichewitz’s machine matzahs claiming most of the American market by the early 20th century, it was now the handmade matzah makers who were on the back foot; it was they and not the machines who needed to demonstrate that they were up to the difficult task of preparing this food with the efficiency and reliability of the machines.
The result is more than a little tragic. Matzah is the Jewish food with the deepest origins of all — deeper than brisket, deeper than latkes, deeper even than challah — and yet it is the ritual food most likely to be picked up at the supermarket and least likely to be made at home. While there are still communities today that exclusively eat handmade matzah, even this job is now largely outsourced to just a few companies that resemble their machine-driven counterparts in scale. While teachers will sometimes demonstrate how to make matzah for educational purposes, across the religious spectrum the era of locally made matzah is over.
Despite the fact that it’s hard to imagine a simpler baked good — matzah is just flour and water, and it’s literally illegal to spend more than 18 minutes making it — its production is treated as though it is only slightly less complicated than constructing a jet engine, and people are worried about shortages as though matzah were a natural resource or an advanced microchip. The transition has been so complete that we barely remember there was a transition at all.
Baked matzah coming out of the oven at Streit’s Matzo factory on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, date unknown. (Courtesy Streit’s Matzo)
Did the rabbis pushing for machine matzah know this was going to happen? Almost certainly not. The economic impact of machine labor is relatively easy to predict, but the psychological and cultural effects are a lot harder. There was probably no way of knowing how machines would change the way we thought about matzah in the long run, but today it’s clear that automating this ancient task has changed our own relationship to Passover’s central food — and because the change has resulted in a lot of alienation from matzah production, I’m not so sure it was a change for the better. Making matzah locally could have been a way to feel connected to the ancient Israelites, who left Egypt so fast that they didn’t have time to make anything else. Instead of emulating this ad-hoc food, we optimized it for cost and efficiency, in the process turning matzah into just another specialty cracker on the grocery store shelf. Was it really worth it?
It’s probably a bit much to say that OpenAI is just a modern Manischewitz, but the parallels between the debate about machine-generated matzah and the present debate about machine-generated everything are useful for considering how short-term policy choices around AI won’t necessarily capture all of the technology’s long-term effects on how human beings want to spend their time. When we relinquish an activity to an AI for economic reasons, we may eventually come to believe that humans are no longer qualified to do the task at all.
Then as now we must balance our economic needs against our ideas about what kinds of activities make for a good and fulfilling life.
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How the Haskalah Changed the Way Jews Experienced Judaism
A Torah scroll. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
The word “Haskalah” conjures up a period of upheaval in 18th century European Jewish life. If you were to ask anybody what the term Haskalah refers to nowadays, in Israel you will be told that “Haskalah Gevoha” means higher education. But once upon a time, Haskalah was a scandalous word to some, and stood for intellectual freedom to others.
It was Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) who was (perhaps unfairly) regarded as the founder of Haskalah — the attempt to combine the Jewish religion and its scholarship with secular cultural and scientific advances.
Mendelssohn was given permission to settle in Berlin, where he came into contact with non-Jewish scholarship. His brilliant philosophical mind soon led to him being accepted into the German cultural elite.
Mendelssohn saw the danger of Jews moving out of the ghetto to assimilate. He believed that by translating the Torah into German, the danger could be averted. He argued that Judaism did not conflict with modern states. It is worth reading his book, Jerusalem: Or on Religious Power and Judaism. In it, he claimed that Jews were not a threat to established societies and religions, and should be granted equality.
Sadly, although he remained completely Orthodox himself, within a generation, all his children married out and abandoned Judaism. At the time, this seemed to negate his position. But his position found support and admirers in much of Central Europe, even in rabbinic circles.
Back in Eastern Europe and Russia, the leaders of the Jewish world saw this trend of accepting and studying secular subjects as a threat to their Jewish life.
When Napoleon attacked Russia, many rabbis sided with the antisemitic tzar against Napoleon, because they feared that if Napoleon brought equality to the Jews, many would abandon Judaism altogether. They also believed that loosened restrictions in Central and Western Europe were leading to assimilation.
This era was described as a “Kulturkampf” (culture war) between the old and the new. And either way, Jews were seen as outsiders. This is why Theodor Herzl believed that Jews would always be alien, and only a Jewish state could keep the Jewish people safe.
Within the Jewish world, the desire for wider knowledge in the realms of medicine, mathematics, and philosophy had always been encouraged by great rabbinic authorities from Maimonides to the Vilna Gaon. But they were not approved for mass consumption.
The movement to open up to the cultural world became known as the Haskalah — with rival camps supporting their own systems of education, language, literature, drama, and ideology. But it often turned into an anti-religious mindset.
At the same time, the Reform movement began in Germany and headed in a different direction. The rivalry between rabbis of different persuasions fractured and altered Jewish communities fundamentally.
In the past, if you wanted to abandon Judaism, your only option was to become a Christian or a Muslim. Now, for the first time, there was a third option — embrace a different strand of Judaism. The cohesion that had been forced on the Jewish people since the Roman exile began to fragment.
Secular Judaism is strong and manifest in Israel. On the other hand, the Haredi world has doubled down on its separatism as the only way to combat the attraction of Western civilization.
Today, there are so many other factions and sects that have developed. And what is called Modern or Open Orthodoxy still adheres to the dream of combining two worlds that generated the Haskalah originally.
The Jewish people face constant challenges from the outside and within. Nothing reflects this more clearly than the history of Haskalah. I can only conclude that this division can be regarded as creative, forcing us to cope with different challenges and to examine our own lives and our own relationship with Judaism.
The author is a writer and rabbi based in New York.
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US Intelligence Raises Doubts About Venezuela Leader’s Cooperation
Venezuela’s interim president Delcy Rodriguez speaks during a press conference, more than a week after the US launched a strike on the country and captured President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, at Miraflores Palace in Caracas, Venezuela, Jan. 14, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Leonardo Fernandez Viloria
US intelligence reports have raised doubts about whether interim Venezuelan President Delcy Rodriguez will cooperate with the Trump administration by formally cutting ties with US adversaries, four people familiar with the reports said in recent days.
US officials have said publicly they want the interim president to sever relations with close international allies like Iran, China, and Russia, including expelling their diplomats and advisers from Venezuela.
But Rodriguez, whose swearing-in ceremony was attended by representatives of those countries early this month, has yet to publicly announce such a move. She became president after the US captured former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on Jan. 3.
The US intelligence reports said it was not clear if she is fully on board with the US strategy in her country, according to the sources, who declined to be identified by name.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled on Jan. 15 to Caracas, where he discussed the country’s political future with Rodriguez. Reuters could not determine if those conversations changed the intelligence agencies’ opinion.
Washington wants to rein in its foes’ influence in the Western hemisphere, including in Venezuela, where Trump seeks to exploit the OPEC nation’s vast oil reserves.
If Rodriguez were to break ties with the US rivals, it would open more opportunity for US investment in Venezuela’s energy sector. But failure to control Rodriguez could undercut Washington’s efforts to direct the country’s interim rulers from afar and avoid a deeper US military role.
The Central Intelligence Agency and the Venezuela government did not respond to requests for comment.
Asked for comment, a senior Trump administration official, who declined to be identified, said US President Donald Trump “continues to exert maximum leverage” over Venezuela‘s leaders and “expects this cooperation to continue.”
ABANDON LONGTIME ALLIES?
The CIA has previously assessed that officials loyal to Maduro, including Rodriguez, were best positioned to govern the country following his ouster.
But critics of Trump’s Venezuela strategy have expressed doubts about the wisdom of keeping Maduro’s loyalists in place as the country’s interim leaders. The concerns about Rodriguez’ reliability were present prior to the US military operation, said two sources.
For Venezuela, the US directive means abandoning its closest allies outside the region. Iran has helped Venezuela repair oil refineries while China has taken oil as repayment for debt. Russia has supplied weaponry, including missiles, to Venezuela‘s military.
Trump has also cited communist-led Cuba as another US foe he wants Venezuela to abandon. Havana has provided security and intelligence support while receiving cut-rate Venezuelan oil.
Since Maduro’s removal, Rodriguez, whose deep ties to the oil sector are crucial to keeping the country stable, has taken steps to stay in favor with Washington including releasing political prisoners and authorizing the sale of 30 million to 50 million barrels of oil to the United States.
In a speech on Sunday, Rodriguez said she has had “enough” of US intervention. Still, US officials have also held positive calls with her in recent days, according to two of the sources.
The Trump administration does not see an immediate alternative to working with Rodriguez, given it has publicly backed her so strongly, two of the sources said.
But US officials are developing contacts with senior military and security officials in case they decide to change their approach, a source briefed on Venezuela policy said.
MACHADO CONSIDERED A LONGER-TERM OPTION TO RUN VENEZUELA
The recent intelligence reports also found that opposition leader Maria Corina Machado is not currently able to run the country successfully in part because she lacks strong ties to the country’s security services or oil sector, the sources said.
Some observers and Machado’s movement say it won a 2024 election that year by a huge margin, though the state backed a Maduro victory. She remains popular with Venezuelans.
Trump told reporters last week he wanted Machado “involved” in the country’s leadership, without providing details.
One person familiar with the administration’s discussions with Machado said she is well-liked by the White House and is considered a longer-term option for a leadership position in Venezuela.
The separate source briefed on Venezuela policy suggested that for now, Machado could be considered for an advisory role but no firm decision had been made. Representatives for Machado did not respond to a request for comment.
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UN Experts Denounce Switzerland for Sentencing Students Over Anti-Israel Protest Activity
Illustrative: Youths take part in the occupation of a street in front of the building of the Sciences Po University in support of Palestinians in Gaza, during the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Paris, France, April 26, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes
UN human rights experts said on Tuesday they had protested to Switzerland after a group of students were sentenced for trespassing after taking part in anti-Israel sit-ins at a Swiss-funded university during the war in Gaza.
The students who took part in the protests in May 2024 were opposing the Swiss university ETH Zurich’s partnerships with Israeli universities, the UN experts said.
“Peaceful student activism, on and off campus, is part of students‘ rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly, and must not be criminalized,” the UN experts said, adding that they had written to the Swiss government and the university to raise the issue.
A spokesperson for the Swiss Foreign Ministry confirmed it had received the message and said it would respond in due course.
An ETH Zurich spokesperson said it had received the letter. It said that of the 40 people that were reported for trespassing, 11 were ETH members, including nine students and two employees.
“The claim that the two sit-ins were peaceful and aimed at dialogue does not match our perception,” the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson also said that the university and the police communicated to the sit-in protesters the potential consequences regarding charges and prosecution for trespassing and gave the demonstrators several deadlines to leave without consequences.
Five students have so far been sentenced for trespassing, resulting in suspended fines of up to 2,700 Swiss francs ($3,516), legal fees of over 2,000 Swiss francs and a criminal conviction on their records which could discourage future prospective employers, the UN experts said.
Ten others who appealed the charges await sentencing and two others were acquitted, they said.
($1 = 0.7679 Swiss francs)