What do artificial intelligence and the Jewish holiday of Passover have in common?

AI has taken the world by storm recently, dazzling many and causing serious reservations among others. No longer just a fun tool to play with, AI is increasingly used to create everything from high-quality digital art to full-length newspaper articles, from complex mathematical formulas to beautiful pieces of music. Compared with doing these tasks by hand, the reliable quality, speed and cost savings of AI are apparent to just about everyone.

However, many leaders in the tech community are ringing the alarm bells that AI will endanger countless jobs and creatives warn that AI may spell the death of their livelihoods. AI can also have society-wide impacts: industries as varied as journalism, advertising, computer programming and accounting have the potential to be radically disrupted by AI.

What does this have to do with Passover?

On April 22, Jews around the world will gather for the Seders – festive ritual-heavy Passover meals – to celebrate their freedom from slavery in Egypt some 3,300 years ago. One of the most recognizable practices of Passover is matzah, the unleavened Passover bread. It is an iconic product enjoyed by both Jews and non-Jews alike, and can be found on grocery store shelves year-round in many parts of the country.

Matzah has been consumed since time immemorial, starting when Moses led the Jewish people out of Egyptian slavery. In the millennia since, the recipe remained the same — a simple blend of water and flour kneaded by hand and flattened into circular cake shapes.

But as everything else, matzah has seen its fair share of innovation, as well as controversy. Almost two centuries ago, the art of matzah making was revolutionized when French Jew Isaac Singer invented a matzah-baking machine in 1838. This machine made matzah simpler and cheaper to produce, more consistent in size and quality and easier to churn out in bulk quantities. For many reasons, including the greater availability and cheaper price, this new matzah exploded in popularity.

However, a debate erupted over this new technology. One of the biggest issues with the matzah machines was that it took away jobs from the thousands of impoverished manual laborers who relied on the seasonal work of hand-sorting, rolling and baking the matzah to survive.

Many rabbis also opposed the new development for halachic or Jewish legal reasons: the machines were difficult to properly clean between batches, which many Rabbinic authorities consider crucial to ensuring that the matzah is Kosher for Passover. To assuage these concerns, Singer and the Rabbis came to a compromise where he agreed to produce his machine-made matzah in a square shape, and not the traditional round shape in order to easily identify the difference between the products.

There are a few lessons from the centuries-old matzah dispute that may offer some direction forward for AI.

First, in recent decades, hand-made “Shmurah matzah” has made a comeback. After nearly a century of near total machine-matzah dominance, handmade matzah is now sold in many supermarkets, including Costco. It may be partially attributed to changing tastes or the desire for authenticity, however it is more likely due to the efforts of the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory, who began the “Matzah Campaign” in 1954.

The Rebbe instructed his followers, known as Chabad-Hasidim, to distribute Shmurah matzah to Jews before the Seders. What started as a small endeavor resulted in tens of millions of handmade matzahs given out with love to Jews around the world over the past 70 years, and continues to this day.

On a deeper level, however, handmade matzah represents what I believe is the remedy for our ailing world today: connection. Technology, for all its benefits, creates distance and disconnection between people. The antidote for this is connection – connection to age-old traditions, connection to the fruits of our labor and connection to others through shared ritual.

This is the message of Passover. We join together as a community around the Seder table. At the Seder, we recite the following verse as we consume the matzah—“this is the bread our forefathers ate when they were slaves in Egypt.” The connection we feel, both to our ancestors and with others around the world, is a powerful tool in the fight against the epidemic of loneliness and depression that our society faces.

This Passover, as we come together at the Seder and enjoy matzah, let us appreciate it for what it means (and not just for how it tastes.) If you know someone who doesn’t have a place to go for the Seder, invite them to your home to celebrate Passover. If you, yourself don’t have a Seder, know that you are invited to join our communal Seders at the Chabad of Maine. And of course, if you are in need of matzah, we would be honored to provide you with some.

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