Is your rabbi’s sermon written by AI?

Read Rabbi Miriam's latest opinion piece published in the Jewish News.

I’ve seen the fingerprints of AI all over sermons and written parasha pieces of late

It was a Shabbat morning sermon like any other. The Rabbi began. An interesting talk. Perhaps not up to his usual quality, perhaps more flowery than his usual style, but nothing striking. Then he stopped, looked up, and told the congregation that everything said so far had been written by Artificial Intelligence. A ripple of surprise and a chuckle spread around the shul. The second half of the sermon was spent analysing the quality of the first, concluding that it was surprisingly good.

Most Rabbis won’t be that open. I’ve seen the fingerprints of AI all over sermons and written parasha pieces of late. The telltale signs of ChatGPT are em dashes (elongated dashes), a rhetorical, lyrical style, overuse of hyperbolic words like “powerful” and “inspiring” and certain phrases like “not just X but also Y”. Here’s an AI gem I just found in a social media Torah post (em dash and all):

”Redemption doesn’t happen all at once—it unfolds in rhythms over time”.

Ask ChatGPT to write you a rabbi’s sermon on this week’s parasha and you’ll see for yourself.

I’ve dabbled in AI with my own sermons, but only once asked it to write for me. It was erev Yom Kippur, and with 4 talks to give in 25 hours, I fed ChatGPT some bullet points for a Neila drasha. The ideas were my own, and the writing came out like a poem. It seemed brilliant at first. The Chatbot even spooked me with:

“I’ll be here until the gates actually close if you need anything else from me”.

But at a closer look, there were inaccuracies, repetition, and beneath the lyricism, there was a kind of banality that left me feeling flat. From now on I’ll be writing my own material.

It’s not just Rabbis. One of my Bat Mitzvah students shared that her cousin isn’t having any Bat Mitzvah lessons.

“Oh, she is giving a Dvar Torah”, she said, “but she’s planning on getting ChatGPT to write it”.

And indeed, some of the Bnei Mitzvah talks I’ve heard recently have borne the same marks of AI. Not of my own students, Heaven forfend.

Why? Because for both children approaching Bar or Bat Mitzvah, and for us Rabbis, the process matters. For children, the learning journey is far more important than what gets read out on the day. My students will spend hours learning about their parasha, identifying and interrogating what most interests them, then will craft a talk which is truly personal to them and reflective of their process. The presentation on the day is secondary to the parasha becoming “theirs”. No AI can replace that.

For Rabbis, the community wants to know that this is a sermon which has come from the heart – the human heart. They want a sermon which brings together learning from the Torah and a message for this moment, through the Rabbi’s own unique lens.

I know well that Rabbis’ time is short and writing a sermon with AI would save hours of work (one Rabbi I know spends an hour preparing every minute of sermon produced!) You could argue that this time is better spent with congregants. But sermon writing is one part of the job which keeps us scholars beyond Rabbinical school. Most Rabbis I know try to maintain some non-instrumental Torah study, but it’s the sermon which forces us to learn and research each week. Remove Torah, and you remove the source of nourishment which feeds everything else.

There’s a difference between using AI for research, and using it to actually write. Cutting out AI for the research stage feels anachronistic today – as laughable as suggesting we cut out Google, or the internet. But that crucial lightbulb moment when the Rabbi or Bnei Mitzvah child finds “the” idea and takes it forward – in their own words – without that, both they and their audience misses out.

I for one cringe almost daily, reading and hearing words that have clearly come from a Large Language Model. Words whose poetry and elegance belie their lack of humanity. I mourn the loss of learning for so many children approaching Bar and Bat Mitzvah. And I worry for both Rabbis and congregations with such a shiny time-saving product freely available. Give me the crude and clumsy but real words of a human being any day.