Moshe Koppel: Artificial Intelligence and Torah [Prayer Re-Release]

October 6, 2025

AI Summary

5 min read

In a 1956 conference at Dartmouth, researchers set out to make computers do things that people do—play chess, diagnose illness, write coherent text. Nearly seventy years later, Moshe Koppel, a professor of computer science for forty-two years and head of the Dicta lab in Israel, has watched that project exceed nearly every expectation. The latest GPT models, now estimated at a trillion parameters, can pass the bar exam and generate plausible rabbinic responsa. But Koppel’s central argument in this conversation is not about what computers can do. It is about what they cannot do—and why that distinction matters more than ever for Torah study, halakhic decision-making, and the human act of prayer.

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What you'll learn

1 Moshe Koppel: Artificial Intelligence and Torah [Prayer Re-Release]
2 (00:00) **Advertisements** - Sponsorship messages for Magen David Adom and Talmud Daily program.
3 (04:11) **Introduction: The Problem of Total Recall** - David Bashevkin opens with Jorge Luis Borges' story "Funes the Memorius" and the real case of Solomon Shereshevsky, illustrating how perfect memory hinders conceptual thought.
4 (11:51) **Guest Introduction and Political Context** - Bashevkin introduces returning guest Dr. Moshe Koppel and addresses listener concerns about Koppel's involvement with the Kohelet Policy Forum and Israeli judicial reform.
5 (21:57) **Defining Artificial Intelligence** - Koppel explains what AI means and traces its origins to the 1956 Dartmouth conference.
6 (27:24) **Three Levels of AI for Torah: Accessibility** - Koppel describes the first level: making Torah texts more accessible through OCR, vocalization (Nikud), punctuation, and abbreviation expansion.
7 (35:08) **AI for Torah Scholars** - The second level: identifying sources and building citation networks.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Guests on this episode

David Bashevkin

Show Notes

As a hint at our next new series, we want to share with you our 2023 episode with Moshe Koppel—a computer scientist and Talmud scholar—about Torah and its intersection with artificial intelligence.

In a world in which technology puts vast libraries of Torah at our fingertips, we are tasked with thinking more deeply about what essentially human abilities we bring to the enterprise of Torah and tefillah. In this episode we discuss:

What computer-based innovations are on the horizon in the realm of Torah study?
Will AI ever be able to reliably answer our halachic questions?
Will advances in technology drastically change the experience of Shabbos observance?

Tune in to hear a conversation about how AI has the potential to make our Jewish lives richer—if we use it wisely.

Interview begins at 18:21.

Dr. Moshe Koppel is a computer scientist, Talmud scholar, and political activist. Moshe is a professor of computer science at Bar-Ilan University, and a prolific author of academic articles and books on Jewish thought, computer science, economics, political science, and other disciplines. He is the founding director of Kohelet, a conservative-libertarian think tank in Israel, and he advises members of the Knesset on legislative matters. Dr. Koppel is the author of three sharply thought books on Jewish thought and previously joined 18Forty to talk about Halacha as Language.

References:

“Funes the Memorious” by Jorge Luis Borges

The Mind of a Mnemonist by A.R. Luria

Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking by Douglas R. Hofstadter & Emmanuel Sander

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter

Meta-Halakhah: Logic, Intuition, and the Unfolding of Jewish Law