Rebuilding the Temple in the Age of AI
The Duplicity of the Tavnit
Blessed are You, Lord our God…who created the human being in the divine image, in the image of the divine likeness did God fashion the human form (b’zetelm d’mut tavnito)… — The Fourth Sheva Bracha
Exactly as I show you—the pattern (tavnit) of the Tabernacle and the pattern (tavnit) of all its furnishings—so shall you make it. (Exodus 25:9)
For your own sake, therefore, be most careful—since you saw no shape when the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire— not to act wickedly and make for yourselves a sculptured image in any likeness whatever: the form (tavnit) of a man or a woman, the form (tavnit) of any beast on earth, the form (tavnit) of any winged bird that flies in the sky, the form (tavnit) of anything that creeps on the ground, the form of any fish that is in the waters below the earth. (Deuteronomy 4:15-19)
“They exchanged their glory for the image (tavnit) of a bull that feeds on grass.” (Psalm 106:20)
The word tavnit (form, image, pattern)—from the word livnot, to build—appears only five times in the Five Books of Moses and only sporadically in the remainder of the Torah. It appears twice in this week’s parasha, Terumah, to describe the revealed image of the Tabernacle—which some think to be a blueprint—and three times in Deuteronomy as part of an injunction against artisanal idolatry. Most of the other Biblical references suggest a negative, idolotrous connotation to the word tavnit. The positive appearance of the Temple’s tavnit is a Biblical outlier, although it is the first time we meet this word.
Zooming out a bit, we get another positive meaning of tavnit in Jewish life: under the chuppah, the wedding canopy, we recite seven blessings. The fourth is a blessing thanking God for creating the human form, and alluding to the male and female forms that—according to a Midrash—were riven from an original whole. The human being is a tavnit, or at least a tzelem d’mut of a tavnit (formed image of a pattern) of God.
So, why is the same word, tavnit, used to describe the visual form of the Temple, the visual form of a mini-deity, and the visual form of the human being? An answer from psychology reveals that our strengths are also our weaknesses. An answer from strategy reveals that “what got us here, won’t get us there.” The visual form can both elevate and distract. The built thing can both testify to the sublime and become a barrier to it. Presciently, the prophets who criticized the excesses of Temple life gone awry understood that too much focus on a building could lead to confusing means with ends. 2,000+ years of Exile were/are needed to unlearn our conflation of physical structure with metaphysical attention.
Yet we live in the physical world and are aesthetic beings. We human beings may be spiritual beings with non-objectifiable souls, but we also look out from faces and are seen, in turn. We move and touch. We are moved and touched. We stand at a sensory threshold, our being merging with and distinguishing itself from its Umwelt, its surrounding. In this context, we are, like the Temple, a doubled being: we are composed of matter and we are composed in the divine likeness. If too much focus on the building is a kind of materialism, the reverse is also an occupational hazard of religious life: too much negation of the physical, as if spiritual life needed no substrate, no corporeality, no flesh, no crimson, no acacia. Look, the words are just sounds, therefore I won’t say them, says the fool. Jewish festivals, with the exception of Yom Kippur, involve feasting—a banal activity like eating is elevated by its purposive framing. An animalistic activity born of the need to survive is transformed into a ritualistic and social one in which family, friends, and guests “share a table.” The tavnit, at its best, is not an object, but “the between”—the space that gathers, the dwelling that enables nearness. The problem with the tavnit is that it so often becomes a fetish, a pretext for magical thinking, a spectacle.
To be a tavnit of God is the human vocation, and we invoke it in the context of a wedding celebration, not just because the home is intended as a mini-Temple, but because the form of God is not to be worshipped as an object, but to be taken as a summons to authentic relationship, a facing of self and other. In Buber’s terms, we have two ways that we can be in relationship, “I-It” and “I-Thou.” The human tavnit can and should lead to us to the affirmation of a soulful encounter with others. Too often, our relationships are transactional. Likewise, the Temple, and religious life can provide a path to encountering the divine, but too often, they become captives of selfishness: “What can I get out of this?” “How is religion good for me?” “I’ll believe in God only if God answers my prayer” (a thinly veiled command).
The challenge of the tavnit is the challenge of metaphor—how do we allow for comparison to be a form of elucidation rather than diminishment or flattening? “Who is like You, Lord, among the gods…” (Exodus 15:11) The question both brings God within the horizon of idols and suggests that God cannot be compared to another deity. Everything has a tavnit, yet the tavnit of the divine cannot be the same as any other. The Temple looks like other temples, but it must be unique. Its uniqueness cannot simply be at the level of visuals, for any visual template or design can be copied. The Temple cannot be just another Tinder profile so to speak. Yet where is its distinction? Where is the distinction in the individual human? Where is the distinction in the home that makes it different from all others? Not in the four walls. Not in the square footage. Not even in the posters and decorations. The differentiator is emergent, palpable, yet not quite tangible.
In the age of AI where large language models can complete our sentences for us, can imitate our language patterns, can take our visual data and spit out deep fakes and simulations that are quite convincing, where is our non-copypasta humanity to be found? God is like no other god, the human like no other human, the couple like no other couple, the Temple like no other Temple in that its tavnit is in the data, but not of the data. Its being-in-the-world is not conveyed by algorithm, or if it is, the algorithm includes that which is quite mysterious: b’chira, freedom, care, existence, attunement.
I am excited about the technological breakthroughs and gains from innovation that AI will unlock, but, impressive as GPTChat is, the tavnit it reveals is not the tavnit b’zelem d’mut tavnito that we celebrate under the Chuppah. Per the movie Her, there is something misdirected about the love that a person demonstrates for a large language learning model rather than for another person. Yet it is possible for us to relate to one another as bots, too, closing ourselves off because we already know what content the other person will spit back at us. To be a house of God, the Temple can never be so programmatic, so obvious, so basic. Religious life requires routine, but it must also point us to something still unknown. The Temple as paradigmatic tavnit is a structure that cannot be accounted for by structuralism. It is this building that is more than a building and not just a building that has been destroyed and that we must seek to rebuild. It is the relationship to art, to space, and to one another, that is gone, but which we recall, too, under the hopeful sign of the wedding canopy.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins