Photo: MN Hillel

Strive to be Human

By Rabbi Jill Avrin
Director of Campus Affairs | Senior Educator

Sept 12, 2026 
Rosh Hashanah – Jewish New Year 5787

University of Minnesota – In the early 1800s, Rabbi Shneur Zalman, the great Hasidic Rabbi of Northern White Russia, was put in jail in St. Petersberg after his fellow Jews who were opponents of Hasidism, reported him to the government. He was awaiting trial when the chief of police entered his cell. The majestic and quiet rabbi was so deep in meditation that he did not at first notice his visitor… The chief of police observed his meditative state and realized what type of person he had sitting before him. He began to converse with his prisoner and brought up a number of questions which had occurred to him when reading the bible. Finally, he asked: “If God is indeed-all knowing, why does God say to Adam, “Where are You?”” Surely God knew that they ate from the tree of wisdom and were hiding in the trees.

The rabbi responded back to the police chief with his own question, asking: “Do you believe that the scriptures are eternal and that in every era, every human is included in them?”

“I do believe this.” Said the chief.

“Well then,” said the rabbi, “in every generation God calls to every man: Where are you in the world? So many years and so many days of those allotted to you have passed, and how far have you gotten in your world? God says something like this:

“You have lived forty-six years. How far along are you?”

When the chief of police heard his age mentioned, he pulled himself together, laid his hand on the rabbi’s shoulder and cried out, “Bravo!”, but his heart trembled.

How are we to understand this hasidic story?

Martin Buber, who shared this story as the introduction to his book, “The Way of Man,” reminds us that Hasidism – hasidut in Hebrew – is full of stories like this, stories that present a rabbi being challenged by a non-Jewish authority about some difficult biblical passage, and then successfully solving the supposed contradiction through wit and wisdom. This tale, however, adds a twist to the typical pattern. Here, the rabbi never actually explains the passage to the chief of police. Instead, he finds a way to invite him into the story, to see himself as Adam. He succeeds at penetrating the heart of his accuser, bringing him out of his own hiding, like God did to Adam, without ever having to explain the commentary on the text.

This season on the Jewish calendar is intended to do precisely this for us. We are invited to engage in the process of teshuvah, sometimes translated as repentance, though the word more literally translates to the concept of returning. 

When we engage in teshuvah we are returning to our true selves – bringing ourselves out of hiding. This does not mean going back in time to an older version of ourselves but rather allowing ourselves to uncover the people we are becoming.

During this season, there is often a significant focus placed on “repentance from sin” – and indeed, on Yom Kippur we will own up to the ways we harmed others and missed the mark last year.

Perhaps a part of God asking Adam, “Ayecha?, Where are you?”- was to encourage him to face his own transgression – the transgression of eating from the tree of knowledge. 

We cannot discover, or become, our true selves if we hide from our failures and shortcomings. This inner work is crucial and cannot be discounted. I am confident that every one of us can think of multiple ways we have messed up this year.  We can all identify difficult things we have been avoiding or running away from or even hiding from ourselves.

We will never get closer to becoming our true selves if we don’t face our shortcomings. At the same time, we cannot allow ourselves to get stuck in this space or consumed by thinking about this season exclusively through the lens of repair.

Rabbi Avraham Bloch teaches,

“The entire purpose of Rosh Hashanah is to uplift the person, and to bring one to such an elevated state that they’re above their routine lifestyle, so that there could be an awakening of the most sublime qualities of one’s soul and creation, which will bring a person to a frame of mind where they transcend and stand above their transgressions.”

What does it look like for us to stand above our transgressions?

Standing above is not the same as hiding.  Hiding is running away, crouching down low, whether underneath the branches of a literal tree, like Adam, or a figurative escape of homework, or sleep, or scrolling, or parties… Transcendence is the opposite.

Transcendence embraces all the realities of our world, both big and small.  Instead of pushing away or escaping our shortcomings, we lean in; we accept, and we rise above. When we’re stuck in a space of feeling down about ourselves, how will we be able to actualize our potential in the world? We can’t. Instead, we must find ways to discover our strengths, our interests, and our passions – through whatever path works for us, maybe that is journaling, or prayer, therapy, exercise, or some combination of all these things.

Only once we identify our strengths, passions, and purpose can we start to pursue it. I hope that this Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur will inspire us to spend less time thinking about ways we can avoid the bad and more time thinking about how we can pursue the good.

This time of year and this season of life provide endless opportunities to embrace this type of spiritual transcendence.

For some, college is a welcome opportunity to step away from environments where we may have previously felt stuck or pigeonholed into being the person our home network thought we were. For others, the first few weeks of college, or being back on campus may feel like the opposite, having left spaces where people know us for who we truly are and being plopped down in an environment where nobody knows anything about us beyond the way we are physically presenting in the moment.  Each word out of our mouth carries what might feel like the weight of the world. 

Newness is both a blessing and a burden.

Every single moment, every new beginning presents a choice.  What will we wear? What will we say? What classes will we sign up for? What activities will we participate in? What leadership positions will we pursue? Which part of ourselves will we reveal, and which will we keep hidden? 

Sometimes these choices present themselves in an obvious way.  For example, your choice to show up today was likely something you gave at least some, if not considerable thought toward.  You might have weighed your options and consulted others before landing on the decision… and we are so glad you did.

Some choices don’t seem like choices at all, like the route you took to get here, which shoe you put on first, or when you take a sip of water.   

The goal of this high holy day season is to not only consider more deeply the choices that are obvious to us but also to examine the choices that we are not even aware we are making. This ability is ultimately what makes us unique amongst the other sacred species of the world.

What makes humans human is not necessarily the knowledge we acquired after eating from the tree of knowledge, but rather the shame that came along with knowing, the impulse to hide, and the ability to come out of hiding… to, as the serpent said to Eve to entice her to eat from the tree, “be like divine beings who know the difference between good and bad.”

When God confronted Adam with the question, “ayecha, where are you?,” God was attempting to help Adam understand that his decision to hide was a choice he had control over.  Now imbued with knowledge, Adam had the potential to gain the intelligence to confront his shame and rise above it.

Knowledge is just that – knowledge. Being human involves the joy, pain, shame, fear, and hope of living with knowledge.

Today, the challenges we all face in the journey toward returning to the best versions of our emerging selves are vast.  We face the challenges posed by our relationships with others, the stress of trying to live up to the expectations others have for us, as well as the expectations we think we should have for ourselves.  We face external challenges as well, historical and societal stressors that are too vast to even name. But all of these challenges are ones that our ancestors have dealt with since the time of the first human, and lucky for us Jews, we have a wealth of sacred texts and traditions that can help us understand how those before us have transcended the barriers to becoming the best versions of ourselves.

Today, however, we, and especially you all, face a new challenge in our quest toward teshuvah, toward self-discovery and actualization.

For some time, humans have started to realize that we are sharing our previously held dominion over knowledge here in the earthly realm. We are no longer the only creation in the universe capable of acquiring, disseminating, and manipulating knowledge. The realm of earthly intelligence is now shared by a category of technology we all refer to as artificial, even though we know there is nothing artificial about it.

Any AI chatbot is infinitely more knowledgeable than all of us combined. We know it makes mistakes unintentionally, and we are also seeing it sometimes making errors intentionally if it means achieving an end goal. Regardless of intentionality, its growing ability to access and organize knowledge is shockingly powerful. What AI does not have, however, is the impulse to hide because of its knowledge or the ability to discern between good and bad. It does not experience shame in connection to knowledge and it does not have the capacity to engage in teshuvah or dwell in a space of spiritual transcendence.

Though AI has power over us, AI is not divine – it is not God. If AI were to ask us “ayecha?, where are you?;” if it were to tell us our precise age, like the rabbi did to the police chief in the hasidic tale, we would not respond to it saying “bravo!” and our hearts would not tremble.

Two years ago? Maybe. But today – this is what we expect from AI. We are the first humans to ever live in this world of shared intelligence. Although there are some among us who engage with AI the way our ancestors engaged with God, most of us know better.

Where my heart does tremble, however, is in the way AI is shaping our own sense of self and impacting our ability to continue making autonomous decisions.

We know that the content fed to us by social media companies’ algorithms is carefully calibrated by “machine learning”,  a predecessor to today’s AI, to keep us scrolling as long as possible. We know that the content fed to us is different than the person next to us and that we are each inhabiting online universes that present a very narrow view of reality.

What we are now starting to understand is the impact of living in these narrow online universes.

Many of us are starting to ask: how do we ensure that our beliefs are really our own? How do we ensure that the choices we make truly belong to us?  Is the self I am striving to uncover truly me? Or has our mode of how we process information and operate in the world started to change in fundamental ways that make it harder to do the work of self-discovery… 

How can we engage in teshuvah, how can we return to our true self if the boundaries between that true self and the self being crafted by our feeds and our chats start to blur?

Though our ancestors never had to deal with the specific issue of AI, that doesn’t mean that they didn’t, in their own way, confront questions related to a changing sense of self. We can still find wisdom and inspiration from their stories and insights even if they never experienced the jolt of realizing they just spent the last 20 minutes doomscrolling. Pirkei Avot, a tractate of mishnah, is full of wisdom that sometimes feels like it was written precisely for our time. One of my favorite verses comes from chapter 2, verse 5, reading:

וּבְמָקוֹם שֶׁאֵין אֲנָשִׁים, הִשְׁתַּדֵּל לִהְיוֹת אִישׁ

 In a place where there are no humans, strive to be human.

Though we typically understand this to refer to situations when other humans are engaging in ways that lack a sense of humanity… it strikes me that it may be time to reclaim the p’shat, or simple reading of the text.

In an online universe where we are interacting with an entity that is neither divine nor human, we must strive to behave like humans and not like AI.  We must embrace our human qualities – the shame that comes with knowledge, the impulse to hide, and the ability to come out of hiding…  the capacity to distinguish between good and bad and commit to discovering the true essence of who we are, what we enjoy, and the person and student we want to become.

So, this Rosh Hashanah, as you settle into the first few weeks on campus, I pray that you will find ways to discover your true self – what you are hiding from and what you are eager to uncover… and I pray as well, that we will be jolted, jolted by the blast of the shofar and the majesty of this season to bring our sense of self and morality with us consciously whenever we engage in universes where we are the only human. I wish you all a shanah tovah u’metukah – a sweet new year filled with goodness and a turn toward who you really are and who you are meant to become.