Productivity Is a Drag. Work Is Divine.
6 min read
Why should humans do anything, if machines can do it better? The answer is crucial to the future of human civilization—and may just lie in religious texts from centuries ago.
From the digital (Google searches and Slack chats) to the purely mechanical (washing machines and microwaves), humans use tools nearly constantly to enhance or replace our own labor. Those that save time and effort are easy to appreciate—I have yet to meet someone who misses scrubbing clothes by hand. But the rapid rise of artificial intelligence—which can now write essays and poetry, create art, and substitute for human interaction—has scrambled the relationship between technology and labor. If the creators of AI models are to be believed, all of this has happened even before the technology has reached its full potential.
As this technology improves and proliferates—and as we can delegate more of our tasks to digital assistants—each of us must decide how to devote our time and energy. As a scholar of Jewish texts, I have spent the past 12 years working with a team of engineers who use machine-learning tools to digitize and expand access to the Jewish canon. Jewish tradition says nothing of ChatGPT, but it is adamant about work. According to the ancient rabbis, meaningful, creative labor is how humans channel the divine. It’s an idea that can help us all, regardless of our faith, be discerning adopters of new applications and devices in a time of great technological change. If you have ever felt the joy of untangling a seemingly intractable problem or the adrenaline rush that comes from applying creative energy to shape the world, then you know that worthwhile labor helps us channel our best selves. And we cannot afford to cede it to the robots.
What Americans colloquially call “work” divides into two categories in ancient Hebrew. Melakhah connotes creative labor, according to early rabbinic commentaries on the biblical text. This is distinct from avodah, the word used to describe more menial toil, such as the work that the enslaved Israelites perform for their Egyptian taskmasters as described in the Book of Exodus. Pirkei Avot, a third-century rabbinic treatise filled with life advice, charges its readers to “love work.” Even then, it was part of a textual tradition that distinguishes between those kinds of work we must love and those we just love to avoid. Most of the tech tools we use on a regular basis attempt to reduce our avodah: to speed up rote labor or make backbreaking tasks easier. In a perfect world, I believe, such tools would then free people up to spend more time on our melakhah.
Melakhah is most famous in rabbinic literature as being the overarching category for the 39 types of work that are forbidden on the Jewish Sabbath. Sometimes called “thoughtful labor,” these include actions such as sowing and reaping, building and destroying, and writing and erasing. At its core, melakhah requires intention. Tasks that allow you to set it and forget it are by definition not among the most serious violations of Shabbat. According to the rabbis of the classical rabbinic period, who lived and wrote in the first six centuries of the Common Era, such tasks are not the kind of work that allows us to exercise our divinely given ability to shape and change the world.
In Avot DeRabbi Natan, a companion volume to Pirkei Avot, the very act of Creation in which God produces the world using language is framed as a quintessential example of melakhah. “Let there be light” may seem as effortless to modern readers as “Abracadabra!” but Genesis categorizes this act as labor, noting, “God rested on the seventh day from all the work which God had made” (Gn 2:2). Avot DeRabbi Natan argues that God’s choice to describe “Let there be light” as “work” is a testament to the value of creative labor. The human capacity to work, then, is a way that we imitate God.
That conclusion may sound blasphemous in our modern age, when many social scientists and therapists insist that leaving work behind at the end of the day allows one to be a better partner and parent, whereas a failure to compartmentalize one’s job leads to burnout. But such advice, unlike the ancient texts, fails to distinguish between God’s life-giving melakhah and the soul-sucking avodah that comprises many modern lives.
Perhaps because of the nature of their jobs, many Americans talk about work as something they would not do if they had a choice. We yearn for vacations, for summer, for time spent away from the grind. And yet, the authors of Avot DeRabbi Natan consider work fundamental to human fulfillment. In the Book of Genesis, God deposits Adam in the Garden of Eden and provides him with the first-ever to-do list: “And God placed him in the garden, to work it and guard it” (Gn 2:15–16). Adam was, quite literally, in paradise—not despite the work he was doing, but because of it.
Some of the ancient texts’ lessons on work seem outdated today. Consider, for example, the extensive discourses on the many steps of the process of making fabric, beginning with shearing, cleaning the wool, combing it, and so on. The rabbis of the third century didn’t have ChatGPT, nor did they devote many words to labor-replacing technologies. But they did live in a time when people had indentured servants, so they could easily envision a life in which labor was delegated to others. The Mishnah, a rabbinic legal work compiled around the year 200, discusses a woman so wealthy that she does not need to do anything but lounge; even her spinning and weaving can be delegated to the household help. But if she does no work at all, the Mishnah warns, she will go crazy.
Modern technologies such as generative AI threaten to make 21st-century Americans like the woman in the Mishnah: Deprived of purpose, convinced that our creative output is useless because a computer can produce a result that is sometimes just as good, or even better. Much of the debate around AI hinges on the question Can a computer do it better? But Jewish texts insist that the most important question is about process, not product. Tools that offer to replace work that I find meaningful aren’t ones I’ll be using anytime soon. I feel fulfilled when I write and when I teach even though I know that emerging large language models can write essays for me and may soon be able to transmit information to my students. I enjoy using my creative powers to bake despite the existence of bakeries that mass-produce delicious cookies in far less time and for far less money than I can.
Some digital “solutions” don’t just steal melakhah, but also make rote tasks proliferate. Are 20 Slack messages really more efficient than one phone call? I can’t quit Slack or totally avoid email, but I can recognize them as forms of avodah and push back against their ubiquity. Technology that doesn’t allow me to devote more of my time to creative labor isn’t worth using.
Jewish law views the story of Creation as a blueprint for structuring the work week. “Six days you shall labor,” proclaims the Book of Exodus—that is, six days of creative work, followed by a day of rest. The implications of this model echo throughout the Bible and beyond: The day of rest is meaningless without the preceding six days of melakhah to sanctify it. At the end of the story of Creation, the Book of Genesis tells us that God deemed the world “very good.” To have a world in which we feel invested and fulfilled—that we can deem very good—we should let the machines do the chores while we, like God, create.
