Command F: We Built the Golem. Now What?

Who are we when the systems around us keep telling us what to want, believe, and become? Jenna Arnold speaks with Zvika Krieger, technology adviser and spiritual leader of Chochmat HaLev, about AI, certainty, community, and the search for meaning beyond work. Drawing on his experience as Facebook’s first director of responsible innovation, Krieger examines the difference between allowing speech and amplifying it—and the responsibility built into decisions that platforms often present as neutral. The conversation then turns inward: why a confident answer can feel easier than uncertainty, why job titles cannot carry all of our meaning, and why community matters when familiar sources of identity become unstable. Jewish practices offer ways to respond, including Shabbat as the decision to stop creating before everything is finished. As AI mirrors our preferences and supplies answers on demand, this episode asks what we retain for ourselves: the work of discernment, the willingness to be complicated by other people, and the freedom to define a life by more than its productivity.Full transcript and show notes available at thelandofand.live

Before AI, Jewish stories imagined artificial beings made by human hands. What did those stories ask of their creators? Jenna Arnold speaks with Jewish scholar David Zvi Kalman and Adamah’s Adam Sher about the golem, technological power, and the responsibility that begins when we build something capable of changing the world. Kalman traces the golem from an unformed human being to rabbinic stories of creation and later technological imagination. The conversation moves beyond whether a machine seems alive to the harder problem of what creators must do when rules and obedience fail to guarantee safety. Sher brings that responsibility down to earth: energy, water, communities, feedback, and the limits a powerful system should be designed to respect. Jewish practices such as Shabbat become more than private rituals; they offer a way to think about building the stop into the system. This episode asks whether our technical capacity is outrunning our ability to name obligations—and why making something possible is not the same as making it permissible.Full transcript and show notes available at thelandofand.live

The Pope has weighed in on artificial intelligence. Where are the Jews? With DZ Kalman, we explore why the Vatican's attempt to establish moral guardrails for AI is such a consequential moment, what Jewish history teaches us about the concentration of power, and why the unlikely story of Heinz ketchup might offer a surprisingly useful model for turning values into enforceable standards.Full transcript and show notes available at thelandofand.live

AI can tutor, entertain, and answer almost any question. But if it removes the struggle, what does a child lose the chance to learn? Jenna Arnold speaks with Brooklyn Children’s Museum president and CEO Atiba Edwards, child-development psychologist Tovah Klein, and Jewish scholar David Zvi Kalman about play, resilience, and the responsibilities adults cannot outsource. Edwards asks whether time saved by technology actually becomes time to play—or simply more time to work. Klein challenges the parental impulse to fix everything: children need adults who know them and can help them through disappointment, rather than making disappointment disappear. Kalman asks who should carry the burden of proof before AI enters children’s learning, and what happens when an instant answer replaces the work of deciphering a question together. Through chinuch, the Jewish language of education and formation, the episode asks what we are preparing children for: a world that responds to every demand, or a life that requires patience, judgment, and relationships with other people? What should adults protect when convenience begins to crowd out the experiences that help a child become a person?Full transcript and show notes available at thelandofand.live

What happens when technology promises to keep a conversation going after death? Jenna Arnold speaks with grief educator CJ Infantino, death doula and Buddhist chaplain Alex Sarkissian, and Jewish scholar David Zvi Kalman about grief bots, digital memory, and what it means to be witnessed. Drawing on the death of his wife and his experience raising three children, Infantino challenges the idea that grief is a problem someone else can fix. Sarkissian brings us to the bedside: a good death depends on the individual, and compassionate support begins with their needs, choices, and fears. He asks what happens when an AI companion built for engagement turns comfort into dependence—and whether it knows when to stop. Kalman brings Jewish mourning practices into the conversation: shiva, comforting mourners, and kavod ha-met, the dignity owed to the dead. A simulation might feel comforting, unsettling, or both. Whose needs does it serve, whose consent does it assume, and does it help us face the reality of loss? This episode asks what we owe the living who carry an absence—and the people whose memories we are turning into something that speaks back.Full transcript and show notes available at thelandofand.live

In an age of synthetic creation, what makes art more than an image? Jenna Arnold speaks with artist, journalist, and NYTimes Best Selling author, Molly Crabapple, artist and producer Stephanie Lepp, and Temple of the Moon lead artist James Gwertzman about memory, disagreement, and the communities we build by making things together. Crabapple traces her family’s artistic inheritance into the history of the Jewish Bund and recovers a secular, socialist, defiantly anti-Zionist movement that fought for Jewish dignity and belonging where its members already lived, arguing that a home lives within us. Lepp explores how Faces of X and the Anti-Debate can make difficult perspectives visible without collapsing them into a meaningless middle. Gwertzman describes a Burning Man temple built by volunteers to hold grief, memory, and release—and why the process can matter more than the finished object. Through the lens of lishmah, the Jewish idea of doing something for its own sake, the conversation asks what gets lost when creative work becomes only an output to optimize. AI can generate endless images. What responsibility do we retain for the human lives, constraints, and histories that give them meaning?Full transcripts and show notes available at: thelandofand.live

Long before dating apps, humans built systems for helping people find one another: families, communities, matchmakers, rituals, intuition, and a good amount of unsolicited advice. Jenna Arnold speaks with Greta Tufvesson and Nikki Lewis of The Bevy, Molly Tolsky of Hey Alma, Phillipa James of Fate, and Rabbi Yonah Schiller of Common Era about what happens when one of humanity’s oldest social technologies meets one of its newest. Jewish culture carries the idea of bashert—באַשערט, destined or “meant to be”—alongside traditions that insist love still requires discernment, responsibility, community, and work. As AI promises better matching and fewer wrong turns, this episode asks whether technology can help us find connection without teaching us to optimize the mystery out of it. If algorithms become better at choosing for us, what responsibility do we retain for cultivating intuition, tolerating uncertainty, and becoming people capable of recognizing another human being rather than merely evaluating them?Full episode transcripts and more information available at thelandofand.live

Artificial intelligence is extraordinarily good at giving us an answer. Jewish tradition is unusually interested in what happens before we arrive at one. Jenna Arnold speaks with Rabbi Jason Bonder, Senior Rabbi of Congregation Beth Or, and David Zvi Kalman about havruta—חַבְרוּתָא, the ancient practice of learning in partnership through questioning, disagreement, and interpretation. A true havruta does not exist to confirm what you already think; the partner has a responsibility to expose where your certainty is thin and to make room for an understanding neither person could reach alone. At a moment when AI can polish almost any position into confidence and personalization can turn the world into a mirror, this episode asks a harder question: are we still practicing the human disciplines that allow another person to change us? If disagreement is part of the process rather than evidence of failure, what responsibility do we have to seek out perspectives that resist us—and can a machine ever really do that work on our behalf?Full episode transcripts and more information available at thelandofand.live

In 1977, humanity sent the Voyager Golden Record into space as an attempt to explain ourselves to an intelligence we could not imagine. Nearly fifty years later, we are building another record of who we are through artificial intelligence—one assembled from our books, images, histories, arguments, omissions, and digital traces. Jenna Arnold is joined by Sasha Sagan, Sara Wolkenfeld, and David Zvi Kalman to ask what it means to transmit identity across generations, and what responsibility we carry for the version of ourselves AI will inherit. Jewish tradition gives us l’dor v’dor—לְדוֹר וָדוֹר, “from generation to generation”—not as passive inheritance, but as a demand to receive, interpret, challenge, and retransmit what came before. If interpretation without responsibility breaks the chain, what are we doing to preserve the plurality, contradiction, and uncomfortable truths inside our own record—and are we willing to call ourselves on what we exclude before a machine repeats it back to us as truth?Transcript and more information at: thelandofand.live

What if some of the answers we need for the future have been hiding in the past? Command F is a podcast about the relationship between ancient and modern technologies. As artificial intelligence reshapes how we create, remember, relate, grieve, raise children, make meaning, and understand ourselves, host Jenna Arnold turns toward 5,000 years of Jewish thought, ritual, storytelling, argument, and inherited wisdom to ask what might already exist in the ancient.Across the season, artists, rabbis, technologists, writers, parents, spiritual thinkers, and builders explore practices human beings developed long before AI: prayer, ritual, debate, grief, art, community, memory, and the responsibility of transmitting meaning across generations. This is not a show about pretending the past contains easy answers. It is a show about asking whether the people who came before us left behind technologies for staying human while confronting a future they could not yet name.Learn more at thelandofand.live