# When Knowledge Is Cheap, Insight Is Everything: Jevons Paradox applied to Torah Learning
**作者**: Zohar Atkins
**日期**: 2026-05-12T11:53:59.000Z
**来源**: [https://x.com/ZoharAtkins/status/2054168204658815070](https://x.com/ZoharAtkins/status/2054168204658815070)
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In 1865, an English economist named William Stanley Jevons published a book that almost no one reads anymore. It was called The Coal Question, and it argued that Britain was about to ruin itself. The argument turned on a paradox so counterintuitive that Jevons spent most of the book establishing it was real before he allowed himself to draw conclusions from it.
The puzzle was this: James Watt’s improved steam engine, patented in 1769 and refined for decades after, was by design a more efficient machine. It produced more mechanical work from less coal. Every reasonable observer predicted that Britain would consume less coal as Watt’s engines spread. The math was airtight: a given amount of coal now produced more useful energy; therefore, to produce a given amount of useful energy, you needed less coal; therefore, total coal consumption would fall. Jevons looked at the numbers and discovered that the opposite had happened. Between Watt’s patent and the publication of The Coal Question, British coal consumption had risen more than tenfold.
What Jevons saw was that efficiency generates demand. Cheaper steam power produced applications for mechanical work that had been economically impossible at the old prices. Railroads became viable. Iron smelting became cheap enough to industrialize. Ocean shipping was reorganized around coal-fired engines. The savings per engine were real, and they were swamped completely by the proliferation of engines.
Jevons drew a darker conclusion than the one he is now remembered for. He thought Britain would exhaust its coal reserves within a century and lose its industrial supremacy as a result. He was wrong about that, because he could not foresee oil. But the underlying observation, that efficiency in an input produces explosive growth in demand for that input, turned out to be one of the most durable findings in economics. It is now called the Jevons paradox, and it shows up everywhere people study the diffusion of new technology. Cheaper lighting lengthened the working day and lit up the night sky. Cheaper computation built an information economy that now consumes more electricity than most countries. The pattern repeats. When the cost of an input collapses, that input becomes the substrate of a world that could not previously exist.
We are about to learn this lesson again. The input this time is knowledge, and the place we are about to learn it first is the Jewish study hall.
For most of human history, access to the great Jewish textual traditions was rationed by labor. To read Maimonides in his own twelfth-century Judeo-Arabic, you needed years of training. To trace a legal argument across the Babylonian Talmud, the Jerusalem Talmud, the medieval commentators, and the early modern halakhic authorities, you needed a library most people never set foot in and a lifetime most people never had. Even after the printing press, even after the digitization of nearly the entire corpus on the open-access platform Sefaria, the actual capacity to make these texts speak to you, to ask them a question and receive a real answer, remained the property of a small guild of trained readers. The cost of consulting the tradition was high, and so consultation was rationed.
LLLms like Yochai and Rav Dicta — along with base models themselves — have collapsed that cost. A teenager in the Israeli desert town of Be’er Sheva with a phone can now ask a question about the meaning of a difficult line in Rashi’s commentary on the Bible and receive, within seconds, an answer that draws on works she has never heard of, in a language she actually speaks, calibrated to her level. The corpus has not changed. The cost of consulting it has fallen by orders of magnitude.
A reasonable person, watching this happen, might predict that the role of the rabbi, the traditional human interface to the corpus, is about to contract. If anyone can ask the tradition a question, who needs the person who used to answer it? This is the wrong prediction, and Jevons explains why. The cost of consulting Torah is collapsing while the demand for what Torah is supposed to produce stands to explode. When consultation gets cheap, the bottleneck migrates somewhere else. It migrates to a place the tradition has been pointing at for fifteen hundred years and almost nobody, including the rabbinic world itself, has organized its life around.
The bottleneck moves to chiddush, a Hebrew word that means, roughly, the production of genuine new insight from inherited material. The English word innovation gives the wrong flavor. So does originality. Chiddush is closer to seeing something true that nobody saw before, in a text that was already there. It is the act of reading that produces, rather than the act of reading that absorbs. The rabbinic tradition has held for a very long time that this act is what Torah study is for, and that without it, the study hall is not really functioning. The Talmud states this directly: a house of study cannot stand without chiddush (Chagigah 3a). By which the tradition means: without something new being seen, what is happening in the room is no longer Torah, however many books are open on the tables.
It is worth pausing here to note that the rabbinic tradition was not, in the nineteenth century, sitting around waiting for an English economist to explain to it how human desire interacts with supply.
The book of Kohelet, known in English as Ecclesiastes, already observed that the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing (Kohelet 1:8). The Talmud, in Sukkah 52b, sharpens the principle into a structural law: there is a small organ in a person, the Gemara says, which when starved is satisfied and when satisfied is starved. On the same page, the sage Abaye generalizes: the greater a person, the greater his appetite. The early rabbinic anthology Kohelet Rabbah (1:13) gives the principle its proverbial form: a man with a hundred wants two hundred. The eighteenth-century ethical work Mesillat Yesharim, the standard Jewish text on moral psychology, makes the same observation as a developmental claim: indulgence does not satisfy desire, it expands desire’s capacity (chapters 1 and 13). The nineteenth-century commentator Malbim, glossing the book of Proverbs (21:17), says the same of pleasure as such: attachment enlarges want rather than quieting it.
What the tradition was abundance generates further appetite. This is the same observation Jevons made about coal, transposed from industrial input to human desire. Or rather, Jevons’s observation about coal is the same one Kohelet made about the eye, transposed from human desire to industrial input.
Now we can return to the line from Chagigah 3a: a house of study cannot stand without chiddush (novel insight). The reason a house of study cannot stand without chiddush is precisely what Kohelet identified about the eye and Jevons identified about coal. Abundance generates further appetite. A learner with access to a tradition will be moved, by the structure of desire itself, to want more from it than the tradition has yet given. The only thing capable of meeting that expanded appetite is the production of new insight from inside the tradition.
For most of Jewish history, this collapse was avoided through a brutal economic fact. Producing chiddush required so much preparatory labor (reading the text, the parallel texts, the commentaries on the text, the commentaries on the commentaries) that the appetite was, for most learners, suppressed by the impossibility of feeding it properly. The obligation to produce chiddush, which the Talmud frames as universal, was theoretically binding on every learner and practically binding only on the small number of people who could afford the labor. The practical fact ate the theoretical principle for breakfast, and the tradition, with some discomfort, accommodated the discrepancy by treating chiddush as the elite achievement of a few rather than the obligation of all.
What happens when the practical fact changes?
You are commanded to produce something new.
When the cost of consulting a corpus falls, two things happen at once. Demand for the corpus increases. More people consult it, more often, about more things. That part is obvious. The less obvious part is that the bottleneck migrates.
When books were expensive, the binding constraint on Torah was access to books. When print loosened that, the constraint became literacy. When literacy spread, the constraint became time. When time pressures eased, the constraint became guidance: someone to tell you which page to open and why it mattered. Each loosened constraint revealed the next.
AI loosens the constraint of consultation: the friction of finding, translating, and contextualizing relevant sources. The deeper constraint is chiddush itself: the production of genuine new insight from the material now so easily at hand.
Here Jevons hands off to the French economist Jean-Baptiste Say. Say’s proposition, that supply creates its own demand, was a claim about how new productive capacity reshapes desire. When sewing machines lowered the cost of clothing, people began to imagine wardrobes. When recorded music lowered the cost of hearing a symphony, people discovered that music could accompany every hour of the day. New supply generated demand that had not previously existed because it had not been imaginable.
Cheap consultation of the corpus will do the same to chiddush. When a learner can, in an afternoon, gather every source the medieval commentators cite on a given verse along with their full midrashic and halakhic afterlife, the question that suddenly becomes pressing is what do I see, having seen what they saw? The supply of accessible material generates a demand for synthesis that did not exist when the material was inaccessible. A student who two years ago could spend a semester just locating the relevant texts can now spend that semester actually thinking with them. The chiddush has nowhere to hide.
For most of Jewish history a serious learner could honorably say, I would produce chiddush if I could, but I cannot. The corpus is too vast, my time is too short, my teachers are too few. That sentence has expired. The obligation has gone from aspirational to operational.
The first objection runs that AI-assisted chiddush is not really chiddush. The model did the work. The human pressed the buttons. To call the output an insight is to debase the word.
This objection depends on a particular theory of what chiddush is. If chiddush is invention, the addition of something new to the tradition from outside it, then yes, scaling production cheapens the currency. The rabbinic tradition has always understood chiddush differently. Chiddush is recovery: the surfacing of structure that was always present in the gift but not yet visible.
The locus classicus is in the Talmud, tractate Menachot 29b. Moses ascends to heaven and finds God tying ornamental crowns onto the letters of the Torah. He asks why. God tells him that one day, generations hence, a man named Akiva ben Yosef will derive heaps and heaps of laws from each one of those tags. Moses asks to see him. God tells him to turn around, and suddenly Moses is sitting in the eighth row of Akiva’s study hall. He cannot follow the discussion. He does not understand what the students are saying. His strength fails him. Then a student asks Akiva where some particular ruling comes from, and Akiva answers: halakha l’Moshe miSinai, a law given to Moses at Sinai. And Moses, the text says, is settled.
Everything turns on what settles him. Akiva’s chiddush, which Moses himself could not have produced, traces back to him. The thing Akiva sees was always there, implicit in the gift, waiting for someone with eyes to surface it.
This is the rabbinic theory of chiddush in compressed form. The Torah has a structure with depth, and chiddush is the surfacing of structure that was always present but not yet visible. The crowns were tied at Sinai. Akiva became their reader. If this is what chiddush is, the worry about scale dissolves. There is no risk of running out of crowns. The tradition has no upper limit on the structure it contains, because the structure is the surplus of revelation over comprehension. Every generation surfaces what its tools allow it to surface. The early rabbinic sages saw one set of crowns; their medieval successors saw another; each set saw what their methods made visible. There is no reason to think we have reached the end of what is recoverable.
A second objection runs deeper. Even granting that chiddush is recovery and that AI can lower the cost of the preparatory work, something disordered remains about a world in which insight becomes cheap. A tradition is more than its insights. Cheap chiddush, the worry goes, produces a population of solo learners typing prompts into a chatbot, each generating private surfacings, none of them building anything together. The corpus survives; the people of the book don’t.
This is the right worry, and the tradition met it on the same page of the Talmud as the Akiva story. In Bava Metzia 85b, the third-century sage Reish Lakish is marking the burial caves of the great rabbis. He locates them all except for the cave of Rabbi Chiya, which keeps eluding him. He breaks down. Did I not analyze Torah like Chiya? A heavenly voice answers: yes, you analyzed like him. You did not spread like him. Chiya, the voice says, sowed flax. From the flax he made nets. With the nets he trapped deer. He fed the meat to orphans and made parchment from the hides. On the parchment he wrote the five books of Moses. He went to towns with no teachers and taught five children five books and six children six orders of the Mishnah, and told them: until I return, teach each other. In this way, he said, I have made it so that Torah will not be forgotten from Israel.
Reish Lakish was a virtuoso of analysis. Chiya was a builder of rooms. The heavenly voice’s verdict ranks them: peerless analysis without spreading is enough to lose your cave. The rabbi whose work survives is the one who builds the room in which others learn.
A different Talmudic debate, in Horayot 14a, stages the same tension as institutional politics. The question is which is greater: Sinai, meaning the master of the corpus, the one who has read everything, or oker harim, the uprooter of mountains, the master of original insight who tears the tradition open. The community votes Sinai, with the slogan that everyone needs the master of wheat (a play on the Aramaic for master of the corpus). The academy, in lived practice, gave its presidency to the mountain-uprooter, the third-century sage Rabbah, for twenty-two years. The official answer and the lived answer diverged. We are about to experience that divergence sharply. The wheat is being technologized. The question of who can do something with it is going to dominate everything.
There is a small parable in the kabbalistic tradition. A man from the mountains comes down to the city, eats bread for the first time, and asks what it is. He is told it is made from wheat. He returns to his mountain, gathers raw wheat, eats it dry by the handful, and goes home convinced he has tasted what the city tastes. He has eaten the input. He has missed the thing made when the input is ground and kneaded and salted and left to rise and finally exposed to fire. Bread lives only in the baking.
AI is the new master of wheat. It is unusually capable at producing the relevant source, the right translation, the missing citation. Information was never the goal. A learner who consumes AI-generated wheat by the handful, who asks ChatGPT for the meaning of the weekly Torah portion and stops there, has eaten dry grain and gone home thinking she has tasted Torah. She has tasted the input. The tradition lives in what gets made from it.
The vocation of the learner in the age of cheap wheat is to become a baker: to take the now-abundant raw material and turn it into something a human can eat. Chiddush that surfaces structure. Communities that perpetuate the learning. Students who teach each other when the teacher is gone. This is true for the rabbi and it is true for the nineteen-year-old in Be’er Sheva, because the obligation was always universal in principle (Chagigah 3a). The economics restricted it. The economics just changed.
Jevons’ coal built a new England, more dependent on coal than the old one and more capable of using it. Cheap knowledge will build a new Torah world, more dependent on the corpus than the old one and more capable of working it. The question is whether the people inside that world will recognize the work for what it is and pick up the rolling pin.
I write from my perspective as a rabbi and teacher of Torah, but the arguments I make here well apply to academic knowledge production, too.
If you enjoyed this piece, you might enjoy Alexandria - our great books library with an AI tutor in the margins.
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*导出时间: 2026/5/14 10:26:32*
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## 中文翻译
# 当知识变得廉价，洞见便是一切：杰文斯悖论在妥拉研习中的应用
**作者**: Zohar Atkins
**日期**: 2026-05-12T11:53:59.000Z
**来源**: [https://x.com/ZoharAtkins/status/2054168204658815070](https://x.com/ZoharAtkins/status/2054168204658815070)
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1865年，一位名叫威廉·斯坦利·杰文斯的英国经济学家出版了一本现在几乎没人读的书。这本书名叫《煤炭问题》，书中论证了英国即将走向毁灭。这个论点建立在一个悖论之上，这个悖论如此反直觉，以至于杰文斯在书中花费了大部分篇幅来证明它的真实性，然后才敢从中得出结论。
难题是这样的：詹姆斯·瓦特改良的蒸汽机于1769年获得专利，并在随后的几十年中不断改进，按设计来说是一台效率更高的机器。它消耗更少的煤，却能产生更多的机械功。每一个理性的观察者都曾预言，随着瓦特发动机的普及，英国的煤炭消耗量将会减少。其中的数学逻辑无懈可击：给定数量的煤现在能产生更多的有用能量；因此，要产生给定数量的有用能量，所需的煤就更少；因此，煤炭的总消耗量将会下降。杰文斯查看了数据，却发现事实恰恰相反。从瓦特获得专利到《煤炭问题》出版，英国的煤炭消耗量增长了十倍以上。
杰文斯看到的是，效率会催生需求。更便宜的蒸汽动力使得机械工作在经济上成为可能，这在旧的价格体系下是无法实现的。铁路变得有利可图。炼铁成本降低到了足以实现工业化。海洋航运围绕燃煤发动机进行了重组。每台发动机的节省是实实在在的，但它们完全被发动机数量的激增所淹没。
杰文斯得出了一个比他现在所因之而名的结论更黑暗的结论。他认为英国的煤炭储备将在一个世纪内耗尽，并因此失去其工业霸权。他在这一点上错了，因为他无法预见石油的出现。但是，其潜在的观察结果——即某种投入的效率提高会导致对该投入的需求爆炸性增长——已被证明是经济学中最持久的发现之一。它现在被称为杰文斯悖论，并且出现在任何研究新技术扩散的地方。更廉价的照明延长了工作日，点亮了夜空。更廉价的计算建立了一个信息经济，其现在消耗的电力比大多数国家还多。这种模式不断重复。当某种投入的成本崩溃时，该投入就成为一个以前不存在的世界的基底。
我们即将再次吸取这个教训。这一次，投入是知识，而我们首先将要学习这一课的地方是犹太经学院。
在人类历史的大部分时间里，接触伟大的犹太文本传统是由劳动定额配给的。要用迈蒙尼德本人的12世纪犹太-阿拉伯语阅读他的著作，你需要多年的训练。要追溯一个跨越《巴比伦塔木德》、《耶路撒冷塔木德》、中世纪评注者和现代早期律法权威的法律论证，你需要一个大多数从未踏足过的图书馆，和大多数从未拥有过的一生。即使在印刷术发明之后，即使在开放获取平台 Sefaria 上对几乎整个语料库进行了数字化之后，真正让这些文本向你开口、向它们提问并得到真实答案的能力，仍然是少数受过训练的读者的行会财产。咨询传统的成本很高，因此咨询是被配给的。
像 Yochai 和 Rav Dicta 这样的大语言模型——以及基础模型本身——已经崩塌了这一成本。一位在以色列沙漠小镇贝尔谢巴拿着手机的青少年，现在可以询问拉什（Rashi）对《圣经》某句难懂经文注释的含义，并在几秒钟内收到答案，这些答案引用了她从未听说过的著作，用她实际使用的语言，并针对她的水平进行了调整。语料库没有改变。咨询它的成本已经下降了几个数量级。
一个理性的人，看着这一切发生，可能会预测拉比——即传统的人类界面——的角色即将收缩。如果任何人都可以向传统提问，谁还需要那个过去负责回答的人呢？这是一个错误的预测，杰文斯解释了原因。咨询妥拉的成本正在崩塌，而对妥拉理应产出的东西的需求则有望爆炸式增长。当咨询变得廉价时，瓶颈就会转移到别处。它转移到一个传统指向了一千五百年、但几乎没有人——包括拉比界本身——围绕它来组织生活的地方。
瓶颈转移到了 *Chiddush*（希迪什）上，这是一个希伯来词，大致意思是从继承的材料中产生真正的新洞见。“创新”这个英文词给人的感觉不对。“独创性”也是如此。*Chiddush* 更接近于在一段原本就存在的文本中，看到以前没有人看到的真理。这是一种产生的阅读行为，而不是吸收的阅读行为。拉比传统很久以来就认为，这种行为才是妥拉研习的目的，如果没有它，经学院就无法真正运作。《塔木德》直接指出了这一点：如果没有 *chiddush*，经学院就无法立足（Chagigah 3a）。传统所说的意思是：如果没有看到新的东西，房间里发生的就不再是妥拉，无论桌子上打开了多少本书。
值得在这里停顿一下，请注意拉比传统在19世纪并不是坐等一位英国经济学家来解释人类欲望是如何与供给相互作用的。
《传道书》，英文称为 Ecclesiastes，早就观察到“眼饱看不尽，耳听听不完”（传道书 1:8）。《塔木德》在《 Sukkah 52b》中，将这一原则强化为一条结构定律：人体内有一个小器官，*Gemara* 说，当它饥饿时它就满足，当它满足时它就饥饿。在同一页，圣哲 Abaye 概括道：人越伟大，他的胃口就越大。早期的拉比文集《大传道书》（1:13）以谚语的形式表达了这一原则：拥有一百的人想要二百。18世纪的伦理著作《正直者之路》，犹太道德心理学的标准文本，将这一观察作为一种发展性主张：放纵并不能满足欲望，而是扩大了欲望的容量（第1章和第13章）。19世纪的评注者 Malbim 在注释《箴言》（21:17）时，对快乐本身也说了同样的话：依恋不是平息欲望，而是扩大了欲望。
传统所拥有的这种丰富性会产生进一步的食欲。这与杰文斯关于煤炭的观察是一样的，只是从工业投入转换到了人类欲望。或者更确切地说，杰文斯关于煤炭的观察与《传道书》关于眼睛的观察是一样的，只是从人类欲望转换到了工业投入。
现在我们可以回到《Chagigah 3a》的那句话：如果没有 *chiddush*（新洞见），经学院就无法立足。经学院不能没有 *chiddush* 而立足的原因，正是《传道书》关于眼睛所确定的以及杰文斯关于煤炭所确定的东西。丰富性会产生进一步的食欲。一个能够接触到传统的学习者，将被欲望的结构本身所驱使，想要从中获得比传统目前给予的更多的东西。唯一能够满足这种扩大了胃口的东西，就是从传统内部产生新的洞见。
在犹太历史的大部分时间里，通过一个残酷的经济事实避免了这种崩溃。生产 *chiddush* 需要大量的准备工作（阅读文本、平行文本、对文本的评注、对评注的评注），以至于对于大多数学习者来说，这种食欲被无法适当喂养的不可能性所压抑。产生 *chiddush* 的义务，被《塔木德》界定为普遍义务，在理论上对每个学习者都有约束力，但实际上只对少数能够负担这种劳动的人有约束力。现实的情况把理论的原则生吞活剥了，传统带着些许不适，通过将 *chiddush* 视为少数人的精英成就而不是所有人的义务来适应这种差异。
当实际情况发生变化时会发生什么？
你被命令去创造新东西。
当咨询语料库的成本下降时，两件事会同时发生。对语料库的需求增加。更多的人更频繁地就更多的事情咨询它。这部分是显而易见的。不太明显的部分是瓶颈发生了转移。
当书籍昂贵时，妥拉的约束条件是获取书籍。当印刷术缓解了这一点时，约束变成了识字。当识字普及时，约束变成了时间。当时间压力缓解时，约束变成了指导：需要有人告诉你打开哪一页以及为什么它很重要。每一个被缓解的约束都揭示了下一个。
AI 缓解了咨询的约束：寻找、翻译和将相关源置于语境中的摩擦。更深层的约束是 *chiddush* 本身：从现在容易获得的材料中产生真正的新洞见。
在这里，杰文斯将接力棒交给了法国经济学家让-巴蒂斯特·萨伊。萨伊的命题，即供给创造其自身的需求，是关于新的生产能力如何重塑欲望的主张。当缝纫机降低了服装的成本时，人们开始想象衣柜。当录制的音乐降低了听交响乐的成本时，人们发现音乐可以伴随一天的每一个小时。新的供给产生了以前不存在的需求，因为它们以前是无法想象的。
廉价地咨询语料库将对 *chiddush* 做同样的事情。当一个学习者在一下午内就能收集中世纪评注者对某句经文引用的所有来源，以及它们完整的米德拉什和律法后续影响时，突然变得紧迫的问题是，既然看到了他们所看到的，我看到了什么？可获得材料的供给产生了一种综合的需求，而这种需求在材料无法获得时是不存在的。一个两年前可能要花整个学期才能找到相关文本的学生，现在可以花那个学期真正地用它们进行思考。*Chiddush* 无处遁形。
在犹太历史的大部分时间里，一个严肃的学习者可以体面地说，如果我能，我会产生 *chiddush*，但我不能。语料库太浩瀚了，我的时间太短，我的老师太少。这句话已经过期了。义务已经从抱负层面转变为操作层面。
第一种反对意见认为，AI 辅助的 *chiddush* 并不是真正的 *chiddush*。模型做了工作。人类按下了按钮。把输出称为洞见是贬低了这个词。
这种反对意见取决于关于 *chiddush* 是什么的特定理论。如果 *chiddush* 是发明，是从传统之外向传统添加新的东西，那么是的，扩大生产会降低货币的价值。拉比传统一直对 *chiddush* 有不同的理解。*Chiddush* 是发现：使一直存在于恩赐中但尚未可见的结构浮出水面。
最经典的出处是《塔木德》 Menachot 篇 29b。摩西升到天堂，发现上帝正在妥拉经文的字母上系装饰性的冠冕。他问为什么。上帝告诉他，几代人之后，有一个名叫阿基瓦·本·约瑟（Akiva ben Yosef）的人将从每一个标签中推导出成堆的律法。摩西要求见他。上帝让他转过身去，突然摩西坐在了阿基瓦经学院的第八排。他无法跟上讨论。他不理解学生在说什么。他的力气耗尽了。然后一个学生问阿基瓦某个特定的裁决从何而来，阿基瓦回答：*halakha l’Moshe miSinai*，在西奈山赐予摩西的律法。经文说，摩西这才安心。
一切都取决于是什么让他安心。阿基瓦的 *chiddush*，即摩西自己无法产生的 *chiddush*，追溯到了他。阿基瓦看到的东西一直都在那里，隐含在恩赐中，等待着有眼光的人将它浮出水面。
这是拉比关于 *chiddush* 理论的压缩形式。妥拉具有深度的结构，而 *chiddush* 是使一直存在但尚未可见的结构浮出水面。冠冕是在西奈山上系上的。阿基瓦成了它们的读者。如果这就是 *chiddush* 的含义，那么对规模的担忧就消解了。没有用完冠冕的风险。传统对它所包含的结构没有上限，因为结构是启示超过理解的盈余。每一代人都会浮出其工具允许其浮出的东西。早期的拉比圣哲看到了一组冠冕；他们的中世纪继承者看到了另一组；每一组人都看到了他们的方法使之可见的东西。没有理由认为我们已经达到了可恢复事物的终点。
第二种反对意见更深刻。即使承认 *chiddush* 是发现，并且 AI 可以降低准备工作的成本，在一个洞见变得廉价的世界里，仍然存在某种无序的东西。传统不仅仅是它的洞见。人们担心，廉价的 *chiddush* 会产生一群孤独的学习者，在聊天机器人中输入提示词，每个人都在产生私人的发现，却没有共同建设任何东西。语料库存续了下来；这本书的人民却没有存续。
这是一个正确的担忧，而传统在与阿基瓦故事相同的《塔木德》页面上遇到了它。在《 Bava Metzia 85b》中，3世纪的圣哲雷什·拉基什正在标记伟大拉比的埋葬洞穴。他找到了所有的洞穴，除了拉比·希雅（Rabbi Chiya）的洞穴，这洞穴总是避开他。他崩溃了。难道我没有像希雅那样分析妥拉吗？一个天上的声音回答：是的，你像他一样分析了。你没有像他那样传播。希雅，声音说，种了亚麻。他用亚麻做成了网。他用网捕捉鹿。他把肉喂给孤儿，用皮做羊皮纸。在羊皮纸上，他写了摩西五经。他去没有老师的城镇，教五个孩子五卷书，教六个孩子六卷密西拿，并告诉他们：在我回来之前，互相教学。通过这种方式，他说，我已经使妥拉不会在以色列被遗忘。
雷什·拉基什是分析的大师。希雅是房间的建造者。天上的声音的判决对它们进行了排名：没有传播的无与伦比的分析足以让你失去洞穴。其作品得以存续的拉比，是建造了他人学习房间的人。
《塔木德》中另一场不同的辩论，在《 Horayot 14a》中，将同样的紧张关系表现为制度政治。问题是哪个更伟大：*Sinai*，即语料库的大师，那个读过一切的人；还是 *oker harim*，拔山者，大师级的原始洞见者，他撕裂了传统。社区投票给了 *Sinai*，口号是每个人都需要小麦大师（这是对阿拉米语中“语料库大师”的双关语）。学院，在实际生活中，将主席职位给了拔山者，即3世纪的圣哲拉巴，长达二十二年。官方答案和生活答案分歧了。我们将要深刻地体验到这种分歧。小麦正在技术化。谁能用它做点事情的问题将主导一切。
卡巴拉传统中有一个小寓言。一个来自山区的人下到城市，第一次吃了面包，问那是什么。他告诉他那是用小麦做的。他回到他的山上，收集了生小麦，一把一把地干吃，然后回家确信他已经尝到了城市里的味道。他吃了投入。他错过了投入被研磨、揉捏、加盐、发酵并最终暴露在火中时制造出来的东西。面包只存在于烘烤中。
AI 是新的大师。它非常擅长生产相关的来源、正确的翻译、缺失的引用。信息从来不是