Hi, I'm Andrew Soren, and today on Meaningful Work Matters, I'm joined by Sarah Walkenfeld, Chief Learning Officer at Sefaria. Together, we dive into the fascinating intersection of ancient wisdom and modern technology. In this episode, Sarah unpacks timeless lessons about creative labor, rest and aligning work with our
mission and values. Drawing from ancient Jewish texts to help us navigate the challenges of things like artificial intelligence and automation, we discuss how tools and technology can enhance our understanding of what we learn from ancient traditions, but also how those ancient traditions can help us preserve the human connection and purpose that's at the heart of meaningful work. Join us for a thought provoking conversation about what makes work truly sacred in the digital age.
Welcome to the Meaningful Work Matters podcast, Andrew. I'm your host, Andrew Soren, founder of Eudaimonic by Design. On this podcast, we'll dive into the world of meaningful work, explore its complexities, and examine its impact on people and the organizations they're a part of. Each episode features insightful conversations with cutting edge experts who are successfully navigating the challenges of meaningful
work. We hope to offer you ideas, frameworks and tools to unlock potential and design work that's fulfilling, impactful, and supports everyone's well being. Subscribe or follow us now and let's make meaningful work matter. Sarah Walkenfeld, I first came across your work after reading one of your articles for the Atlantic back in September,
which kind of blew my mind. And I think that the reason that it blew my mind was because it was about emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and how they intersect with ancient wisdom, specifically Judaic texts. I'm Jewish. Uh, reading Torah is not a deep part of my practice. But like, I am just so excited by this combination of ancient wisdom and modern technology and maybe the lessons that we can learn to help us navigate the world that we're in.
So yes, I'm excited to have you on the. On the podcast. Welcome. Thank you. I'm really excited to be here. Maybe we can just start a little bit by by you briefly introducing yourself. Tell tell listeners what you'd like them to know about you and also what makes your work meaningful. My name is Sarah Wachenfeld and I work for a website called Sefaria, which is dedicated to bringing the ancient Jewish canon into the digital age and opening up access to Jewish texts to all who are curious.
I am someone who was gifted an incredibly rich Jewish education in which I gained skills to decode and understand these ancient books with all of their dead languages and complex ideas. And it was really Just a weird confluence of events that made that happen. Kind of like a right place, right time, and the crowd that my parents happened to fall into when they were deciding how to educate me.
And as a result, I feel a responsibility to the rest of the Jewish world because of the education that I was given. And I feel lucky to have found a job that allows me to do that work of making these books more accessible day in and day out. And so what makes my work so meaningful is that it really aligns with my passion in a way that I. I don't think I was even fully aware of. Had I not found the job, I might not have realized that that
was really what I wanted to do with my life. But once I did, it just all clicked. And it sounds like you are the perfect product of job crafting, like intentionally making sure that your job is just meeting your strengths and your values and your passions and
what a gift. And that's a great thing. It really feels like this amazing series of coincidences, but it definitely has convinced me that work should be at least, I would say at least some of one's work, whether or not it's your day job, should be at least overlapping with at least one of your passions in order for meaning making to happen on a regular basis. Well,
maybe that's not necessarily a new insight. So maybe that's a good jumping off point into some of the ancient wisdom that you bring to bear on topics like meaningful work. I know that you've written about specifically Judaic perspectives on work and how they can help us maybe reimagine the role of creativity and intention in the modern workforce. So maybe you can just start
by helping us unpack some of that. One of the things that I wrote about was the distinction in, in Judaism, in really, in biblical language, between different types of work. Avodah is the word for work without craftsmanship or creativity. I'd say work that is assigned to a person. It's the word that's in the Bible for the labor of the enslaved Israelites in Egypt. And Melechah, in contrast, is creative labor, the kind of work that you invest in and feel proud of.
And in Jewish thought, the same word is used to describe the intentional work that God put into creating the world in the book of Genesis and the kinds of labor that are forbidden to traditional Jews on the Sabbath. That was my jumping off point for thinking about this division and the ways in which that distinction helps encourage us to. On the other six days of the week when we are meant to be working, to invest in that kind of meaningful,
creative work. And really that's something that the rabbinic sources, in reflecting on the idea of a Jewish Sabbath, talk about this, that the mandate to not work on the seventh day is inextricably bound to a mandate to work on the other six days. And that was really inspiring to me to think about what's so powerful about work that we'd want to make sure that people do it the other six days of their lives. I feel like there's so much to be able
to unpack there. So I know that we're going to. I want us to make sure that we have a good conversation about Sabbath and rest, because I feel like it's really important. But maybe we'll park that a little bit later in this conversation and dive a little bit into this distinction of malaka and avodah. So this difference between creative labor and assigned labor, which seems really, really interesting.
And maybe we can talk a little bit about. You talk about how creative labor or avodah is this channeling of the divine or this channel to the divine. So can you just help us understand that? There's a lot of discussion. I'm sure I don't have to tell you of how or why AI will ultimately be distinguished from human beings. I think that most people, religious and secular
alike, want to believe. They either do believe, or they at least want to believe that there is something that humans have that artificial intelligence will never have. I am no longer convinced that that something is the ability to do any given job better, whatever that means. But we can love our work, the creative knowledge based, even if it's manual labor, whatever it is, we can love that work and we can decide engaging in it is important to us.
And so the ability, the. The innate human ability to do work and to invest in work is one possible understanding of what it means that humans are created in the divine image. So for me, if AI wants to wash my dishes or organize my cabinets or do my laundry, that's great. Those aren't places where I particularly feel that I channel the divine. But I'm going to keep writing essays because that's something that helps me form and feel
I am. And that's. That's the divine spark. We all have that and we can tap into it through some kind of work, whether or not it's in our day job. You're suggesting that AI and tools like AI are. Are. Are more of this assigned work, the aboda side of things. I think that's true. But I think even when they can replace us in something that we would have considered. Malacha. We still have the right to hold onto it. I'm suggesting that the most interesting question to me is not can AI do this
or can AI do this better? The most interesting question is how do we want to spend our time? In an ideal world, AI gives us more flexibility to make those decisions. But either way, it's a decision that we have to make on a daily basis and then also on a long term basis. Can you unpack that? Give me an example, what would that look like? And specifically around the ways that we might use AI in the course of our work or in the way that you use AI in the course of
your work? Maybe I'll give you an example that plays out both sides. I had a conversation with a colleague, actually an employee recently about the possibility of using AI to craft emails. And this is something that I think is very much, very much in public conversation right now. Should you or shouldn't you have AI write your emails for you? And something that emerged from the conversation for me is that there are definitely some emails where I already know what I want to say.
And I, I don't grow in the process of writing those emails. I have it all. It's basically just taking, taking something I know or taking something that's even in a document. I just need to turn it into an email and send it out. And I use AI to do that. There are other emails, they're probably the ones that take me longer, that I write and rewrite a few times. And it's not because I can't think of a synonym for the word. It's not because I lack words in my head.
It's because I'm think through and working through what I want the other person to get out of the experience of reading the email. That's about a relationship. And I feel invested in those emails. And when I do a good job, that brings me a certain kind of satisfaction. So probably AI could help me with those emails. I've decided for now I don't, I don't want to run those emails through AI. That's a choice. That's a way of exercising again, what I believe
is a divinely given power. And I'm not stressed about the question of whether AI could do it or not. I mean, it's just interesting. It kind of goes back to this notion of kind of what you described as work that makes you feel proud and where you want to invest yourself in. It makes me think a lot about the words that we Use. And I know that's something else that you've written about too, like, how do you interact with AI? Do we say thank you? Do we say
please? Do we have a kind of relationship between the words that we use and this technology that's suddenly all around us and available to us? Wondering if you could say a little bit more about some of that. I do think it's important to be careful about the way that we speak. Not because I think that AI is sentient and will mind if we're insulting to it, but I think that as a society, we invest a fair amount, maybe we should invest more in thinking about how people speak to other people.
And. And speech is speech, and it's very easy to fall into bad habits. And so, although my children make a lot of fun of me, I do say please and thank you to the Alexa that inhabits my children's bedroom. And I do it every time. They make fun of me every time. But my feeling is that I'm teaching them to say please and thank you in life in general. I want to model that also. I think that increasingly there's going to be more and more different kinds of bots around us.
And even if it's easy to distinguish in the moment of, this one's a robot, this one's a human, you're just talking. You're not going to necessarily pause to make those distinctions all the time. There is an idea in Jewish thought that refined speech not only reflects refined character, but that sort of will be drawn after our speech, that our souls will come to reflect the way that we talk to people. And so I think it's important. I don't think it means that AI has
to be your best friend. I think it's just important to maintain a certain kind of civility, no matter who you're talking to,
but for your own sake, not for the AI's sake. One of the things that I love about the way that you have talked about this and defended it is a very Aristotelian notion that our words become our deeds, and our deeds ultimately shape the character that we are in the world, which, of course, is a thought that exists in all sorts of different cultural contexts in ancient wisdoms. Is there anything more that you would want to say about that in
this context? I think that's right. I think it's a widespread idea that's also kind of easy to lose sight of. And so I know a lot of people who think it's funny. They're polite to people, but they scream at their Siri or whatever, and I haven't tried that. I think it can be fun to scream at, you know, anyone for, you know, a release for any reason. But I'm not, I'm not, I'm not convinced by that, that theory of kind of separation
between the two. Again, I think it's important to remember that we, we only have one character to shape, as you said. I'm curious about how technology can be really a helpful partner in work. And I know that I, I mean you've, you've used technology very interestingly and I think effectively in the work that you're doing with Sephardia. Can you, can you talk a little bit about that and kind of the promise that technology has for, for kind of meaningful work in education?
I think we should approach new technologies with curiosity and openness and also commitment to our core values. And so my work with Safari, it was obvious pretty much from day one that digital tools were going to give us so many, so many avenues, so many ways of building pathways in to these ancient texts for people who had not previously had access or for people who had access but were going to be able to learn new things and gain new insights.
And I'm a big believer in again being curious and staying open to the paths that technology might present. So that's been a big part of my work and I think it is about looking for those opportunities. I think too often people have a kind of knee jerk reaction, either in the positive or the negative, that technology is something that we should resist or technology is cool and cutting edge and that's something we should immediately try to implement
as much as possible. And I would like to think that in Safaria's work we've tried to sort of chart this middle course of knowing that we're committed to the core values of opening up the study of these ancient texts and prioritizing that and using whatever tools can be used to prioritize those core commitments and not losing sight of those core commitments. So not pursuing something just because it's cool or interesting or new.
Can you give me an example of what that's looked like in the context of the work you've done with Sephora? One of the features of traditional Jewish texts is that they are extremely heavily interconnected. It's almost like a layering system, even sometimes within text themselves, that there's an earlier layer and then a slightly later layer and then a later layer superimposed over that and then the book or the text that comes next will quote that earlier text and so on. And so forth.
If you are someone who is steeped in these texts, let's say, for many, many years, then it's not too hard to find those connections and move between texts. And if you don't have that kind of background, then it's extremely difficult to do that. And from a sort of internal Jewish textual perspective, you're missing a lot if you're not reading these
texts in conversation with one another. And so one of the things that machine learning has allowed us to do is to surface, over time, more and more of those connections and turn them into links so that someone who is reading one text can easily find the reference in either an earlier text or a later text and open up those two texts side by side and read them in conversation with one another. I think that that is a tremendous gift to the reader of Jewish texts. That was not. It wasn't
that it was impossible before. It was just that it was accessible to so many fewer people before. And we've made that experience open to so many more people. And is there any example that you would give that's really helpful? Is there any example that you would give kind of of the reverse, like where you put your foot on the brake because you were like, this isn't aligned with our values.
And it might be cool, it might be a useful thing to be able to do in the context of, you know, these ancient texts, but we're not going to do this. I get emails probably at least weekly asking me whether we've rigged up a chat bot yet that either can answer religious questions, right? Like ask your, Ask, Ask Jesus, ask. They all exist. Yes, exactly like ask Jesus. But, you know, ask Moses,
really. Like, you know, you could, in theory, you could have a chatbot in the voice of Moses or in the voice of some other great biblical figure who is answering questions. Or more frequently, people say, well, you know, there's these big religious questions that I have. Surely if you kind of chewed on all the data in Safari's system, you would come out
with the right answer. And I think that's a great example of where technological capabilities are not in alignment with our core mission and our core commitments. Because fundamental to the idea of having all these different kinds of texts is the idea that there's generally not one right answer. You would be doing it wrong if you came up with one right answer. And so we don't have that bot on our side. We are using AI to help people find sources, navigate sources, connect between sources.
Those things are true to our core values. But the idea of A chatgpt like experience, where it's going to give you the correct answer is not what we're going for. You have to do the work that becomes the essential part one of the pieces. And by the way, we'll link to all of these articles
that you've written in the show Notes. But in your Religious Dispatches piece, you talk about this Talmudic story where Rabb, we're grappling with new tools, which also just reinforces the fact there's nothing new about this challenge of being confronted with new tools in our lives. But how do you think that specifically ancient wisdom and the lessons that you take from these Talmudic texts, how do they help us navigate the ethical issues that are posed by emerging technologies today?
So, first of all, I have to say that of all the texts that I study and investigate, that that one is my favorite. That's the one they're going to put on my tombstone. Because I just think it is this great, highly relatable moment of people who are faced with a new technology who have a sense that it is not the right thing to use, and then kind of stop and think to themselves, but wait, what if this new technology gave us something tremendous? What if it actually helped
us further our goals? What if there was a way to use it impactfully and effectively and in, in ways that really align with our core values and they think to themselves, oh, well, I guess, I guess that would be a good idea. I guess that would work. And, and then, and then they do, and kind of the rest is history. And so I love that story. And I think it is a model for having conversations with ourselves, with others, with society, about navigating the challenges of new technologies. That again,
too often it's kind of a knee jerk reaction. I see in these ancient texts kind of ethical principles around these core values, these core commitments, these decisions about what we want to do and who we want to be in our lives, and then these models of measured conversation about how new technologies do or don't help us. Because as you said, these are not new conversations. You don't have to look very far back in history. You don't have to
look as far back in history as I'm going to see. Interesting conversations about the dangers or promises of new technology. For me, it's instructive that these conversations go so far back that they are even embedded in ancient Jewish texts. Can you tell us the story? Sure. The story is the story of two rabbis who lived early in the Talmudic period. Their names are Rabbi Yochanan And Reish Lakish. They are famously a kind of matched pair of study
partners. And they were discovered on the Sabbath reading a book of rabbinic stories, which sounds like a very appropriate rabbinic activity, but is actually recounted in the Talmud as a kind of rabbinic horror story. Because as it. As it turns out, these. These words, this book of rabbinic stories was not meant to be written. The Talmud says it was. You weren't allowed to write those stories down. They were the words of the rabbis. And the words of the rabbis had been
transmitted as oral Torah. Torah passed from one person to another and were meant to remain that way. And so the Talmud asks, how could it possibly be that these two great rabbis were reading from this written scroll of these stories? And. And the answer is, they had no other choice. They had to write it down. The Talmud doesn't expand exactly on what that means, but it seems like some version of there's advantages to writing. Most people say when I ask them, what's a big advantage to writing?
You write things down so you don't forget it. Now, it's true that written words are fragile in different ways, but instinctively we write things down so that we don't forget them. There's a kind of preservation technique that can happen when you write things down. And I think that these two rabbis were being responsive to that, and they were thinking, well, this is great. It's great that we have these stories to talk about. We'd like to write them down, we'd like to contemplate them in that way,
and we'd like to pass them down in that way. And so the Talmud then goes through a kind of rabbinic legal exercise to prove to kind of root within the Bible the idea that you're allowed to make this kind of change when it's necessary. And that's where that section kind of caps the story. And again, I think it's a great model for how we think about implementing new technologies in our own lives. And what would be
the extension? So, like, if I was in an organization and I was trying to figure out what's the line that's like, the most helpful between adopting new technology and just ceding too much of this to automation, how does that story help me navigate it? The rabbis
had a really strong mission statement. And I would say that the stronger your mission statement and the stronger probably your passion and your team's passion around that mission statement, the easier it will be to figure out if the technology is aligned with the goals of the organization. So the mission statement of the rabbis was 100% commitment to capturing these ideas and passing them down, such that later generations could keep working with the ideas. And when you frame it
that way, yeah, it makes a lot of sense to write down texts. If it didn't matter to them so much that the next generation know their ideas, if it was sort of like, oh, everyone's gonna. No, we want people to be completely creative and just sort of make it up as they go along, then it wouldn't have been a good technology for them to use. Yeah, it's so obvious. It's wonderful. Like, start with a. Why start
with a purpose. Make sure that your mission is clear, have strong values that you can actually look at to help you navigate with what the ethical challenge is in this particular context. It is so easy and so hard at the same time. Right. Like I said, they had the advantage of a super strong mission statement. But,
you know, I think that you're talking about meaningful work. I think that the work of figuring out what is our organization's mission, what is the work, where do we feel like we can really uniquely have an impact that is meaningful work in and of itself and, as you said, needs to be done as a precursor to any of this.
Yeah. I think it's ironic given that that's actually what my day job is, to help organizations figure out what their purpose and their values and behavioralize that and make sure that that's
written into the very fabric of how they do everything. That it's something we talk very little about on this podcast is the fact that meaningful work becomes much more meaningful when we have a strong sense of purpose, when we are upholding a set of values, when we use work to be able to be a praxis for figuring out how to do that. Absolutely. And that's when it feels meaningful for all involved also, I guess
part of your day job also. But it's not just, oh, then the organization will be more successful, but we'll feel better about it and feel more invested when we do that work. As I said, I feel lucky to be in that place. And I'm happy that there are
people like you helping other people do that. I'm happy that there's people like you reminding us that there's all of these ancient wisdoms that we can actually tap into to remind us that we're not alone, that we're not thinking about this stuff for the first time, that there's actually a whole entire context of civilizations that can help us think about what it means to practice these things in A very deliberate way,
Absolutely. I want us to shift to this question of rest that you started with at the beginning. So Shabbat or the Sabbath, this idea, the Jewish model, that there are six days of work and then there's one day of rest. And that that is important. Both of those things
are exceptionally important for us. Can you just fill us in bit on that framework and on kind of what that looks like and how you think it can kind of inspire healthier relationships to work and also to probably everything else in our lives. One of the things that struck me when I was doing this research and writing is how we colloquially use the word work in ways that are kind of fluid and don't necessarily reflect
the specific action that we're doing. So if you send me an email to wish me a happy birthday and I write back to you, then that's not work. But if my boss sends me an email that I need to respond to, that's work. Same action. Either way, I'm opening up my computer or I'm pulling up my Gmail on my phone and I'm writing back to the email. But we would sort of mentally categorize them in
very different ways. And that gets messy and gets tricky because as everybody knows, if you go on your email to check your happy birthday messages, you will very easily also end up responding to the work message from your boss. Right. It's very hard to kind of distinguish between those things. And one of the interesting things about the Jewish Sabbath practices is that there's a lot more of a focus on the actions that are or are not permitted with a little less attention to the context.
So responding to email can be fun. Responding to email can be work. But a traditional Jewish framework doesn't allow for answering emails on the Sabbath. So I think about that a lot. Not so much in terms of advocating for any particular practice, but in thinking about what allows people to set boundaries. You've probably thought about this in a lot of different ways in your work. I'd be interested to hear what you've seen work for people. Um, but I do find that that's a place that is.
That is hard. And I, I, on the one hand, I would not say about myself that I'm good at setting those boundaries. I think actually something that helps me is the kind of absolutes. So I just don't turn on my computer Friday night into Saturday, and I just don't turn on my phone if I did. I think it, I find it very hard to distinguish between the emails that are work and the emails that are for fun. And so something that's interesting is these categories of labor. And then of course it works both
ways. Once you've established that there's something that you need to avoid in order to rest, it then gets invested with the meaning of work. And when you go back to it, you think about it in that way. I think that the absolutes are really helpful and they're also confounding, right? So again, like a tension point, like a polarity of how do we manage these things. Like in the research that's been done around work life balance, for example, there's research that says that some people are natural
segregators. They want the Sabbath, they want the work, they want to keep a fair distinction between the 2 or 9 to 5. Like they're going to show up at work when they're at work, but as soon as that computer closes at the end of the day, they are done and they don't want to be interrupted at all. Whereas there's other people who
are natural integrators. They want the intersection. They want to be able to just like look at their phone at 9:00 and respond to a couple emails at 9:00 at night and respond to a couple emails, because that's, that's the best time for them to be able to do so. And it doesn't actually stress their well being to do so. In fact, it would probably stress it more to have to wait until the next day and have the pile of emails as soon
as they go into work. And so I feel like that's a natural tension that exists a lot in organizations that I do work on, where I think it's really important to codify things that we take for granted, like when do we respond to emails and how do we manage our communication practices. As an organization. It's so helpful to be able to talk about those things and to make collective rules so that there
can be absolutes. We can have our own version of Talmudic guidelines, but at the same time, not everyone's going to be happy with all of those things all the time. Time. That's true. And maybe that's a difference between a religion and an organizational culture. Can confirm a hundred percent. Many people who keep these strictures are not happy and they do it anyway. I'm not sure that means it's not helpful or productive. It just means that it doesn't always feel comfortable.
And I also wonder if that isn't something about, about work that we should talk about. That work is still workful and feels like work. And it's okay for work to feel like work. That being in a state of invested, meaningful work doesn't mean that it doesn't still feel like work. I think that's helpful. I think that's helpful. And like to me perhaps the thing that's most helpful in that is that we don't have to like it all the time. That we don't
have to feel happy about all of the decisions. Certainly all of us won't like. It's just that just won't happen in the context of the work that we, that any of us do in our lives, in our lives in general are like even well being. Like an Aristotelian perspective on what happiness and well being is, does not involve feeling good all the time. Like it can actually involve a lot of suffering and being
okay with that suffering. Right. Wrestling with it. Which is, I think what we do when you know, we engage with ancient texts and specifically in a religious context is wrestle with difficult questions or things that make us feel uncomfortable. Absolutely. It's a, that's a big part of. I would, what I would call the work of, of studying these kinds of texts is that it is hard and it should be hard. And again, it goes back to your, your values, those ideals that guide your
work. I think maybe one of them could be or should be that this is going to be hard and we're still going to do it because we care about X, Y and Z out outcomes. I'm curious what, just as we start to wrap up this conversation, like how, what advice you'd give people, like if you could offer one insight to leaders who are really trying to create environments where people can find balance of creative fulfillment and kind of well being, like find meaning
in their work and at the same time be able to get through. Like what would it be? What lesson would you want to impress? I would say I really believe that leaders in particular need to model their commitments. So don't just set boundaries, but model them. Don't just talk about commitment, but model it. That's not particularly like innovative advice, but I do think that that is,
that that's really important. And I think in one of my articles I talk about this Jewish kind of Jewish wisdom idea that I would, I would call in shorthand. The phrase is that if you're in a place, literally it means if you're in a place where there's no person there, you should work to be a person. Or like no men in that place, you gotta be a man. The way that I read that is, or the way that I've always read it is that you need to step up and be
the model you want to see. But I would say that since starting to talk about and think about AI a lot more, I also think of it more literally that if you're in a place where the default is technological tools, you need to think, what's the human piece that I bring to this that's going to be more and more important for leaders, for anyone in an organization to think, what's the piece that I uniquely bring to this? And then to be really present with that strength with, to lead from a place of
this is what I bring to the table. I think people who have that kind of enthusiasm and sort of outward facing stance towards what they bring to their work will naturally draw other people into that. I love that answer. That's a great, great answer. And it also makes me think about the very last question that I have, which is, you know, as somebody who spends a lot of time thinking about the intersection of ancient wisdom and modern technology, what's your greatest
hope about the future of war work? I'm inspired by thinking about how long people have been working, just how enduring an endeavor this is. And my greatest hope is really also the Talmudic insight that people kind of can't exist without work on some level. Leaving aside the economic piece that we need something to occupy our minds or occupy our hands, occupy our souls. And so. So I'm not worried about AI taking that away from us. I think that humans will just find new
things to do. And I'm actually excited about that, excited about the ways that we might expand our definition of work. Because I do believe that it's deeply ingrained in us to want to make a difference in the world. What a great way to end. Sarah, thank you so much for your time today and your wisdom. Thank you so much. This has been a lot of fun. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Meaningful Work Matters. If you haven't already done so, be sure to subscribe to our podcast
on your favorite platform. And if this episode resonated with you, please take a moment to leave us a review. Your feedback helps us make this podcast better and reach more listeners. You can connect with me, Andrew Sorin on LinkedIn or visit www.eubd.ca to learn more about Eudaimonic by Design. Finally, if what you heard today spoke to you, tell your colleagues and people in your community about our podcast. We really appreciate your support in making meaningful work matter see you next.