Hermeneutic AI

How to Become Someone Who Cares

“And this shall be unclean to you among the swarming things that swarm upon the earth: the mole, the mouse, and the great lizard of its kind.” (Leviticus 11:29)

Ve’zeh lakhem hatamei basheretz hashoreitz al ha’aretz: hacholed, veha’akhbar, vehatzav lemi’neihu.

A list of rodents and reptiles. The sort of verse you might skim past if you weren’t actively looking for meaning. But if you so much as hesitate—just for a beat—it starts to open. Why these animals? Why now, in the structure of the chapter? Why is the lizard given a qualifier—“of its kind”—when the mouse is not? What even is a choled? Does the term refer to a mole as commonly translated, or some now-lost species? Why does the verse use sheretz, a word freighted with impurity and primordial chaos from Genesis? And what does it mean to be tamei, ritually impure, in this context? Moral filth? Spiritual static? Contact with death?

The verse may be small, but it’s thick with interpretive potential. Each word is a node in a vast network—linguistic, halakhic, symbolic, philosophical. You can ask hundreds of questions here without repeating yourself. And in that act of asking—if you stay with it long enough—you begin to realize that the point isn’t just to “figure it out,” but to be changed by the practice of inquiry itself.

This is what hermeneutics is. Not just interpretation, but the cultivation of a particular attentiveness, a set of instincts and moves: noticing the oddity of word choice, the echo across chapters, the structural asymmetry, the cultural presuppositions. And beyond noticing, there’s the deeper art: asking better and better questions. Questions that don’t just seek answers, but clarify what kind of thing this text is, and what kind of reader you are becoming in relation to it.

Not all questions are created equal. Some scratch the surface. Some unlock chambers of meaning. Some draw you into ethical responsibility; others deepen your historical imagination. The great commentators—Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Ramban, Sforno—each had their own filters, their own ways of hearing what the verse was really saying or concealing. But what if we could help students today build their own filters—not to imitate the past, but to engage it honestly, playfully, rigorously?

This is where an AI tutor could become more than just a search engine or an automated rebbe. It could become a partner in training the art of hermeneutic sensitivity.