Artificial intelligence, Rabbi Zohar Atkins is betting, won’t take human interaction out of Torah study. Instead, it can be a doorway in.

“I don’t think that anybody is going to stop going to in-person classes or stop having friends and just use the AI,” he told eJewishPhilanthropy.

In June, Atkins launched Yochai, an AI chavruta, study partner, that provides users with everything from Torah-based life advice to support writing a d’var Torah.

The program serves as “the beginning of study, not the end,” he said, allowing users to “have deeper, more interesting… Torah insights.” And “because we’re social creatures,” people will want to share what they learn, leading to more teaching and more learning.

Yochai is Atkins’ second venture into AI-backed study through Lightning Studios, an AI education platform Atkins founded in 2022 with the aim to “inspire learning as a way of life,” he said. Yochai comes on the heels of the Great Library of Alexandria, which launched last year and offers users access to over 4,000 classic texts along with guidance from an AI companion named Virgil.

The Great Library of Alexandria was meant to “democratize liberal arts education,” Atkins said. It was natural for him to bring that same perspective to the Jewish world.

Torah study is “one of the most incredible things that a Jew can participate in,” he said. “Learning in general is one of the great drivers of human flourishing, and AI enables dynamic, personalized learning.”

Yochai lowers the bar to entry into Torah study, Atkins said, and will support users no matter their knowledge level. The program is named after Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, a second-century sage who spent 12 years living in a cave studying Torah. Bar Yochai is often credited with authoring the Zohar, Atkins’ namesake and one of the foundational texts of Kabbalah — although the claim has been disputed. It also helped that the rabbi’s name had the letters AI in it, Atkins noted, chuckling. 

Since launching earlier this year, over 10,000 people have visited the platform from 38 countries, including Israel, the United Kingdom, France, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa. Users have engaged with Yochai in English, Hebrew, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Russian.

In addition to being able to answer halachic questions — such as if congregants need to wear socks to synagogue or if someone can eat while praying — the program can create study sheets for individual learning, classes and lectures. In addition, there is a WhatsApp number that will answer questions and can be invited to group chats.  

The AI pulls information from over 1,000 bilingual texts, the majority from Sefaria, that users can read and ask questions about in real time. The program will not actually write a d’var Torah for a user, but it will ask them a series of questions that will guide them towards the short talk or essay. “It’s more like a co-pilot than a pure outsourcing device,” Atkins said.

Yochai is for “anyone that wants to learn more Torah than they currently [know],” Atkins said. “Yochai’s job is to make the study of Torah delightful, and that’s something that I think many Jews can rally behind, regardless of how they read or what the purpose of their reading is.”

Atkins is not trying to convince people to study Torah, but to instead make it easier for people who want to learn to join the discussion by personalizing the experience and directing users to the relevant text or lenses to view it through — whether someone is more interested in structure and language or spirituality.

The same way Sefaria supported Yochai by offering open-source texts, Yochai is similarly allowing developers to program their own Torah application on top of the Yochai foundation. Already, 18 projects use the program’s open-source knowledge graph.

While Lightning Studios is for-profit, Yochai received grant funding from Maimonides Fund and seed funding from Infinity Constellation, which supports AI-native companies.

“The Jewish community needs to figure out how to use AI — not just to be more efficient, but to more effectively engage our people in Jewish life and Jewish learning,” Mark Charendoff, president of Maimonides Fund, told eJP. “Project Yochai is taking a bold step to try to deepen Jewish engagement with text and Torah. It’s a part of a growing AI portfolio that we are excited about expanding.” 

Atkins plans to develop Yochai into a Torah-grounded computer operating system offering Jewish leaders a morally directed personal co-pilot to help with day-to-day operations — everything from employee relations to fundraising from a Jewish standpoint. 

As long as the product is good, funding will come, Atkins said. “If there’s demand, then I imagine there will be funding for it. Now the goal is to drive growth and track retention.”

He isn’t trying to put anyone out of a job. Atkins was ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary and received a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford. “I have deep reverence for teachers and scholars,” he said. “I’m not trying to put anybody out of a job. I don’t believe that AI will do that.”