Who Fashioned a Golem? (article summary)
Here’s the summary post for my Jewish Link article from two weeks back, “Who Fashioned a Golem”. Read it in full in the image below, or paywalled Scribal Error, Jewish Link HTML, flipdocs.
The breakdown:
There’s a famous gemara of Rava making a gavra / golem and sending it to Rabbi Zeira. Rabbi Zeira speaks to it, it doesn’t respond. You are from the חבריא / fellows. Return to your dust! This might be a good source for the ethics of creating artificial general intelligence.
(There’s also a derasha from Rava beforehand of sins separating from God, so a righteous person can create a world. And Rav Oshaya and Rav Chanina making and eating a calf for Shabbat.)Before any such discussion, we often take pains to establish the correct girsa and the correct people. That might impact the weight we give to specific Amoraim, their actions, establishing consistent positions, applying hilcheta kebatrai, and so on.
Candidates for the sender could be fourth-generation Rava, who we’d pair with fourth-generation Rabbi Zeira II. But how about third-generation Rabba, paired with third-generation Rabbi Zeira I; or approximately fourth-generation Rabbi Abba II?
Manuscripts we have say Rava. Except Munich 95 that has ר׳ אבא make the drasha and רב׳ sending the golem. There are images.
Munich 95 manuscript, an Amora sends the golem Connect to Rabba’s (or Rava’s) Purim feast in Megillah 7b. Maybe these are the same participants. And discuss the manuscripts there. There’s Vilna and Munich 95 (being consistent with here) for it being Rabba. But I discuss it in greater detail in a later article, coming out next week.
Distinguish between Rabbi Zeira I and II, and how they relate to Rabba / Rava.
Digression to discuss Rav Oshaya and Rav Chanina. There are some good proofs that they are brothers to Rabba (bar Nachmani). Maybe that lends support to Rabba creating / sending the golem here. All three brothers have mystical Sefer Yetzira powers.
Concluding paragraph showing the merits of each approach.
