Did AI help prepare your rabbi's High Holydays sermon?

RYE, New York — This is the time of year when rabbis begin working on their High Holydays sermons, and Howard Goldsmith of Temple Emanu-El of Westchester had an idea for one the other day.

Rabbi Goldsmith, who has served 15 years as spiritual leader of the congregation in suburban Westchester County, 25 miles north of New York City, was reading Yascha Mounk’s “The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time” (Penguin Press, 2023), about minority groups’ growing assertion of their individual identity within wider society.

The book’s theme suggested to the rabbi a sermon about the Jewi...