When Zvika Krieger considered a major career shift just as he’d gained momentum in one field, a mentor cautioned him, “You don’t want people to look at your resume and think you’re a dilettante.”
He didn’t take the advice. He changed his career — then did it again and again and again until he ended up an ethics adviser to Anthropic and other AI giants in Silicon Valley and a part-time rabbi at Chochmat HaLev, a Renewal synagogue in Berkeley.
It’s worked out so far for Krieger, 42, in part because he sees himself as someone with “diverse cross-sector experience,” not a dilettante.
Krieger declined to discuss his tech clients. “I’ll just say that over the past year, I’ve been advising almost all of the major AI companies.” That role makes him one of the most significant voices among rabbis and Jewish leaders seeking to grapple with the implications of AI for human civilization.
“The decisions that are made in the next six to 12 months are going to shape the entire industry, and in some ways, the trajectory of humanity,” Krieger said. “What’s happening in AI is akin to the printing press, if not more significant.”
Krieger is also currently writing a book called “The God You Don’t Believe In.” The project draws on what he calls the “eclectic threads” of his life — tech, government, journalism and spirituality — reimagining God through ancient Jewish sources, taking readers from Davos and Burning Man to the Pentagon and the alleys of Jerusalem and Mecca. The goal, he said, is to help seekers find meaning.
It will be his second book. The first one, slated to come out this fall, is titled “Speak to the Bones: A Book of Jewish Spells and Incantations” and co-authored with Rabbi Jericho Vincent, a teacher of Jewish mysticism.
Raised in an Orthodox home in L.A.’s Pico-Robertson neighborhood, Krieger attended Shalhevet High School. He co-founded the Jewish college-prep school’s student newspaper, Boiling Point. After high school, he studied political science at Yale University and then spent a decade reporting for outlets like Newsweek, the New Republic and the Atlantic, covering the Middle East and U.S. politics.
In 2014, Krieger moved into government, first working in the U.S. Department of Defense, where he co-wrote the department’s climate change strategy and worked on security issues related to Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. He later worked for the U.S. State Department, running its innovation lab and applying tech principles to government security and privacy.
In 2020, Krieger was ready for a change and was considering two options: take a job at Meta or go to rabbinical school. He decided he would do both.
At Meta, he served as the company’s first director of responsible innovation from 2020 to 2022, and meanwhile enrolled in the seminary program offered by the Aleph: Alliance for Jewish Renewal, the movement’s hub. Even before his ordination in 2024, he had started working as a part-time spiritual leader for Chochmat HaLev, a congregation he described as a perfect fit for his Burning Man Shabbat ethos.
Since coming to Chochmat, the synagogue has tripled its membership, according to Krieger.
“We just had a board meeting discussing how the sanctuary is too crowded,” Krieger said. “Do we have to stop letting people in?” He added, “We’re close to violating the fire code.”
Krieger has a vested interest in helping ensure that AI tools are used with child safety and privacy in mind. He serves on the tech advisory council for Oakland Hebrew Day School, where his 12-year-old son attends.
In parallel to Chochmat, he has consulted for AI companies as well TikTok, Airbnb, Alphabet and Pixar, focused on ethical dilemmas they face every day.
Companies ask, for example, for his help identifying bias in AI chatbots and designing their personalities: How friendly is too friendly? How adversarial should it be?
Krieger also fields questions about tech addiction.
“There’s a fine line between making a product compelling and making a product addicting,” he said. “Are people using this product more than is healthy for them?”
In June, Krieger wrote an essay in response to Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical warning on safeguarding human dignity in the age of AI. He offered a rabbinic take on what we can learn — and what we should be wary of — in our daily use of AI.
Krieger wrote that Judaism treats sitting with not-knowing as a sacred practice, not a problem to be solved. He contrasts this with AI tools like ChatGPT, where answers are instant, but they’re not necessarily to our benefit.
“Sometimes the holy thing is not to solve,” Krieger wrote. “Not to conclude. Not to accelerate the process. Sometimes the holy thing is to wait without collapsing. To stay awake without forcing. To let the hour arrive when it arrives.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I’ve read that Burning Man was your inspiration to pursue rabbinic ordination. How did you end up moving from a career in politics and tech to becoming a congregational rabbi?
I love to be able to bring tradition and deep Jewish wisdom, Jewish liturgy, Jewish practice, to unexpected places and making it accessible and relevant to people who have never experienced it in a meaningful way. I grew up Orthodox, and I just had so much fun taking the traditional rituals and reimagining them in ways that feel relevant to people in the modern world, but are still very deeply grounded in the rituals and the liturgy. Probably the biggest culmination of that was co-leading Shabbat at Burning Man for the past 10 years.
What ultimately brought you to Chochmat HaLev?
I ended up leaving Meta in 2022 because I was just totally burnt out. I got divorced. I became a single parent. It was very difficult for me. I gave myself six months to recharge and then thought, I’m going to go back into tech. And at that time, the previous spiritual leaders at Chochmat HaLev retired and put out these job postings for a new spiritual leader. And 10 different people forwarded it to me and they’re like: You should do this.
Then what happened?
I decided I’m going to go through this interview process, but I’m just going to be 100% myself. And if I don’t get the job, that’s great because then that tells me that this is not a job in which I can be myself. And so I went through the interview preview process, said some pretty ridiculous things along the way, and Chochmat’s just such a cool community that everything I thought may be a deal breaker, they thought was great!
You answer questions about AI from tech companies. What about your congregants? Do they also ask you about AI? What kind of questions do they ask?
There are multiple conversations happening in different corners of the Jewish community about whether there should be a Jewish take on AI. Those conversations have been going on for at least two years now.
Right now, a lot of what I’m dealing with, given that we are in Silicon Valley, I think we are seeing the tip of the spear in terms of job loss as a result of AI.
No question. Tell me more about what you’re seeing.
We’re the canaries in the coal mine here in the Bay Area. And I have so many people in my community who are unemployed right now. People who you wouldn’t have imagined having a hard time finding a job. And now they’ve been unemployed for the past six months or a year and haven’t even gotten an interview.
For a lot of people it raises some fundamental questions about who we are as humans if we’re not working. How do we find meaning in life? I think for too long we’ve outsourced our sense of meaning and purpose to our jobs. This is where Judaism can really help. We can ask what it means to be human in the age of AI.
If you were to take off your consulting hat, advising hat and your rabbi hat, and it’s just you at home with your devices, what’s your relationship with all of this technology? Do you embrace it? Do you question it?
I’m not an anti-technology person, but I’m just very intentional about how I use my technology. There’s the privacy angle, like what data am I sharing with these companies? Now that I’ve been behind the curtain in almost all of these companies, I know how that data gets used.
People are asking me, are you using AI for your book or are you using AI for your sermons? And I’m like, no, because I love writing sermons. I love writing my book. AI is very bad at writing stuff about Jewish texts in particular. It will hallucinate things all the time.
By hallucinate, do you mean, the chat will say “As Rabbi Akivah once said” and then make something up?
Yeah. What I would love to use it for is if I’m writing a sermon on “x” topic, asking can you help me find five sources that I can use to explore this argument that I’m making with citations? Then I’ll pull those sources off the bookshelf, and that book doesn’t even have that page number.
I can’t imagine how many rabbis are not even taking that final step of going to the bookshelf and pulling it up, and they’re giving sermons based on hallucinated sources.
Hopefully not many.
No, I don’t think that’s true. This comes exactly at the time when rabbis are so overworked, where there’s a huge burnout crisis in the rabbinic world. I think a lot more than you would like to think are almost completely outsourcing their sermons.
What Jewish resources or texts do you turn to when you think about AI and ethics?
There are a lot of what I might call “too cute” attempts to read AI back into Judaism. I don’t find those particularly helpful for the people who are designing the technology, or consumers.
If someone gets hit by an autonomous vehicle, the Talmud has debates about if your ox gored my ox. We learn all these interesting things about liability. That doesn’t actually feel useful to me.
I think where Judaism and Jewish wisdom comes in is when we ask what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to live a good life?
Earlier this year, Anthropic invited 15 Christian leaders to a summit to help shape Claude’s moral behavior. There are also initiatives like the Faith AI Covenant, which includes rabbis. Do you believe faith leaders are being heard in Silicon Valley?
Let’s be honest, I actually helped run these summits when I was at Meta, where we brought in other faith leaders. There are ways in which that can be real, but a lot of it is just window dressing. We’d bring in religious leaders, and they’d be saying all these abstract, philosophical things, and there’d be engineers and product designers sitting on the other side of the table being like, OK, great, that was an interesting grad school seminar. I just find that a lot of that outreach is a little bit conceptual, and it doesn’t lead to very much.
The work you’re doing for these companies is different, given your background in tech. What common ethical questions do you encounter when you’re advising various tech companies?
While there may be commonalities, what’s been more surprising to me are the differences across the companies. I think that some companies are very interested in the practical questions, like, how do I make sure that this AI system is not biased? There’s this whole concept called algorithmic bias. There’s also data labeling that I help companies with, providing transparency around the data that trains the AI models.
Some of the consulting I do is very practical and some of it is more philosophical. I’ve consulted with companies about the personalities of their chatbots. What is the default personality? How friendly is too friendly?
One of the reasons why I consult for Pixar and for some other cultural/creative companies is because I do think that the narrative around these technologies is shaped by popular culture. A lot of what I do is help these companies think about how the technology is portrayed in these movies, how children are portrayed using these technologies, and what message does that send to both children and parents about healthy ways to use these technologies?
Do the impacts of AI we’re already seeing keep you up at night? Or does the potential of AI excite you when you wake up in the morning? Or a bit of both?
I would say it’s both. For a lot of people, AI feels very abstract. They hear “AI is coming.” I think a lot of people feel a lack of control. They’re scared of AI, and there’s nothing they can do about it. I totally understand that, that feeling of helplessness.
What feels nice for me is that I do have something I can do. Something that’s unique about tech companies is that decisions tend to be made in a very decentralized way. Everyone just has this fantasy that Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or Sam Altman are making every major decision about these products.
But actually what happens is you have people who are relatively low on the totem pole who are making very consequential decisions about these products. So if you talk to the right person at the right time and give them the right advice, that can actually change the trajectory of a product.
Say more.
In tech, things move really fast. There’s a very acute sense that there’s an AI arms race and that there’s going to be one winner. To the extent that there were guardrails before, even those minimal guardrails have been taken down. What that means is that individuals all up and down the totem pole can make very consequential decisions.
Technology doesn’t feel anonymous and faceless. I know the people designing the products, I know what they’re grappling with. They don’t always listen to me, and I don’t think they always make the right decisions, but I’m able to sleep a little bit better at night.
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