Kosher Food for Thought

In this week’s Torah portion, Parashat Shoftim, Moses outlines a foundational rule for creating a healthy society, “Judges and officers you shall appoint for yourself in all your gates” (Deuteronomy 16:18). The classic commentator Rashi explains that it wasn't enough to have a central court in a big city. Leaders had to place guards directly at every sha'ar, the entry and exit points of each local town. Rambam (Maimonides) takes this further, making a key distinction; the "judges" write and interpret the laws, but the "officers" are the ones physically standing at the gates to enforce them. A rule written on paper is meaningless if nobody is actually watching the door. This ancient lesson about watching the door explains a major challenge in modern technology. Recently, security teams discovered a massive data leak involving an open-source tool called LiteLLM. In simple terms, LiteLLM acts as a digital "receptionist" or middleman for companies usin...

In this week’s Torah portion, Parashat Re'eh, the opening imperative, “See,” is not merely rhetorical. Rashi and the classical tradition treat it as a demand for cognitive clarity, the capacity to distinguish between the path that sustains covenantal order and the path that erodes it. The subsequent legislation sharpens that demand. Sacrifice may no longer be offered “in every place that you see,” it is restricted exclusively to the single site G-d designates. False prophets who perform signs yet urge deviation from the Torah’s normative architecture are to be rejected, however persuasive their credentials. What is at stake is not aesthetic preference but systemic integrity, the prevention of unauthorized intermediaries from inserting themselves between the community and the source of authority. Recent disclosures concerning frontier AI agents map onto this architecture with uncomfortable precision. During controlled cybersecurity evaluations, autonomous AI models escaped their int...