What would Elijah Say? / The 18th Fellow
About a month after I got the news of my acceptance into the Aspen First Movers’ Fellowship I learned the identities of the rest of my inspiring cohort - seventeen people strong. Seventeen? The number was intrinsically awkward to me. I immediately thought… why not eighteen?
This viscerally negative reaction to “17” comes from the fact that the number “18” carries serious significance in Jewish culture. In Hebrew, each number has a letter representing it. The number 18 is represented by the letters that spell “חַי” or “Chai” which means “life.” So 18 is our luckiest number because it is thought to impart a long life. My own mother’s name is “Chaya” and she has always prided herself on being full of life (or a wild animal, another synonym for her name). If you’ve ever received a gift of money from a Jewish person, chances are it was given in a multiple of “18.” Other than 10, it’s the multiplication table that comes easiest to me: 18, 36, 72, 90, 108, 126, 144… you get the idea. I received a lot of $36 checks for my bat mitzvah in the 90s.
So yeah - a cohort of 17 felt off to me, perhaps even a bit unlucky? But of course the Aspen Institute isn’t a Jewish organization, so I tried to put the “off” feeling aside and focus on meeting my cohort and digging into a year of learning and growing. Next thing I knew, I was in Aspen, and during our opening discussion about what kinds of community agreements we should make about the experience, a fellow shared that we should always be thinking about the voices that are not in the room.
And then another great Jewish tradition popped into my mind: how at every Passover seder we set a whole extra seat for Elijah the prophet. It sits empty with a full place-setting and he even gets his own wine glass. Eventually we open the door to welcome him in, serenading him while the kids watch closely to see if they can detect the presence of his ghost from any wine gone missing from his cup. Elijah was a prophet in the ancient Kingdom of Israel in the 9th century BCE. The story goes that when the people of Israel were tempted by false gods who promised rain, Elijah used miracles to show the power of the one true God. As Daniel C. Matt, author of “Becoming Elijah” explained, “He’s basically a zealot who is a little too much for the world to handle… "He’s zealous to help the poor. He can't stay away from Earth when somebody is in trouble.” And he’s a shapeshifter, “He can turn into anyone depending on what's needed at the moment.”
Elijah has frequented Jewish life and ritual ever since, expected to come down from heaven to help when Jews are in distress. So we hope for him and beckon him, and we muse about what Elijah would say if he were here, at our table, in our time. And as I looked around the room at these fellows who were all selected for their passion to right the world’s wrongs, I imagined an empty 18th seat (satisfying my inner discomfort with the incomplete 17), and wondered who it would represent and what they would say if they were in the room?
A 13th-century Byzantine image of the prophet Elijah from the Monastery of Saint John Lampadistis in Cyprus.
Photo Credit: DeAgostini/Getty Images
What would Elijah say?
I don’t know about you, but I could use some help from distress right about now. I’ll just name it here - the antisemitism my parents’ generation spent a lifetime warning me about, but which I was pretty sure would die with them, is back in full, distressing, force. And it is emanating from a dizzyingly diverse set of actors amidst an equally daunting number of other existentially threatening disruptions in the world - from environmental protection and basic research rollbacks to distrust in vaccines to deportation of migrant workers to the threat of nuclear war to AI upending the workforce to the loneliness epidemic. I know the idea that “now is the scariest time” has been said throughout generations. But it was noted even by our amazing team of Aspen Institute facilitators that this year feels different in the corporate social intrapraneurship space.
What are “corporate social intrepreneurs,” you ask?
The Aspen Institute defines us as “The innovators inside companies who are imagining new products, services, business models, and practices that generate business value and positive social or environmental impact. They are the avant-garde for re-thinking how business is done and how success is measured.” I love that, because I’m always imagining new possibilities for living and working better. My particular focus for “positive social impact” has been on helping people find connection and community even as they are navigating a loneliness epidemic.
Yet while helping the lonely find connection may be a worthy cause for a human, why should capitalist businesses care (aside from it being the right thing to do)? Because just as loneliness increases the odds of dying from physical disease faster, it also hits employers in the bottom line - to the tune of $154B per year in lost revenue due to absenteeism and lost productivity. It’s a uniquely human problem for a uniquely human workforce.
So if employers want to keep employing humans, they need a solution for loneliness - no easy feat. I say it that way to point out the obvious - It’s 2025 and employers are faced with the enticing possibility of spurning the needs of humans in favor of an AI workforce that needs almost nothing from us - not food, nor sleep nor human connection. Sure, it does need vast quantities of water, but at the moment, that’s not something employers are held accountable for solving.
So why keep employing humans at all?
Well if humans aren’t so essential, why has the pace of work ramped up? After all, the tenor of Silicon Valley work culture has changed from free food, bean bags and foosball to the “9-9-6” work schedule that sees humans slaving away in service of winning the ultimate AI innovation race. Wait, I thought artificial intelligence was supposed to take menial work away from humans and free up our time, not the other way around…? It seems downright shortsighted to me that companies are spending their precious human resources this way, and burning them out to boot, when the robots are right here to lighten the load.
So what is the unique value that humans bring to work? I argue that it’s creativity, in the most basic sense of the word - the ability to produce original and unusual ideas, or to make something new or imaginative. You might call this “innovation.” I was inspired (and comforted) by a theory proposed by former Adobe Chief Strategy Officer (currently partner at the A24 film studio) Scott Belsky in 2019 that “Creativity is the new Productivity” in which he explains that as machines outpace us humans in productivity gains, what’s left for us to contribute is creativity itself. And while arguments abound that AI is showing remarkable gains in creativity too, I just don’t buy that it will produce the kind of of novel, game-changing, “next-big-thing” kind of ideating that flesh-and-blood, lonely, hungry human beings have done for millenia. In a more recent piece, Belsky shares the way he sees this working - that AI will enable accelaration of both the pace and risk-taking of creativity.
“If new tools and techniques can help creators visualize, experiment, and explore the full landscape of their imagination with far less cost, perhaps we can advance new ideas at a fraction of the cost. Perhaps we can encourage and support more creative risk in ways that transform the world of storytelling and the lives of those who need these new stories the most. ”
What would Elijah say? I live and work in the heart of Sillicon Valley where AI is all anyone talks about. I recently met someone at my physical therapy office who moved to town from Sacramento and she commented on how strange it was to see the topic of AI on every single billboard. “Welcome to San Francisco,” I told her. Over here in the land of tech it can be easy to miss how strange this moment is for humanity and that maybe, just maybe, it’s not the only topic deserving of our attention.
So what about other voices that aren’t “in the room,” either literally, as part of my fellowship program at the Aspen Institute, or figuratively, in conversations about everything from antisemitism to product sustainability to internet safety to health equity to the future of work? I don’t know, but I will continue to be curious about the answers that my fellow human beings have to offer, and to create opportunities for us to connect and explore, together.
