My first year after college, I didn’t go home for Passover. I was a working woman now, and for the first time in my life, the familiar rhythms of the school year (spring break among them) no longer applied.

It wasn’t a big deal to my parents, whose contract with organized Judaism seemed to expire promptly after my Bat Mitzvah. But since my birthday fell the same week, they decided to visit me in Los Angeles… and since they wanted to see the world I had built for myself there, I decided to host a Seder for my friends in my courtyard apartment in Hollywood. I printed out Michael Rubiner’s “Two-Minute Haggadah” from Slate magazine, made my grandmother’s chicken soup (and subbed the wishbone in for a lamb shank), and we gathered around my IKEA table with matzoh and Manischewitz. After dinner, my friends and I waited in the hallway while my parents hid the afikomen; my Korean-American roommate found it and won five dollars. It remains one of the best seders of my life: both for how it was unlike any seder I’d ever been to, and for how it was like every seder in the three-thousand-year-plus chain of Jewish tradition.

Indeed, the Exodus is among the oldest continuously told stories in the world, at least partly thanks to a Seder ritual expressly designed to make an ancient and potentially remote narrative immediate and tangible to new generations. It’s participatory, not passive. We listen, yes, but we also read, sing, taste, ask, and answer. The Seder is physical. It’s communal. It’s consistent. In an increasingly virtual, fragmented, and chaotic world, it really is different from all other nights.

Pesach embodies the power of contrast, a concept I think about a lot as a TV writer. After all, drama is the contrast between hope and fear, and comedy the contrast between expectation and result (“tragedy plus time” people, stand down). The seder, like a television show, is a constant negotiation between repetition and variation. The familiar invites the audience inside, the surprising keeps them there.

So, what happens to our stories – and our lives – when we lose the variation? Look no further than ChatGPT and other large language models. These models excel at the familiar, identifying patterns within the wide variety of (copyrighted) material fed into their algorithms and optimizing for a widely acceptable average. And when we cut and paste the results into our products – academic papers, social media posts, advertising, and entertainment – they rejoin the pool of data being averaged, concentrating the models closer and closer to a manufactured middle.

The appeal of these tools is obvious: our brains are prediction machines and repetition lets them shift to autopilot, saving time and energy. But is that a good thing? Is the middle necessarily the same as the truth? Is efficiency really the point of life? When we outsource and automate expression, do we lose what makes us uniquely human? (No, no, no, and yes).

Thankfully, even as generative AI strives to reduce the staggering diversity of our knowledge and expression to a digestible, effortless average, Judaism insists on the value of friction (see: the Talmud). While ChatGPT fawns over your every idea or question, the Torah doesn’t even let Hashem escape challenge and accountability (see: Abraham, Moses, Job). And efficiency? Tell that to the Ten (10!) Plagues.

So as we recount the Exodus again this year, we might consider not only why we tell this story, but why we tell stories at all. Stories teach us who we are and who we want to be – but just as importantly, they also help us see each other, in both our parallels and contrasts.

And just as the Four Questions hold space for the diversity of child development, I hope this Passover reminds us to hold space for the whole range of human stories, and the miracles that are anything but average.

Pesach sameach!