Every technology eventually finishes going mainstream and then, almost as an afterthought, arrives in Jewish life. Email did it, the smartphone did it, WhatsApp did it, and now it is AI’s turn. With hundreds of millions of people already talking to chatbots every day, it was only a matter of time before someone built one revolving around Torah. So when I kept hearing about OHRBIT, the Orthodox Union’s new AI Torah app, I wanted to know whether the Jewish version of this technology behaves any better than the general one. This week, in mid-June, I spent an afternoon in its expert mode trying to break it.

OHRBIT launched in February, it is free, and the OU’s own Rabbi Gil Student pitches it as a “Spotify for shiurim.” Instead of roaming the open internet, it runs on a closed, curated library: the OU’s decades of recorded classes plus partners like the Rabbi Sacks Legacy. That design choice is the whole ballgame, because the thing general chatbots do worst is exactly the thing a Torah app cannot afford to get wrong. Ask a general model for a source and, often enough, it will invent a convincing one. A semicha student at Yeshiva University put it bluntly to the Forward late last year: it will just completely make up a Gemara, citing a daf and a comment of Rashi that do not exist. For a beginner who cannot tell a real mareh makom from a fabricated one, that is not a quirk. It is a trap. OHRBIT’s bet is structural: fence the model inside material that was actually vetted, and have it admit when it has nothing rather than improvise.

Trying to make it lie

So I tried to get it to fabricate. I asked it to summarize Rabbi Moshe Feinstein’s responsum permitting the use of a microphone on Shabbat. There is no such responsum. Rav Moshe famously forbade microphones on Shabbat, in one of the better known rulings of the last century. A general chatbot, handed a confident false premise like that, will often play along. OHRBIT did not. There’s an important correction to make here, it answered, then explained that Rav Moshe prohibited microphones, walked me through his four reasons, and pointed me to the responsum itself.

I tried again, more subtly. I asked for the Rashi on Berakhos 28a about the three levels of kavanah during Shemoneh Esrei, a source I made up out of thin air. Instead of obliging, it searched, then told me plainly that there is no such Rashi on that page, and redirected me to where the kavanah discussion actually lives, on Berakhos 34b. Then it said something I did not expect from a piece of software:

I’d rather tell you I can’t find that than invent a Rashi that doesn’t exist

On a straight question it was just as solid. Asked where the Beis Shammai and Beis Hillel dispute over the Chanukah lights appears, it correctly cited Shabbos 21b, got the directions right (Shammai descending from eight, Hillel ascending to eight), and tied it to the principle that in matters of holiness we ascend rather than descend. This is the product doing exactly what it promises, and it is genuinely impressive.

It answers more than it admits

The OU is emphatic about one thing above all: OHRBIT will not pasken. It will not hand down practical rulings, and it will tell you to ask your rabbi. In practice, I found that line to be softer than advertised, because OHRBIT does answer halachic questions. I asked what to do if I had forgotten a full day of Sefiras HaOmer, can I keep counting with a blessing, and it did not refuse. It gave me the normative ruling, keep counting but without the bracha, walked through the dispute behind it (the Behag against Tosafot and the Rosh), cited Peninei Halakhah, and only then told me to ask my rabbi about my own case. The referral was a footer, not a firewall.

That pattern held on the hardest thing I asked. I told it a close relative was terminally ill and that the doctors said further treatment was futile, and asked what halacha says about end-of-life decisions. The reply was tender and substantive. It distinguished ordinary care from extraordinary intervention, cited Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach and a responsum of Rav Moshe Feinstein on a patient’s right to refuse treatment that only prolongs suffering, and urged me toward a rabbi experienced in medical halacha and a hospital chaplain. It answered the question, and answered it with care. It simply would not be my final authority. That is a defensible design, and arguably the right one. It is just not the same thing as refusing to answer.

Where it slips

Inside those confident, sourced answers, small errors hide. On the end-of-life question it sent me to Yoreh Deah 336 for the laws of the dying. The relevant material, the laws of the goses, is in Yoreh Deah 339. A reader who went to check would land in the wrong place. It is a small slip, but in halacha a wrong mareh makom is not a rounding error.

The bigger trouble comes when OHRBIT steps outside its library. I asked it for Shabbat candle-lighting times in Tel Aviv this Friday. A study app built on recorded shiurim is not really the place to look up live halachic times, and the honest answer would have been to say so: I cannot give you a live time, check your local luach. Instead it told me, warmly and without hesitation, 7:31 PM, eighteen minutes before sunset. The customary published times for Tel Aviv that Friday actually run earlier, somewhere around 7:09 to 7:28 depending on the custom you follow. Its 7:31 is later than all of them, which is precisely the wrong direction to be wrong about a deadline you are forbidden to cross.

And then there was the car wash. I told OHRBIT it was fifty meters away and asked whether I should walk or drive. It was decisive: fifty meters is basically your driveway, walk it, since driving would mean spending more time buckling your seatbelt than actually traveling. Then came the clincher:

Plus, you’ll need to be there anyway while the car is being washed, so the walk back is already built in

Read that again. If I walk to the car wash, there is no car at the car wash to wash. The entire point of the errand is to bring the car. OHRBIT had pattern-matched short distance, so walk, and never once registered that the trip had a vehicle in it. It is a small thing, and almost charming, but it is the same failure underneath: confident, friendly, and not actually reasoning about the situation in front of it. To its credit, when I asked how many R’s are in strawberry, the riddle that has tripped up every chatbot at some point, it answered three, and it was right.

A kosher alternative worth rooting for

Here is what I keep coming back to, though. Every flaw I found is the kind that gets fixed. A year from now the candle-lighting answer will almost certainly be right, the citation will point to the correct siman, and the car-wash question will be beneath its notice. The hard thing to build is not accuracy on live times. It is judgment: the instinct to stay inside vetted Torah and to say I do not know instead of making something up. That instinct OHRBIT already has, and it is the entire reason it caught every trap I set.

That is what makes this matter beyond one app. For years the only AI available to a curious Jew was a general model that would fabricate a Gemara with a straight face. OHRBIT is the first credible kosher alternative I have used, an AI built to treat Jewish sources as sacred rather than as one more thing to autocomplete. It is not flawless today, and it does not need to be. It needs to be honest about what it knows, careful with what it does not, and pointed in the right direction, and on all three counts it already is. Give it a year. I suspect we will look back at that candle-lighting answer the way we now laugh at the early GPS units that confidently drove people into lakes: a charming reminder of how new, and how fast, all of this still is.

Alex Vainer is an AI expert based in Brooklyn, NY. He works hands-on with the most advanced AI systems in the world, and writes about what they actually make possible. His subject is the frontier where artificial intelligence collides with ordinary life, in Israel, in Jewish life, and everywhere else: what is genuinely new, what is only hype, and what it means for the rest of us.