There’s an old saying: “Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water …” In other words, there’s always something waiting for you that’s unexpected and dangerous. Ladies and gentlemen, meet “grief tech,” the AI way to communicate with dead friends and family.

Grief tech was the subject of a recent article in Mosaic, a Jewish digest.¹ Apparently, it is, or will soon be, possible to “communicate” with deceased relatives who, before their deaths, prerecorded certain answers to questions that can be asked posthumously.

I miss my departed loved ones, but I have no desire to try to talk to them. Because it wouldn’t really be them.

The Mosaic author goes beyond calling grief tech unwise and actually calls it unholy. She elaborates, “First, the awareness of artifice must taint any conversation with an AI-generated persona that does not tire or thirst or fall ill…. Second, human beings possess free will in a way that AI cannot, including the freedom to deny conversation; exchanges with an AI-generated facsimile of a human loved one suggest an untoward control over that person.”

On the other hand, the Museum of Jewish Heritage, a Holocaust museum in New York, has an exhibit called “Survivor Stories: An Interactive Dialogue,” which has been running since January 2025. The idea is for visitors to be able to “converse” with ten different Holocaust survivors who have prerecorded their testimonies. Then, “leveraging AI technology, the recordings enable survivors to ‘hear’ and ‘answer’ visitors’ direct questions, simulating a real-life conversation.”²

There is a difference between using this kind of AI for educational purposes and attempting to keep a real-life relationship going beyond death. I remember something similar at the Carter Center in Atlanta, GA, even before the advent of AI. You could ask preselected questions and choose one of three answers. Then a video would come on with President Jimmy Carter giving reasons why the chosen answer was either right or wrong. It was a learning experience.

The best-known séance of all time may be the one recorded in the Bible.

But the desire to continue to relate with our departed loved ones is different. And it’s nothing new. Spiritualism, which included séances among its many manifestations, swept the country like nothing else in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.³ Many believed that they could contact the dead and speak with them. Reports of apparitions of those departed continue to be widespread.⁴

The best-known séance of all time may be the one recorded in the Bible, in 1 Samuel 28 (which is also mentioned in the Mosaic piece). Here, we find King Saul seeking out the dead prophet Samuel, not because he was a departed loved one, but in order to figure out where the political winds were blowing. When the Witch of Endor, as she is known, brings up Samuel from the dead, the prophet does not begin with, “Hi, Saul, so nice to see you again.” Instead, to paraphrase it, Samuel rebukes Saul: “Why the heck did you bother me?” Saul lets on that he wants Samuel’s advice since God has turned against him. Samuel’s response is essentially, “God already told you what’s going to happen. And it’s not good for you, Saul.” Call it “The World’s Worst Séance Ever.”

Jewish tradition, from the Torah onwards, frowns on spiritualism and trying to reach beyond the grave. The Jewish practice of shiva⁵ accepts the reality of death and the need to grieve and process loss. AI grief tech seems to be a way to try and make the barrier between the dead and the living a permeable one—a 21st-century séance achieved technologically. But it can never be a real human conversation. How could it? The AI avatar is not going to say, “Enough questions! I need to have a nap” (unless the actual person prerecorded those lines). It’s never going to say, “I’m proud of what you’ve done since I died.” Or, “I’m disappointed in what you’ve become.” Or, “Let’s go out for a meal.”

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Attempts at transcending death take many forms, and AI grief tech is just one of those. Others cryogenically freeze themselves in the hope of reviving one day. Some hope to be able to download their brains (their minds?) even if their bodies decay.

What if we accepted death for what it is? Rather than fight the totality of someone’s life—birth, growth, decline, and then an end—what if we accepted that life for what it was and for what it gave to those now living? I would love to speak to my grandfather again—the person who taught me ha-motzi⁶ at the dinner table as a child. The one who walked with me to shul. Yes, the one who greatly objected when I chose to believe in Jesus.

What I don’t want is to “converse”—or, really, have a one-way conversation—with an avatar generated by AI, preprogrammed to respond, unable to speak beyond certain carefully defined parameters, unable to enter into the realities of this life here and now.

There are unrealities and then there are unrealities. A novel is fictional. But the best fiction allows us to enter another world and make it our own, so that when we have finished the book, we may be able to learn and grow as human beings. That kind of unreality actually ends up being real.

But grief tech is fiction wherein death masquerades as life. It does not end up being real, but inverts life and death. It offers not a world to enter by means of which we can grow. Instead, it proffers a stunted reality which affirms its own unrealness.

Death is certain. I don’t know about you, but I would rather have the real world with its joys, pains, boredom, and excitements, and, yes, death—even my own.

When people pass away, it is the end of something, but it’s also the beginning of something that we can’t package or produce. That beginning, whatever form it takes, is real. Real like a grandfather who isn’t always pleased, real like our bodies that grow frail, and real like life.

Endnotes

1 Devorah Goldman, “I Shall Go to Him, but He Will Never Come Back to Me,” Mosaic, June 29, 2026.

2 “Survivor Stories: An Interactive Dialogue,” Museum of Jewish Heritage, accessed August 4, 2026.

3 Wikipedia Foundation, “Spiritualism (movement),” last modified August 16, 2026.

4 See the fascinating work by Jonathan Kendall, Seeing the Messiah: An Analysis of the Postmortem Appearances of Jesus Christ and the Lubavitcher Rebbe Against the Backdrop of Apparitional Phenomena (Resource Publications, 2025).

5 Shiva is a seven-day period of mourning with its own traditions, such as covering mirrors in the home and sitting on low stools.

6 Ha-motzi is the blessing over bread.