November 15, 2026|ה' כסלו ה' אלפים תשפ"ז What Jensen Huang’s Downfall Teaches Us About Human Nature
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Jensen Huang helped revolutionize artificial intelligence. As the cofounder and CEO of Nvidia, he built a company at the center of the AI revolution, powering technology capable of processing unimaginable amounts of information, identifying patterns, predicting outcomes, and solving problems once thought impossible. His extraordinary success, however, raises an important question about the difference between artificial intelligence and human wisdom. No matter how brilliant we become, can intelligence alone protect us from the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of human nature?
Intelligence vs. Wisdom
We’ve seen this story before. Again and again, titans of industry, celebrated athletes, entertainers, elected officials, and enormously successful people have watched their careers, reputations, marriages, and families unravel because of inappropriate relationships, infidelity, and failures of self-control. Tragically, our own community is not immune. We have witnessed prominent rabbis and respected Jewish leaders fall prey to the very temptations they warned others about.
Each time, we are stunned. How could someone so accomplished, admired, intelligent, or learned make such a terrible mistake? How could someone with so much to lose risk everything?
Perhaps the answer is that intelligence and wisdom are not the same thing. Intelligence enables us to understand complex problems, recognize patterns, and devise solutions. Wisdom is the humility to recognize our own limitations and vulnerabilities. Sometimes, the more intelligent a person is, the more capable he becomes of rationalizing behavior he knows is wrong.
But the most important response to these stories is not to sit in judgment, question how someone could have been so foolish, or feel superior because we imagine we would have acted differently. Rather, it is to recognize that we are all human, we are all vulnerable, and none of us is immune to poor judgment. Instead of focusing on another person's failures, we should reflect on our own vulnerabilities and appreciate how fortunate we are to have a Torah that understands human nature so profoundly and provides us with the wisdom and boundaries to protect us from ourselves.
No One Is Immune
Long before artificial intelligence, Chazal demonstrated a remarkable understanding of human psychology. The Gemara (Kiddushin 81a) teaches, Ein apotropos l'arayos, no one is immune to temptation in matters of intimacy and forbidden relationships. No amount of intelligence, accomplishment, power, or even righteousness guarantees that a person is beyond vulnerability. We all possess drives and desires that can overwhelm even our best judgment.
In fact, Chazal go further. The Gemara (Sukkah 52a) teaches, Kol hagadol meichaveiro, yitzro gadol heimenu, the greater a person, the greater his yetzer hara. We might assume that the more accomplished, disciplined, or spiritually elevated someone becomes, the less vulnerable they are. Chazal teach us that the opposite can be true. Greatness doesn't necessarily diminish the struggle. Sometimes it intensifies it.
The very qualities that enable extraordinary achievement, including passion, ambition, confidence, and intensity, can also create extraordinary challenges. Someone accustomed to overcoming obstacles and succeeding where others failed can begin to believe that ordinary rules don't apply to him. Success in one area of life can create the dangerous illusion of invincibility in every area of life.
Even the Greatest Struggled
This understanding of human nature is embedded in the very way the Torah tells its stories. Our Tanach is remarkably candid about the challenges, struggles, and even apparent shortcomings of its greatest personalities. But we must be exceedingly careful not to confuse their humanity with ordinary human weakness. Avraham, Yitzchak, Yaakov, Moshe Rabbeinu, Dovid HaMelech, and the other giants of Tanach were not simply ordinary people like us who accomplished extraordinary things. They were spiritual giants whose greatness, righteousness, and closeness to Hashem are beyond anything we can imagine. We cannot read about and casually judge their actions by our standards or presume to understand their struggles through the lens of our own experiences. Chazal teach us how carefully and reverently we must approach these accounts.
Yet precisely because they were so great, there is something remarkable about the Torah's willingness to share their challenges rather than portray them as flawless. Acknowledging their struggles does not diminish their greatness. It teaches us that even extraordinary spiritual greatness does not mean the absence of challenge. If the Torah wants us to appreciate that even its greatest personalities confronted challenges, how much more must we, who cannot begin to compare ourselves to them, recognize our vulnerabilities and the need for boundaries to protect us?
And that is precisely why the Torah insists on boundaries.
The Case for Boundaries
We live in a world that increasingly views the Torah's restrictions governing relationships between men and women as archaic, excessive, or even fanatical. (Indeed, when it was revealed that former vice president Mike Pence kept certain restrictions in place to ensure appropriate behavior, he was widely mocked and criticized for his archaic approach to male/female relationships.) The laws of yichud, prohibiting certain situations of private seclusion, and negiah, restricting physical contact, can seem unnecessary to those who believe mature, intelligent, responsible adults should simply be trusted to exercise good judgment. Why impose restrictions on people who have no intention of doing anything wrong?
The answer is that the Torah understands something about human nature that we are often reluctant to acknowledge: Good intentions are not always sufficient protection against powerful temptations. The Torah doesn't assume that everyone will behave inappropriately. It recognizes that anyone can. It doesn't teach us to distrust others, but to be appropriately cautious about ourselves.
How Good People Cross Lines
The laws of yichud and negiah reflect a sophisticated and realistic understanding of the human psyche. Attraction is powerful and emotional intimacy can develop unexpectedly. Physical closeness can awaken feelings neither anticipated nor intended. Rarely does someone wake up one morning and decide to destroy a marriage, betray a family, or sacrifice a reputation built over decades. More often, the process is gradual. A conversation or friendship starts casual but becomes intimate. An appropriate, genial workplace relationship morphs over time into a personal and inappropriate one. A boundary is crossed, then another and another until a person doesn’t even feel they are doing anything wrong. Each step seems small, each rationalization reasonable, until a person finds himself somewhere he never intended to be.
The Torah's wisdom is to establish boundaries before we reach the moment when we need them most, because by then our judgment may already be compromised.
Passion Is a Gift
This is not an indictment of desire itself. Judaism does not consider attraction, passion, or intimacy inherently shameful. Quite the opposite. The Torah celebrates human connection and sanctifies intimacy between husband and wife. The word for the marital union is literally Kiddushin, a reference to the highest levels of holiness. These drives are among the greatest gifts Hashem has given us, enabling us to love, bond, create families, and experience profound closeness.
But precisely because they are so powerful, they require care. Fire can warm a home or destroy it. Water can sustain life or overwhelm everything in its path. The answer is not to eliminate these forces, but to channel them responsibly. The Torah doesn't seek to extinguish passion. It seeks to protect and direct it so that it builds rather than destroys.
Protecting What Matters Most
Pirkei Avos (2:4) warns, Al ta'amin b'atzmecha ad yom moscha, do not trust yourself until the day of your death. Never assume you have reached a point when you are beyond temptation, failure, or the need for vigilance. The greatest danger is not in having a yetzer hara; we all have one. The greatest danger is believing that ours is no longer a threat.
We don't know another person's struggles and should be exceedingly careful about judging them. But we must be equally careful not to become so confident in our own strength that we abandon the safeguards designed to protect us.
There is a tendency to think of boundaries as restrictions that limit our freedom, inhibit our relationships, or deprive us of experiences. But perhaps we have it exactly backward: Boundaries are not punitive. They are protective.
We lock the doors of our homes not because we dislike our homes, but because we cherish what is inside. We place valuable possessions in safes, protect important information with passwords, and guard precious heirlooms with extraordinary care. Nobody considers these precautions irrational or extreme. We instinctively understand that the more something matters to us, the more carefully we protect it.
Shouldn't the same be true of our marriages, our families, our integrity, and our souls? If we take extraordinary precautions to protect our financial assets, shouldn't we exercise at least as much care in protecting the trust, loyalty, and love that define our homes?
The Torah's boundaries are not evidence that it misunderstands human nature. They are evidence that it understands human nature better than we often understand ourselves.
Ancient Wisdom for the Age of AI
We live in an age of extraordinary technological sophistication. Artificial intelligence can solve problems once considered impossible and transform entire industries. Yet all that progress has not fundamentally changed the human heart. Our vulnerabilities, desires, and capacity for self-deception remain remarkably similar to those of generations past.
The same Torah that some dismiss as outdated understood these realities thousands of years before modern psychology began exploring them. Its guidance is not rendered obsolete by progress. In many ways, progress only makes its wisdom more relevant.
Jensen Huang is not the first, and he will not be the last. We will undoubtedly continue to hear stories of brilliant executives, celebrated athletes, powerful politicians, and even respected religious leaders whose failures leave us shocked and disappointed. We can find ourselves once again asking how people so smart could be so foolish, or we can recognize the deeper lesson Chazal have been teaching us all along.
No one is too great to need boundaries, no one is too accomplished to need humility, and no one is too strong to need protection. We should not wait for a scandal to appreciate the wisdom of the Torah's safeguards or recognize that what we care about most deserves our greatest vigilance.
Artificial intelligence may continue to become smarter, faster, and more sophisticated. But human intelligence will always need something more: the humility to acknowledge our vulnerabilities and the wisdom to protect ourselves from them.
Intelligence tells us what we are capable of. Wisdom reminds us what we are vulnerable to. And the Torah teaches us how to protect what matters most.