Zvi Ish-Shalom, PhD, is a documented descendant of the Maharal of Prague, the most famous golem-builder in Jewish history. Zvi grew up Orthodox in Brooklyn reading Mendy and the Golem, and is named for his great-grandfather, whose manuscripts record a rabbinic debate over whether a golem could be counted in a minyan, the quorum needed for communal prayer.

Four generations later, the question came back to him wearing a new face. Here’s how he describes the moment it started, from his forthcoming book Silicon Light:

“I was sitting in bed at two in the morning, reading a paper on transformer architecture, and the same stillness that arrives when something true lands in deep meditation arrived right there… I could have written a paper about these parallels. Instead, I built a golem.”