You Are a Person, First

Sometime in the 1670s, R. Yair Chaim Bacharach, better known by the title of his responsa collection, the Chavos Yair, recorded a remarkable exchange between his brother-in-law and Karl Ludwig, Elector Palatine of the Rhine. The Duke had lodged a complaint to the rabbi: the Jews of his province were bribing his judges and making a mockery of the court system (the old “Jews and money” trope) and the duke wanted to know if this was indeed permissible under Jewish law. As recorded in the Chavos Yair, the rabbi responded that of course such actions prohibited, but not (necessarily, or exclusively) as a matter of Jewish law:

“There is no way to advocate on behalf of the bribe-givers, for even if the prohibition were not stated in the Torah, reason itself, the ordered society, and the proper administration of the state would demand forbidding it — just as with murder, robbery, theft, fraud, licentiousness, and false weights. All of these are things reason itself obligates, and law and religion and statute impose upon them all, for if justice is corrupted, every man will do what is right in his own eyes.”

The rabbi takes it for granted that certainly there is something even more fundamental than the Torah’s laws that prohibits bribing judges and perverting justice, it is “reason itself”. In the end, the rabbi actually does come up with justifications for these bribe-givers, writing that the integrity of these judges were already compromised, and the Duke responds with amusement at the clever rabbi’s ability to justify anything. But the primary point stands: Jews are prohibited from acting immorally not only as Jews, but as human beings, and that their obligations within this human framework have their own force, even if these obligations cannot be traced back to God’s revelation to Moshe at Sinai.

This idea runs very deep in the rabbinic tradition. R. Nissim Gaon, writing in eleventh-century Kairouan, opens one of the very first commentaries written on the Talmud with a similar statement, that all of humanity, Jews and non-Jews alike, are obligated to follow the ‘laws of reason’ even without any explicit divine command. Similar discussions can be found the R. Yehudah Halevi’s Kuzari (see below) and Rambam’s Guide for the Perplexed (3:17, 3:50). R. Yosef Engel, the great early twentieth-century posek and systematic thinker, developed this in several directions, connecting it to a well-established principle that sevarah (logical reasoning) can generate binding halakhic obligations (Beis ha-Otzar 131).

I recently spoke to David Zvi Kalman, who has been at the forefront of arguing that Judaism has something unique and important to say about how humanity engages with the new challenges that we are likely to be faced with thanks to the rise of Artificial Intelligence. If you’ve read any of my work, you’ll probably assume that I agree; I’ve been devoting a lot of time and effort towards trying to map out what would a genuinely Jewish response look like to AI. But at least for the purposes of this essay, I want to consider the alternative: what if we’re wrong, and Judaism does not have anything meaningful to contribute here? Where does that leave us as committed Jews? Does that mean we are off the hook, or left to flail about blindly?

There is a tendency in some circles of halakhically committed Jews to assume that if there is no specific Torah source on a matter, then it is not really a Jewish issue, and we are either free to do whatever we feel like doing, or such arenas should be completely avoided by rabbinic voices. Some may have this attitude due to an understandable parochialism and appreciation of the limited resources necessary: let the philosophers and the AI researchers figure it out, but we have yeshivos to run and congregants to attend to. Some, I think, take a more principled stance that this is the Torah’s intention: God wants us to focus exclusively within the confines of the four cubits of halakha, and we (or “the rabbis”) have no obligation and even no right to extend themselves beyond those four cubits.

In a previous essay I discussed the R. Aharon Lichtenstein’s classic essay “Does Jewish Tradition Recognize an Ethic Independent of Halakha?” which concludes that the implied definition of “halakha” in the question is too restrictive. Here I am talking a bit more directly about Jewish leadership on a non-Jewish (or at least, not obviously Torah-related) issue, so I want to quote a more forceful paragraph of his from an essay on “Communal Governance”:

[An untenable presupposition] clearly implies, as a point of departure, a restricted role for the rabbi and a constricted conception of his person. While the existence of areas, presumably halakhic, of rabbinic jurisdiction is evidently recognized, the perception of the rabbi, insofar as matters of communal policy are concerned, as a legal specialist, seems inescapable. He will be heard and heeded, so long as he addresses his congregants from the platform of the Shulhan Arukh as their posek. Barring that, however, he carries no more weight than any of them. Devar ha-reshut is just that -- purely optional in every sense. I find this position unconscionable. It does violence to Halakhah, and it does violence to its rabbinic representatives. The notion that whatever has not been explicitly proscribed is implicitly licit, and thus not subject to rabbinic judgment, is morally and religiously abhorrent. It obviates sensitivity to lifnim mi-shurat ha-din, in its multifaceted manifestations, obliterates meta-halakhic considerations, and potentially eviscerates the ethical and axiological components of Torah spiritual life. It invites not only Pauline and Buberian charges of arid legalism but Hazal’s scathing comment, lo harvah Yerushalayim ela al she-danu bah din Torah [Jerusalem was only destroyed because they judged according to the strict letter of the Torah law].

R. Aharon Lichtenstein is referring here specifically to rabbinic leadership when it comes to topics and policies that go beyond the strict confines of what it says in the books. But the principle is applicable also to everything else that falls outside “din Torah,” as the sages put it. The Chavos Yair’s brother-in-law could clearly acknowledge that his congregants had done something wrong, not necessarily because it violated Jewish law, but because reason itself, the ordered society, and the proper administration of the state demanded better. He recognized that the moral universe he was living in was larger than the boundaries of his community.

To return to the essay on “an ethic independent of halakha,” R. Lichtenstein makes a strong case for such obligations, but doesn’t discuss how they should be determined. Rabbi Avraham Grodzinsky, the spiritual leader of Slobodka yeshiva who was killed by the Nazis in 1944, also wrote on this topic at length, stating that the study and adherence to human morality should constitute a fundamental obligation, even prior in some ways to the study of Torah (Toras Avraham p. 128ff). The Shulhan Arukh of moral reasoning is shared by all of humanity, and while it requires a different methodological toolkit, it too requires toil.

That work, when it comes to Artificial Intelligence, is already well underway. It is being carried out by philosophers, engineers, economists, policymakers… and by the Catholic Church. The fact that this conversation is, for now, largely happening without much serious input from Jewish voices is not surprising at all; we are rightfully busy with other things. But these issues are going to quickly become our issues, as we are not exempt from being members of the entire human community, nor should we seek to be. And if the only rabbinic engagement we have is some other version of the question of whether or not an LLM can count as one of the ten men for a minyan, I think we’ll have failed in our duties as Jews and humans to work through the moral reasoning by applying both Jewish and human wisdom. I do think Judaism has something unique to contribute here, but for some of these purposes that does not matter. We Jews are humans, first.

The Kotzker Rebbe is said to have taught, lifting a line from the liturgy out of context, לעולם יהא אדם “first of all, be a person (in Yiddish, a mensch).” Being a person comes before being a yerei-shamayim, someone who is God-fearing. I’ve heard it told as something like a rebuke, a warning to those who prioritize ritual scrupulousness at the expense of basic decency. But I also like it because of the order of operations, derekh eretz kodmah la-Torah; before you are a Jew in the sense of a carrier of particular laws and practices, you are a human being, embedded in human society, with responsibilities that flow from that fact alone. Jewish obligations of the Torah are meant as additions to that basic foundation of human morality.

R. Yehudah Halevi makes just this point through the mouth of his rabbi in the Kuzari. The king of the Khazars notes that Israel’s own scriptures seem preoccupied with ordinary morality rather than with the rituals that set Israel apart (Kuzari II:47). The chaver answers that the rational laws are “the basis and preamble of the divine law, preceding it in character and time, and being indispensable in the administration of every human society.” Someone who fails on this basic level at traits like justice and character has no business with the minutia of sacrificial offerings and ritual law; if you cannot be a good person first, certainly you cannot be a good Jew. The prophets thus foretold of the destruction both of the temple as well as the entire political and social order of Jerusalem, and when the book of Eikhah cries in mourning, it is for the people much more than is for God’s temple.

It’s not just the pope who should be talking about building Jerusalem. We know that the city, Zion, will be “redeemed through justice,” tziyon be-mishpat tipadeh, and only then “called the city of righteousness, the faithful city,” the place to which the nations stream for instruction. It is human work, and it is Jewish work, and we should be doing both.