Author’s Note: I will be giving a short series of talks at Beth Israel Congregation, Ann Arbor, Michigan. These classes will be on Wednesdays beginning the last week of October through the second week of November. The course is titled “The Journey.” I have been meditating on various scriptural and other texts since being approached to teach this short course. These will not be merely lectures, but rather a dialogue, a sharing of our journey of faith. The following is based on those reflections. They are presented here as introductory comments.   

The Journey

“Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.” Pope Leo XIV

In his Encyclical Letter MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS, Pope Leo XIV addresses the questions, and seeks to discern “…how to navigate responsibly in the era of AI, I would like to bring to mind two scenes from the Bible: the construction of the Tower of Babel (cf. Gen 11:1-9)” and the people working together to rebuild Jerusalem (Nehemiah 3:1-38, in particular verse 38).

Babylon, in the Pope’s words, is “…a city built on pride and the claim to self-sufficiency, communication breaks down, languages are confused, and people no longer understand each other. The result is not unity, but dispersion. Babel thus reveals the limits of any effort that, however grandiose, arises from self-affirmation, sacrifices human dignity for efficiency and aspires to reach heaven without God’s blessing.”

Of Jerusalem, he writes, “The narrative shows how the city is reborn, not through the initiative of one man, but through the shared responsibility of all: men, women, priests, artisans, heads of households and young people all play a part. It is an undertaking with God at the center, which rebuilds relationships before rebuilding with stones. Thus, ancient Jerusalem rediscovers a common language — not one of uniformity, but one of communion, namely the harmony that arises when all persons assume their own role and recognize that their strength comes from the Lord.”

I agree with Pope Leo’s assessment, though the questions come to mind. “What is the grandeur of the human person?” And, as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks asked, “What is the role of religion in a secular society?” The answers to these questions are found in the Genesis account of the first human beings.

The primary teaching of the first two chapters of Genesis is that the physical universe results from the activity of one, undivided God. It is this Divine Being who creates and establishes a structured order, a unity that mirrors the Divine unity, a connectedness between all things. Today, physics (the laws of physics) and other sciences allow us to perceive this unity and to gaze with awe into the vast mysteries of our world and the cosmos.

For all their insights, physics and the sciences are unable to convey the second message of the Genesis author. He directs our attention to creation’s intrinsic moral nature.

The author expresses this moral value through the word Tov (good). Tov appears six times (Genesis 1:10, 12, 18, 21, 26, 31). Verse 31 modifies it as me’od tov (very good). This and the blessing of Adam and Eve establish a moral, and one could add a religious dimension to the text.

This idea of morality in creation is fully articulated in the creation of human beings in the tzelem Elohim or imago Dio—in God’s own image. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks emphasize that we are reminders of the Divine Presence on earth. This is the grandeur of our humanity that, despite the efforts of artificial intelligence developers, cannot be duplicated. Humanity was created to be moral beings in our relationship to nature as its caretakers, to our fellow human beings in respecting their dignity and being responsible for them, and to God in fulfilling our obligations. We serve the Divine through our moral actions in the first two relationships and through prayer. Prayer is our avodah shebalev, service of the heart (Talmud in Ta’anit 2a). In Deuteronomy 13:5 we are instructed to: “Follow none but the Lord your God, and revere none but Him; observe His commandments alone and heed only His orders; serve none but Him and hold fast to Him.” It is our personal and communal responsibility to find the fire in our souls to live the moral life. 

But what is our soul? In our faith, there are different Hebrew words for the soul. The most commonly used are nefesh, neshamah—meaning our “breath.” The author of Genesis describes the soul as the Divine breath.  “And the ETERNAL God formed the man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life: and the man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7). Elsewhere in the TaNaKh we read, “The spirit of God formed me;/The breath of Shaddai sustains me” (Job 33.4).

One does not have to take the Biblical account literally to understand that the author is establishing the majesty of human beings. Each person is a microcosm of the cosmos through which the breath of God flows.

The architects of artificial intelligence are unable to create a soul or train machines to be “good” or moral “beings” in decision-making. The majesty of human beings lies not in the capacity to dominate the natural finite world—because we ourselves are finite beings—but in our capacity to live as moral beings. To live the moral life is to understand that creation itself is endowed with moral goodness. To comprehend this leads to a life of faith.

The life of faith is, as the Jewish philosopher Joseph B. Soloveitchik notes is “a rendezvous with eternity.” Our life is a daily rendezvous, a journey towards engagement that follows in the footsteps of Abraham and Sarah, which leads us to Mount Sinai, and a commitment in accepting the covenant that molds the depths of our being as we stand before the Divine.   

The conventual life is a life of living in harmony with the natural world, others, and the Divine. A recent letter from Terrill Welch, a Canadian artist, reminds me of this understanding when she quotes Etty Hillesum. Hillesum was from Middelburg, Netherlands. She was born on 15 January, 1914. Hillesum was 29 years old when she died on 30 November, 1943, in Auschwitz. “‛Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it towards others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will be in our troubled world.’” ( Etty: the Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943., p. 535).

The Journey ©2026 Charles van Heck

Photograph:  “Backroads” ©2026 Charles van Heck