Dwelling Together in the City of God
I started crafting this sermon by opening up ChatGPT and typing in the following prompt.*
‘What is your (concise) response to the Pope’s Encyclical Letter ‘Magnifica Humanitas’ on the role of AI in our society?’[i]
Pope Leo XIV, the Bishop of Rome from Chicago, recently issued a lengthy Encyclical Letter: ‘Magnifica Humanitas – On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.’ I didn’t put ‘citing the Pope in a synagogue sermon’ on my rabbinic bingo card, but these are curious times.
I will not claim that I have read the entire 42,000 word document, nor did I use ChatGPT to summarize it, but reading the introduction to this papal text is already worthwhile. ‘Humanity,’, Pope Leo writes, ‘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. Each generation inherits the task of shaping its own era, of guiding history to become a place where the dignity of every person is safeguarded, justice is promoted and fraternity is made possible. Yet every era also runs the risk of creating an inhumane and more unjust world.’
The Pope reflects on two Biblical metaphors in his letter: the hubris of building the Tower of Babel and the sacred project of rebuilding Jerusalem for the common good in the time of Ezra and Nechemiah. He continues: ‘We must, then, avoid the “Babel syndrome,” namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance. The risk of dehumanization — of building a future that excludes God and reduces the other to a means — is an ancient and ever-new temptation that today takes on a technical guise. Instead, let us choose the “way of Nehemiah,” which highlights the importance of working together to make the City of God a safe place for returning exiles.’
There is a great deal of consternation about the place of AI in our lives. I am not able to meaningfully assess the level of threat AI poses to human civilization; that is not my expertise. What I can speak to are my own worries and fears. One of my closest kin is a graphic designer: will his job be replaced by AI? When I see a Korean Buddhist monk robot initiated into a sacred order, does that mean that even my vocation is in peril? We see the rise of AI everywhere; in our doctor’s offices where AI generates transcripts of the intimate conversations we have with our health care professionals, in our Zoom meetings and Google searches and in other ways visible or invisible to the mind’s eye. The irony is that the ‘robotics revolution’ may eliminate meaningful, creative work before it consigns soul-numbing drudgery to the dustbin of history.
There are many things beyond our control, and unknowns that only history can resolve, but there are still ways in which we can govern ourselves wisely on. Whether our robot overlords are already here or not, whether the singularity is on the horizon, what matters much is how we treat and value each other as human beings. This is why the Pope’s letter is titled so beautifully: ‘Magnifica Humanitas’, or to put it in the more Herschelian prose the Pope uses at the end of his document: the grandeur of humanity.
‘So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean’, writes Pope Leo in the third chapter[ii]. Our response needs to be to elevate and sanctify those very gifts in our own lives. It may seem like a historical irony, but one role that religious traditions can play in this brave new world of AI is modeling an iron-clad dedication to humanism. We need a new humanism for the age of the thinking machines.
The pope challenges the downstream effects of the AI on the economy and society; the relentless profit motive, the loss of jobs and family stability, the concentration of power, the violation of privacy and the sacrifice of those most vulnerable. Instead, by foregrounding the singular personhood of the human being, our society must build regulations and safeguards that can harness the boons of the technology but without falling prey to its dangers. This requires new bipartisan legislation and democratic mass mobilization. It also requires a personal, individual consciousness and commitment – a sacred practice of one’s own humanism – that technology should remain the handmaid of humanity. It requires us to create a clear moral hierarchy, be it on the principle of b’tzelem Elohim (humanity created in the image of the Divine) or humanist universal rights, that places humanity above the machine.
We have to unlearn our knee-jerk reverence for the technology. In a world where some people fall in love or even marry their AI’s, it is important that we understand these large language models as fallible and limited; they scrape the internet for the aggregate of all human knowledge: every resplendent symphony composition, every innovative scientific research paper, every inconsequential Reddit post, and combine this—no less, no more—into coherence. It is not magic and it is not sentience. It is part of our spiritual discipline to understand this and to center human creativity and relationship. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use the technology at all. It means that we keep at the forefront of our mind that we are using a machine to harvest digitized human knowledge. This allows us to close the moral circle and reinstate the genius of humanity.
In this week’s Torah portion, Parashat Naso, we encounter the threading of a number of major themes: the holy labor of the Levitical tribes who shlep the Tabernacle and are honored for the work of their hands; the ritual dissolving of the Name of God in the arcane ceremony of the Sotah (the wife suspected and absolved of adultery); and the Nazirite vow, where an Israelite, of any gender, status or class, takes spiritual agency to deepen their relationship with God. What these three disparate stories have in common is the primacy of the dignity and empowerment of human beings, with the mission to preserve relationships, be it in sometimes clunkily patriarchal or hierarchical ways.
The shlepping Gershonites remind us that there is honor in honest, hard work, dignity in tired limbs and calloused hands.
The Sotah ritual, despite the temporary humiliation of the wife, creates a mechanism to protect a woman from wanton spousal abuse and to hold a husband accountable for issuing false accusations. Preserving peace in a household is of such infinite worth, the Rabbis in the Talmud comment, that erasing God’s Name in the ritual is a justified cost.
The Nazirite vow creates a counterpoint to the privilege of wealth and inheritance. Running parallel to the hereditary priesthood, this sacred status is created by intent alone and fully democratizes religious expression. Each person is responsible for their own commitments.
The dignity of creative work. The sanctity of human love, commitment and relationship. Freedom of conscience. These are our moral anchors; they are worth fighting for. We can stand bravely and boldly with Pope Leo the 14th , and all human beings of conscience, in doing so.
As for my ChatGPT prompt? This is what the robot told me:
“The encyclical offers a qualified affirmation of AI paired with a strong moral boundary: AI is not rejected, but it is explicitly denied any claim to neutrality or autonomy from ethical and social responsibility. Its central concern is not technology itself, but the concentration of power, erosion of human dignity, and the risk that efficiency, profit, or systems logic begin to displace moral judgment and human relationship.
In short, it reframes AI as a tool that must remain radically subordinate to human dignity and the common good—and warns that when AI becomes an organizing logic rather than an instrument, it risks becoming a new form of technocratic domination.”
It is perfectly adequate but it blithely unimpressive; a bloodless summary, void of the poetry that makes human minds soar. We will leave creation to those created in the Image of God, building the City of God. May we all warrant those blessings.
*This sermon was written and edited by a human being, without the assistance of AI.
[i] https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html
[ii] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/25/the-guardian-view-on-the-pope-and-claude-encyclical-on-ai-is-right-to-put-humanity-first
