The Vatican is right to enter the debate on artificial intelligence. But it should not be the only religious voice standing at the threshold.

Pope Leo XIV’s forthcoming encyclical Magnifica humanitas, devoted to safeguarding the human person in the age of artificial intelligence, marks an important moment. It places AI where it belongs: not merely among technical innovations, market opportunities, or national-security instruments, but inside one of the oldest questions of civilization: what may power do to a human being?

The staging itself matters. This is not only a document being released. It is a scene being assembled. A pope, cardinals, theologians, and Christopher Olah of Anthropic appear together around the same problem: how advanced AI is to be morally named, governed, explained, trusted, and limited. Before the world has even learned how to contest these systems properly, a moral theater of technology is being formed.

That is precisely why another voice is needed.

Not an anti-Catholic voice. Not a secular sneer. Not another predictable argument about “religion and technology.” What is needed is a Hebrew interruption.

Christian language, especially in its modern Catholic social form, tends to speak of the dignity of the human person, humanity, universal responsibility, and the common good. This is not weak language. It has protected workers, the poor, the vulnerable, and the wounded against many forms of instrumental power. In the age of AI, it can still serve as a barrier against reducing the human being to data, function, labor, risk, or target.

But the Hebrew tradition does not begin from the universal human person.

It begins from commandment, interruption, prohibition, witness, the stranger, the widow, the orphan, the debtor, the worker, the defeated, and the enemy. It does not first ask whether the human being possesses dignity within a universal moral order. It asks whether an apparatus has begun to behave like an idol.

This distinction matters.

An idol is not only a statue. An idol is any human-made structure that receives the authority to decide reality while hiding the hands that made it. An idol does not need incense. It needs obedience. It needs people to say: the system knows. The model assessed. The algorithm predicted. The platform detected. The risk score indicated. The target was generated. The decision was procedurally valid.

At that moment, the machine has not merely assisted judgment. It has absorbed responsibility.

A Hebrew response to AI ethics must therefore begin with a prohibition: no model may become an idol of decision.

This does not mean that AI must be rejected. Judaism is not a romance of technological innocence. The Hebrew Bible is full of tools, measurements, architectures,........

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