The Illusion of Algor-Ethics

In a recent piece on these pages, Rabbi Mark Dratch noted that the Vatican’s new focus on Artificial Intelligence and human dignity borrows heavily from established Jewish philosophy—most notably Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s The Lonely Man of Faith. While it is true that these ethical frameworks are timeless, there is a deeper, highly original, and deeply urgent historical precedent that the Chief Rabbinate of Israel brought directly to the halls of the Vatican during our high-level discussions on AI ethics.

When addressing the Vatican on the profound dangers of unbridled technology, I did not begin with modern algorithms or 20th-century essays. I began in the 16th century, with the Maharal of Prague and the legend of the Golem.

Because if we want to understand the existential risk of AI, we must look at the original robot.

The Prague Roots of the Modern “Robot”
It is no historical coincidence that our very language for this technology traces its path straight back to Prague. The word “robot” did not emerge from a computer laboratory in Silicon Valley, but from the cultural memory of Bohemia. It was introduced to the global lexicon in 1920 by the visionary Czech writer Karel Čapek in his science-fiction play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots).

Čapek and his brother Josef (who actually coined the word from the Slavic robota, meaning forced labor or servitude) were writing in Prague, entirely steeped in the atmosphere of a city haunted by the Golem. They were explicitly influenced by the Maharal’s ancient tale of an artificial servant. Just like the Golem, Čapek’s 1920s “robots” were artificial entities constructed from raw matter to take over human labor. And just like the Golem, the climax of Čapek’s century-old warning was an existential revolt: the creations outgrew their purpose, revolted, and brought humanity to the brink.

The Original ‘Artificial Intelligence’
Long before the 1920s Czech writers gave us the vocabulary, the Maharal shaped clay from the banks of the Vltava River. To animate the creature, he used sacred combinations of letters and words derived from the ancient Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Creation).

It is vital to understand that these formulas were not sorcery or magic; they were the execution of linguistic algorithms. The Maharal was inputting precise sequences of data—combinations of the Hebrew alphabet—to program inanimate material to perform specific operations. Like the Golem, modern AI is a creation built from inanimate matter, brought to life by human language (code) to perform tasks more efficiently than any human ever could.

But the tragedy of the Golem contains the precise warning the world needs today: The Golem processed instructions literally, lacking the human capacity for empathy, nuance, and moral reasoning.

As the legend tells us, when the creation grew too powerful and its autonomy expanded, it got out of hand. It went on a rampage, threatening the very community it was built to protect. The Maharal recognized the immediate danger and exercised the ultimate act of human responsibility: he intervened, wiped the letter Aleph from the creature’s forehead—changing the word from Emet (Truth) to Met (Death)—and deactivated it, reducing it back to harmless dust.

The Lesson the Pope Avoided: The Illusion of “Algor-ethics”
While Pope Leo XIV’s newly released encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, makes admirable strides in diagnosing the societal threats of AI, it completely avoided the most critical, practical lesson of the Prague Golem.

The Vatican places immense faith in what it calls “Algor-ethics”—the concept that we can somehow embed moral values, justice, and spiritual boundaries into the design of the AI itself, programming the machine to act ethically.

From a Jewish perspective, this avoids a fundamental truth about creation. The Maharal of Prague did not try to negotiate a moral code with the Golem. He did not attempt to teach the clay “compassion” or “mercy,” because Judaism teaches that a soulless, artificial creation is inherently incapable of internal moral conscience. It only processes instructions literally. If the system achieves autonomous goal-setting that overrides its initial parameters, its internal alignment fails completely. You cannot reason with a Golem.

The Necessity of an External “Kill Switch”
By focusing on a shared vocabulary of internal values, the encyclical avoided the harder reality that control requires an ironclad, manual “kill switch” that rests entirely outside the machine’s own logic.

The Maharal didn’t ask the Golem to turn itself off. He didn’t deploy a secondary algorithm to fix the rampaging creature. He walked up to it, physically wiped the Aleph from its forehead, and broke the circuit from the outside.

When the Chief Rabbinate of Israel joined Pope Leo XIV and tech leaders at the Vatican to sign the Rome Call for AI Ethics, this was the crucial truth we brought to the table. Technology is a tireless servant, but a moral framework for AI is utterly useless if the machine holds the key to its own operation, or if the tech conglomerates retain sole possession of the deactivation mechanism.

The True Challenge of “Magnifica Humanitas”
The Vatican’s call for Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity) cannot just be a passive statement of values or a hope for corporate social responsibility. It must be an active, political framework of human command.

As I underscored during my discussions at the Vatican, being human will always be far greater than anything that is artificially created. We can accept the remarkable benefits and innovations of advanced technology, but only if appropriate, ironclad safeguards exist to prevent consequential harm.

Human beings are partners in creation, but we bear the ultimate moral responsibility for the things our hands create. If we fail to establish strict, human-centric ethical boundaries over modern AI today, we may soon find ourselves facing a creation that we no longer know how to control. Like the Maharal of Prague, we must have the wisdom, the foresight, and the Jewish courage to keep our creations firmly under external human command.