Human Rights as Mashiach: A Jewish Theology of Human Rights

By Shaiya Rothberg

While religion is sometimes the enemy of human dignity, it can also be a powerful force for its protection. When John Woolman, an American Quaker born in 1720, began preaching that faithfulness to God requires abolishing slavery, he ignited a religious passion that helped facilitate the global paradigm shift that outlawed human bondage across the planet. That religious passion united humanity's moral intuition with her awe in the face of God's creation; it wove the mysterious and enthralling presence of the divine into the love that humans can know for the other. The time has come to preach global moral responsibility: God commands that we enact a "human covenant" to protect and nurture all human beings. While all doctrines may be criticized and all laws revised, the confidence that humanity has placed in human rights establishes them as the foundation of that sacred effort.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shaiya Rothberg
• Release date: Mar 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301304776

Shaiya Rothberg

Shaiya Rothberg grew up in New Jersey and made aliyah to Israel in 1988. Today he lives in Jerusalem with his wife Gittit, and three sons, Amos, Binyamin and Yotam. He holds a PhD in Jewish Thought from Hebrew University and a B.A. in Talmud and Jewish Philosophy from Bar Ilan University. Shaiya teaches Bible, Kabbalah and Jewish Philosophy at the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem.

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Human Rights as Mashiah -

A Jewish Theology of Human rights

Copyright Shaiya Rothberg

Published by City of Justice Press at Smashwords

Jerusalem

5773 - 2013

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Human Rights Theology

Table of Contents

Human Rights Theology

A Jewish Theology of Human Rights

The Interpretative Methodology behind the Theology

The Mystery of Human Rights

About the Author

Human Rights as Mashiach

A Jewish Theology of Human Rights

The Theology of Human Rights

It happens now and again that powerful new ideas change the course of history. I'm talking about a special class of redemptive ideas that push humanity to a higher stage of evolution, a stage in which we as a species are wiser and more loving and more just than we were before. One such idea was that all human beings are created in the image of God. Another was that faithfulness to God means abolishing slavery. I think that on the cultural horizon of the human species today there is such a new idea, an idea that could help redeem humanity from her present state of exile and destruction. That idea is the theology of human rights.

I believe that the human rights vision of humanity has started to imprint itself on the mind of our race. Even as we are broken and divided, humanity's inner eye has awoken to imagine the magnificence of an international order in which we as a species invest what's necessary to protect and nurture every human being. As people come to recognize that we could take moral responsibility for each other if we willed it, the monstrosity of our present indifference to poverty and oppression becomes impossible to ignore. Even our most compelling stories about the sovereignty of states and the sanctity of private property loose their force. They can no longer blot out the faces of suffering humanity from our view as they did before.

The world movement for human rights, as I see it, is in essence the human race taking moral responsibility for itself.¹ Committing to the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights formulated in the International Bill of Rights² would mean accepting upon ourselves our most elementary obligation: to use our power to protect human life. Our failure