The Right Rights
“The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” Mark 12:31 NIV
Neighbor – “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand the rights I have just read to you? With these rights in mind, do you wish to speak to me?”[1] It’s called Mirandizing. Hollywood has made it as well known as the Lord’s Prayer. It’s now the legal backbone of police work, but it only reflects the evolution of society toward rights rather than obligations.
“ . . . we have concentrated our attention upon the idea of human rights and overlooked the importance of human obligations,” wrote Heschel. “Caring only for his needs rather than for his being needed, he is hardly able to realize that rights are anything more than legalized interests.” [2]
Hopefully, Miranda reminds us that, yes, indeed, rights are legal fictions, elevated to the place of the divine. “Needs are looked upon today as if they were holy, as if they contained the totality of existence. Needs are our gods, and we toil and spare no effort to gratify them. Suppression of a desire is considered sacrilege that must inevitably avenge itself in the form of some mental disorder.”[3]
Obligations, on the other hand, are built into what it means to be human. Oh, you thought being human meant (as commentators on Genesis 1:26 are apt to say) being rational, social, and a physical/spiritual, temporary union. But that’s not the sense of the Hebrew text. The Hebrew text is about action—obligations of relationship. That’s how we’re like God. We can act in the ways He acts: creating, promising, nurturing, demanding, forgiving, sacrificing.
“This, indeed, is the purpose of our religious traditions: to keep alive the higher ‘yes’ as well as the power of man to say ‘Here I am’; to teach our minds to understand the true demand and to teach our conscience to be present. Too often, we misunderstand the demand; too often the call goes forth, and history records our conscience as absent.”[4]
Heschel’s analysis of modern religion demonstrates the ultimate end of “rights” as idolatry.
Religion has adjusted itself to the modern temperament by proclaiming that it too is the satisfaction of a need. . . To define religion primarily as a quest for personal satisfaction, as the satisfaction of a human need, is to make of it a refined sort of magic.”[5]
Topical Index: rights, obligations, neighbor, Mark 12:31
[1] http://www.mirandawarning.org/whatareyourmirandarights.html
[2] Abraham Heschel, Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism (Free Press Paperbacks, 1959), p. 129.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid., p. 131.
[5] Ibid.
