From Abraham to human rights: Chabad launches four week course

Chabad North Shore has launched a free four-session course in St Ives exploring how foundational Jewish ethical ideas helped shape the moral values held by wider society.

The course, For All Humankind, will run on Thursdays from October 8 to 29 and is open to members of the public from all backgrounds.

Led by Rabbi Nochum Schapiro, the course is being delivered as a pilot program and explores Judaism’s universal values and how timeless principles can help build better lives, stronger communities and a more cohesive society.

Chabad North Shore plans to present the course again early next year, with the aim of expanding it into additional council areas and making it accessible to a wider audience.

“This isn’t a course about becoming Jewish or joining anything,” Schapiro said. “Judaism has never believed its deepest moral values belong only to Jews. These are ideas that were always meant for everyone.”

Schapiro said no religious background or prior study was needed.

“Think of it as hearing solid answers to life’s most essential ethical questions from an intellectual tradition that’s been thinking about them for over three thousand years,” he said. “You’ll walk away with something that’s hard to find right now: the clarity to explain why your deepest values are worth holding onto, and why every choice you make adds up to a better world.”

The course traces ideas about justice, human dignity, the purpose of education and the direction of history back to their roots in the Jewish intellectual tradition.

Participants will examine how an idea that began with Abraham more than 3000 years ago went on to shape moral assumptions many people still live by today, often without knowing where those assumptions came from.

The four sessions cover the significance of ethical monotheism, the foundation of innate human dignity, the deeper purpose of educating children, and the case that history has a moral direction and that individual choices matter.

Questions at the centre of the course include what makes something a human right, where the conviction that every person has dignity comes from, and whether people can still defend their deepest moral instincts or have simply inherited values they can no longer explain.

The course also asks what makes a life genuinely good, what makes a society just, and whether individual choices add up to anything.

Registration is available at www.krg.nsw.gov.au/Things-to-do/Whats-on/For-all-Humankind