In Judaism Is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life (FSG, Mar.), Rabbi Shai Held explains that even Jews mistakenly think that Judaism is rooted in law or justice, when actually love is at the center of Jewish theology, spirituality, and ethics. PW recently caught up with Held, who is the president of Manhattan’s Hadar Institute, a non-denominational educational center for observant and egalitarian Jewish communities, and the author of 2017’s The Heart of Torah.
How did Judaism become unassociated with love?
Historian David Nirenberg has this formulation, which is that Christianity had insisted that it came to the world to repair the lovelessness that was endemic to Judaism; that Judaism was about law. Judaism was about action. Judaism had no notion of inwardness, let alone love. And Christianity came to the world in part to heal that, to repair that. And I think it's not a coincidence that so many Jewish thinkers even started acting as if halachah [Jewish law] was the only thing at the heart of Jewish spirituality and the relationship of the Jewish people with God. That feels to me like an internalization of anti-Judaism.
How widespread is that misconception?
What I've been so struck by is when I have taught sources on love, even in traditionally Orthodox Jewish settings, I'll still get people who say, ‘Love—isn't that a Christian idea?’ It's not just liberal Jews who think this. It's very pervasive. I've even had Jews say, ‘Isn't compassion a Buddhist idea?’ At which point I'm ready to tear my hair out. I mean, what were you taught Judaism is about?
Grace too is rarely thought of as an essential Jewish concept. How would you explain grace's role in Judaism?
The very fact that we are alive is grace, because, by definition, none of us could have ever done anything to earn it. No one has ever earned the gift of life. It is pure gift. In a similar way, the idea that God loves us because we are created in the image of God, is, on some level, a claim about grace because it means we don't earn God's love. You think about grace as essentially that which is unearned but given anyway. So life and divine love are grace, right? And actually one of the things that I want to argue very strongly in the book is that, even though you could find sources that suggest otherwise, the dominant thrust in the Jewish tradition is the claim that God's love is prior to anything we do, and is unconditional.
What gives you hope, at this latest dark time for the Jewish people?
On a good day, I think the Jewish insistence that, no matter how many times we fail, God refuses to give up on us, is just incredibly moving—the idea that God believes in us. I don't always believe it, but I'm always moved by it.
