Rabbi Shai Held’s newest book, Judaism Is About Love, has all the markings of an instant theological classic. Held is director of the Hadar Institute, a center of Jewish learning and practice located in Manhattan. Two encounters—one with Jews and another with Christians—led him to recognize the stubborn persistence of the longstanding caricature of Judaism as a religion of law, righteousness, and action as opposed to the Christian focus on love, mercy, and interiority. Jewish internalization of this stereotype compelled him to write a book addressed to both Jews and Christians. His main goal is to show that God’s love for Israel—particularly in election, loving kindness, and covenant fidelity—lies at the very heart of Jewish teaching, piety, and practice. This theological vision is inextricably related to spirituality and morality: profound gratitude for this loving God generates a responsive love for God and a corresponding ethic of love of neighbor and concern for every person as created in the image of God.
Some readers might assume a book on love will fly either too low (offering only platitudes) or too high (concerned only with abstractions), but they would be wrong. We find in this book realistic arguments rather than sentimental aspirations and true-to-life concerns rather than just lofty theories. Held writes in a style that is irenic and inviting but also provocative. The first line of the book is: “Judaism is not what you think it is.” He shows in clear and compelling prose how love and related themes like righteousness and compassion are central to both biblical texts and rabbinic commentaries on them. This book is thus meant to challenge as well as to inform the reader: “My goal is to make life harder for believers, not easier; make sure your religious life in general, and your religious study in particular, makes you kinder and more present because after all that’s ultimately what it’s all about.”
Judaism Is About Love makes its case in four steps. Part One begins with an examination of what it means to say the human person is loved by God and called to respond with gratitude, generosity, and a commitment to justice. Part Two shows how human love is made possible by a developmental process that begins with the family and moves outward. Deep particular attachments make it possible for us to respect the intrinsic dignity of all human beings, to show hospitality to strangers, and to protect the vulnerable and marginalized. Part Three examines God’s loving kindness (hesed) as the basis of our ethical responsibility to one another. Part Four examines how Judaism’s experience of divine love—and what it means to be “chosen”—is both particular and universal in that it embraces all persons as created in the image of God. The resonances with Catholic social teaching will be apparent to readers of Commonweal.
Held writes in a way that will appeal to a variety of readers, from educated non-specialists to scholars of the Bible, Judaism, or Christian theology. His clear and direct style brings the reader into the complexities of biblical exegesis and rabbinic debates without ever missing the forest for the trees. This conversational writing style is supported by impressive scholarship (there are 150 pages of footnotes), but it is never pedantic.
One of the attractive features of Judaism Is About Love is the way Held invites us to think along with him as either Jewish or Christian conversation partners. We are brought into a unifying view of the “essence” of Judaism by someone who, refreshingly, does not pretend to have all the answers to every relevant question about how to interpret ambiguous biblical passages or how to resolve age-old debates among Held’s rabbinic forbears. He reminds us that we do not have to resolve every quandary to take seriously the prophet’s ringing call “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8).
Held’s book manifests the deep resonances shared by Judaism and Christianity. It can help Christian readers understand why Pope John Paul II described Jews as “our elder brothers [and sisters]” in faith. Appreciating our commonalities and shared values in no way challenges the Christian affirmation of God as triune and incarnate, but it does help us see that our fundamental credal convictions make sense only when viewed within the covenantal and redemptive love of God for Israel.
Unfortunately, popular Christian piety all too often still assumes a fundamental opposition between the wrathful God of the Old Testament and the loving God of the New that is untrue to the richness and complexity of the Bible itself. Held reveals how this dualism is also unsupported by the long and venerable tradition of rabbinic commentaries. Many Christians ignorant of both the Bible and the Jewish tradition take their false assumptions about biblical dualism to imply that Jews are religiously and morally inferior to Christians. The destructive repercussions of such pernicious assumptions have been condemned by the Catholic Church and should have led Christians to drop them long ago.
Held’s book offers a positive correction to these assumptions by the way it lays out a vision of love-centered Judaism that has many deep resonances with Catholicism. He demonstrates a laudable aversion to the modern tendency to create false dichotomies between life as a gift and life as responsibility, between law and love, obligation and desire, justice and mercy, personal dignity and the common good. In Catholic circles, this kind of “both-and” tendency is said to reflect an “analogical imagination.”
This book will help Christian readers not only to become more informed about Judaism but also to have a better understanding of the Gospel. It highlights the essential faith that Christians share with Jews: the triple affirmation that all of life is a completely gratuitous gift of a loving God, that we rightly respond to that gift with loving gratitude, and that our gratitude ought to lead us to live generously by loving each other, caring for outcasts, and promoting justice in our institutions.
Judaism Is About Love resonates in particular with the Catholic sense that our natural human loves—how we are connected to one another as spouses, parents, friends, and neighbors—are taken up, corrected, and healed by divine love rather than stamped out and replaced by some kind of love suitable only to saints and angels. The Catholic axiom that grace perfects rather than destroys human nature implies that we ought to love those with whom we share special bonds of affection and loyalty and, other things being equal, give them a special priority when deciding how to use our time, talents, and treasure. It also recognizes that grace seeks to root out the egocentric distortions of our love of self, family, and friends, and fosters a special concern for the marginalized, the vulnerable, and the exploited in our communities and beyond. Just as love without justice slides into individualistic sentimentality, so justice without love is stern, cold, and judgmental. Healthy and mature love necessarily requires a commitment to solidarity, social justice, and the preferential option for the poor. (Held doesn’t use this last phrase, but he endorses the idea.)
Held received the manuscript proofs for this book shortly after October 7. The brutal torture and murder of Jews, the kidnapping of hostages, the sharp rise of antisemitism in the United States and elsewhere, and rallies and protests by college students who gave aid and comfort to Hamas—all of this might seem to make a book about the love of God and the love of neighbor not only untimely but naïve, distracting, and misguided. Yet it’s precisely when we are most angry, grieving, or threatened that we need to be reminded of divine love. In times like these, we are easily inclined not just to defend ourselves but also to embrace hatred and to indulge destructive fury. So perhaps this book has appeared at just the right moment.
Judaism Is About Love is a monumental achievement by a learned, experienced, and wise writer. It is full to the brim with insights into how both Jews and Christians should conceive of divine love and its significance for the moral life. Judaism Is About Love is not only religiously informative but also morally enlightening and spiritually uplifting. It will no doubt be used in future Jewish-Christian dialogue; it is also well-suited to college courses in theology and should be required reading in every seminary. It is a “must read” for all thoughtful Christians, who, if they take its message to heart, will really begin to see Jews as our elder brothers and sisters in faith.
Judaism Is About Love
Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life
Shai Held
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
$35 | 560 pp.
Listen a conversation with the author here, on the Commonweal Podcast:
