Why Rabbi Shai Held says love is the cornerstone of Jewish belief and practice - opinion

• Published date: 24 March 2024
• Author: ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL/JTA
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Said one skeptical student: "That sounds Christian to me."

Held recalls thinking, "I was just quoting the morning liturgy: bechol levavacha" — "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart," as it says in the Veahavata section of the Shema.

And yet generations of Jews have been taught that while Christianity is about love, Judaism is about — well, take your pick: justice, law, study, action, obedience.

Experiences like that, Held told me, "drove me to write this book." The book is "Judaism Is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life," and it comes out this week. Held calls it an "act of recovery." In 15 chapters — backed up by 130 pages of notes and citations — it sets out to restore the idea that Judaism is animated by love, no matter what the reader might have heard about a fierce, vengeful "Old Testament God." It's a love that manifests itself in acts of "loving kindness," in the way Jews are supposed to behave with family and neighbors, and how Jews practice their responsibility to the wider world.

"My aim," he writes, "is to tell the story of Jewish theology, ethics, and spirituality through the lens of love and thereby to restore the heart — in both senses of the word — of Judaism to its rightful place."

Held, 52, is the dean and president of the Hadar Institute, a yeshiva and think tank that many consider the flagship of the "independent minyanim" movement: lay-led congregations that function independently of the Big Four American Jewish denominations.

Held, who was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary, is the author of two other books, "Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence," and the two-volume "The Heart of Torah," a collection of essays on the weekly Torah portions.

We spoke about how Judaism has been shaped by the enduring legacy of antisemitism, the limits of universalism, and how Jewish hearts risk being hardened by the tragedy of Oct. 7. And while he only briefly alludes to it in the book, I also asked Held about how his own health struggles — he's written publicly that he has chronic fatigue syndrome and a series of related ailments — have shaped his thinking about love.

The conversation was edited for length and clarity.

You note in your book that "generations of American Jewish children have been taught that Judaism is about something other than love." Why do you think Jews tend to run away from the notion of love as a Jewish priority?

There is very deep, internalized anti-Judaism here. Thousands of years of being a minority culture really do have an impact. I was just recently looking at some psychological literature about how minority groups often end up seeing themselves through the lens of how the majority sees them. So that's one piece.

The other piece is that Jewish tradition has rightly emphasized that emotions manifest themselves concretely in the world or they're not worth very much. If someone says "I'm the most compassionate person in the world," but never does anything for anyone, you obviously begin to think that their compassion is fraudulent. Judaism's ideal is that the inner state is expressed in the external action. And what ended up happening in a lot of Jewish educational settings is a focus on the external action.

Actions versus feelings

I'm reminded of the joke about the guy who asks the rabbi, "Who's better, the person who gives $10 to a beggar with a generous spirit or the person who gives him $100 grudgingly?" and the rabbi answers, "Ask the beggar." But you are saying that the idea Judaism doesn't care how you feel about the poor as long as you do something about it is a distortion.

It's funny because the Talmud actually says that the reward we receive for an act of tzedakah depends on how much effort went into the giving. So there is that side.

But yes, to your question, I think that that's a gross distortion of how rabbinic tradition thought about it. Its ideal is very much that "I feel compassion and act compassionately," and out of that feeling of compassion, there is a virtuous circle. Compassionate action elicits compassionate feeling, which in turn elicits compassionate action. Action and emotion are constantly nourishing each other.

I remember when I lived in Cambridge in an area where there were a lot of homeless people. And I would say to them on Friday night, "I'm really sorry, but I don't carry money on Shabbat," and a number of times people would say to me, "Thank you for acknowledging me." It was really poignant to me. That's where things like sever panim yafot (Pirke Avot 1:15) — meeting people with a warm face, a warm smile — really does matter a lot. If you gave most rabbinic sages a choice between someone who feels something but does nothing and someone who feels nothing but does something, they will always pick the latter. But the ideal is walking in God's ways, which means being merciful and doing acts of mercy, not one or the other.

Let's maybe get some definitions down. We're clearly not talking, or just talking, about romantic love. What is this love that you are talking about, and how is it manifest in the world?

First, it's probably important to say that love is not primarily an emotion. Love has an emotional manifestation. But love is an existential posture. It's a way of comporting ourselves, a way of orienting ourselves in the world. That's really important because you cannot build a spiritual life on a feeling. Feelings come and go. I can be a compassionate person even if at this moment what I'm feeling is frustration.

Love is an umbrella category in which I include things like compassion, mercy, generosity — what psychologists called prosocial emotions. In the Aramaic of the Babylonian Talmud, there is no way to distinguish compassion from love. The root of the word for both is r-h-m, as in Rahamana, a name for God which can mean "the Merciful One" or "the Loving One." I try to argue that, for the rabbinic tradition, the highest ideal is compassion for people in vulnerable moments of their lives. That's visiting the sick, comforting the mourner, burying the dead, et cetera. That is what the sages think it means to say that we are mandated to walk in God's ways. So a Judaism that fulfills its purpose is a Judaism in which we are all moved to greater acts of love and kindness than we might otherwise be. That's the project.

And then I would also add, because it's really challenging to me, is what would it really mean to love a God who loves widows and orphans? How would it orient my life if I really meant that? A Judaism that fulfills the Torah's vision of God is very much a Judaism that is concerned with the downtrodden, the lonely, the vulnerable. You can't have a Judaism that is self-contented.

Who do you think might most object to the assertion of your book, and why? I'm thinking it's the person who says, "Judaism is really about justice."

I don't mean to say that Judaism is about love to the exclusion of other things. It's that you can't understand Judaism's commitment to its core values without understanding love as being at the center. I do expect some to say Judaism is about justice. To which I would say, in Jewish...