Is Judaism About Love?

This review has been a long time coming.

I first encountered Rabbi Dr. Shai Held when I was about 20 years old, working at Camp Ramah in Nyack. Every week, a group of us counselors would travel to Yeshivat Hadar in Manhattan to learn in their beit midrash and then join a class with Rabbi Held on Sefer Tehilim. Those evenings were my first experience listening to someone who was highly fluent in Jewish texts, deeply engaged with Jewish traditions, and unapologetically egalitarian. Those nights listening to what Rabbi Held had to say were the first times I had ever questioned the commitment to Orthodoxy I had embraced in high school and solidified early in university. Had I been exposed to Hadar only a few years earlier, I wonder if I would have felt a need to become Orthodox at all. But that’s another essay (spoiler alert).

Following those evenings at Hadar, I continued to learn from him virtually. His series of shiurim on Rabbis Heschel and Soloveitchik forever changed how I think about both figures, I return to his thoughtful Why I Still (Sometimes) Believe in God lecture at least every few months, and his theological debate with Rabbi Meir Soloveichik contains so much food for thought, I have to keep re-listening just to digest more pearls of wisdom. We were eventually able to connect directly, and I am profoundly thankful for the insight and inspiration that he shared with me then and continues to share with me to this day.

While Held has written several books, including Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence and The Heart of Torah, Judaism Is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2024) is the first written for a mass audience as opposed to a light reworking of his doctoral dissertation or a collection of divrei Torah. Indeed, Judaism Is About Love was written with an overarching purpose deserving of as many readers as possible; “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.”

What does that mean? Rav Shai unpacks it on the very first page of the book:

Judaism is about love. The Jewish tradition tells the story of a God of love who creates us in love and enjoins us, in turn, to live lives of love. We are commanded to love God, the neighbor, the stranger — and all of humanity — and we are told that the highest achievement of which we are capable is to live with compassion. This is considered nothing less than walking in God’s own ways.

If this seems new or surprising to you, it is likely because centuries of Christian anti-Judaism have profoundly distorted the way Judaism is seen and understood, even, tragically, by many — perhaps most — Jews.

As that second paragraph makes clear, Judaism Is About Love is, in some sense, both a work of interfaith as well as intrafaith dialogue. That is to say that it is directed both at Jews and non-Jews who, as far as Held is concerned, misunderstand Judaism to the ultimate degree. This is hammered in by a story told in the book’s introduction:

The journey that led to this book began more than two decades ago. Speaking to a classroom full of senior students at one of America’s major rabbinical seminaries, I remarked in passing that “Judaism is built on the idea that God loves us and beckons us to love God back.” Seemingly bewildered by what I’d said, one of the students declared: “I’m sorry, but that sounds like Christianity to me.” I was perturbed, even somewhat distraught, by how he’d responded, and I explained that I’d been thinking of Judaism’s daily liturgy: in the twice-daily recitation of the Shema we first declare that God loves us, and then recite Deuteronomy’s command: “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your being, and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5). How, I wondered, could something so fundamental to Judaism have come to seem so foreign that even an advanced rabbinical student could react in this way?

We have all heard it a thousand times. Christianity is about love, we are told, but Judaism is about… something else, like law, or justice, or whatever. In the past, such ideas were propagated by Christian thinkers who created a “theological discourse about the supersession of a loveless Judaism by a loving Christianity.” But strangely — and tragically — many Jews, including many rabbis and teachers, have accepted, and in some cases even embraced, this legacy of Christian anti-Judaism. And so generations of American Jewish children have been taught that Judaism is about something other than love.

In a similar vein, we often hear that whereas Christianity cares about how you feel and what you believe, Judaism cares only about what you do. Judaism is a religion of action, we’ve been taught, not emotion, a religion of deeds, or rote rituals, not inwardness.

Along the same lines, we are told that whereas the God of the New Testament is a God of love and mercy and grace, the God of what Christians refer to as “the Old Testament” — that is, the Hebrew Bible — is angry, vindictive, and bloodthirsty. This idea, and enduring legacy of anti-Judaism, tends to be treated as an unquestioned commonplace in our culture.

This is all hopelessly misguided. Judaism is a religion of love and law, of action and emotion; indeed, Jewish liturgy reminds us daily that Jewish law is itself a manifestation of divine love, not a contrast or an alternative to it.

Held makes his case for this in 386 pages followed by over 100 pages of some of the most worthwhile endnotes I’ve read. It is a thorough, passionate, and incredibly well-argued work that, in my opinion, succeeds at its mission.

In addition to the core message, Judaism Is About Love solidifies Held as heir to the theological legacy of Heschel. Not only is each chapter of the book subdivided into easily digestible chunks, but many areas directly continue Heschel’s legacy in modern language. Held writes the following about the art of “sacred indignation,” for example:

Judaism asks us to love the world so acutely that we are prepared to fight for it; it beckons us to love human beings so deeply that we are primed to side with them in the face of oppression and injustice. When we see a palace in flames, we may not remain silent. Judaism summons us to love God so profoundly that God’s desire for a just society becomes our desire as well.

But how can Judaism lead to the creation of a truly loving society if Jews are singled out as the “chosen people” over other nations? Held initially contemplates a universal understanding of chosenness familiar to many non-Orthodox Jews, but ultimately rejects it and theologically incoherent:

I am sometimes tempted to think of chosenness in mostly phenomenological terms, as a desctiption of what it feels like to be loved, summoned, and commanded by God. By this logic, when we talk about God choosing us from among all the nations, perhaps what we are doing is describing our experience of God’s transformative love, not making definitive claims about the nature and boundaries of God’s own love. When we are surrounded by God’s love, we feel we are the only ones (even if we are not). But this solution seems inadequate to me too, since I am a theological realist, meaning that I believe that God exists independently of human beings, and that the things we say when we talk about God can be more or less true (or false). Thus, when I talk about God, I mean to talk about God (however ham-handed and inadequate all human talk of God must inevitably be) and not just my/our own experience thereof.

To the extent that we regard the biblical and rabbinic canons as authoritative, it is difficult to imagine a coherent Jewish theology that eliminates chosenness altogether… The idea of election is fundamental to the Jewish tradition. To maintain fidelity to and continuity with the past, we should hold on to this idea, and at the same time we should remain ever conscious of our responsibility as heirs of tradition to interpret what is handed down to us. For that we need to be at once textually literate, morally sensitive, conscious of God’s vast love, and honest with ourselves about what we can and can’t believe (or yearn to believe). That task of keeping tradition alive is — always — ongoing.

As Held writes, “any covenant theology will necessarily have both insiders and outsiders. We can soften the edges around that fact, but we can’t sidestep it… Covenants, like religions in general — are like identities in general, for that matter —- are inherently particular; what matters from a moral perspective is not whether or not they have outsiders, but how they imagine and interact with those outsiders.”

If embracing literal divine chosenness may alienate less traditional readers, Held’s Heschelian style of reframing biblical texts may equally alienate Orthodox readers. That style was alluded to just above, but is explained in detail throughout the book. It’s made especially clear in the introduction:

To inherit a tradition is to make decisions, whether conscious or not, about which texts and ideas to place at the center, and which to treat as more marginal. If someone wanted to, they could presumably write a book entitled Judaism Is About Hate, and marshal an abundance of sources to bolster their case… To put it somewhat colloquially, as inheritors of traditions we must necessarily decide what to read in light of what. Standing inside a tradition prevents us from rejecting classical sources, but it allows — and arguably invites or even requires us — to interpret and reinterpret them. Accordingly, I read the Jewish tradition as a story about a God of love. As I understand it, everything else about the tradition revolves around that fundamental claim.

In making this claim and embracing this method (a method, I will note, which is perfectly at home within the Halakhic Egalitarian ethos of Hadar), Held acknowledges that his book is not a definitive statement of Jewish theology but rather “a meditation — or series of meditations — on love, grounded in the immense resources of the Jewish tradition.”

At first, I was deeply uncomfortable with such an acknowledgement. Isn’t this, after all, the equivalent of shooting an arrow and only then drawing the bulls-eye around it? Under such assumptions, can’t one craft a Judaism about anything and be on solid ground? At what point does my personal preference of what Judaism ought to be stop and objective Judaism begin?

Over time, however, I realized that as long as such an understanding is firmly rooted in Torah itself — the objective word of God as we know it — there is little to worry about. Held’s theology of revelation, while not “Orthodox” is also a direct modernization of Heschel’s:

Some, who maintain that the Bible is just a human effort — or better, a series of human efforts — to grasp something about the divine will argue that while it contains powerful and even revolutionary insights, it also reflects the limitations of human understanding. Others, for whom a robust theory of revelation precludes this type of stance, are forced to try to make sense of how an “accurate” picture of God could be so perplexing — or seek ways of denying that it is perplexing at all. My own view is that God does communicate with us through revealed texts, but that these texts reflect both God’s revelation and our perception. What we hear when God speaks is profoundly affected by our own capacities and, crucially, by our shortcomings too.

Torah, in the words Held uses in his other book to describe Heschel’s theology, ultimately “conveys divine content in human words.” It is, therefore, of the utmost importance to center in all our convictions. This leads to a powerful point that all religious believers ought to internalize:

Sometimes it seems as if we live in a Godless world. God can seem hidden, absent, perhaps even nonexistent. For me, as for many Jews, Torah is a deep comfort in these moments, because even when God is not available, God’s teachings are. For many of us, the textual cord uniting heaven and earth is a precious lifeline in moments of spiritual darkness and aridity. Our task is to make Torah so deeply our own that it, and therefore God, are always with us.

…God’s Torah is both a gift and a challenge. On one level, it is a gift, a concrete manifestation of God’s love. Yet on another level it is a challenge, a set of prescriptions and ideals that prod us to live good, loving, and holy lives; to create good, loving, and holy communities; to work toward a good, loving, and holy world. It asks us to be more and to do more than we might otherwise be inclined to do or to be.

If we are merely making Torah what we want it to be, we are blasphemously replacing religion with convenience. On the other hand, if we do not allow our religious beliefs and texts to fundamentally change who we are for the better, then we are heretically ignoring the word of God. Held implores his readers to embrace Judaism in their lives in active and direct ways, and to embrace the Torah as God’s true will in order to do so. He reclaims Jewish belief in God’s love from its Christian captors while challenging Jewish readers to really read the Torah for perhaps the first time in their lives. As such, Judaism Is About Love is precisely the book the Jewish people need in this moment. The more Jews who think seriously about their Judaism, the stronger our people will be. Good thing the book happens to currently be on sale on Amazon.