“Christianity is about love; Judaism is about law,” according to common belief. Rabbi Shai Held’s provocative new book challenges that stereotype with a rare blend of deep scholarship and compassion.
Rabbi Shai Held (above) says a statement many years ago by his mentor, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, changed his life. It was, “The difference between believing and not believing is not how much, but how often.”
Shai Held, rabbi, president of the Hadar Institute in New York and one of the most admired Jewish leaders and thinkers in America, says it’s not only Christians who considerJudaism to be a religion of laws and justice. “I find that across the denominations of Jewish life, people have internalized this belief that Judaism is primarily about keeping the mitzvot. I’m trying to interpret our tradition in a robust way, reclaiming the heart of Judaism.”
His new book, “Judaism Is About Love,” published this week, is the product of 25 years of thought Held has given to making the case for love as “an umbrella term” that encompasses compassion, empathy and caring as the core tenet of Jewish life. The result is a wide-ranging exploration of how love anchors Biblical stories from ancient times and applies to issues of the moment, like our attitude toward immigrants or whether one must love the stranger or even one’s enemy.
The book already has received superlative pre-publication blurbs from leading Jewish and Christian scholars, including those who predict that it will still be read centuries from now and describe Held as the next Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. It surely will motivate readers to re-evaluate their thoughts about Judaism in a softer light.
The scholarship in “Judaism Is About Love” is deep. The last section of the book has more than 130 pages of detailed notes that reference Orthodox and liberal Jewish scholars across the centuries as well as Christian theologians. But the writing is clear and accessible. Held often shares with the reader his personal experiences, most poignantly recalling how, as a 12-year-old struggling after his father’s sudden death, he felt stung by his Jewish day school teacher’s harsh statement that true believers don’t question God’s ways. “For years after that, I moved in and out of belief, and in and out of religious observance,” he writes. “If religion could crush a wounded child in that way, I wanted no part of it.
“Except that religion does not have to be like that,” he concludes, realizing over time that Biblical texts are honest and thus, liberating, refusing “to sweep human suffering under the rug.”
With intellectual honesty, Held acknowledges his struggles at times in resolving tensions and seeming contradictions between sacred texts and modern life, including, most recently, how we are to deal with enemies like Hamas.
The book was written before October 7, but Held said the hardest chapter for him to write was on loving our enemies. He cites Jewish texts on both sides of the issue and struggles with the question: If all humans are created in God’s image, are we forbidden from hating our enemies? “If we love God, we cannot hate what God has made,” Held writes, and then asks: “Is this right? … I am not at all certain.
“Religion helps us ask hard questions but it does not offer us easy answers.”
An important lesson Held said he has learned since the horrific Hamas attack on Israel is that “it is completely reasonable that the first response to trauma is to take care of one’s own family.”
He asserted that “compassion is never a vice,” and “allowing our compassion to die is walking on treacherous ground. It’s dangerous,” he said, “because it licenses us to do bad things,” like saying there are no innocent people in Gaza.
“It’s always a mistake to discount the fact that we are created in God’s image.”
Here is an excerpt from a chapter, entitled “The Gifts of God Flow Through You,” from Held’s book:
Gratitude For The Gift Of Life
Shai Held
One of the central tasks of religion is to help us remember that life is grace — and to prod us to wrestle with the implications of that simple but startling perception. When religion works, instead of taking life for granted, we begin to experience it as granted. Instead of feeling entitled, we feel blessed. More than that, rather than thinking of life as having been bestowed once and for all, we experience it as a gift received again and again, from moment to moment.
There is a rabbinic teaching that has become more and more important and helpful to me the older I’ve gotten. The Talmudic sage Rabbi Hanina declares: “For every single breath that a person breathes, she must praise the Creator.” I readily admit that when I first encountered these words, I was put off by them: I am not capable of praising God with every breath, I thought, so these words offer nothing more than a prescription for guilt.
But over time I have come to hear Rabbi Hanina’s dictum very differently. On one level, Rabbi Hanina lays down a daunting challenge: Can we maintain a sense of gratitude at all times? Can we remember that each moment we are alive is another unearned gift? Yet on another level, he provides wise and gentle counsel. If we have trouble with gratitude — perhaps we’ve suffered so deeply that the depth of our hurt threatens to crowd out the possibility of gratitude; perhaps the pace of our lives is so overwhelming that we can’t seem to slow down enough to touch into gratitude—there is a resource perpetually available to us: we can take a breath and ask, Who made that?
A simple inhalation is a portable and perpetually available reminder of the gift we are given at each moment. Every breath, Rabbi Hanina reminds us, is both a summons and an opportunity to be grateful.
Traditionally, Jews begin each day with three simple words: “Modeh/ Modah Ani Lefanecha,” grateful am I before You. As we all know well, ritual can easily become rote, mechanical actions replacing heartfelt gestures. But think about what it would mean to take this practice seriously: as we awaken each morning, the very first word we say is “grateful.” In uttering that single word, we take a major step toward setting an orientation for our lives. We recognize that life is a gift, that each day is a gift, that consciousness is a gift, and we commit to cultivating and expressing appreciation for that wondrous fact.
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Crucially, we do not say “Ani Modeh” (I am grateful), but rather “Modeh Ani” (grateful am I). Were we to wake up each morning and have the first word we speak be “I,” we would be reproducing an awful lot of what ails us as a society, both morally and spiritually.
In saying “grateful” first and “I” only second, we articulate something profound about what it truly means to be a human being. It is common, especially in modern times, to think of oneself first and foremost as an “I,” an isolated self. First I am a self, and then I decide whether and with whom I want to enter into a relationship. At bottom, I am detached, independent, and totally autonomous. But what if that’s not the way life works — or at least not the way it ought to? By saying “grateful” and only then saying “I,” I remind myself that, from a Jewish perspective, there is no self without gratitude, and that I exist in relationship even before I exist as a self. Before I ever make or do anything in the world, I first receive. It is only possible for me to become a maker or doer precisely because I am first, and always, a receiver. I am grateful, and only then am I a self. Grateful am I: “I thank, therefore I am.”
Ultimately, gratitude for the gifts of life and consciousness can form a baseline from which a more pervasive sense of gratitude can grow and expand. We respond gratefully to this kindness or that, but even more fundamentally, gratitude comes to “color our entire outlook.” When this happens, gratitude becomes “the salient characteristic, the dominant mood or theme of a total way of life.” Gratitude becomes a way of being in the world.
None of this should paper over the fact that aspects of our life can be profoundly disappointing. A sense of life as a gift is a crucial starting point for religion, but it is not the only one — which is a good thing, because life can be excruciatingly painful, and it is sometimes immensely difficult to see it as grace.
One of the challenges of the spiritual life is to become capacious enough to hold gratitude and disappointment — or gratitude and protest — at the same time.
