For the Life of the World / Yale Center for Faith & Culture

There’s a common misconception that Judaism is a religion of law and Christianity is a religion of love. But the very love commandments at the heart of Jesus’s teaching are direct quotes from Deuteronomy 6. Jesus, after all, was Jewish.

Joining Miroslav Volf in this episode is one of the most important Jewish thinkers alive today: Rabbi Shai Held—theologian, educator, author—is President, Dean, and Chair in Jewish Thought at the Hadar Institute in New York City. He is the author of Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence and The Heart of Torah, a collection of essays on the Torah in two volumes. His latest book is Judaism is about Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life.

Image Credit: “Vienna Genesis”, 6th century, Manuscript (Codex Vindobonensis theol. graec. 31), 333 x 270 mm, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna

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About Shai Held

Rabbi Shai Held—theologian, educator, author—is President, Dean, and Chair in Jewish Thought at the Hadar Institute in New York City. He is the author of Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence and The Heart of Torah, a collection of essays on the Torah in two volumes. His most recent book is Judaism Is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life.

Show Notes

• Get your copy of Judaism Is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life
• Two stories that set the course for Judaism Is About Love
• Deuteronomy 6 and the Love Commands
• Is Judaism really a “loveless religion”?
• Christian students who don’t realize what wells Jesus drank from
• “The very inclination to dichotomize between love and law leads almost, I think, ineluctably to a misunderstanding of traditional Jewish spirituality, for which law is never an alternative to love,  but a manifestation of love.”
• “The deed is an expression of a posture of love. The deed cannot replace the posture. It has to express it.”
• “A majority culture telling a minority  culture that it is inferior and loveless.”
• Interpreting both Judaism and Christianity through a moral or ethical lens, rather than the mystical, affective, and spiritual dimensions of both
• Unconditionality of God’s love
• Obedience to law vs unconditionality of love
• “My argument is that divine love, biblically speaking, comes without conditions, but with expectations. God does not say, do this or I will stop loving you. God says, I love you and I want you to do this.”
• Analogy to parental love for children
• “God believes in the centrality and urgency of human agency.”
• Eliezer Berkovits: embrace of human agency in Judaism
• Zero sum games and God’s will and human agency
• Performance-oriented society, and “measuring up”
• Competition and being better than others
• Not earning, but striving to live up to
• Grace
• What objectives exist for us to
• John Levinson
• Choseness
• Moshe Weinfeld: “you were not chosen because you were wonderful.”
• Election isn’t earned, but don’t let grace become capricious.
• Abraham’s blessing and God’s love for Israel
• Rabbi Akiva: “Every human being on the face of the earth is loved simply by being created in the divine image.”
• Centering theology around creation
• Noah’s flood and a universal covenant with humanity as a whole
• God and Moses’s chutzpah to ask for forgiveness because Israel is so stubborn
• Grace is a Jewish idea, not invented by Christianity or the New Testament
• “Culture stripped of grace”
• Arbitrariness of election
• Exodus 34
• Psalm 145:9 God is good to  all. God's mercies are upon all of God's  creations.
• Mercy on everything that God has made, including animals and all sentient beings
• “Very good” and God’s assessment of creation
• Love for stranger and love for the enemy
• Judaism and expanding circles of concern
• “The temptation  to dehumanize is one that must always and everywhere be resisted. … every human being on the face of the earth is infinitely valuable without exception.”
• John Levinson’s “universal horizon of biblical particularism”
• Just War Theory
• “At the end of the If the Middle East and the land of Israel are ever to become less blood soaked,  what will be required is two  peoples engaging in profoundly empathic listening to one another's stories. There is no other way.”
• Moshe Una and the Religious Zionist Peace Movement
• “Jews dreamed of this place for thousands of years, and that this is a unique place where God's commandments can be fulfilled, and this is a place of religious yearning, religious aspiration, historical connection. And the second is, we have to teach our children that there is another people who feels the same way.”
• “So much of the protest of this war has, it seemed to me, really lacked empathy and actually perpetuated really destructive ways of thinking about this conflict.”
• What is Rabbi Shai Held’s vision of a life worth living?
• Medieval Mishnah on Genesis 1:27: “The human being  is created in God's image, but whether we become God's likeness is a function of the choices we make.”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Shai Held
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow, Kacie Barrett, and Zoë Halaban
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give