At the heart of his book “Judaism is About Love” Rabbi Shai Held is trying to influence perspectives: The President and Dean at Hadar Institute wants Jews to modify their self-awareness and non-Jews to shift their understanding of Jews and Judaism.
“If my book can contribute in some small way to making that possible, I would regard that as a blessing,” Held told the Chronicle by phone from White Plains, New York.
Since its publication last March by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, “Judaism is About Love” has been a mainstay of book clubs and committed readers — while nearly one-third of Held’s 560-page treatise is footnotes.
The literary construction was deliberate, he said. “One of the things that I tried to do was almost write two books: The main body of the text — which was intended to be accessible to anyone who is interested in reading a serious book and is interested in ideas — and then almost a second book in the footnotes that I think many people can safely and comfortably ignore.”
Held, who is visiting Pittsburgh next week for a conversation at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, said his work’s textual layering is “because I realize I’m making the case that — for a lot of people — is surprising and new and that they’re resistant to.”
Within his work, the philosopher, theologian and Bible scholar, who has been routinely praised by The Forward and Newsweek for his robust influence on American Jewry, argues that Judaism is too often dismissed for its devotion to love.

“My book, ‘Judaism is About Love,’ is primarily written for Jews to help us reclaim the centrality of love in the Jewish tradition. But it is also written with Christians in mind, in the hopes of helping them move past some of the really pernicious caricatures of the Jewish tradition that have been so prevalent in Christian context,” he said. As opposed to commonly held historical views that love primarily belongs within the Christian domain, “Jews need to, and are entitled to, reclaim the heart of our tradition: that Jews and Christians sometimes think about love in very different ways, and it’s worth drawing out some of those differences and understanding them deeply.”
Held’s Feb. 11 visit to Pittsburgh will include a public conversation with Rev. Jerome Creach, the seminary’s Robert C. Holland professor of Old Testament.
“I hope that Professor Creach and I can model what it means for two people with great respect for each other to talk across deep and fundamental theological differences,” Held said.
The theologians’ exercise is intended to encourage others with diverse religious views to do more than get together to share simple pleasantries.
“Interfaith dialogue is about learning to trust each other enough to talk about biblical things, including theological and ethical differences,” he said. “That’s one of the reasons why I hope that members of the Jewish community will attend this event because I very much value the idea of Jews and Christians talking together about topics that really matter, and that have divided us and that have caused great pain between us.”
Too often lost is the reality that “religious people have spent thousands of years murdering each other, and dehumanizing each other and bolstering their own identities by degrading other people,” Held added. “It’s long past time for religious people of all traditions to live with each other differently.”
In the year since his work was published, Held has joined numerous Christian theologians to talk about love. One of the most recurring questions involves expressing love in difficult circumstances, specifically, “How does one love an enemy?”
That question has a certain difficulty in that “we use ‘enemies’ to mean a lot of different things,” Held said. “An enemy can mean someone I don’t get along with at work; an enemy can mean someone I was in business with and we had a falling out and I have questions about their ethics; an enemy can mean [Yahya] Sinwar or Saddam Hussein. And it is not clear to me at all from the perspective of Jewish ethics that Judaism says I should have the same posture towards all three of those groups or people.”
What Held has realized since authoring the book is that “Jewish ethics is pretty clear that in the first two of those categories there is an obligation to love our enemy, certainly to treat them lovingly. The third category is where I think there’s a bit of a divide between the Jewish tradition and the Christian one,” he said. “I don’t think there’s a mitzvah to love genocidal murderers. I don’t. There is a crucial value in not dehumanizing anyone because of the immense ethical dangers that come from that, but I think the conversation would benefit from a lot more nuance
about who we’re talking about when we’re talking about enemies.”
A balance of pause, exploration and specificity is critical, Held stressed.
“In general, when there are these huge scale truisms — Christianity says X but Judaism says Y — those truisms should be interrogated so that we get a more complicated worldview,” he said. “Christianity believes in a trinity, Judaism doesn’t. That’s true. But Christianity teaches love your enemies and Judaism doesn’t? That’s actually quite messy.”
“Judaism is About Love: A Conversation with Rabbi Shai Held and Rev. Dr. Jerome Creach” will occur at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, on Feb. 11 at 6:30 p.m. Registration is available at pts.edu/judaism_is_about_love. PJC
Adam Reinherz can be reached at areinherz@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.
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