Noam
Coming up on Wondering Jews…
Shai Held
One of the challenges I think of taking Torah seriously, Jewish theology seriously, is that we hold to an idea that human beings matter infinitely, and we live in a world in which human dignity is trodden upon in countless ways all the time.
Noam
Hey everyone, welcome to Wondering Jews with Mijal and Noam.
Mijal
I’m Mijal.
Noam
And I’m Noam, this podcast is our way of trying to unpack those really big questions being asked in the world today about Israel, about Judaism, and the broader Jewish experience.
Mijal
So we’re right now in the middle of our series on family, where we are asking what Jewish tradition and wisdom has to tell us for our own lives within family, and also what it has to tell us about the way that we think of the Jewish people as a family. And you know, Noam, you and I were so excited for the conversation we just recorded with our guest, Rabbi Shy Held. Rabbi Held is president and dean at the Hadar Institute. He’s the host of the podcast Answers WithHeld.
And he’s the author of a great new book called Judaism is About Love. and and no, I’m just like in terms of the conversation, I was expecting it to be great, but I wasn’t expecting it to feel like it took me back to the classroom in like the best of ways to speak with like a philosopher who’s just like challenging you and making you think and take notes. Right, right, right.
Noam
Yeah.
Noam
And watching them think also. Right? Like watching him think, watching him actually struggle through these questions and the ideas is awesome.
Mijal
So with that, let’s hear the conversation.
Mijal
Welcome to Wondering Jews, Rev Shai. It is so great to have you here. Thank you for joining us.
Shai Held
Thank you so much for having me.
Mijal
Part of the reason that I’m calling you Rev Shai has to do with with how I first met you. I think I was like in my early or mid twenties, in like my exploration phase of like being confused about theology and God and many other questions. And I found my way to your classes at Hadar.
Noam
Yeah, let’s let’s re let’s revive that, Mijal.
Mijal
And I still remember sitting there and actually like really grappling and even disagreeing very strongly with some of what you taught Rev Shai, but also becoming a student. so every Shabbat, you know, when I prepare my Drashot, my sermons, yours is one of the books that I read, to prepare about the weekly Torah portion. I forgot the names of the books, but they are blue and they are wonderful. There’s it’s a they’re heart sorry, the heart of Torah.
Shai Held
The heart of Torah, yeah. Yeah, thank you.
Mijal
And recently you published another book, which we’re gonna be talking about today, and I’m so grateful that you joined us, called Judaism is about love. that is a a purple lavender book, at least the one that I have. and it’s I I felt when I read it that it was a distillation of a lot of your theology and philosophy. and also like almost like a standard bearer of saying, like, this is what my vision of like a committed Judaism engaged with the world looks like.
so for a l you know, this is not gonna be like a book review or conversation. We’re gonna actually dig into some questions around family. It’s part of our series on family. But before we jump to our questions, could you give us like a quick summary of what the book is about for those who haven’t read it?
Shai Held
I would love to, but can I first share one memory of having you in my class? No, it’s interesting that you it’s interesting that you talked about how you were in your exploration phase. Because I remember I met you, and as we all do and shouldn’t do, I immediately made certain assumptions about sort of what you were like and what your intellectual universe was like. And then in the second or third class you were there, you raised your hand and you said, I don’t like this guy, Kohellet.
Mijal
Yeah, sure. Go ahead.
Shai Held
It was a class on Ecclesiastes on Gohelit. And I was so taken aback by you weren’t like, you just weren’t, I don’t like him. I don’t like what he’s saying. I don’t like his attitude. And I was like, wow, I did not expect this from you. This is fantastic. Do you remember this at all? Amazing. Yeah, no, of course, we’ve all had a lifetime since then. Yes.
Mijal
nope. I I I’ve had three children since so my my brain is you know
Noam
Wha what was surprising what what was surprising Shai, what was surprising about it? That that Mijal was direct? Like I don’t get it. What was what was what what was the what don’t Mijal let Shai I was
Shai Held
I think
I think it played to honestly some prejudices I had. I think I assumed, I’m not sure based on what, that Michal, who I had never spoken to, was probably like a fairly conventional modern Orthodox kid who wouldn’t let herself say something like that so explicitly. That she would find, you know, the way like a modern Orthodox kid finds a way of saying it. I don’t understand this, I’m puzzled by this. And she was just like right there. She was like, I don’t like him. And I I really.
Noam
Ha ha ha
Shai Held
appreciate it. By the way, I was taken aback because like we don’t really talk like that in our Beit Midrash either, but I really like when people feel that strongly about a text that they just sort of like can’t not say that. Anyway, it it taught me something that I’ve spent my life trying to learn, which is like, you know, you probably shouldn’t make assumptions about people just from nothing. I I have this thing that I often tell students that
One of the ways you know you have a lot of work to do about yourself. I’m now going to make a complete idiot out of myself, but bear with me, is that you’re in a supermarket and you’re like, you know, buying pickles or whatever, and someone walks by you in the aisle, and by the time they pass you, you think you know everything that’s important to know about them. Even though you haven’t interacted with them at all, you know nothing about them, but you’ve projected all of this stuff that you’re carrying onto them.
I talk about this in the context of the idea of judging people Lechafs Good of what it means to actually see people in a favorable lens and how often we fall back on the opposite way of seeing people, or at least maybe I do. and this was just a case where I was like, I’ve taught a lot of twenty-four year old modern Orthodox kids before. I know what they talk like. And Mijal was different. And it just reminded me to like me meet each person, meet each person as a new person. I hope I’m not embarrassing you, Mijal.
Noam
Mijal is different. Mijal is different.
That’s right.
Mijal
No no I I just I I don’t remember much. I I recall other classes but but I guess yeah, Kohelar is kind of Kohler is hard. Is
Noam
I love it.
Shai Held
It’s a hard book? It’s a hard book?
Noam
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Wait, wait. Now me, now me. I told Shai what I remember about you and you said what you remember about Mijal. Now about what about me? What about are you
Shai Held
Well Mijal, why don’t you tell me embarrassing things about Noam?
Noam
Yeah. Let’s get to it, let’s get to it. I messing, I’m messing, I’m messing
Mijal
We only have how how much left? just kidding. Just kidding. Yeah, before yeah, before we we before we really dig into some questions around family, but could you just tell and I’ll just say p be before you you you you share a quick summary of your book or like the main goals behind it, part of what’s really always been intriguing for me about your work is that you engage both classical Jewish thinkers, but you’re also like a theologian. So you’re engaging Christian theology and other
Shai Held
so you wanna know about my book. Let’s you wanna talk about my book. So
Mijal
you know, Western thinkers from the Western canon that don’t always find their way into a Jewish conversation. so I felt that that book was both an attempt to describe internally what it means to be a Jew and also an attempt to represent to others what Judaism offers the world.
Shai Held
Hmm. Yeah, I mean that’s actually a very, I think, right-on observation about I I really had two audiences in mind for this project. I’d say, like a primary audience and a secondary audience. The primary audience, this book in a lot of ways grew out of sort of a lifetime of frustration, I guess I would say, at
My sense of how deeply Jews have internalized a lot of traditional Christian anti-Judaic ideas. And the thing that struck me after I had been teaching in the Jewish world for probably, you know, just at that point, it was probably about 20 years, was that it felt like it was everywhere to me. It w I would see it with reform rabbis and conservative Jews and Hezder yeshiva, you know, kids from America who were learning in Israeli yeshivot. Like this internalized sense that some of the most
To my mind, almost degrading things that Christians had traditionally said about Judaism, Jews had internalized. The most dramatic, of course, is that whereas Christianity is about love, Judaism is about other things. Judaism is quote unquote a loveless religion, as the historian David Nuremberg, you describes Christian identity as, you know, traditional Christian identity built on this idea. And over time, I I I came to wonder what would it be like
To do this almost insanely ambitious thing of trying to look at the whole Masora, at the whole tradition of Judaism through this lens. What would happen if you said, so far from Judaism being loveless, what happens if you take love and make it the lens through which you see all of it? And the truth is the book kept growing.
Shai Held
I could have kept going, meaning I actually found the idea of looking at Judaism as a project of growing in love.
And through that, to think about what does love actually mean? What does love look like? What does it mean to love in a world that is so suffused with brokenness and hate, right? All these really deep philosophical and theological questions, they all kind of emerged from this perspective. And so so the first audience was very much Jews. Jews, I hoped.
I didn’t know, but I hoped of every stripe, you know, from from people who were pretty traditionally observant and raised inside of the world of traditional Jewish learning to Jews who had much less of a background or different ideological commitments. So that was sort of the primary audience. And then I had this fantasy that I had no idea whether it would actually materialize. I was hoping that some of the many Christians I had met.
Who seemed really eager?
To begin to see and think about Judaism in a different way than they had been taught, that the book would resonate with people like them. That was like my fantasy second audience. And that, as I think you know, has ended up being kind of one of the more amazing experiences of my life. You know, I’ve spent a lot of time in the two and a half years now since the book came out in Christian seminaries, doing Christian podcasts, talking to Christian theologians. It’s been a really interesting experience with some really, really powerful conversations
Mijal
So so you just described for us like these two audiences, two goals, and I also loved how you put it that Judaism is about is a project of growing in love. So I actually want us to ask you questions about these two layers within the context of our thinking on family. and you you you write a lot in the book about how families, so like biological families, families that we are part of, that families are schools of love.
Shai Held
Mm-hmm.
Mijal
But there’s something about being inside a family that is supposed to train us spiritually, philosophically, pedagogically to be better at love. Can you tease out that idea?
Shai Held
Yeah, yeah. so let me sort of tease it out a little bit more abstractly and then maybe share something personally. I think th so I start my whole kind of like spiritual project, if you will, it sounds very grandiose, but let’s let’s go with that. Was to start start with the idea that the core truth about being a human being is that we are loved. Hashem loves us, God loves us.
Mijal
Go f go with grandiose.
Shai Held
And of course, we don’t always feel that way, we don’t always believe that. And that, of course, is based on the famous statement of Rabi Akiva Khaviva Damshiniv Rabitzelim, beloved as the human being who was created in the image of God. And the thing that I found myself thinking as I taught about the idea of being loved over the years is that people would say to me, sometimes in a class, often after a class,
That’s lovely, but my mother abused me. I can’t feel any of what you’re saying.
And so it sort of began to register for me over time. You know, God’s love is mediated first and foremost by our parents and our homes. Sometimes well, and sometimes, you know, tragically, incredibly poorly. so it became more and more important for me as I worked on the book to figure out what did I really want to say about family. And some of the chapters in this book grew out of classes I’d been giving over two decades, and some of them were really new.
The family chapter was like little bits and pieces that I had taught, but never as a unit. I had never really tried to develop a kind of theology of family before. And so I tried to do that. How does being part of a family prepare us to receive God’s love and through that to become lovers ourselves? That was the question that was really animating me. And I’ll say personally, just because, you know, because I’m an
American Jew and so oversharing is what I do. You know, I it was hard for me because I grew up in a very profoundly troubled home. And it was not my experience. you know, my father died when I was a kid. My mother was not a mentally well person. I grew up alone with her.
Shai Held
And so the chapter was very difficult for me to write. I was, in a way, writing about what I wished I had had and what I wanted to make for my children. It was a very emotionally intense experience to work on this chapter.
Mijal
The the very poignant mission statement a little bit is that family mediates us feeling loved by God and makes us into better lovers of other people and maybe God as well. Could you break it down for people who maybe aren’t so much into philosophy? who wanna try to understand what is Judaism telling us is possible or is
aspirationally something we should aspire to in terms of what our families should look like and could look like, in a very like applied way.
Shai Held
Yeah, yeah. So I thank you. I so yeah. I think what I would start by saying is there should be at least one place in the world where the deep truth that each of us is infinitely valuable
And loved by God is played out concretely in real life. Because one of the challenges I think of taking Torah seriously, Jewish theology seriously, is that we hold to an idea that human beings matter infinitely, and we live in a world in which human dignity is trodden upon in countless ways all the time.
And I think the first meaning of a home is the aspiration to have a place where everyone, but children in particular, feel and experience the truth that they matter and matter infinitely, where their dignity is, you know, uncompromised. That I think is is is just really fundamental. And the more you make someone feel loved.
and valued in a healthy way. We could talk about what a healthy way means in a minute if you want, but the more you make someone feel loved and valued in a healthy way, the more capable they become
Of love themselves, right? When people very often, it’s not always the case, but very often when people are unloved, they find loving very hard, right? They find receiving love. One of the tragedies that we’ve all met people who have experienced is people who have been unloved. If the world were somewhat fairer, they would find it easy to receive love. But that’s not how it works, right? I mean, Noam, you were a principal of a school, right? It’s often the kids who are suffering most from not being loved who have
Shai Held
The hardest time making friends and receiving love. It’s one of the paradoxes, right? So we we we have this very sacred task as parents of preparing kids for the twin abilities of receiving love and giving love. And we do that most fundamentally by loving them, by treasuring them, and I would add, and it’s something else we could talk about, by seeing them and valuing them in all their uniqueness.
I mean, you know, one of the things that I think about a lot, I have three kids
All of whom are in every conceivable way totally different from each other. You know, their families, I know they look like they produce carbon copies of each other. I mean, my kids, each one of them is like from a different planet. And it’s such an avoda, it’s such a like a spiritual practice for me to like actually constantly be aware which of my kids am I talking to right now. Because I have to speak a somewhat different language to each of them, a different psychological language, a different religious language.
And that’s also really, really important. Kids should not grow up feeling like their parents see them as examples of some kind of genius, right? That’s not what they are. They are infinitely valuable in all their uniqueness, right? In the wonderful image of the Mishnah, right, God mints an infinite number of coins, and no one of them, right, is exactly the same as the other. And that is a statement of God’s glory.
Mijal
I wanna hear from n Noam like from your perspective how you know this plays out as as an as an educator. but also just want to say like part of what this brings up for me is I feel like you’re describing attachment a lot of like the lessons from like attachment theory but giving it like a theological valence. So sometimes as a mom, I’ll be spending a lot of time, you know, making my f my kid feel really good and I’ll remind myself
This is setting them up for like a life of like secure attachment. And I think what you’re adding is it’s not just that, but it’s setting them up to feel loved by God and to be able to love as well in like a spiritual way. which is very powerful. It’s sacralizing some of the relationships that are fairly mundane. Noam, how does this play out for you?
Noam
Well I was gonna ask before I answered how it plays out, I wanted to I I wanted to ask Shy, I w I just wanna like I wanna level for a second. What is love?
Mijal
Yeah, I’ll I’ll go ahead and ask ya.
Shai Held
I wouldn’t I don’t want to attempt a definition of love, but I will say that a something that holds all the different kinds of love that we talk about together. That is to say, like love of neighbor, love of God, love of the gare or immigrant and later convert, right? You know, love of all humanity, as Ravyakov Emden will talk about in, you know, l later in modern times.
Love includes something like wanting in a really deep place the flourishing of others. and when you love someone enough and want something for them enough, you
End up moved to try to make it happen for them yourself. And I didn’t include this in the book, but I have this kind of reading of a passage in Nachmanides, the great medieval Torah commentator, where I think you see this sort of slippage from love as wanting someone, wanting something, to love as making helping make something happen. Now, love, I argue in the book, is more of a posture than a feeling, right?
Shai Held
When I say I love my daughter, that has an emotional intensity and valence that loving the gare does not, right? I love my daughter, thankfully, in a totally different way than I love my neighbor. It would be creepy if that were not true, right? If I love my neighbor like I love my child, that would be just weird and miss a misunderstanding of love. So I think love can be more or less emotionally laden, more or less manifest as feeling, but in family it’s
Where it’s often most manifest as feeling, which is, this is not something I talk about in the book and maybe should have, which is why love in a family setting, I think, can be the most powerful love, but also the most explosive and dangerous love. Because it’s so emotionally laden, we know family love can be really explosive. We’ve all been around families where you know the love veers off into craziness.
Mijal
Yeah. No, no, no, no, it’s okay. And I I do want us and and you began to t tease out attention that that I want us to go into, you know, love of family versus love of neighbor. But before we go there, let me just ask one more clarifying question about family. you know, w when Noam and I started like thinking about these series and like what are our big questions around family, one of the questions that came up for me was and it’s gonna be a big question, but it’s like, is there
Shai Held
Sorry, that was a bit of a ramble, but I hope it’s clear.
Noam
It’s very helpful.
Mijal
Does Jewish wisdom dictate that like a Jewish family like looks differently than like a regular family in terms of like an aspirational, healthy family dynamic? And I’m curious, especially in light of your work speaking to multiple audiences, both Jews, but also being really conversant in other religious traditions, what how would you answer that? Is there like a Jewish vision of family? So I’m not I’m not talking here about like ritual.
Shai Held
Mm.
Mijal
traditions that I think are can be more discrete, but like more broadly, is there a Jewish vision of family that is particular to the Jewish tradition?
Shai Held
That is a very interesting question that I’m not sure I know how to answer, in part because
I think probably different Jewish communities think about family in very, very different ways. And also one of the things that I struggle with, here I will overshare again, is the way that I sometimes feel like family talk in the Jewish community, maybe beyond the Jewish community, it’s just that I happen to live in the Jewish community. Sometimes people talk in cliches that I can’t quite understand. Like on Jewish dating apps.
Mijal
What do you mean?
Shai Held
Which once upon a time I spent a few months on. Once upon a time, I would notice that like everyone in the app would say, I’m very family oriented. And I would want to write people and say, Can you tell me what that means?
Like I’m just really curious to hear you use other words than than that. What do you mean by that? Do you mean that you plan to be faithful to your partner? Do you mean that the thing you would most like to do with your time is spend it with your children? Do you mean that your extended family is really important to you? What do actually mean by that? I’m not even asking it skeptically exactly. I’m asking it because I’m I don’t actually know what people mean by it, because they sort of tend to use these phrases that feel
Noam
D did the love of your life did the love of your life love that you c asked that question? The one who found you did the love of your life who you found on the dating app like that you were wondering that question?
Shai Held
Is what?
Shai Held
You know, I’m proud to say no I found the love of my life at Shul. But you know, no, I don’t I it’s so so I’ll just say I don’t I I I I’m not always sure what people mean by it. I I don’t know the answer. I I I really don’t know the answer to this question. I think it’s a really interesting question and obviously one that I’ve thought about.
Noam
okay.
Shai Held
I would say that I’ve been struck. This is really only answering your question in a very kind of back back into it kind of way. That when I’ve spoken in Christian audiences and f issues around love and family have come up, I’ve been struck by just how similar the questions people ask about what they’re struggling with are to what I hear in Shules. I didn’t really expect that, to be honest. Part
Some kind of Jewish parochialist in me thought, well, when I talk to evangelicals, they’ll have different things to say about it. But like, that has not been my experience so far. I feel like a lot of the questions are the same. They’re about, you know, rebellious kids. They’re about something that I write about in the book that maybe we could talk about that is like very important to me about the difference between conditions and expectations when it comes to love. That is, that parents are supposed to love their children, at least as I understand.
Mijal
Interesting.
Shai Held
It without conditions but with expectations, which is part of what I mean by healthy love. I just feel like I any kind of distinction that I was inclined to make, I now have questions about based on two years of conversations with Christians. It’s it’s just a very long-winded way of saying you’ve asked me a question I don’t really know how to answer.
Mijal
So but but but it’s a good it’s a great transition though to talking about an area of Jewish wisdom and family, which I do think sets Judaism apart, or at least many people claim it sets it apart, and and you write a lot about this. so one of the things that makes Judaism be different than other more, I would say, universalist religions
Shai Held
Mm.
Mijal
Is that it considers the Jewish people an extended family, right? So part of like this series, like like Noam and I have been going back and forth almost like a ping-pong, like, what does Jewish tradition have to say to us in our families? And also what does it have to say about the Jewish people as a family? And a lot of the like, let’s just name it, a lot of the critiques that exist from outside the Jewish community is to look at Jews and to say, you are too parochial, you only care about yourselves, you love each other, but you do it at the exclusion of others.
And I would love for you to tease out how you walk this line in your book because you take like an approach that is I think says yes and.
Shai Held
I think that for me my thinking about this developed from hearing people, especially in more liberal Jewish settings, talk about is Judaism particularist or universalist? And thinking, I don’t really understand the question. It feels to me like the answer to that question is yes.
Mijal
Well, can you tease out those terms because some of our our listeners might not be in Jewish spaces where they hear these terms?
Shai Held
Y yeah, for sure. For sure. So well, okay, so let me say what I think people meant by it when they use it, right? Particularism means
As people use it, like prioritizing that which is local or particular to you, your own family, your own community, or in a different register, the people say in your own neighborhood, which which the rabbis also very much talk about, right? The people who live near you take priority in your life in some way. Universalism, right, is the idea that on some level I am responsible for, accountable to, connected to, in relationship with everyone everywhere. The more
radical form of universalism that you hear among like utilitarian philosophers is I am accountable and related to everyone in the world equally, which in the book I try to argue is a very strange claim that very few actual people believe. It’s like a really an odd thing to believe. And so people would
Noam
What’s manifestation of that again? What what would be what would be a simple manifestation example of that?
Shai Held
Of universalism that a everyone is equal. So there’s a a a famous passage in the philosopher P one of the one of the philosopher Peter Singer’s books. It’s his most extreme sentence where he says, You know, if I had two starving children and one bowl of rice, and one of the children was my own, and one of the children was another child, I cannot defend philosophically that I would feed my child first.
And most humans, and most philosophers, by the way, also say, sorry, something went wrong in your universalism. Because of course, part of what it means to be a human being is to have relationships, which means to have certain relationships that are preferential in your life. Of course, I love my own daughter more than I love your daughter. That’s part of what it means to simply be a person. Though there’s a philosophical thing here that I was arguing. I was arguing against a certain kind of what philosophers call kind of
Radical impartiality, the idea that I shouldn’t, you know, prefer people that I care about to others, which is a view that in philosophy, again, there’s certain utilitarians, and in Christianity there are certain Lutheran philosophers who hold this view. They think that what it means to love your neighbor is to love every human being in the world equally.
Noam
Could you say a sentence why you think that’s so illogical? Like why that’s so inhuman because you just said it’s it doesn’t make sense because it doesn’t make sense. I just want to understand why it doesn’t make sense.
Shai Held
Well, so I don’t know, you know, it’s funny. I’m not sure that illogical is the word that I would use. I would say it’s inhumane and it so profoundly cuts against
Noam
Inhumane.
Shai Held
What it means to be a person. I mean, here, if we if you’ll pardon me for a minute, if we go into like, you know, 20th century moral philosophy, one of the most famous essays in philosophy in the 20th century is an argument where the philosopher Bernard Williams talks about the question of you know, what if two people are drowning, one of which is my wife, and one of which is someone else, can I actually defend saving my wife? And Bernard Williams makes this really interesting, and I think for a philosopher,
I’m not totally sure what I think of it. He says, I’m not interested in that question. I don’t actually care about arguments. She’s my wife.
And then he says, if I’m not entitled to certain relationships, then I have no reason to even be around. That’s his his phrase, if I remember correctly, as a person in the first place. What it means to be a person is to have relationships. If philosophy is going to come along and say, I want to efface or erase all relationships such that I owe every person the same. I can’t even defend saving my wife first. I’m just not interested. I don’t even want to be in a world like that.
Mijal
Yeah, and the argument could both be that it’s inhumane and that it’s it sets things up in a way that would make them worse, also practically, to to have standards that are illogical. But but but but Rev Shai, just going back to the the original question, so you you were saying that you were hearing around in many liberal Jewish spaces this question, you know, is Judaism more particular or more universal? so and that that that you thought that it was a false binary.
Shai Held
What that’s
Shai Held
Yeah, right. I think that it’s a false binary because I think that ultimately traditional Judaism embraces the idea of I’ll you know I use my own language here, family first but not family only. That is, you know
Mijal
Hm, I like that. Family first, but I we should do it with like America. America first. But not America only. I’m thinking about it, I have to play with it.
Noam
Would you apply that to America? I was gonna ask you America first, not American only? Well, huh? Okay. Okay. Yeah, play Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Shai Held
Well, in certain ways, by the way, in certain ways, yes. By the way, everyone in America on some level believes in America first, in the sense that you might think that feeding your neighbor across the street who’s hungry comes before feeding someone far away. It’s when America First becomes jingoistic that then you begin to worry about it, right? But like a it it’s nothing crazy about saying that local relationships come
Come first. So, you know, when people say Jews are parochial, we only care about our own. I think the better reading of the Jewish tradition, I’m not saying there aren’t voices in the tradition that talk about family only, or at least that there aren’t contemporary readers of the tradition who talk that way. But it seemed to me that family first means I feed my daughter first, but your daughter’s needs also make a claim on me.
Right. And the the passage in a Jewish text that I came upon that I found really very moving is where.
A prominent modern rabbinic figure, or Yaakov Emdin, says in one of his books, he says, There is a commandment, a mitzvah, to love our neighbor. And loving our neighbor in Leviticus clearly means loving our fellow Jews. Right? That that’s what the word reya, covenantal fellow, you know, other person in my community, means. Right? And then implicitly you can almost feel it in the text. He’s saying, wait, does that mean I don’t love to other other people? He says in the next paragraph, he says, and there’s another commandment.
Commandment of love, and that is to love every human being who was created in the image of God. That’s what Rabbi Akiva taught us, every human being should be beloved. And what I loved about that is Rabbi Yaqov Emdin refused to choose. Right? He didn’t say, either I have to love my fellow Jews, or I have to love human beings. He found a way to say, it’s perfectly reasonable to love my own people more, and not but and
Shai Held
I have to love everyone. I called that in my book Judaism’s particularist universalism.
Mijal
Right. So so I have a lot of, let’s say, philosophical, theological, theoretical questions, but let me put them aside for a second. Let me just ask in terms of like in practice. So let’s say that like, you know, I agree that we don’t need to say bat and we can say and and we can love our particular community and love the world and you know and and kind of like reconcile some of the theoretical contradictions. But in practice today, in a world that is increasingly
Polarized and fractured, where the options in front of us are fractured. You know, I’ll give you an example. So I’m thinking right now about all of these elections that are coming up, local elections that are coming up. And I would say that in my pre-October 7th world, I would really push myself to think through a lot of issues and how they affected different people and different communities and not just me. All of those things. In this pre post-October 7th moment, there’s something in me that thinks.
I need to focus right now on safety and security of our com of my community. That is the most important. And because when I go to the booth to vote, I am going to be given binary or we know whatever, multiple options. I’m not going to be able to say yes and. I’m actually going to have to make singular commitments. I will need to prioritize which are the circles that I am that I am taking into account when making choices. This is just one example. We can apply it to a million different things that are just becoming
sharper so that even if we were to have a theoretical particularistic universalism as Jews, the the world and what it’s offering us right now is asking us to at times make a choice in how we approach things.
Shai Held
So yes, I mean obviously there’s there’s like a million different questions tied up in the question I think you just asked. There’s like a lot of really hard stuff. But I wanna say one thing kind of almost floating above what you just asked, which is and I try to talk about this at least briefly in my book, which is
That I think what is often neat in theory is almost always extremely messy in practice. So I I agree with you that it’s really hard, but I I’ll let’s just make it harder and say, I don’t feel like I always know which candidate with which approach.
Is actually better for the Jewish community. And also, in the back of my mind, I remember something that the old liberal Jewish activist Leonard Fine, Allah Shalom, may he rest in peace, used to say, which I always found really provocative and interesting. He used to say: the Jewish people have no greater interest than the pursuit of their values.
I don’t know exactly when and how to apply that, but I find that very moving. And I often think about it when I hear people talk about, I only care about Jewish safety. I’m not saying you said that, but I when when when people say I only care about certain things, you know, that was a big dissent of mine around certain political figures in our own time, right? Someone you disagree with about every issue, it’s just not clear you can embrace them because of one thing. I I I find this question very, very hard. And and
I I I will just say one of the things I think about a lot, and you know, some would say this is wishy-washy. I would say it’s honest. At least th that’s how I think about it. I feel like I increasingly don’t fit in in the age of social media because there’s more and more things about which I feel I really don’t know what the answer is at all.
And it’s hard to function that way in this world. Everyone has to know what they think about everything. And they have to be able to tell their students and their congregants exactly what to think about everything. And I don’t know how to do that. I find the world gets more bewildering to me the older I get. That’s just where I’m at, you know? And and and and it is how I read the tradition. Now, is that the tradition affecting me? Is it me affecting how I read the tradition? It’s probably both.
Mijal
Yeah.
Mijal
I I feel like I’m back to to the classroom. I was taking notes as you were speaking.
and just like things that stood out to me. So I wanna just maybe tease out three big ideas that came out of this conversation. one big idea is that to be human is to engage in a project of growing in love. And that this is a key, maybe this is the beating heart of the Jewish tradition. A second key idea is that families at the best of times they are schools of love and they help us be able to nurture a healthy love that can teach us
That God loves us and they help us to become better lovers in the world in return. And a third key idea is that we have this unsettling, I’m adding a little bit here, unsettling beautiful, precious tradition that asks us to cultivate a posture of particularist universalism, in which we care for our Jewish community, our Jewish people, and we care for our neighbors, our societies, and the world at large. And that
having multiple commitments is going to unsettle us in the best of ways. So these are the three big ideas. Each of them can be its own book, and of course they’re all contained in in your wisdom of shy. and super yeah. One more? Well there is more. I just chose, you know
Noam
I have I have one more. I have one more. I have one I I know, but I I have one more that like I’ve been
Shai Held
I love that Mijal. I wish you had written the conclusion to my chapter for me. It’s better than my own conclusion. But yes, no, I’m go for it.
Noam
Alright. Exactly. The the one more that I have is when when we asked like what is love to you and you gave a theological philosophical answer by not answering it, you actually did answer it and you said, ’cause Mijal, you asked me a question that I didn’t get to answer, you ask you you said to love basically means to want the more the flourishing of another individual in in the context that they’re in. That’s that’s that’s what you want. So therefore it makes sense that your daughter
you’d love in a certain way that’s different than your neighbor, that’s different than someone across the world. I love that definition. First of all, there’s a Hebrew word, which is a Yiddish word, which is something that I think the people who really love show this more than anything, which is Lefargen. When you when you feel fear gun for somebody as opposed to Schadenfreud, that is a great articulation of love. When you want someone to succeed, when you want th someone to flourish, that is that is that is an expression of love. And some
Shai Held
So n Noam, you might I don’t know if you I I I make no assumption about about how much of my book you’ve read, but that’s literally how I define love of neighbor according to Ramban. And that it’s originally a Yiddish word to forgin, which became modern Hebrew Lefargen. That’s exact I that’s exactly right.
Mijal
We could stay here for hours talking about love. and it’s due to to the the wisdom and sensitivity that you bring to the subject. So everyone check out the book Judaism is about love, and also the podcast Answers Withheld. and thank you so much, Rev Shai, for joining us.
Noam
Thank Rev Shy.
Shai Held
Thank you both so much.