#53 - Rabbi Shai Held

In this month’s episode, I talk with Rabbi Shai Held, who is President of the Hadar Institute. Rabbi Held was visiting my institution, Saint Leo University, at the invitation of our Center for Catholic Jewish Studies. We spoke about his new book, Judaism is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life, the role his parents played in his early interests in theology, and on what it means to love one’s enemies.

Rabbi Shai Held (image from the Hadar Institute)

Rabbi Shai Held is the President and Dean at the Hadar Institute in New York City. He earned his AB in Religion from Harvard University, his MA in Jewish Philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and his PhD in Religious Studies from Harvard University. He is the author of Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence (Indiana University Press, 2013), The Heart of the Torah volumes one and two (Jewish Publication Society, 2017), and Judaism is About Love (Picador, 2024).

I have again had an unexpected hiatus, and I won’t bore you with promises of upcoming consistency. I plan on two more episodes coming out in 2024, but what I plan on and what actually comes out ain’t ever exactly been similar.

You can also see the full transcript for this episode below.

Thanks as always to Matt Hines of the band Eastern Sea for providing the music for the Daily Theology Podcast.

Transcript of Episode #53 - Rabbi Shai Held

DT Episode - Shai Held

[opening music]

Stephen Okey: Welcome to the Daily Theology Podcast, a podcast on the craft and vocation of theology.

I'm your host, Stephen Okey.

In this month's episode, I talk with Rabbi Shai Held, who is president of the Hadar Institute. Rabbi Held was visiting my institution, Saint Leo University at the invitation of our Center for Catholic Jewish Studies. We spoke about his new book, Judaism is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life. We also spoke about the role his parents played in his early interests in theology and on what it means to love one's enemies.

I have again, had an unexpected hiatus and I won't bore you with promises of upcoming consistency. I plan on two more episodes coming out in 2024, but what I plan on and what actually comes out ain't ever exactly been similar. Nonetheless, thanks for your patience, I hope you enjoy the episode, and thanks for listening.

[Music transition]

Stephen Okey: Today for the Daily Theology Podcast, I'm talking to Rabbi Shai Held, who is the president at the Hadar Institute. And he's here today at Saint Leo as a guest of the Center for Catholic Jewish Studies. And I like to always start my conversations by asking, how did you get into theology?

Shai Held: Thanks for having me, first of all. Um, how did I get into theology? You know, I was raised, I always like to say I was raised in a kind of cognitive dissonance experiment. I was raised by parents for whom Jewish learning and Jewish culture were everything. My father was a professor of Jewish Studies. My mother was a high school teacher of Hebrew literature, but we were very secular.

But because Jewish culture was so important to them and traditional robust Jewish culture, I was sent to a pretty mainstream orthodox Jewish day school.

And the chasm between what I was being taught in school and what I was doing or really not doing at home really affected me from a very young age. I have an older brother and older sister. It really rolled off of them.

I remember being I must have been in third grade coming home and saying to my father my teachers at school tell me every day that God wrote the Torah and gave it to Moses on Mount Sinai.

I know you think that's not true. How am I supposed to, how am I supposed to think about this? And my father, who was a philologist and a kind of right, had no philosophical inclination at all. He was like, I don't know what you want from me. Like, I can't, he just did not know what to do with me.

But so, from a very young age, I was sort of interested in these kind of religious theological questions. I wanted to know how it could be true that the work my father was doing as a biblical scholar was true and yet, on some level, the Torah being the mediated word of God for us. Like, I wanted to know what that meant. I must have been eight or nine years old.

And then, you know, this kind of continued. My my father very abruptly just died one day when I was 12 years old. And I became completely consumed with the problem of evil, the problem of suffering, you know, I wanted to know why God had let me down. It was very personal. It was not abstract at all. It wasn't like a seminar room question. It was a little boy in pain question. But it was very, very theological. It's like, I want to believe in God. I want to believe that God cares about me. And yet, my whole world just fell apart. And why?

So you know, it was sort of like a Just kind of like a preoccupation, a temperament to always be asking religious questions. And then, you know, as I got older, I would say I, feel like I was very lucky, I guess the more theological way to say it would be, it was like kind of a blessing, is that I found that when I talked about the questions I was thinking about, people wanted to listen.

And I was sort of bewildered by that, for a long time. like, why is that interesting to you? It's just like my obsessions, you know? But I guess, you know, over time I came to realize that actually maybe that was a part of what I was sort of in the world to do, which is to help people have language for religious questions, to help people really grapple with questions of theology.

And I always wanted to talk to what we might call real people rather than just other scholars, which is kind of the path that I've taken.

Stephen Okey: So when you were younger, so when you bring these questions to your dad, he doesn't know what to do with you, was he, was your mom, were they encouraging of the questions or were they discouraging or were they just sort of like, I don't know, you go figure it out or?

Shai Held: You know, I think they were discouraging in part because. So, my parents were the age of many of my friends grandparents. My father was almost 50 when I was born, which in the community I was in school and it was very, very rare. My parents had been born in Europe. My father was born in Poland, my mother in Lithuania. They were essentially refugees from the Nazis. They were so traumatized that religion mattered to them, but in very I don't even know what words to use. They really didn't have language. You know, one of the rare moments, an amazing theological moment I had with my mother, not long, maybe four or five years before she died.

She said to me one day, kind of out of the blue, it was an amazing comment. She said in Hebrew, we talked in Hebrew, she said, you know, I'm so angry that apparently I am a believer. And I was like, wow, that's an amazing comment.

And that actually relates in a way to uh, the chapter on protest in my book, this notion that, you know, if you're angry at someone, then aren't you on some level claiming or implicitly affirming that there's something or someone out there who is an address for this?

Stephen Okey: So you have discerned this vocation to essentially to teaching, right? Like that's how you, how you describe it, but also one that is not primarily oriented to, you know, like speaking to other scholars, that sort of thing, but really like real people, as you say. How has that manifested in what you've been doing since you went to graduate school, did your dissertation and all that sort of thing?

Shai Held: Yeah, so the main thing that I've done for the last 17 years now is help to build this institution that I was privileged to co found called Hadar. And Hadar was essentially staked on two ideas. One was that one could be totally immersed in and committed to tradition while also being committed to full gender equality and egalitarianism. And the other was that we could help, I mean it sounds pretentious to say it, but sort of raise the bar on Jewish discourse in the American Jewish community more broadly.

So help rabbis teach better, you know, inspire teachers to keep learning, you know, things like that. So I spend a lot of my time just teaching rabbis, teaching teachers, teaching lay people who, for whatever reason, feel like their synagogue does not offer them exactly what they need in terms of learning.

I don't spend much of my time in academic settings. I spend a lot of time reading academics, and I'm in conversation with various academics, but I've really chosen not to be in an academic Jewish Studies department, because at the end of the day, I'm interested in Torah more than I am in Jewish Studies, to make a dichotomy that's maybe too stark.

Yeah, and, it's very important to me, in a way, I once I was invited to speak to a group of doctoral students in Jewish Studies about how being a theologian is different than being an academic Jewish Studies scholar. And one of the things I said to them was you know I never really took to standing over texts.

I've always been much more drawn to standing under them. I'm not quite sure I love that image in retrospect, but I think what I was groping for was sort of saying these texts are making a claim on me and I'm not really embarrassed about that at all. Actually, it's the only reason I care about them in the first place, is because on some level I'm understanding them to be demanding something of me, if you prefer, you know, there are somehow, God speaks to us through these texts.

Stephen Okey: Yeah.

Shai Held: Whatever we take those words to mean.

Stephen Okey: I like what you're saying in part, because, when I think about myself as a theologian, one of the tensions that I experience is, and my language for it comes out of David Tracy, who I did my dissertation on, but he talks about the theologian having commitments to, you know, society and the church and the academy.

And there are overlaps among those, but in many ways, the sort of demands and expectations or, standards even of the academy and of the church are different, and the motivations in some respects are different, the audiences in many respects are different.

And so there can be a tension between trying to satisfy both in some kind of, you know, authentic integral way. And it, I mean, that sounds similar to what you're describing.

Shai Held: Yeah. And I would say just, you know, speaking very autobiographically different things I've written are more explicitly focused on different audiences. My first book was on Abraham Joshua Heschel, kind of philosophical analysis of his worldview.

That is, I would say, written for scholars and people who are willing to work to read a book. Do You know what I mean? It's not it's not a popular book. It's just not, you know.

Stephen Okey: It's got a lot of footnotes.

Shai Held: My my second book, The Heart of Torah, which is essays on the weekly Torah portion, You know, I'm interested in speaking to scholars, but, you know, it's overwhelmingly written for regular folks.

You know, just smart, thoughtful people who want to be engaged with biblical texts. This new book, Judaism is About Love, in some ways aims to do both at the same time. The book is written in such a way, I hope, that a thoughtful lay person can read it. And the 150 pages of footnotes are almost like a second book for philosophers, for Jewish Studies scholars.

Yeah, I mean, part of that, I should say, the reason why I did that is I realized that the argument of this book, which, you know, we can we can get to, but the argument of this book is surprising and even subversive to many Christians and many Jews. And I felt it was especially important to show my work, right?

In other words, I wanted to like, I'm not making this stuff up. This is deeply rooted. Let me show you all the places that it's deeply rooted. And there's also very much a conversation with the world of Christian theology that takes place in the notes in a very explicit way.

Stephen Okey: Yeah, I mean, I was struck in what I read from it that you reference a lot of Christian thinkers as well. I know I saw Kierkegaard. But you, you were engaging with a lot of Christian authors in addition to, you know, significant Jewish authors. And so it struck me the way that that, I mean, in itself is modeling a sort of inter religious question.

But it's tied to, I mean, the thematic, what seemed to be at least the impetus for the book, if I understood it correctly, which is that there is a widespread perception that Judaism is fundamentally about law and Christianity is fundamentally about love. And that this seems to be a perception that a lot of Christians hold, but in your telling it's also a perception that a lot of Jews hold.

And so you have this story in the introduction about a rabbinic student who, you get a question and you essentially say, Judaism is about love, and the rabbinic student's response is, that sounds like Christianity. And you were shocked that that was the response to that.

And so the book does a very nice thing for its readers, which is the title is the thesis, which a lot of books don't do, we try to be clever with our titles instead. But the claim is Judaism is about love

Shai Held: I wanted the title to be a provocation. That was the goal.

Stephen Okey: Yeah. But yeah, a good, yeah, a good thesis should be provocative a little bit. And so I wanted to ask, number one, can you expand on the, on that thesis, like explain what you're trying to work through in the book, and then, two maybe expand a bit on why you see this as such a provocation. Why is this something that is so sort of striking or possibly controversial?

Shai Held: Right. I mean, I feel like that's a whole bunch of interesting questions rolled into one. So let me, no, no, not at all. But They're all really interesting. Let me, let me try to sort of unravel them for a second.

So, first, the story that I begin with, I want, if I could, I want to be more explicit for a moment about that exchange because it was just so striking. What I said was, Judaism is, or tells the story of a God who loves us and beckons us to love God back, to which this student said, I'm sorry, but that sounds like Christianity to me.

And what I said to him was, you know, it's so funny that you say that because I was literally thinking of the twice a day Jewish liturgy in which we say explicitly that, we say with vast love, have you loved us? And then we read Deuteronomy saying, and you should love the Lord, your God, with all your et cetera.

Right. So, so I said to him, you know, if that sounds like Christianity to you, then we have to ask ourselves, how much have we internalized traditional Christian anti-Judaism. And so when you say a lot of Jews view it that way, my argument is that, you know, we know that minority cultures often internalize the way majority cultures see them.

And I think that very clearly happened in the history of Judaism. Right? Jews were told, this is David Nirenberg, the historian David Nirenberg's famous argument, right? Christianity came into the world and said, Judaism is a loveless religion and Christianity is here to repair that, to offer an alternative.

Jews internalized, I think, the narrative of lovelessness. And that is deeply tragic because it means that we don't even hear some of the core texts of our own tradition. Now, I don't tell the story in this book, but it's perhaps worth sharing this in this context, is that a few months after the story that I share here, I was speaking at a conference, an interfaith conference for high school students.

And although it was in 1990s, it was structured as if it was the 1950s. The kids were broken up into groups of Jews, Catholics, Protestants. Okay. So I'm speaking to the Protestant kids. This is literally true. I'm speaking to the Protestant kids, and I say in passing in a discussion, I say, so someone remind me, what does Jesus say is the great commandment?

And 20 hands, all the students raise their hand, I call him one of them, he proudly tells me about love of God and love of neighbor. And then I in total innocence say, and Jesus is quoting what? No hands, not a single one.

And I thought to myself, this is amazing, like of course you can believe a story where Judaism is a loveless religion, because you don't know what Jesus is quoting.

You don't have the vaguest idea where it's coming from. And so, in some ways, you know, this book, I would say it started in that moment, I certainly didn't know it.

But it, the main audience for this book, I guess I would say, is Jews in the sense that I want to offer them the opportunity to quote the subtitle to recover the heart of Jewish life. And I mean heart in both senses of that word, heart as in core and heart as in the heart.

And also the book is written for Christians in the hopes that it can help Christians who are open to doing this to radically rethink what they know about or what they think they know about Judaism, and to help develop a kind of much healthier, more robust relationship between the two traditions that's not based on one belittling the other.

Stephen Okey: My impression, and I, I could be wrong about this, but this has been my experience when, from working with undergraduate students the last ten or so years, is that, in teaching Christianity, and in teaching scripture, and, but also in, in some cases in teaching sort of inter religious questions, is that a lot of contemporary students, if they are not Jewish and do not have, you know, close Jewish friends or family, they have essentially three touch points for anything that they might know about Judaism.

And they are the modern state of Israel, the Holocaust, and then the Pharisees in the gospels, like that's what they have. And, all of those are, are to some extent at a distance from them, in some respects. And especially with respect to the Pharisees, there's not any kind of sense of how, you know, that's a particular moment in time, that is not the same moment in time now.

And so the sense of any ways in which contemporary Judaism is clearly connected to, but also distinct from, I think is often lost for, for contemporary students. It's not an experience they have.

And I mean, to be fair to the students, they often, even when they're Christian may not have a great grip on their own tradition, I think is part of it too.

And so, I mean, one of the things I'm grateful to about your book is as an introduction to something that I think for a lot of Christians actually is just unfamiliar, or the, the touch points are in many respects removed from their contemporary experience and contemporary possibilities.

Shai Held: Right. I, I mean, I definitely am struck by how wide eyed Christian audiences sometimes get when I talk about sort of some of my understandings of Judaism because it's like, wait, what? I don't know anything about this. This doesn't sound like any of the things that I've ever heard. And so I, you know, I hope that it's kind of world opening for you.

Stephen Okey: Mm-Hmm.

Shai Held: That's the goal. And by the way, if I could, I want to go back for a second something you said before in that, in that multi layered question that you asked before, you know, I'm not arguing that Judaism is not about law.

I'm actually arguing that the Christian dichotomization of love and law is something that no Jew can comprehend. That is to say, because law itself is described in our liturgy, we regularly instill this in ourselves, the notion that God's law is a manifestation of God's love. That's part of the the Shema prayer that we say. We talk about, you know, you've loved us. And one of the ways you loved us is by offering us instruction. I would say that's a better term than than law in this case.

So, you know, when the rabbis of the Talmud talk about the joy of being commanded, simcha shel mitzvah, right? You know, try selling that to Martin Luther. You're not going to get very far, right? But I think that has led Christians to say, Oh, Judaism is about law, well It must not be about love, which I think is just, from a Jewish perspective, a kind of incomprehensible dichotomy.

Stephen Okey: That's fascinating.

This, I hope this question makes sense. Please tell me if it doesn't. Is there in line with what you've been saying about love, relationship of love and law in Judaism, could you, I guess, explain for me, is there a sort of dominant or predominant way in Jewish thought to think about the concept of freedom and what freedom means?

And, and I'll, I'll say why I'm thinking about this in this context, which is when you make this point about, for Judaism, overall, love and law are interconnected with one another, and that law is seen as a gift and whatnot. There is, in Christian thought, there is a strain of thinking about freedom that is, I think, very influenced by, Enlightenment thought, U. S. Bill of Rights, freedom means I get to do what I want to do.

And I might use my freedom well, I might use it poorly, but what matters is I get to choose. And there's a different frame of thought, and which is that freedom is more fundamentally about doing the good, and that what freedom is for is doing the good, and that in that context, we'll often talk about how the Catholic Church also has a lot of rules, and defenses of those rules will often be Grounded on the idea that like, these rules are for your well being.

They are for your good. They are themselves expressions of love Like divine

Shai Held: That's the language of Deuteronomy, right? I give you these laws for your own good. letuvatch, your own benefit.

Stephen Okey: And so I guess I'm wondering, is the question of freedom a question in Judaism in the same way, I mean, in a comparable way to how I think it might be for a lot of Christians. And is the, the understanding of it similar or are there, are there shades of it that you think would be worth highlighting?

Shai Held: Yeah, that's an interesting question. I, I think that for sure in traditional Jewish sources, the notion of freedom is very much tied with self discipline. Not giving into whim, caprice, impulse. Right? So the freedom to make decisions about the good, as opposed to the freedom to do what I want. You know, the famous rabbinic statement that, you know, freedom is playing on the Hebrew word "cherut" meaning freedom, and "charut" meaning engraved, that freedom comes through what is engraved upon the law, on the tablets of the law.

I would want to make a distinction between how we think about freedom politically and how we think about freedom religiously. Otherwise, we end up advocating for theocracy. Which is, I'll tell you what the good is and I'll make you do it and that'll make you free. I'm terrified of people like that, right? But I really want to distinguish here between political freedom and religious freedom.

Judaism does not think freedom means freedom to do whatever I want. That's just impulsiveness. That's not freedom. That's the argument. And in a funny way, if anything, Kant, I think, is an interesting parallel to religious traditions here. And Kant's Christianity comes across very strongly here. What is freedom?

Freedom is obeying the moral law. Because other things are impulsiveness, giving into what he calls, you know, inclination. I think that's like a deeply Jewish and Christian view.

I would also say, you know, when it comes to Judaism and freedom, I think that one of the interesting theological claims that you find in parts of the Jewish tradition is that God is so committed to human freedom that God can be disappointed.

Stephen Okey: Hmm.

Shai Held: And that's a really profound biblical idea. I always joke that if the Bible were published today, the title would be the book of divine disappointment, right? It's like, oh, I'm calling you into covenant. I'm trying to have a relationship with you and you guys are impossible. You drive me bananas, right? You keep taking the freedom I give you and making just bad, bad choices.

And yet, you know, it seems like God is committed to human freedom. Where I think there is some gap, and I'm not sure if this is Judaism versus Lutheranism or versus Christianity more broadly, and maybe you can, you can weigh in on this question, is that I think that Jewish sources tend to be more "possible-istic" than a lot of Christian sources are.

Meaning, I think that the rabbis of the Talmud believed that people were capable of obeying the law. Didn't mean they always would, to be sure, but people were capable, you don't, the law is not given to break yourself upon, that's not what it's there, you know, I, not long ago I was reading a commentary on Leviticus by a contemporary Lutheran Bible scholar, and he gets to the mandate to love your neighbor as yourself in Leviticus 19, and he says, this is there to show you that you're not capable of observing the law because nobody can do this.

I remember thinking, you know, I know you're writing as an Old Testament scholar, but you sound like Martin Luther, not an Old Testament scholar. Because, I think that Leviticus probably thought, love your neighbors, you're probably capable of more love than you think you are. There's an interesting, it seems to me at least, there's an interesting dichotomization there.

Judaism has I don't like when people say Judaism has an optimistic view of nature, because I'm not sure it's optimistic. I always prefer possibilistic, meaning you're capable of it. I'm not confident that you will. I'm not even optimistic that you will, but you're capable of it. Whereas some Christians, at least really don't want to talk that way. Hence the obsession with grace alone.

Stephen Okey: Yeah, there's this story in the gospels, the, the story of the rich young man and, you know, he comes to Jesus and he wants to know, how do I get eternal life and so forth. And at least in Matthew 19, the first thing Jesus says is follow the commandments, you know, and names the commandments and the young and the rich young man says, like, I'm already doing these.

And there's a couple of different ways people often preach on this. But one of them, and I, this is one I always, to be honest, I find instructive in the story itself is, at least in Mark, the next line is, Jesus looking at him, loved him. And I, now that I live in the South, I always hear like, bless his heart, as like Jesus's response, right?

Like you think you're doing this, right? But it is also possible that he actually is, right? Like, that's a real possibility that he is following the commandments. He has not done, you know, he hasn't done the follow up in that story of sell all your goods, give them to the poor, take up your cross, and follow me.

I think, yeah, I think this is an interesting point in terms of there's sort of gradations among Christian traditions about, essentially the degree to which freedom is, corrupted, damaged, destroyed in the fall, and the effect of that on, you know, the image of God in the person. And I think more Reformed traditions have a much lower sense of human freedom as a possibility.

My sense generally in the Catholic tradition has been, there's a greater possibility for doing the good, but there's always a little bit of a tinge to it, because the other, the other side of things that, at least the Catholic tradition wants to avoid is Pelagianism, which is this idea that you can do good, entirely on your own without any divine assistance, like you got it all going for you.

And so how to sort of square between going it alone, and being incapable of doing anything, I think is the various Christian traditions should try to find themselves somewhere in between those. So yeah, I mean, you say in your book, you think sort of Christian anthropologies tend to be a bit more pessimistic about, you know, the possibility of obeying the law. I think that's pretty accurate.

Shai Held: Yeah, I mean, what's interesting is that I think Jewish sources tend to have a bit of a dialectic here. On the one hand, they do think we're capable of obeying the law. On the other hand, you know, one of the culminating moments of the high holidays we say over and over again, our god have mercy on us because we have no deeds.

That's a moment of sheer grace, asking for the grace of forgiveness, you know, we in other words, we're under no illusions, right, believing that humans are capable of obeying the law is not meant to be a prescription for self righteousness; quite the contrary.

It's for taking responsibility for our own shortcomings.

Stephen Okey: Yeah, and I think also just as someone who a lot of what I teach is ethics, I mean, if your tradition has a vision of moral theology, you have to have some vision of the possibility of making better choices.

Shai Held: Maimonides, in a very famous passage in his code of Jewish law basically says the whole project of religion would make no sense if we didn't have real freedom. What would it mean to command someone who's not capable of obeying the law? What are you doing? God, God is not incoherent.

Stephen Okey: So I had some other questions from your book, things that I thought were really helpful or at least helpful for me to try to sort of think about.

One was, something that you note is, between Judaism and Christianity, there are clearly very significant theological differences, especially around the understanding of God. And so, Christian teaching sees God as triune and believes that God becomes incarnate in a human person. Judaism does not hold these positions.

But in both traditions, the understanding of love is also clearly grounded in the understanding of who God is. And so I'm curious, in this claim, you know, Judaism is About Love and the heart of Judaism is love, what are sort of the main concepts or aspects of love that, that you highlight in making this claim?

Shai Held: Aspects of divine love, you mean? or more generally?

Stephen Okey: Well, more generally, but my understanding, I would think of them as connected and so

Shai Held: Yeah, of course.

Stephen Okey: Yeah.

Shai Held: Yeah. I mean, the language that I use for this at times is God creates us with love for love, right? In other words, God creates us with love in the hopes that we become lovers ourselves. That's actually, I think if you asked me to summarize my theology of, you know, or my theological anthropology in one sentence, which nobody should ever do, but if you, right, I would say, you know, God creates us with love with deep hope that we ourselves will bring love into the world. That's actually the project.

And I think, actually, I should say, since we were just talking about freedom, that God's commitment to freedom itself stems from God's love. Because, if you love someone, you have to allow them some space to be not you.

I talk, at one point in the book, about this really interesting development in Martin Buber's thought. When Buber is young, he famously says, in I and Thou, in the beginning was the relation. You know, I'm constituted by the way I'm relating to you. And then, as he gets older, Buber writes that, no, that's not quite right. First, before there can be a relation, there needs to be what he calls a primal setting at a distance.

I need to let you not be me in order to be in any kind of relationship with you. Otherwise, you're just an extension of my will. That's one of the reasons why to go into, you know, really kind of Christian analytic theology for a second, that's why I think notions of meticulous providence are so troubling.

Because if there's meticulous providence, and there's no people, actually. There's just puppets. Right? So, so I think it's very important to see freedom as stemming in significant degree from love. And then we have to ask what kind of love does God want us to embody in the world?

And I suggest here, I'm not totally sure this is you know, the best way of thinking about this, I suggest that the Jewish tradition, this is my formulation, I'm not quoting traditional sources here, has essentially five notions of love. What I mean by not quoting traditional sources is that that list of five is not one that you see in traditional sources.

One of course is love of God. The second is love of neighbor which biblically means love of your fellow Jew; love of humanity; love of the stranger, the "ger" in biblical Hebrew; and then compassionate presence with those who are vulnerable, what the rabbis of the Talmud understand it means to walk in God's ways imitatio Dei. And then we can talk about whether love of enemies is a sixth one or not, but that's... Those five loves seemed to me to be a really interesting description of what a truly good life would look like, what human flourishing is involves all of those loves.

Stephen Okey: But one of the challenges, even with those is, and you talk about this as well, there's a distinction between love as action and what you do and then love as fondness, feeling a sort of emotional component to it. And what I find a lot of times when I talk with undergrads about love and I ask them, like, what is love?

And I, I do the little song and everything. Typically their start is going to be some version of the emotional component, right? And it's the butterflies in the stomach or it's, you know, the passion, that kind of thing. And I can usually get them around to other aspects of it from there.

But I think that that understanding of love as the emotional aspect is, is it's very culturally dominant, I mean, I think at least among my students in the last 10 years.

And so I'm wondering, like, how do you, and it might be different for each of those five loves, but like, how do you think about the sort of tension or relationship between, you know, what you do, what you feel as far as love goes?

Shai Held: So this is another, I think, caricature that is quite common, which is Christianity cares about what you feel, Judaism cares about what you do, which first of all, I think is unfair to Christianity and second of all, it's unfair to Judaism, but other than that, it's very helpful.

Stephen Okey: That also, like that would reinforce a sort of law love comparison because love is still being read as feeling.

Shai Held: Right, exactly. Now. So what I argue in this book is that the better way to think about love, if you will, is to coin a term that is pretentious, but I found it quite helpful in my own thinking: Love is an existential posture. Love is a way of holding myself in the world. It's a way of comporting myself. An orientation, if you prefer.

And that's important to me for a couple of reasons. First of all, I don't think it's helpful in a religious context to define love as an emotion. Because emotions, by definition, come and go. They're fleeting. Anyone who's meditated for 15 seconds, right, has witnessed that. Or just walk down the street, feel like they're in a really good mood, and five minutes later you're brooding, right? What's happening, right?

So, when we say that religion is built on love, I can't be built on the emotion of love, because there's moments when I'm not gonna feel that. What I would rather say, here's another way of saying what I was saying before, love is a disposition to feel and act in certain ways.

That means that I can be loving even if my primary feeling at this moment is grumpiness. Right or just you know tiredness and like I'm not in you know, like ugh, I'm just in a bad mood. But if you ask me like what am I oriented to yeah, love is everything to me. Now if you have a disposition that never manifests in emotion the disposition will dissipate or you just don't really have it.

But I don't think it's helpful to define it as an emotion. And I think that's true about a lot of things. There was one time, strange things that I do, I ordered to the library every title that was a self help book about gratitude I could find because I was interested in how does this culture talk about gratitude. And one of the things that I found really interesting is that a lot of the self help books talk about gratitude as a feeling.

And I thought, that's wrong. Gratitude can manifest in a feeling of gratitude. But I can be grateful even if right now what I'm feeling is sad because I don't know, someone I care about is really sick, or I'm grieving, someone I care about just died. My primary feeling at this moment is not an emotion of gratitude.

But if you ask me, am I oriented towards gratitude? Yes, I am. Right? And, one of the other dangers of this is, is that when you give people the illusion that to be grateful is to feel the emotion of gratitude at all times, what they end up doing is saying, okay, gratitude is not for me. Because I can't do that. And you know what? They shouldn't do that. That's not actually how emotions work.

Another example of this, it's the risk of belaboring the point is marriage. I don't really think that marriage is built on a constant state of emotional love. Marriage is built on an orientation, on a commitment.

There are moments when it bubbles up as emotion or it's to not gonna work. But like, if you asked me, you know, Shai what were you feeling at 2:36 this afternoon, I'm probably not going to say, well, I was overcome with the love for my wife that I'm overcome with at all times. I hope she's not listening to this but the point is,

Stephen Okey: I mean, I hope she is.

Shai Held: But, but, I, I, do, I love my wife tremendous amount, but that's, that's not the same thing as, as, as an emotion that I feel at all times. So that's, that's important to me and, something that I learned in the course of my research. I did not know this until I was working on the book actually is that historians of the emotions have started to argue that in the ancient world, in the world of the Bible, the dichotomy between emotion and action was not one that was current, meaning people have started to argue that the notion of a purely internal emotional state is a function of the romantic period.

That if you had said to a biblical author When you say compassion, do you mean a feeling or an or an action? They probably would have said well, yeah And we have some intuition of this I think in the way we talk. If you meet someone who says I feel compassion for everyone, but you've never seen them do anything for anyone on some level you think that's not real compassion. And emotion and action are, they spill over into each other. There's a kind of seamlessness between them.

So when we ask is love an emotion or an action, I think we might be asking a very modern question about a very pre modern set of texts, and the pre modern texts may have a more sophisticated and helpful way of thinking about this than we tend to.

Stephen Okey: I think there's also a degree to which for a lot of people, the way that they think about emotions is at a certain distance. It's a thing that happens to me. And there's nothing I can do about it. And so I just, I feel the way I feel. That's how it is. And I say this as someone who is raising two small children, part of what I have to do as a dad is help them to, I mean, we talk about emotional regulation, like part of what they're learning.

And you can't, if they just happened to you, then you can't regulate them. But clearly, my four year old who has tantrums at some point will not have tantrums, but will still have strong feelings about things, but will be able to manage them.

Shai Held: Yeah, you know, there's a wonderful essay, a moral philosophical essay by Nancy Sherman, I think professor at Georgetown, in which she talks about this term that I love. Her term is emotional agency. And she says at one point, I hope I'm remembering this correctly, but if I remember correctly, she says at one point that already an infant, you know when the mother is making contact, eye contact and the kid feels it's too much in some instinctive way, the baby knows to turn away. And in that moment the baby's already exercising some agency over what she feels,

There's this kind of almost intuitive knowledge, instinctive maybe, knowledge that like I can affect what I'm feeling. In the book I talk about the ways in which Jewish philosophy is here, like Christian Muslim philosophy, I think deeply indebted to Aristotle, who taught us, you know, you may not be able to turn love on like you turn on a tap, but you can cultivate it. Emotions can be cultivated, and in fact, part of the spiritual life is the cultivation of certain emotional postures, certain dispositions, right? And I think that's really fundamental. I can't decide right now, I'm going to walk up to Steve and I'm going to love him. But I can decide to live my life in such a way that makes it more likely that when I meet Steve, my reaction will be loving.

Stephen Okey: Yeah. Sometimes in the Christian tradition, when we talk about, like the famous passage from Matthew 25, you know, the last judgment and it's, you know, you fed and gave drink and everything else, you know, it was me, right? And we'll talk about this sort of, perspective that is to see Christ in everyone. And if you can form that as a concept that someone actually works with, like it can generate the kind of compassion and whatnot, and also, you know, attendant action to that. But yeah, that's just an example of, of forming a disposition. Right.

Shai Held: Right. By the way, Jesus there may also be quoting the Hebrew Bible in that the book of Proverbs says the way you treat a poor person is the way you treat God. I actually was fascinated by this. I mean, I, I think I talk at one point in this book about how I think another way of talking about love is love as a form of seeing, like trying to see other human beings and the world itself through God's eyes, trying to participate as it were in God's view.

Like I see someone who's getting on my nerves. God sees one of God's children, right? I see someone who's driving me crazy. God sees an infinitely precious. Oh, maybe I can start to see you that way too.

Or I know that God sees with the eyes of compassion. Maybe I can see with the eyes of compassion, too. You know, there's a wonderful teaching that I mentioned in the book that, you know, there's a teaching in the Mishnah that literally means that we're supposed to judge every person favorably. But by a kind of over reading of the Hebrew, you can read it to mean I'm supposed to judge the entirety of the person favorably.

Stephen Okey: Hmm.

Shai Held: And one particular rabbinic figure that I've been interested in talks about how when you feel angry at someone, you see them as almost defined by what they've done wrong to you. But he sort of asks, can you actually ask yourself just for a moment what their story is? What led them to behave in that way in the moment?

Not to excuse them, but to maybe understand them a little bit in a way that, opens the door to a more generous way of seeing them. I find that like really powerful and it's actually I've been trying to implement my own life because you know. Believe it or not, hard to believe, sometimes people get on my nerves

And you're trying to like no, how do I see them favorably and then by the way at moments How do I see myself more favorably? Right. I mean what led me to behave this way. I'm not justifying it but I'm trying to understand it so that I can take a more expansive view of, of myself.

Stephen Okey: So, one of the chapters I, I really wanted to talk to you in your book is the chapter on loving enemies. And you've alluded to this, right? Is this possibly like the sixth, you know, love that we're supposed to have? And so I, I have two questions maybe to start on this. One is in your reading of the Jewish tradition in particular, what would it mean to love one's enemies? Like, what would that actually look like if that is the case?

And then two, you raised the question, is it actually a moral problem to love your enemies? Like, is that something that we maybe we actually should not do? There's a moral threat or danger that comes with loving one enemies.

Shai Held: Yeah. That too is, I think a bunch of questions. So let me, let me, let me, let me try to, kind of hold this up to the light in a way that is at least helpful to me, and maybe it'll be helpful.

You know I think one thing I learned in my research was that although many Christians will tell you that loving your enemies is at the very heart of Christ's teaching, what they think that entails, I mean here I am talking to a Christian ethicist and telling you what you already know, but what they think that entails is obviously the subject of endless debate, right, do I have a right to self defense?

Do I have an obligation to self defense? Do I have a right to defend my friend who's being attacked? I have an obligation to defend, right? Is it about being humiliated or is it about being physically assaulted? What are we talking about we talk about love of enemies? There's a lot to struggle with there.

Now, there's a very common dichotomization. You hear some version of the following sentence a lot, I think. Christianity believes in loving your enemies. Judaism believes that we should defend ourselves, or some version like that, which will first of all, again, many Christians think love of enemies is not exclusive of defending yourself, but okay.

I think that we certainly find in Jewish sources impulses to love of enemies. We can start with things like Jews pray twice a day traditionally, that our hearts be silent in the face of those that curse us. We pray for our capacity not to retaliate. We have biblical sources that say if your enemies, you know, if your enemy loses something, you are obligated to help them.

And the commentary tradition actually makes it sort of clear that one of the hopes is that by helping them, the ice will be broken and a kind of relationship between you can be restored. So the impulse to heal wounds rather than nurturing them, to sort of put down grudges, is I think already central to the Hebrew Bible, and to the ethics of the rabbis as well, the rabbis of the Talmud that is.

Where I think some discussions about love of enemies get stuck, or at least so it seems to me, is that we don't do enough work to define who and what we're talking about. When I say enemy, am I talking about a guy at work I don't like? Am I talking about Someone who hurt me deeply in ways that fundamentally altered the course of my life. Am I talking about Saddam Hussein? What am I talking about?

So when people say, you know, is it a, is it a mitzvah? Is it a commandment to love your enemies? Well first can we talk about what we're talking about for a minute? Because I think that for a lot of Jewish ethics, it is for sure a mitzvah to love the people you don't really get along with.

Where it gets much harder is am I supposed to love the anti semite who comes with the desire to harm me and my community? Now there are Jewish sources. They are, you know, perhaps surprising, that seem to say actually, you should try to disarm people rather than... right is a midrash that I quote that is when i've probably more than any other Jewish source that i've taught surprises Jewish audiences the most right?

It's it's not a particularly well known passage a midrash that says if your enemy comes with the intention of harming you give them food and drink and God will reconcile you. I mean, right? That sounds like, sounds like a little bit of a, of a, you know, a passage that, I, if I handed it to those Jews, they'd say, oh, where does Jesus say that? But actually, it's the Midrash on Proverbs that says that.

Now, one of the things that I try to talk about is that's a Midrash, not a law, which means it can hold things up to the light in a provocative way, but it's not telling you what to do in a particular moment because I'm not going to prescribe that.

To go to talk about the last piece of what you asked, I mean, the question that I struggle with and ask in this chapter is, you know, to the extent that Jesus radicalizes the notion of love your enemies, from a Jewish perspective, is that a positive moral development?

And it just feels messy to me. You know, I, I was reading this book not that long ago by a Christian activist, who says something like, quoting this from memory, so I might be getting a little bit wrong, but it's something like, If we were really to look in our enemies hearts, we would realize that we don't have any enemies.

I remember thinking, okay, so I'm going to go have lunch with Bashar Assad and Saddam Hussein. I'm going to realize that actually they're generous, loving souls, and I just was failing to perceive them. You know, I don't think religion is supposed to be a prescription for naivete. I just don't think that's responsible.

So, I found concluding this chapter incredibly difficult. Because there's a little, it's a little anticlimactic after 50 pages to say, what does Judaism say about loving your enemies? Well, it depends.

But I, I've really come to the view as I've gotten older, that religion is often better at giving us language for difficult questions than it is at offering us simple answers. And loving your enemies in the Jewish tradition seems to be a great example of that. Like there, there are texts that are provocations, that are challenges, that are inspirations, that are voices that bump up against each other. Now, good luck to you, make your way through the world.

Stephen Okey: Part of why this is a question that I think about a lot, is among the communities that I teach, I teach men who are becoming permanent deacons in the Catholic church pretty regularly. And so they will, you know, they will serve in the community, but they'll also serve at the altar. They'll usually like, they'll read the gospel, that sort of thing.

And I teach ethics, and so this is one of the things we'll talk about is, you know, love of enemies and so forth, and what does Jesus mean by this? And one of the things I will always ask them is like, do you think you should love your enemies? And they'll, you know, all raise their hands cause you know, they're good Catholics, they're going to say that.

But I'll ask them, like, can you , make that particular, can you make that specific. And, sometimes a lot of the men who are becoming deacons, they're veterans. And so you can make it in a real kind of visceral for them is like, should you love the Taliban? Should you love Saddam Hussein?

And they'll be able to get to a point where it's like, I should, and I don't, or something like that. And then the other thing I'll follow up with is, you know, part of this teaching in the gospel is, you know, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. And I will note that, I've been Catholic for like 21 years, 22 years now.

And in that entire time, you know, on average, a couple Masses a week, I have never, in my entire time as a Catholic, during the prayers of the faithful, ever heard a prayer that was any version of, we pray for our enemies. Never. Like, pray for the Pope, pray for our political leaders, pray for these people going through these things.

I've never heard one that was pray for our enemies, especially never one that was specific. And I can understand why. If I went to Mass and someone got up there and said, you know, today we pray for the Taliban, the Nazis, whomever it is, people are going to pay attention, they're going to notice, they're going to hear something, but like, it's not going to go well.

And so I always sort of push them like, why is that not a thing that we actually do? And maybe someone has examples where that's happened, but I, I have, I've listened for it. I've never heard it.

Shai Held: That is fascinating.

Stephen Okey: Yeah. And so, one of the things, I mean, and I talk about this with them, is that one of the sort of logical outs for this is, it doesn't have to be the case that Jesus means feel fondness for your enemies, right?

You know, like, you want to hug them, that kind of thing. You can think about it in this sort of Thomistic, love is willing the good of the other, and part of willing the good for your enemies might be willing that they convert from their terrible positions, that kind of thing. Like, you can kind of have an out like that that works.

But that still, for that to be meaningful, has to require, actively praying for that sort of thing in a way that you mean it, for the well being of the other, right? Not just for my own purposes. And even that is a hard leap to make. And it's an understandable, difficult leap to make.

But I do think this challenge of, enemies are a real thing, dangers are a real thing, the need to protect oneself, one's community, one's family is a real thing. I mean, in Christianity it's one of the hard teachings that I think people really struggle with and it's easy to say and then not do, or say it didn't mean that.

And so there's this line in one of Augustine's letters, as he's working through part of the just war concept, and he talks about how it is possible to kill your enemy and love your enemy at the same time. And when you, when, at least when I teach this to students, there is this immediate cognitive dissonance, like that, that's nonsense.

Shai Held: Yeah, you know, it's interesting that one of the most, I think, often cited Talmudic stories is a story of a Talmudic sage who, has a bunch of people who are bothering him, picking on him, whatever, and he prays for them to die. And his wife says to him, What on earth are you doing? Why don't you pray for them? Pray for them to change. And of course, you know, the Talmud makes this a happy ending. He prays for them to change, and they do. Right? But like, you know, it's such a powerful moment. And it's an interesting moment where, the sage gets it wrong and needs his wife to come and say to him what, what? What? I think you're missing the point here, right?

And that's, you know, that's another story that if I just gave you that story, you would say, oh, is that a gospel story? Right? And yet, it's a kind of classic rabbinic story about one of the most central rabbinic sages.

Stephen Okey: Just one closing real quick question before we wrap up. The other chapter that I found very striking cause I found it very contemporary and relevant in a real way is on protest, and on this idea you call it of sacred indignation.

And I was wondering if you could just sort of briefly talk about how you see, protest at least potentially as an expression of these various kinds of love that are at the heart of the Jewish tradition.

Shai Held: I think there's a bunch of ways to actually see this. One is, if you love the world that God created, you want that world to flourish and thrive. And when you see it falling into injustice or interpersonal failure, right? Some kind of response to it, I think, is actually important and imperative. One of the things that I argue that I, it's not an argument exactly, but it's like an intuition, is that I think that the very impulse to protest the state of the world is in itself an interesting pointer to some kind of religious commitment.

Because, I don't know, when we say something like parents are not supposed to bury their own children, what are we really saying when we say what do you mean not supposed to? Mean, where is that supposed to coming from? What is the capital S in that supposed to? And it just feels to me that the idea that we can protest that the world is not supposed to be this way is on some level an intuition that there is some transcendent standard by which this imperfect world is measured and judged.

So It feels to me like again, not an argument, but an intuition to God. And I was very interested in the fact that, you know, when I was working on this, I then discovered that Miroslav Volf says something very similar in a Christian idiom, that like protest is a path to faith.

I think I would say two other things here if I could.

One is that, protest against injustice is important because it's part of what Is entailed by taking other people seriously. An argument that Peter Strawson famously made in moral philosophy, right? If you behave terribly and I have no reaction to you, what that means is I don't take you seriously as a moral agent. It's like, I don't respect you. Whereas if you behave badly and I say, Steve, what are you doing?

Then it means that I'm taking your agency seriously. It's back to that freedom question. I believe that you are free. So I find that to be really interesting and it's one of the ways that i've started to think about the idea in the Bible that god gets angry at us, which obviously that's a whole other discussion, but the, but the notion that god gets angry at people in the Bible because god takes us seriously as agents is really intriguing to me.

Stephen Okey: Well, Rabbi Held, I really want to thank you for your time, for this great conversation.

Shai Held: Thank you so much.

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