ON BEING with Krista Tippett
Episode: Shai Held — On Love, and Judaism
Date: March 26, 2026

Episode Overview

This profound conversation between Krista Tippett and Rabbi Shai Held explores “Judaism is About Love”—the radical assertion and central argument of Held’s theological work. The episode delves into Judaism’s complicated, often overlooked, history with love as a religious value, asking what it truly means to love in the Jewish tradition, and how this conversation on love resonates for individuals and society amidst the global tumult of the present. The exchange is intellectual, vulnerable, and pragmatic, weaving Jewish sources, philosophy, personal narrative, and social commentary.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

Shai Held's Religious Background & Spiritual Journey

• Cognitive Dissonance Origins (03:00)
  • Raised by European Jewish refugees-turned-secular Israelis, with secular music and values at home, but an insistence on Jewish education.
  • From childhood, Held grappled with the tensions between traditional religious claims and secular academic perspectives:

    “How, how can you both be right?” —Shai Held (04:41)

• Parental Loss and Religious Disillusionment (06:10)
  • Father’s sudden death at 12 revealed the lack of emotional accommodation in Held’s religious environment.

    “I ran into a lot...teachers who were willing to sacrifice the pain of a kid in the name of protecting their own certainty.” —Shai Held (06:25)

  • Crystallized his lifelong commitment: no human experience gets “chased out of the room”—a guiding institutional ethos at Hadar.

The Provocation: Judaism as a Tradition of Love

• Many Jews in America internalize the idea that “love” is a Christian value; the suggestion that Judaism is essentially about love shocks both Jews and non-Jews.

  “The sentence [‘Judaism is About Love’] is so surprising to most people that if I put that on the table at Barnes & Noble, people will stop and read it.” —Shai Held, quoting his editor, Eric Chinsky (13:02)

• Historical Dynamics:

  • Centuries of Jewish-Christian polemic, anxieties about assimilation, and a tendency to define Judaism in contrast to Christian tropes (14:00).
  • Jewish self-definition often defaults to ethics (“deeds not creeds”) and denies centrality of love—despite ample tradition to the contrary.

The Language of Love: Emotion, Action, and Disposition

• Major Hebrew Terms:
  • Ahavah (love), Hesed (lovingkindness, or “love made active”) are both difficult to translate fully (17:00).
  • Love is not “just a feeling or just an action—it’s both.”
  • Tippett draws the connection to Abraham Joshua Heschel's phrase, “my legs were praying."
• Existential Posture:

  “Love is an existential posture. It's a stance I take in the world... an orientation to the thing.” —Shai Held (20:00)

  • Rejects the notion that people can or should feel abundant, overflowing love all the time. “Abiding love,” or commitment, is often more crucial.

    “Romantic relationships that last over time are actually not about abundant love a lot of the time. They're actually about abiding love.” —Shai Held (24:00)

Jewish Possibleism vs. Optimism

• Judaism isn’t “optimistic” about human nature, but insists more is possible than we imagine:

  “I'm not optimistic, but it's possible. That's what I'm getting at with possibleism.” —Shai Held (27:00)

• The “love your neighbor as yourself” command (Leviticus 19:18) is not about failure, but a real invitation.

The Challenge of Particular vs. Universal Love

• Judaism helps embrace tensions between our obligations to those closest to us and to the broader world:

  “It is true that I owe my daughter more than I owe your daughter. And it is also true that for most of us, family first often deteriorates into family only, and we're not allowed to let that happen.” —Shai Held (32:12)

• Religion as amplifier:

  “Religion is an amplifying force. So it amplifies our capacity for love, and it also amplifies all of the darkest forces within us.” —Shai Held (35:22)

The Complex Role of Memory and Trauma

• Memory can be redemptive ("You were strangers in Egypt") or toxic ("Remember what Amalek did to you").

  • The Bible's focus is to cultivate moral imagination for empathy, not perpetuate victimhood or vengeance. (36:39)
  • Elie Wiesel’s late-career insight: "It's not memory. It's redemptive memory." (38:38)

• Modern trauma science bolsters ancient wisdom about pain, rage, and healing.

• The Psalms model bringing all experience—even rage and horror—into relationship with God:

  “They show such an astonishing confidence in the worth of their feelings.” —Shai Held (43:51)

• Dangers of repressing negative emotions lead to shadow selves and spiritual distortion.

Loving the Stranger, the Neighbor, and the Enemy

• Jewish tradition asks us to keep both particular and universal obligations in play and to grapple seriously with the complexities:
  • Sometimes, “for Jews, love of neighbor is central, love of stranger is a moral stretch, and love of enemies is deeply fraught.”
• On love of enemies, Held notes that all the elements Christian scholars ascribe to “love of enemy” are present in Jewish sources, albeit not always labeled as such (55:20).
  • Example: prayer not to retaliate against those who curse you is recited thrice daily in Jewish liturgy.
• The notion of praying even for a profound enemy’s repentance or healing represents a “non-Hallmark” vision of love:

  “Could you imagine for one minute closing your eyes and praying that before he dies, your husband have one minute where he fully faces the enormity of what he did to you?” —Shai Held (60:00)

  • “That would be love.” —Survivor (60:27)

The Lens of Love on Today’s Chaos

• Held aspires—sometimes fails—to see events through the question: “What would love look like here? ... Not a feeling, but love as a defiant insistence we can look deeper even here.” (62:47)
• He critiques both religious and secular dehumanization in contemporary American and Israeli society, asking for complexity—not righteous reductionism.

  “The human condition is not healed by my deciding, you know, 48% of America is irredeemable.” —Shai Held (65:33)

• Cites examples of unexpected love across political divides—e.g., Jamie Raskin’s deep gratitude for support from Lauren Boebert during illness (66:26).

Israel, Palestine, and the Tragic Reality of Love

• “The only people who will bring any real healing to the land of Israel are people who understand that there are two peoples who love this place like crazy and that neither of them are going anywhere. ... Or the fire will consume us all as it almost has. Everything else is commentary after that to me.” —Shai Held (67:54)
• Held references educator and peace-movement founder Moshe Una:
  • True education in Israel must teach BOTH love for the land AND the knowledge that another people feels the same.
  • “It is the only path forward. And we are farther away from that being a path forward than we have ever been. That is the tragedy of where we live right now.” (69:32)

Hope and Despair: Living in the Chasm

• Tippett reads:

  “To take Judaism to heart is to live with the enormous chasm between what we affirm and what we experience every day. To live with that gap is to live in the vast chasm between our theology and our daily experience. ... We cannot redeem the world, but we can and must anticipate its redemption. We can catch glimpses for others of what a redeemed world would look like.” (70:59)

• Held’s Despair:

  • The radical demands of the Hebrew Bible (to love the vulnerable, the unseen) are rarely taken seriously, even by “the faithful.”
  • “Either you take that seriously or you don’t... If you’re not prepared to take it seriously, then we don’t have a reason for doing this thing.” (73:12)

• Held’s Hope:

  • Even small moments—students reaching out to the homeless, inspired by Torah—are evidence of “possibleism” and the glimpses of redemption we can offer each other. (75:00)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Love is an existential posture. It’s a stance I take in the world... an orientation to the thing.” —Shai Held (20:00)
• “Religion is an amplifying force. It amplifies our capacity for love and it also amplifies all of the darkest forces within us.” —Shai Held (35:22)
• “God loves those whom we ignore. God loves widows and orphans and strangers and Egyptian slave women running away from their Israelite taskmasters. God loves them.” —Shai Held (73:00)
• On memory: “It’s not memory. It’s redemptive memory. It’s memory that leads to empathy.” —Shai Held, citing Elie Wiesel (38:38)
• “We cannot redeem the world, but we can and must anticipate its redemption. We can catch glimpses for others of what a redeemed world would look like.” —Krista Tippett, reading Held (71:20)
• “Could you imagine for one minute... praying that before he dies, your husband have one minute where he fully faces the enormity of what he did to you? ... That would be love.” —Exchange with survivor (60:00)
• “The world... is a place of human tragicness at its most profound. But it’s the only hope.” —Shai Held (69:32)

Important Timestamps

• Shai’s formative tension between home and school: 03:00-06:00
• Loss, pain, and religious abandonment: 06:07-10:06
• The “provocation” of Judaism about love: 10:06-13:23
• The evolution from ‘actions only’ to 'love as central' in Judaism: 16:00-20:00
• Love as existential posture/disposition: 19:54-21:17
• Judaism’s reality-based ‘possibleism’: 25:45-28:30
• Universal versus particular love — how Judaism holds both: 31:34-35:22
• Redemptive vs. toxic memory: 36:39-39:57
• On pain, rage, and the Psalms: 41:21-44:22
• Love of enemy, real-world application: 52:27-62:16
• Love in assessing contemporary politics and Israel/Palestine: 62:47-71:20
• Hope and despair: glimpses of redemption: 72:44-75:19

Tone and Atmosphere

The conversation is deeply intellectual yet accessible, candid without cynicism, and earnest in its ambition for moral and theological clarity. Both Tippett and Held balance realism and hope, rigorous analysis and personal anecdote, never shying away from complexity or the limits of tradition. There is warmth, self-critical honesty, and a recurring insistence that love is both simple and impossibly demanding: not an emotion or a platitude, but a lived task—avoda, “work”—always partial, always needed, always possible.