← On Being with Krista Tippett
On Being with Krista Tippett
Shai Held — On Love, and Judaism
01:17:21
From Krista: I'm on record bemoaning across the years that “love” is the most watered-down word in the English language. I know that invoking love feels very soft for our hard realms of politics and war. Yet it is an enduring truth that love is the only force as powerful in a human body as fear. And we inhabit a world that calls us to grow up our capacity to love — and to redeem our relationships to neighbors, strangers, and enemies — as never before, both in the present and for the sake of the world beyond this age of violence we've come to inhabit. Rabbi Shai Held has written an epic theological work called Judaism is About Love. And, as he interrogates Judaism's complicated history with love, he makes an offering that is of relevance to us all.
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- [00:00]
A
I am on record bemoaning across the years that love is the most watered down word in the English language. I do know that invoking love feels very soft for our hard realms of politics and power. Yet it is an enduring truth that love is the only force as powerful in a human body as fear. And we inhabit a world that calls us to grow up our capacity to love and be loved, and to redeem our relationships to neighbors, strangers and enemies as never before. My guest this hour, Shai Held, has written an epic theological work called Judaism is About Love. But as he interrogates Judaism's complicated history with love, he makes an offering that is of relevance to us all. I'm Krista Tippett and this is on Being. Schai. Held is a philosopher, biblical scholar and rabbi. He is the president and dean of the Hadar Institute, which describes itself as a center of life, learning and practice, supporting a Judaism that is both traditional and egalitarian. We spoke before an audience at Hadar's Manhattan Center. Thank you. It's been wonderful working with everybody at Hadar and I want to thank Dani especially. When did your book Judaism is About Love, when was that published? Was it 2023?
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B
2024? March of 2024.
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A
So I started getting emails from people I know, including my professor of Hebrew Bible, Ellen Davis. She old friend of yours I imagine. And she was at Yale.
- [01:56]
B
Old friend and hero.
- [01:57]
A
She's at Duke. Yeah, she's wonderful. And so 30 years later, I still do what Ellen says and she told me I had to talk to you about this book. So it took a little while but here we are. And it truly is an extraordinary book and an important book and I may be reading to you from it tonight. We'll just see how this goes. It's full of goodness. But I want to start where I like to start all of my conversations. And I'm especially curious to begin with you by just inquiring about how you would begin to talk about the, the religious and spiritual background of your childhood.
- [02:34]
B
Great, thank you. Thank you for this privilege and welcome. You know, I always like to say I was raised in a cognitive dissonance experiment. My parents who were the age of most of my friends grandparents, my parents were European refugees. My father was from Poland, my mother from Lithuania. They fled with their parents in the 30s to Palestine, pre state Israel, where they spent their adolescence and young adulthood and then ended up making a life here beginning in the middle of the 1950s. And that's important in part because my parents identity very much became they were secular Israelis. The musical background of my childhood, if you're familiar with Israeli music, like Yoram Gaon, was the soundtrack of my childhood. It's like really kind of like secular, hardy Israeli, almost like pioneer music, you know, and. But my parents were like figures out of the Jewish enlightenment in the 19th century. My father was a very secular Jewish studies professor who decided that although we were not observant at all at home, no child of his was going to mean ignoramus. So my siblings and I went to yeshiva day school in Muncie. Now Muncie then, to be fair, Muncie then was mainly kind of a Yeshiva university theater community. It was like what now gets called centrist Orthodoxy. Right. With some ultra Orthodox outposts. Now that's flipped. My older brother and sister had the religious education piece just roll right off them. And I was predictably tormented by it because I could not figure out. I remember as a fourth grader, I came home and said to my father one day, you know, my teachers in yeshiva tell me all the time that God wrote the Bible word for word and gave it to Moses on Mount Sinai. You are a Bible professor. I know you don't believe that. And then the question that I remember asking, which is in retrospect sort of interesting to me that this is how I formulated it. How, how can you both be right?
- [04:54]
A
Right. Yeah.
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B
And my father, who was a philologist and a historian, did not have a theological bond in his body. My father said, not dismissively but bewilderedly, I don't even really know what you're asking me. Right. Like, he just had no capacity to have that conversation. But the truth is that began a sort of journey that I have never gotten off of, being preoccupied with those questions, being preoccupied with finding better language for those questions. And I think, really importantly, this is a major piece of how this institution came into being. I wanted to be the kind of teacher that I looked for as a kid but couldn't find. And I wanted to build the institution where the 18 year old version of me could now go. Right. Someone who said, no, I want this to be Torah. I want this to be about what does God ask of us? But I am not prepared to check my mind at the door. So that was the project.
- [05:52]
A
And then I would also say that it belongs to this spiritual background of your childhood, that your father died suddenly when you were 12 and you were, I think, let down by the religious authorities and teachers around you.
- [06:08]
B
Yes. Including God.
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A
Okay, right.
- [06:11]
B
I mean, if we're going to already, you know, if we're going to talk about religious authorities. We might as well. Might as well go all the way up, right? It is true. I mean, as I talk about in my book, and some of the folks here have heard me talk about this in different ways over the years, what I ran into a lot was what, in retrospect felt to me like teachers who were willing to sacrifice the pain of a kid in the name of protecting their own certainty. In other words, I would say, I mean, I tell the story in the book when I was in eighth grade, and this tells you something about sort of what we did to boys, probably still do it to boys. I remember very vividly after my father died at the end of seventh grade, saying to myself, I mean, in retrospect, this horrifies me, but saying to myself, I'm going to conduct myself at school in a way that no one is going to be able to tell that anything is wrong. Literally, that was what I. That was my, like, internal compass. I was like, I'm not showing anything. And I was, quote, unquote, very good at that for a long time. Until one day when it cracked. We were in this morning class in halacha in Jewish law, and we happened to come upon the blessing one says upon hearing tragic news. At which point my armor finally cracked. I raised my hand and I say, what do you do when you just can't? What do you do when you hear something that is so painful that you can't say it? And, like, think for a minute what you would have said as that eighth grade teacher. And then my eighth grade teacher said, I'll say it in his language and then in English. For a true mamin, that is not a question, right? For a true believer, that is not a question. And I was devastated. I mean, crushed, really. Like, sort of crushed underfoot. Like, there's no place for me here. And over time, first of all, that led me to totally rebel and throw the whole thing off. But it also kind of filled me with a sense of how violent we can be in pursuit of our own certainty and how dangerous religion becomes in precisely those moments. And I remember saying in one of our first faculty meetings when we were creating this institution, I said, here's the thing we have to commit to. No human experience ever gets chased out of the room. We don't do that. If we're gonna do that, I'm out. I just don't wanna do that. I don't wanna build one more institution that does that. And it's hard. It means you have to Sit with a lot of pain. You have to be willing to acknowledge how much you don't know how often people bring you things. You don't know what to say other than, I'm so sorry and I'm here, which turns out to be a lot. Right. But that was a very hard piece for me, and it became a kind of almost like a negative guiding light. I never want to reproduce that, but I should say that at the same time, I also was presented with incredible models of kindness. You know, I can say two sentences about my life at the same time. They're both really true. I lost my father. I was raised by a mother who had no business being a parent to anyone. And people showed me such extraordinary kindness, opened their homes, opened their hearts, made me feel like I was wanted. And those two things are really the guiding two experiences of my life. I don't think that I thought that until recently, but it's sort of like, oh, why have I spent my life teaching and writing about what it means to be present with people who feel alone and abandoned? Because people did that for me.
- [10:07]
A
And you found your way to be speaking to a classroom of rabbinical seminary students and about two decades ago, which you say was the beginning of the journey that ended in this book, saying to this room, Judaism is built on the idea that God loves us and beckons us to love God back. And one of the students declared to you, I'm sorry, but that sounds like Christianity to me. Did that surprise you?
- [10:38]
B
You know, it's funny, I would say that if I can turn into a cliche of myself, a caricature of myself for a minute, I found it descriptively unsurprising, but normatively shocking. Right. I was like, yeah, this is the state of Judaism in America. Internalized anti Judaism is everywhere. I mean, I could go on about that for hours. Internalized. This is. After two years on the road now, I realized I didn't know the half of it. The depth of internalized anti Judaism that pervades everywhere in the Jewish community, from the most liberal reformed Jews to yeshiva day school kids, it's everywhere. So on one level, I mean, I was a little surprised by it, but I sort of kind of knew it was coming. But more than that, I was crestfallen. I still remember the sort of sensation in my chest of really fifth year rabbinical stool. And you still think that that was, like, horrifying to me.
- [11:32]
A
Yeah. And, and, and it's also, I mean, it's a long, long centuries, for all kinds of reasons, of Jews feeling The need to define themselves over against Christianity, and Christianity being so assertive about God being love and doing things with that that are not Jewish. And also, as you say, there's internal debate within Judaism that has led to that. That idea that Judaism is about love. I mean, it's, you know, fascinating to me that, like, when the book came out, you know, Michael Sandel said, this is provocative. That it is provocative, Right. To say that Judaism is about love. So I guess, yeah, I guess. I mean, I wanted you to respond to that, but I want to talk. I think it's so important then to say, what are we talking about? Like, what is this love of which you spe the nuance and contours of that and why that is important and defining.
- [12:25]
B
Right. So, you know, I'll share, actually an experience that I had as the book was being completed that was both. I mean, I got what I wanted, but it broke my heart. I was talking to my editor, Eric Chinsky, as the book was about to be about to be completed, and he said, so what do you think about titles? And I said, well, what if we just call it like we see it? What if we said, judaism is about love? And Eric said, you know, Shai, you never, ever, ever have a declarative sentence as the title of a nonfiction book that's not a truth.
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A
I hate it when people make statements like that.
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B
And then he said, which was amazing and tragic. He said, but here's the thing. That sentence is so surprising to most people that if I put that on the table at Barnes and Noble, people will stop and read it. So let's do it.
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A
Right, Right.
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B
And I was like, eric, I'm really happy to have my way, but you realize you've just confirmed everything that drives me crazy.
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A
Exactly.
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B
Right.
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A
Yes.
- [13:24]
B
So, you know, that is a situation, and what you say is right. I mean, I always describe this as a kind of double whammy, which is, on the one hand, the majority culture, Christianity, spent 2,000 years telling Jews that Judaism was a loveless religion. Jesus brought love, whole cloth, right out of nowhere. And then at some point in American Jewish history, Jews who were anxious, were not Jewishly learned, but were anxious about not assimilating, began themselves to define their Judaism as whatever they thought Christianity was not. And we have obvious and almost absurd examples of this. Many people in this room were undoubtedly taught at some point. Judaism has no notion of the afterlife. This is sort of manifestly untrue. Where it comes from is Jews who didn't really have a sophisticated understanding of Christianity, thought Christianity, all they talk about is getting into heaven. We don't even believe in heaven. And a similar thing happened around love. These people never stop talking about love. We don't talk about love. So you have this combination of the majority culture tells you you're not about love, you're anxious about not assimilating, and you say, in fact, we are not about love. And so you become a co conspirator in degrading your own religious life. Yeah, that's what happened to Judaism in America in a very clear way.
- [14:39]
A
I also think there's a way in which that idea. You know what I was thinking? Because I did an investigation of Einstein years and years ago, and I think about how he, as he grew older, grew. He was very committed to the state of Israel existing. And I wouldn't say that he became devout, but his Jewish identity became more and more important to him. And I think what he found attractive, Right, and this is the thing, this can also be attractive is he said, Judaism is no transcendental religion. It is concerned with life as we live it and as we can, to a certain extent, grasp it and nothing else. You know, so there's that aspect of it too. It's accessible and it's also an out, right? It's deeds.
- [15:24]
B
It is an out. And look, I think one of the reasons, I mean, this is a whole nother route we can go down. I mean, post Holocaust Judaism in America is also so profoundly atheological. And to the extent that Jews talk about theology, it's often very dilute, watered down theology. It's what I would call barely theological theology. And so talking about Judaism as basically ethics makes a lot of sense why people held onto that. But it's still a very poor reading of the Jewish tradition. And what ends up happening is that a lot of Jews who actually are hungry for spiritual connection simply go elsewhere. There's a reason why every prominent Buddhist meditation teacher in America, right. Not only is Jewish, but has a name out of central casting. Right. I remember when I was a rabbi at Harvard Hillel, the head of the Cambridge Meditation was Larry Rosenberg. I was like, you wanna come for kiddush? I mean, the whole thing was. It was just so interesting, right? But what happened was, like, people, they still wanted something that had been effectively
- [16:29]
A
chased out of the city, taken out of.
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B
Yeah, right.
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A
So it's fascinating. Okay, so Judaism is about love. I know enough about Hebrew and about Jewish tradition to know that there is a lot going on inside a word and in the history of a word. And so talk to us about the words that are the roots of this new recovery, as you say, of love at the heart of Judaism.
- [16:59]
B
You know, it's a great question. I would say, in some ways, the smartest question I've been asked in two years on the road was by a ninth grader in a day school in Brooklyn who said, what is the Hebrew word that you're translating? Cause I can think of five different candidates.
- [17:14]
A
Right. Well, also. Let's also just pause it. And what is true is that the word love in English is absolutely watered down, ruined for every meaningful purpose. Right. Love is a Subaru. So that's where Americans start.
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B
Indeed. That's what I always say. Yeah, Yeah. I mean, and I think it's also important to say, you know, Hallmark murdered love. Right. It reduced it to a kind of cliche that doesn't.
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A
I love songs. I don't know, movies, Hollywood. We can. It's very distressing.
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B
You know, it's interesting because on a couple of occasions when I started working on the book and I mentioned to friends who are Christian theologians, I was writing about love, their reaction was, oh, God, please, no. Right. Like, I mean, I think Ellen was one of. Ellen Davis was just kind of like, really? You know, I write about love the most over abused. And I was like, yeah, you're not Jewish, because. Right. That is a very Christian response. Right. So, you know, so what that ninth grader was right to perceive is that in talking about love, I'm actually talking about a whole series of Hebrew words. The primary ones are ahavah and hesed, both of which are very hard to translate. I have played around with the notion of translating chesed, which going back to the Coverdale Bible, has been rendered in English as loving kindness, which is a word that makes most people's eyes glaze over. But if you read.
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A
It's also the word that those Jewish Buddhists have brought into American culture.
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B
Exactly, exactly. Right.
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A
Yeah.
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B
But if you reinsert the space between loving and kindness, you actually come upon something interesting, which is an emotion expressed in a way of being in the world. Right. Love manifested as kindness, which I think is a lot of what the Talmudic sages were after in talking about love is to say that in their ideal, which we only achieve at moments in our lives, no one gets there and lives there. There is a kind of integration of the inner and the outer that happens. That is, I engage in an act of kindness and I am fully there. That is a moment of what the sages think it means to walk in God's ways.
- [19:32]
A
Part of what's wrong with the way Americans throw the word around is it's an emotion, a feeling. And you say this love, this biblical love, is not an emotion or an action. That's both. And, you know, what came to mind immediately for me is, you know that picture of Heschel saying, you know, I felt like my legs were praying.
- [19:55]
B
Yeah. Right. So, you know, the word that I like to use. I can never figure out whether anyone who's not interested in philosophy resonates with this language at all, is that love is not an emotion. It's a disposition to feel certain things and act in certain ways. It's not the thing. It's the orientation to the thing. The term that I coined in the book that I'm always embarrassed by. But it really helped me in my own thinking. Love is an existential posture. It's a stance I take in the world. It's like a way I hold myself. And what's important about that, I think, is that when you use the language of disposition, on the one hand, you're saying something extremely, kind of daunting and almost spiritually ambitious. I'm trying to orient my life around love. But you're also saying something that is accessible because I can have a disposition to love. But if you actually ask me what I'm feeling right now, what I'm feeling is grumpy and heartbroken, right? When people talk about the spiritual life being built on a feeling, that's by definition a dead end. Because feelings are fleeting. You can't have any feeling all the time. No one feels love all the time. And what's become important to me, I wish I had actually written about this in the book, which is obviously not long enough, is that.
- [21:13]
A
Well, the notes section is very long, so it's quite as big as it looks, right?
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B
There's only six pages of text, actually. But there is a way in which when we tell people that they have to feel love, or for that matter, any other feeling, what we end up doing is religion foments the building of a larger and larger shadow self. Cause people end up lying to themselves about what they feel, right? People end up saying, oh, I mean, you've all met people like this. I'm all about love. And meanwhile, they're like a simmering pot of rage, but they're in denial about it, right? Because religion has actually done the opposite of what it should do. Which is, instead of opening me up to an awareness of what I feel and what I'm capable of feeling, religion becomes a tool for essentially denying 95% of what goes on inside of me. And that is very dangerous stuff. That's when people start murdering in the name of love. Right. Is because they're not actually aware of all the things that are happening for them.
- [22:16]
A
I mean, for me, this is why to really take love seriously and see it through a theological lens and unfold it in the context of this rich tradition and this conversation across generations is so important, you know, because you use this language a lot in the book. And this phrase, learning to love and be loved. Right. I've long loved this quote by Rilke, who said, love is hard, and this is more the reason we should do it. And he calls love the work for which all other work is only preparation. And we want this to be the thing we fall into. As you say, we want this to be something we're good at. And it is actually so complex and exacting. And, you know, one of the things I love, you know, your dedication is to. Is it to your children? I don't know who those names are. It's gorgeous. With love abundant and abiding. And that often doesn't feel possible. Right. Like, we all. We all hopefully come to that state again and again or at times, but that's not a constant state in terms of our emotional capacity. Right. Or even sometimes our practical capacity.
- [23:35]
B
Yeah, exactly. So first of all, I should say love abundant and abiding was my attempt to offer a kind of literary translation of the two terms many people in this room will be familiar from in the liturgy, love abundant is ahavaraba, which is morning prayer. And love abiding is avat olam, enduring love, which is the evening prayer, at least in the Ashkenazic.
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A
Right. So beautiful.
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B
And what is so interesting about that is abundant. I guess another way of saying what you're saying, maybe a way of saying it in very traditional languages. Nobody can feel abundant, overflowing love all the time. And so what we need to rely on is abiding love, which I would also translate as commitment. Right. It's a little bit like. It's funny, I always say this. I always say, I will not say this when my wife is in the room, but my wife is in the room. But I'm gonna say it anyway. Right. It's like the realization that romantic relationships that last over time are actually not about abundant love a lot of the time. They're actually about abiding love.
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A
Right, Right. It's the love that is about what you do, even when you don't feel like It.
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B
Exactly.
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A
Because you are in that relationship, which is true of our most intimate relationships.
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B
Right. But the moment when you wake up and you look at your spouse and you think, oh, you're still here. And then you think, okay, and I'm committed to being here. I'm not looking over there. I've never had this feeling, but I have read about it. And no, and I think that that's actually a very intense. That is when you know, the very Jewish word that is in my head all the time when I talk about love is avoda, which means both worship and work.
- [25:17]
A
Right.
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B
Love is a task. Right. Kierkegaard's wonderful phrase. It is a task of a lifetime. We work at it. We work at love. It's not. You don't naturally become good at sitting with people who are suffering. I mean, some people have an incredible gift for this. But like, it's work. You learn to sit with your fear, you learn to sit with your distraction, you learn to cultivate attention. That's work. It's really. It's avoda in that sense. It's a task. But it's a task that is ultimately heart opening. That's at least that's the goal.
- [25:45]
A
And I really appreciate this formulation that, you know, what you say is that Jewish tradition is not optimistic about human nature. It's realistic about human nature, which is strange and complicated. And we're so good at working against actually what we most want and our best interests. But you say, but what Jewish tradition is, is stubbornly possibilistic.
- [26:11]
B
Yeah. I mean, this is another place, I think, where a lot of American rabbis define Judaism based not on Jewish sources, but on what they imagine Christianity is not. So because they see Christianity as pessimistic about human nature, rabbis will get up and say, Judaism is profoundly optimistic about human nature. I have to say, I don't see it. I mean, I just don't. I mean, the Bible is a book about God's heart being broken over and over and over again. Right? Yeah, it's, you know, God is this, like, bastion of insistent hopefulness. Like, I just refuse to give up. But it's not like, empirically speaking, God is like, hey, you guys are great. That is not the Bible's view of humanity.
- [26:56]
A
Those are not God's experience. Right?
- [26:58]
B
No, exactly. So possibleism to me was like this term I thought of as a way of saying what I think Jewish texts tend to believe that many Christian writers, especially Protestants, don't, is that we are actually capable of more love than we think we are. Right. I had this experience, I can't remember now whether I wrote about this in the book where I was reading an academic commentary on Leviticus by a contemporary Lutheran Bible scholar. And he gets to the verse about loving.
- [27:28]
A
Why are you doing that?
- [27:32]
B
You know, my colleague Ellie asks me this question every day. Why do you do what you do? Not sure. So he says, he says there, he gets to Leviticus 19:18, Love your neighbor as yourself. And he says, some academic Bible scholar, right? Seemingly not doing Lutheran theology. And he says this verse is in Leviticus to make us realize just how profoundly incapable we are of doing it and then throwing ourselves upon God's mercy. And I'm like, well, this is a beautiful text about Lutheran theology, but this is not in any way what Leviticus is saying, right? I mean, if anything, Deuteronomy comes along and says, the law is not too hard for you. It is possible. I'm not optimistic, but it's possible. That's what I'm getting at with possibleism. Right. You actually, I think that the law about loving your neighbor is in part an invitation to consider whether we are capable of being and doing more than we think we are.
- [28:30]
A
I like this as a corollary to physics world of probability. Jewish theology is a world of possibility. So one thing that's really on my mind deeply right now and as I think about, what I care about supporting in the years ahead in this world, is that we absolutely, like, we are a secularizing world. And there's never been a time in my lifetime when theological words and practices and rituals felt more urgently like just relevant. Exactly what we need and a part of the human enterprise that is part of the human enterprise, right? It resides and has been carried forward and tended inside traditions and communities and identities. And yet our world needs lamentation and repentance and confession. Like, we can't find that language and that way of being, that teaching about that way of being anywhere else. And also this love, it seems to me also that in our. Especially when it comes to love in our lives, we all possess a lot of experience and intelligence about what it means to stay in relationship with people who we don't, first of all, you know, may not feel like it at the moment, and they may not deserve it, and they don't understand us and we don't understand them, and we're very different, right? And that's a description of the people in our most intimate circles. And yet we don't apply this. And I do want to call it intelligence, and it's just practical. It's not. Again, it's not a feeling to our life together. So I kind of like to turn there with you in terms of. Yes. What you're talking about is a recovery which feels so beautiful and important for Judaism and also for the world. I think one of the questions, and we're not going to answer it here tonight, is how do the traditions retain the integrity of the depths of the tradition while, you know, what can be offered up in a different way to the secular world? So, anyway. But that also then gets at these trickier loves, even trickier loves of love of neighbor, love of stranger, love of enemy. In the book you wrote, there is. You were writing about love of neighbor, but I think it applies to all of those. There's something wonderfully, almost quintessentially Jewish about this. We all agree that the command is crucial, but we disagree about precisely what it requires. And then later you say, at its best, Judaism tries to make room both for the sense that we owe those closest to us more than we owe to others. And I feel like that's speaking a plain truth, that it's good to speak aloud and it's not just about Jews and to the conviction that we have real and deep obligations to everyone.
- [31:34]
B
Yeah, I mean. I mean, you just said a lot, so let me.
- [31:37]
A
I know. Well, you only have 75.
- [31:40]
B
Exactly. So, you know, I'll start with the end. I feel like maybe this has always been true, but as I look around the world, I know a lot of people who are very tempted to seize one truth or the other. Right. That is, I am responsible first and foremost to those nearest to me, or I am skeptical of anyone who makes space for that. I am a quote unquote universalist. And the truth is that I think theology and ethics at their best are about inviting us to hold the complex reality of things that live sometimes in tension with each other, but are both true. 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. And it's not about, therefore disavowing one pole or the other. It has to somehow be about holding both poles in some sense. To deny either of those poles is, I think, to deny something that is essential to our experience of what it means to be human. Right. I mean, this is something that the philosopher Bernard Williams famously said, you know, if you say you owe the same things to everyone in the world, and you can't have partiality towards anyone, you lose any reason for simply being around. So he says, right. Why would you want to be alive? You've ruled out friendship, you've ruled out family, You've ruled out community. What is left? Right. Utilitarianism. Okay. It's not that interesting. Right, Right.
- [33:26]
A
I feel like you just become uninteresting also.
- [33:28]
B
Right. You just don't have the things that make up the fabric of a human life. However, the other poll is true, too. I mean, there are questions that most of us don't want to ask. You know, I have to feed my children before I feed your children. Do I have to give my children two nice vacations a year before your children have lunch?
- [33:47]
A
Do I have to?
- [33:48]
B
Not so sure I can defend that morally. Certainly not sure I can defend it religiously. Those questions are very hard, and most of us spend our time honestly avoiding those questions. Understandably, they're devastating. But I think there's something I would say about religion in general is that it's rare to me. I'm gonna overstate this and then regret it, but here we go. Right. Most often the answer to really hard either or questions is yes. It's not like, oh, yeah, I'll pick one. It's how do I create a worldview in which I can hold the complexity of. Of course I love my child more than I love your child, but your child makes a claim upon me.
- [34:28]
A
Yeah.
- [34:29]
B
Right. And there's a million examples of that.
- [34:31]
A
And I want to say there's, again, there's no other part of the human enterprise that actually insists that we ponder this. Right. That we do this impossible thing, which, as you say, we are strange enough also to make possible again and again and again.
- [34:48]
B
Well, you know, I think it's funny because I hear this a lot in a lot of the conversations I've heard you have and the things I've read you write that sort of. We need religion to get us to keep asking the questions that make us most human. The challenge, of course, is we also need to tame religion for making us the worst we can possibly be. Cause it does both of those things on a regular basis. And sometimes it does both of those things within a span of 10 minutes.
- [35:14]
A
Yeah. It's also not an either or. It's both.
- [35:16]
B
Right, exactly.
- [35:17]
A
And it's powerful. And therefore it is powerfully light and it's powerfully dark.
- [35:22]
B
Right. I mean, the language that I think I might have used in the book, which has become helpful for me, is religion is an amplifying force. So it amplifies our capacity for love and it also amplifies all of the darkest forces within us. Right. It makes us more brutal, more violent. Right. It does all those things and it creates staggering displays of love and kindness and decency that we otherwise might not show. It just. Is that. So? Then the question is, how do we mindfully and consciously inherit and perpetuate religion? Right. And those words are really important. Mindfully and consciously knowing that it can be a force for making us worse.
- [36:03]
A
Yeah. So what we're talking about is massive and we can't kind of go into all the intricacy. But so what I'd like to do, what I thought I'd want to do, is kind of drop down, touch down on some of the points that for me were interesting and helpful in just fleshing this out and kind of standing on this ground. So one is the complexity when we talk about loving the stranger or I think, loving the enemy. The role of memory, which, you know, as you say, you know, the memory too can be redemptive and it can be toxic.
- [36:40]
B
Right, Yeah. I mean, so that it took me a while to realize, you know, the notion that you find repeated in the Bible, you were strangers or sojourners in the land of Egypt, and therefore you should have empathy for the sojourner. Those verses are so frequently repeated, even if not lived out, they're so frequently repeated that it's easy to miss how profoundly non obvious they are. Right. That someone could say, I was a sojourner in Egypt. No one lifted a finger for me. I don't owe anybody anything. And the Bible ends up, I think, trying to invite us to cultivate the other voice. And as I got older, I came to realize this is not just true about the Israelites, it's true about all of our lives. You know, the example that I sometimes give is, you know, someone who's grown up with an abusive parent will often have two voices that they can recognize inside themselves. The one voice that says, look, if you had had my mother, you would know I don't owe anybody anything. And the other voice that says, I had my mother. Every vulnerable child in the world feels like they're my responsibility. And that part of the task of religion is how do I nurture that second voice and tame the first. Right. I think the Bible is trying to do that, by the way, not always successfully. The Bible also gives voice to remember what Amalek did to you, therefore murder their grandchildren. Right. That is hard. And the rabbis of the Talmud already had a very hard Time with that. It's almost like the other form of memory slipped in there, right? And so the language that I was searching for was helping us move beyond the naivete that memory is inherently moral or redemptive. We have to take part in shaping the memory that in turn will shape us. Right? Auschwitz on its own doesn't mean anything. I've really come to believe that in my philosopher hat, right? Auschwitz can mean kill everyone who comes near you because they're all dangerous to you. And it can mean every vulnerable person needs to be protected, and that's your whole life, right? And it's a choice. And, you know, it's amazing, I stumbled upon this speech that Elie Wiesel gave. Elie Wiesel, who, you know, had spent his whole life talking about memory, memory, memory, memory. And then in the middle of the genocide in Bosnia, he gives this talk and he says, I think maybe I wasn't saying this right, because they are relitigating a war that they've kept alive in memory for six centuries. I needed to talk about what kind of memory. I was wrong. It wasn't memory. It's redemptive memory. It's memory that leads to empathy. It's a particular kind of memory. That's what I think loving the Stranger is about. It's a particular kind of memory, or the way that I think I say it there, and that's become very important to me, is the mandate to love the stranger is a double act of moral imagination. First I have to imagine that it wasn't my ancestors who were in Egypt, but it was me. And then I have to move my way into understanding that there are other people in the society who are currently experiencing some version of that. It's a double act of moral imagination that is an exercise in empathy. That's called growing as a human. It's really hard.
- [39:57]
A
Yeah, you know, it's really hard. Something I think is also true for us in this time is that science, science in a new way, is a companion to theology, to this complex understanding of us, right? Like, you know, a phrase like hurt people, hurt people, or traumatized people, traumatized people. This is what we, you know, like, we really understand now what's happening in bodies and brains and the interaction between these things. And so we have knowledge, I feel, that actually affirms this wisdom about us that has been carried forward in sacred text and also gives us some ways to work with it. You know, it's fascinating. It's a good, hopeful thing to me.
- [40:38]
B
I know of no people who need trauma therapy quite like the Jewish people. No, I mean, you say that and it sounds like you're saying something awful, but it's really true. I mean, how could they not? How could we not? I think about something. My family's story. I mean, how could we not? Right? And we actually have tools now that we didn't have 50 years ago, which is kind of amazing. But it's really, really deep and hard work. And it requires kind of, I think, an ability to sit with stuff inside of us that we would much rather deny. Is there. Yeah, rage, you know, suspicion. Right. I mean, it's stuff that's just not easy to live with.
- [41:22]
A
I've thought about that, too. That this idea that after the Holocaust, the Jewish people would be the most magnanimous, like, would lead the way and never again wasn't intelligent about what happens when suffering happens. And that magnitude of suffering is unfathomable. One thing that you talk about appreciating in the Hebrew Bible, that I also just love in the Hebrew Bible and, you know, it's epitomized in the Psalms, is this insistence that everything can be brought in the presence of God. Pain and grief and rage and murderous rage and murderous grief. And that it must be expressed. Right. Again, there's intelligence there, and it doesn't leave you in it. But you can't not go. There's nothing that says you don't go there. You have to go there. You have to let those things happen, have their place.
- [42:25]
B
You know, it's interesting because that, for me, at least in my own kind of intellectual and spiritual journey, that brings me right back to where you started, because I was very much. I don't really remember whether this was said explicitly, but I felt like it was part of the culture of the schooling that I had, which was the sort of valorization of this Talmudic story about a sage who, no matter what happened, would say, this also is for the best. And gamzula tova, this also was for the best. And then, I mean, I'm sort of embarrassed to say this because I had a pretty strong Jewish education, but I was, like, in my 30s and actually, for the first time, sat down to really read the Psalms of Lament and thought the people who wrote this psalm would have taken that sage and shaken him and said, are you out of your mind? What do you mean it's for the best? It's not for the best. It's awful. It's absolutely, unspeakably awful.
- [43:23]
A
And you have to let the awfulness be true. To walk with it anywhere else and
- [43:27]
B
believe that God cares about you enough that you can even bring it to the divine throne and say no. This is intolerable. By the way, the thing about the Psalms of Lament that I have thought about writing about, but I don't really have quite the language for yet, is they show such an astonishing confidence in the worth of their feelings.
- [43:51]
A
Right.
- [43:52]
B
Like God, you are interested in my yelling at you and telling you that
- [43:58]
A
you are imprecatory psalms. Cursing Psalms.
- [44:01]
B
Yeah. Or that's like a. That's like the cousin. Right. Which is God, you're willing to hear how much I currently hate this person. Even though you're not a fan of hate in general. Right, right. And I think that there's something there, that there's a kind of self trust in the Psalms of Lament that are. It's really quite powerful and it's psychologically
- [44:22]
A
astute, as we're saying. Also everything we're learning.
- [44:27]
B
Yeah. And it also works against growing a shadow self. Right.
- [44:33]
A
Paradoxically.
- [44:34]
B
Right. Because the shadow self is like, you know, I remember once. Okay, now we're really upping the world of oversharing.
- [44:41]
A
Yeah, we're here. I remember 45 minutes in and about.
- [44:44]
B
Right. 24 years old. I was sitting in my therapist's office. Do you know, I don't know if you guys know. That's why God invented the first floor of buildings on the Upper west side. Right. So. Right. So I'm.
- [44:55]
A
So why is that where the therapists are?
- [44:56]
B
That's all the therapists are. Yeah. So I'm in my therapist's office and he says to me something about, you know, you must have a lot of anger given what you've been through. And I said, some just saccharine, spiritual thing. I said, no, you know, life is a gift. God doesn't owe me anything. And he looked at me and said, oh, please. And I was very taken aback. I'm like, what do you mean, oh, please? And of course, a few years later, I was like, oh, yeah, good point. Oh, please indeed. And that's what the authors of the Psalms of Lament would have said. Oh, please. No. Right. You know, the ability to find language for simultaneously sometimes the wonder and the horror of being alive. That's where religion is most potent and articulate. They're both true.
- [45:51]
A
And that's what's interesting to name. There is. It is reality based on transcendent. It may be, but it is more reality based than things will turn than our kind of hopeful defying of physics. Dreaming that we do culturally.
- [46:09]
B
I mean, it's funny. One of the things I struggle with this, because I'm not sure this is exactly my best quality, but I hear people sometimes kind of articulate what I think of as popular religious cliches. And, like, my skin crawls, you know, like, I'll hear someone say something like, God would never give you something you're not strong enough to handle. And I sort of want to be like, want to bet?
- [46:32]
A
Right, right.
- [46:34]
B
Like, you know, like.
- [46:35]
A
So that gets us to one of the hard parts of this, because, you know, one of the themes, too, is that in loving, we are imitating God. And, you know, part of this stereotype of Judaism is not about love. Is this vengeful. What is it?
- [46:57]
B
Wrathful. Vengeful, yeah.
- [47:01]
A
So how do you start to talk about. And obviously that's, you know, that's picking up on some things that are there, and it's not the whole. So how do you start to talk about the whole of this, that God is love, which, again, sounds like a Christian statement, and it sounds like a platitude, and it's anything but for you.
- [47:21]
B
So first I want to just say this is a little bit kind of almost pedantic. But one thing that as a Jewish philosopher, I never say and have never said is the sentence that God is love, which is a trinitarian statement based on the Gospel of John. It's about the parts of the Godhead loving each other. The God of Judaism is loving, but the God of Judaism is not love. I think it's actually just important because I think it's really important we not end up conflating Judaism and Christianity, despite the fact that, if I'm right, they have more in common about a lot of this than we've been trained to think. You know, another thing there that's important to say just before you go into the direct question, is the way that question is often formulated, not by you, I mean, in, like, the literature, is like, well, this is a problem we have with Tanakh, with the Hebrew Bible. And I often like to quote Brent Straughn, the Christian Bible scholar who likes to say to Christian audiences, if you think the Hebrew Bible has a problem with divine vengeance, I invite you to take a few minutes, read the Book of Revelation, and then come back, because there's nothing remotely in the Hebrew Bible that comes near that degree of divine violence and rage. He's like, so maybe we could frame this not as an anti Semitic question, but as a question about how we deal with religious Texts being complicated. And what's really important about Brent is that he's a minister. It's one thing for me to say it, it's another thing for him to say.
- [48:44]
A
It's. Yeah.
- [48:44]
B
So that's, I think, important to say. Now I think that the Bible does have obviously a lot of different pictures of God, a lot of different moods, if you will, that are reflected in its portrayal of God. But I still think that it makes sense to talk about how the central thrust of, of the Hebrew Bible is about a God of love and mercy. The simplest example of this that I give, and I don't mean this in a bean counting way, but the verses in the Bible that are quoted most often in the Bible itself are Exodus 34, 6 and 7, which are known to most Jews as part of the liturgy. Hashem hashem el rachum v' hanun, the Lord the Lord merciful and gracious, etc. Those verses are quoted more than any others. And interestingly, as the prophets keep quoting them, the second part about punishment falls away, which is amazing. Right. The Bible quotes those verses, but it massages them constantly until it comes out to a place that it likes more. I guess you might. I mean, that's a little bit, obviously an anthropomorphizing of a canon, but. Right. And I would say that as the Bible goes on, you have a radicalization. Right. So in Exodus 34, God describes God's self as merciful to God's covenant people. And you might be tempted to ask, okay, but what about everybody else? And then you get to Psalm 145 that every Jew who goes to synagogue knows by heart. We call it Ashrei. And in the ninth verse we hear Tov adonai la kolachamav al kol masav. God is good to all, and God's mercy is upon all God's creation. That and the verse before it are a clear quote of Exodus 34,6,7. Only the claim is what is true about covenant is also true about creation. God interacts this way not just with God's people, but with all people. Right. And there are these moves and I'm sort of suggesting that there are trajectories in the Bible that produce to a deeper understanding of who God is. Ultimately, the argument that I make in the book, I haven't convinced everyone on the planet to be sure, but that you can say writ large that in the Bible, loving is something God is, whereas angry is something God gets.
- [51:29]
A
Okay, okay. You know, you say, I mean, I think Also, this also brings us to the love of enemies. And that's not a description of what's happening much in our world right now. I think a lot about the force of fear in a human body. And. Yeah, and I think there are just lots of good reasons for almost everyone to be afraid, and some more than others. You know, here's your. Something you read. It's beautiful. Jewish texts push us to love both more deeply and more widely. They help us understand what intimate relationships and families and communities require of us and what they make possible for us. They push us to love our neighbors, to want them to flourish and to contribute in meaningful ways to make that happen. They teach us to see the world with eyes of love and generosity of spirit. They prod us to love the stranger, the outsider, who is so often ignored or cast out or even demonized. They invite us to cultivate compassion so that we can be present with others when they are hurting and suffering. And all of that is so hard. It's almost too much to ask for a body that is living in a state of fear. One of the things you wrote, you said, and then getting to love of enemies, if we love God, and I like this because it's very straightforward. I mean, obviously this is a complicated. But there's also this simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity. Right. If we love God, we cannot hate what God has made. And then you said, is this right? Again, I am not at all certain, being Jewish, being a rabbi there. And then you said, religious helps us ask hard questions, but it does not often offer us easy answers.
- [53:26]
B
Yeah. So, I mean, God, there's so much to try and sort of like, open up when it comes to the question of love of enemies. I mean, so let me maybe share just a couple of thoughts here that maybe can move us to the heart of. I think what you're asking. One of the experiences that I had that was very powerful in writing about trying to write about love of enemies was that I was struck by how many Christian ethicists and New Testament scholars said love of enemies is the very core of Jesus teaching. But then, like Jews talking about love of neighbor, as soon as you ask, okay, but what does love of enemies consist of? They're totally at loggerheads with one another. No one can agree. I mean, the most obvious example of this is. Think about the history of debates about pacifism versus just war theory. Right? Does love of enemies require that I never pick up arms? Does it require that I actually. Specifically, yes, pick up arms. And you have 20th century lives like Bonhoeffers that sort of like lay it out right in front of you. Like, what do you do when you're faced with unspeakable evil? But so I ended up having this experience that was really sort of bizarre. I was listing out on a pad all of the things that I had seen Christian writers say love of enemies means. And I looked at this list like something like 17 items on this list and I thought, well, that's interesting because the phrase love your enemies almost never appears in Jewish sources. But every single one of these 17 items is amply attested in the Bible and repeated rabbinic literature. Every last one of them. Right, right. The example is that I always like to give people because Jews kind of are taken aback by this, especially the more traditional they are, which is like the ethos of non retaliation. Have you ever heard of anything more Christian than that? And yet, three times a day in the Amida, Jews pray to those who curse me, may my soul remain silent. You literally pray for the ability to be a non retaliator. And on and on and on. So Jews don't often call this love of enemies. But the ethos of love of enemies, as Christians use it is all over the Jewish tradition. Now why they don't call it that is interesting and worth thinking of. I don't think that's a minor point. I don't mean to pooh pooh it. I think it's actually interesting and hard and I don't really have a worked out thesis about it. The other thing that I think gets really into the heart of what I think, Krista, that you're raising here is it seems to me, I think this is true in a lot of languages is my sense, but it's certainly true in English. We use the word enemy to refer to so many different things that it becomes hard to think about what we're talking about. Enemy can be a guy I don't get along with in my office. Right. Enemy can be, you know, I was in business with my Aunt Zelda and, and she handled the accounting. I don't have an Anzela, but she handled the accounting. I felt she was a little bit of a crook. We haven't spoken in a few years. Right. Enemies can be Saddam Hussein. Now I think that it's worth asking, is it so obvious that what I owe A and B, I also owe C? I don't think it's to Jewish sources. It's not so obvious. And so sometimes I think we suffer from an impoverishment of Language that a lot of Jews I know are so focused on insisting, which I think is actually more complicated than many Jews think, but that they don't owe love to see that they sweep aside A and B. Whereas I would argue that for the rabbinic tradition, overwhelmingly I do owe love to A and B. Just because I don't like you doesn't mean you're not my neighbor. Just because we've had conflict doesn't mean I don't have to seek your well being. And when it comes to enemies, real enemies, like Saddam Hussein, like enemies, I
- [57:24]
A
mean, people who would hurt me or take something from me. Right.
- [57:29]
B
Hurt my children. Yeah, right. So there. I'll tell you what I'm sitting with these days with this. And you know, this is not going to satisfy anyone, but I do think this is one of the places where Judaism is far more ambivalent than Christianity. I had a conversation with the Christian theologian Sarah Coakley about a year ago. And I said to her, so, Sarah, just to be clear, you are convinced that worshiping Jesus Christ means that you have to love Vladimir Putin? And Sarah said, in an honesty that I found very moving, she said, I want to say I have no idea how I would do that, but yes.
- [58:11]
A
Yeah, okay, well, I'm glad you confessed that.
- [58:13]
B
And I sort of said, well, that's interesting because this is where I would say there is some difference. On the other hand, we do not recite all of the psalms of praise during much of Passover because we are mourning for the dead Egyptian soldiers. We do that. That is part of everyone's religious life in normative Judaism. So the one other thing I just want to throw into the mix, this is what I've been thinking about lately, that I wish I had written. But I've only come to think about it as going on a book tour, talking about love. In the wake of October 7th, not surprisingly, everybody wants to talk about this. Right? So I think that we sometimes simplify what we mean by love. Way too much. Sometimes love simply means wishing the other person would repent, wanting their soul to be healed. I'll tell you where I came to that. The most amazingly courageous moment I've had. It wasn't my courage, it was someone else's courage. On this book tour, a woman came up to me. She's probably in her late 80s. After one of the book events, she pulls me aside, she grabs me by the elbow, she says, rabbi, my husband beat me and my kids for 15 years. Does the Torah think I'm supposed to love him? I'M like, okay. I'm like, you know, I should have started a hedge fund. You know, and it's very powerful. So, you know, obviously the first thing I said to her was, you know, oh, my God, I'm so incredibly sorry. No one should live with that kind of fear for one minute, let alone for 15 years. And then I said something to her that I'm still thinking about because I'm trying to decide whether it was like, quote, unquote, the right answer or even a good answer.
- [60:00]
A
Yeah.
- [60:01]
B
I said to her, I want to ask you whether you could 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. And she sort of like. She takes a step back and she says, that would be love. And I was like, are you kidding? I was like, you know, we live in a culture where love. You are trained to think, means, you're gonna have breakfast tomorrow.
- [60:35]
A
Yeah, but I can't.
- [60:35]
B
You should never see him again. But you want his soul to be healed. What could be more loving than that?
- [60:41]
A
Yeah.
- [60:41]
B
And amazingly, by the way, what she said to me, which I'll never. She said, I don't know if I could do that, but I could think about that. And I was like, okay, like, that's. Now, that's love of enemies. I really believe that. Meaning, I think that is love of enemies. It's not Hallmark Love of enemies.
- [60:57]
A
No, it's not Hallmark. Yeah. And so this brings me to, you know, so one of the things I've come to understand is after these 25 years of this work I've been doing, this conversation, I look at the world through a lens on the human condition. So I don't. I look at a political event or a societal event or an economic event, and I'm asking what is going on inside human bodies and psyches and spirits, and how is this stretching us and how is it giving rise to that thing we're calling political or economic or social? And I think you go through the world now at least partly looking through a lens of love, right? Of Judaism being about love. So, you know, and I think we've come to this place in our conversation. I mean, just, you know, let's put that, you know, in this world of so much tumult and so much tenderness in this post 10-7-world, how does this lens. Like, what do you think? You know, I mean, you know, what questions are you asking that other people are not asking? Like, when, as you take in Events that are analyzed always in certain ways and not in this way.
- [62:17]
B
Wow, that's a really hard question. I mean, first of all, I want to say I aspire to take in the world from a lens of love. Sometimes I take in the world from a lens of, I don't know, petulance.
- [62:31]
A
Yeah, well, I don't necessarily think you. I'm not necessarily talking about you being loving or not being loving, but you saying, where is love in this picture? And just like as you were just really in this very subtle and interesting way going like, what could love mean in this picture? And it's not simple.
- [62:47]
B
Exactly that. So that really is a question. So what you just said feels like that's a lot of where I live these days, which is sort of asking about really messy, difficult, painful situations. What would love look like here? Not love is a cliche. Not love as an act of naivete, not a feeling. But love is a defiant insistence that we can look deeper even here. Yeah, right. I am trying to put down some of my political rage these days and figure out what animates people who believe they follow Jesus Christ to embrace unspeakable cruelty. What leads people who go to yeshiva day schools in the tri state area to embrace horrific cruelty and defend it in the name of their religious identity. I'm trying to understand it like, I'm trying to move beyond feeling self righteous about it, which is not actually a virtue, it's just a human feeling. But like, you know, can I actually understand things? So I'll give you an example of this, which I know some people would say probably, you know, sounds incredibly condescending, but I have come to realize, or at least I think I've realized it, right, that we cannot understand MAGA without understanding the opiate crisis because we cannot understand how much pain and desperation rule this land. You talk about fear. What happens, people who feel they have no future, their country has no future, their children have no future. And all they children have no future. And because they're good Christians, they don't hate anyone. But they can hire politicians to hate for them. And I don't want to hate them for it. Yeah. And I have not been innocent of that crime, but it's not helpful actually. And the human condition is not healed by my deciding, you know, 48% of America is, you know, irredeemable. I mean, it's just not. Even though I feel that way sometimes. So I'm feeling right. There is a moment, I'll tell you, a moment that really stayed with me. Tim, Alberta Wrote a book about. Tim Alberta is a evangelical Christian journalist. His father is a full on MAGA minister. And Tim Alberta writes a book about the MAGA ization of evangelical Christianity. And it is a devastating read. It's just if you're committed to religion as a source of compassion in the world, you read this book and it breaks you. But there's one moment in that book that I cannot get out of my head where he says something like, but in some of these churches, the things that bewildered me was the same people I saw on Sunday morning in church applauding these sermons that I found utterly deplorable. I would then see them at the soup kitchen serving dinner later that night. And I thought, tim, you know, you don't have the whole story here. And I was sort of very taken with that. I mean, some of the people in this room were present at the very first event I did about my book, at which I had a conversation with Jamie Raskin, which some of you may remember the story Jamie told about loving enemies. That was astonishing. Just very quickly, the moderator asked us about love of enemies. And Jamie said, you know, I am aware that I'm at the Nageshwaran Synagogue on the Upper west side of Manhattan. I am aware that what I'm about to say is going to shock a lot of you, horrify you. But I want to say that one of my very closest friends in Congress is Lauren Boebert. And there was this, like, audible gasp. And what he said that I found so incredibly moving was he said, look, it's a long time ago now I'm putting words in his mouth. What I remember him saying was, look, Lauren is wrong about everything. She's a toxic force in American politics. But when I was diagnosed with lymphoma, no member of Congress showed me love like Lauren Boebert did. And she taught me something really profound, which is, someone can be wrong and still be a human being capable of great love. He's like, isn't that, like, the baseline of starting to have a conversation that feels very important to me and mainly because I have failed at it, not because I've succeeded at it.
- [67:25]
A
Yeah. And what do you think are the questions you ask of Israel and of the situation in Israel, the future of Israel through this lens of Judaism? It's about love. Like, what are you watching? What are you watching? What are you wanting to.
- [67:43]
B
What time is it?
- [67:44]
A
I know, I know. I am aware of this.
- [67:48]
B
Gosh. I mean, there are so many things that I would be tempted to say here. I Think I will say one thing that I mean without the slightest hint of Pollyannishness. But I still think at the end of the day, 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. And that at the end of the day, we will learn to bear witness to the pain we have each suffered and inflicted upon one another, or the fire will consume us all as it almost has. Everything else is commentary after that to me, right? Everything else is coming. You know, there's one of my heroes was a man named Moshe Una, who no one has ever heard of anymore. Moshe Una. To show you how much Israel has changed, Moshe Una was a member of the Knesset for the National Religious Party, while simultaneously being the founder of the Religious Zionist peace movement. Okay, so this is the Smotrich Ben GVIR party. He's the founder of Oz Vashalom, the Religious Zionist peace movement. He was an educator, German immigrant. And there's this speech he gives to a bunch of educators that. There's one paragraph there that I find it. I think it's 1945. When he gives this speech. It's amazing, right? He says one of the things that Jewish education is about is, he says, chinook la moledet. It is education to sort of embrace. I don't know how to translate Moledet, the heartland, right? And then he says, we have to teach our kids how much they love this place, how our ancestors lived here and worshiped here, how God's commandments can be fulfilled here, how this is the place that we love. And he says, and there's another aspect of it too. We have to teach our kids that there's another people that feels exactly the same way. That's it. That's the answer. That's what he said. That's what religious education does. Now, there's a way in which some people will say, well, that's Pollyannish. But you know what? You can call it whatever you want. 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. And there is a lot of blame to go around. And the fact that public discourse treats empathy as a zero sum game. If you want to go on Twitter, you see what empathy as a zero sum game is, right? If you have sympathy for Palestinian pain, then all Zionists are demons. If you have sympathy for the Jewish experience, Palestinians are not Even a real people, right? And it goes. We go around and around. And the simple capaciousness to hold that this is a situation of human tragicness at its most profound eludes most of us in this moment for understandable reasons. But it's the only hope.
- [70:59]
A
Thank you for that. So I want to. Something I didn't know if I would read, but follows. It's wonderful words from your book that move me and I think, feel like I want to read them, honor them also, after what you just said. 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. And then later you said, 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. To me, that feels also like this absolute reality base that is also profoundly aspirational and that challenges us in the right way. There were so many things I wanted to talk to you about. I was going to have you riff on the story of Jonah and Ruth, but I think because we're out of time. I think what I just want to ask you as we close, is through this lens of love, Judaism being about love, that you take on the world and life, what just kind of right now, today, is bringing you hope. Now, let me ask you, in this order, what is making you despair? And perhaps you just named that. And what is bringing you hope?
- [72:45]
B
I think what I feel a lot of despair about these days is that I think the more I try to take in what I believe the Bible is asking of us, the harder it seems to me and the less evidence I see of almost anyone actually taking it to heart. The example of this that I always talk about is that I think kind of the most fundamental teaching in many ways of the Hebrew Bible is that 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. Or as I told the students in our summer program in New York City, God has members of God's own household. They are homeless men who sleep in their own urine in the city. And 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 that we call Torah. And not you, me, right. Either we take it seriously. So I feel a lot of hopelessness. About that? How do we do that? And I think what gives me hope, paradoxically, is, you know, it goes back to that possibleism thing. There are moments. I had a student this summer, so here's the perfect, you know, in a way, what gives me hope this summer? I said that to the students. So the next morning I woke up and I got an email from one of the summer fellows. And he says, dear rav Shai, it's 11:30pm Rachel's going to laugh at me because I'm going to cry. It's 11:30pm I just feel I need to tell you where I've been the last four hours. It's like I was walking home thinking about what you said in class today and about how you taught that here in the city of Sodom. That's what he writes to me, here in the city of Sodom. And he said, and I passed a homeless man and I gave him change. And then I realized you said that God is the God who sees people. So I spent four hours on a grate with him asking him about his life because I figured it probably had been a while. He said, thank you for creating a place where I can learn Torah that gives me hope.
- [75:20]
A
Schai Held, thank you for your book and this conversation. Rabbi Shai Held is president and dean at the Hadar Institute. His most recent book is Judaism is About Love. He also hosts a podcast named Answers Withheld. Learn more@hadar.org special thanks this week to Rabbi Danny Passow, Amishar Frutkoff and Abigail Beatty of the Hadar Institute. Our funding partners include the Hearthland foundation, helping to build a more just, equitable and connected America, one creative act at a time. The Fetzer Institute Supporting a movement of organizations that are applying spiritual solutions to society's toughest problems. Find them@fetzer.org Kaliopeia foundation dedicated to cultivating the connections between ecology, culture and space spirituality. Supporting initiatives and organizations that uphold sacred relationships with the living earth. Learn more@kaliopeia.org and the Osprey Foundation. A catalyst for empowered, healthy and fulfilled lives. On Being is an independent production of the On Being project based in Minnesota and New York City.
- [77:12]
B
SA.