Shai Held — On Love, and Judaism

29:29Like 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, 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.

30:16Again, it's not a feeling to our life together. So I'd kind of like to turn there with you. In terms of like, 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? 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, you were writing about love of neighbor, but I think it applies to all of those.

31:01There'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. Yeah I mean I mean you just said a lot so let me know. Well, you only have 75 minutes. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, I'll start with the end.

31:45I 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. Yeah. 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.

32:37And 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 you know famously said you know if you say you owe the same things to everyone in the world and you can't have a 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 i think like you just become uninteresting also right you know you just don't have the things that make up the fabric of a human life yeah however the other pole 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 two nights vacations a year before your children have lunch?

33:47Not 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, you know, I think there's something I would say about religion in general is that it's rare to me. I'm going to 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.

34:28And there's a million examples of that. And I want to say, again, there's no other part of the human enterprise that actually insists that we ponder this. That we do this impossible thing, which as you say, we are strange enough also to make possible again and again and again. 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.

35:08Because it does both of those things on a regular basis. And sometimes it does both of those things within a span of 10 minutes. Yeah, it's also not an either or. It's both. Right, exactly. And it's powerful, and therefore it is powerfully light and it's powerfully dark. 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.

35:49It just is that. So then the question is, how do we mindfully and consciously inherit and perpetuate religion? And those words are really important, mindfully and consciously, knowing that it can be a force for making us worse. Yeah. So what we're talking about is massive, and we can't kind of go into all the intricacy. 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, you know, interesting and helpful in just fleshing this out and kind of standing on this ground. So one is, you know, the complexity when we talk about loving the stranger or I think loving the enemy, the role of memory.

36:33Which, you know, as you say, you know, the memory too can be redemptive and it can be toxic. 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 are 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 know anybody, anything. And the Bible ends up, I think, trying to invite us to cultivate the other voice.

37:21And 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 know 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 that is and the rabbis of the tom would already had a very hard time with that it's almost like the other form of memory slipped in there right um and so the language that i was searching for was helping us move beyond the naivete that memory is inherently moral or redemptive.

38:27We 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 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 right i needed to talk about what kind of memory i was i was wrong it memory.

39:17It'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, you know, 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.

39:54That's called growing as a human. It's really hard. 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.

40:35You know, it's fascinating. It's a good, hopeful thing to me. 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 in my family's story. I mean, how could we not? 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.

41:15Rage, you know, suspicion, right? I mean, it's stuff that's just not easy to live with. I 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.

42:08and 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 have their place. 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.

42:52and that 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. And you have to let the awfulness be true to walk with it anywhere else. And believe that God cares about you enough that you can even bring it to the divine throne and say, no, this is intolerable.

43:36The 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. yeah right like god you are interested in my yelling at you yeah and telling you that you are the cursing psalms yeah or that's like 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 does there's a kind of self-trust in the Psalms of Lament that are, it's really quite powerful.

44:20And it's psychologically astute, as we're saying also, everything we're learning. Yeah. And it also works against growing a shadow self, right? Paradoxically. Right. Because the shadow self is like, you know, I remember once, okay, now we're really, I think, the world of oversharing. Yeah, we're here. I remember once. 45 minutes in and about right. I was 24 years old. I was sitting in my therapist's office. 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. So, right. Why is that where the therapist's office is? That's where the therapist's office is.

44:56Yeah. 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 yeah 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 yeah You know, the ability to find language for simultaneously sometimes the wonder and the horror of being alive.

45:47That's where religion is most potent and articulate. They're both true. And that's what's interesting to, you know, name there is it is reality-based. Transcended it may be, but it is more reality-based than things will turn out, you know, than our kind of hopeful, defying of physics, dreaming that we do culturally. 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.

46:29And I sort of want to be like, want to bet? Right. Right? Like, you know, like. 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? Wrathful, vengeful. Vengeant God. so how do you start to talk about and obviously 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 so first I want to just say this is a little bit kind of almost pedantic but one thing that as a Jewish philosopher for 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.

47:36It'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.

48:11and I often like to quote Brent Strawn, 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.

48:42It's another thing for him to say it. 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 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, Vachanun, the Lord, the Lord, merciful and gracious, etc.

49:39Those 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, it's a little bit obviously of an anthropomorphizing of a canon. And I would say that as the Bible goes on, you have a radicalization. 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.

50:29We call it Asherah. And in the ninth verse, we hear, 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, and 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 brought us 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.

51:29Okay. Okay. You know, you say, I mean, I think also this also brings us to the love of enemies. For sure. And that's not really 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 I think there are just lots of good reasons for almost everyone to be afraid and some more than others. You know, here's 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.

52:16They 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. You know, one of the things you wrote, you know, you said, and then you're getting to love of enemies.

52:55If 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, but you said religious helps us ask hard questions, but it does not often offer us easy answers.

53:25Yeah, 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. Yeah. 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, right?

54:14No 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 Bonhoeffer's 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.

54:51I 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 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 and my soul remains silent.

55:26You 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 about. I don't think that's a minor point. I don't mean to poo-poo 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.

56:06We 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 she handled the accounting. I don't have an Aunt Zelda, 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.

56:47And 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 C, 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 mean, people who would hurt me or take something from me, right?

57:28Hurt my children. Yeah. Right. So there, I'll tell you what I'm sitting with these days with this, and 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 a 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. Okay, well, I'm glad you confessed that.

58:12And 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. Right. 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?

58:48So 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, and it wasn't my courage, it was someone else's courage, on this book tour, a woman came up to me, she was probably in her late 80s, after one of the book events. She pulls me aside, and 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? And I'm like, okay, I'm like, you know, I should have started a hedge fund.

59:40You 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. 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.

1:00:21And she's 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 going to have breakfast tomorrow. You should never see him again. But you want his soul to be healed. What could be more loving than that? 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. 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.

1:00:56No, 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 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, of Judaism being about love.

1:01:44And so, you know, and I think we've come to this place in our conversation. I mean, just, you know, I guess what that, you know, in this world of so much tumult and so much tenderness in this post-October 7th 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? Well, that's, 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.

1:02:31Yeah, 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. Yeah, exactly. 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 as a cliche. Not love as an act of naivete. Not a feeling.

1:03:07But 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 it's just a human feeling. But like, you know, can I actually understand?

1:04:01So 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 children all the children have no future and because they're good christians they don't hate anyone but they can hire politicians to hate for them

1:04:47and and i don't want to hate them for it yeah i and i have not been innocent of that crime but i 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 I'm 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 MAGAization of evangelical Christianity. And it is a devastating read.

1:05:31It'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.

1:06:21Just very quickly, the moderator asked us about love of enemies. And Jamie said, you know, I am aware that I'm at B 'nai Jeshurun Synagogue on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I'm 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 guest. And what he said that I found so incredibly moving was he said, look, I'm, you know, 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 is a toxic force in American politics.

1:06:59But 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? Yeah. That feels very important to me. And mainly because I have failed at it, not because I've succeeded at it. Yeah. And what do you think are the questions you ask, like, 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?

1:07:38What are you watching? What are you wanting to? What time is it? I know. I know. I am aware of this. 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.

1:08:38Everything else is commentary after that to me, right? Everything else is commentary. You know, 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 V'Shalom, 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 out.

1:09:16I 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, 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 is another people that feels exactly the same way. That's it. That's what religious education does.

1:10:01Now, 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?

1:10:41And 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. Thank you for that. But so I wonder, something I didn't know if I would read, but it 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 he 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 you know to me that feels also like this absolute reality base that is also profoundly aspirational and that challenges us in the right way.

1:12:04There 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, you know, 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? Let me ask you that in this order. What is making you despair? And perhaps you just named that. And what is bringing you hope? 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.

1:13:07The 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.

1:13:54And 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 that possible-ism 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 of shy, it's 1130. I'm going to, Rachel's going to laugh at me because I'm going to cry. It's 1130 p.m. I just feel I need to tell you where I've been the last four hours.

1:14:42It'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. So 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 Shai Held thank you for your book and this conversation

1:15:44Rabbi 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 at hadar.org. Special thanks this week to Rabbi Danny Passau, Amashar Frutkoff, and Abigail Beatty of the Hadar Institute.

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