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Shai Held: My argument is that divine love, biblically speaking, comes without conditions, but with expectations. God does not say, do this or I will stop loving you. God says, I love you and I want you to do this. I'm not going to stop loving you. I do have expectations, and I think parents struggle with this all the time.

How do you convey to children, I have expectations of you, but they don't make my love for you conditional? Or, conversely, I love you unconditionally, but I'm not inviting you to go through life being complacent and self satisfied, quite the contrary. I love you in the hopes that you will exercise your agency in particular ways.

It seems to me that the Bible and then rabbinic tradition Very dramatically emphasized that God believes in the centrality and urgency of human agency. God does not want to build a redeemed or perfected world on God's own. That's what covenant means, right? The invitation of human beings to participate in the divine project of building a world.

I think that you can almost say. You can't have covenant if love is conditional because human beings will fail God left and right. And so if God's love is conditional, then the relationship is almost impossibly volatile. So if there's going to be covenant, probably that's also why forgiveness and repentance are so central to Jewish spirituality.

Because if God's going to take us seriously, there have to be, if you will, mechanisms or processes by which relationships that have been ruptured.

Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. It is a common misconception that Judaism is a religion of law, while Christianity is a religion of love. But the very love commandments at the heart of Jesus teaching are direct quotes from Deuteronomy 6.

Jesus, after all, was Jewish. And joining Miroslav Volf in this episode is one of the most important Jewish thinkers alive today. Rabbi Shai Held, a theologian, educator, and author. He's president, dean, and chair in Jewish thought at the Hadar Institute in New York City. He's the author of Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Call of Transcendence, and The Heart of Torah, a collection of essays about the Torah in two volumes.

His latest book is titled Judaism is About Love, Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life. Thanks for listening. Enjoy. Rabbi 

Miroslav Volf: Shai, my friend, it is so wonderful to be able to converse with you with such an extraordinary book that you have written. As you know, I have been an admirer of your work for some time now.

I really love your two volumes of meditations, reflections, scholarly work, everything combined on Torah, the heart of Torah. And this book, I read it with great pleasure. It's joy and excitement and I'm delighted to be able to talk to you about it and I want to recommend it in strongest possible terms to any of our readers, listeners, who are interested in a topic that we will be discussing.

Thank you so much. Thank you. So maybe we should start by saying, just if you can give us briefly, the motivation for writing the book that's already on the first pages of the book itself, but maybe it's good for us to hear it from your mouth as to frame the conversation that we will have. 

Shai Held: Yeah, thank you.

I think I would share both one story that is in the book and one story that is not in the book that I wish I had included that really, in retrospect, set the course for a lot of my work in the world. culminating in this book. The first is, as you say, on the opening page of the book. A couple of decades ago, I was speaking to a class of senior rabbinical students at one of America's major rabbinical seminaries.

And in passing, I said, Judaism is the story of a God who loves us and beckons us to love God back. And one of the students responded somewhat sneeringly, I have to say, by saying, I'm sorry, but that sounds like Christianity to me. And I was really taken aback and a little bit heartbroken. And I said to him, you know, it's so interesting that you say that because I was actually thinking about the twice a day Jewish liturgy in which we say to God, with vast love, have you loved us?

And then immediately recite Deuteronomy chapter six, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your being, et cetera. In other words. A God who loves us and beckons us to love God back. So if you hear that and you think of Christianity, then there's a much more difficult conversation we need to have about just how deeply many Jews have internalized a traditional Christian anti Judaic bias.

According to which Judaism is a loveless religion that Christianity came into the world to sort of repair or better displace, right? We have to deal with that. Now, I had an experience a few months after that I didn't write about in the book that is. It's just. Kind of parallel in a way, which is that I was speaking to a group of Christian high school students, Protestant high school students, all of whom had been selected for this program I was teaching and based on their devotion and leadership in their local churches.

And in passing again, during the class discussion, I said to them, Now, remind me guys, what does Jesus say is the great command and everyone raises their hand and one of them very proudly tells me, love of God and love of neighbor. And then totally innocently, I say, and remind me, what is Jesus quoting? No hands go up, not a single one.

It was an amazing moment for me. It was really revelatory for me. I realized in that moment, wow, you have never been taught what wells Jesus drank from. You have no idea where he got the love, right? He's quoting Leviticus and Deuteronomy, but you don't know that. And so in a way, those two stories in retrospect kind of set the trajectory that kind of culminated in this book, which is on the one hand, a book written for Jews to help reclaim, restore, re center what I think lies at the heart of the Jewish tradition.

Heart in both senses of that word, heart as in core and heart as in the human heart. And also a book for Christians. in the hopes that it can provide them with a more realistic, honest, real assessment or picture of what Jewish spirituality taken on its own terms really looks like. 

Miroslav Volf: Though I never bought into kind of sharp divide, religion of law and religion of love, nonetheless, I would have put it Well, both include a love and law, but the emphasis in the two traditions is different.

And I had not appreciated that before reading the book, the extent to which God's love and our love for God and our love for one another is so central to Judaism. Yeah, I think the very 

Shai Held: inclination to dichotomize between love and law leads almost, I think, ineluctably to a misunderstanding of traditional Jewish spirituality.

For which law is never an alternative to love, but a manifestation of love. Law becomes both the ways that God reveals God's love to us. It's almost like a parent sending a child out into the world and saying, before you go, I'd like to impart some wisdom and guidance as to how you can flourish in the world.

And then a child who loves the parent and expresses that by really taking that instruction on board. 

Miroslav Volf: I think it makes a lot of sense. I don't think also in Christianity, at least the way I understand Christian, Christian faith, one ought to oppose one another. And I think in a probably more accurate way to put it is not just primary emphasis, but the main mode in which one comes to relate.

to God, so that this kind of framing out of love and for love, the law is given, that ends up missing that, that intentionality for the law so that it's tied very carefully to, to love, law that is tied to, to love. Now, One place where I talked about your book was in the committee on the board that I sit and fellow board member is very well educated and religiously sensitive anthropologist who is Jewish.

He read the book, in fact, and he said, but I'm not quite sure that I buy that Judaism ended up emphasizing the law or overemphasizing the law. Under influence of anti-Jewish Christian, uh, polemic. What I heard him say is that giving, that's giving too much power to this anti-Jewish polemic and contrasting separation of, of the two, two tradition.

And I think what he was looking for and, and suggesting well, that there, there are internal Jewish reasons why when that way it might not have been fully. It might have gone too far, but the dynamic were inner Jewish as well and not simply coming from the outside. How would you respond? Yeah, I actually, I 

Shai Held: agree with that.

And I, I try in the book to say that I think there is also an internal Jewish conversation here. And that is that there's always been a kind of, how should I say this, a kind of ambivalence about and even worry about. Love not being allowed to descend into platitude, meaning if you love God, then express it concretely in the world.

And so there's always been this impulse to emphasize the deed, and there have been times in the history of Judaism where thinkers have come along and said, but wait a minute, remember that the deed is an expression of a posture of love. The deed cannot replace love. the posture, it has to express it. So I do think there is an internal Jewish dynamic here, but I, my suggestion is that it has been kind of dramatically exacerbated by also a majority culture telling a minority culture that it is inferior and loveless.

Meaning I don't see a contradiction between what your friend is saying and what I'm saying. I don't think that it's only a function of the culture. of a Christian story about Judaism. I think it's a Christian story about Judaism that then took certain impulses in the Jewish tradition itself and sort of, if you will, put them on steroids.

Miroslav Volf: Yeah, my sense also, and I appreciate what you're saying, but my sense also when I read it, when I read your text was Those intellectual tradition of Jews engaging their own tradition is so incredibly robust and so rigorous that I was a little bit suspicious about this influence that even though minority culture in many instances Judaism was minority culture, the day that we as Goy would have so much impact on shaping it.

Shai Held: Well, I think that there's another dimension here that I'll mention that I think kind of complicates this picture and maybe shed some additional light, which is that, although I can't tell you exactly when this happened, I don't think anyone is quite sure, but I suspect it's in the wake of World War II.

You have a generation of American Jews, whose knowledge of Judaism is, I would say, somewhat attenuated, who are very nervous about assimilation, and who therefore begin, consciously or unconsciously, to define their Judaism as whatever they imagine Christianity is not. So, whatever they think is strongly associated with Christianity, they imagine that Judaism has to be something else.

So, to take a very kind of clear example of this, that any, I think, American Jewish educator will sort of nod knowingly and sadly about this, is generations of American Jewish kids were taught that Judaism has no notion of the afterlife. That is patently absurd as a description of the Jewish tradition, but I think what happened is that American Jews And they're not that sophisticated understanding of Christianity, believe that Christianity was all about the afterlife, it's about getting into heaven, therefore Judaism must be about the opposite.

Judaism is entirely about this world. I think something similar happened about love, which is that American Jews heard Christians talk about love all the time. And ended up saying, okay, so we're about something else, law, justice, practice, something else. And my, the real hypothesis that I wanted to put forward is that it's a kind of double whammy that affected Judaism in America.

That on the one hand, you have a majority culture telling a minority culture that it is loveless. And at the same time, you have that minority culture itself Deciding that it wants to define itself over against the majority culture, and so Jews participate in a very active way in the stripping of that.

of love from the center of Jewish consciousness. I don't think it's just a kind of Christian crime against Judaism. It's also that, but it's certainly not by any means only that. So there's, it's a very rich and complex picture here. And the funny thing is, Miroslav, this is not even my main agenda. Meaning in some ways, I, when I talk about this, I'm just trying to set the table for Why this conversation became important to me, what's important to me is actually the conversation about love.

But it's interesting how much attention those opening pages have gotten, which is totally understandable. And I think it maybe can make for interesting conversations, both among Jews about how they understand their own Judaism and among Christians and Jews about how Christians have and ought to going forward.

Think about Judaism. 

Miroslav Volf: As we're talking, it occurs to me that maybe there were also the pressures of modernity. Famously, Kant, but even before him, with others, a kind of Christian faith itself was interpreted radically through ethical, through moral means. It became what it is as a moral thing. religion that is concerned primarily with that.

So after life, more kind of emotional, affective side of religion gets, they get submerged and ethical comes, comes forward. And it could be that actually both of our traditions have suffered some under, under that emphasis, more emphasis on law and more emphasis on ethics. simple agency, motivated by love, but a certain kind of suppression of, if you want, mystical dimensions, affective dimensions, belief even dimensions in Christianity.

And that might be an interesting conversation, what happens to both of the traditions, say, in the, the at the end of the 18th and in the middle of 19th century and on. 

Shai Held: Yeah, I think there's a discussion to be had also, and it really kind of is very close to what you're saying, about how Jews felt they had the most to gain from secularism.

That is to say, it would mean acceptance finally. It would mean not being dominated by Christianity. And then, of course, there's a lot of Jewish historiography. The famous Jewish historian, Jacob Katz, for example, wrote about how the promise of a neutral society was never fulfilled. At most, you had a semi neutral society, right?

It was still a Christian society in which you still went to school on Saturdays, you know what I mean? But I think that there is a funny way in which Jews Kind of, if you'll pardon the un Jewish expression, went whole hog for secularization, right? Because it gave them certain hope of, again, being secular.

I

Miroslav Volf: was so particularly taken by your emphasis on unconditionality of love. I myself have had what is clearly prejudice, that though this is present in Jewish texts, this was not as prominent as I thought that it was. And so to me, it came as a wonderful, wonderful discovery. I learned something fresh. And can you speak, uh, about kind of the relationship between the requirement of the obedience to law and the unconditionality of God's love?

Shai Held: Yeah, I think this is a really rich topic because it's actually also one of the places, one of the infinite number of places, where theology and the very concrete day to day task of living really speak to each other in very profound ways, because to my mind, at least, we often get tripped up in thinking about conditions as opposed to expectations, right?

That is to say, my argument is that divine love, biblically speaking, comes without conditions, but with expectations, right? God does not say, do this or I will stop loving you. God says, I love you and I want you to do this. I'm not gonna stop loving you. But, I do have expectations, and I think parents struggle with this all the time.

How do you convey to children, I have expectations of you, but they don't make my love for you conditional. Or conversely, I love you unconditionally, but I'm not inviting you to go through life being complacent and self satisfied. Quite the contrary. I love you in the hopes that you will exercise your agency.

in particular ways. And I think sort of related to this is it seems to me that the Bible and then rabbinic tradition very dramatically emphasize that God believes in the centrality and urgency of human agency. God does not want to build a redeemed or perfected world on God's own. That's what covenant means, right?

The invitation of human beings to participate in the divine project of building a world. I think that you can almost say you can't have covenant if love is conditional, because human beings will fail God left and right. And so if God's love is conditional, then the relationship is almost impossibly volatile.

I love you at 1015, but at 1020, I can't stand you. You can't really have a relationship like that. So if there's going to be covenant, probably that's also why forgiveness and repentance is so important. are so central to Jewish spirituality, because if God's going to take us seriously, there have to be, if you will, mechanisms or processes by which relationships that have been ruptured can be restored.

Now, one question, actually, Miroslav, if I could, that I would ask you is, one of the things, a 20th century Jewish philosopher named Eliezer Berkovits. who was very hostile, I should say, to Christianity, which is why I have some suspicion about this. He carried a tremendous amount of post Holocaust rage, sort of felt like Christians should just leave us alone.

That's all we want from Christians and Christianity. But he says something really interesting, which is that, and I don't know if it's right, so I'm curious what you'll make of this. He argues that Judaism has always had much more of an embrace of human agency and partnership with God. than Christianity has.

And that's, he then argues, that's why the death of God theology is a Christian phenomenon. Because the notion that humanity come of age means that God can't be there anymore, he says, is totally foreign to Judaism. Because in Judaism, so he argues, God has always wanted humanity to come of age. God wants humans to take responsibility.

That kind of is built in all the way 

Miroslav Volf: down. Is that fair? I think that's a very interesting, very interesting thesis. My sense of kind of the death of God, the emergence of the death of God and what precipitated that is a kind of conviction that God is an entity. In the world and when God, uh, acts, human beings, uh, are passive and you cannot align divine and human agency.

And since we have come of ages, we, since we are responsible as human beings, since we have these, uh, fundamental responsibility to order our lives in the world. presence of God would some kind intrude on our deeply human task. And I mean, it's a kind of 

Shai Held: zero sum game of agency. Zero sum, 

Miroslav Volf: exactly. Zero sum game that, that simply then doesn't allow for God to actually act almost behind.

I sometimes think God acts behind our wills as informing the will in shaping the agency, and there is no need to set them in opposition to one another. So I think there may be two ways to articulate a similar problem. And that is the problem that the expectation is, if I act, either I act or God acts.

And that seems to me deeply problematic. I hope I didn't take us too far from where you were, uh No, no. I think that's a very important topic. And I was going to say, returning back to this unconditional love, I love the way you put it. It's both an analogy of human, parent, and the child. And I think it's a broadly significant issue.

I think especially in the time of The pressure to perform performance oriented society and the judgment of every human beings end up being it's performance measured. And if you not do not measure up, then the, there's some, i, I cut you off. Uh, you are no longer interesting, important, uh, to me and to have this idea that you quite, you.

unconditionally matter, but that doesn't mean that I'm not interested in your performance. To the contrary, I want to make sure that you have conditions in which you can perform in the best possible way, but nothing can separate, uh, nothing can cut off my commitment to you. I think that's what, uh, a parent, good parent tells to their child, makes it possible.

Go ahead. No, 

Shai Held: I, yeah, I think that's a very powerful and I, I would just say it, it prompts two thoughts for me that are really related maybe where you're thinking and my writing about Judaism in an interesting way dovetail, which is that one of the things that it seems to me that believing or affirming unconditional love does, or at least in theory does, is make possible a kind of religious alternative to the culture of comparison and competition, right?

But because I think so much of our culture. We have a kind of illusion that we can acquire self worth by putting down other people. I'm worth something because you're worth less. I'm, I have worth because I'm better looking than you are. I have worth because I've accomplished more than you have. As opposed to I have worth and you have worth because God loves both of us.

It's such a radically counter cultural idea. It's a kind of theological counter culture. to the kind of almost obsessive need to quote unquote, prove myself. And again, I don't mean that as I know you don't as, oh, so therefore be completion and don't do anything, but it allows it to be about contributing to the world, doing good rather than earning my value.

The way that I put this, which has been helpful to me in my own thinking is that divine love is not something we earn, but something we strive to live up to. Similarly, human worth is not something we earn, but something we strive to live up to. I don't earn the fact that I'm infinitely valuable. That's divine grace.

Now the question is, how will I live in light of being told that, given that God loves me? Now what?

Miroslav Volf: The interesting part is that in both of our traditions, and in this regard, they seem to be almost one. It's a kind of. performance if you want against the backdrop of a kind of stable set of values. And, uh, that's, uh, if people think, well, I've got to earn, uh, salvation, I got to earn that, that, that love. It has its own internal, internal problems.

And I think tradition has then nicely and rightly put it that, well, if it depends, if relationship to God depends on our performance, it's going to be very fragile and most of the time won't even succeed. But what I find so difficult in a situation, in situation today is that we don't have even objective standards against which I can measure myself.

The only measurement or predominant measurement that we use is how do I stack over against you? And so then it is a completely freewheeling competition and you're completely at the mercy of other people's performance because you don't have anything objective to measure yourself. So doubly We have a difficulty, and I think it's really a fantastic, fantastic to see this in the tradition, how relevant, at least to my mind, it is.

Now, I was struck reading, reading you and your teacher, um, one of your teachers, John Levinson, how central that is in the, The reason why God chose Israel in the reason why God chose Abraham, or in the absence, actually, of reasons for choice, where it then doesn't become choice based on performance, but choice based on the relationship as such, and then undercut, compare it with others, undercut striving for superiority.

Yeah, 

Shai Held: there's a wonderful comment, Moshe Weinfeld, who was a great biblical scholar in the last generation, a great scholar of Deuteronomy. He talks about how strenuously Deuteronomy wants to avoid the temptation of a superiority complex, which is why Deuteronomy wants to say, I want to remind you, you were not chosen because you're wonderful.

If anything, you're really not that special, right? Divine election is grace. Right? Divine election is pure grace. John Levinson calls it at one point, a bolt from the blue. Abraham is walking down the street one day and God says, I think I love you. It's a very strange, right? It's actually, and I think, I think I talk about this at one point in the book.

There's a kind of, the Jewish tradition has always struggled. And I imagine this is true about Christianity too, but you can tell me on the one hand, You don't want to say ever that election is a function of having been earned. But on the other hand, if you say it's totally a function of grace, how do you avoid it seeming capricious, right?

In other words, it's not that Abraham was virtuous. It's that Abraham was loved by God. But if it was just that Abraham was loved by God, then why Abraham? Which is why I think later tradition then starts telling stories about Abraham's great virtue. It's like you have this dialectic, right? You want to avoid both poles, a kind of grace that turns to caprice.

Miroslav Volf: Or you might, you, you might take it in a slightly different direction. You might take those that capricious, seemingly capricious choice to be the choice that involves not only the recipient of love, but also the entirety of the humanity. And one way to read Genesis 12, 1 to 3, where the blessing of Abraham is predominantly a blessing for him, there are a whole, almost full three verses about blessing for Abraham, but then it culminates in the idea that he And in that sense, it's a choice, uh, capricious, maybe, as it is, but it's a choice that redounds to the good of the whole, rather than simply being about Abraham, and in that sense, it may be a choice.

disanalogous to falling in love as it is, uh, the terms are used of God falling in love with, at least with Israel in due to, um, uh, because generally one doesn't fall in love in an intimate setting so that one can be something special to the whole world, right? But even there, I suppose, one can have a sense that we are there together.

I have fallen in love with you so that we together can become something for not just ourselves, but for others as well. Yeah. I think that I might 

Shai Held: put this just a tiny bit differently, which is, I don't think. That in Genesis, you can say that God falls in love with Abraham so that it will redound. But rather, God falls in love with Abraham and it will redound.

Meaning, I, I am, I'm a little bit skeptical about the instrumentalization that becomes used. Kind of a temptation among some Christian thinkers. God falls in love or God loves Abraham so that God can bless all of humanity. This is something that of Walter Moberly, a great Christian Bible scholar, has really been emphatic about, right?

It is not the case that Abraham is chosen so that he can bring blessing. It's that Abraham is chosen and he must bring blessing. In other words, nobody says, actually, I'm falling in love with you so that we can do good. I'm falling in love with you and our love means that we can do good. That feels more.

I don't know, it captures the dialectic of love more deeply to me, and as opposed to a so that. I would also just say, by the way, one of the reasons that I feel so drawn, and I think my own structuring of the book, the reason I start with humanity rather than chosenness, which is a obviously like a choice in Jewish thought, is because I was very drawn essentially to this one kind of teaching of Rabbi Akiva in the Mishnah.

that every human being on the face of the earth is loved simply by being created in the divine image. That's, I think, his understanding of the logic of Genesis 1. And that makes the conversation about covenant and election Come second rather than first. In other words, what comes first is the love that is rooted in creation.

And if I can kind of enter obscure land for a minute, that was a kind of Maimonidean choice on my part to center the theology around creation, which makes possible universal love, and only then to talk about covenantal love. Is that clear? 

Miroslav Volf: No, that's interesting and that's clear, but I think what you do also with the story of Noah's Flood, especially for with the connection between the reason why it says that God has decided to repent creating humanity and the reason why God gives for why it happened.

He has decided never to destroy humanity again, that those are exactly the same reason, but then established something like the universal covenant with humanity as a whole. And that seems to me quite right, that there's a certain unconditionality that's already present in Noah's covenant with Noah, and with the entirety of the humanity.

Shai Held: I wonder whether we should just back up for a second and make sure that listeners just understood the allusion you just made, because I think it's actually not an obvious point about Genesis, which is that in Genesis 6, just to sort of draw this out for a minute, but God says, right, I essentially, or God thinks I will destroy humanity because the human inclination is evil from their youth.

And then two chapters later, God says, I will never destroy them again. Why? Because human nature is evil. And it's just so bizarre. How does the very same reason for giving up on humanity then become a reason for promising never to give up on humanity? Right? I'm, I'm, I'm belaboring the point, but I want to just draw it out for a minute, right?

And it becomes this amazing opportunity to display divine grace towards all humanity. And then also, as I tried to argue in the heart of Torah, I think it's a really powerful ethical lesson that very often the reasons we give ourselves for writing people off, if we just frame the same reason a little differently.

can be grounds for actually seeing people empathically and through the eyes of love, right? I think, you know, the example that if I remember correctly, I give there is, I say to someone, I say about someone in my mind, Oh, I just can't stand her. She's like incapable of being nice. And then I have the chance to say, Oh, wait a minute, she's actually incapable.

Maybe I could see her in a different way. Now, I don't think I talk about this in the present book, but something parallel seems to happen between God and Moses, right? Which is that God says, I'm going to destroy this people because they're stubborn. And then Moses, in a moment of utter chutzpah, there's no other way to put it, says, forgive them.

You know why? Maybe. Because they're stubborn. How does that work? God just said, I'm tired of them because they're stubborn, and Moses says, no, can you reframe that? Maybe their stubbornness means you should actually have mercy, and God says, oh, okay, that's a really good point. 

Miroslav Volf: That's an amazing moment. I think it's an amazing moment.

It's an amazing moment in Genesis 8, and it's an amazing moment in Exodus 34, to which you have just referred to. And I take from this that unless God, given who we are, and given what we do with the freedom which we have been given by God, if God bases relationship to us on our moral performance, There will not be no relationship, and if there is to be a relationship to which God is committed by creating us, it has to be based on a different, not on our performance, but simply on deep commitment that is unbreakable.

And I think that's where one gets then to the universality and unconditionality of love. And I, reading you, reading, reading others, and especially this connection between Moses And Noah, it struck me how fundamental grace, unconditional grace, unconditional love is in the Hebrew Bible in the Pentateuch.

Shai Held: The funny thing is, Miroslav, that brings us back all the way to where we started, because that is another aspect of Judaism, which I think many Jews gave up in their attempt to separate themselves from Christianity. Christianity is all about grace. Oh, Judaism is not about that. Judaism, if I had a dollar for every time a knowledgeable, committed synagogue going Jew said to me, Oh, grace is a Jewish idea.

I would be a very rich man. And it's remarkable because it's so essential. One of the highest liturgical moments of the year on the days of awe, we say Jews, Jews pray. And you could feel it with so much passion, right? Our father, our King show us grace and answer us. Because we have no deeds. If that's not a prayer for grace, then what is Right.

Right, right, 

Miroslav Volf: right. Beautiful. What is I and I, I think we talked about contemporary culture, to have a commitment to someone that is, cannot be altered by lack of performance. It seems to be such an incredibly. important experience. And that actually ends up, as you suggested earlier, leading people into possibility of flourishing life, almost sometimes against themselves and their own nature, because they know that somebody else not just believes in them, but somebody else stands by them utterly unconditionally.

And it seems to me such a transformative conviction, much more powerful than. Coming to a person with a finger wagging and telling them to shape up, you know, it 

Shai Held: reminds me, I forgive me for, for not remembering fully, but one of your books, the subtitle is something like, in a culture stripped of grace. Yes.

And I remember being very struck by that phrase, a culture stripped of grace, and sort of wondering what would a culture suffused with grace in contrast look like? Yeah, that's, that's, 

Miroslav Volf: we'd act like God does, it seems to me, in many ways. Now, so, so you mentioned arbitrariness of election, and I, as a Christian, make sense of this arbitrariness of election by saying, Yeah, that's for those who are elect, but those who are elect are not elect simply for themselves.

And, uh, I know that there is a concern, especially in Jewish Christian relations, about instrumentalization, so that then the purpose ends up being, for some kind of a mission. And then once that mission is accomplished, then the particular who was chosen for that mission can be dropped out of, out of view.

Now, I think by this would, from where I sit, this would be kind of radical betrayal of the choice of that individual if one instrumentalized it, right? So, So, but somehow I'm, I find it difficult to have the idea of arbitrariness and there. And so I think in a sense, as a Christian, I think, well, without taking anything away from what has been given by God in God's election to the Jews, that which is given to them is given to all.

The kind of unconditionality of love, maybe in a different way, so that it's not either or, but it is the universality of, right, that unconditional love, which was already been suggested, indicated in the covenant with Noah. So, I'm going to If I 

Shai Held: were to argue what you're saying biblically, and this is actually, this was kind of an arresting discovery for me, I mean, it was not my discovery, I don't think, but when I first came upon it, it was so moving to me, is that Exodus 34, 6 and 7, famously, right, God, merciful, compassionate, gracious, so there is a covenant description, right, that's about God's relationship to Israel, and then you get to Psalm 145, which Jews recite it.

Multiple times a day. Right? Ashrei Yoshvei Betech, a fortunate other ones who dwell in your house. And you get to the eighth and ninth verses, which are quote Exodus 34, six and seven, but then say, verse 145, nine, God is good to all. God's mercies are upon all of God's creations, that multiple repetition of the word all.

And you realize that what has been until that moment covenantal is now reimagined creationally, right? God is merciful, compassionate, and gracious. to all. To go back to your language, maybe you might say the logic of Genesis 8 is now made explicit that God is gracious to all of God's creations. And interestingly, that verse, Psalm 145.

9 forms, you could argue, the very heart of Maimonides vision of ethics, because it is a kind of radical universalization of moral obligation, right? Maimonides says, for example, yeah, there are certain laws that say, You can treat your community members better than you treat other people, but a virtuous person would never do that.

Miroslav Volf: Oh, that's interesting. 

Shai Held: And then quote Psalm 145, nine, after all, God's mercy is upon all of God's creatures. And I think if I, if I remember correctly in the guy that perplexed at one point, he even says, yes, to be clear, God's mercy is upon all of God's creations includes animals. Human beings are not the only God's creations.

Oh, that's fascinating. So one has to have mercy on everything God has made. I love the sort of the potential ecological power of that also is really rich and interesting. So that would be my kind of biblical defense of the case 

Miroslav Volf: that you're making. I love it. I love it. I love also that you included, or my modernist included animals.

I'm just working reading Schopenhauer. And one of the big Schopenhauer's critique of whole Christian tradition in particular is nasty toward Jewish tradition. That's no other way to say it. And one of his signature false accusation is Uh, how awful Christians and Jews are to animals. So he's one of the first to attend to the feelings of all sentient beings.

So Maimonides will serve as a good counterpoint, uh, in, in Psalm 140, 140 as well. By 

Shai Held: the way, I, one of the, if I could just add to this, I think Maimonides actually very explicitly in refusing anthropocentrism. argues that it's really crucial to notice how many times God looks at things and says they are good before God creates a person.

Yeah. Right. In other words, you know, for him, very important, the notion that the world is a kind of claim of arrogance that needs to be let go of. Right? And that is, that is what God says, look, the animals are good. My biblical version of that for what it's worth is Genesis 1 is like a hymn to biodiversity, right?

God doesn't just create animals. God creates animals of every kinds. God creates birds of every kind. God creates plants of every kind. It's like God is looking around saying, look how gorgeous this is. 

Miroslav Volf: An interesting, I don't know, you can tell me whether that that's right. It's totally not based on any sense of grammar there, but on the logic of the text, the first chapter of Genesis as a whole, when everything was done, then God says that it was all very good.

And so the good are individual kind of And then everything together becomes very good. I read it, maybe I read into it as, uh, it's not just that we have specific good things. It's that this good in the world, the creation and its interrelations is the very good thing. And hence, then even more ecologically kind of attuned that we belong all together in one community of creation.

And that's what is very good. 

Shai Held: Yeah, I love that. I think Psalm 104 comes pretty close to saying that, this sort of notion of an ecological harmony. Bill Brown has this wonderful, the Bible scholar Bill Brown has this wonderful comment about one of the later verses in Psalm 104 where he says, what separates humanity and the lions is that humanity takes the day shift and lions take the night shift.

But there's a kind of wonderful, there's a kind of wonderful harmony that's imagined there. Oh, that's fantastic.

Miroslav Volf: So talking about this unconditional love and then the obligation of Israel to respond to God in love as a kind of a pillar of the entire, entire faith. You also come to write about love for stranger. That is to say, the one who doesn't belong to people of Israel, but is within the boundaries of the, within the, or among the people, or maybe even outside, and love for the enemy, and I was reading, especially this, uh, text your, your chapter on love of for the Enemy.

And I think, wow, this is interesting because all sorts of quotations, uh, in the New Testament motivation to love the enemy is often given via quotations of texts. that you engage in that chapter from the Hebrew Bible, because obviously, for first Christians, this was the only holy book that they had, and they drew on it.

And so this is kind of, as you mentioned, also fundamental to Christian tradition. Christians have, over the centuries, have questions about how does that, how do we interpret that, especially in situations of, uh, of violence and especially in situations of where we ourselves have been, been attacked. Now, this kind of teaching obviously has opposed us, uh, a challenge for situations in which we find ourselves, and I wanted to ask you, what implications do you think that what you've written, this book, Judaism Being, about love has concretely for the situation currently that we have in Israel and in Gaza?

Shai Held: Yeah, that's obviously an interesting and really difficult question. The truth is your preamble makes me want to have a whole nother discussion about love of enemies as a category, but, but let me, let me, let me respond. I would say a few things that are not intended to be some grand synthetic statement, but actually just kind of like a series of thoughts.

One is to begin in a way that is not always popular. I think. It's important to acknowledge the ways that, in moments of profound crisis, it is understandable and sometimes even salutary. To begin by responding with compassion and concern for one's own community. Because as I tried to write about it extensively in this book, you know, Judaism really does kind of have this ethic of expanding circles of concern that it starts with family and moves out from there.

Doesn't try to transcend human nature, but tries to build from it. So I want to say that the kind of initial response of Caring for one's own first feels to me to be, there's nothing immoral or problematic about that. It might actually be simply part of what it means to be a human being. Now, that said, it is really essential, I think, not to allow that experience either A, to blunt one's compassion for those who are not one's community, including those who are in a war zone when one is fighting real enemies.

Right? And then secondly, the temptation to dehumanize is one that must always and everywhere be resisted. Right? And that I think is the fundamental, a fundamental implication of Genesis 1, right? The claim that every human being on the face of the earth is infinitely valuable without exception. Right?

John Levinson, who you invoked earlier, has this beautiful essay where he says, the Bible is different. then most ancient Near Eastern texts in that most ancient Near Eastern texts tell a creation story which culminates in the creation of the culture telling the story. But Israel was different in that it chose to tell a creation story in which it was not primordial.

Israel's creation story is about the creation of Adam, not the creation of Abraham. So there's a kind of universalism there. John calls that the universal horizon of biblical particularism, which I think is just a wonderful phrase. Yeah. And so The temptation to dehumanize has to be resisted for two crucial intertwined reasons, it seems to me.

Beyond the obvious is a kind of falsehood, a sacrilege, a kind of, it is a failure to live up to one's own theological heritage. But also, when you dehumanize people. You actually not only dehumanize them, but almost ineluctably you dehumanize yourself. You can't actually assault another person's humanity without on some level weakening or sullying your own.

And that I think is a really deep moral, spiritual challenge. Also, to be perfectly honest, if you dehumanize people, you actually end up not holding them morally accountable. Right? You see someone as an animal. So then what, right? In other words, to me, the whole point is Hamas are not animals. They're human beings who have an incredibly toxic ideology that has to be reckoned with and combated.

Now, so where this gets incredibly messy is that it seems to me that Israel had, you know, a kind of just cause for war in this situation. And the problem becomes the execution of war as so often in just war theory. The question is, I think in just war theory, is any war ever fought fully justly, right? And that is like, and that's, of course, why a lot of people are skeptical about just war arguments.

But I think actually I would want to say something else. really fundamental that it feels to me has been lost on, it feels to me, I'm not sure I would want to argue this because I would have to think more carefully about this. It's, it has felt to me over the past nine months that this has been lost on both sides of the political spectrum, which is that at the end of the day, if the Middle East and the land of Israel are ever to become less blood soaked, what will be required is Two peoples engaging in profoundly empathic listening to one another's stories.

There is no other way because neither side is going anywhere. The fantasies of rightists or leftists notwithstanding, right? Jews are not going back to Poland. And when you say that, you're inviting them to go back and be genocided. And Palestinians are not going anywhere. This is their land. And Jews are How Jews who have loved this land for 2, 000 years of all people should be sensitive to another people who feel incredibly close and bonded.

to this land. There's a, there was a religious Zionist leader in the last century whose writings I really admired, Moshe Una, was a prominent German Jewish educator who moved to Israel and became both a politician and a prominent educator and founded the religious Zionist peace movement. And he has this one speech that he gives that for some reason I keep going back to in my own thinking, where he says, when we want to teach our kids to be connected to this land, there are two tasks we have.

One, is to have them understand that Jews dreamed of this place for thousands of years, and that this is a unique place where God's commandments can be fulfilled, and this is a place of religious yearning, religious aspiration, historical connection. And the second is, we have to teach our children that there is another people who feels the same way.

It's like so simple. I think what I, what I struggle with is that so much of the protests of the war have actually been a kind of, Oh, well, Jews don't have any right to this land. Jews are just white colonialists. Whereas actually it feels to me that if we want to heal this conflict, that is profoundly counterproductive.

The story we have to tell is, no, there are two people who love this place so, so deeply. Can they find a way to either share it or split it? Because if they don't, to borrow that famous James Baldwinism, the fire next time will consume us all. It already is. It already is, right? You have tens of thousands of Palestinians who are dead, hundreds of thousands of Israelis who can't go home, either in the South or the North, right?

Is this the future that we're all going to have? And I guess what I find profoundly saddening is that so much of the protest of this war has, it seemed to me, really lacked empathy and actually perpetuated the Really destructive ways of thinking about this conflict. So many of the people who feel so righteous about the positions they're taking, I think are not helping because both sides need to find ways to really hear the reality of other people's stories.

And yes, you can say one side, I'm totally open to this argument, one side presently has more power and therefore has greater responsibility. Okay, but still, there are 

Miroslav Volf: two stories here. And the logic, once one goes and follows the logic of war, it creates this almost impermeable fronts that are opposed, radically opposed, so that if a story like yours is told, either side might take it as, well, you're doing it.

Just taking my enemy away, would how I would be put it, or you're trying to weaken the sides. We see that in American politics in a slightly different, different way. And I think reminder of this horizon of universality in any particularism, whether that's Christian or Jewish particularism is really very, very important.

I think you, you know, that every year Judaism is always, uh, Uh, one of the traditions that we, that we engage in this course. So, uh, so it's repeatedly there. I have come to think that we live in a situation of contending particular universalisms. A lot of positions are universal, but they're all parallel.

particular this, uh, universalistic, but they're particular out of particular space, time, perspective and so forth. And they're not sitting like a variety of flavors of ice cream next to each other. But actually, they're kind of contending for the truth of their position. And that that's kind of a perspective that partly informs also what we do with this life worth living.

And life worth living is we are asking the question, you know, it's not how do you get from point A to point B, which is what Our culture is obsessed with, probably rightly, because there's so many A's and so many B's to which we have to arrive, what kind of B is worth getting to? And how does that fit into the vision of who we are as human beings?

At the end of this very rich conversation about your new book, maybe it's good for me to ask you a kind of a personal question, though I notice that the book as a whole seems to be a testament of a certain sense of what Judaism is about and what you as a rabbi stand for. If you were asked, what kind of life?

is worthy of our humanity. How would you answer that question? What a rich and 

Shai Held: enormous question. So it's funny that when you asked that, something popped into my mind that I hope I'm not misremembering. There is a medieval midrash on Genesis 127. Let us make human being in our image after our likeness, which says the human is created in God's image.

But whether we become God's likeness, is a function of the choices we make. And I guess what I would want to argue or suggest, or what I've maybe learned over the course of my life, is that. A major piece of what it means to grow into being God's likeness is to constantly be engaged in the project of growing in love, of becoming more compassionate and loving.

of learning to care more and more deeply, of learning to de center the ego. You know, obviously, there's so many answers to what a good life can look like, but I think that love, love I would argue is the red thread that makes human life worth living, and that maybe kind of enables us. to at moments at least live up to the love that God has bestowed upon

Miroslav Volf: us. Shai, thank you for this answer. Thank you for this conversation. And especially thank you for writing this book that is so rich and enriching. And thank you for the life of study and teaching. in which you are engaged and out of which such wonderful products emerge. 

Shai Held: Thank you so much, Miroslav. It's been a pleasure.

Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Shai Held and Miroslav Volf. Our production assistants are Alexa Rollow, Emily Brookfield, Kacie Barrett, and Zoë Halaban. I'm Evan Rosa, and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at either faith.yale.edu or lifeworthliving.yale.edu, where you can find podcasts, articles, books, and all sorts of other educational resources that help people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity. If you're new to the show. Remember to hit subscribe. And if you're a faithful listener, consider sharing the episode or giving us an honest rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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