Judaism Is a Religion of the Heart - Shai Held, WSJ

Speaking to a class at one of America’s major rabbinical seminaries, I once remarked in passing that “Judaism is built on the idea that God loves us and beckons us to love God back.” Seemingly bewildered by what I’d said, one of the students declared: “I’m sorry, but that sounds like Christianity to me.”

We have all heard it a thousand times. Christianity is about love, we are told, but Judaism is about…something else, like law or justice. In a similar vein, we often hear that whereas Christianity cares about how you feel and what you believe, Judaism cares only about what you do. Judaism is a religion of action, we’ve been taught, not emotion; a religion of deeds, of rote rituals, not inwardness.

Centuries of Christian anti-Judaic polemics are not the only source of such distortions and misapprehensions; they are also part of a broader phenomenon in American Jewish life. Perhaps because of anxiety about assimilation, American Jews long ago began to define Judaism as whatever they thought Christianity was not. So because Christianity was about love, Judaism was, well, not about love.

Another crucial example: because Christianity stressed divine grace, many Jews held that Judaism did not really have a notion of grace. I have been asked countless times by educated and religiously observant Jews whether grace is a Jewish idea; each time I am surprised afresh at how something so essential to Judaism can seem so alien to it. Yet grace—in Hebrew, hein or hesed—is foundational to Jewish theology and spirituality. The gift of life is grace—the existence of the world is not something that anyone earned. God’s love for us is grace—it is not something we earn but something we strive to live up to. And the revelation of Torah is grace—it is a divine gift given to us through no merit of our own.

(snip)

The Torah issues three dramatic love commands. We are charged to love our neighbor, a fellow member of the covenant between God and Israel; to love the stranger, someone who lives among us despite not being part of our kin group and who is therefore vulnerable to exploitation; and to love God, who created the world, redeemed us from slavery, and gave us the Torah as an act of love and commitment. Later Jewish sources clarify that we have an additional obligation to love all human beings, who were created in the image of God and who are part of the same single human family as we are. Rabbinic tradition adds the challenge to “walk in God’s ways,” to respond to other people’s suffering with both compassionate feeling and compassionate action.


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Rabbi Shai Held is president of the Hadar Institute. This essay is adapted from his new book, “Judaism Is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life,” published March 26 by Farrar Straus Giroux.