(ANALYSIS) “Judaism Is About Love” is a new book that thoroughly and poetically shatters the misconception that the God of the Hebrew Bible is about law, while the God of the New Testament is about love. As a result, it creates healthy parameters for disagreement between Jewish and Christian believers.

It’s not news that Judaism and Christianity have a long and complicated history. Christianity came out of Judaism and was started by Jews who saw themselves as the continuation of their historical faith, but rejected by the majority of Jews at the time. When Christians came to power, they began to persecute Jews.

It is amid that backdrop that Christians and Jews have waged propaganda wars against each other in an effort to define one another. Christians, being the more influential majority, had more power to perpetuate such propaganda. Today, many Christians and Jews have created a somewhat unprecedented alliance of defending “Judeo-Christian values.” Yet old divisions remain, hence the controversy of The Daily Wire’s firing of Candace Owens for making antisemitic comments.

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Influential American Jewish Rabbi Shai Held’s “Judaism Is About Love” attempts to address one of the big misconceptions about Judaism, both within and without Judaism, that has arisen out of this mutual Christians-Jewish propaganda war. This misconception is that Christianity is about love, while Judaism is about “the law” or “justice.”

“I was speaking to a class of senior rabbinical students at a major American seminary” Held recounted in an interview with Religion Unplugged. “And I said in passing, ‘Judaism tells the story of a God who loves us and beckons us to love God back.’ And a fifth-year rabbinical student said, I have to say somewhat sneeringly. He said, ‘I'm sorry, but that sounds like Christianity to me.’ And was really taken aback, and I said, ‘I'm not sure how to respond to that other than to tell you that what I was thinking about is the twice a day Jewish liturgy in which we say to God, ‘With vast love, have you loved us?’”

This both shocked and saddened Held.

“What it made me understand is that centuries of Christian anti-Judaism, centuries of tragically Christianity's relentless insistence that Judaism is in some sense a loveless religion had been internalized by many, many Jews, including many devout and pious Jews, such that a fifth-year rabbinical student could say such a thing,” he said.

Having such conversations with both Jews and Christians, the rabbi was determined to write a book reclaiming the truth of God’s love being an essential part of Judaism.

“I wrote it for Jews as an act of recovery,” he added. “Let's reclaim what is fundamentally at the heart of the Jewish tradition and heart in both senses, heart as in core and heart as in our hearts, and also for Christians in the hopes that it would enable Christians to think and talk about Judaism in very different ways than have historically been the conventional ones.”

In his book, Held covers a lot of ground as to how the Hebrew Bible — the Old Testament to Christians — really is the story of God’s love, despite views to the contrary. He argues how God’s love and his wrath are not incompatible (on the contrary, how could a loving God not bring justice on the earth where there is injustice?), how love and rituals and rules are not incompatible (we are embodied creatures, and rituals help teach us and form us in a way that helps us love each other better), among other topics.

A lot of these problems, Held said he finds are based on “false dichotomies” that he tries to show in the book.

“So for example, Judaism is not about love, Judaism is about law. Well, here's the thing. According to Jewish tradition, law itself is a revelation of divine love,” he said. “Deuteronomy basically says that law is a means for God to be imminent. … The law is not something in Judaism we're supposed to break ourselves upon. The law is something that is God loves us so much that God gives us guidance as to how to make our way in the world and how to flourish. Deuteronomy likes to use the words ‘Letov Lak’ in Hebrew, for your very flourishing, for your very own good.”

Many Christians will find that plenty of his arguments reflect things they’ve been taught in their own Christian communities related to why a God of love involves wrath, rules and how His creation shows us His love. For those who’ve been raised to see the continuity between the Old and New Testament’s image of God (and who’ve benefited from resources such as The Biblical Mind), this is such a thorough examination of that continuity that Christians will find their love for God grow even more. For Christians who’ve been raised to see the stark differences between the God of the Old and New Testaments, this will be a deeply needed compliment to that tradition.

One of the best parts of Held’s writing, stylistically speaking, is how deftly he melds an analytical thoroughness with a poetic tenderness. He walks through each of his points with exactness and clarity, backing it up with biblical and extrabiblical evidence that makes his arguments as airtight as a logical thinker could ask for. Yet, woven through all of this is a deep emotional thread, a love for God, a love for his people, a hurt at injustice, a struggle with unanswered questions, which sometimes brings his prose closer to a Psalm. I rarely see non-fiction writers able to balance both of these aspects of the human experience so well, yet for a book about God, which inevitably brings up both intellectual and emotional questions, it is deeply necessary and satisfying.

Not every part of the book is as strong or thorough as the others. While most of his arguments are detailed and persuasive, sometimes one gets the impression that Held goes on flights of fancy away from which interpretation of scripture has the most backing, toward one he particularly prefers, such as when he jumps on a more speculative reason why Abraham might have been chosen by God or when he shies away from the idea that Israel was ever meant to be a light to the nations.

Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with taking a minority viewpoint. But he isn’t always clear that’s what he’s doing. He also, rather off-handedly, tosses truth away early in the book as unworthy of consideration regarding the topic of love. Given how much the “truth versus love” discussion is a subject of heated debate in some religious circles, I think showing how a God of love would balance these seems like a major oversight.

Some of the most interesting parts are where Held argues how Judaism and Christianity disagree. He lists the Christian emphasis on loving your enemies, the universality of Christianity and the missional emphasis of Christianity, to name a few. He argues that in many of these cases, the Jewish view of these things is better, or at least, more realistic.

When it comes to loving one’s enemies, Rabbi Held was very clear — both in the book and in our conversation — that both Jewish and Christian authors affirm both the need for self-defense and a strong ethic toward loving your enemies. 

“Where I do think there is a distinction is when you read Christian writers saying, ‘love of enemies is the very heart of Christian ethics,’ I don't think you're going to find Jewish thinkers say that,” Held told me. “And one of the reasons why I think is that a culture that is in power will often be enabled to talk and think in different ways than a culture that is fundamentally disempowered. Jews have felt the need to defend themselves, by the way, tragically often in the face of marauding Christians, that's what's so complicated.”

I pushed back that Jesus’s command to love one’s enemies, and the New Testament authors’ admonition to love one’s enemies at the heart of their ethics was done when they were a persecuted minority from both the Jews and Romans. He agreed that was true — and that the difference in emphasis couldn’t be reduced to that difference, but that it was still important context.

I asked him about how he saw the missional beliefs in Christianity as a distinction between Christianity and Judaism. For myself, I said, I am glad that Christianity had a missional bent because it’s for that reason that my ancestors were taken out of pagan barbarism and into the morality of God of the Bible (as Tom Holland wrote about in the book “Dominion”). How could a God of love not be “missional” in how he desires to save even the Gentiles like me, as Jesus sent his Apostles out to do?

“I think that the issue really is from, I think a Jewish theological perspective is that you can be to coin a term ‘good with God’ without being Jewish,” Held replied. “That is to say, God can have relationships with other persons and other peoples without needing them to be converted to one in the same religion and one in the same way of worshiping God. So it's not that if Judaism has a particularist story that, that means because God doesn't care about everyone else. It's that God doesn't need to convert everyone else to Judaism. And that's one of the ways that traditional Judaism and traditional Christianity are different.”

That said, the rabbi did agree that many Jews do see the benefits of Christians spreading the Bible around the world.

“One impulse is to write it off as a diluted monotheism or worse, after all there's one God, not three. I realize I'm being … right? And then there's another voice that says, ‘wait a minute, Christianity for all its anti-Judaism and antisemitism for all the theological disagreements we have has brought the word of the God of the Hebrew Bible all over the world.’ Clearly, Christianity has some role in God's outworking of God's relationship with all of humanity.”

Another fascinating part of the book for me as a Christian was his discussion of how the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70 changed Judaism and how Jewish thinkers thought and talked about suffering. Before that, while there was always an understanding that suffering could be mysterious, there was a strong tradition that huge acts of calamity typically happened to the Jewish people because they rejected God’s covenant, such as during the exile recorded in the Hebrew Bible. That changed with the destruction of the Second Temple because it was difficult to find an explanation as to how something so catastrophic could happen when they’d been so faithful.

The reason that’s so fascinating is the authors of the New Testament had an explanation, which they were very explicit about: The destruction of the Second Temple was due to the rejection of Jesus as the Messiah. Understanding how this event was seen by both Jews and Christians at the same time helped me understand both traditions religious traditions better.

The rabbi agreed.

“It's true that Christians had this story whereby there was an explanation in the traditional paradigm, and Jews were really groping, and the rabbis used that as an opportunity to say some, I think spiritually and ethically very profound things like the Second Temple was destroyed based on gratuitous hatred,” he said. “That is to say, it's not just big sins, like idolatry and sexual immorality, it's also just interpersonal brutality.”

But, he added, another strain of thought grew: “In the history of Jewish thought, there became this deep skepticism about measuring how good with God to return to that silly phrase, how good with God you are based on how much earthly political power you have.”

This gave pause to the rabbi as we talked, such that he noted one thing he admitted he hadn’t considered before: “There's a deep historical irony here, which is that Christianity that worshiped a God who in a fundamental way on some level celebrated his own powerlessness and renunciation of power, Christians felt confirmed in their superiority by the extent of their earthly power. And Jews who had inherited this biblical narrative about if you do X, then they'll be Y, actually felt like, well, that's not the right measure.”

Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York City. He is co-host of the podcast “The Overthinkers” and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.world, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers. His other work and contact info can be found at his website josephholmesstudios.com.