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Apr 26, 2024 | 
jewishreviewofbooks.com | Benjamin Weiner |Akiva Schick |Yehudah Mirsky |Shai Held
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 560 pp., $35 At five o’clock in the afternoon, in James Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom finds himself in a Dublin pub, arguing over the meaning of life with a band of incredulous Christians.
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Apr 21, 2024 | 
nytimes.com | Shai Held
What do we do with our pain? What, if anything, can we learn from it? The Bible offers a startling and potentially transformative response: Let your memory teach you empathy and your suffering teach you love. This week, Jews around the world will mark the beginning of Passover. We'll gather for Seders, in which we'll re-enact the foundational story of the Jewish people, the Exodus from Egypt.
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Apr 2, 2024 | 
christiancentury.org | Peter W. Marty |Timothy Adkins-Jones |Emmy Brett |Shai Held
At its heart, Judaism is about love. If you find that claim surprising, you’re not alone. Many Christians and Jews—and, sadly, even some of my rabbinical students—view Christianity as a religion of love and grace while viewing Judaism as a religion merely of law and justice. We assume that Judaism values rituals and actions more than beliefs and emotions, and we’re taught that the God of the Hebrew Bible is angry and vindictive while the God of the New Testament is loving and forgiving.
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Mar 25, 2024 | 
jewishbookcouncil.org | Shai Held |Toby Lloyd
Tisha B’Av (the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av) is the most painful day of the Jewish year. According to the sages of the Talmud sages, all the major catastrophes of Jewish history fell on that day. God decreed that the wilderness generation would not enter the land of Israel; the first Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians, the second was destroyed by the Romans; and the list goes on.
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Mar 21, 2024 | 
wsj.com | Shai Held
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.
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Mar 17, 2024 | 
spiritualityandpractice.com | Shai Held
“The fact that a commitment to loving kindness is not uniquely Jewish is an extremely good thing, since there are very few Jews and a tremendous amount of suffering in the world. The more communities and worldviews that advocate and inculcate love manifested as kindness, the better. But more than that: something does not need to be uniquely Jewish in order to be authentically Jewish. “Kindness is at the very core of Judaism’s vision of the good life.
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Mar 17, 2024 | 
spiritualityandpractice.com | Shai Held
This will probably be the most important Jewish book to publish this year or even in the last few. Its message is essential, important for a Christian-centric world that seems to perceive the Christian tradition as all about love, while considering Judaism to be about law and justice. Shai Held — with a PhD from Harvard and rabbinic ordination through the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York — is one of the most articulate rabbis and scholars in North America today.
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Jan 13, 2024 | 
kirkusreviews.com | Shai Held |Marilynne Robinson |Albert Camus
A highly literate, thought-provoking, persuasive argument for the centrality of love in the Jewish faith. An exploration of the role of love in Jewish scripture, ethics, and practice. Held, president of the Hadar Institute and author of The Heart of the Torah, provides an erudite look at what lies at the heart of the Jewish faith. Noting that some view Judaism as based on justice, tradition, law, or other elements, the author argues convincingly that love is the central tenet.
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Dec 7, 2023 | 
publishersweekly.com | Sharon Brous |Shai Held |Lamar Hardwick |Christian Wiman
Marcus Anthony Hunter. Amistad, $29.99 (336p) ISBN 978-0-063-00472-6Inspired by the work of W.E.B. DuBois, Derrick Bell, and Octavia Butler, sociologist Hunter (Chocolate Cities) offers an imaginative and exhilarating vision of slavery as “a founding premise of the current human condition,” utilizing this idea as a launch point for his argument that “radical reparations” need to extend beyond the merely financial.
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Dec 7, 2023 | 
publishersweekly.com | Shai Held |Lamar Hardwick |Christian Wiman |Jacob Wright
Ruby Lal. Yale Univ, $30 (296p) ISBN 978-0-300-25127-2Historian Lal (Empress) delivers an insightful biography of princess Gulbadan Begum (1523–1603), an adventurer and influential presence at court during the early years of the Mughal empire. Born to Babur, the first Mughal king, Gulbadan’s youth was characterized by travel as her father expanded the empire across South Asia.
