When discussing the Bible, Christians often contrast the God in the Hebrew scriptures with the God they believe is found in the Christian scriptures. According to this dichotomy, the God of Hebrew scripture is focused on laws and punishment—given to disturbing displays of violence—whereas the Christian God is loving and merciful. In this framing, Jesus came to reveal the truth about God, but the Jewish people rejected him.
This view, popular even among progressive Christians, edges into supersessionism: the belief that the covenant between God and the Jewish people was erased and replaced with a new covenant through Christ. It reiterates a simplistic narrative about Jesus’ relationship with his own heritage that has been used to justify Christian antisemitism for centuries. The dichotomy is also inaccurate about Judaism. As scholar and rabbi Shai Held argues in his new book, Judaism Is About Love (Macmillan), Jewish emphasis on law must be understood in the context of beliefs about God, love, forgiveness, and our responsibilities to one another. The view of Judaism as harsh and authoritarian is a caricature.
While Christian misrepresentations of Judaism as loveless are often innocent, motivated by a desire to highlight the radical nature of gospel teachings, these ideas still further antisemitism. And setting Jesus in opposition to his own Jewish heritage can mean missing out on important aspects of his teachings.
“The world is God’s,” Held writes. “God loves the world and accordingly, so must we.” It’s a commandment, yes, but hardly one that is set in opposition to love.
We sometimes hear that Christianity is about love, but Judaism is about rules. Where did the idea come from?
The historian David Nirenberg argues that the story Christianity traditionally told is that Judaism was a loveless religion, and Christianity came into the world to introduce love and repair what was broken in Judaism. That became integral to the long and horrifying tradition of Christian anti-Judaism.
Minority cultures often begin to see themselves the way the majority culture sees them. I suspect that many Jews, being a minority culture for 2,000 years, internalized the Christian insistence that Judaism is not about love. And that has done incredible damage—both in allowing Christianity to perpetuate an insidious set of stereotypes and in distorting Jews’ own relationship to the Jewish tradition. In Judaism Is About Love, and more broadly in my work, I’m trying to help Jews reclaim the very heart of the Jewish tradition and help Christians think differently about Jews, Judaism, and their relationship to Judaism.
The very framing of this opposition, rules versus love, is foreign to Judaism. For Judaism, law is a manifestation of love, not a contrast to it. Every morning, Jews thank God for loving us and manifesting that love by giving us guidance, laws, teachings, and principles. Jews talk about delighting in God’s law.
How do we understand the God of the Hebrew scriptures as a God of love, considering the passages about vengeance and violence?
I think this idea from Christian Bible scholar Brent Strawn is helpful: If you are a Christian who is disturbed by divine violence in the Hebrew Bible, what do you make of the Book of Revelation, which far exceeds anything in the Hebrew Bible in its vision of violence? In other words, if we see divine violence as a problem, it is a problem for Christians, too.
I don’t pretend to be able to solve the problem of divine violence in the Hebrew Bible. That said, I’m not sure that divine anger is something that people should be so embarrassed by. Certain moral philosophers argue that anger is sometimes a function of taking someone seriously. Meaning, if I see you commit an injustice and my reaction is indifference, then either I don’t care about the victim or I don’t respect you enough to have an emotional reaction to how you behaved.
The fact that God takes us seriously is precisely what leads to God being disappointed in us. That doesn’t solve the problem of explosive divine violence, but it frames the question differently. Jewish theologian Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel writes that in a world after the Holocaust, the notion of divine anger is in some sense a comfort because it means that someone somewhere cared about the murder of the Jews. It means that the whole cosmos is not indifferent to the oppression of the vulnerable.
Divine violence in the Bible is troubling, but we find that in the New Testament too. I think we must be nuanced when we talk about divine anger. In a world in which Auschwitz happens, a God who doesn’t get angry might be irrelevant.
How does Judaism understand love?
First, it helps to understand human love as a disposition to act and feel in certain ways. It’s not an emotion in the sense that we should always feel loving. I find it helpful to think of an “existential posture”—a way of holding myself in the world. Love has an emotional dimension but is not itself the emotion. I can love my neighbor even when my primary feeling at that moment is grumpiness.
Of course, no tradition is a monolith, but one way Judaism and Christianity differ is that for Jews, law is a revelation of love. Jews have this notion of simchah shel mitzvah or the “joy of being commanded.” If Christians want to understand Jewish spirituality, they have to wrestle with this notion, which is integral to Judaism.
Another way Judaism and Christianity differ is that Christians often view love of neighbor as love of everyone in the world equally. And other Christian thinkers have asked: How does one do that? Jews would never say that love of neighbor means love of everyone in the world equally. Judaism celebrates the particular.
Am I supposed to love everyone equally, or am I supposed to love my child more? The answer is “yes.” Sometimes “family first” can deteriorate into “family only,” but the notion that I don’t start with my family is psychologically incoherent. Judaism has this idea that God doesn’t make impossible demands. Jewish ethics works with the grain of nature.
Is this Christian focus on the universal a problem?
Christian culture generally assumes that universalism is superior to particularism. But universalism has historically gone hand-in-hand with imperialism. That is, if I believe I have the truth and it is intended for everyone, I am tempted to force everyone to accept it. So universalism is the opposite of pluralism and can be quite violent.
The advantage of particularism is that Jews aren’t trying to convert the whole world to Judaism. Jews assume that non-Jews who live lives of integrity can have a relationship with God, and Judaism has traditionally been much less violent than Christianity or Islam. Part of that, of course, is because Jews were often powerless, but also, Jews didn’t have that ambition for global domination. Judaism is universalistic, in a way, but it starts local and moves to the global.
Rather than succumb to the temptation of religious triumphalism, we should think about the trade-offs in any theological position. Universalism does have its benefits: You don’t forget about people. But it also has its dangers: You’re tempted to do violence to them. And the opposite is true, too. Starting with the particular can lead to getting stuck on the particular—or it can be a path toward deeper love.
Does Judaism have a teaching about loving our enemies?
Christians have often been divided about what this command means. What does it demand of us? Is it an emotion or an action? Is it only personal, or does it embrace the political sphere? And what do we mean by enemy? It could mean someone I don’t get along with at work or someone like Vladimir Putin.
To say that Christianity counsels us to love our enemies, whereas Judaism says we don’t have to, would be simplistic. In my book, I include several passages that instruct us to repay cruelty with kindness. At the same time, some Christian scholars argue that love of enemies is the essence of Christian ethics. Jews, by contrast, are much more ambivalent about love of enemies, especially violent ones. It is easier for a tradition that has historically had a lot of power to talk about love of enemies than it is for people who have struggled to survive for centuries. As a Jew, I’m part of a tradition that Christianity has often seen as an enemy. And Christians have not always treated Jews with love.
What does it mean to love enemies who are trying to eradicate you?
In such situations, our first mandate is to survive, to keep our covenant with God alive, and to not let the enemy define us. For Jews, love of enemies tends to be something in the interpersonal sphere. There’s an interesting midrash, or Jewish rabbinic interpretation on scripture. It’s a simple story about two traveling men who have had a falling out. One sees that the other’s donkey has fallen but keeps walking. Then he remembers that the Bible says that if you see your enemy’s donkey has fallen, you should help him. He goes back. They help the donkey up, then go to an inn for a drink. By the end of the evening, they’re friends. And the man realizes that this is what it means when we say God’s laws are just: They bring people together.
Does everyone you think of as an enemy really need to be thought of that way? Can’t they just be someone who hurt you? There’s another midrash that says, “If your enemy comes to your home with the intention of killing you, you should give him food and drink and then God will bring peace between you.” But Jewish law says that if someone comes to kill you, you are permitted to kill them first. So what does this mean? Someone comes to kill you, and you give them a sandwich?
I think the point is that there are sometimes other ways to disarm a situation. I think about stories of Jews who have invited white supremacists to Shabbat meals. I’m not saying it is easy. Once when I taught this text, a rabbi broke down in tears and said, “I have been physically struck by white supremacists. I find this text unbearable. I was scared for my children.”
Religion is often better at giving us the language for the questions than it is in offering pat answers. I walked away from writing my chapter on enemy love feeling, if anything, less certain about what the concrete instructions of the Jewish tradition are. But I felt like I could talk about the issue in more intelligent ways.
Can the Jewish tradition of loving the stranger be practically applied to immigration issues today?
The Bible enacts an interesting moral revolution. In the ancient Near East, there was a preoccupation with the well-being of widows and orphans, the paradigmatic examples of people vulnerable to the depredations of the powerful. The Bible takes that preoccupation with widows and orphans but expands that to include strangers.
A stranger or sojourner means someone who is not part of the kin group, and therefore they are subject to exploitation. The Bible goes from the already lofty aspiration to protect our own vulnerable to the even loftier aspiration to protect anyone who is vulnerable.
Scholars have long debated how to translate the Hebrew word ger. “Stranger” and “sojourner” are two translations. Some use “alien,” although that has weird connotations for American ears. Some scholars render ger as “immigrant.” It’s not a political choice to translate it that way. A more political choice would be to translate ger as “refugee,” but that feels inaccurate: All refugees may be gerim, but not all gerim are refugees.
I find it helpful to distinguish between a general ethos on the one hand and concrete guidance on the other. The Bible is never going to answer the question of how many refugees the United States should accept. But the Bible can tell you that demonizing or dehumanizing immigrants is an abomination. It can tell you that welcoming the vulnerable is a sacred task.
If God loves everyone, then what does it mean for the Jewish people to be “chosen”?
Chosenness has meant so many different things to Jews over the course of an unfolding tradition that it’s difficult to know where to start. I think it is important to insist that God’s choosing of the Jewish people, what scholars call “election,” is a function of grace rather than anything earned. Abraham doesn’t do anything to earn being chosen. And Deuteronomy explicitly tells the Israelites, “You might be tempted to think that God chose you because you’re great. You’re not greater than anybody else. God just fell in love with you.” The notion of election as grace undercuts the possibility of a superiority complex.
One approach to this is the idea that chosenness is a summons to holiness. Leviticus 19 states, “You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy.” Different texts accentuate different understandings of holiness.
Another idea I find inspiring is that God creates a world for us to live in, and we are invited to return the favor. The aspiration of Jewish spirituality is to make this a world where God can dwell, where God’s presence is acknowledged. God will not live in a world where the weak are savaged by the strong.
Chosenness is never moral license. It’s not a blank check to do what you want. In the Book of Amos, God basically says, “You have I loved among all the peoples of the Earth; therefore, I will hold you accountable for all of your sins.” Consider how subversive that is. “You have I loved among all the nations of the Earth,” does not mean “little sweetie, you can do whatever you want.” Election amplifies accountability.
The Bible is very clear that election should not translate into indifference to others. Deuteronomy emphasizes that God has given other lands to other peoples. God has other stories going on, if you will, with other peoples.
The idea of God giving people land has been abused a lot, including by Christians. How do we balance that with the demands of justice?
In the Bible, the promise of the land to the Israelites is eternal, but whether any generation of Israelites gets to partake of that blessing is dependent on their behavior. So you don’t have a right to the land. You have to live up to the expectations of covenant in order to merit being there.
Also, when some Jews say things like “the Temple Mount belongs to us,” I recoil a bit. Human beings don’t own the holy. God owns the holy. I’m not talking here about political arrangements, but religiously I find it somewhere between off-putting and unacceptable.
There was a religious Zionist leader in the last century named Moshe Unna who was a legislator in the Israeli government and an educator. And he wrote, “You know what education requires of us at this moment? It requires us to understand, to instill in our children a sense of deep, deep, visceral, and emotional attachment to this land. And also, it requires instilling them a sensitivity to the fact that there is another people who feels the same way. And our educational task is to make it possible for them to figure out how two people who share these feelings about the land can actually live together without killing each other.” Poignant words, obviously. One thing I’ve been researching over the years is how and why religious Zionism went from the most pacific part of the movement to the most jingoistic.
How can these Jewish ideas about love help us talk about all the devastation in history, including the conflict in the Middle East right now?
In times of crisis, it is OK and sometimes necessary to turn to family first. I don’t think it’s wrong for Jews to be sensitive to the suffering of their own family under attack. That said, compassion is always a virtue. No matter your view, the sheer horror and devastation of what has unfolded in Gaza should break your heart.
One thing that hurt many Jews deeply is that before the terror attacks of October 7 had even ended, people were already turning on the Jews. For many of my generation, it was a realization that, when push comes to shove, we have only ourselves. So yes, it’s OK to turn to family first. It’s not OK to lack compassion. And it is never OK to dehumanize.
Radicals on all sides are playing into one another’s narratives. Some Palestinians and leftist activists talk about bringing an end to the state of Israel, which basically means their annihilation. So Israelis feel they have to fight to the death. The spiral gets out of control, and Israelis and Palestinians move farther and farther away from any way we could live together on this land.
At the end of the day, Israel and Palestine will cease being a bloodbath only if both peoples can learn to see each other, respect each other’s stories, and acknowledge each other’s pain. Only love—or at least a modicum of compassion—can fix this conflict. That doesn’t mean that it will. It’s hard to be optimistic right now, but there’s not another solution. Neither people is going anywhere. So, either you find a way to live together, or you set the whole world on fire, because it really does come down to that.
This article also appears in the July 2024 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 89, No. 7, pages 16-19). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Unsplash/Diana Polekhina
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