Ep. 188 - Rabbi Shai Held ”Judaism is About Love” pt. 1

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[00:01:02] Deconstructed these walls and I found a man's

[00:01:32] website.

[00:01:32] Just go to .org as opposed to .com.

[00:01:36] We have a new web store where you can get things shipped internationally for the first time.

[00:01:41] We even have some new options on there as well.

[00:01:44] Other than that, everything else is the same.

[00:01:47] This week's guest is the amazing Rabbi Shai Held.

[00:01:51] We had an amazing conversation all about his new book.

[00:01:55] It's called Judaism Is About Love.

[00:01:58] We talk all about it and some of the misconceptions within Judaism, even within the Jewish community.

[00:02:05] Really cool conversation.

[00:02:06] He's a philosopher, theologian and Bible scholar.

[00:02:09] He's also the president and dean at the Hadar Institute.

[00:02:12] He received the prestigious Covenant Award for Excellence in Jewish Education

[00:02:16] and has been named multiple times by Newsweek as one of the 50 most influential rabbis in America

[00:02:21] and by the Jewish Daily Forward as one of the 50 most prominent Jews in the world.

[00:02:25] Rabbi Held is the author of Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Call of Transcendence, The Heart of Torah

[00:02:32] and of course the new book we talk all about Judaism Is About Love.

[00:02:36] He's the host of Hadar's newest podcast, Answers with Held.

[00:02:41] Let's get to it.

[00:02:43] Without further ado here is Part 1 with Rabbi Shai Freakin Held.

[00:02:48] We build a church on certainty that fears everything against it.

[00:03:06] Alright, welcome to the podcast. Very excited to have on Rabbi Shai Held.

[00:03:10] Thank you so much for spending some time with me today.

[00:03:13] Thank you for having me, John.

[00:03:15] Absolutely. And so your book, you have a new book, Judaism Is About Love, Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life.

[00:03:22] I was kind of surprised, kind of the premise of the book.

[00:03:27] That like, well I'll let you tell the story.

[00:03:31] Like basically what sort of inspired the writing of this book.

[00:03:33] But I was kind of surprised by this.

[00:03:36] The fact that you kind of mentioned at the front that Christianity is sort of known as the religion of love

[00:03:42] and Judaism is sort of kind of pigeonholed as the religion of like law or something to that effect.

[00:03:49] Tell people a little bit about the story about how this came to fruition

[00:03:53] but also sort of where the history of this sort of misconception came from.

[00:03:59] Yeah, thanks. I mean that's actually a few kind of interesting inter-time questions.

[00:04:03] So let me start by saying I think that we now know that minority groups often come to see themselves the way the majority sees them.

[00:04:14] And I suspect very strongly that in the history of Judaism, that is a major piece of what happened

[00:04:22] is that Jews began to internalize centuries of often vitriolic Christian anti-Judaism.

[00:04:29] The story Christianity told about the world is that Judaism was essentially a loveless religion

[00:04:35] and Christianity came into the world to kind of fill that lacuna to kind of present what had not been taught before.

[00:04:41] And I think over time Jews in very large numbers came to internalize that.

[00:04:48] And you know, I opened the book by sharing one experience that I had that in retrospect

[00:04:54] kind of helped set the course of my life as an educator, as a philosopher.

[00:05:00] And there's another story too that I would share here that I actually regret now that I didn't share in the book

[00:05:06] but I think is relevant to our discussion.

[00:05:07] So first the one that I begin to book with is actually very simple.

[00:05:11] I was speaking to a group of senior rabbinical students at one of America's major rabbinical seminaries

[00:05:16] and I said to the students in passing, Judaism is the story of a God who loves us and beckons us to love God back.

[00:05:24] And one of the students said somewhat sneeringly honestly, I'm sorry but that just sounds like Christianity to me.

[00:05:32] And I was so taken aback by that response and honestly kind of heartbroken by it.

[00:05:38] And I said to him, you know, it is so interesting that I say that and you think of Christianity

[00:05:43] because I was thinking of Jewish liturgy in which twice a day we say to God with vast love have you loved us

[00:05:52] and then immediately recite Deuteronomy chapter 6 and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart

[00:05:56] and all your being and all your might.

[00:05:58] In other words, a God who loves us and beckons us to love God back.

[00:06:03] Now if you think that that sounds like Christianity then there's a much deeper and more fundamental conversation

[00:06:10] we need to have about just how deeply so many Jews have internalized a kind of traditional anti-Judaic bias.

[00:06:19] Like we need to go back and reclaim what lies at the very heart of Jewish theology, ethics and spirituality.

[00:06:26] And you know, that's what this book is about 25 years later.

[00:06:30] You know, I wish I could say that in that moment I knew the journey of my life had been set.

[00:06:34] I mean, that's ridiculous. That's not what happened.

[00:06:36] But in retrospect that moment really was very formative for me.

[00:06:40] Now a few months after that I had this second experience that again I wish I had included in the book

[00:06:47] because I think for Christians it would be really interesting to hear

[00:06:50] which is that I was speaking to a group of high school students.

[00:06:55] They were brought together under the heading Protestant, right?

[00:06:59] So like fast range. This is the late 1990s I think.

[00:07:04] And these are all kids who had been chosen for this program because they were outspoken,

[00:07:10] committed, devout leaders in their church youth groups.

[00:07:13] So these are like serious kids, right?

[00:07:15] And in passing in the middle of a class, which is not our main topic,

[00:07:18] in passing I say, so remind me guys, what does Jesus say is the great command?

[00:07:24] And all 20 hands go up.

[00:07:26] I call on one of them and he very kind of proudly tells me about love of God and love of neighbor.

[00:07:31] And then innocently I say and remind me what is Jesus quoting?

[00:07:37] No hands go up, not one.

[00:07:39] And I was stunned.

[00:07:42] You know, the answer just to be clear is Leviticus and Deuteronomy, right?

[00:07:45] And I realized in that moment, so this is how you're able to tell a story about Judaism as loveless.

[00:07:54] You've never been taught where Jesus got the love.

[00:07:58] You don't know what wells he drank from.

[00:08:00] You don't know that Jesus was reading Leviticus and Deuteronomy.

[00:08:03] No one ever taught you that. It's not your fault, right?

[00:08:06] And you know when you take those two stories together,

[00:08:09] you get a sense, I think, of the project that I'm trying to engage in here.

[00:08:16] On the one hand, I'm writing for Jews to try and kind of give Jews back their birthright if you will.

[00:08:23] That sounds so grandiose and melodramatic, but I think you get my point.

[00:08:27] And I'm also writing for Christians.

[00:08:29] I have been so moved by the number of Christians I've met who know that what they were taught about Judaism is outdated at best and offensive at worst,

[00:08:40] but they have no idea what to put in its place.

[00:08:43] I hear this a lot actually from people who teach ministers that they'll get calls.

[00:08:48] I was talking to a friend who teaches at a mainline Protestant seminary and she said that at alumni gatherings,

[00:08:55] inevitably someone will come up to her and say,

[00:08:58] I know I can't preach the things that we learned 25 years ago in seminary about Jews,

[00:09:03] but I don't really know what I'm supposed to preach instead.

[00:09:06] And I've been very moved.

[00:09:07] I mean, she said to me, oh now I've started handing out your book, which I just, I find so moving and I'm so gratified by that.

[00:09:14] But that's kind of the origin story of this.

[00:09:19] I would like to get us to the point where we can see love as a shared passion,

[00:09:25] not that everything we say about love is identical.

[00:09:28] I'm not invested at all quite the opposite.

[00:09:30] I'm opposed to flattening out differences between religious traditions,

[00:09:34] but a commitment and an orientation to love around love is something that's deeply shared,

[00:09:41] not surprisingly given our common roots.

[00:09:45] Yeah, that's such a good point.

[00:09:47] And as someone who grew up within the Christian faith,

[00:09:49] I think the thing that kind of surprised me about what you had sort of noticed and identified within your tradition

[00:09:57] was that we were always taught that Jesus was born and became a rabbi

[00:10:03] and taught from what we consider the Old Testament and was hearkening back to these Old Testament stories.

[00:10:09] And in effect, his mission was to kind of give us a small glimpse into the character and the nature of God.

[00:10:17] So it's like, so I think from that perspective and the way that I learned it,

[00:10:22] I found it kind of surprising that there were young people out there within the Jewish faith

[00:10:27] who were surprised that Judaism is also about love because I thought,

[00:10:32] well, Jesus' whole mission was to teach us that that's the case.

[00:10:40] Yeah, well, I think this is sort of about to some extent,

[00:10:45] I think the way in which it is so common for people to define their identities in a kind of over-againstness.

[00:10:52] If this is what's central to me, it must be exclusively mine.

[00:10:56] There's a kind of temptation to kind of co-opt and make exclusively mine.

[00:11:00] And I think, and I say this as like a great lover of and student of Christianity,

[00:11:05] I think that's been a particular temptation among Christian thinkers to imagine that the best of Christianity

[00:11:10] must be exclusive to it.

[00:11:13] And that's not always true.

[00:11:15] Yeah, yeah.

[00:11:17] Absolutely. Yeah, there is definitely sort of an egotism that I've found

[00:11:23] in the sort of uniqueness or specialness of Christianity.

[00:11:26] Like that is the one and only path with which to find the divine.

[00:11:32] And so I think that's sort of what we've attempted to sort of deconstruct, you know, to use the term on this podcast.

[00:11:39] It's just, you know, I find that more often than not, the things that we're sort of debating are not so much truths

[00:11:46] about these other faith traditions, but really sort of misconceptions that we're sort of dealing with.

[00:11:52] And once we strip away those misconceptions, we realize, yes, there are still clear differences

[00:11:58] or else we'd all be going to the same temple or synagogue or church.

[00:12:03] But there's more in common that we have that we're just not seeing through the, I guess,

[00:12:09] through the veil of all of these untruths that have been sort of perpetuated over time.

[00:12:16] Yeah, I mean, you know, I think there's a kind of historical conversation to be had here,

[00:12:20] which I don't consider myself expert in at all to be clear.

[00:12:23] But, you know, I think when early Christians were offended by large scale Jewish rejection of Jesus as the Messiah,

[00:12:33] right, the temptation to then say, well, Judaism is blind all the way down.

[00:12:38] Judaism is clueless about what really matters.

[00:12:41] Judaism is a rejection of God rather than a fidelity to God.

[00:12:44] You know, those things began to run very deep in Christian waters.

[00:12:48] And, you know, it's taken a long time for I think for at least some Christians to want to dig out from that.

[00:12:56] I mean, obviously as you and I both know, there's many Christians who have no interest in digging out from that.

[00:13:00] I just plenty of people who still think exactly those things.

[00:13:03] But I do think there's a very large and kind of burdensome legacy there to get out from under.

[00:13:12] And I don't think it does either of us Jews or Christians any good to deny that or step around it.

[00:13:17] There is a lot of work to do.

[00:13:20] Absolutely, absolutely.

[00:13:22] So sort of digging into your book a little bit.

[00:13:25] I heard you say at some point and I love this and I would love for you to expand on a little bit.

[00:13:32] Love your neighbor.

[00:13:33] I think that's one thing that I absolutely want to discuss on this podcast and primarily because I find that in today's political climate.

[00:13:42] That one's been largely sort of forgotten.

[00:13:45] You know, how do we love our neighbor especially in an environment where we fundamentally disagree?

[00:13:50] But I've heard you say love your neighbor and if you can't act lovingly because your neighbor like towards your neighbor,

[00:13:57] your neighbor can't wait for you to achieve virtue.

[00:14:00] And so at least act lovingly if you, you know, even if you can't love them per se in the moment.

[00:14:06] Talk about what you meant by that and what it means to love your neighbor.

[00:14:11] Yeah, so I think where I would begin is by saying that Judaism's kind of spiritual and ethical ideal is to operate from a place of full integration such that what goes on inside me

[00:14:24] and what goes on as an external expression of that are fully integrated.

[00:14:29] So to take loving kindness or compassion as an example when I encounter someone who's suffering,

[00:14:35] I'm supposed to concretely be of aid to them and to at the same time actually care about them.

[00:14:45] Right? Those are the, you know, it's internal and external at the same time.

[00:14:49] Now, but what Judaism also says is look, you can't wait until you are a fully realized compassionate being before you start behaving compassionately towards other people because they're in need

[00:15:03] and their need comes first.

[00:15:05] The way that I sometimes say that is Judaism is very concerned with virtue so much so that virtue is the second most important thing in the world.

[00:15:12] The first most important thing in the world is that a person in need gets their needs met.

[00:15:17] Right? So, you know, if I feed the poor kicking and screaming, okay, but at least I'm feeding the poor.

[00:15:25] Now again, the ideal is not that.

[00:15:28] The ideal is I should care about the poor.

[00:15:31] I should come to see every person including the people who are downtrodden as in every way equal to me as precious in God's eyes.

[00:15:39] All of that is part of what I'm aspiring to.

[00:15:42] But it, in other words, I'm not allowed to go into a room to meditate and pray and say, I'll see you in 35 years when I'm perfectly compassionate.

[00:15:50] Not allowed to do that.

[00:15:52] Right?

[00:15:52] And so that's the kind of ideal that we have in mind.

[00:15:57] Now, when I talk about love of neighbor, one of the ideas that I tried to build on in this book is an idea from the medieval sage Nahmanides.

[00:16:07] Which I think I kind of chose to focus on it partially because I found it so moving and partially challenging in our kind of consumerist competition based society.

[00:16:18] Which is that Nahmanides kind of playing on the fact that the Hebrew red, maybe hyper literally would be translated as love for your neighbor what you love for yourself as opposed to love your neighbor as you love yourself.

[00:16:34] He understands the obligation as genuinely wanting other people to have everything that I do to the extent that I do.

[00:16:44] And where I found that so challenging, honestly as a critique of myself, I mean to be perfectly blunt is, you know, I feel like in our society, we purchase the illusion of self worth very often by just comparing ourselves in denigrating ways to other people.

[00:17:02] Oh, I may not be wonderful but at least I'm smarter than you are.

[00:17:05] Right?

[00:17:05] I may not be great but at least I'm better looking than she is whatever it might be right.

[00:17:09] And that's ultimately so toxic.

[00:17:12] Because first of all, it makes me invested in your failure it like necessitates Schadenfreude.

[00:17:19] I need you to not be good at things and it also makes real relation impossible because my self worth is constantly being renegotiated right constantly on the line.

[00:17:31] And I just sort of found that nachmanides is opening the path to a different way of being which now he doesn't make this leap.

[00:17:40] This is sort of the connection that I was making that if we take seriously the idea that we all of us every last one of us is always already infinitely valuable because God loves us.

[00:17:51] Then we don't need to be in competition all the time.

[00:17:54] Right?

[00:17:55] I don't need you to fail for me to feel good about myself.

[00:17:59] Right.

[00:17:59] And so love your neighbor becomes part and parcel of a kind of healthy love of self as opposed to a false love of self.

[00:18:09] You know the kind of love of self that comes from competition only ever offers us fools gold.

[00:18:16] Right?

[00:18:16] If I think that I'm worth something because I'm smarter than you what am I going to do when I meet someone who's smarter than me?

[00:18:23] Or if I think I'm worth something because I'm better looking than you what am I going to do when I bump into George Clooney on the street?

[00:18:30] Like what happens then?

[00:18:33] So I don't know.

[00:18:35] I apologize if this is a rambling formulation but it's just so important to me this idea that an acceptance and internalization of the idea that God loves us always enables us to kind of see the other in more than just a

[00:18:55] more generous loving ways.

[00:18:58] And again as I say I found that to be just a real spiritual challenge to me and I find myself to be quite honest thinking about it all the time trying to kind of teach it to myself as a spiritual discipline.

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[00:20:10] Yeah that it what you just said first of all beautiful but also made me think of something that that Father Richard Rohr once said in regards to the selfless act that is to love another person and he said something on a paraphrasing but essentially that for love to even exist.

[00:20:31] It has to constantly be given away.

[00:20:33] You can't the minute you try to hold on to love poof it's gone.

[00:20:37] You know and I thought yeah that's it.

[00:20:40] You have to constantly give it away in order for it to continue to live and thrive and exist you have to constantly be passing it off to the next person and I thought that's yeah.

[00:20:49] Yeah I mean that is interestingly connected I think to something else that I try to develop in my book which is the idea that the gift we receive for God from God are meant to flow through us and not just to us.

[00:21:02] That hoarding is the antithesis of a genuine spiritual life.

[00:21:07] You know this is mine this is mine this is mine is deeply anti religious posture.

[00:21:12] Right and actually it's not that I'm not allowed to enjoy the gifts and one of the things I love about rabbinic spirituality is that it tells us we should enjoy the gifts that God makes possible for us.

[00:21:21] And we have to pass them on there's there's an image in Kabbalah that I really like that God's gifts are a kind of flow through the universe and the challenge is not to let ourselves become a dam that stops up the flow.

[00:21:38] And like you know and so I find it to be like an interesting kind of question for kind of self scrutiny almost you know what are the reasons that I sometimes become a dam why do I feel the need to hoard things rather than passing them along.

[00:21:54] Oh yeah yeah I mean that just makes me self reflect to and I think in those moments it's largely because I'm feeling less than and the thing that I'm holding on to makes me feel like I'm worth something.

[00:22:06] You know and so like largely it's out of my own insecurities that I become a dam in those moments more than anything else.

[00:22:15] Yeah so you know that's why this idea of a kind of self worth that is prior to anything that we ever do is so important to me.

[00:22:28] I'm not 100% sure that I'm right that this can work but it's the idea is just so compelling to me.

[00:22:36] The idea that our worth is not something that we earn but instead is something that we try to live up to and similarly that God's love is not something that we earn but something that we try to live up to that just feels so much healthier to me honestly.

[00:22:54] It also feels honestly theologically much more compelling.

[00:22:59] You know a notion of a God who's like withholding love oh you did that I don't love you anymore would be inferior to just the human parent right.

[00:23:06] Human parents are disappointed by their children all the time and ideally when they're good parents they still love them right so you know if we see God's love as a kind of baseline reality that never goes away.

[00:23:17] I just sort of wonder what that enables us to do and be in the world.

[00:23:24] Yeah and I think that's a good transition to something you talk about also which is you make the correlation which I think fits perfectly by the way within sort of the Christian understanding of God.

[00:23:36] You hear in abundance within Christianity God as father God is like this parental figure and so you sort of correlate this notion of like the laws you know within scripture as being something that you know again liking it likening it to

[00:23:53] sort of guardrails that parents provide for children because they love them and so there's some room to move there and make mistakes but at the same time like you don't want your child to you know to climb into the oven.

[00:24:05] You know like you don't want them to you don't want them to like you know run around the house with knives in their hands you know like so like you have to keep them safe to some degree you know obviously.

[00:24:13] But you also want the freedom for them to kind of get a bump in a bruise and sort of learn from that.

[00:24:20] But the rules again to go back to the rules or laws as we would reference it you know within scripture are there because God loves us and God is trying to protect us as a parent would.

[00:24:32] Yeah I mean I think I would say two things related to this one is that I find it helpful to kind of keep in mind the distinction between conditions and expectations that God loves us without condition but with expectations.

[00:24:49] Right so and we often and I think in our culture to get confused about this we think that somehow expectations are conditions but they don't need to be quite the contrary right.

[00:25:00] Quite the contrary in the sense that sometimes it's actually helpful to realize that it's precisely because God loves us that God has expectations of us one way that I've been thinking about a lot since I wrote the book.

[00:25:15] I don't think this formulation is in the book it is the idea that at the heart of Jewish theology and I imagine Christian theology to is this really interesting assumption that God takes us seriously as moral agents and that that's why God gives us instruction to write the literal meaning of Torah which is not law but instruction.

[00:25:38] Right it's sort of you know God says look I believe you have the capacity to join me in the project of shaping the world. Let me give you some guidance as to how go how to go about that.

[00:25:48] I mean Deuteronomy on multiple occasions describes the giving of the law as in Hebrew litovlach for your own flourishing.

[00:25:57] I love that I think it's so interesting and it's by the way it's so different than this kind of you know old style Lutheran idea that you know we have the law to break ourselves you know quite the contrary.

[00:26:08] We have the law because God believes in us.

[00:26:11] That's I think really very moving stuff and very different from how we tend to talk.

[00:26:19] Absolutely you know and it's what's interesting over the years to is like one of the things I wanted to touch on also is the fact that you know I think some of the misconception that comes from the Christian side about Judaism is that you know the Christians view the Bible is like two two halves right so we've got the what we call the Old Testament and the New Testament New Testament.

[00:26:39] Jesus full of love Old Testament.

[00:26:42] Oh, violence and God is vengeful and you know and so we kind of forget about we kind of ignore that side of God and we're like we like the sweet loving God that we see through Jesus in the New Testament.

[00:26:55] But I think through reading some other rabbis Rabbi Jonathan Sacks for example I read his book at the essays on ethics really helped me to kind of view like well again what we consider the Old Testament through a vastly different lens and and see that no love is consistent throughout the entire book.

[00:27:16] You know if you want to call it a collection of writings you know but it just different lens different vantage point and things that I had read before but saw from a different light which again is sort of baked into Judaism I come to find you know I think the term is what midrash.

[00:27:35] And I think that's where there's a little bit more room within Judaism to sort of wrestle with passages and see things from different perspectives and that sort of baked in where it is in Christianity.

[00:27:45] I think where we sort of like shoved ourselves up against a brick wall is we don't have that baked in and so we have 45,000 different Christian denominations the United States alone because we can't agree on one simple interpretation and there's no room for you know diversity there.

[00:28:07] You know, it's funny you remind me I sometimes say to Christian friends.

[00:28:12] There are more Christian denominations than there are Jews.

[00:28:16] Yeah, that's probably true.

[00:28:18] Right.

[00:28:19] But, but you know, I think also this is a bunch of things and what you said that I think are interesting first of all just to go back a moment.

[00:28:28] This notion that the Old Testament God is a God of vengeance and the New Testament God is somehow a God of sweetness and light.

[00:28:38] Yeah.

[00:28:39] You know, I think a lot about a comment that Brent Straughn makes in one of his popular books.

[00:28:44] I don't know if Brent has ever been on your podcast but you know a Christian Old Testament scholar and Brent makes the comment something like in one of his books.

[00:28:51] You know for Christians who think that the New Testament God is a God of sweetness and light.

[00:28:57] I invite you to spend an hour reading the book of Revelation which far outstrips anything that the Hebrew Bible could have ever imagined in terms of divine vengeance like it's worth out of keeping that in mind and then sort of differently.

[00:29:11] I don't want to pretend to be able to make every disturbing passage in the Bible work.

[00:29:16] I'm invested in not doing that because I think part of what it means to live with a tradition is to live with its edges, to live with difficult texts rather than kind of pretending to make them all work.

[00:29:28] But I am not sure that divine anger should be as easily written off as a problem as it is.

[00:29:36] And what led me here is actually two things in the course of my life.

[00:29:41] One was reading Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel saying, you know for people who lived through the years of the Holocaust and the inferno of Germany and Europe, a God who doesn't get angry is in irrelevancy because what divine anger means is that somewhere in the universe someone actually cares when a child is incinerated.

[00:30:06] That is actually, you know for him I think it was spiritually grounding.

[00:30:12] It sort of saved God for him.

[00:30:14] But in a different register the philosopher Peter Strossen has this argument about how anger is a moral emotion.

[00:30:23] If I see you behave in a horrible way to someone and I don't get angry then on some level I'm not taking you seriously as a moral agent because I don't expect anything different.

[00:30:36] You're nothing to me.

[00:30:38] And I think the point of the Bible is that Israel is not nothing to God.

[00:30:43] And so when people create societies that are unjust, when the rich throttle the poor or when Israel worships idols to give a more theological, explicitly theological example, God sort of says, wait a minute, I trusted you.

[00:31:00] I invited you to be my partner and look at you.

[00:31:04] And I do think there's something quite moving about that.

[00:31:07] Again, the overkill is very hard to make sense of.

[00:31:11] Again, I'm not trying to engage in a kind of cheap apologetics here.

[00:31:15] I'm really trying to make sense of like what can I learn from those passages?

[00:31:19] And I think where I've come is sort of to feel like, well, one of those things those passages do seem predicated on is the sense that God takes me seriously.

[00:31:34] Right?

[00:31:35] And therefore God can be disappointed in me.

[00:31:38] And there's something actually quite, I don't know, like inspiring about that.

[00:31:45] Yeah.

[00:31:46] And I think the other thing that sometimes we lose sight of also is the idea that the authors of these passages were also sort of wrestling with their place in the world and God's role in their lives and in the universe.

[00:32:04] And we see that play out, you know, that the passages are imperfect and they show imperfections.

[00:32:09] And there's beauty to be found in that.

[00:32:13] This isn't like a story, these aren't stories where we're taking the embarrassing bits out.

[00:32:21] They're left in there.

[00:32:22] If this was a really well-crafted story, everybody would come off looking like the hero.

[00:32:32] But that's not the case.

[00:32:33] Like in the New or Old Testament for that matter, it's there's the imperfections and the blemishes are left in there as part of the story.

[00:32:40] And I think there's bits to that that we forget and that we could learn from.

[00:32:48] Yeah.

[00:32:49] I mean, for sure.

[00:32:50] You know, I think this is hard in the sense that depending on how traditionally minded a believer is, they will be more or less comfortable with the idea that biblical to use.

[00:33:03] And I think that the Christian for a minute, the biblical witness is also shaped by the human voice.

[00:33:08] You know, so it sort of depends, I think, who you're talking to and what their theology of revelation is.

[00:33:14] But you know, something that I found helpful when I was writing on Abraham Joshua Heschel for my first book is this term he has, which is co-revelation.

[00:33:25] He describes the Bible really interestingly and intriguingly as more than merely divine because it's divine and human.

[00:33:33] And interestingly, he does not say it's therefore less than divine.

[00:33:37] Right?

[00:33:38] He says it's more than divine.

[00:33:39] It's divine and human.

[00:33:41] And then the challenge becomes, of course, how do we as inheritors read responsibly so that we don't let the Bible kind of sanction us in our most brutal fantasies

[00:33:51] and actually go to us, challenge us, inspire us to become better, more caring, more loving, more just, etc.

[00:33:58] That's not easy stuff.

[00:34:00] I mean, you know, liberal theology always has the danger, I think of essentially just saying, oh, the good stuff in the Bible is the stuff that I like.

[00:34:09] And the bad stuff is the stuff that I don't like.

[00:34:12] And, you know, I think we always have to be self critical in that way.

[00:34:16] This is a really hard territory.

[00:34:18] By the way, religious conservatives do that too in different way.

[00:34:22] I think it's like always a challenge.

[00:34:24] And this is why, sorry, you know, this is a little bit of a kind of like funny formulation.

[00:34:29] This is why what you said a moment ago is so important about how we don't edit out the hard stuff.

[00:34:34] Right?

[00:34:34] Because one of the things that I've been thinking about lately, I don't even know why really is, you know, in three generations from now,

[00:34:41] will there be Jews who find the same stuff in the Bible that I find most disconcerting and upsetting immensely helpful?

[00:34:51] Like the way Heschel found divine anger helpful.

[00:34:54] In a way that I think probably many Jews in 19th century German felt like a little, oh, that's so primitive.

[00:34:59] And then he said, primitive is not primitive.

[00:35:01] It's actually liberatory.

[00:35:03] Like that's really interesting.

[00:35:04] So I like a canon that's not in a bow.

[00:35:11] Does God have a face?

[00:35:17] Does he have a body or even a name?

[00:35:23] If he does, does he know that I'm alive?

[00:35:34] Is God even here?

[00:35:38] Does he care that I doubt?

[00:35:43] Does he care that I fear?

[00:35:45] Something tells me God will survive.

[00:35:56] So take a breath, breathe it in.

[00:36:02] The mystery that is this.

[00:36:06] A universe we don't know.

[00:36:13] I think the truth is,

[00:36:21] if God has a face, his face must look like yours.

[00:36:37] Did God kill his kid?

[00:36:43] Did he have to have blood before he would forgive?

[00:36:49] Maybe we made a God that looks like us.

[00:36:59] Does God know my name?

[00:37:05] Is the ache in my soul just confined to my brain?

[00:37:10] Even so, does that mean it's not real?

[00:37:21] So take a breath, breathe it in.

[00:37:26] The mystery that is this.

[00:37:33] A universe we don't know.

[00:37:38] But I think the truth is,

[00:37:46] if God has a face, her face must look like yours.

[00:38:03] A face like a Tina, an armadome ill dread.

[00:38:09] A rust and his husband, guss and their children.

[00:38:14] A face like a Kim, a Ted or Tyrone.

[00:38:19] A Lucy born with an extra chromosome.

[00:38:25] A Pablo with legs he can't move by himself.

[00:38:30] A girl born to Daniel, who now is Daniel.

[00:38:36] A Bill H and Eve, a white guy's name Todd.

[00:38:41] If you have a heartbeat, you are the face of God.

[00:38:55] A

[00:39:11] Take a breath, breathe it in.

[00:39:15] The mystery that is this.

[00:39:21] A universe the truth is.

[00:39:34] If God has a face, her face must look.

[00:39:40] If God has a face, his face must look.

[00:39:46] If God has a face, the face it must be yours.

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