I was very excited when I heard about Rabbi Shai Held’s book, Judaism Is About Love. I was eager to see how the book would address love between Jews and partners from other faith backgrounds. I was disappointed to find that it doesn’t.
Nevertheless, the book is – I don’t know what adjectives best describe it and its hundreds of expansive footnotes – awesome? Magisterial? It is an intensive examination of the centrality of love to Judaism, with comparisons to Christianity. I learned a great deal from it, including that the Torah’s fundamental tenet to love your “neighbor” clearly refers to other Jews, but that we are also commanded to love the “stranger,” which means people who are not Jewish who live with us and who are vulnerable, as well as all humans, who are all made in God’s image.
The only explicit reference I found to intermarriage came in a discussion of the book of Joshua and whether God wanted all of the inhabitants of the land killed, which would seem to be inconsistent with loving all people. Rabbi Held notes that the Torah’s commandment not to intermarry with them seems gratuitous if they’ve been wiped out. (p. 296) There’s no further discussion of the commandment not to intermarry.
Only about ten pages, in Chapter 4 on “The Family,” are devoted to intimacy, marriage, sexual love – loving a spouse, “covenantal love” in that sense. Rabbi Held writes that separateness, otherness, is necessary for a relationship (partners don’t become one person), that partners celebrate the uniqueness of their partners, that the commitment to remain steadfast is often challenging, and that “finding an appropriate partner is difficult – so difficult, in fact, that one midrash imagines that only God can successfully pair people off, and even God finds it as difficult as splitting the Sea of Reeds.” (p. 86) The love between married couples is meant to radiate outward, to add more love to the world, to bring us closer to redemption.
Rabbi Held doesn’t explicitly say he is talking about marriage between Jews, but that is pretty clear from the context. One interesting footnote (p. 88, n. 32) may allude to interfaith relationships; he cites Anthony Gliddens as saying that “in modern times the spread of ideals of romantic love was a key factor tending to disentangle the marital bond from wider kinship ties” and that in modern times kinship relations have been largely destroyed.” Rabbi Held says few of us would want to abandon the ideals of romantic love as a core foundation of marriage, but that the absence of deep attachment to extended family often brings malaise in its wake.
Rabbi Held also says, with respect to falling in love, whom we choose to spend time with, which qualities in a person we value, all play a part; “the assumption that we cannot control our emotions is a mistake. We have far more agency over our feelings that we are usually willing to admit.” (p. 107) People who disapprove of interfaith marriage, or who don’t support making any accommodations that might engage interfaith couples, sometimes justify their position by saying that the Jewish partner made a choice.
Rabbis who officiate for gay and lesbian couples but not for interfaith couples, for example, sometimes justify the distinction by saying that being gay is not a choice; but Noah Feldman, in To Be a Jew Today, says this doesn’t fully take into account modern understandings “according to which a couple who fall in love cannot in good conscience do other than marry each other…. They are in love, they have chosen one another, and Jewish law, as traditionally interpreted, stands in the way of their union.” (p. 370) It would be very interesting to know Rabbi Held’s thoughts about this.
There is a lot in the book about how Judaism is universal and particular. For example, “Judaism represents a vision of integrating universal values with particularistic practices: we raise our children to be kind, and also to observe Shabbat; we inculcate the value of compassion and also of eating and praying as a Jew.” (p. 243) Perhaps Rabbi Held would say that in-marriage is an important particularistic practice that can co-exist with loving all people? But does that take into account modern understandings?
In a discussion about judging others, Rabbi Held recognizes that how we view people can maim them: “A person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. It can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted or reduced mode of being.” (p. 123) I couldn’t help thinking how this is applicable to partners from different faith backgrounds who are viewed as undesirable marriage partners for Jews.
Rabbi Held says that “any covenant theology will necessarily have both insiders and outsiders. We can soften the edges around that fact but can’t sidestep it altogether. Covenants, like religions in general, like identities in general, are inherently particular; what matters from a moral perspective is not whether or not they have outsiders but how they imagine and interact with those outsiders.” (p. 344) I’m not sure what he means by “soften the edges,” but, as I have argued elsewhere, we could define the covenant as between God and not only people who are Jewish, but also people who do Jewish, who are Jewishly-engaged.
All in all, it’s a very important book, deserving of all the acclaim it is receiving, but I do wish more had been said about interfaith relationships. Perhaps that will be a future subject.