On Being with Krista Tippett Shai Held — On Love, and Judaism
21 snips
Mar 26, 2026 
Shai Held, philosopher, biblical scholar, and rabbi who leads the Hadar Institute, discusses Jewish theology and love. He explores Hebrew ideas of love, love as spiritual work, memory’s role in empathy and revenge, loving enemies in practical ways, and bearing witness to mutual pain in the Israel/Palestine story.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
Practice Love As Work And Worship
- Do treat love as avodah, both worship and work, by practicing attention, sitting with fear, and cultivating presence.
- Held urges seeing love as training — persistent tasks like learning to sit with suffering rather than relying on fleeting feelings.
Possibilism Over Optimism Or Pessimism
- Held rejects simplistic optimism about human nature and proposes 'possibilism' — we are not naive but capable of more love than we assume.
- He reads Leviticus and Deuteronomy as insisting the law is possible, inviting effort toward greater love.
Use Memory To Train Empathy For Strangers
- Do practice a redemptive form of memory: imagine yourself as the Israelite in Egypt and then imagine others in comparable vulnerability today.
- Held calls loving the stranger a double act of moral imagination that cultivates empathy.