Jewish Musings, Monday June 17

[louise]

What’s on your mind — how to make kugel? This week’s Torah reading? Life goals? Prayer? We are all engaged in weight loss/weight maintenance journeys and we are all Jewish or at least interested in Judaism. We like to eat, we like to discuss. It is our goal here to provide each other support on our journeys, to share experiences, to call on our rich cultural heritage and texts, and to help each other grow spiritually.

Some of us take weekly turns starting the thread:
Frieda (hopefully)?
Holly
Lee
Louise
Lynne
Peachy

And for those of you that stop by to read this thread without posting — you are welcome to, but you are also welcome to chime in. Don’t be shy!

[louise]

I just started a book called Judaism is about Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life. I feel this is not a book I could read on the bus (without a book cover)!. I am also out of the habit of carrying around an actual print book, let alone a hardcover. I heard the author, Rabbi Shai Held, speak about this recently and I was very moved by it. At this point I can just share his basic premise – maybe in a month or two I will have more! He feels we have all heard it over and over – Christianity is about love and Judaism is not – it’s about law, or justice, or something else, but not love. ‘In the past such ideas were propagated by Christian thinkers who created a “theological discourse about the supersession of a loveless Judaism by a loving Christianity’”.

He goes on to mention that Christianity cares about how you feel and what you believe while Judaism cares about what you do - Judaism is a religion of action. The God of the “New” Testament is a God of love and mercy and grace. The God of the “Old” Testament is angry and vindictive. He says that this idea, an enduring legacy of anti-Judaism, tends to be treated as an unquestioned commomplace in our culture.

I have quoted heavily here and only barely stated his case but I’m afraid this will get too dense if I say more, so that’s the bare bones of it. He fervently believes that Judaism is a religion of love, and of action, and of emotion. The gift of life is grace. – it is not something we earn but something we strive to live up to. And the revelaton of the Torah is grace – it is a divine gift given to us through no merit of our own.

One of the speakers on the panel pointed out that his thesis is the antidote to entitlement. She spoke about entitlement vs worth, entitlement vs. indebtedness. About God’s faith in our capacity to rise to that.

Judaism is about love, but not only about love. His intention is to be provocative, not present a comprehensive thesis. The love is unconditional, but it does come with expectations.

I hope I have given enough to think about with these small bites.

[hollygail]

I just finished reading Friday's and Sunday's threads. I've been busy... and haven't opened my laptop since the middle of the day on Thursday. We left home around 3pm (which was easily a half hour earlier than necessary) spent a lot of time waiting in the airport before we were able to check in (which I thought we'd already done online...) and then waiting in the waiting room until someone finally showed up behind the desk there... DH is partially disabled, and the two women (one joined the first one) came over to him to ask if he needed a wheel chair or some other kind of help getting from the waiting room into the airplane... It was wonderful! As a matter of fact, they made sure DH and I were the first two people to enter the plane! The plane was in the air about 2 hours (and although we left almost 10 minutes later than the schedule said, we arrived about 5 minutes after the scheduled time). DH needed to sit down for a few minutes (so I went to the rest room), then I texted DS who said we should go outside through the main exit doors and we'd see him. Well, DGS was with him too! Who knew! The four of us drove from the airport (in one small city) to where DS and DDIL live (also DS when he's living with his parents...), about an hour away from the airport.

We hung out with family the rest of Thursday and Friday. It was WONDERFUL! Then Saturday, DS returned to school to move his stuff out of the dorm he'd been living in this last quarter and into the room he's going to have during the time his job lasts (he's working for the University during the summer; the same job as last summer except in a supervisory position). We left Sunday morning around 9am (the drive was supposed to take more than 2 hours, hopefully less than 3, buy it was Father's Day so traffic could have been more than usual. But it took us two and a half hours. We got an incredible parking space (as close as you can imagine to where the commencement was to be held!). And we were early enough that we were able to save 7 seats on the aisle 3 rows behind the 8 rows reserved for the grads.

Eric K. Ward was the keynote speaker (who talked about antisemitism, racism, other bigotries, and how they're all related and how the "establishment" (my term, not his) perpetuates bigotries and how important it is for these college graduates to do everything they can to change the system. He really was terrific, a great speaker.

As for the Priestly Blessings: I liked both Louise's and Peachy's versions.

Today's: I know Shai Held. He was in San Diego for a few years not too many years ago. I got to hear him speak at least at two venues at different times (different topics). Good for him for pointing out these differences Louise mentioned. And thank you, Louise, for bringing his work to us!

I have no idea what we're doing tomorrow (Monday) so if possible, I'll be back. Otherwise, it may be later in the week...

[lee058]

Good morning everybody. Hope you are all well and SAFE! Please pray for Israel.

Re today's topic: I've heard the comments about Judaism being judgmental as opposed to Christianity being about love before, and it always has made me angry. I should check out the book that was discussed!

Today I have a tele-med appointment this morning, followed by a nurse's call this afternoon about my upcoming colonoscopy. I hope everything goes well.

Here's wishing everyone a peaceful day, Lee

[peachymom1]

Louise, thank you for bringing this up. It has long been a pet peeve of mine that so many people polarize Christianity and Judaism as being about love versus law.

I am profoundly grateful that I had the amazingly good fortune to belong to Rabbi Harold Schulweis's (z"l) congregation for so many years. He spoke about this many times. He would take us through the siddur, the Torah and the Talmud, showing us example after example of how love is all over Judaism. What is the most well-known text for Jews? Is it not the Shema? It's the first Jewish text I learned. "And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might." "Ahava raba" (great love) is a phrase I heard in songs we sang in the choir - I know several different melodies to that. Just last week on Shavuot, we heard the cantor sing "Adonai, Adonai" during the Torah service: "...merciful and gracious, ...abundant in love and truth" (Ex. 34:6). This section of Torah about God's attributes is so important that we sing it three times in a row, on all the major holidays (except on Shabbat).

According to Rabbi Schulweis, the most important verse in the entire Torah is "Ve-ahavta le're-echa kamocha," "And you shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Lev. 19:19). And he reminded us many times of my favorite mitzvah about love, which is to love the stranger (Lev. 19:34, Deut. 10:19). It's not my favorite just because I am the stranger, but also because it teaches us, no, commands us, to face and learn about and love all strangers, when our inclination might be to keep to ourselves (justifiably at times).

I can't leave my soapbox without including something else drummed into me by Rabbi Schulweis over the years: "It's not an either/or." Love and law are not mutually exclusive. Belief and action are not mutually exclusive. God gave us law because God loves us and wants us to have the tools to build a loving and productive society. We have so many laws about love, kindness and compassion that it's impossible for me to think of Judaism as stark and loveless. As Rabbi Schulweis would say, "If you believe something, then what? Go and do it!"

[gazelle18]

You said it, Peachy. It is NOT either/or. There is no reason that you can not have a system for living that is based upon both love AND law. I had not previously heard of the author Louise mentions, but I’m now interested in reading this.

[hollygail]

Jun 17, 2024 9:36:53 GMT -5 peachymom1 said:

According to Rabbi Schulweis, the most important verse in the entire Torah is "Ve-ahavta le're-echa kamocha," "And you shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Lev. 19:19).

He's in good company. According to Talmud, someone (I heard "an apikorus") went to Shammai and asked, "if you can teach me all of Torah while standing on one foot, I'll convert to Judaism." Shammai threw him out. He then went to Hillel with the same line; Hillel said "What is hateful to you, do not do to anyone else" (a different way of saying "love your neighbor as yourself," right? And about 100 years later, Jesus is supposed to have taught, "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you," also another way of saying the same thing...)