Judaism Is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life

The prophets count on us to be appalled by injustice.

Judaism is not a religion for the individual seeker alone; it is a vision for how human beings ought to live together in pursuit of the right and the good.

Loving our neighbor requires us to be truly generous and openhearted, to wish for our friend to have whatever we have to the same extent as we do.35

the Torah insists that if we are grateful, we must share; yet on the other, it suggests that if we are grateful, we will want to share, because the urge to share is a significant part of what it means to be grateful.

Knowing that we matter, Jewish theology insists, is not pride; pride would be the insistence that we have earned all of the worth we have, or the pretension that we matter while others do not.

Better a suffering religion than a sanitized one.

Caring-about is empty if it does not culminate in caring relations.”

In protesting, the psalmists reach out to a God who loves them.

emotional health and interpersonal connection. If I am truly going to love others, it helps a lot to feel confident that I, too, am loved; if I am going to affirm the worth of others, it helps to feel sure that I, too, have worth. Judaism understands this and teaches us: we are always already loved and always already “worthful.”