Do Jews and Christians Love the Same Way?

For centuries, Christian anti-Judaic prejudice insisted that whereas Christianity is about love, Judaism is about … something else, like law, or justice, or obedience.  Rabbi Shai Held’s new book argues that Judaism, no less than Christianity, is a religion of love.  And yet Judaism is not just Christianity avant la lettre, and so there are some key differences in the ways Jews and Christians tend to think and talk about love.  In this lecture, we’ll consider some of those crucial differences: divergent understandings of human nature, of the relationship between love and law, of the relative priority of the particular and the universal, and of the ideal of loving our enemies.