By Adam Eilath, First Things. (Photo: Santosh Verma/Unsplash)
Something is stirring in the West. After decades of polite secular confidence, people are talking about God again. Not only priests and rabbis but writers, artists, and philosophers are rediscovering that the human heart cannot live on irony and self-optimization alone. The modern world has reached the end of its disenchanted imagination. Across denominations, communities that once whispered God’s name are learning to speak it aloud. In this new hunger for transcendence, every serious attempt to bring the divine back into the public square deserves gratitude. Few have done so more compellingly than Rabbi Shai Held.
Rabbi Held, president and dean of the Hadar Institute in New York, has recently offered a stirring vision of God in Judaism Is About Love. His book is not merely a theological statement, it is a moral intervention. Held writes to a generation that has inherited ritual but not reverence, ethics but not encounter. He urges readers to reclaim a faith rooted in divine care. As he puts it, “God seeks partners in love and justice, and Jewish life is the work of responding to that invitation. God cares, and wants that care to flow through us into the world.”