Turning Suffering Into Love: The Bible’s Moral Revolution — A Dialogue between Shai Held and Stephen Pope
A Book Event for Shai Held’s Judaism Is About Love
The Torah contains three great love commandments: love of God, love of neighbor, and love of the stranger/sojourner. Love of the stranger/sojourner, repeated for emphasis in both Leviticus and Deuteronomy, represents one of the Torah’s greatest moral revolutions. This event will be a dialogue between Rabbi Shai Held and Prof. Stephen Pope to probe the meaning of the commandment, ask why it was so radical in its (and our) time, and explore the relationship between memory of past sufferings and commitment to present-day love.
Rabbi Shai Held– philosopher, theologian, and Bible scholar– is President, Dean, and Chair in Jewish Thought at the Hadar Institute. He received the prestigious Covenant Award for Excellence in Jewish Education, and has been named multiple times by Newsweek as one of the fifty most influential rabbis in America and by the Jewish Daily Forward as one of the fifty most prominent Jews in the world. Rabbi Held is the author of Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence (2013) and The Heart of Torah (2017). His next book, Judaism is About Love, will be published by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux in March 2024.
Stephen J. Pope is a Professor in the Department of Theology at Boston College, where he teaches courses on social justice, the virtues, and the intersection of science and theology. He received his BA in philosophy from Gonzaga University and his MA and Ph.D. in theological ethics from the University of Chicago. His publications include Human Evolution and Christian Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and A Step Along the Way: Models of Christian Service (Orbis, 2015). He is currently working on a book project entitled, God’s Love and Ours: A Christian Ethic of Forgiveness.
