Thursday, July 17, 2025
Rabbi Emeritus Charles Klein stepped down as spiritual leader of the Merrick Jewish Centre nearly four years ago, concluding a 43-year career. Upon his retirement, Klein and his wife, Betty, established a legacy fund to help the synagogue expand educational opportunities for congregants of all ages.
Last month, the synagogue welcomed Rabbi Shai Held, a leading Jewish scholar, as the third installment in the legacy fund’s lecture series. Held, who earned a PhD in religious studies from Harvard University, is a founder of the Hadar Institute, a center for Jewish life, learning and practice in North America and Israel.
The first two installments of the legacy series featured speakers in 2023 and 2024.
Held’s topic of discussion at the Merrick synagogue on May 21 was simple: “Judaism is about love,” an ode to his latest book published last year with the same title.
“We are sitting here in the Rabbi Charles A. Klein sanctuary,” Rabbi Josh Dorsch, the synagogue’s spiritual leader since 2023, said. “This is the sanctuary — but dare I say the community — that was built after what was an incredibly remarkable and amazing career. There’s no more crowning achievement than the legacy, which is why it’s so beautiful that Rabbi Klein’s parting gift was the creation of the legacy fund — creating an endowment to ensure that this community will be able to bring such high class, incredibly powerful, prominent and educational speakers like Rabbi Shai Held.”
In addressing the lecture’s attendees, Klein said he’s long considered Held one of his teachers.
“My love for Jewish study has been fueled by really great teachers,” Klein said. “Rabbi Shai Held is absolutely one of that group. He is one of the most influential teachers I’ve had over the course of my life.”
He called Held a “leading theologian,” noting his biblical commentary.
“He creates this beautiful, rich, wonderful tapestry of learning,” Klein said, adding that the Hadar Institute is an “extraordinary institution. It’s a gathering place for gifted teachers, hungry learners — a world-renowned center for Jewish learning.”
“His latest book, ‘Judaism Is About Love,’ makes clear that Judaism’s essential, eternal message is creating a society that is founded upon love, that promotes love,” Klein pointed out.
Held, who received a warm welcome from the crowd during his lecture at the Merrick synagogue, shared that his inspiration for writing the book dates back to when he addressed students at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan. He told them: “Judaism is the story of a God who loves us and beckons us to love God back.” One of the students, he recounted, responded: “That just sounds like Christianity.”
“If you hear that and the first thought you have is, ‘Oh, that’s Christianity,’ then there is a much more fundamental and difficult conversation we need to have,” Held said, “which is about how — and why — so many Jews, even passionate, knowledgeable Jews, have internalized a traditional Christian, anti-Jewish caricature, whereby Christianity is about love, but Judaism is about something else.”
Christians far outnumber Jews in global communities, Held said, adding that Jews have been a minority for thousands of years.
“There was a point in American Jewish history where Jews who felt anxious about assimilation but did not have a strong enough Jewish education — and I don’t know if this process was conscious or unconscious — began to define Judaism as whatever they imagined Christianity was not,” he said.
In his book, Held said, he seeks to illuminate love — “the forgotten heart” of Jewish theology and practice. Through a blend of intellectualism and a respect for tradition and the practices of Judaism, Held conveys that love is a foundational and constitutive part of the Jewish faith.
“Love is an existential posture,” he said. “It’s a stance. If you like the language of philosophy, love is a disposition to feel certain things and act in certain things. If you have the disposition to feel something and you never actually feel it, you either will lose the disposition or you already have.”
Held noted that sometimes it may feel difficult to be disposed to feelings like love — which is totally normal.
“The goal is to be oriented around gratitude, to have a disposition towards being grateful,” he said. “Love, I don’t think, refers to a single feeling or a single disposition.”
He also touched upon the theme of self-worth, after looking at excerpts from Jewish texts that were shared with attendees.
“What if we actually took seriously the idea that all of us are infinitely valuable?” he said. “This is one of the central arguments I’ve been trying to make, especially with young adults: Self-worth is not something you can earn, it is something you try to live up to. You never have to earn your worth — that is the most fundamental claim that Jewish theology makes about being a person. You are already loved because God loves you.”
For more on Held and his work with the Hadar Institute, visit Hadar.org. To learn more about the Rabbi Charles and Betty Klein Legacy Fund and other upcoming programs, visit MerrickJC.org.
