I was eight years old in Basel, Switzerland the day I learned about the way places have layers.  

It was a chilly, autumn shabbos, and my father and I were on a walk by the river.  My father pointed out different sights as we walked: there is the house where his elementary school friend lived.  There is the gate they walked through to get to school, there is the shop run by the woman rumored to be a witch.  And there, he said, pointing to a small, shady area, is the place where they burned the Jews in the 14th century.

What can the Bible teach us about navigating our way through a time of climate emergency?  In this series, R. Shai Held explores three key biblical texts that offer differing (but perhaps complementary) approaches to understanding our place in this divinely created and much-more-than-human world. Recorded in Winter 2025.

Source sheet: https://mechonhadar.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/mh_torah_source_sheets/HeldClimateChange2025Part3.pdf

What do you do when you feel—or when you know—that because of your actions, you are entirely alone in the world?

Thinking about our own transgressions and repentance is hard, and so it makes sense that we often latch on to metaphors to help us think about these ideas.  Perhaps the strangest metaphor I know of appears in the Zohar. 

There is something about our relationship with God that holds us back from unbridled grief.

What can the Bible teach us about navigating our way through a time of climate emergency?  In this series, R. Shai Held explores three key biblical texts that offer differing (but perhaps complementary) approaches to understanding our place in this divinely created and much-more-than-human world. Recorded in Winter 2025.

Source sheet: https://mechonhadar.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/mh_torah_source_sheets/HeldClimateChange2025Part2.pdf

Of course the Jews thought that they would starve when they left Egypt.

In Moshe’s retelling of the story of the mann (manna), that is deliberate.  There is something about the mann that is inextricably linked to hunger—or, at least, our fear of it.

What can the Bible teach us about navigating our way through a time of climate emergency?  In this series, R. Shai Held explores three key biblical texts that offer differing (but perhaps complementary) approaches to understanding our place in this divinely created and much-more-than-human world. Recorded in Winter 2025.

Source sheet: https://mechonhadar.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/mh_torah_source_sheets/HeldClimateChange2025Part1.pdf

There is no such thing, for a Jew, as loving God without loving human beings as well.

Our love for God is bound up with our love for others: for the parents who taught us His name, and the grandparents who taught them.  For the children we raise to know Him.  For every ancestor, too far back for us to remember their names, who remembered God’s covenant with our people and dedicated their lives to transmitting that memory.

In this episode of What Gives?, The Jewish Philanthropy Podcast, JFN CEO Andrés Spokoiny welcomes Rabbi Shai Held to discuss the claim that love is Judaism’s central value. Together, they confront common misconceptions about the "God of the Old Testament," reflect on theology in the shadow of October 7, and consider how Jewish philanthropy can help nurture a more compassionate and spiritually engaged community. Held makes the case for a Judaism rooted in justice, mercy, and human dignity—and why that vision is so necessary at this moment in which we are living.