Today's Torah: Special Edition for Sukkot BY Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson

 Mighty is Love

A few weeks ago I received a package in the mail from Professor Thomas Ord, a Christian theologian who teaches at Northwest Nazarene University in Idaho. He mailed me two of his latest books because he read an article of mine and he thought they would help us launch a conversation. The two books offer an extended argument that the central virtue of Christianity ought to be love - not faith, not salvation, but love. Reading his insightful books (Defining Love and The Nature of Love: A Theology) it occurred to me that the subject is one that has a natural home in Judaism, and calls for a Jewish reclamation. I want to make an argument for why love is important as a Jew; what it is that Jewish love looks like, and how we might resolve to attempt a more persistent and resilient love to heal this broken world and to bring wholeness to shattered hearts.