“The fact that a commitment to loving kindness is not uniquely Jewish is an extremely good thing, since there are very few Jews and a tremendous amount of suffering in the world. The more communities and worldviews that advocate and inculcate love manifested as kindness, the better. But more than that: something does not need to be uniquely Jewish in order to be authentically Jewish.
“Kindness is at the very core of Judaism’s vision of the good life. If only we taught and embodied that message with everything we have, and if other religious (and secular) communities did the same, our world would be a lot less broken as a result.
“That said, Judaism represents a vision of integrating universal values with particularist practices: we raise our children to be kind, and also to observe Shabbat; we inculcate the value of compassion and also of eating and praying as a Jew. This is the only way for Judaism qua Judaism to flourish, and it’s also the only way for it to survive. Any religious tradition that wants to survive has to teach more than universal values. In other words, we can’t have Judaism without a commitment to love and compassion lying at its very core; but we also can’t have Judaism if all we teach is love and compassion. Jews need to teach our children about hesed [the Hebrew word translated 'loving kindness'] but we also need to teach them about how to mark time (Shabbat, holidays, etc.) as a Jew, how to internalize the laws and stories that make Jews — well, Jewish. A Judaism that isn’t about compassion is bankrupt, but a Judaism that is only about compassion is self-liquidating.”
