Something is stirring in the West. After decades of polite secular confidence, people are talking about God again. Not only priests and rabbis but writers, artists, and philosophers are rediscovering that the human heart cannot live on irony and self-optimization alone. The modern world has reached the end of its disenchanted imagination. Across denominations, communities that once whispered God’s name are learning to speak it aloud. In this new hunger for transcendence, every serious attempt to bring the divine back into the public square deserves gratitude. Few have done so more compellingly than Rabbi Shai Held.
Rabbi Held, president and dean of the Hadar Institute in New York, has recently offered a stirring vision of God in Judaism Is About Love. His book is not merely a theological statement, it is a moral intervention. Held writes to a generation that has inherited ritual but not reverence, ethics but not encounter. He urges readers to reclaim a faith rooted in divine care. As he puts it, “God seeks partners in love and justice, and Jewish life is the work of responding to that invitation. God cares, and wants that care to flow through us into the world.”
It is theology at its most humane and expansive. Held’s God is not a distant monarch but a power-sharing presence, inviting humanity into moral co-creation. Yet precisely in that beauty lies a peril. When the Creator is defined primarily through relationship, when his essence is framed chiefly as partnership, transcendence can yield to reciprocity, and God risks becoming a reflection of our aspirations rather than the ground of their possibility.
As a school leader, I see versions of this every day. We are very good at teaching compassion and belonging, less good at teaching reverence. We train children to manage their emotions, but not always to recognize mystery. We have social-emotional learning, but no metaphysical literacy. We tell students that God cares about how they treat one another, but rarely that God is the reason there is a world in which treatment matters at all. Prayer becomes a form of mindfulness, ritual takes on the cadence of group therapy, and the divine presence begins to mirror our own interior state.
Either we will recover transcendence, or we will exhaust ourselves trying to manufacture it. The choice is simple. The recovery is not. What we need is not less love but a love grounded in being itself, a return to the God who is, not only the God who feels.
R. Hayyim of Volozhin saw this two centuries ago. The foremost disciple of the Vilna Gaon, Rabbi Eliyahu ben Shlomo Zalman, and founder of the Lithuanian yeshiva, he watched Hasidic fervor sweep through the Jewish world, promising emotional closeness to God. Volozhin admired its passion but feared its collapse into sentiment. His answer, Nefesh HaChayim, teaches a double vision of the divine. God both “fills all worlds,” present in the intimacy of every breath, and “surrounds all worlds,” utterly beyond comprehension, the ungraspable source of being. Creation, he explains, is an unending act, God’s speech continuously sustaining all things. To live in faith is to move between those two poles, nearness and distance, warmth and wonder.
Later thinkers such as Rav Shagar echoed this rhythm for a postmodern age, reminding students that spirituality is not a form of self-expression but an opening to something larger than the self.
Catholic theology traced a similar arc. Vatican II sought to open the Church to the modern world, emphasizing renewal and relationship. But renewal risks flattening transcendence unless paired with awe. Hans Urs von Balthasar attempted that synthesis. In The Glory of the Lord, he argued that divine love and divine glory must be seen together, self-giving and majesty, intimacy and otherness. Love, for Balthasar, is not a feeling but the very structure of being. Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, carried that vision into pastoral form. His first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, begins not with emotion but with ontology. “God is love,” he writes. That verb, is, restores gravity. God does not simply act lovingly. Love is the texture of reality itself, and to love is to participate in being.
Seen together, Volozhin, Balthasar, and Benedict form a united front against the temptation that defines our age: to reduce the vertical to the horizontal, awe to empathy, transcendence to affirmation.
So how might educators recover a grammar of reverence? The answer is not to replace empathy with abstraction but to remind students that kindness is sacred because existence itself is a gift. Awe begins in silence and in beauty. A teacher who lets a question hang, who allows a room to feel the weight of wonder, teaches theology more powerfully than any lecture. When students watch an adult pause before lighting Shabbat candles, or hear a teacher speak of learning as covenant, they encounter the possibility that life itself is responsive.
Across the West, religion is returning, but no one knows what kind. It could become another therapeutic brand, spirituality retooled for stress management, or it could become again what it once was, a grammar for awe. Whether the revival deepens or dissipates will depend not on slogans but on schools, not on outreach but on teachers. A generation ago, we taught rules without warmth and drove children to rebellion. Now we teach warmth without weight and risk raising souls unable to bow. If we want faith to endure, we must recover the weight of the One before whom we stand, for children need more than affirmation. They need a world that can command their attention.
If I could leave my students one gift, it would be this: that when the world tells them everything is negotiable, they will still feel the tremor of something unchangeable; that when they speak of love, they will mean the kind that holds the cosmos in being. The world does not need more curators of mood. It needs mediators of mystery.
