Unfortunately, this book is probably preaching to the choir. In a time where antisemitism around the globe is a bad as it has been for the past eighty years, we need books like this. But the people who need it the most will probably never get past the title before they set the book aflame with another chant of "from the river to the sea..."

While the book isn't a hard read, it does seem a bit long and repetitive. But rather than critique it, why not just pull a few excerpts which can probably do a better job than I of saying what the book is about:

<i>The path to universal love always runs through the particular.

Learn the truth from whoever says it.

The best response to people using the word 'love' poorly is not to use it less but to use it better.

When religion works, instead of taking life for granted, we begin to experience it as granted. Instead of feeling entitled, we feel blessed.

Ingratitude constitutes both a moral failure and a failure of reason.

On the one hand, the Torah insists that if we are grateful, we must share; yet on the other, it suggests that if we are grateful, we will want to share, because the urge to share is a significant part of what it means to be grateful. This is arguably what distinguishes being grateful for something from being merely glad or pleased about it. When I am grateful, I 'want to favor another because I have been favored myself.' Here again, duty and desire are interwoven.

Protesting injustice and oppression is a mitzvah, a moral and religious responsibility we are not permitted to shirk; and that protest can be a potent demonstration of love.

To confront injustice and oppression and not to get angry is a moral failure.

Asked when a person should start educating his child, Rev Hayyim of Volozhin is reported to have replied, 'Twenty years before they are born.'

The Torah adjures Israel to love and protect the stranger and to include him in various aspects of communal and national life, but also expects some degree of assimilation on the stranger's part.

Whatever you push away is going to bounce back at you. It is nature's law. Whatever you run from becomes your shadow.

Heroism consists not in the willingness to start a fight, but in the eagerness to end one.

As the Talmudic sage Rav Huna puts it, 'One who occupies himself only with study of the law and not with hesed</i> [love] <i>is as if he had no God.' God leads to love, he suggests, or it is actually not God we know.

Grief and lament have their place, but they cannot, must not, have the final word.

Anger is not essential to who God is in the way that love it. God gets angry, but God is love.

God's love comes with expectations, but without conditions.</i>

I felt like this one got a little repetitive in areas but overall I liked it, the writing style, and message to challenge readers to think about what they really know about Judaism.

Rabbi Shai Held has written one of the most important books on Jewish faith and tradition I have read in a long while. This is a must read for Jews as well as others who wish to better understand Jewish tradition and beliefs. A great contribution to the library of our time.