Answers WithHeld

About Answers WithHeld

A podcast where we confront big questions with bold thinking and honest searching. Each week, Rabbi Shai Held sits down with a leading thinker or teacher to explore one powerful Jewish idea. This podcast doesn’t have all the answers, but it can uncover new insights and model what it means to take Torah and Jewish thought seriously.

Publisher

Hadar Institute

Category

religion & spirituality

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

15 Feb 2024

Latest episode

11 May 2026

Latest episodes

1 of 24 episodes have a transcript.

1. 

   11 May 2026TRANSCRIPT

   Faith and Doubt in Our Final Hours: A Conversation Between Dr. Lydia Dugdale and R. Shai Held

   For many of us, confronting death raises urgent questions of faith, doubt, and the meaning and purpose of our lives. Yet we live in a culture that avoids talking about death, let alone the existential challenges it raises. Physician and ethicist Lydia Dugdale, author of The Lost Art of Dying, joins Rabbi Shai Held to draw on ancient and contemporary wisdom about mortality and meaning. Recorded in Fall 2025. This conversation is part of the Faith WithHeld series, generously sponsored by ...

2. 

   27 Apr 2026

   Faith WithHeld: A Conversation Between Sarah Wildman and R. Shai Held

   When the unthinkable happens, what remains of faith? Journalist Sarah Wildman, who lost her young daughter, joins Rabbi Shai Held in a searching conversation about grief, love, and the struggle to go on. They will probe how mourning collides with meaning-making, and how faith might fracture, endure, or be remade in the wake of devastating loss. Recorded in Fall 2025. This conversation is part of the Faith WithHeld series, generously sponsored by the Schiller family.

3. 

   25 Sept 2025

   Dreaming of the Messiah: What Can We Learn from Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook?

   Was Rabbi Kook a mystic, a radical, or a realist? And what did he really believe about redemption? In this season finale, Rabbi Shai Held is joined by Professor Yehudah Mirsky to unpack the bold and complex messianic vision of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and the ways in which this vision still reverberates today. Together, they explore Kook’s hopes for a transformed humanity, his belief in the spiritual potential of the Jewish people, and how his messianism shaped (and was shaped by) the politic...

Inside a recent episode

Faith and Doubt in Our Final Hours: A Conversation Between Dr. Lydia Dugdale and R. Shai Held

Published 11 May 2026 · Transcript excerpt

[…] He says, what most characterizes the modern approach to death is escapism. Yeah, I think that's right. And that's why the Ars Moriandi can't survive into modernity ultimately, right? It's too much. We're busy pretending that that's not real. We don't even let people die in their own home, right? So we're not exposed to the reality of death as touching into our innermost spaces. That's just not something that we are comfortable with. Yeah, and then there's all the other things that Silicon Valley is doing, sort of everything from uploading the brain to cryopreservation of the body to Brian Johnson getting infusions from his son's plasma or something. […]

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

58 ratings

Spotify

4.8 / 5

22 ratings

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Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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