In his recently published book The Triumph of Life: A Narrative Theology of Judaism (The Jewish Publication Society) prominent modern Orthodox theologian Rabbi Irving (Yitz) Greenberg explores the evolving nature of God's covenant with humanity, theodicy, and the Jewish vision of a perfected world, in which humans have managed "to overcome poverty, hunger, oppression, war, even sickness, and thus roll back the realm of death." PW caught up with Greenberg to talk about his new book, and the author’s own spiritual evolution.
In The Triumph of Life, you write that God has "self-limited, now to the point of becoming totally hidden in natural laws and material processes." Can you explain that?
Yes, I believe that God has become more hidden, more limited, in order that humans will have more responsibility. The covenant is now a mature, fulfilled covenant in which God has raised us to the level where we will really have the freedom to make serious choices. God has not abandoned us. God did not intervene in the Holocaust, for example, because God had made this commitment that it was time for humans to take full responsibility.
How does that voluntary self-limiting differ from the theodicy of theologians such as Harold Kushner, who, in When Bad Things Happen to Good People, concludes that God is benevolent, but not all-powerful, and thus can't avert human suffering?
I think we're both describing the same phenomenon. There is a difference between a God who is limited and a God who self-limits. My version does justice, I think, to the God of the Exodus, who intervened in human history. It does justice to that, but also does justice to the facts that we’ve both wrestled with—mass murder, and the suffering of innocents. My argument is not with Kushner. This is the best I can make of the combination of the tradition and of the experiences of my lifetime. Which one of us is right is not worth arguing about. When we get to the world to come, we'll have the answer.
You've said that some of your thinking has changed over the years. Can you provide an example?
Perhaps the most important example is my wrestling with the Holocaust. That's really been a central part of my life. In a sense, it started me on my theological journey. In 1961, I was planning to be an American academic. I was what I jokingly call a fulfilled Orthodox Jew. I had enjoyed and loved the life of observance that I inherited and grew up in.
And, what happened?
I went to Israel for a year on a Fulbright to teach American intellectual history, my professional field. I had a vague idea about what the Holocaust was, but after visiting Yad Vashem [The World Holocaust Remembrance Center, in Jerusalem], it took over my life, and I became totally immersed in it. For six, seven months, I did nothing but teach my Tel Aviv University intellectual history course, and all the rest of the time I was at Yad Vashem.
Of course, it shook me up deeply. It made me doubt and question God and God's presence, and made me realize that the Orthodoxy which I loved was not adequate to the full challenge of these ideas, nor, for that matter, were any other denominations. At first there were days when I would want to pray, and I couldn't. I literally couldn't. I would choke on the words, because what was burning in my mind and heart were the stories about Treblinka or Auschwitz, children being burnt alive. I wrestled with how God could make a covenant with the Jewish people, and then leave them exposed to such murder and such suffering. I concluded that the covenant was now voluntary. That, given such destruction, and suffering, God has no right to command people.
Can you expand upon what you mean by voluntary covenant?
It's the Jewish people saying, "I so love the mission of repairing the world, that I'm willing to take this on with all the risk." It is the idea that command or obligation is really finished, and that what we're seeing is voluntary, and, in fact, in my judgment, superior, and more committed than before.
Can talk about any other major changes in your thinking?
I had been so immersed in death and destruction that I realized that I'm not being fair to the Jewish religion, which, in the end, is all about life. It's a very positive, very affirmative religion that speaks in Messianic terms of turning this world into a paradise of justice, and overcoming war, and overcoming sickness. So, I moved to what became central to this book, the idea that Judaism is a religion of life, that all its practices are attempts to get us to maximize life and to live with greater depth.
You joined a Jewish-Christian dialogue. What did you learn from that experience?
For one, it made me realize that I have to search my own tradition and root out where it has hostile images of Gentiles. It made me see that God works through other religions, and that there were places where I felt Christianity was ahead of Judaism. There were issues that need improvement in the Jewish tradition. Christianity has remained much more responsible for all of humanity than Judaism, which, in self-protection, became much more tribal, much more self-defensive. So, it inspired me to try to open my eyes, to widen the embrace of Judaism.
