Greenberg’s New Book is a Personal Triumph
At 92, Yitz Greenberg will be honored for a lifetime of achievement at this year’s National Jewish Book Awards.
Rabbi Irving Yitzchak Greenberg’s recently published book, “The Triumph of Life,” could easily have been retitled, “The Triumph of Yitz,” the name by which the distinguished American rabbi is almost universally known by his many admirers. It has been described as his magnum opus, the culminating statement of a long lifetime of intense reflection on what he considers the essence of Jewish life and thought.
The work, which Greenberg says he has been wrestling with for the last 10 years, was originally over a thousand pages. After several rounds of editing assistance, both at the Hadar Institute in New York, the innovative learning center where Greenberg serves as the senior scholar-in-residence, and the Jewish Publication Society, the work has been pared to a more manageable length of just over 300 pages.
While he deals with the broad sweep of Jewish history — from Biblical times to the present — he is most concerned with life today. Our power to choose life in the third and present stage of our covenant, to act as the title implies rather than to expect G-d to act for us.
“I have to believe,” he has been quoted as saying that G-d, already in this third stage of the covenant, had self-limited completely, asking humans to take full responsibility. Now I believe this was a signal, not only to the Jewish people, but to the whole world, and that’s what modern civilization is about. The signal was [to] take power. The claim is that modernity, with all its technology, is the human response to an invitation to take power and redeem the world.”
Rabbi Greenberg, who will be 92 in May, has used the final stage of his life to shape a vision of who we are in our relationship to G-d. The clarity of his mind and his eloquence which has shaped so much of Jewish intellectual life over his long life seems undiminished in what he implies is his final major work.
In a revealing interview with Michael Berenbaum, the prolific scholar and professor of Jewish studies at the American Jewish University, Greenberg summed up what possibilities modern life offers when we go it, as it were, alone.
“Modernity was tremendously attractive to Jews because it said you can join in this process to fulfill the old dreams, the old messianic dreams, to overcome poverty and hunger, war, beat the swords into plowshares to overcome sickness. Isaiah predicts, in the Messianic age, the deaf will hear, the blind will see. In effect, modernity said, take power and we can redeem the world.”
But the promise of modernity, Greenberg warns, carries with it immense dangers as well. The Nazi Holocaust, he believes, was a summary statement of all the dangers that technology and the scientific advances of modern civilization present to Jews and to mankind. To those who ask, where was G-d in the Holocaust, Greenberg answers, there, but silent.
“My answer is not that G-d failed. G-d was in the concentration camps. G-d was in the ghettos, being tormented and hungered and starved. G-d was in the gas chambers, choking, losing control of one’s sphincters, being totally confused in the pain. But why did G-d not stop it? Because hundreds of years already, G-d had said, I will no longer do the intervention control. I will work only through human beings. That’s the time that we’re in, it’s a time when human beings have all the power.”
In place of the might and power of the Exodus, G-d has withdrawn in favor of the freedom that human beings have to act, for better or worse.
“G-d loves it and trusts us enough to say, take this power and I will guide you as best I can. I will guide you through tradition. I will guide you through Bible. I will guide you through inspiration and insights of human beings trying to be faithful. I will walk with you. I will be at your side. And this is the time that we live in, in which G-d is totally hidden, but that means G-d is present everywhere in every moment of life.”
In recognition of the power that Greenberg wields in this work, it was selected for a Lifetime Achievement honor at the 74th National Jewish Book Awards which will be presented on March 12 at Temple Emanu-El in New York City.
In announcing the selection, Greenberg was cited as “a towering figure in Jewish life and education … whose “teachings around a philosophy … encourages a view of Judaism as a unified people.”
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