For the Sake of Heaven and Earth, by Irving (Yitz) Greenberg)
Jewish Publication Society
reviewed by Allan Gould
Reading Irving Greenberg: A powerful message for Jews and Christians alike.
There are some books which I have the honour of reviewing for you that I long for every Jew to own: Emil Fackenheim’s brilliant yet accessible WHAT IS JUDAISM?, which I looked at last year as a Kaddish for that wonderful human being, Jew, and philosopher, is a good example.
Rabbi Irving Greenberg—known as "Yitz" to nearly anyone who has met this kind, good, wise Orthodox rabbi—has written several books which should, indeed, be in every Jewish library, such as his THE JEWISH WAY—THE JEWISH HOLIDAYS, a profound, exquisitely-written study of each of the major yom-tovim of our faith, which I find myself re-reading several times each year (and which can be purchased from various Internet book stores in used condition). (Get it!)
Only last year, the revered Yitz Greenberg gathered together several scholarly articles on a subject which has long vexed him, and which has long been [dangerously?] ignored by most Jews, especially the most "traditional" of our faith, and added a devastating opening essay of just under 50 pages. The book is called For the Sake of Heaven and Earth, and is subtitled “The New Encounter between Judaism and Christianity,” and it was published in 2004 as a low-priced paperback by the Jewish Publication Society. This latest book by one of our faith’s most intriguing philosophers and thinkers is NOT one that need be in most private Jewish libraries; it is hard-going, and often maddeningly complex. But it raises so many serious, challenging questions about Jewish/Gentile relations—and from an Orthodox rabbi yet!—that it is impossible to ignore. Let me at least raise some of those questions for you, without urging you to rush out and buy a copy.
The opening paragraph of Rabbi Yitz’s first, most recent essay (“On the Road to a New Encounter between Judaism and Christianity: a Personal Journey”) really messed up my brain. But then, listening to Yitz—as I always do, when he comes and lectures in Toronto—and reading Yitz—as I often do, as noted above—has always been a kind of Cuisinart for my thinking. And what more can anyone ask of a serious philosopher? Here goes:
Almost 2000 years ago, Judaism and nascent Christianity separated from each other. The two communities set out on very different journeys through history, guided by the star of a parallel policy: hear no good, see no good, and speak no good of each other. Important Christian canonical texts portrayed Judaism as a religion that had no right to exist; Jewish faith was a once valid, now spiritually bankrupt creed, repudiated by God. Great Jewish rabbis defined Christianity as a faith founded on folly, whose dogmas violently twisted classical Jewish concepts into a not-to-be-recognized form of idolatry. The church was viewed as a bastard offspring (a medieval polemicist would say: the offspring of a bastard) that grew up and became big and violent enough to abuse its parent unmercifully.
Whew. That’s certainly "telling it like it is," isn't it? But then, Rabbi Yitz never minces words. Of course, then he lays out what will be his major purpose, and theme, of this collection of often difficult-to-follow essays: "Yet in the past century, both religions have begun a new encounter with each other. Every passing decade reveals that this process is offering both faiths a true historical rarity: a second chance to connect and thus an opportunity to re-revision themselves. I believe that by responding openly with honesty, both communities will discover that God has given them an opportunity to renew the purpose of their sacred existence on earth…."
Whew, again. What words to encounter—and from a halachic, 613-law-following Orthodox Jewish rabbi in the 21st century! And you can see what Yitz Greenberg has been up against: as more and more Christian Americans (especially) move to the "right" in religiosity and observance, more and more of them see Jews, Muslims, and everyone who does not "accept the divinity of Jesus as the Messiah" as being doomed to a fiery eternity. And the Jews? Those who count themselves among "the Torah-true," like my dear friend Yitz Greenberg, essentially "don’t give a damn what the Gentiles think," any more than most people on this earth lose any sleep over global warming, or the Newfoundland seal hunt, or anything else which does not seem to impact on their lives in any important, vital way.
Of course, there is a needle in this haystack; a fly in this ointment; a mosquito in this tent: and it is a very large needle/fly/mosquito: the cold-blooded, organized, deliberate murder of 85% of the Jews of Europe, or over a third of every Jew who was alive on this earth in 1940. How can one escape the centrality of the Holocaust; the Shoah? For most Jews, it destroyed their ability to ever trust their Christian brothers and sisters again (who were either murdering us by gas or gun, or ignoring the smell and sound of the latter); for most Christians, the image of their parents or friends dragging their Jewish neighbours to the death-camp-directed trains, when it comes to their minds at all, since the end of World War II, has been a source of deep guilt, only alleviated by trying to forget the whole thing, or smiling at the thought that there was the occasional Oskar Schindler or Raoul Wallenberg which somehow forgave millions of others for not responding humanely. For six decades now, Jews have turned to Eli Wiesel (when they turned in that painful direction at all); Christians have mainly turned away. (And who can blame them for that?)
And then, along comes an ordained Orthodox rabbi and Harvard Ph.D., Irving Greenberg, who has been struggling passionately, intellectually, RELIGIOUSLY, with the Big Questions about Jewish (as well as Christian) responses to the Holocaust, since 1961. (Yet, he admits in the extraordinary essay which opens his latest book, "while in college, I did not reflect on my attitude toward Christianity as a religion; on the whole, I remained mildly dismissive of the faith as practiced and remembered that its practitioners had not treated Jews well historically.") (There is an understatement for you!)
Then, Yitz truly began to wake up to the Holocaust. (And I use that phrase advisedly; I am forever quoting the amazing line which James Joyce gives Stephen Daedalus in his early novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.") Greenberg finally hears of his many aunts and uncles murdered in Eastern Europe; he reads many of the books that were being published in the late 1960s which showed how "the United States had abandoned and betrayed the European Jews," and he responded, as a young husband and father, in that deeply profound way which, one would think, most people should respond to that bleak period in human—not only Jewish—history:
Days of helpless despair sequenced into nights of joy. Hours of sitting, enveloped by consuming, all-pervasive anxiety and fear of what the next moment would bring, were followed by walks through the peaceful, secure, unafraid streets of Jerusalem. [How ironic this last sentence seems today, over four decades later, as bus bombings and pizzeria slaughters had become common over the past few years!] In the end, my wife’s loving presence preserved me from madness, and a living Israel saved me from death of the soul. Although I since have moved on to other stages of Holocaust consciousness and religious response, there is a piece of my soul that is permanently fixed in this relentless, locked embrace of the life force and the death force….
What a response! And that’s where the agony begins, and never ends. Because Rabbi Irving Greenberg eventually came to see—as did his dear friend, the recently-deceased Emil Fackenheim—that the Shoah was NOT merely just "one more slaughter," but a murderous explosion which challenged Christian purpose and survival, and even shook (and possibly broke?) the actual covenant made between God and his people Israel in the Sinai desert, some three millennia ago.
To quote the good Rabbi, "I became convinced that dialogue was an absolute necessity—first to check Christian teaching of contempt and then to revise Jewish negative stereotypes toward Christianity." As one might joke (but won’t): good luck! And this obsession with a dialogue (with the enemy? With our younger, sister, murderous brethren?) led to a further conviction on the part of Rabbi Irving Greenberg: ". . .I was convinced that the Holocaust was a revelational event in at least two religions (Judaism and Christianity). Therefore, it was important to spell out its messages and teach them to be practitioners in both faiths. Can one event be a revelation in two religions?" A good question! And answered in a fascinating fashion.
Along the way, Yitz Greenberg found true, deep, supportive friends in the Christian community, such as Alice and Roy Eckardt, who recognized in the Holocaust a crippling failure in Christian goodness and acceptable response. But he often received reactions from the religious Jewish community which were passionately negative: it’s useless to try and have a dialogue with these people who murdered our parents, our families, our children! Why even attempt it? And, perhaps even more crushing was the refusal of most "frum" Jews to see the Shoah as a possible break in the eternal covenant between Ha-Shem and His People; had there not been so many other mass murders, slaughters, expulsions, crusades, pogroms, Chmelnitzkis, Stalins. . . ?
You can see why I find Yitz Greenberg such a haunting—and haunted—philosopher. He has spent most of his life trying to convince his fellow (religious) Jews that the Shoah was NOT merely "one more event"
in Jewish history; and to convince his growing number of Christian philosopher friends that “the teaching of contempt goes straight back to the original Gospel accounts. The Holocaust had revealed that, at the very heart of Christianity, a shelter for evil existed that must be razed, since hatred was in fundamental contradiction to the gospel of love that is the New Testament’s true role and goal.”
What makes Yitz’s struggle all the more painful is, that a growing number of Christians (especially since the Six Day War) have seen the Israelis as "the new Nazis," whose actions in self-defense (and often more pro-active) against suicide bombers and Palestinians who felt displaced since 1967, have been excessive, cruel, and a too-simple way of forgiving their own fellow-practitioners of Christianity for their grotesque failure of morality and humanity during the 1940s.
Whew, indeed. I often think of Yitz Greenberg as a kind of modern John the Baptist, "a voice crying out in the wilderness"—although the good Rabbi might prefer to hear me compare him with the more classically-Jewish figure of Jeremiah, crying out against Jewish failings and demanding positive moral responses from everyone.
What I love about Yitz Greenberg—and this problematic, mind-boggling book (especially the opening 50 pages of "a philosopher’s autobiography")—is that he keeps raising the Big Questions—questions so big that few of us think of them, once we move past our teenage years, get married, have families, find jobs, pay our mortgages and taxes, etc. One example which echoes through the entire collection of essays: "The general Jewish position has been that Jesus was a false messiah. Why? Would it not be more precise to say that a false messiah is one who teaches the wrong values and who turns sin into holiness? A more accurate description, from a Jewish perspective, would be that Jesus was not a 'false' but a 'failed' messiah. He has not finished the job but his work is not in vain."
What a thought! But to a religious Jew, what could Jesus have been but false—well, if not Jesus, then assuredly what his followers made of him and his teachings. And to a religious Christian, even the term "failed messiah" can easily be taken as an insult, in spite of the obvious fact that Rabbi Greenberg means nothing of the sort.
Do I recommend this book? Certainly, the first 50 pages, in which Yitz Greenberg shares his growing obsession with the Shoah, with Christianity, and with what he thinks is the vital need for some kind of serious dialogue. It is heartbreaking, meaningful, tragic, possibly doomed work. Should this book be in your library? Well, maybe not; not all the essays are up to the level of the opening chapter, although each has the occasional mind-teaser which I was happy to have twig my brain.
I love Yitz Greenberg. Whether a modern John the Baptist or a modern Jeremiah, he is certainly an important thorn—in the sides of both Jews and Christians alike. I hope the above thoughts will stir in you a new longing to try and bridge that ferocious, terrifying gap between the Jewish people and our younger brothers and sisters (as the late Pope would say about Christians).
Of course, the need for such dialogue is ever changing, ever growing—and not only with our Christian friends and neighbours. I’ll conclude with one painful line (and a footnote to that line) in one of the essays reprinted in this book: "The reason we no longer have religious wars is not so much that modern people are so pluralist, but that they no longer care so passionately about religion." Then, just below, Yitz adds a footnote: "This was written in 1968. Since 9/11/2001, we have been taught that people who care passionately about religion are back and they are prepared to terrorize without limit and kill without mercy."
Oh, Lord; does it ever end?
