Rabbi Irving Greenberg
In Praise
Short Pieces
Rabbi Irving Greenberg is an influential theologian and an activist who has been a seminal thinker on the Holocaust as a turning point in Jewish and Western culture and on the State of Israel as the Jewish assumption of power and the beginning of a new era in Jewish history. He has written extensively on the ethics of Jewish power. He served as Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council from 2000–2002. He is currently writing a comprehensive theology of Judaism as the religion of tikkun olam seeking to perfect the world.
Greenberg, universally known as Yitz, stepped down as President of Jewish Life Network/Steinhardt Foundation in July 2007. This capped a storied fifty-year career as a leading thinker, activist, and professional in the American Jewish Community. In those decades he served (including overlapping years) eight years in the Rabbinate [ordained by Beth Joseph (Novaredok) Rabbinical Seminary, 1953], twenty years in academia [PhD Harvard University, 1960; thirteen years at Yeshiva University], twenty-three years as a Founding President of the educational organization CLAL, and ten years as Founding President of a new entrepreneurial philanthropic foundation, Jewish Life Network/ Steinhardt Foundation.
In the 1960s in the Rabbinate he built a nationally leading modern Orthodox synagogue/community in Riverdale, New York, created SAR Academy, a leading day school with particular focus on individual development and values integration, was spiritual guide to Yavneh for Orthodox Jewish student activism on campus, and was one of the founders of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, the trailblazer in the American Soviet Jewry Movement.
Greenberg became an influential figure in the Jewish-Christian dialogue, which led to the revision of Christian teachings on Judaism. In joining the dialogue, he went against the Orthodox establishment and beyond the views of his teacher and spiritual mentor, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. In the 1970s, Greenberg was founding chairman of the Department of Jewish Studies of City College of the City University, New York and was one of the founders of the Association for Jewish Studies, the professional organization for academic Jewish Studies. Starting from the 1960s, he was a pioneer in Holocaust education, including service as (Executive) Director of the President's Commission on the Holocaust in 1979–1980, which conceived (and later supervised the creation of) the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. From 1974–1997, he served as Founding President of CLAL: The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership which played a leading role in shifting the agenda of Jewish Federations toward priority for Jewish education and identity. CLAL pioneered pluralistic Jewish education for lay leadership and interdenominational religious dialogue and study for Rabbis.
In 1990s and 2000s, together with Michael Steinhardt and his son, JJ Greenberg of blessed memory, he worked on developing the new entrepreneurial philanthropy for Jewish renewal. Among the projects they initiated were Makor, outreach to Jews in their 20s and 30s, through cutting-edge music, the arts and culture; the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education (PEJE) to spread and improve day school education; and birthright Israel, a universal gift of an educational trip for Jews ages of 18–26.
Greenberg's theological writings on post-Shoah theology, on religious pluralism, on reimagining the relationship of Judaism and Christianity have won a wide following among American Jews and non-Jews alike. In his book, Interpreters of Judaism in the Late Twentieth Century, Professor Steven T. Katz wrote, "No Jewish thinker has had a greater impact on the American Jewish community in the last two decades than Irving (Yitz) Greenberg."
The Talmud says every human being should be treated as if they were infinitely valuable. God is not white or black. God is not a Jew or a gentile.
My thinking and my institutional leadership have been driven by the messages and friendship that the audience and co-workers have communicated to me, nonverbally as well as verbally. And when I have gone through periods when I felt that I could not go on (there have been such times), the people have renewed my strength…and propelled me onward. This is as it should be. A leader should not simply follow, but should be sustained by the people.
The shock of the Shoah undermines the credibility of modern culture's promises and reveals that all these glittering redemptive visions disarmed the victims even as modern technology armed the victimizers.
In the history of brit, with the passage of time, God intervenes less and less openly, and gives humans more and more freedom. I believe that we are living through the climax of that process. In this era, God does not strike you dead for sin; God does not stop the rain if a people do not obey. Genuine freedom is scary.
People remember Hillel's famous statement of the basis of Torah, what you do not want the other one to do you, do not do to the other. People forget that Hillel continued with the instruction: 'go study [and apply] the rest.' All these issues require a lifetime of application and wrestling.
What is my mission, what is my shlichut, which God has in mind for me? Unfortunately, there are no neon lights flashing the answer or messages directly from God that tell us what do…each of us must figure the mission out for ourselves, and that task may take a lifetime.
This is the heroic age of the Jewish people, an age of resurrection and rebirth. It is simultaneously an age of awakening and new hope for humanity.
The secular world needs our help to develop healthy limits.
Jewish educators must recognize that there is an unprecedented level of impact of the dominant world civilization on all 'local' worlds—including ours, the Jewish world…I would argue that the issue of relating the two worlds positively—or creating syntheses that bring out the best in both—is the particular mission of our generation.
Open-ended freedom is frightening. We now know that if there are no limits in a society, the process leads to destruction and mass murder, to a breakdown in values and the unleashing of disintegrative forces.
So what is the meaning of life?…The Jews faced that question and they concluded that life is a partnership between God and humanity. Life is making sense of this world and improving it and doing tikkun olam (repairing the world) in one's own time.
We spend four years—and more—in college to train ourselves for a career…in self-respect and conscience, we must spend at least one year working full-time at becoming a mensch…Only a year of full time student of Torah, deepened by encounter with the holiness and pulsating life of Jerusalem and Israel, can begin to give the inspiration and knowledge of authentic Jewish living to illuminate a lifetime.
Still I know that although Shabbat does not last all week, I would like to make the world look more like Shabbat. I would like to make the Jewish people a little closer to Shabbat.
There is an old Yiddish proverb—love is wonderful, but love with noodles is even better. The modern world offered the Jewish people love with noodles. The noodles were unprecedented economic, political and cultural advances for them and for all people. The love was human dignity, equal rights, peace, and the end of war. The remarkable offer proved overwhelmingly irresistible to Jews.
It is likely that this event [the Holocaust] will turn out to be a fundamental turning point in human history, not just in Jewish history. The Holocaust represents a crisis of credibility for the dominant culture in which we live.
All halachic behaviors are dramatic/mimetic gestures articulating a central metaphor of living. Grasping the metaphor adds depth to action and joy to life.
The covenant becomes a treaty with all the generations. Each generation will have to do its share of redemption and pass it on to the next generation until the redemption is complete.
Great leadership is not always crowned with success. In order to be a great leader, you have to be willing to fail.
If the principal makes the day school into such a covenantal community—in imitation of God—then the student will experience a dignity that anticipates the Messianic world promised by Judaism and modernity.
The Holocaust is the most radical counter testimony to both Christianity and Judaism. After the Holocaust, no statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of the burning children.
I believe that contemporary civilization is one of the great cultures of all time; that is why it is so appealing. The greatness of the culture embodies some of the finest Jewish values as well.
If you can get people of such decency and quality who are willing to really criticize themselves and determined to change their own religious teaching in order to make it a vision of love… this is the key to breaking anti-Semitism.
In my mind, the faith-annihilating Shoah and the faith-renewing restoration of Israel are twinned forever. They ceaselessly wrestle for dominance; just when the message of one appears to be triumphant; it is challenged and even overthrown by the phenomenon of the other in an endless, recurring cycle.
The educational challenge is no longer how one [Jewish] world can reshape itself to be integrated into the other; rather the question is how do the two worlds [Jewish and non-Jewish]—standing side by side—correlate, integrate or confront each other? The time has come for a two-way conversation of equals, not a one-way conversation between a dominant and a minor culture.
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