At 91, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg writes the ‘big book’ his admirers had been waiting for 

In the late 1990s, I would joke that my family and I lived on “Planet Yitz.” 

Our children attended SAR Academy, the co-ed, educationally progressive Modern Orthodox day school co-founded by Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg in 1970. 

I worked at CLAL, the Jewish think tank founded by Greenberg, Elie Wiesel, and Rabbi Steven Shaw in 1974 as an experiment in dialogue across the Jewish denominations. 

And we lived in Riverdale, New York, not far from where Greenberg and his wife, the Orthodox feminist pioneer Blu Greenberg, raised five children and where Yitz had served as rabbi at the Riverdale Jewish Center in the 1960s.

“Planet Yitz” was also a state of mind: As a Modern Orthodox philosopher, Greenberg wrote about a Jewish world shattered by the Holocaust and forced to create a new, life-affirming reality in what he called the “Third Great Era” in Jewish history. This era would be marked by Jews taking full responsibility for their own destiny, from creating the state of Israel to developing new Diaspora institutions that would promote and celebrate the full range of Jewish religious and ethnic identity. At the core of this philosophy was the traditional concept of b’tzelem elohim (all humans are created in God’s image), radical pluralism, and a reverence for life, its quality and quantity.

The institutions he created or influenced — SAR, CLAL, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where he served as chairman from 2000 to 2002 — reflected these ideas in sometimes controversial ways. Like Blu, he became a leading Orthodox feminist, pushing for expanded women’s roles in learning and leadership. He was a proponent of interfaith dialogue when other Orthodox Jews resisted sitting down with leaders of other religions. Traditionalists bristled at his notion that the Holocaust had “broken” God’s covenant with the Jewish people and that since Auschwitz, God had become paradoxically both more hidden and more available. And he sought to elevate the status of Jewish philanthropists and other lay leaders, however secular they might be, suggesting they were at least equals with rabbis as religious role models and community leaders. 

Over seven decades, Greenberg explored these ideas directly in a series of seminal papers and interviews and perhaps more indirectly in five books, including a classic guide to the Jewish holidays and a book about interfaith dialogue. What he hadn’t written was the “big book” — the capstone volume laying out his theology and agenda for the Jewish people. Until now. “The Triumph of Life: A Narrative Theology of Judaism,” being published this month, is what Rabbi Shai Held, president and dean at Hadar (where Greenberg is now the senior scholar in residence) calls a “culmination of a lifetime of theological reflection.”

“The truth is, I didn’t think it would take this long,” Greenberg, 91, told me. “But I want to push the book not in the interest of sales because I think the Jewish people need a narrative right now.”

Greenberg serves as president of the J.J. Greenberg Institute for the Advancement of Jewish Life. He was born in Brooklyn and in 1953 was ordained there at the Beis Yosef yeshiva. He was one of the founders of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry and earned a PhD in history from Harvard University. In the 1970s he served as professor and chairman of the Department of Jewish Studies of City College of the City University of New York.

Greenberg spoke with me Wednesday from Jerusalem, where he and his wife have lived mostly full-time for the past five years. We spoke about the policy implications of his theology, the toll the war in Gaza has taken on his family and why he became a vegetarian.  

Congratulations on the book. And I must be honest: I think many people have been waiting many years for your magnum opus. I wonder if you thought about it the same way, that you wanted to write the big book and pull all your ideas together between two covers. Do you agree with Shai Held that this is a culmination of a lifetime of thinking?

In some ways, the answer is yes. 

I started working on it in 2009 when I retired. But it came out as a kind of academic, more abstract and more theoretical book, and at the end of four years, I said, “This isn’t the book that I want to write.” I wanted to write a book that would speak intelligently to a lay audience. So I just put it aside and started over again.  

So, while the book is a culmination, some of my main ideas have come and gone, meaning I had to revise them.

What’s an example of an idea that you long-held but felt you needed to revise?

In 1961 I was shattered when I immersed myself in the evidence of the atrocities of the Holocaust, and as a result had written that God had broken the covenant with the Jewish people by not protecting the Jews. When I said that it was probably the peak of the backlash I faced from the more traditional sectors. I also argued that in the first great era of Jewish history, the biblical era, God was dominant and visible, and in the second, the rabbinic era, after the destruction of the Second Temple, God self-limited, essentially saying that human behavior will make much more of a difference should they take more responsibility for themselves. We’re now in the third stage, where God is completely hidden but wants humans to take power and overcome the enemies of life. It is not that God is uncaring, but God really wants humans to take full responsibility. Reward and punishment is no longer the model. It’s all about relationships and shared values. 

And therefore, the covenant is not broken, not failed, but it is voluntary. We’re choosing to do God’s work. So the book in one way walks back the notion of “brokenness” and on the other hand it claims that this is truly a voluntary, transformed covenant in which we each have a commitment to tikkun olam — world repair.

“Tikkun olam” has come to be associated with liberal Judaism and universal social justice, but in the book you claim that the concept is a responsibility of every Jew, no matter their movement or denomination. Do you worry that Orthodox Jews might reject the idea of tikkun olam precisely because it has become central to liberal movements?

Thank you for picking that up. That’s correct. Tikkun olam is easy to dismiss if you want to interpret Judaism as a tribal religion. But it is a world religion. Bereishit, the first book of the Torah, famously starts with the creation of the world, and not with the first mitzvah God commanded of Abraham. [The medieval commentator] Rashi said the point of starting there was to validate our claim to Israel — but if so, why not start with chapter 12, when God promises the land to Abraham? What I argue is that the purpose of starting with the creation of the world is to demonstrate that the first covenant is not Jewish, and that God wants to redeem the whole earth and all of humanity, not just the Jewish people. When it comes to overcoming oppression, discrimination, racism and sexism, if you strip away political and tribal visions, the idea of repairing the world is for everybody. 

Do you worry that tikkun olam can become an end in itself, or just another word for universal justice, and you can end up losing the Jewish language or distinctiveness?  

After the Shoah I became a pluralist, and came to realize that the other versions of Judaism and its secular version are very, very important. In the Third Era the most important thing is for humanity to take power. So the secular Zionists focused on the human and on the ethical and on the historical homeland, and the haredim said no because they were trying to be faithful to an earlier encounter with God. But that’s not what God was asking for. 

And unfortunately, many religious Jews focus on the ritual and not necessarily the ethical. So my answer is that a lot of the so-called “secular” or non-Orthodox Jews experience the covenant’s sustaining power, and feel responsibility and a sense of belonging to a covenant dedicated to battling for life in every field.

Central to your theology, and it’s in the title of your book, is that Judaism prioritizes upholding the quantity and quality of life over all competing values and interests. You write, “In the Third Era, all human actions should strive more intensely to make the Earth more hospitable to life and more sustaining of a higher quality of life,” and you even apply that to the policy dimension, in terms of protecting the environment, investing in health care, housing and mass transit, protecting workers’ rights and regarding same-sex relationships as natural and even holy. Are you optimistic? Do you think the world is moving towards a place of maximizing life in both quantity and quality?  

My answer is that there are major breakthroughs in all these areas. Absolutely. Overcoming poverty, developing human dignity, the concept of liberal democracy, these are major accomplishments. We’ve had amazing progress. However, and this is what we learn from the Shoah, number one: the culture itself, with all of its good qualities, can be applied and harnessed for bad things, the way the Nazis perverted some of the most powerful and constructive elements of modernity and technology. Bureaucracy, for example, makes possible most of the great, constructive accomplishments, like Social Security. But they took those forces of technology and rationality and bureaucracy and they harnessed them for death. Progress is real, but it’s not automatic and it’s still heavily driven by human choice.

What does belief in God add to this equation? 

One of the prices we pay, and in part I blame religious leadership, is that people say, “Well, we’re the masters of the universe. There is no god. Humans are doing all this.” Modernity lost a sense of confidence, lost a sense of accountability, lost a sense that there is a power higher than us. A lot of the pathology we’re seeing now — global crises, environmental crisis, global warming — these are all reflective of the breakdown of a sense of partnership with a higher power. 

You apply the notion of the dignity of all life not only in the policy sphere but in personal behavior, including sexuality and the things we eat. Remind me – I remember that you are a vegetarian?

Since 1991. I was influenced by the [biblical scholar] Jacob Milgrom’s evidence that kashrut is at root an ethic of vegetarianism. You are allowed to eat meat, but the Torah puts restrictions, heavy restrictions, on what you can and cannot eat, and all of these restrictions apply to flesh. If you are committed to maximizing life, you don’t kill and eat animals, and if you must, you kill them painlessly. You don’t eat blood, because that is your admission that life really shouldn’t be taken away. So kashrut is really a way of reshaping eating to maximize life, which extends to eco-kashrut, which means for example not eating fish that is being overfished, and expanding the rights of workers who bring meat to the market. 

I had tried being vegetarian earlier, but my mother served steak regularly because she loved her children. If you didn’t eat her steak she felt like a failure, so I came to feel that meat is love. In 1991 my cholesterol was way too high. A doctor suggested pills, but I asked if I could change my diet and he reluctantly said yes. So I switched to vegetarianism. I got my cholesterol under control but sometimes feel I chose my cholesterol over a mother’s love.

Have you been in Israel since Oct. 7 and during the war? I wonder if any of the awful events of the past nine months challenged your theology, or confirmed aspects of it. 

We were here on Oct. 7 and have been here since. It’s had a crushing, negative aspect in many ways. For example, one of my grandsons is [an Israeli equivalent of] a Navy Seal; he went south that day and arrived to see the catastrophic aftermath. He was devastated and angry. As a moderate, a centrist, he saw evil and how vicious [Hamas] were. He has calmed down a bit but his anger was consuming.

The second, tougher example, is when another of my grandsons took part in a mission to free hostages, and instead got involved in a bloody fight, and he was badly wounded. And here is the paradox of life and death: Israeli medicine is amazing. The doctor told our daughter, “If this happened 50 years ago, he would have been dead from loss of blood. If it happened 20 years ago, he would have lost the use of his legs.” Instead, they were able to evacuate him to Soroka Hospital, and they have methods of growing bone that by the end will restore the use of his legs. He’s had 20 operations, but the bottom line is the human capacity to do amazing things.

And here is the last example. He is the middle of three older sons. Two weeks ago the wives of the number one and number three sons each had a baby. We became great-grandparents twice in one week. When we asked them about the timing, they said, “After Oct. 7, what can you do in the face of this tragedy? Have a child.” In the book I write about the Displaced Persons camps after World War II, which had an explosive birth rate — they responded to death by increasing life. 

In your book you describe the Israel Defense Forces as the “most moral army in the world” and the lengths it goes to avoid civilian casualties in asymmetrical wars like the one in Gaza. And yet the enormous death toll has given pause even to Israel’s supporters, including in the White House and to be honest in a number of synagogue pulpits here in the U.S. Has the war shaken your faith in the government or the military?

It’s a miserable government. I’ve written a number of articles about this. But a lot of the criticism of Israel is unfair, including distorted claims of a genocide. I recall an article about Richard Kemp, head of the British forces in Afghanistan, who regarded it as extraordinary that Western armies reduced Afghan civilian casualties to three or four civilians for every Taliban fighter killed. And in the Gaza war, Israel claims to have kept that rate to one to 1.5 civilians for every fighter. [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Time magazine last week that the ratio of civilians to combatants killed in the war has been “one-to-one.”] And this is a situation in which Hamas has taken over mosques and schools in order to maximize civilian casualties. 

That being said, there has been real reputational damage to Israel, much of that self-inflicted, thanks to [far-right government ministers] like [Bezalel] Smotrich and [Itamar]Ben-Gvir. Religious-based parties such as the Religious Zionist Party and Otzma Yehudit pushed the government to inflict more damage on Palestinians and to hold back humanitarian aid. Smotrich and Ben-Gvir have said they wanted Palestinians to die. To keep himself in power, Benjamin Netanyahu has allowed this. 

I regard Israel as the greatest expression of Jews taking power for themselves for the sake of life, liberating millions of Soviet and Ethiopian Jews, and Jews from Arab countries. And they created a democracy. That was a great adventure, a great accomplishment, but it can be taken for granted, and power can be abused. There are no guarantees. I believe Israel has been a light unto the nations, but at the moment its reputation is not showing much light.

But I believe that Hamas will fall, and we’ll see a future where on balance Israel’s democracy will extend more dignity to the Arabs. I do believe that. After the Holocaust and from the beginning of the state of Israel, Jewry had to develop new ways of obtaining power to protect itself. That is the greatest challenge: exercising power for the sake of life. It is an unfinished agenda.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.