This Rosh Hashanah is about negating evil so life can triumph - opinion

This Rosh Hashanah, many wonder: How dare we celebrate mid-war? I answer: How dare we not continue enjoying life, especially in Israel? Let’s not give our enemies victories they don’t deserve.

Of course, it’s easier said than done. And it’s easier in houses that have avoided catastrophe.

Wars are not equal-opportunity devastators. Some people’s war wounds never heal; but, in winning democracies like Israel, most dodge the bullets, and bounce back when peace returns. 

Those still on the ledger’s lucky side must embrace those suffering physically and emotionally. Meanwhile, we must not only soldier on, but dance!

Yad Vashem calls this “spiritual resistance.” The Jewish educator Yael Weinstock Mashbaum describes resistance as “not only the struggle against,” but “also the struggle for.” We’re fighting for normalcy, which includes celebrating holidays joyously, even while shouting the post-Holocaust, post-October 7 question – God, how dare you do this to us?

Rabbi Yitz Greenberg’s timely masterwork, The Triumph of Life: A Narrative Theology of Judaism, tackles this painful question. His title alone challenges us to celebrate daily, transcending the horrors.

Greenberg teaches that in the “unrelenting struggle between life and death… God is on the side of life.” That’s why Judaism’s commandments, rituals, and stories “orient human behaviors toward life.”

Nevertheless, today, “God has chosen by self-limitation to be a presence rather than a controlling force.” That empowers humans to do good or bad, to cause problems or be the tikkun, the solution.

Our covenant with this partially hidden God grants us freedom while preserving our celestial partnership. That intimate, mystical, paradox makes us realists, “living in the tension between the real and the ideal.” Understanding that the “ideal is often the enemy of the possible,” we accept incremental progress. 

Historically, too many zealots murdered millions rushing to perfection. As I argue in my new book, To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream, most bad ideas started as good ideas, but went all accelerator, no brakes.

To Greenberg, the High Holy Days validate our partnership. Exercising our freedom, Jews reset, reaffirming our covenants with God and one another. In purging our sins, personally and communally, we pursue goodness and holiness.  

Culminating his courageous journey since the 1961 Eichmann trial, confronting the fear that God betrayed the six million, Greenberg tests his theology against the Holocaust’s horrors.

Tragically, the “cosmic movement of divine tzimtzum,” (withdrawal of the divine) freed the Nazis “to do their evil.” God’s voluntary contraction confirmed that “human agency is the most important piece of the covenant of life in modernity.” But, enduring unrelenting torture, Jews “resisted by choosing life as much as possible.” 

Jews kept procreating; conducting Jewish rituals; establishing underground yeshivas, mikvahs, and youth groups in the ghettos; and secretly observing holidays in Auschwitz. Each act of resistance, no matter how minor or incremental, brought “God and Jewry even closer together in common fate and mission.” True then, and now.

Applying his training as a Harvard historian, Greenberg charts the Jews’ miracle-making aftermath. Amid a postwar “frenzy of marriage,” from 1946 to 1948 the birth rate in displaced person camps “was the highest in the world.” 

Zionism predating the Holocaust

Most dramatically, although Zionism predated the Holocaust, and Israel’s founding had many historical causes, theologically, “The fundamental Jewish response to the devastating death blow inflicted by the Holocaust was to create the State of Israel. In this extraordinary assertion of its determination to live,” Jewry inverted the Holocaust’s “trauma” by assuming power and restoring “the dignity of the image of God.”

In fact, decades earlier, “Zionism – Jewish nationalism – reemerged in the 19th century as a Jewish response to the divine tzimtzum that led many peoples the world over to take control over their own destinies,” especially through liberal-democratic nationalism.

SIMILARLY, OCTOBER 7 proved humans’ capacity to do evil when they have agency. But, as Greenberg explains beautifully, with Israelis and supporters worldwide “wagering” on “those upholding freedom and human dignity” – especially Israel’s soldiers – we realize we live in an “era of hope but not certainty.” We’re obligated to keep being counter-cultural by choosing life.  

Central to Israel’s holiness is wielding power ethically.  Appalled by some fanatics perverting Judaism for their own agendas, Greenberg is even prouder of the quintessentially Jewish moral guidelines Israel’s army upholds. 

Echoing West Point experts marveling at Israel’s impressive one-combatant-for-one-civilian ratio in urban warfare, and paralleling Rabbi Shlomo Brody’s equally timely book on morality in wartime Ethics of our Fighters, Greenberg recognizes our soldiers’ holiness when they fight honorably in khaki, not just when they’re covered in burial shrouds.

Greenberg’s theology is no abstraction. He and his extraordinary wife Blu have raised a wonderful clan living their eternal values, their positive vision. With their children, in-laws, and grandchildren, many of whom I am privileged to know, they affirm life daily. 

They inject holiness and goodness into their families and their communities. They fight fiercely for Israel and the Jewish people. Loving life passionately, Jewishly, they navigate complexity, overcome tragedy, and heal from searing wounds courageously and gracefully. 

Such holiness, goodness, and hope – Hatikvah!  have kept Israel going, since 1948, let alone since October 7. And by accepting uncertainty and tragedy, we celebrate Rosh HaShanah – and every holiday – zestfully. 

Balancing good and evil, we should mark next Monday, October 7, as the anniversary of Hamas’s massacre, not Simchat Torah as Israel’s government proposes. That will preserve our holiday. That way we write our history, set the tone, and choose to celebrate – negating evil so life can triumph.

The writer, a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute, is an American presidential historian. His latest book, To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream, was just published.