(RNS) — Rabbi Yitz Greenberg is my oldest rabbi buddy.
First, this contemporary Orthodox rabbi was one of many first rabbis to actually contact my life and to have interaction me in what my Protestant colleagues would name “formation.”
Rabbi Yitz Greenberg was a congregational rabbi in Riverdale, New York, the founding father of the Jewish research program at Metropolis School of New York and the creator of the Heart for Studying and Management (CLAL), a suppose tank for Jewish pluralism and intra-Jewish dialog.
I first met Rabbi Greenberg and his spouse, Blu Greenberg, the most important Jewish feminist chief, when he engaged me to work with a bunch of recent Orthodox youngsters on a CLAL retreat.
That encounter with Rabbi Greenberg, whom I might come to know as Yitz or Rabbi Yitz, modified my notion of Orthodox Jews and Orthodox Judaism. It made me extra open to seeing the Jews as a unified folks and never only a discrete assortment of ideologies.
Rabbi Irving ‘Yitz’ Greenberg. (Courtesy picture)
Sure: This Orthodox rabbi helped form the world view of this Reform rabbi. His imaginative and prescient of an observant Judaism that was open to the world, and freely encountered the world, moved me — a lot so, that a long time later, I might change into a daily participant within the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, based by Rabbi Greenberg’s colleague, the late Rabbi David Hartman — additionally an Orthodox rabbi and, like Yitz, additionally a insurgent.
The second method through which Rav Yitz is my oldest buddy within the rabbinate: He’s 91 years previous, and he has simply printed his magnum opus, his grasp work, the fruits of every little thing that he has taught for thus lengthy — “The Triumph of Life: A Narrative Theology of Judaism.”
That is the e book that Yitz’s college students — and admittedly, the Jewish world — have been ready for for greater than a half century.
Yitz’s central thought: Judaism is a faith of life, that facilities on life, through which each commandment affirms life and strikes the human being towards increased affirmations of life and, in the end, towards God.
The essence of the commandments is for us to stay via them. When there’s a alternative between life/well being and a spiritual responsibility, the Jew should put aside nearly any non secular responsibility with a purpose to save life.
Yitz writes:
God needs the forces of order and life to win out. God asks people to stay in such a method that of their actions, they take part on the aspect of order and towards chaos, on the aspect of life and towards nonlife and dying, on the aspect of accelerating high quality of life and towards dumbing it down.
The which means of the covenant between God and the Jewish folks is that we’d restore the world — tikkun olam — to excellent the world and to deliver it nearer to God’s final imaginative and prescient of human perfection. At each stage of Jewish life, we’re referred to as upon to see our actions, and the arenas through which we play them out, as microcosms of that excellent world.
The Torah works with microcosms, internal circles which may be expanded.
The (historic) Temple is the microcosm for house; Shabbat is the internal circle for time; the Jewish folks is the internal circle for humanity.
In time the internal circles will broaden and embody all these within the outer circle. Thus holy house will embody Jerusalem, then Israel, and ultimately the entire world.
Shabbat will develop till the entire week is the zone of full life.
The holy folks will broaden till all of humanity are holy folks.
For Yitz, what instructing kinds the ethical core of Judaism? “The nice precept underlying the ethic of the Torah is that each human being — no matter gender, race, pores and skin coloration, nationality, or faith — is created within the picture of God, and endowed accordingly with three basic dignities: infinite worth, equality, and uniqueness.”
Infinite worth and infinite value. Within the film “The Monuments Males,” a staff goes into Europe throughout World Conflict II to search out and save priceless items of artwork that the Nazis had stolen and threatened to destroy. I favored the film; I enormously disliked the story. Individuals labored admirably to save lots of artistic endeavors; they labored far much less admirably to save lots of the actual artistic endeavors — God’s youngsters, God’s creations.
In Yitz’s phrases:
What’s the worth of a picture of a human being?—that’s, of a murals created by a traditional artist? A number of Picassos have bought for over $100 million … In 1990 the world document for a portray at the moment was set when one by Van Gogh — itself actually a picture of a person, the Portrait of Dr. Gachet — was bought for $82.5 million to a Japanese insurance coverage firm.
That is exactly what shaped Rav Yitz’s lifelong involvement in Holocaust remembrance. (He was one of many founders of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.) The Nazis incinerated Jewish youngsters alive with a purpose to economize on the price of fuel. The Holocaust was a singular assault on the divine picture. Due to this fact, something and every little thing that we are able to do to uphold the divine picture is sacred work.
Upholding the divine picture — that’s our job — even because the divine appears to fade. In certainly one of his most profound strikes, Rabbi Yitz demarcates three eras in Jewish historical past — the biblical, the rabbinic and the trendy. In every period, the presence of God adjustments. God is not manifest, as God was in biblical instances; God withdraws into the divine self to permit better human activism.
His phrases:
God is now completely hidden in pure legal guidelines and materials processes. Right this moment, God makes extra miracles than ever, however solely via human company — our unlocking the miraculous powers in bodily and organic matter that solely we are able to train by understanding and using nature’s legal guidelines.
As soon as upon a time, folks lived lives of religion, generally interrupted by moments of doubt. Right this moment, folks stay lives of doubt, generally interrupted by moments of religion.
“The Triumph of Life” is solely that — a triumph of the Jewish thoughts and spirit. It’s a exceptional tribute to the life work of certainly one of up to date Judaism’s most treasured and cherished voices. That it emerges when he’s 91 years previous is itself a blessing — first, that he had the blessing to see his work come to gentle, and second, that, within the phrases of Deuteronomy in describing the aged Moses, “his eye is undimmed” and his spirit as sturdy at this time because it was a long time in the past.
“The Triumph of Life: A Narrative Theology of Judaism” by Rabbi Irving Greenberg. (Courtesy picture)
Greater than that: My friendship with Yitz and Blu has enriched my life immeasurably. Their hospitality to me, with the accompanying conversations concerning the challenges of modernity, and the way our respective Judaisms confront these challenges, have change into the true spotlight of my July sojourns in Jerusalem.
Years in the past, he stated one thing that has at all times stayed with me — the job description of the Jews, in three Ps:
The Jews are pedagogues — instructing the concept of the infinite worth, equality and uniqueness of each human being — even and particularly in instances and locations when this concept would have been thought-about absurd.
The Jews are paradigms — a working mannequin to point out how we are able to excellent the world. A working mannequin will not be excellent, however however, the Jews can nonetheless be a mannequin.
The Jews are companions — working with these of different faiths and even no religion in perfecting the world. It’s only now, in a time of elevated non secular dialogue, that such a partnership is even thinkable.
One last item.
It isn’t solely that Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, at 91, is my oldest buddy within the rabbinate (or anyplace else, for that matter).
It’s way over that.
Rabbi Yitz Greenberg is the final of his era of Jewish thinkers.
I consider these from whom we now have discovered and who’ve died: Eugene Borowitz, Leonard “Leibel” Fein, David Hartman, Jacob Neusner, Richard Rubenstein, Harold Schulweis, Steven Schwarzchild, Elie Wiesel, Michael Wyschogrod. The record goes on and on.
No girls? Really, there are two — and each of them are nonetheless fairly alive. There’s Cynthia Ozick, 96 years previous — novelist, literary critic and Jewish thinker. And there’s, after all, Blu Greenberg, whose imaginative and prescient of Jewish feminism created and nurtured a era of Jewish feminist thinkers.
However, that record of thinkers … All of them, born between 1924 and 1934. All of them, now finding out collectively and arguing loudly and vociferously at a desk on the planet to come back.
Solely Yitz continues to be right here.
Let’s hold it that method. Yitz Greenberg is the dwelling witness to the phrases of the Psalmist: Don’t forged us off into previous age.
Till 120. Please.
