Encore ArchiveOn this page, we present essays profound or timely culled from the CLAL literary archive. Most of the articles that appear here appeared originally in the pages of Sh'ma A Journal of Jewish Responsibility, which was founded by Eugene Borowitz in 1970 and published by CLAL from 1994-1998. For further information regarding Sh'ma today, click here.
(from Shma
13/254, May 13, 1983) The Revisionism of Irving Greenberg By Arnold Jacob Wolf In
traditional Jewish thought, or at least in one version of our central tradition, Jews are
responsible for doing the mitzvot (commandments),
and God is responsible for protecting the Jews. Irving
Greenberg comes close, in his important recent essay Voluntary Covenant, to
reversing these roles. A series of papers
written by him and published by the National Jewish Resource Center [CLAL], which he
founded and heads, have become a kind of semi-official theology for the United Jewish
Appeal and more thoughtful members of the Jewish establishment. No wonder: Greenberg is learned, persuasive and
personally both charming and forthcoming. The
conclusions of his recent latest manifesto require and deserve serious critical attention. Irving
Greenberg believes there has been a profound transformation in the covenantal relationship
between God and Israel. While the biblical
covenants with humankind, and especially with the Jewish people, already revealed a
certain self-limitation on the part of an originally omnipotent God, He, nevertheless,
early on required of Israel that it serve as His surrogate, ministering to all
nations and connecting them to the Divine. God
remained active with Israel in order to prevent its defection from this
central and necessary responsibility; circumcision is a perfect sign of the once
involuntary, irrevocable nature of our chosenness. The
Divine is saddled with an erratic covenantal partner, but It has Its own mechanisms
of insuring that Jewish fate will keep us honest, even when Jewish faith will not. That pact worked pretty well for many hundreds of
years. The Deconstruction Of The
Covenant
Most of
Greenbergs paper is devoted to the revolutionary deconstruction of the original
covenant relationship, in which Gods providence fully guaranteed both Jewish
survival and Jewish loyalty. Already, the
fall of the First Temple and, more poignantly, the destruction of the Second Temple mark a
conscious withdrawal of the Divine Presence from Jewish history: after that no more
prophecy, no more sacraments a new kind of human partnership with a God who is
increasingly unavailable. The Shechinah (Divine indwelling) is hidden from then
on, so Israel herself must learn to assume much of the providential role formerly played
by God. The
mixture of authority and modesty of the Rabbis is also consistent with the unfolding of
the covenant model. The rabbis,
according to Greenberg, basing himself upon a passage in Tractate Shabbat of the Babylonian Talmud, asserted that
Israel took upon itself the renewal of the covenant after the pact had, in a way, lapsed
because of Gods removal of himself from personal responsibility for the Jews. It was, from rabbinic times on, the task of the
people and its leaders to name the specific terms of their loyalty and to define the
responsibilities of Jewish peoplehood. God
had once given the Torah, but its interpretation subsequently fell entirely to human
beings, scholars, poskim (judges). Orthodox ideology which offered a juridical
view of the covenant missed the full radical implications of covenant renewal,
implications only fully manifest in our own time. But
rabbinic Judaism is already on the way to a voluntary covenant, developers and conservers at the same
time. The old idea
of covenant was shattered once and for all at Auschwitz.
Greenberg quotes Elie Wiesel: When God gave us a mission, that was all
right. But God failed to tell us that it was
a suicide mission. There can be no
question of reward and punishment or Divine providence any longer. There can be no sense of shared loyalty and mutual
love or responsibility between God and Israel. He
left us in the fatal lurch. Worse, He sent us
on a suicide mission, thus permanently revising the terms of His own covenant. We do not owe Him anything, really, after the
Holocaust that we do not wish to pay. Voluntary Renewal Of The
Covenant
On the other
hand, many Jews have voluntarily renewed the covenant simply by refusing to die as a
people. We can have no more obligations in
the old sense, but we can choose, and many of us have chosen, the dream of redemption. We have, as a people, volunteered to carry on. Our covenant (according to Greenbergs
citation of Rav Soloveitchik, in a note 63 which by no means seems to me to
mean what he thinks it does) is no longer a covenant of doing, but of being. We are loyal simply by remaining Jews, whatever we
do about our affirmation in the future. The
final meaning of the fall of both of the Temples, even of human free will as such, and
certainly of the progressive alienation of God through history culminating in the
Holocaust is a voluntary covenant whose terms are finally set only by the human party. This inevitable redistribution of
power is what political Zionism really means. If
the Messiah didnt come to Auschwitz, he can never come. We must redeem ourselves and/or our world. God permitted the Holocaust; we must, and only we
can, overcome it forever. The
implications of the idea of a voluntary covenant are, of course, political and theological
at once. It makes no essential
difference if the Jews involved consciously articulate the covenantal hope or express a
belief in the God who is the ground of the covenant.
They are expressions of that covenant whatever they may think or do. By being ready for martyrdom, they fulfill the
essential; obligation that remains for them to fulfill.
Other mitzvot are, in a way,
optional. Pluralism endorses various
alternative formulations of duty. Reform must
waive its dogmatically modernist criteria, Orthodoxy its univocal demands. After Auschwitz, all differences between Jews
become trivial, even in relation to God. The
State of Israel is the central vehicle of Jewish power, self-defense and redemption
building; its needs should be given greater religious weight, perhaps rated as a matter of
life or death. Greenberg believes, theoretically more than in practice (to judge by
the rather one-sided series of publications of the Resource Center), that there can be
many interpretations of the new, human, Israel-centered covenant. He does not want the Jewish State to become an
idol. But Yom Hashoah and Yom
HaAtzmaut must become central holy days of the Jewish calendar; Jewish
survival must be the center and not merely a part of Judaism. All the days of the week can finally become as
holy as Shabbat.
A new covenant ceremony can and should coexist with circumcision, the old sign of
the old involuntary covenant. The Novel Heresy Of Our Time
There is a
principle behind this radical revisionism by an Orthodox rabbi. It is, I believe, the great, novel heresy of the
twentieth century, of what he fondly calls the Third Era, and it is this: The Third
Era analogue to this concept (of voluntary covenant) is Greenbergs view that
greater is the one who is not commanded but voluntarily comes forward than the one
who acts only out of command. This
is a bold denial of a central Jewish view. Here
unravels the whole skein of Jewish self-understanding.
We are the center of the covenant. We have
the primary task of self-protection. (Do the
Palestinians, too, even if they have not yet suffered a Holocaust?) We are
the makers and unmakers of the mitzvot, since
our existence is already a fulfillment of them all. We define the terms on which we choose, not what God chooses; of course, not
what the United Nations or the peoples of the world might expect. The Biblical God has shrunken to near
invisibility; we are just about all the God there is left in the world. Greenberg has systematically deconstructed
Judaism, in favor of a political teleology whose consequences are clear enough:
voluntarism means liberation from duty. Irving
Greenberg says more than I have said he says. Some
of his views are almost antithetical, perhaps he would say dialectically related to these. Above all, he insists (like Bonhoeffer, who was
also profoundly affected by the Hitler period) that Gods self-alienation is to be
perceived primarily as the liberation of humanity, and that the new covenant is, in a
sense, our own coming of age. What has been
unfolding for centuries and emerges in the Holocaust is not just Divine withdrawal, but
Divine love for an increasingly responsible humanity.
God is educating us to take over His world. God is,
therefore, not so much unavailable as invisible. The
covenant has reached a new level of redemptive power.
Even Auschwitz may be a kind of Exodus.
That something precious was, in fact, broken does not mean that it was
ended, but, in Greenbergs view, it has become more adequate than ever before. God may have endangered us, but He also shared and
still shares our endangerment. He may no
longer be able simply to redeem humanity, but He longs for our redemption as passionately
as He ever did. He may even be more present
than ever, though less markedly visible, and may be more involved even though distinctly
less immediate, more important in a mystical sense, if less commanding and less demanding
than He was before. New Jewish Chauvinism In
Disguise
The reader
will have to decide whether this, indeed, represents a true mystic vision, or rather, as I
believe, more obfuscation, a mystification in the Marxist sense. Greenberg believes that less God is more. I believe that less God is always less, and that a
secret divinity can hardly shape our ends or call us to true self-transcendence. I believe
that Israel is still chosen, still obligated, and by no merely voluntary covenant. I suspect Greenbergs complex theological
dialectic of being a cover for the new Jewish chauvinism, and Greenberg of being a victim
of his own mysticism. The old covenant is, of
course, problematic, not less after Auschwitz. Still,
it not only empowered but also confronted Jews. The
voluntary covenant, I fear, is a product of our natural inclination to evil more than it
is a new revelation. In any case, Irving
Greenberg has raised questions that Jewish history cannot evade, even if, as I think, he
himself is sometimes evasive and often dangerously confused.
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