Few thinkers have influenced modern Orthodox theology in the way Irving (Yitz) Greenberg has. Throughout his career, Greenberg has written extensively about a host of issues, including post-Holocaust theology, the boundaries of interreligious dialogue, and the centrality of tikkun olam. Perhaps no other book in Greenberg’s oeuvre puts all of these ideas in one place better than The Triumph of Life.
This book is at once a powerful summary and an important reframing of many of Greenberg’s core ideas. He divides the book into three sections. In the first, “A Vision of Life in a Redeemed World,” Greenberg spells out what it means for humans to be made in God’s image and what a life of tikkun olam should look like. He also describes the life-affirming nature of Judaism and the purpose of the commandments. In his second section, “Covenant as Method for World Repair,” he discusses the role of Torah in creating societies that promote justice. In the third section, “The Covenant in the Third Era,” he explores how modernity, the Holocaust, and the State of Israel have shaped Jewish thought.
Greenberg organizes much of the book by what he calls the three “eras” of Jewish history. In the first, which took place primarily during biblical times, God was present and involved in our lives. Then, after the Temple was destroyed in 70 CE, God moved away but still kept in touch through smaller, subtler acts. In the second era, humans were in partnership with God. But something changed, and we are now in the third era, in which God is almost entirely absent and we humans have a radical freedom to act on our own. Today, without God always intervening, we can easily fall astray. Greenberg argues that the Holocaust is one manifestation of the danger of being radically free. But so too is the miracle of Israel, a land that Greenberg writes about with love and admiration and that exists mainly as a product of human agency.
Greenberg ends his book by looking at the current landscape of Jewish life. If God is hidden, then our communal institutions are all the more important to hold us together. Our institutions must be adaptive in order to face the newer challenges and opportunities of modernity, including feminism, pluralism, and antisemitism.
The Triumph of Life leaves us with the sense that Greenberg is a man of faith — not just faith in God, but also in humanity, in all of us. He doesn’t see God’s absence in the world as necessarily bad. Rather, it provides us with an opportunity to own our decisions. Whether this broken world swims or sinks is up to us. Where some see this as a burden, Greenberg believes that it can also be a gift.
Rabbi Marc Katz is the Rabbi at Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, NJ. He is author of the book The Heart of Loneliness: How Jewish Wisdom Can Help You Cope and Find Comfort (Turner Publishing), which was chosen as a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award.
