Author: Irving Greenberg
Reviewer: Rabbi Charles L. Arian
Some
books are so provocative that they stay on the mind for weeks and months. They
demand to be read and re-read, discussed over and over again. For the Sake of
Heaven and Earth is such a book. Rabbi Irving “”Yitz”Greenberg has
spent most of his professional career promoting Jewish pluralism and exploring
new and creative models of Jewish life. At the same time, he has written several
important theological works and has been one of the pioneers in Christian-Jewish
dialogue. Although the focus of the book is the Christian-Jewish encounter, it
is not possible to isolate Greenberg's understanding of the respective roles of
Judaism and Christianity from the larger context of Greenberg's overall
theological position. He sees the encounter between God and humanity as one of
growth and responsibility. Like any good teacher or wise parent, God knows that
humanity needs to accept more responsibility, but in a gradual fashion. God
therefore began a relationship with a specific family, that of Abraham and
Sarah, but always promised them that they would be a blessing to all humanity.
Gradually the covenantal relationship spread from this one family to a nation
and then to all of humanity itself. Concomitant with the growth in numbers of
the covenant community, God allowed, indeed forced, the human partners to accept
more responsibility through an act of tzimtzum, a kabalistic term meaning
voluntary self-limitation. Thus, within Judaism, the synagogue and study hall
came to replace the Temple, while rabbis and scholars replaced prophets and
priests.
The separation between the two religions was always part of God's plan. According to Greenberg, it was never God's intention for the entire world to become Jewish, but it was God's intention to have a relationship with all of humanity. “”It was the divine intention not to replace the original, but to reach a new set of nations with a new modulation of the message of creation, redemption, and covenant.”The separation between the two religions was always part of God's plan: “”Had the Nazarenes not been cast loose, it is likely that the Jewish ethnic elements of the Gospel would have been strengthened, making the new faith more difficult for Gentiles to join.”” History teaches us, according to Greenberg, that both Christianity and Judaism misread God's intentions in allowing this split. Christians took the fact of their “”new covenant”to mean that the “”old”one from which they sprang was dead. Jews, meanwhile, accepted the Christian understanding that only one iteration of the covenant could be valid, and rejected the legitimacy. This was perhaps understandable in view of the way in which Christians often oppressed Jews, but it had a heavy spiritual cost. Jews came to downplay indigenously Jewish religious ideas that were shared by Christians. No less significant was the diminishment of the Jewish soul as the sense of responsibility towards the rest of the world shriveled. Greenberg wants his readers, whether Jewish or Christian to break free of the binary thinking that has dominated both religions for nearly two millennia. He wants both Christians and Jews to acknowledge that their experience of the truth of their own religious tradition does not exhaust God's possibilities for revelation and relationship. In the past, both Jews and Christians have agreed that only one group's beliefs could be true. Either Jesus was or was not the messiah.
Christians have erred. The doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation were either
true or false. Showing no interest in entering into this sort of disputation, he
says that the experience Jesus' followers had of his triumph over death was an
authentic experience which they interpreted, as Jews, in the only way they knew
how: as evidence of God's breaking into history and the coming of redemption.
Christians have erred not by virtue of their believing in the resurrection and
the incarnation, but rather in assuming that their experience was proof that
their religion was universally true, to the exclusion of all others. If
Christianity was intended by God to supplement rather than replace Judaism, Jews
need not insist on the falsity of Christian beliefs. “”Exactly what happened
in the first century is of limited import to Jews . . . they need only insist
that, open as they were, God did not give them the Christian signal — because
God had another plan for them.”
Greenberg is both a theologian and a
historian (his Harvard Ph.D. is in American history). He firmly believes that
God acts in and through history; our task as humans is to determine what exactly
God was trying to tell us. Readers will need to judge for themselves whether or
not Greenberg's interpretations ring true. I suspect that many readers, whether
Jewish or Christian, will find, as I did, some of his theological formulations
to be jarring. Given the history of polemics between Judaism and Christianity,
it is hard for members of either community to accept that another community's
revelations may be authentic revelations but directed only at that particular
community and thus of little import to the faith life of another community.
Readers familiar with Rabbi Jonathan Sacks' distinction between absolute truth
and universal truth will find echoes of this idea in Greenberg as well.
Greenberg, however, goes far beyond Sacks in his willingness to see Christians
and Jews as part of the same story and indeed part of the same overall covenant.
Greenberg acknowledges the fears and concerns that his writings inspire. The
””voluntary covenant”concept can clearly be misused to justify non
observance and religious indifference. His positive evaluations of Christianity
can be used to justify assimilation, intermarriage and syncretism; or that they
may be misused by Christian missionaries and so-called “”Messianic
Jews”in attempts to convert Jews to Christianity. He writes a number of
times that such is not his intent and he hopes his intellectual honesty will not
be misused or misconstrued. And yet, a concern remains. Greenberg has made the
case that both Judaism and Christianity are organic outgrowths of the religion
of biblical Israel; that the world needs both religions, that they are
complementary, albeit distinct and that they are both legitimate and valid ways
of worshipping the God of Israel. What he has not done in this book is address
the question of why, given that this is the case, any particular Jew ought to
remain Jewish. Is it enough merely to write that he does not intend his
theological work to be used to justify syncretism or conversion? I wished
Greenberg had addressed this question more fully. Having said that, I still
believe that For the Sake of Heaven and Earth is important, challenging, and
generally convincing.
This is an abridged version of the review originally published by Rabbi Charles L. Arian, who is Staff Scholar at the Institute of Christian Jewish Studies (Baltimore)
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Email address: hdm@idx.com.au