Chosen peoples

Commonweal, Nov 5, 2004 by Jon D. Levenson

For the Sake of Heaven and Earth

The New Encounter beween Judaism and Christianity

Irving Greenberg

The Jewish Publication Society, $20, 274 pp.

Rabbi Irving Greenberg has been one of the leading figures in American Jewish communal life for three decades. A rather unorthodox Orthodox rabbi, he has worked tirelessly and courageously among both Jews and Gentiles to raise awareness of the significance of the Holocaust, to assess the practical and theological import of the emergence of a Jewish state in his lifetime, and to improve relations among the various movements in Judaism. He has performed these services in a wide array of contexts--as a professor of Jewish Studies, as a congregational rabbi, and as the president of more than one influential communal organization.

The present volume reflects Greenberg's passionate and longstanding involvement in Jewish-Christian dialogue. His own contribution is followed by brief reflections from five respondents, both Christian and Jewish. These are mostly in the manner of uncritical encomia, but (as we shall see) they occasionally raise a valuable objection. The book closes with a study guide.

The "new encounter between Judaism and Christianity" to which the subtitle refers, is the product of the post-Holocaust shift in Christian practice from the "teaching of contempt" to a more appreciative understanding of Judaism in all its periods and of the continuing role of the Jewish people in the economy of salvation. The shift has already been well-documented, but Greenberg's personal reminiscences are illuminating and reveal a generous and compassionate sensibility along with a refreshing openness to correction and reformulation. Particularly moving are the accounts of how he came to rethink the negative stereotypes of Christianity that he imbibed in his intense Jewish education.

A few years ago, Greenberg's rethinking got him into deep trouble with an Orthodox rabbinical body to which he has long belonged. In particular, his application of the term "failed messiah" to Jesus implied to some that he accepted Christian messianic claims. In Greenberg's telling, Orthodoxy has also proved unable to distinguish between pluralism (in which he believes) and relativism (which he opposes). One cannot but sense the deep pain he felt when he was summoned into something approaching a heresy trial, which ended only with his accepting a kind of consent decree.

Consisting of nine essays written over nearly forty years, Greenberg's volume displays considerable inconsistencies, some of which are undoubtedly owing to the "shifts" that the author openly acknowledges in his preface. The book is, though, also exceedingly repetitive, and one does not sense that the problematic aspects of the early essays have been resolved, or even effectively addressed, in the later ones. A major source of the difficulty is that Greenberg's discourse tends to be more homiletic than analytic; he too easily disposes of objections (where they are dealt with at all), with references to the novelty of our times, the putative "revelational event" of the Holocaust, and other ideas that are themselves inadequately defended.

The parade example is that all-important notion of pluralism. Rooted in a claim that "acts of love and repentance deserve to be reciprocated," Greenberg's concept of the new encounter of Judaism and Christianity requires that both communities revamp their historic traditions drastically in light of the other. On the Christian side, this means not only that the Jewish Torah must be seen as currently valid, but that Jesus himself is better reconceived as "more a messenger for the Divine than a Divine Messenger." Similarly, "from a Jewish perspective, one hopes," he writes, "that the growing Christian emphasis on Jesus as the path to God rather than on Jesus as God Incarnate may yet win out as a more proper understanding." The Crucifixion fares no better: it is to be "addressed through Holocaust categories as total degradation and as a model of what should not be tolerated or allowed to happen rather than as redemptive suffering" (his italics). Indeed, Greenberg thinks the Holocaust shows that "both faiths ... must downplay elements of formal sacrality and intermediary figures and teach believers to serve God with greater purity--for God's sake and not for reward or victory."

The changes on the Jewish side are also wide-ranging and fundamental. Jesus should be seen as a failed rather than a false messiah: "a failed messiah is one who has the right values and upholds the covenant, but does not attain the final goal." In this, as Greenberg would have it, Jesus resembles Bar Kokhba, "the great Jewish freedom fighter" of the second century C.E. whom one prominent Talmudic rabbi hailed as the messiah before the Romans crushed his armed rebellion (and killed the rabbi). Jews need to recognize that Christianity not only spreads Jewish values but also brings millions of people into a knowledge of the God of Israel that they would never otherwise have had. Thus, Jews must see Christians, too, as a chosen people, as "the people of Israel" no less, for "there is enough love in God to choose again and again." There is one condition, though. God's choice is real only when Christians have "purged themselves of hatred of Jews and of supersessionist claims." For that reason, in Greenberg's judgment, Muslims, who also spread the knowledge of the God of Abraham, cannot yet be considered the people of Israel. This is because of the virulent Jew-hatred surging through the Muslim world in recent years and the correlative opposition to the very existence of the State of Israel, within whatever borders.