It was in Israel in 1961 — the year they tried Adolf Eichmann — that Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg began studying the atrocities of the Holocaust in great detail. He barely skirted a nervous breakdown. Shock and revulsion propelled him into joining the Jewish-Christian dialogue of that idealistic era.
It became a lifetime mission, as explored in his book “For the Sake of Heaven and Earth: The New Encounter between Judaism and Christianity.” The rabbi was in the Bay Area recently for a private book party.
Following an autobiographical introduction, the book contains seven essays written over a 40-year span, reflecting the author’s intellectual and spiritual progress, and his often frustrating but ultimately rewarding mission of conciliation. It concludes with testimony from five Christian leaders to their profound enlightenment, epitomized by what Sister Mary C. Boys calls “the bold and gracious vision of Irving Greenberg.”
Born in New York to European immigrants, Greenberg had heard his mother crying in her room over Hitler’s destruction of her family, but he had been spared the details. They were still vague with him even after 12 years of intensive Jewish religious education, earning a Ph.D. at Harvard and becoming ordained as an Orthodox rabbi.
Now he was tormented by questions: How could the United States, and his erstwhile hero President Franklin D. Roosevelt, have abandoned and betrayed the Jews of Europe? And how could God have allowed it?
The answer to his second question came with floods of emotion. Changing his baby’s diaper, he noted the inflamed skin, visualized the suffering of babies and their parents in cattle cars en route to the death camps and was filled with compassion for them and for his child, Moshe. Fourteen years later he had a similar flash of empathy — with the sudden conviction that God, too, had suffered in the Holocaust and deserved pity; that He had refrained from intervention in order to grant His people free will.
But Greenberg could not so easily forgive the passivity of Europe’s Christian leaders. He blames Christianity for the Holocaust, not because Nazism was Christian — he calls it pagan — but because of the connivance of the European churches, drawing on their own ages-old “teaching of contempt” for the Jews. He believes that their still-hateful attitude could lead to another Shoah.
His essays and dialogues, therefore, have focused on the need to eradicate that hatred, and on the commonalities, biblical and otherwise, of the two religions. He has urged Jewish acceptance of Christianity as well, which led to grievous trouble with the Rabbinical Council of America.
In the 1980s he put aside that quarrel to defend the state of Israel against the growing assaults on its legitimacy. “I earnestly believed that the Jewish State, in protecting itself, was exercising a genuine ethic of power,” he declared. “I continue to hold that Israel is a moral and theological response to the intolerable powerlessness of the victims of the Holocaust.”
The author’s voice is powerful and eloquent in moments of praise and criticism. As a theological work, his book is revitalized by insights from modern science and philosophy.
He deserves much credit for opening Christian churches to the teachings of the Jewish tradition, and especially for the dialogues that helped further understanding between Jews and Catholics in the wake of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.
However, he has left out one important group. His disparagement of “secularism and modernism” risks alienating real and potential allies among secularists, many of whom are highly principled and supportive of Jewish survival, at a time when people of good will are under attack by Islamic terror and need to stand together.
“For the Sake of Heaven and Earth: The New Encounter Between Judaism and Christianity,” by Rabbi Irving Greenberg (274 pages, The Jewish Publication Society, $20).