Rabbi Irving Greenberg

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Parshat HaShavua

“Creation,” Parashat Bereishit 5781, Fall 2020.

“Covenant,” Parashat Noah 5781, Fall 2020.

“Covenantal Pluralism,” Parashat Lekh Lekha 5781, Fall 2020.

“Your Arm’s Too Short to Box With God. – Or is it?” Parashat VaYera 5781, Fall 2020.

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Open-ended freedom is frightening. We now know that if there are no limits in a society, the process leads to destruction and mass murder, to a breakdown in values and the unleashing of disintegrative forces.
I believe that contemporary civilization is one of the great cultures of all time; that is why it is so appealing. The greatness of the culture embodies some of the finest Jewish values as well.
The secular world needs our help to develop healthy limits.
So what is the meaning of life?…The Jews faced that question and they concluded that life is a partnership between God and humanity. Life is making sense of this world and improving it and doing tikkun olam (repairing the world) in one’s own time.
The shock of the Shoah undermines the credibility of modern culture’s promises and reveals that all these glittering redemptive visions disarmed the victims even as modern technology armed the victimizers.
All halachic behaviors are dramatic/mimetic gestures articulating a central metaphor of living. Grasping the metaphor adds depth to action and joy to life.
Jewish educators must recognize that there is an unprecedented level of impact of the dominant world civilization on all ‘local’ worlds—including ours, the Jewish world…I would argue that the issue of relating the two worlds positively—or creating syntheses that bring out the best in both—is the particular mission of our generation.
The educational challenge is no longer how one [Jewish] world can reshape itself to be integrated into the other; rather the question is how do the two worlds [Jewish and non-Jewish]—standing side by side—correlate, integrate or confront each other? The time has come for a two-way conversation of equals, not a one-way conversation between a dominant and a minor culture.
Great leadership is not always crowned with success. In order to be a great leader, you have to be willing to fail.
In my mind, the faith-annihilating Shoah and the faith-renewing restoration of Israel are twinned forever. They ceaselessly wrestle for dominance; just when the message of one appears to be triumphant; it is challenged and even overthrown by the phenomenon of the other in an endless, recurring cycle.
The Holocaust is the most radical counter testimony to both Christianity and Judaism. After the Holocaust, no statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of the burning children.
If the principal makes the day school into such a covenantal community—in imitation of God—then the student will experience a dignity that anticipates the Messianic world promised by Judaism and modernity.
Still I know that although Shabbat does not last all week, I would like to make the world look more like Shabbat. I would like to make the Jewish people a little closer to Shabbat.
People remember Hillel’s famous statement of the basis of Torah, what you do not want the other one to do you, do not do to the other. People forget that Hillel continued with the instruction: ‘go study [and apply] the rest.’ All these issues require a lifetime of application and wrestling.
There is an old Yiddish proverb—love is wonderful, but love with noodles is even better. The modern world offered the Jewish people love with noodles. The noodles were unprecedented economic, political and cultural advances for them and for all people. The love was human dignity, equal rights, peace, and the end of war. The remarkable offer proved overwhelmingly irresistible to Jews.
If you can get people of such decency and quality who are willing to really criticize themselves and determined to change their own religious teaching in order to make it a vision of love… this is the key to breaking anti-Semitism.
In the history of brit, with the passage of time, God intervenes less and less openly, and gives humans more and more freedom. I believe that we are living through the climax of that process. In this era, God does not strike you dead for sin; God does not stop the rain if a people do not obey. Genuine freedom is scary.
The covenant becomes a treaty with all the generations. Each generation will have to do its share of redemption and pass it on to the next generation until the redemption is complete.
What is my mission, what is my shlichut, which God has in mind for me? Unfortunately, there are no neon lights flashing the answer or messages directly from God that tell us what do…each of us must figure the mission out for ourselves, and that task may take a lifetime.
It is likely that this event [the Holocaust] will turn out to be a fundamental turning point in human history, not just in Jewish history. The Holocaust represents a crisis of credibility for the dominant culture in which we live.
My thinking and my institutional leadership have been driven by the messages and friendship that the audience and co-workers have communicated to me, nonverbally as well as verbally. And when I have gone through periods when I felt that I could not go on (there have been such times), the people have renewed my strength…and propelled me onward. This is as it should be. A leader should not simply follow, but should be sustained by the people.
We spend four years—and more—in college to train ourselves for a career…in self-respect and conscience, we must spend at least one year working full-time at becoming a mensch…Only a year of full time student of Torah, deepened by encounter with the holiness and pulsating life of Jerusalem and Israel, can begin to give the inspiration and knowledge of authentic Jewish living to illuminate a lifetime.
This is the heroic age of the Jewish people, an age of resurrection and rebirth. It is simultaneously an age of awakening and new hope for humanity.
The Talmud says every human being should be treated as if they were infinitely valuable. God is not white or black. God is not a Jew or a gentile.

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