Judaism in the Twentieth Century

...Classical Christianity and Judaism gave meaning to life by providing a cohe rent and consistent picture of a world run according to a divinely sanctioned moral order in which good ultimately triumphs over evil, grace over sin...

...The next part of the book turns our attention to "Personal Life Along the Way," that is, the nurturance of individual spirituality in preparation for the ultimate redemption...

...What we see here is the tradition indicating that the very same piece of matzah can represent either the experience of slavery or of freedom, depending upon the frame of mind of the individual eating it...

...and Tisha B'Av, the anniversary of the destruction of the two Jerusalem Temples, denotes the Jewish response to catastrophe...

...After finding both academia and the pulpit rabbinate too confining, he launched the Center for Jewish Learning and Leadership (CLAL) as a vehicle to revitalize Jewish life...

...Judaism has been particularly affected by the assaults on tradition...

...Rather, he divides them thematically...

...Since the 17th century, a series of challenges has steadily eroded old religious assumptions...

...The final part of the book, "Unfolding the Way," recounts the tentative steps that have already been taken toward the development of two new commemorations, Holocaust Memorial Day and Israel Independence Day...

...Less interested in theological issues than Christians, premodern Jews concentrated on the study and practice of religious law...

...Others withdraw to the verities of the past...

...The Jewish Way is full of perceptions applicable to both Christians and Jews seeking to transcend the modern challenges to religious commitment...

...Until now, Greenberg has attracted his legions of loyal followers within the American Jewish communal leadership mainly through the spoken word...

...Some extract values or sentiments they still consider relevant in the modern cultural context...

...Greenberg has a keen eye for the broad patterns of meaning that underlie the seemingly uncoordinated cycle of Jewish observances...

...Or does it show that using matzah was an ancient custom whose origins, lost in the mists of time, were the subject of varied speculation through the generations...

...He presents the holidays neither in the order in which they occur during the Jewish year nor in the sequence of their historical emergence...

...But such performances are more than acts of recollection or pious hope, and more than psychologically healthy strategies to cope with the stresses of life...

...Only a small band of traditionalists continued to live by the old ritual, and to do so they blocked out the intellectual and moral implications of modern life...

...While the Jewish view of time is linear—history is going in a certain direction—time also recurs: Each Sabbath is the day God rested from creating the universe...

...Historical and anthropological research cast doubt on the divinity and authority of sacred scripture...

...individual-family, ideal-actual, tradition-innovation, awe-joy, insularity-openness, national-universal...

...Rabbi Irving Greenberg has devoted his career to the development of a "postmodern" Judaism that is rooted in the authentic tradition, yet at home in the 20th century...

...In "Walking the Way—Through Jewish History" Greenberg analyzes the holidays that emerged in post-biblical times...

...But the special character of Judaism played a role as well...

...For Greenberg, every ritual provides contact with a world of ultimate reality that lies hidden behind the everyday world of experience...

...In the process, he demonstrates the limitations of methodologies that try to understand religion purely in historical or sociological terms...

...Reviewed by Lawrence Grossman Director of Publications, American Jewish Committee Western religion has never quite recovered from the shock of modernity...

...disciplines or codes that set limits to the freedom of the individual —traditional religion being a prime example—went into decline...

...For them, an elaborate set of ritual behaviors expressed nearness to God and an ongoing covenant with Him...

...These represent, to Greenberg, the concepts of freedom from bondage, acceptance of and obedience to a binding divine covenant, and the long, tedious process of journeying toward full liberation for the Jewish people—and by extension, for all humanity...

...For, paradoxically, Greenberg's case for the continuing meaning of his faith today is far stronger than his argument that the horrible deeds of the Nazis somehow put that faith into question...

...In the first section, "The Vision and the Way," the reader is introduced to Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot...

...It proved so difficult for Judaism to reinterpret this approach to fit the modern temperament that the bulk of Western Jewry gave up the observances...

...The book also contributes considerably to our understanding of what religious practice can mean for a 20thcentury person who takes it seriously...

...Greenberg is especially successful in using a dialectical approach to surmount inconsistencies and seeming contradictions in his religious tradition...

...He argues that the Nazi destruction of European Jewry marks a new historical era, making clear that God no longer intervenes in the affairs of man...

...Those seeking to salvage a meaning for their spiritual heritage in our time tend to react in one of two ways...

...Greenberg is equally unsparing toward the ideologies of Christianity and secularism, whose continuing credibility are also challenged by the Holocaust...

...Toward the end of the book, Greenberg moves from interpreting the Jewish religion to philosophizing about recent Jewish experience...

...The stress instead became a set of ethical concerns which, although present in the classic sources of the religion, constituted a radical break with the past once removed from the broader body of Jewish law and lore...

...Having shown that Judaism is open to the vagaries of history, Greenberg maintains that the same process continues in our time...

...each Passover is the moment God took the Israelites out of Egypt...

...Greenberg goes so far as to claim that God broke his covenant with the Jewish people when he let Hitler kill 6 million of them, and that Jewish adherence to that covenant today is purely voluntary...

...Greenberg then presents a number of suggestions for new rituals to mark these days...

...Interaction across religious lines and sustained contact with non-Western societies encouraged cultural relativism, shaking faith in a universal set of absolute moral values...

...Fundamentalism generally reflects a conscious strategy of shutting out, rather than confronting, the crisis of religion...

...One can only hope that the inevitable furor over Greenberg's insistence on the Holocaust's theological centrality does not come to obscure the brilliance of his presentation of Judaism in this book...

...The rapid advance of science suggested that cause-and-effect relationships and mathematical formulas adequately explain the workings of nature...

...Each of these, too, embodies a theme: Purim, celebrating the escape of Jews in ancient Persia from destruction, is the prototypical Jewish struggle with anti-Semitism...

...Greenberg stresses the need for the observant Jew to be something of an actor, since each holiday requires him or her to recreate the past or anticipate the future through stylized ritual behavior...

...Chanukah, marking the successful Maccabean revolt against Syrian Hellenists in the second century BCE, provides a complex lesson about Jewish participation in Gentile cultures...

...the Jewish calendar and its special commemorations provide the occasion for the author to communicate a compelling religious vision that encompasses nothing less than the final redemption of the world...

...The Jewish Sabbath is treated as a pre-enactment of what life will be like in a redeemed world, and theHigh Holy Days of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur constitute a spiritually necessary confrontation with the specter of death, a grim present reality that, Greenberg is sure, redemption will overcome...

...Does this discrepancy attest to two different traditions that were brought together, unresolved, by the rabbis...

...And if, as Greenberg and others have argued, Jews are now under an obligation to survive so as not to grant Hitler any posthumous victories, it would be the greatest irony if Hitler were allowed to shape Judaism itself...

...For example, everyone knows that Jews eat matzah instead of leavened bread on Passover...

...They were left without the luxury Christians had of centuries of adjustment to new ways of thought...

...The few articles and pamphlets he has written have given at best a fragmentary sense of the sweep of his thought and the depth of his insights...

...As Greenberg interprets them, the Jewish holidays, with all of their complicated details, express the most profound polarities and ambivalences of the human spirit...

...Religion becomes a useful source of insights about poverty, atomic war, class conflict, sexual ethics...

...Two apparently opposite reasons are given for this practice in the tradition—one, that the matzah is "the bread of affliction" reminding Jews of slavery in Egypt, the other, that it is "the bread of freedom" signifying the escape from bondage...

...Subjective attitudes about one's role in the world can be more "real" than any tangible "reality...

...The challenges have come from many directions...

...This is partly due to the historically late emergence of the Jews from the medieval ghetto...

...The publication of The Jewish Way: Living the Holidays makes available a full statement of Greenberg's worldview...

...The creation of the State of Israel, according to Greenberg, shows that Jews now understand the need to control their own fate without relying on supernatural aid, a "secular" observation that, in his eyes, is profoundly religious...

...Neither, says Greenberg...

...He is a man of broad scholarship (he holds a Harvard PhD in history in addition to Orthodox rabbinical ordination), sparkling wit and driving energy...

...And since the ethical emphasis of modern Judaism did not differ much from the values of non-Jews, little more than ties of sentiment bound most Jews to their ancestral faith...

...The triumph of democratic politics and the economic vistas opened up by capitalism and the Industrial Revolution spurred self-assertion in all aspects of life...

...Despite the title, this is not a "how-to" book about the Jewish holidays...