Some books are so provocative that they stay on the mind for weeks and months. They demand to be read and re-read, dis-cussed over and over again. For the Sake of Heaven and Earth is such a book.

Rabbi Irving "Yitz" Greenberg defies easy characterization. He received his rabbinical ordination at a haredi ("ultra-Orthodox") yeshiva, and a Ph.D. at Harvard. He served as an Orthodox pulpit rabbi, a professor at Yeshiva University (the flagship of Modern Orthodoxy) as well as the City University of New York, and 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.

For the Sake of Heaven and Earth is a summation of nearly 40 years of Greenberg's thinking on the nature of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity and their respective roles in God's plan. The first half of the book presents two new essays; the second half is a collection of nine reprinted essays on the subject, originally published between 1967 and 2000. The reprinted essays appear chronologically so that the reader can chart the development of Greenberg's positions over the years.

The two new essays are the most worthwhile. "On the Road to a New Encounter Between Judaism and Christianity: A Personal Journey" is best described as an intellectual autobiography. "Covenantal Partners in a Postmodern World" synthesizes much of the material from the reprinted essays and presents the outlines of a complete theology of the Christian-Jewish reality.

Although the focus of the book is the Christian-Jewish en-counter, 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. Greenberg 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.¹ Thus, within Judaism, the synagogue and study hall came to replace the Temple, while rabbis and scholars replaced prophets and priests.

But God was not interested in merely giving greater respon-sibility to the members of one small nation. God wanted a relationship with other nations, other cultures. While of course it was possible for non-Jews to join the covenant, and in fact many proselytes did join the Jewish community in the Hel-lenistic world, most were not prepared to take that step. Becoming Jewish was not merely to adopt a new "religion" in the modern Western sense; it meant taking on a whole new ethnic identity.

According to Greenberg's view, 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."² 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 ele-ments of the Gospel would have been strengthened, making the new faith more difficult for Gentiles to join."³

History teaches us, according to Greenberg, that both Chris-tianity 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 of Christianity. 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 indige-nously 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.

This theological reading of history, while more positive towards Christianity than that of many other Jewish theologians, does not necessarily break new ground. Other Jewish thinkers through the centuries have also seen Christianity as part of God's plan for humanity. Where Greenberg does go well be-yond others is in his evaluation of Christian religious claims.

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. The doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation were either true or false. Greenberg shows 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 inter-preted, 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 Chris-tian 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."⁴

Greenberg takes his cue here from Rabbi Menachem Ha-Meiri, a 13th-century Provençal rabbi. Meiri ruled that in social and commercial matters, Christians (and Muslims) were to be treated by Jews in exactly the same way as Jews. The bib-lical and rabbinic strictures regarding idolaters did not apply to them. This was because they were "peoples bound by the ways of religion" who followed the same ethical code as Jews. As Greenberg writes, for Meiri "idolatry is as idolatry does." As long as Christians seek to live in peace with Jews, work together with them for the healing of the world, and do not seek to undermine Judaism either through oppression or proselytization, Jews have no need to insist on the falsity of Christian religious beliefs. Indeed, they ought to celebrate the fact that Christianity has spread the worship of Israel's God throughout the world, thus fulfilling Abraham's mandate to be a blessing for all of humanity.

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 interpreta-tions ring true. I suspect that many readers, whether Jewish or Christian, will find, as I did, some of his theological formu-lations 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 par-ticular community and thus of little import to the faith life of another community. Readers familiar with Rabbi Jonathan Sacks's distinction between absolute truth and universal truth will find echoes of this idea in Greenberg as well, though Greenberg 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 is well aware that many of his ideas are controver-sial in the Orthodox community that ordained him and with which he still identifies. Indeed, in the first autobiographical essay, Greenberg reveals that he was the subject of a heresy trial in the early 1990s for his writings on Christianity. It was only the fear that the conviction of a prominent rabbi for being "too soft on Christianity" could lead to an anti-Jewish backlash that led the Rabbinical Council of America (the Orthodox rab-binical body of which Greenberg remains a member) to drop the charges. In return, Greenberg, an outspoken advocate of religious pluralism within Judaism, agreed not to take public honors in the rituals of non-Orthodox synagogues.⁵

Greenberg's autobiographical essay is fiercely honest in the revelation of the "heresy trial" and his own doubts about the concessions he ultimately made. He also testifies in a number of cases about the anguish and dissonance his thoughts and writings have caused him.

Within Judaism, Greenberg's most controversial idea is his no-tion of the "voluntary covenant." Greenberg has written that, in the wake of the Shoah, God has lost the moral authority to demand anything of the Jews. Whatever religious obligations Jews take on, they now do so voluntarily. Sociologically the point is unassailable; theologically it remains deeply problem-atic and certainly runs against the grain of traditional Judaism. In his autobiographical essay, Greenberg acknowledges his deep debt to Christian theologian Roy Eckhardt in his devel-opment of this idea.

Greenberg acknowledges the fears and concerns that his writ-ings inspire. The "voluntary covenant" concept can clearly be misused to justify non-observance and religious indifference. He also acknowledges the possibility that his positive evalua-tions 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. Greenberg writes a number of times that such is not his intent and he hopes his intellectual honesty will not be misused or misconstrued.

But it seems to me that there are grounds for concern. In point of fact, there are few figures in contemporary American Jewry who have enriched Jewish life as much as Yitz Green-berg. Through his founding and leadership of such institutions as CLAL and the Jewish Life Foundation, he has made serious text study the birthright of all Jews and not just the Orthodox community into which he was born. He has taught Jews of different stripes to appreciate each other, has helped Jews and Christians learn from each other, and made the wisdom of the Jewish tradition accessible and attractive. He has demonstrated that an engagement with the wider world need not mean a diminished commitment to Jews and Judaism.

And yet, a concern remains. Greenberg has made the case that both Judaism and Christianity are organic outgrowths of the religion of biblical Israel. He has made the case 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 wish that 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. Perhaps Rabbi Greenberg will address some of these concerns at greater length when he speaks under ICJS auspices on February 8.

Endnotes

¹In kabalistic thought, God originally was coextensive with the universe and voluntarily withdrew to allow the existence of the material world. In Greenberg's thought, God's tzimtzum makes way for human creativity; we no longer encounter God through miracles but through study and interpretation of sacred texts.

²Pg. 73.

³loc.cit.

⁴Pg. 67-8.

⁵Pg. 34-5.