A Self-Limiting God: Reflections on Rabbi Irving Greenberg’s ‘The Triumph of Life: A Narrative Theology of Judaism’ (Jewish Publication Society, 2024)

In his newest book, The Triumph of Life: A Narrative Theology of Judaism, Rabbi Irving Greenberg, a venerable modern Orthodox Jewish thinker and community organizer, reviews and refines his post-Holocaust covenantal theology of Judaism. As in his past writings, Greenberg proposes that the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel mark the beginning of a Third Era in Jewish history, built on the shoulders of the biblical and rabbinic eras. In a useful and thoughtfully crafted chart as an appendix to the book, he describes the chronology, characteristic elements and theological values of each of the three Great Eras of Jewish History.

In earlier writings, Greenberg, following Elie Wiesel, had suggested that the Holocaust had resulted in a “broken” covenant between God and Israel. In this book, he softens that position, proposing that God’s tzimztum (“contraction” or “withdrawal”) from the world, which has been happening in stages since the biblical era, creates a new “possibility of a voluntary covenant.” He elaborates:

God did break the covenant by allowing the Holocaust to happen — but in practice, the covenant was still functioning, because the Jewish people had chosen to uphold its side of the terms. (237).

He clarifies that by “broken” he did not mean that the covenant had become “null and void,” but that God was “wagering that humans operating in freedom would deepen their commitment and achieve far more than they had when operating under orders from a coercive authority.” (238).

Greenberg now proposes that, rather than broken, the covenant has been “transformed.” God and the Jewish people continue to be bound by a “shared covenant” (239). In this new stage, God invites humans to become the “managing partner.” The Jewish people is to “testify to the world that the profoundly hidden God is neither absent nor uncaring” (240). Human agency is the “most important piece of the covenant of life in modernity” (241). Greenberg chooses to call this Third Era of Jewish history, the “Lay Era,” proposing that responsibility for the Jewish future is no longer in the hands of biblical priests and prophets, nor of rabbis and scholars, but in the voluntarism and engagement of lay people in a democratic, pluralistic, communal setting.

There is much that is appealing about this scheme, and there are insights and wisdom to be gleaned from the writings of this master teacher. I find the basic premise of Greenberg’s theology, however, to be problematic and self-contradictory.

Greenberg is by training and practice an Orthodox rabbi who chose to move past some of the more restrictive elements of halakhah or Jewish law, in order to embrace a pluralistic understanding of Jewish life. His wife, Blu, has been a leader in the Jewish feminist movement. The rabbi charismatically became an entrepreneurial emissary of Judaism to the non-Orthodox and interfaith communities and, through the founding of CLAL (The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership) served for years as the “spiritual mentor” of the Jewish Federation world, advocating his Third Era premise that Jewish leadership and responsibility had transferred from the rabbinic to the lay constituency.

While on the one hand, Greenberg professes that Judaism has transcended the “supernatural” stage of the biblical Era, he continues to affirm a belief in a revealed Torah. Greenberg’s notion of a “self-limiting” God borrows from classic Kabbalistic sources and has elements (as we shall see below) from the theology of Rabbi Milton Steinberg, an early disciple of Mordecai Kaplan. Nevertheless, while Greenberg has a section on “Jewish Religious Responses to Modernity,” he only passingly engages Reform Judaism, has one reference to Conservative Judaism (320) and totally ignores Reconstructionism.

Greenberg calls his latest effort a “narrative” theology. He meanders theologically as he traces his journey from his early Orthodoxy to his present position. He is critical of the liberal movements’ “abandonment of many covenantal behaviors [that have] eroded the power of religion,” and remains protective and defensive of Orthodoxy, even Haredi Judaism’s mission of upholding the “inherited halakhah” to “sustain Torah unchanged” (322). At the same time, he calls on traditionalists not to “willfully [close] their ears to new revelations” (322). Greenberg’s theology is nostalgic and appealing for some who would maintain a traditionalist view of God but still wish to make sense of the evil in the world. But his theology is riddled with philosophic inconsistencies and inner contradictions.

His affirmation of faith in a supernaturalistic, albeit increasingly withdrawing and self-limiting God, is problematic. He claims that “Revelation comes from an Infinite Boundless One, who transcends all capacities of finite mortals to grasp” (p. 324). Yet, he says: “God has become totally hidden in order not to force or coerce people to do the right thing.”

There is an ongoing vacillation in Greenberg’s theology between a “Lord” who is “Infinite [and] Boundless,” and a “self-limiting,” increasingly “withdrawing” God. This presents a moral dilemma with which Greenberg’s theodicy does not fully grapple. If God remains a “Supernatural Lord” who is all powerful and loving, then the attribution of willful self-limitation of God in the presence of overwhelming evil presents a callous and perilous contradiction.

One of Greenberg’s central premises is what he labels the “Ethics of Power.” He addresses this meaningfully in his chapters on “The State of Israel” and “Judaism in the Third Era.” Greenberg reminds us that power may corrupt but failure to use power in the service of good is a moral failure. He writes: “ … power spells greater capacity both to do good and to inflict evil” (291). In the face of this affirmation it is, to say the least, ironic that Greenberg, who professes belief in a supernatural and loving God, can justify Divine “self-limitation” in the face of evil. Only in non-supernaturalist or trans-naturalist theology, such as that of Mordecai Kaplan wherein God operates, by definition, within the bounds of natural law, can such a construct be morally defended. Evil, for Kaplan, represents the unfinished work of creation, for which humans are partners of the Divine in completing.

If God remains a “Supernatural Lord” who is all powerful and loving, then the attribution of willful self-limitation of God in the presence of overwhelming evil presents a callous and perilous contradiction.

Rabbi Milton Steinberg — Kaplan’s early disciple — addressed the problematic implications of a classical supernaturalist theodicy (Anatomy of Faith, 1960). If God is all good, how can there be evil; if all powerful, why doesn’t God subdue it; if all-knowing, what is the Divine excuse? Steinberg proposes the notion of “limited theism,” wherein God is an eternal, conscious reality whose will is for good, whose love for creation is infinite, but whose power is, “by nature,” limited (not willfully “self-limited”). The evil and unjust realities of the world are not the works of a just God. God’s will for good is boundless; but God’s power over evil is finite. This limitation requires human freedom of will and effort. Human beings are partners of God in advancing and completing the works of creation and redemption.

Another approach to dealing with the contradictions of classical theodicy is offered by Rabbi Harold Schulweis in his proposal of a “predicate theology” that reverses theologically and grammatically affirmations about God and Divine attributes. Schulweis speaks of Elohut or Godliness — not of a “subject” God that acts directly upon the universe but of “predicates” of divinity that manifest the godly reality and potential unfolding of cosmic and human nature. “God is just” becomes “Justice is godly,” and “God is Love,” becomes “Love is godly.” Thus, the Divine is not an embodied or reified entity but represents those qualities that make for the ongoing becoming of the cosmos and moral development of humanity.

Greenberg does not go where Steinberg or Schulweis lead. Instead, he proposes that an all-powerful God “self-limits” and “withdraws” from intervention, thus creating the ethical and intellectual conundrum of classical theodicy.

Despite these considerations, we are grateful to Rabbi Irving Greenberg for a book that opens the door to further theological reflection, as well as ongoing discernment and conversation about the meaning and purpose of religious life, in general, and Jewish life, in particular.