The Leap of Action
The Jewish Way: Living the Holidays.
by Irving Greenberg.
Summit Books. 463 pp. $22.95.
Can the Orthodox religious tradition speak to contemporary Jews? The answer, of course, is yes, provided they are willing to listen. Irving Greenberg’s new book, focusing on “Judaism as it expresses itself in the Jewish holidays,” is a strikingly original attempt to create just such a dialogue.
Generally speaking, English-language books on the Jewish holidays fall into one of three categories. First there are scholarly works, like Theodor Gaster’s Festivals of the Jewish Year, which draw upon the findings of modern historical research and the comparative study of religions. These books have a limited appeal, and in any case are not written with the intent of providing religious inspiration and guidance. A second genre is exemplified in Arthur Waskow’s Seasons of Our Joy, a book which tendentiously builds upon its discussion of the Jewish holidays to promote a pet cause—in this case, radical politics and the countercultural ethos. Here again—once the reader understands what is going on—the appeal is a limited one. Finally there are the substantial number of “how-to” volumes produced under various denominational auspices. These books reach larger audiences of already committed Jews, providing them with valuable guidance on the nuts and bolts of holiday observance. Two successful models of this type are Peter Knobel’s Gates of the Seasons (Reform) and the relevant sections of Hayim H. Donin’s To Be a Jew (Orthodox).
The Jewish Way serves up a heavy dollop of “how-to” guidance, but its overall aim is much more ambitious. Greenberg seeks to lay bare Judaism’s “underlying structures of meaning—the understanding of the world, the direction of history, the values of life” that find their “classic expression” in the Jewish holidays. It is these “deep structures” that Greenberg wishes to convey to contemporary Jews, in order to help “release [their] creative imagination for religious living.”
For Greenberg, The Jewish Way is a natural extension of work in which he has been engaged for years as the director of CLAL, the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. Although his name is also prominently associated with efforts on behalf of Jewish religious unity, Greenberg’s primary labor has been directed toward increasing the literacy and commitment of Jewish leadership cadres. The fact that he has a Ph.D. from Harvard gives him entry to the largely secularized Jewish audience that he wishes to address; the fact that his own Orthodoxy has been significantly shaped by exposure to modern thought makes him appreciative of the existential situation in which that audience finds itself. In short, Greenberg is very well placed to carry forward the hoped-for dialogue between Jewish tradition and the contemporary sensibility.
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The Jewish Way is organized in four parts, each focusing on a particular cluster of holidays. First come Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot—the three “core holidays” that “combine to communicate powerfully the origins and vision of the Jewish religion.” Most basic of all is Passover, which teaches the “central idea of redemption.” The Exodus, Greenberg stresses, is an “orienting event,” one that “sets in motion and guides the Jewish way (and, ultimately, humanity’s way) toward the Promised Land—an earth set free and perfected.” Following Passover is Shavuot, in which “the Jewish people reenact the heart-stopping, recklessly loving moment [at Mt. Sinai] when they committed themselves to an open-ended covenantal mission.” Finally there is Sukkot, which “explores the psychology of wandering, the interplay of mobility and rootedness, and the challenge of walking the way.”
A second cluster of holidays—the Sabbath and the Days of Awe (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur)—provide significant opportunities to “nurture personal life along the way.” “These days were designed to orient the individual and the family toward redemption in their personal lives, even as the pilgrimage holidays set the direction for the Jewish people collectively.” On the Sabbath, Greenberg observes, the “vivid glimpse of perfection combines with the delights and peace of the day to restore the soul.” In sharp contrast, the Days of Awe “lead to fundamental self-renewal” by “shattering the crusts of arrogance and complacency. . . . Moved, the individual removes the detritus of evil deeds and guilt; afterward, a reborn person walks the Jewish way.”
All the holidays mentioned thus far have their source in the Pentateuch; taken together they present a “stationary model of Judaism, coherent, revealed, structured.” But Judaism, as Greenberg notes, is open to history, and history is “full of the unexpected.” Hence the third cluster of holidays, consisting of Purim, Hanukkah, and Tisha B’Av. Purim is about the “challenge of Diaspora living,” the fact that Jews have been confronted with “genocidal anti-Semitism.” Hanukkah focuses on the issues of “assimilation, acculturation, and Jewish survival” in the context of the encounter with Hellenism. As for Tisha B’Av, it commemorates the destruction of the Second Temple, a “catastrophe . . . so overwhelming that it threatened the structures of meaning in Judaism.”
Finally, there is a fourth cluster of holidays that Greenberg identifies with two events of “extraordinary magnitude” in contemporary Jewish experience: “the Holocaust, which is as great a crisis for Judaism as was the destruction of the Temple, and the recreation of the state of Israel, which can only be compared to the Exodus.” Greenberg devotes a chapter each to Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Memorial Day) and Yom Ha’Atzmaut (Israel Independence Day), “two major new holy days [that] are being added to the Jewish calendar.”
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To make holiday observance palatable to his intended audience of largely secularized Jews, Greenberg employs a variety of strategies. Foremost among them is an emphasis on ritual activity as performance and play. To talk of these things is to hold forth the promise of pleasure, something quite different from the associations brought forth by the notion of “commandment,” and also to provide an original rationale for detailed religious observance that might otherwise prove extremely onerous. In this connection Greenberg urges his readers to take on starring roles in their own Jewish drama: “If you will,” he notes, “one must be a bit of a ham to be a kosher Jew.”
Secondly, Greenberg relies extensively on psychological explanations to account for various ritual patterns. Here again, the aim is to plug into the reader’s own interests. Some of Greenberg’s observations in this vein are quite acute, as when he explains the ritual washing of the hands before the seder meal in the following manner: “In the psychic movement from storytelling to eating, the hands are washed to break the routine of the story and to awaken consciousness of the festive meal. This is also the transition from the dry crust of slavery to the rich, varied feast of free men and women. Thus, feasting and biological pleasure confirm the psychological liberation experience.”
Psychology operates more directly in The Jewish Way in the soothing supportive tone of Greenberg’s voice, very much in the mode of the therapeutic professional. This comes through with particular force in the chapter on the Sabbath, where Greenberg is at pains to reassure the reader likely to be overwhelmed by the “oppressive minutiae” of observance. “If a particular requirement is a problem,” he writes, “do not give up. Start slowly. Do it in stages. Grow into it [it].”
Last but hardly least is the strategic use Greenberg makes of humor. While not all the jokes in The Jewish Way are successful, the volume contains more material of a humorous nature than all the other books I have ever read on the Jewish holidays combined. The aim, of course, is quite serious: to relieve the pressure on author and audience alike. “In laughing at religious forms and at reality,” Greenberg writes, “one admits the fallibility of religious hopes but one also affirms them.”
The Jewish Way is an impressive book, perhaps the best single volume of its kind in English. Still, the question must be posed: has Greenberg successfully bridged the gap between the Orthodox religious tradition and the contemporary sensibility? The answer, I am afraid, is no. While he spares no effort to present Orthodox teaching in an attractive manner, Greenberg completely sidesteps the most crucial issue of all—the issue of faith.
Greenberg knows full well that he is addressing an audience short on religious belief. Rather than facing up to this, however, he chooses to ignore it, apparently out of fear that argument in this area will only alienate his readers. Instead, Greenberg relies on a variant of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s “leap of action.” The book’s implicit message is: “Don’t worry about faith. Just do, and faith will take care of itself.”
But it will not. Without a firm foundation in belief, how is a contemporary Jew to take on the burden—yes, the burden—of disciplined religious observance? One may, to be sure, latch on to some particulars of practice, either because they are personally gratifying or because they bespeak a loyalty to the Jewish people. But consistent, comprehensive observance—never. In the absence of a framework of belief, what to Greenberg is ritual play to others can only seem grueling labor.
The situation is made more problematical still by Greenberg’s insistence on the centrality of the Holocaust to contemporary religious consciousness. In and of itself this is a perfectly reasonable position, but it stands at cross purposes with any effort to enhance belief in Judaism as a religion of redemption. In Greenberg’s own case, preoccupation with the Holocaust leads to talk about a “broken covenant,” and even to this startling statement:
The Holocaust reveals that behind the flux of history is an ideal paradigm that is fragmentary, broken. If the central normative models are “flawed” or “cracked,” then the criteria of systemic adequacy used by most people—i.e., wholeness, completeness, or even being perfect—may be fundamentally erroneous.
If Greenberg is serious, then the message of Passover—the message of redemption—has been completely subverted. Can he reasonably expect contemporary Jews to walk “the Jewish way” if that way leads to nowhere?
Greenberg, of course, is not responsible for the fact that most contemporary Jews remain outside the circle of faith. And he certainly deserves praise for reaching out to these Jews in an honest, open manner. But unless and until the issue of faith is met and overcome, the Jewish way will remain, of necessity, an infrequently traveled road.
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