Rab­bi Irv­ing ​“Yitz” Green­berg, win­ner of the 74th Nation­al Jew­ish Book Award for Life­time Achieve­ment, is a piv­otal fig­ure in mod­ern Jew­ish thought. His the­o­log­i­cal work has played a key role in redefin­ing post-Holo­caust Jew­ish iden­ti­ty and the­ol­o­gy. His lat­est book, The Tri­umph of Life: A Nar­ra­tive The­ol­o­gy of Judaism, is the cul­mi­na­tion of a life­time of schol­ar­ship and lead­er­ship in Jew­ish life. It is a com­pelling, inspir­ing, and pow­er­ful artic­u­la­tion of a Judaism root­ed in the sanc­ti­ty of life, the dig­ni­ty of every human being, and the moral imper­a­tive of tikkun olam.

Using the for­mat of her pod­cast, The Five Books, host Tali Rosen­blatt Cohen inter­views Rab­bi Green­berg about the books in five cat­e­gories that have pro­found­ly influ­enced his life and work. 

Tali Rosen­blatt Cohen: What is a book you read as a child that helped shape your Jew­ish identity?

Yitz Green­berg: I would say Megillah, a trac­tate of the Tal­mud. Let me start with some back­ground. My father was born in Poland to a very poor fam­i­ly, and his father died when he was five or six. He was the youngest child, and his moth­er couldn’t sup­port him, so she sent him to a yeshi­va at the age of eight or nine. For boys who were bril­liant enough, the yeshi­va would waive tuition and pro­vide hous­ing and food. How­ev­er, they couldn’t offer reg­u­lar meals. My father depend­ed on fam­i­lies invit­ing him to eat with them; if they did, he ate, if not, he went hun­gry. Because of his wit and his abil­i­ty to enter­tain, he lit­er­al­ly sang for his dinner.

When he grew up, he came to Amer­i­ca, where he taught Tal­mud. He was a lov­ing par­ent but he strug­gled with the day-to-day. He nev­er played bas­ket­ball or chat­ted with us chil­dren. He expressed his love by study­ing Tal­mud with us, includ­ing my sis­ters; he was ahead of his time in that way. Being loved through Tal­mud study was a deeply pos­i­tive expe­ri­ence for me.

One sum­mer, when I was eleven or twelve years old and in the high­est ele­men­tary yeshi­va class, we had an excel­lent Tal­mud teacher. In the sum­mer, he invit­ed us to study a full trac­tate of Tal­mud — Megillah Esther, about twen­ty pages — with him to give us the joy of com­plet­ing a whole book of Tal­mud. This launched my life­long study of rab­binic texts, which is tied to feel­ing loved, fam­i­ly, and appre­ci­at­ing the big-pic­ture perspective.

That emo­tion­al attach­ment to Tal­mud made study­ing plea­sur­able beyond school and pre­pared me for my stud­ies at Beis Yosef, a yeshi­va of Euro­pean-lev­el inten­si­ty found­ed by refugees — some­thing I oth­er­wise wouldn’t have man­aged. And with­out that back­ground, I wouldn’t have pur­sued smicha, rab­binic ordi­na­tion. While I cher­ish the Bible, the Tal­mud became cen­tral to my per­son­al life, career, and Jew­ish vision.

TRC: What is a book you read as an adult that has impact­ed your rela­tion­ship to Judaism?

YG: The most reli­gious­ly influ­en­tial books I read in col­lege weren’t writ­ten by a Jew, but by the great Amer­i­can author Nathaniel Hawthorne. I fell in love with his works and read them all.

Hawthorne emerged from the Puri­tan evan­gel­i­cal tra­di­tion. He antic­i­pat­ed the ques­tion of divine pres­ence, show­ing that reli­gious ques­tions per­sist even in a blank, uncar­ing world. To this day, Hawthorne influ­ences me as I keep wrestling with those ques­tions despite my mod­ern influ­ences and my ratio­nal tendencies.

In grad­u­ate school at Har­vard, I came into the orbit of Rab­bi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. When I became the rab­bi of the Young Israel of Brook­line, I grew close with his sis­ter Anne Gerber’s fam­i­ly. Anne gave me a copy of Halakhic Man, which had been pub­lished in Hebrew in an obscure jour­nal and was­n’t trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish until the 1980s. I was lucky to read it ear­ly. This book shaped my adult reli­gious vision more than any other.

I was par­tic­u­lar­ly struck by the idea that Judaism iden­ti­fies with life. In the Bible, life is supreme — you can’t enter the Mishkan, the Taber­na­cle, if you’ve touched death. Priests avoid funer­als. Rab­bi Soloveitchik’s PhD in phi­los­o­phy helped him learn to ask big ques­tions: How do you approach life? How do you expe­ri­ence God’s presence?

A major theme in Halakhic Man is that Jew­ish law is not just about rou­tine obser­vance. On the con­trary, it’s sup­posed to be high­ly cre­ative, inspir­ing us to con­stant­ly recon­cep­tu­al­ize our expe­ri­ence of life. 

TRC: What book, not nec­es­sar­i­ly Jew­ish, changed your worldview?

YG: The Struc­ture of Sci­en­tif­ic Rev­o­lu­tions by Thomas Kuhn was that book for me. I strug­gled to rec­on­cile moder­ni­ty and tra­di­tion — West­ern cul­ture and ancient Jew­ish rab­binic cul­ture; it was a great chal­lenge to inte­grate the two.

Kuhn, who was a his­to­ri­an and philoso­pher of sci­ence, chal­lenged the notion that sci­ence was objec­tive, based on data and the mas­tery of real­i­ty, while reli­gion was thought to be based on myth and hope. He argued they both are built on par­a­digms, orga­niz­ing nar­ra­tives that shape what evi­dence is col­lect­ed and how it’s interpreted.

This insight trans­formed my view and became cen­tral to my work. Sci­ence and reli­gion give us dif­fer­ent ways of orga­niz­ing real­i­ty, but they don’t con­flict. Facts of one don’t con­tra­dict the oth­er. This way of think­ing became a mod­el for how I under­stand all dis­ci­plines — sci­ence, med­i­cine, cul­ture, and religion.

TRC: I’d like to hear about your lat­est book, The Tri­umph of Life: A Nar­ra­tive The­ol­o­gy of Judaism.

YG: The cen­tral par­a­digm guid­ing my under­stand­ing of Judaism is redemp­tion. The par­a­digm for redemp­tion is the sto­ry of Exo­dus, and is about per­fect­ing the world, which is also an expres­sion of mes­sian­ism — the promise to over­come all ene­mies of life. When you look at Jew­ish obser­vances, you might see some harsh or trou­bling aspects. There is unequal dig­ni­ty for women, val­ues hos­tile to gay peo­ple. The ques­tion is whether this data is defin­i­tive or deci­sive, or whether you can under­stand these ideas as orga­nized around the theme of the tri­umph of life. The desire to per­fect the world means that we can over­come pover­ty, hunger, dis­crim­i­na­tion, inequal­i­ty, injus­tice, and war.

This broad under­stand­ing of Judaism as a reli­gion of life is the cen­tral theme of my work. I believe only such a ver­sion of our reli­gion can sur­vive and flour­ish. We are liv­ing through one of the great trans­for­ma­tion­al ages of his­to­ry, where every reli­gion and way of life is exposed to every oth­er. The only form of Judaism, or any reli­gion, that can sur­vive is one that is able to open itself up to and devel­op dis­tinc­tive val­ues that ful­ly embrace and cel­e­brate life — not pre­sent­ing oth­ers as evil or infe­ri­or, but with Judaism as a vital alternative. 

I believe this leads to a high­er lev­el of reli­gion. I’ve tried to write a book that artic­u­lates the great themes of life’s suprema­cy, the uni­ver­sal­i­ty of the image of God, and the intrin­sic dig­ni­ty of every per­son. I think the Torah was always meant as a guide not just for the Jew­ish peo­ple but for the whole world. It doesn’t start with the first Jew­ish law in Exo­dus, but with the cre­ation of the world​.My cen­tral claim is that tikkun olam is not a mod­ern lib­er­al inven­tion or a polit­i­cal slo­gan dressed in Jew­ish lan­guage. It is the con­tem­po­rary artic­u­la­tion of mes­sian­ism, which means that we don’t accept the world as it is, but work to repair it. The Jew­ish promise says that this world can be repaired. God wants it repaired and has offered us a part­ner­ship — a covenant — to restore the world to a place where life over­comes hunger, pover­ty, war, and sickness.

Don’t accept the sta­tus quo; trans­form it. Work with allies — God, past gen­er­a­tions who began this process, and non-Jew­ish groups com­mit­ted to repair. Judaism says you can win; you have God’s promise — but you must do your share and work hard.

That is the theme of the book: the promise to turn the world into par­adise in our hands. This part­ner­ship with God has exist­ed in three stages: the bib­li­cal stage, when the Jew­ish peo­ple were more pas­sive and direct­ed by God; the sec­ond stage of equal part­ner­ship, when God self-lim­it­ed and humans took more respon­si­bil­i­ty; and the third stage — now — when God is com­plete­ly hid­den and yet every­where — in your home, hos­pi­tal vis­its, dai­ly life — and so you must uncov­er that presence.

God does more mir­a­cles than ever, but these are not super­nat­ur­al vio­la­tions of nature. They are human achieve­ments: Zoom calls, open-heart surgery, pace­mak­ers. These are mir­a­cles derived from under­stand­ing and har­ness­ing nat­ur­al laws.

This attempt to per­fect the world applies to all human activ­i­ties, for exam­ple, work that pays fair wages and pro­vides dig­ni­ty ver­sus labor con­di­tions that cause harm. We must pri­or­i­tize life in every action, con­tin­u­al­ly study­ing and max­i­miz­ing life while min­i­miz­ing death and harm. This is the core of halacha; it’s not just rit­u­al law, but a guide to eth­i­cal living. 

TRC: Tell us about a book you are enjoy­ing at the moment.

YG: I’m in the mid­dle of The Art of Diplo­ma­cy: How Amer­i­can Nego­tia­tors Reached His­toric Agree­ments that Changed the World by Stu­art Eizen­stat. It’s a study of how diplo­ma­cy and a vision of soft pow­er can make major con­tri­bu­tions to improv­ing the world. Stu­art Eisen­stadt explores how America’s diplo­mat­ic engage­ment has had pow­er­ful effects. Eisen­stadt him­self helped secure repa­ra­tions for Holo­caust sur­vivors and pres­sured Swiss banks to release huge amounts of mon­ey tak­en from Jews killed by Nazis. His achieve­ments exem­pli­fy how diplo­ma­cy and human effort can cre­ate a bet­ter world or peace­ful­ly resolve great challenges