The Triumph of Life: A Narrative Theology of Judaism By Rabbi Irving Greenberg
(University of Nebraska Press/The Jewish Publication Society)

A good synagogue sermon is usually sneaky. It starts slow, often leaving the congregants shifting in their seats as they wonder where the rabbi is taking them. By the end, however, the worshipers are left thoughtful if a bit dazed, their heads filled with a whirlwind of connections and ideas.

This is the case with The Triumph of Life, by noted scholar and author Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg. The book, which won the 2024 Natan Prize and also earned Greenberg the National Jewish Book Awards Lifetime Achievement Award, is dense but clearly written, a cap on a career that has included works such as The Jewish Way and For the Sake of Heaven and Earth. Readers who plow through will find themselves rewarded with a nuanced theology that sweeps all the way through Jewish history to the present.

Greenberg, an Orthodox rabbi, divides his book into three parts. In the first, he outlines what he calls Judaism’s “utopian vision”—that human beings should live according to the concept of tikkun olam, based on an understanding that all are created in the image of God. Usually translated as repairing the world, tikkun olam, Greenberg writes, is better defined in Judaism as the “triumph of life,” i.e., that the forces of life should triumph over death and human suffering. 

In the second section, Greenberg explains how, in his perception, tikkun olam emerges from a covenant between humans and God. This covenant, he writes, “fostered a profound, unbreakable connection to God, as well as a sense of community and a culture that treasured learning and literacy” and that sustained Judaism for 2,000 years.

The third section of the book is its most thought-provoking. Greenberg grapples with the challenges to Judaism posed by a host of issues in the 20th and 21st centuries, including modernity, totalitarianism and the Holocaust as well as the questions created by the modern State of Israel.

It’s the Holocaust, of course, that poses the most difficulties for Jewish theology. As a younger man, Greenberg arrived at a controversial understanding of the Holocaust as a breaking of the covenant between God and the Jewish people. But he has reconsidered that position and, in the new book, writes how the Shoah transformed, rather than destroyed, the covenant between God and humans.

Greenberg uses the kabbalistic concept of tzimtzum to flesh out that transformed covenant. As he describes it, tzimtzum is the “Divine contraction meant to leave room for something besides God.” In other words, God diminishes or shrinks to make room for human beings. “God is profoundly hiding,” he insists, “so that we will put less energy into proclaiming God’s greatness and more energy into serving the Lord by redeeming the world and healing God’s creatures.” 

There’s a lot to think about there. Greenberg borrows from different branches of Judaism as he employs an adjusted concept of God—it’s not that God is absent or uncaring, just hidden—as the ignition for the tikkun olam that he thinks all Jews, indeed all people, should pursue. 

That Greenberg cobbles his core theological principles from various schools of Jewish thought should come as no surprise. He’s worked for decades to bring together disparate parts of the Jewish world, most notably with the pluralistic organization Clal-The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, which he co-founded with Elie Wiesel. He’s an Orthodox rabbi with respect for the liberal strands of Judaism, a Zionist willing to admit Israel’s faults and a husband who credits his wife, the pioneering feminist Blu Greenberg, with helping to turn him into a feminist.

While the majority of The Triumph of Life lies in teaching about the past rather than making recommendations and predictions, he does spend the final chapters looking to a Jewish future based on intrareligious dialogue, improving the role of women and injecting holiness into everyday life.

In the final pages of the book, Greenberg also writes that he remains a committed Zionist who believes that “we will see the long-term victory of the better angels of Israeli nature.”

There’s something comforting in knowing that such an accomplished Jewish thinker who has written such a stimulating, nuanced book about the Jewish past is also an inveterate optimist about the Jewish future. 

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Peter Ephross, the editor of Jewish Major Leaguers in Their Own Words: Oral Histories of 23 Players, is a longtime writer about the Jewish world.