All of this must be borne in mind in assessing the renaissance of Jewish life in contemporary America. Jews in the United States are overwhelmingly universalistic, and particularistic affirmations are made in the service of universal moral and spiritual values. For Jews, as well as for members of other U.S. ethnic groups, the question that therefore remains is whether such affirmations will prove strong enough to sustain a broad cultural and communal identity. Jews have been blessed with freedom in America. Such blessing has allowed for the strengthening of Jewish commitment, values, and identity. At the same time, it has proven to be the solvent in which a distinctive Jewish identity and values often dissolve. . . . The story of Jewish resurgence in the United States during the twentieth century is multivalent and complex, and the adaptive capacity of the Jewish people will surely continue to be tested in the future.

“The Nature and Direction of Modern Jewish Theology”

Some may lament the inability of our era to provide such theological certitude. However, by acknowledging that ours is an era that must accept the contingency of starting-points and, by recognizing that ours is a time that cannot experience what Nietzche termed "metaphysical comfort," we are not unique, and we should not be puffed up such post-modern hubris that we imagine that our generation alone has confronted such a problem. After all, seven decades ago Franz Rosenzweig faced the same dilemma, and he then observed that prior to the advent of the modern era no Jews would have squirmed on the needle point of theology and dogma-a "why" alone as he put it-in justifying their life and faith as Jews.
. . . Yet, for many of us, such finite reflection upon the texts, symbols, and experiences of Jewish life and tradition will be sufficient. We, like so many of our ancestors, will participate from our own personal and communal vantage-points in a conversation that stretches back over the millennia, and we will recognize that our conversation-guided and informed as it is by the literary elements and symbols as well as communal experiences that are the inheritance of the entire Household of Israel-possesses a transformative and transcendent power, a holiness, that is beyond our ability to adequately articulate and explain. We will, at such moments, hear the murmur of angels both as individuals and as a community, and we will feel the power of the divine. Our community, in the future as in the past, will engage in our search for God in a multiplicity of ways, and while we know that religion is not primordially a matter of reflection, our theologians, however haltingly, will be privileged to seek expression for the manifold understandings that will emerge from those engagements.

Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg "The Ethics of Jewish Power"

Are there ethical limits to the Jewish exercise of power? Is Israel living up to these standards? How do we judge in such matters? . . . The Jewish ethic of power that has been forged since 1948 can be summarized simply: Ethical power maximizes possible good (and life) and minimizes possible evil (and death). Morality is only possible on balance. Given what cannot be changed, given the evil that cannot be avoided, there is still some best possible (or least evil) way of exercising power. In the real world, bad judgments or behaviors are inevitable; the measure of morality is its ability to limit wrong action and correct it.

To take up the tools of power is to take on guilt. But that does not mean we are free to desist. Those who do not act because they fear to wrong others are morally irresponsible. Those who point to the inescapable evil side effects, taken out of context, and use them to pillory the defenders of the good are guilty of worse; in their hands, the ideal becomes the enemy of the good.
. . . This, then, is the modern Jewish ethic of power. Israel and Jewry have undertaken to hold themselves to a higher standard, even while knowing that perfection is unattainable and guilt inescapable. We deem necessary the use of force, yet we choose to use only such limited force as is necessary.
. . . In choosing to live by this code, Israel understood that it would pay a price in extra casualties. It has paid that price repeatedly, unfailingly, for 54 years.
. . . To get through this period ethically intact, Jewry and the State of Israel must not surrender to exhaustion nor yield moral scruples in the face of fear, rage and despair. As Maimonides points out in Deuteronomy 30:15, we are told: I place before you today life and good, and death and evil. We must choose both life and good; for in the end, they are one.

The Jewish Way, “ The Dream and How to Live It: Shabbat”

. . . According to the Genesis account, this world originally was and is to be a paradise. But only when there is peace, with abundant resources and an untrammeled right to live, will the world be structured to sustain the infinite value of the human being. This is the heart of Judaism, the dream. Jewish existence without the dream is almost inconceivable. The drawing power of the vision has kept Jews faithful to their mission over several millennia. Expulsion, persecution, and destruction have assaulted but never obliterated the dream. Jews have repeatedly given everything, including their very lives, to keep it alive. And when catastrophe shattered the vision, Jews spent their lives renewing it. The question is: From where can these people draw the strength to renew their dream again and again? The answer of Jewish tradition is: Give people just a foretaste of the fulfillment, and they will never give it up. The Shabbat is that taste.

“Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire:Judaism, Christianity, and Modernity after the Holocaust”

“We now have to speak of “moment faiths,” moments when Redeemer and vision of redemption are present, interspersed with times when the flames and smoke of burning children blot out faith - though it flickers again . . . Like life, this response ebbs and flows. The difference between the believer and the skeptic is the frequency of faith, and not certitude of position.”

Rabbi Harold Kushner, "When Bad Things Happen to Good People"

God wants the righteous to live peaceful, happy lives, but sometimes even He can't bring that about. It is too difficult even for God to keep cruelty and chaos from claiming their innocent victims. ... How does God make a difference in our lives if He neither kills nor cures? God inspires people to help other people who have been hurt by life, and by helping them, they protect them from the danger of feeling alone, abandoned, or judged. God makes some people want to become doctors and nurses, to spend days and nights of self-sacrificing concern with an intensity for which no many can compensate, in the effort to sustain life and alleviate pain. God moves people to want to be medical researchers, to focus their intelligence and energy on the causes and possible cures for some of life's tragedies. ...

To the person who asks "what good is God? Who needs religion if these things happen to good people and bad people alike?" I would say that God may not prevent the calamity, but He gives us the strength and the perseverance to overcome it. Where else do we get these qualities which we did not have before? ...
The flood that devastates a town is not an "act of God", even if the insurance companies find it useful to call it that. But the efforts people make to save lives, risking their own lives for a person who might be a total stranger to them, and the determination to rebuild their community after the flood waters have receded, do qualify as acts of God.

When a person is dying of cancer, I do not hold God responsible for the cancer or for the pain he feels. They have other causes. But I have seen God give such people the strength to take each day as it comes, to be grateful for a day full of sunshine or one in which they are relatively free of pain.
When people who were never particularly strong become strong in the face of adversity, when people who tended to think only of themselves become unselfish and heroic in an emergency, I have to ask myself where they got these qualities which they would freely admit they did not have before. My answer is that this is one of the ways in which God helps us when we suffer beyond the limits of our own strength.

Rabbi David Hartman, "A Living Covenant"

I do not interpret current events in nature and history as direct expressions of God's will or design. I look exclusively to the Torah and mitzvoth as mediators of the personal God of the covenant. That, however, does not mean that I adopt [Israeli philosopher, Yeshiah] Leibowitz's position and ascribe no religious significance to the rebirth of Israel. From my perspective, the religious meaning one gives to events relates not to their origin but to their possible influence on the life of Torah. If an event in history can be a catalyst for a new perception of the scope of Torah, if it widens the range of halakhic action and responsibility, if it provides greater opportunities for hearing God's mitzvot, then this already suffices to endow the event with religious significance, for it intensifies widens the way God can be present in the daily life of the individual and the community. One can religiously embrace modern Israel not through a judgment about God's actions in history but through an understanding of the centrality of Israel for the fullest actualization of the world of mitzvot. This covenantal appreciation of history dispenses with the impossible task of reconciling God's loving redemptive actions in the rebirth of Israel with total withdrawal from and indifference to our tragic suffering in Auschwitz. My position regarding the centrality of modern Israel for the full realization of Torah as a way of life is in sharp opposition to those religious trends in Judaism regard the Zionist quest for normalcy as a revolt against the Torah

I have described, from a covenantal perspective, the new opportunities provided by the rebirth of Israel. It is hardly less necessary, however, to be aware of the new risks that have arisen simultaneously. Opportunities and risks alike owe their origin to the fact that the creation of the third Jewish commonwealth confronts Judaism and the Jewish peo¬ple with a new moral and political agenda, whose implications go beyond the strict geographical confines of the Jewish state. For a long time in history, we did not have to deal with questions that touch upon the relationship between halakhah and political power, since we were a powerless community. Especially from the emancipation period onward, Judaism was not involved with the public domain of power and politics. Judaism gave meaning to the individual. It taught Jews how to conduct their family life. It provided frameworks for the celebration of the holy. It provided a structure that kept alive the major historical moments that shaped the community's spiritual self-understanding. Judaism, however, did not have to deal with those agonizing moral questions that confront a na¬tion that has military and political power. In the political sphere, our activity was limited to the fight for minority rights, religious tolerance, and freedom of conscience in coun¬tries where we were an oppressed or vulnerable minority. As a result of the rebirth of Israel, our political situation has dramatically changed. In Israel, religious and nonreligious Jews have a new sense of power and belonging that they have rarely felt throughout their long sojourn in the diaspora.

Israel, however, not only allows us to give expression to what is most noble in the Jewish tradition, but it also readily exposes moral and spiritual inadequacies in that tradition. Israel therefore provides unique conditions for a serious critique of Judaism as it is practiced by committed halakhic Jews. In Israel there is no external non-Jewish world to inhibit the tradition's full self-expression. Moral attitudes that one never expected to characterize Jewish behavior can surface in this uninhibited, passionate, and complex Jewish reality. Triumphalist nationalism, lack of tolerance for other faith communities, indifference, and often an open disregard for the liberal values of freedom of the individual, human dignity, and freedom of conscience can be found articulated by would-be religious leaders in Israeli society. A mature appreciation of our liberation struggle requires that we recognize the mixed blessings that freedom and power bring to Jewish living.

Back