The Jewish High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah (beginning Monday) and Yom Kippur (beginning Oct. 1), an ancient people’s peak spiritual drama of courageous contemplation and heartfelt contrition, are captured in the life and work of Rabbi Irving Greenberg, acclaimed modern Orthodox rabbi and author.

His latest book, “The Triumph of Life (A Narrative Theology of Judaism),” is Greenberg’s own triumphant accomplishment, offering Jews and non-Jews alike an encompassing scholarly yet accessible work of theological art. It’s bound to rank high as a pioneering beacon of light, learning and enlightenment in our postmodern new age with revolutionary promise as well as colossal dark threats to human life, the painstakingly garnered civilization and the very survival of all life on our planet Earth.

Greenberg attributes the impetus to writing this inspirational guide — which aims to reassure readers from all persuasions that covenantal life of the spirit is worth laboring and fighting for — to his shaking 1961 experience in Israel while attending Tel Aviv University as a Fulbright scholar and encountering the enormity of the Holocaust for the first time.

He refers to the famous Adolf Eichmann trial of the notorious SS officer in Jerusalem, which had a profound impact on a mesmerized nation. I vividly recall as a teenager, living then in Israel and myself a son of Polish Holocaust survivors, the shock of the horrific events described by shaken witnesses. The author offers us a touching confession of a crisis of faith of an Orthodox-raised Jew, challenging his basic assumptions about God, covenant and life’s meaning.

“My loving wife [Blu is a distinguished feminist Orthodox Jew and author] and family saved me from nihilism and despair by showing me the incredible tenacity and unspent power of embracing life,” he writes. “The emergent state of Israel suggested to me that the divine was still operating in the world, and testified to the human capacity to take power for reestablishing life and reasserting its value.”

The book offers far-reaching conclusions of ushering in the hoped for messianic era. Greenberg testifies that it is within human reach in our postmodern era, with its new opportunity for creative human unity within enriching diversity, upholding universal human dignity and equality via restoring God’s violated image.

“I hope it will appeal to non-Jewish readers as well, especially to Christians, partners in the struggle to overcome millennia of hostility and delegitimization. People of all religions must work together to repair the world politically, economically, and culturally, and turn the Earth into the paradise all humans deserve,” he writes.

The admirable Orthodox rabbi, who found his way back to faith and his own particular belief structure following a most challenging crisis impacted by the shattering Holocaust, was enabled to reach beyond the confines of his own faith’s traditions and give credit where it’s due.

His own Jewish people historically have not lacked fracturing divisions among opposing ideologies not allowing for urgently required unity at times of grave danger, such as during the Holocaust. The prosecution of the Gaza war following Hamas’s barbarism both united and divided Israelis, with a backlash of antisemitism in the United States and Europe. It is evident that events in Israel affect the Jewish diaspora, even as the author emphasizes the debt of the latter to the Jewish state of Israel. It is clear that influential American Jewry is the glue to the essential relationship between Israel and the United States.

Greenberg hails Israel’s 1948 creation as reassuring that God’s covenant with the Jewish people yet continues in spite of the Holocaust’s heavy toll. The world’s only Jewish state’s robust democracy, with multiple accomplishments benefitting humanity, has served as a source of pride and unity to world Jewry even though challenges to Israel’s existence and character persist from within and without. May life’s universal blessing yet triumph.

Rabbi Israel Zoberman of Virginia Beach is founder of Temple Lev Tikvah.

https://www.dailypress.com/2025/09/18/column-jewish-high-holy-days-offer-time-for-reflection/