EXOD908 [Irving Greenberg argues that] In our era, the third era of Jewish existence [the biblical era being the first; the rabbinic era the second], the Covenant was shattered in the Holocaust. Following Elie Wiesel and the Yiddish poet Jacob Gladstein, who wrote that "The Torah was given at Sinai and returned at Lublin" [the site of the death camp Majdanek], Greenberg recognized that the Holocaust had altered our perceptions of God and humanity. Greenberg argues that the authority of the covenant was broken in the Holocaust, but the Jewish people--released from its obligations--chose voluntarily to renew the covenant. "We are in the age of the renewal of the covenant. God was no longer in a position to command, but the Jewish people were so in love with the dream of redemption that they volunteered to carry on the mission." Our choice to remain Jews, Greenberg argues, is our response to the covenant with God and the restatement of the response to Sinai: "We will do and we will hear" [this verse]. The ethical task of Jewish existence is to re-create the divine image and the human image defiled during the Holocaust, to respond to death by creating life, and to continue the journey of the Jewish people in history--in short, to bring the redemption. Greenberg established several ethical imperatives that emerge from the Holocaust: the first to confront evil, for not to confront it is to repeat it. He applies this maxim both to the religious antagonism of Christianity to Judaism and to the denial of their complicity in the Holocaust by secular states and institutions--banking, insurance, and industry. Second, the Holocaust may not be used for triumphalism: "Those Jews who feel no guilt for the Holocaust are also tempted to moral apathy. Religious Jews who use the Holocaust to morally impugn every other religious group but their own are the ones who are tempted thereby into indifference at the Holocaust of others.... Israelis... are tempted to use Israeli strength indiscriminately." (Greenberg, Clouds of Fire, Pillar of Smoke" in Eva Fleishner, ed., Auschwitz Beginning of a New Era: Reflection on the Holocaust (New York: KTAV, 1977; repr. in part in Contemporary Jewish Theology: A Reader, Elliott N. Dorff and Louis E. Newman, eds. (New York: Oxford, 1999), pp. 396-416. (By Michael Berenbaum, "Ethical Implications of the Holocaust")