Emil L. Fackenheim : Philosopher, Theologian, Jew [1 ed.] 9789047429340, 9789004157675

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Emil L. Fackenheim

Supplements to The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy Edited by

Leora Batnitzky, Christian Wiese, Elliot Wolfson

VOLUME 5

Emil L. Fackenheim

Emil L. Fackenheim Philosopher, Theologian, Jew

edited by

Sharon Portnoff, James A. Diamond, and Martin D. Yaffe with a foreword by

Elie Wiesel

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2008

This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov.

ISSN 1873-9008 ISBN 978 90 04 15767 5 © Copyright 2008 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

CONTENTS Dedication ................................................................................... Acknowledgement ...................................................................... Foreword by Elie Wiesel ............................................................. Bibliographic Abbreviations .......................................................

vii ix xi xv

Introductory Remarks ................................................................. Sharon Portnoff

1

PART ONE

FACKENHEIM THEN AND NOW Fackenheim in the Fifties ............................................................ John Burbidge

17

Between Halle and Jerusalem .................................................... Michael Oppenheim

25

Fackenheim’s Hermeneutical Circle ........................................... Michael L. Morgan

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Thought Going to School with Life? Fackenheim’s Last Philosophical Testament ......................................................... Benjamin Pollock

55

Fackenheim’s Paradoxical 614th Commandment: Some Personal Reflections ...................................................... Martin J. Plax

89

PART TWO

THE PHILOSOPHICAL DIMENSION OF FACKENHEIM’S THOUGHT Historicism and Revelation in Emil Fackenheim’s Self-Distancing from Leo Strauss ........................................... Martin D. Yaffe

107

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contents

Leo Strauss’s Challenge to Emil Fackenheim: Heidegger, Radical Historicism, and Diabolical Evil ............ Kenneth Hart Green Fackenheim’s Hegelian Return to Contingency ........................ Sharon Portnoff Judaism and the Tragic Vision: Emil Fackenheim and the Problem of Dirty Hands ........................................................ Sam Ajzenstat A Time for Emil Fackenheim, A Time for Baruch Spinoza .... Heidi Morrison Ravven

125 161

179 211

PART THREE

THE RELIGIOUS DIMENSION OF FACKENHEIM’S THOUGHT Rabbi Fackenheim and Philosophical Encounter with Elijah’s Wager ......................................................................... James A. Diamond

221

Tikkun in Fackenheim’s Leben-Denken as a Trace of Lurianic Kabbalah .................................................................. Aubrey L. Glazer

235

In Search of a Meaningful Theology of the Holocaust: Reflections on Fackenheim’s 614th Commandment ............. Lionel Rubinoff

251

Emil Fackenheim and the Levitical Order of Thinking ........... Michael Kigel

295

Bibliography ................................................................................ Contributors ................................................................................ Name Index ................................................................................ Subject Index ..............................................................................

323 331 335 337

DEDICATION James A. Diamond .‫ןב מאיר‬ ‫םהרבא בן‬ ‫תמשנ אברהם‬ ‫רכזל נשמת‬ ‫לזכר‬ .‫ריאמ‬ As an undergraduate at University of Toronto, having just emerged from the world of the yeshivah, I was privileged to experience my first encounter with the world of “outside” knowledge in Emil Fackenheim’s course on modern Jewish philosophy. If philosophy begins in wonder there could be no more wondrous a forum to begin philosophy than Prof. Fackenheim’s class. That encounter would definitively chart the route my pursuit of knowledge and fulfillment of my Judaism was to follow. But there was also an encounter outside the classroom that eased the transition from the yeshivah to the university that otherwise might have been a traumatic one. This book is dedicated to the memory of Abraham Pesses who left no one to say Kaddish for him but who did leave many in whom he continues to live as mentor, teacher, rebbe and friend. Our weekly gatherings to discuss the parshah under his guidance uncovered some of the “seventy faces” that comprise the infinity of meanings in the Torah. Virtually all of us along with Abe belonged to a generation where grandparents were conspicuously absent and so questions were asked that, though perhaps remain unanswerable, were never entertained in the yeshivah. Kierkegaard, Kant, Cohen, Buber, Rosenzweig and Maimonides rather than Rambam. These were names we first heard from his lips. When we read them now we continue to hear his words. It was during the editing process of this volume that I came to realize how formative our meetings in the library of a Catholic college were. As his talmid muvhaq, he would start with Fackenheim, move to Buber, cite a gemara, engage a Rashi, and, at times, we considered whether Richard Rubenstein wasn’t right after all. It would all coalesce in our own version of mad midrash. I mourn the fact that Abe is no longer here to accompany my journeys through the worlds he unlocked for me. In one of his most striking restatements of rabbinic law, Maimonides obligates a teacher to accompany his student guilty of accidental homicide into exile in a city of refuge, “for it is said: [ he shall escape to one of these cities] so that he shall live (Deut. 19:4,5)—enable him to

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live, for the lives of the wise and the seekers thereof, without learning, are considered a form of death.” Similarly, he rules, “if a teacher is exiled—his academy is made to accompany him.” I am deeply sorry that when Abe entered his own exile many in his academy abandoned him. Now that we have lost our teacher of Torah we have all in turn experienced our own form of death. !‫חבל על דאבדין ולא משתכחין‬

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The editors wish to acknowledge the following for their timely and generous assistance during the preparation of this volume: the Department of Religious Studies, Pomona College; the Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies, University of North Texas; and the Joseph and Wolf Lebovic Chair in Jewish Studies, University of Waterloo. Also, we are particularly indebted to Diane Kriger for preparing the Indexes.

FOREWORD Elie Wiesel Life is made not of years but of moments. Permit me to evoke one such moment from the life of Emil Fackenheim. I met him for the first time in 1965 or perhaps a year later in a hotel in the Laurentian mountains near Montreal. Rabbi David Hartman, who was later to become a professor and founder of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, chose that spot to organize a “pluralistic” Jewish conference which lasted from Thursday to Sunday. At that time there was a lot of talk about ecumenism in the religious world. Without denying its value, Hartman was trying, nonetheless, to introduce it also into the Jewish world. He believed quite simply that it was too divided and that a dialogue among its intellectuals seemed necessary, and therefore possible, and also mutually possible, therefore unavoidable. There were about thirty of us there: Orthodox, Conservative and Reform rabbis and others, who, despite the fact that their writings were suffused with Jewish tradition and culture, did not consider themselves spokesmen for them. The program: no papers or lectures, neither before nor during meals and Shabbat services. Only debates on the situation of the Jewish people. How to define our priorities in order to convey a meaning to the Jewish experience for the decades to come. Everyone said what he had in his heart. One participant insisted on the ancient grandeur of the Torah, another on its modern implications, a third on the importance more or less of the vitality of Jewish thought on the practice of Jewish survival. Everyone was thoroughly interested and involved. Everyone spoke well. I kept quiet. I like to listen. This is how I came to meet Maurice Friedman, Irving Greenberg, Herman Schaalman, Aaron Lichtenstein, Gene Borowitz, Steve Schwarzchild . . . and Emil Fackenheim.

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Each of these individuals enjoyed great reputations, each in his own discipline. They were all eloquent, brilliant, generous and nurtured by a sincere and fruitful desire to contribute, if not to the development then at least to the preservation of that which is rich and noble in the spiritual and intellectual life of the Jew in Israel and the Diaspora. Naturally, I waited for the discussion to touch either directly or implicitly, on the Holocaust or the Destruction of the Jews in Germanoccupied Europe. The sessions followed one another in an atmosphere of friendly discourse. Some became passionate and enriched the conversation. But not one word was spoken about the subject which should have logically or humanly dominated all the debates. Life in the ghettoes—a taboo subject. The brutal death of multitudes of Jewish children, the murder of thousand upon thousands of rabbis and their disciples—silence. Treblinka and Majdanek, Belzec and Chelmno, Birkenau: their mournful meaning, their inevitable impact on Jewish sensibility and intellect, on the re-birth of the Jewish State and on the Jewish faith—not one word, not one tear. Thursday, nothing. Friday, nothing. Finally, during the Saturday evening session a survivor of Auschwitz spoke. He posed one simple question: how is it possible and how is one to explain how great Jewish intellectuals from all persuasions could spend three days together in a discussion of all themes, options, truths, illusions, threats and promises which confront religious or secular Jews, twenty years after the most devastating and terrifying catastrophes in its history, without reflecting on it, without even mentioning it? On the spot, all the participants bowed their heads but no one responded. Some weeks or months after that I received a letter from Emil. A sincere contact at all levels was established between us. We saw each other often in Toronto, New York and in Jerusalem. He spoke to me of his childhood, his adolescence and of his rabbinic studies, of the luck he had in having been able to get out of Germany, of his marriage, of his children . . . A refugee from Hitler’s Germany, a reform rabbi, a philosopher by training, he expressed himself slowly, a weak, melancholic smile on his lips, reflecting on each thought, weighing each word.

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Undeniably, he had made an existentialist response to life, a total one to the question of the survivor: everything there had an intrinsic relationship. The philosopher who had believed it necessary before to deal in his works with any subject except that of the Holocaust had now decided that hereafter he would deal exclusively with it. Devoted almost exclusively to the Jewish memory of the Holocaust and to both its metaphysical and practical lessons, his teaching had now veered off from its original trajectory. Hegel and Spinoza, Rosenzweig and Heidegger now became important to him only in terms of their relationship to questions raised by an Event which put into doubt everything that humanity had built and obtained since the beginning of time. (May I mention, with pride, that his first book on the project, God’s Presence in History, is dedicated to me?) Were these acts of lucidity or courage on his part? Emil never failed in this endeavor. In the final analysis, is not the life of a man a series of breaks with the past? Of course, I followed with great interest and friendship the development of his thought and its evolution—which ended in Aliya as well as in a rapprochement with Orthodox practice. In general, in most situations, our relationship was complete. Our positions on problems concerning Israel or Jewish history were never far off. And yet. He believed to the end that he had found answers—if not The Answer—to what some among us in the Diaspora call so pathetically the Holocaust. For me it remains a wound, if not a wound, a burning scar, a question which is condemned to remain forever open and full of anguish. Emil Fackenheim for me? A solemn word and a touching moment. Translated from the French by Arnold Ages.

BIBLIOGRAPHIC ABBREVIATIONS EJM

Emil L. Fackenheim. Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy: A Preface to Future Jewish Thought. New York: Schocken Books, 1973. GPH ——. God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections. First Jason Aronson Edition. Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson Inc., 1997. GPJT Fackenheim: German Philosophy and Jewish Thought. Edited by Louis Greenspan and Graeme Nicholson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. GW Fackenheim, Emil L. The God Within: Kant, Schelling, and Historicity. Edited by John Burbidge. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. JB ——. The Jewish Bible After the Holocaust: A Re-reading. Indiana University Press, 1990. JPJP ——. Jewish Philosophers and Jewish Philosophy. Edited by Michael L. Morgan. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. JRH ——. The Jewish Return into History: Reflections in the Age of Auschwitz and a New Jerusalem. New York: Schocken Books, 1978. JTEF The Jewish Thought of Emil Fackenheim. Edited by Michael L. Morgan. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987. MH Fackenheim, Emil L. Metaphysics and Historicity. The Aquinas Lecture, 1961. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1961. MW ——. To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought. First Midland Edition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. QPF ——. Quest for Past and Future: Essays in Jewish Theology. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968. RD ——. The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967. WJ ——. What is Judaism?: An Interpretation for the Present Age. New York: Summit Books, 1987.

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS Sharon Portnoff Emil Ludwig Fackenheim (named for the popular German biographer and writer Emil Ludwig) was born in 1916 in Halle, Germany. In 1935, the year of the Nuremberg Laws, he began his rabbinic studies at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin. On Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938, Fackenheim was arrested and taken to Sachsenhausen, where he remained for three months. Although he was told thereafter to leave Germany immediately, Fackenheim returned to Berlin to receive his ordination (Reform) in April 1939.1 Finally, in May of that year, Fackenheim fled to Scotland, and began studies at the University of Aberdeen. But after a few weeks in Scotland, he was sent to Canada, where he remained in an internment camp for a year and a half. Upon his release, Fackenheim entered the doctoral program at the University of Toronto. Concurrently, Fackenheim took a pulpit for five years at Temple Anshe Sholom in Hamilton. Fackenheim received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1945 and remained there teaching until 1984, when he moved to Jerusalem, where he remained until his death in 2003. For many of his students—among whom we include in this volume Sam Ajzenstat, John Burbidge, James A. Diamond, Kenneth Hart Green, Michael L. Morgan, Michael Oppenheim, Lionel Rubinoff and Martin D. Yaffe—Fackenheim’s combination of erudition and generosity served to inspire a lifetime of philosophical inquiry. Fackenheim continually sought new and deeper questions, which demanded and inspired in him a deep humility, an awareness that ultimately he did not know—though this conclusion seemed belied by his commanding range of knowledge. Not only did his approach toward knowledge inspire a remarkable ability to listen to others, but also it affirmed the persistence of a realm beyond human attainment. A large part of Fackenheim’s For more on Fackenheim’s relationship to Germany, see, Emil L. Fackenheim, “Reminiscences: From Germany to Canada (Growing up in Germany),” reprinted, with changes from “An Interview with Emil Fackenheim,” by William Novack in New Traditions 3 (Summer, 1986), in JTEF. 1

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work was devoted to exploring—and, indeed, living out—the way in which the human meets the transcendent: how do we know, and at the same time, not know? How in the modern secular world—in the post-Holocaust world—do we continue to take seriously the possibility of action from a God who is absent? Fackenheim worked as both a philosopher and a Jewish theologian. He kept these two intellectual realms distinct, until the appearance in 1982 of his magnum opus To Mend the World, in which he recognized that his work—if it is to be grounded in existence—must issue from an integrated human being. From around 1967 up through and beyond the time of To Mend the World, Fackenheim directed his intellectual focus toward the Holocaust, attempting to define and describe a new way of thinking that reorganized categories of philosophy and religion as tools capable of “mending the world.” The new Jewish philosophy developed by Fackenheim would compromise neither philosophy nor revelation; it would integrate them (paradoxically) into a fragmented whole, grounded in existence, but open to essence and/or transcendence. Fackenheim’s earlier philosophical work focused on German idealism. He was particularly interested in Schelling, whose positive philosophy he credited as the originator of existentialism, and Hegel, to whose work he devoted ten years that culminated in 1967 in the seminal work The Religious Dimension of Hegel’s Thought. He also made important contributions to the scholarship on Kant and Fichte. Fackenheim’s work during these years—and the source of his interest in Hegel—centered on his attempt to find room within modern thought and experience for the incursion of transcendence. This attempt required a repudiation of historicism—the idea that changes in human thinking literally change the object of thought. At the same time, and on the other hand, Fackenheim affirmed the possibility of human self-creation as the source of human action—action that could both fight humanly self-created (“radical”) evil and also prove the reality of the Sinaitic God. It was in this spirit that Fackenheim attacked Heidegger. Rebelling against Heidegger’s radical historicism, Fackenheim affirmed that human self-making, while possible, must take place within a given context, within a context beyond human making. Fackenheim suggests—reminiscent of the later Schelling—that historicism be modified to refer not to human self-making, but to human self-choosing. The human being, as part of his essence, is a chooser from among preexistent ontologies. What situates man is not produced by man but is

introductory remarks

3

the condition of all human choosing. The self that chooses originates in its act of choosing. Fackenheim had another problem with Heidegger’s thought. Not only did Heidegger’s denial of the given deny transcendence—and, consequently, revert to paganism—, but also, Heidegger’s radical openness to all standards made it impossible for him to identify a false, or irrational, standard. This is particularly troubling to prophetic Judaism, which affirms that insecurity stems, not from their being no guarantee of salvation, but from the possibility of mistaking false gods for the true God. And, indeed, Heidegger was deaf to the testimony of Jews—including Buber—not only during and after the Holocaust, but also to the testimony of Jews who lived before the Holocaust—to the thought of Spinoza, whose work, Fackenheim noted, he ignored. Fackenheim concluded that Heidegger’s “history of Being” excludes Jewish experience: the link between philosophy and action on which Heidegger insisted reveals Heidegger’s failure. Even as Fackenheim studied and taught the works of the German idealists, he produced lectures and essays devoted to Jewish theology. In his earlier stage, Fackenheim was particularly interested in preserving revelation as a claim unmitigated by the filter of modern thought. An intellectually honest person might believe still in the reality of the Sinaitic God, since modern thought had done nothing to refute the possibility of revelation. Nevertheless, Fackenheim recognized that historicism had become an element of modern thought: the idealist effort to rise above history into timelessness was no longer possible in the modern period, when mutually incompatible standpoints and historicity have been widely acknowledged. The incorporation into thought of historicism forced the reassessment of the context within which unqualified transcendence might be revealed. While preserving the possibility of the revelation of the Sinaitic God, Fackenheim affirmed its possibility within the context of modern progressive thought. Just as modern thought must make room for unqualified transcendence, Jewish thought must make room for secular (progressive) thought. Around the time of the 1967 Israeli-Arab War, Fackenheim claimed that his earlier work had avoided facing the most momentous and informative event of our age—the Holocaust (although one could, and I certainly would, argue that the Holocaust had informed and set the stage for Fackenheim’s earlier work). Like the later Schelling, Fackenheim was struck with facticity. It was not enough to make room for unqualified transcendence within the context of modernity—and

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sharon portnoff

here Fackenheim parts ways with Buber—; there must be room for this transcendence to act within and through the context of modernity. Fackenheim recognized the Holocaust as a novum in history, overturning (or, to use his term, “rupturing”) categories of philosophy and revelatory theology. Modern (post-Kantian) philosophy, impotent against Hitler’s radical (or transcendent) evil, had proved itself escapist. The Christian teachings of love and universalism had proved severed from Christian life. And to invoke the traditional Jewish theodicies was, to Fackenheim, to blaspheme against the 6 million Jews who had perished. The reaffirmation of a philosophy which promotes the right way of life; of a Christianity which describes a common humanity; of a Judaism grounded in the perpetuation of the Sinaitic covenant; requires a thinking which begins and ends in human action. Fackenheim’s form of religious existentialism builds hope on realism and includes doubt in religious expectation. Like Rosenzweig, Fackenheim advocated a “new thinking” to affirm the need for transcendence, or “eternity in time,” to confront history. Like Buber, Fackenheim advocated the new thinking to reaffirm the relationship with the living God. But unlike both these thinkers, Fackenheim propounded a philosophy open to Jewish experience and a Jewish theology informed by the Sinaitic God’s inaction during the Holocaust—informed by the philosophical insight that human knowledge begins in doubt of authority. Fackenheim recognized the paradoxical nature of his work—the construction of a Jewish philosophy—but overcame this difficulty—and here we have both the source of his openness and the continuity of the stages of his thought—by suggesting that this Jewish philosophy would remain always incomplete. As late as 1982, Fackenheim would wonder if the truly radical response to the Holocaust had yet been given. The openness of his thought, the openness of his projected philosophy, the openness with which he dealt with others—this is Fackenheim’s enduring legacy. The present volume grew out of a panel at a Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies in Chicago in December 2004. The panel, “The Philosophical Dimension in Fackenheim’s Thought,” explored the nature of the encounter between philosophy and theology in Fackenheim’s thought. The three papers that comprised the panel, Martin D. Yaffe’s “Historicism and Revelation in Emil Fackenheim’s Self-Distancing from Leo Strauss,” James A. Diamond’s “Rabbi Fackenheim and the Hermeneutics of Philosophical Encounter,” and Sharon Portnoff’s “Making Peace with Philosophy: Emil L. Fackenheim’s Hegelianism,”

introductory remarks

5

each addressed the extent to which Fackenheim’s attempt to “normalize” Judaism through its encounter with philosophical thought was successful in retaining terms appropriate to each philosophy and to Judaism. As a result of the interest aroused by that panel—and by another panel devoted to Fackenheim’s thought at the same Conference (comprised of David Tracy, Michael L. Morgan and Benjamin Pollock)—we decided to provide a forum through which to introduce Fackenheim’s thought to a broader audience. The present volume is the result of that endeavor. This volume is a modest tribute to his memory. The volume covers a wide spectrum of Fackenheim’s work and has been divided into sections covering biographical, philosophical, and theological aspects of Fackenheim’s thought that have not been addressed adequately in the past. Elie Wiesel, a close personal friend to Fackenheim for over 30 years, has provided the Foreword for the volume. The volume is divided into three sections. The first section, “Fackenheim Then and Now” is comprised of essays that provide a more comprehensive overview of Fackenheim’s life and thought and of the contemporaneous historical factors that may have driven his thinking. The second two sections we have labeled “The Philosophical Dimension of Fackenheim’s Thought” and “The Religious Dimension of Fackenheim’s Thought” respectively. The essays that comprise these sections concern themselves more directly with particular aspects of his philosophical, or theological, thought, or with the encounter between them. The volume includes a number of essays which appraise Fackenheim’s conception of theology and its impact on contemporary political Zionism (Ajzenstat’s “Judaism and the Tragic Vision: Emil Fackenheim and the Problem of Dirty Hands” and Glazer’s “Tikkun in Fackenheim’s Leben-Denken as a Trace of Lurianic Kabbalah”). Fackenheim is perhaps most famous for his 614th commandment: Jews must not hand Hitler a posthumous victory. This commandment is discussed in a number of the essays in this volume. Two of the essays (Plax’s “Fackenheim’s Paradoxical 614th Commandment: Some Personal Reflections” and Rubinoff’s “In Search of a Meaningful Theology of the Holocaust: Reflections on Fackenheim’s 614th Commandment”) are sustained reflections on the impact of this commandment on Jewish theology. Other essays refer to the commandment. While this volume recognizes the importance of Fackenheim’s 614th commandment, its primary aim is to introduce readers to Fackenheim’s less famous contributions. This is why, for instance, Plax’s

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paper, which concerns itself with the political motivations of Fackenheim’s 614th Commandment, appears in Part I of the volume, while Rubinoff’s paper, also concerned with the 614th Commandment, but focusing more specifically on its theological implications, appears in Part III. References to Fackenheim’s texts have been standardized into an abbreviated form throughout the volume. To find abbreviations, please refer to the “Bibliographic Abbreviations” at the beginning of this volume. Fackenheim’s thought was expansive; his thought issued from his experience; he was willing to allow paradox. This makes for a profoundly unfinished intellectual oeuvre, and there are many, at times contradictory, understandings of his work. Among the scholarly disagreements that come to light in this volume are the following. Did Fackenheim maintain his earlier stance against radical historicism, or did he acquiesce entirely to historicism in his later thought? Did Fackenheim succeed in retaining clear lines between reason and revelation and so not compromise one on behalf of the other? Is his philosophy reasonable? Is his Jewish theology normative? Does Fackenheim ground his Jewish philosophy in experience, as he would, or is his thinking simply a reflection of the hermeneutic of his reading? Finally, does Fackenheim’s thought focus too emphatically on the Holocaust and so traumatize Judaism for future generations? The essays in Part I of this volume reflect on Fackenheim as a teacher and guide to post-Holocaust Jews. It includes essays on Fackenheim from the perspective of a former philosophy student ( John Burbidge); on the impact of Fackenheim on the North American Jewish community (Michael Oppenheim); on Fackenheim’s hermeneutics (Michael L. Morgan); on the relationship between thought and life in Fackenheim’s thought (Benjamin Pollock); and on the reasons for Fackenheim’s choice to issue a political directive in the form of a religious, 614th, commandment (Martin J. Plax). These essays bring to the surface various ways in which Fackenheim tried to reaffirm the importance of philosophy in directing the way in which human beings live. Burbidge, who is the editor of Fackenheim’s volume The God Within: Kant, Schelling and Historicity—Fackenheim’s only published collection of essays devoted to German idealism—, recalls his days as Fackenheim’s student at the University of Toronto in the early 1950s. This beautifully written essay brings to life Fackenheim’s classroom presence and

introductory remarks

7

his influence on his students to take philosophy seriously. Recognizing the interconnection between Fackenheim’s scholarly work and the way in which he taught, Burbidge paints a portrait of Fackenheim as an extraordinarily conscientious, thoughtful and erudite scholar, and a remarkably kind and generous teacher and reader. In his essay, Oppenheim notes that Fackenheim represented a link between philosopher and community stronger than the link between any other Jewish thinker and his community in the modern period. Oppenheim’s essay seeks to understand what accounted for the mutual appeal between Fackenheim and his community. Oppenheim suggests that Fackenheim’s recognition of the importance of philosophy to Judaism, and Judaism to philosophy, after the Holocaust, and his formulation of a Jewish response that simultaneously takes seriously Jewish existence, the contexts in which Jewish existence finds itself, and the guiding mythologies of revelation and redemption in Judaism, have allowed him to speak deeply for and to the North American Jewish community. To Oppenheim, “[t]he work of Emil Fackenheim presents the most eloquent contemporary North American statement of th[e] quest for meaning, for that within Judaism which can enhance, ennoble, and sanctify.” Morgan’s essay deals with the relation among Fackenheim’s philosophical stance, the testimony of survivors, and his view of the nature of philosophy in To Mend the World, especially Chapter IV. Morgan points out that Fackenheim uses the testimony of survivors, including the hasidim in Buchenwald, the Warsaw ghetto fighters, Kurt Huber, and the “indispensable testimony” of Pelagia Lewinska, in two different contexts. On the one hand, their testimony occurs in Fackenheim’s philosophical analysis of the Holocaust; on the other, they appear in “particular articulations of post-Holocaust life and thought.” By contrasting the way in which Fackenheim uses these two contexts, Morgan arrives at a deeper meaning of Fackenheim’s enterprise: a reevaluation of the meaning and function of philosophy in the postHolocaust world. Pollock’s essay focuses on the relationship between thought and life in Fackenheim’s thought. This question has stood at the heart of Fackenheim’s thought since his Religious Dimension of Hegel’s Thought declared “the central problem of Hegelian philosophy” to be “the problem of the relation between all of human life and an all-comprehensive philosophical thought.” According to Pollock, Fackenheim’s unparalleled contribution to post-Holocaust thinking lies in his recognition that, in

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order for thought to confront the fragmentation of life in the wake of the Holocaust with the requisite “intellectual probity,” it must abandon aspirations for the kind of all-comprehensive sublation of life in thought which Hegel’s system sought to achieve. As Fackenheim put it, thought today must “go to school with life.” The result of such schooling for Fackenheim’s thinking is his recognition of resistance itself “on the part of the most radically exposed” during the Holocaust, not only as a novum in the history of human life, but also as an “ontological category” that lays a foundation for post-Holocaust thought. Plax’s essay offers a persuasive political—or theo-political—defense of Fackenheim’s appeal to commandment and midrash. Plax suggests that Fackenheim had formulated his appeal to Jews that they not hand Hitler a posthumous victory as a commandment both to communicate dire necessity and also to ground his appeal in religious authority. By grounding his appeal in this way, Fackenheim reaffirms the Jewish theological insight that the human being is innately evil. Since the Holocaust provides experiential proof of this fact, to ignore the Holocaust is to ignore traditional Judaism. What God commands, according to Fackenheim, in Plax’s words, are: “That Jews must survive as Jews; that they must remember the martyrs of the Holocaust; that they must not deny or despair of God; and that they must not despair of the world as the place that is to become the kingdom of God.” This commandment, as Plax notes, not only affirms the inherent evil in human nature and the persistence of the commanding God, but also, paradoxically, reveals Fackenheim’s abiding hope that there is enough good in human beings to mend—though not redeem—the world. The essays in Part II of this volume recognize Fackenheim’s work as a philosopher. It includes essays on Fackenheim’s thought on Strauss (Martin D. Yaffe), his stance on revelation (Kenneth Hart Green), his thought on Hegel (Sharon Portnoff ), his ethics (Sam Ajzenstat), and his thought on Spinoza (Heidi Ravven). Underlying many of these essays is the question of Fackenheim’s historicism and the ethical questions to which his thought may give rise. Yaffe discusses Fackenheim’s historicism and contextualizes it in his work on Heidegger. Fackenheim’s encounter with Heidegger was inspired by Strauss’ criticism of Heidegger’s radical historicism. Through this encounter, Fackenheim attempts to qualify historicism by retaining its connection with the absolute standard of religion. But does

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Fackenheim’s qualification succeed in preserving this standard? Or is the sphere of revelation itself ultimately “blurred” by the introduction of historicism? Fackenheim’s Metaphysics and Historicity (1961) maintains that the self—which, as he argues at length elsewhere, is both the locus of evil and the addressee of revelation—is best understood in terms of arguments precipitously close to those of historicism: qua historical relativism, historicism is self-refuting but may be modified to allow for timeless truth as authorized or underwritten by revelation, considered as an ongoing possibility both in our time and in times past and future. In a letter since lost, Strauss praises Fackenheim’s argument but adds that his merely formal refutation of historicism is inadequate, given the deeper historicism of the “later” Heidegger. Fackenheim’s “The Historicity and Transcendence of Philosophic Truth” (1974) takes up Strauss’s challenge by showing how Heidegger, despite himself, points to the possibility and necessity of revelation. Green’s paper concludes that Fackenheim’s conception of Auschwitz as a “caesura” is not sustainable. This position amounts to the reverse of his Rosenzweig-Buber-Heschel notion of revelation, but it cannot quite be defended on the same ground—as the encounter with God’s presence. At the same time, Auschwitz is not simply an encounter with God’s absence. Fackenheim suggests that Auschwitz is “negative revelation,” while Sinai is “positive revelation.” But this only works—to put it as Strauss wrote to him in a letter about another matter—if “the question ‘what is a demon?’ has received a satisfactory answer.” Auschwitz is not just radical evil; it is not just a “caesura.” Auschwitz must be what Green calls a “Satanic revelation,” or a “revelation of Satan.” But Fackenheim never developed a “theory of Satan,” and he did need one in order to adequately defend his notion of the unique evil which is Auschwitz. Contextualizing the issue of historicism in Fackenheim’s work on Hegel, Portnoff argues that Fackenheim’s affirmation of the informative value of contingency to thought does not undermine—but rather perpetuates—the metaphysical tradition stemming from Plato and Aristotle. Portnoff, in agreement withYaffe, acknowledges the underlying influence of Strauss—whom Fackenheim had recognized as an informal teacher—on Fackenheim’s thought. For Portnoff, this influence describes itself as the reaffirmation of the existence of permanent human problems—in the case of Fackenheim’s work on Hegel, the

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permanent human problem of defining the relationship between the transcendent and the contingent. Tracing the existence of the recognition of the problem to Plato and Aristotle, Fackenheim concludes that Hegel—in response to Aristotle, and though he failed—grounds his thought in contingency even as contingency becomes essentially informative to metaphysical thought. Portnoff contends that Fackenheim’s conclusion intimates the way in which he wanted his own thought to be understood. When we understand thinkers as far as possible as they understood themselves, we find that—while their solutions may falter—their practice of philosophy serves to point to a problem that remains, and so refutes historicism by affirming essential permanence. Portnoff contends that Fackenheim continued to work within the philosophical tradition—continued to be concerned with fundamental questions and committed to their having no ultimate answers—even as he turned that tradition on its head. Focusing on Chapter Two of Fackenheim’s Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy, in which Fackenheim puts into encounter the moralities of Kant, Kierkegaard and Jewish thought, Ajzenstat attempts to identify the deeper meaning of Fackenheim’s prescription for Jewish ethics. Fackenheim’s friend the scholar Gregory Baum had accused him of adopting Kierkegaard’s suspension of the ethical in his position regarding Israeli politics. But rather than responding to this accusation by pointing to the grim reality of the Arab-Israeli conflict—as one familiar with Fackenheim’s affirmation that survival at times trumps ethics would expect—, Fackenheim suggested that he found such a position “horrifying.” Azjenstat suggests that the ambiguity of Fackenheim’s response reveals the profound tension between the “imperative of life” and the “imperative of sanctity” implicit to Fackenheim’s post-Holocaust Jewish thought. As Yaffe points out, Strauss had understood Spinoza’s thought as the context more appropriate than German idealism for the refutation of historicism. Fackenheim, while dealing neither extensively nor independently with Spinoza’s thought, recognized him in his 1983 To Mend the World as the grounding for modern thought—one might argue, as a continuing result of Strauss’ influence. It is precisely with Fackenheim’s reading of Spinoza that Heidi Ravven’s essay, “A Time for Emil Fackenheim, A Time for Baruch Spinoza,” takes issue. Ravven contends that, while Fackenheim’s reading of Spinoza is historicist—he recognized Spinoza’s thought as more open to an historical dimension to Jewish identity than Rosenzweig’s eternal Judaism—, it is not historicist enough.

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For Fackenheim, the Nazi Holocaust has literally changed human nature; Spinoza’s project is therefore in principle inadequate to Fackenheim’s contemporary historical circumstance. Why, Ravven asks, must we remain in Fackenheim’s historical moment? If human nature is not permanent—if there is nothing essential in the answer to the question which each historical moment asks—why should this generation ground its answer in a time of Jewish persecution? We live now in a time of Jewish strength and expansiveness; why, asks Ravven, should we espouse a response that reflects Jewish weakness and destruction? The essays in Part III of this volume address Fackenheim as a theologian. The essays agree that Fackenheim’s theology emerges from his hermeneutic of reading either the Bible or midrashic tradition ( James A. Diamond, Lionel Rubinoff ), or the kabbalistic tradition (Aubrey Glazer). Also included is an evaluation of Fackenheim’s language as a metaphysical construct (Michael Kigel). These papers explore the motivations and limitations of, and, at least for Rubinoff, the possibilities that are opened by, Fackenheim’s attempt to “normalize” Judaism after the Holocaust—or to formulate a Jewish theology that both perpetuates the Sinaitic covenant and also bears the full weight of Auschwitz. While Rubinoff looks at the 614th commandment as the product of Fackenheim’s adoption and application of his hermeneutic of reading the Bible or the midrashic tradition to contemporary history, and Glazer searches for the roots of what he sees as Fackenheim’s parochialism in his formulation of Lurianic kabbalah, Diamond explores the limiting impact of Fackenheim’s work on Hegel on his formulation of a postHolocaust Jewish theology. The implications to Fackenheim’s conception of Zionism is discussed by Glazer. Diamond argues that Fackenheim preserved neither the terms appropriate for either philosophy or revelation, nor, consequently, those appropriate for normative Judaism. Fackenheim’s encounter with Hegel issues in Fackenheim’s reconstruction of biblical Judaism as a means of asserting the philosophical aspect within Judaism. Fackenheim’s resolution of his encounter with Hegel is accomplished ultimately by Fackenheim as theologian. Diamond contends that Fackenheim’s Judaism is authenticated by his hermeneutic, and therefore is not in itself normative. It cannot issue in a normalization of Judaism. Just as Hegel ignored the rabbinic and was highly selective of the biblical in his conception of Judaism, Diamond asks if Fackenheim can be accused of the same. Does his philosophical reconstruction of a prophetic figure such as Elijah fail to account for rabbinic (and halachic) perspectives as a whole and therefore fail to measure up to its normative

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mandate? Taking Elijah (and secondarily, Moses) as a test case, Diamond explores the legitimacy of Fackenheim’s “normative” project and whether his selective emphasis on Elijah’s wager at Mt. Carmel is merely a caricaturized portrait. In the end, it is his very hermeneutic, his act of reading, which authenticates his appropriation of the rabbinic tradition, and places his battle with Hegel side by side with R. Akiva’s battle with Rome. The ultimate proof resides in Fackenheimian/rabbinic inspired configurations of root experiences within the Elijah paradigm that Diamond offers—and which Fackenheim does not pursue—such as the observation of his “death” by Elisha; the end of Malachi as the primary biblical locus of Elijah as the harbinger of the messiah; and the rabbinic anticipation of his normative messianic role (end of Mishnaic tractate Eduyot). In agreement with Diamond, Glazer’s essay suggests that Fackenheim misreads Jewish theology, and that his misreading results in a devastating misunderstanding of the role of Zionism in Judaism. Glazer’s essay focuses on Fackenheim’s construction of a post-Holocaust philosophy as a “life-thinking” modeled on his interpretation of Lurianic kabbalah. But Fackenheim misrepresents the universalistic elements that underlie Lurianic kabbalah—especially in his correlation of the concepts of tikkun and teshuvah—, and this misrepresentation has disastrous results for the action dictated by Fackenheim’s life-thinking. Glazer is particularly concerned with what he sees as Fackenheim’s parochialism. Glazer suggests that Fackenheim’s reduction of the Zohar’s triad of God-TorahIsrael to only Israel—to Zionism—limits Fackenheim’s ability to witness the suffering of others, even in the midst of Zion. Yet Glazer recognizes the importance of Fackenheim’s work in demanding that response to the Holocaust be both communal and grounded in action. Rubinoff’s essay draws on material previously published in three separate articles that draw extensively on Fackenheim’s works: “Auschwitz and the Theology of the Holocaust”2 (based on a paper delivered to a Jewish-Lutheran interfaith conference in 1973), “Auschwitz and the Pathology of Jew Hatred,”3 and “Jewish Identity and the Challenge of

2 In Speaking of God Today, ed. Paul D. Opsahl & Marc H. Tanenbaum (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974). 3 In Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era, ed. Eva Fleischner (New York: Ktav and the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, 1977).

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Auschwitz.”4 Drawing on these previously published materials, Rubinoff develops his argument in directions that reflect Fackenheim’s writing on the Holocaust that were not used at the time at the time of these earlier writings. Rubinoff ’s primary aim is to relate Fackenheim’s position on the Holocaust with his position on the relationship between metaphysics and historicity. Rubinoff contends that Fackenheim’s theology of the Holocaust is at the same time a speculative philosophy of history that seriously challenges 18th and 19th century theories of progress. Rubinoff identifies Fackenheim’s reading of the midrashic tradition as revealing a hermeneutic of re-enactment, or immediacy after reflection. Fackenheim adopts this hermeneutic, and, in a move of “unparalleled” daring and boldness, applies it to the Holocaust. From his deep listening to Auschwitz, Fackenheim’s 614th commandment emerges: in a Jewish root experience parallel to the 613 commandments issued at Sinai, the voice of Auschwitz, a voice of a God in exile, commands that Jews continue to survive as Jews. Rubinoff ponders Fackenheim’s motivations for the affirmation that revelation occurred at Auschwitz, and the possibilities that emerge from this affirmation. Kigel contextualizes Fackenheim’s attempt to positively formulate Jewish identity after Auschwitz within the larger philosophical concept of the Idea of Man. From a philosophical perspective, in the critical thinking of Nietzsche to Heidegger, it was clear that the Idea of Man could not be sustained. Kigel suggests that Fackenheim—having recognized that it was not simply the Idea of Man, but rather the reality of Jews, that was destroyed in Auschwitz—sought to find language “to establish a prescriptive account of Auschwitz.” His failure was inevitable, according to Kigel, because Jewish existence is an implicit precondition of Jewish observance. Yet from this failure Kigel recognizes Fackenheim’s attempt to construct a hermeneutic of human responsibility that returns to the pre-philosophical language of the Bible.

In Jewish Identity, ed. David Theo Goldberg & Michael Krausz (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1993). 4

PART ONE

FACKENHEIM THEN AND NOW

FACKENHEIM IN THE FIFTIES John Burbidge In February 2003, almost fifty years from the time they entered university, four friends who had studied philosophy as undergraduates gathered for lunch. We were joined by a poet who had taken the same course, but graduated in 1953. The most frequent name to surface in our conversation was that of Emil Fackenheim. Through his teaching he had left a mark on all of us, a mark which had endured throughout the years. The poet, Richard Outram, has captured the impact Fackenheim made: On first meeting [he] impressed me as few persons have ever done before or since. A man, a spirit of immense learning and a radical humility, of a rare sweetness, we struggled to comprehend what he was moving toward and through most of the time, (his erudition and frame of reference was limitless, exotic to callow Ontarians; he seemed to have all of Plotinus. Maimonides and St. Augustine by heart, for instance) and revered him.1

It may seem strange that Outram’s references are to medieval philosophers and not to Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, the focus of Fackenheim’s perennial graduate course. But in the Honours Philosophy Program at the University of Toronto in those years, the task of teaching nineteenth century philosophy to undergraduate philosophy majors was assigned to Thomas Goudge, an expert in the thought of C. S. Pierce and the philosophy of biology. While Fackenheim taught the same course, he did so only for English, History and Politics majors. Instead, we encountered him, in our third year, in a one hour a week course on medieval philosophy.2 And then, in our fourth year, he taught us metaphysics

1 Cited in Peter Sanger, “Her kindled shadow . . .” An Introduction to the Work of Richard Outram, 2nd edition (Antigonish, N.S.: The Antigonish Review, 2002) 20. 2 Although the University of Toronto hosted the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, its philosophers taught only those undergraduates in the Roman Catholic St. Michael’s College. Those of us from Trinity, Victoria and University Colleges hardly

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and the philosophy of history,3 a combination that would bear fruit in the Aquinas Lectures of 1961: Metaphysics and Historicity. What was it about this man that his presence in the classroom made such an impression on his students? We shall find clues for answering this question in his own writing—in particular the articles and books he published on philosophy during the fifties. At that time he was working on a project for the publishers, Doubleday & Company, on the philosophy of religion from Kant to Kierkegaard. One chapter from this work grew like Topsy to become The Religious Dimension of Hegel’s Thought.4 The rest was supposed to become a companion volume, tentatively titled “The God Within.” Several of its chapters were drafted, but Fackenheim, from 1967 focused on Holocaust theology, never got around to completing it. Only in 1996 were these fragments collected together with Metaphysics and Historicity and other articles on Kant and Schelling in The God Within: Kant, Schelling and Historicity. The following discussion will be based on these works. “Great philosophers are not intellectual children.” This was a fundamental conviction of Fackenheim’s exegesis: If they have parents at all, they are in the habit of choosing these themselves. It is always possible, and often fashionable, to view philosophical doctrines in a non-philosophical perspective, by treating them as the mere product of the views of others, or of the social needs of the age, or even of the philosopher’s own unconscious mind. But this is always a risky procedure; for it involves dismissing the philosophy in question as philosophy.5

Inspired by Fackenheim we were not inclined to be dismissive of the thinkers we were studying. We were introduced to great minds, struggling with live problems, seeking to avoid unpleasant consequences, discovering new solutions. For we were not simply given a paraphrase, or worse, a series of quotations from philosophical texts. Fackenheim never strings cited passages together to establish an interpretation.

knew that Etienne Gilson, Armand Maurer and Joseph Owens existed. Fackenheim was given this assignment because his dissertation had been on medieval Arabic philosophy. 3 William Dray was a junior member of the department in those days. We would have had him for a course in Epistemology had he not been on sabbatical in our third year. 4 Because Doubleday already had a book on Hegel authored by Walter Kaufman, they were not interested in continuing with the project as so drastically transformed. 5 From “Kant’s Concept of History,” in GW 35.

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Quotations, if they appear at all, come at the end, as a way of showing that the argument that has been developed is in fact to be found in the philosopher’s writings. “I provide a quotation only when it is no longer necessary,” Fackenheim would say. Instead we were led through the reasoning that produced the position: Instead of dismissing idealistic religious thought, we must understand the reasons which drive it to this conclusion.6

Or again: We must first consider the problem which gives rise to this metaphysics of art. For it is by no means obvious what philosophical reasons should make a metaphysics necessary, nor is it obvious how it is possible. We must then proceed to treat Schelling’s ideas on art, not piecemeal but as a system: in conception at least, as an organic whole in which each part has its place.7

Often, Fackenheim appeals to the logical structure of a dilemma. Having reached a certain point in the argument, he would say that we face two options, both of which have serious drawbacks if we are to accomplish the purpose in view. Then he introduces the philosopher’s solution, showing not only how it escapes both horns, but also how it does justice to the positive thrust that make them seem inevitable. Horns of dilemmas are continually surfacing throughout his writings on Kant, Schelling and Hegel: But how can Matter be included in Spirit and yet, real in its own right, be and remain opposed to Spirit? It may well seem that Hegel’s philosophy must either, as Marx believed, after all be a one-sided spiritualism or else dissolve itself into so radical an openness to the world as to cease to be a philosophical system of any kind.8 [ Kant’s] argument for immortality rests on mutually exclusive premises. The one asserts that what we are obligated to attain we must be able to attain; the other asserts that we are obligated to attain something which we cannot attain, namely, holiness. Yet if, for the sake of consistency, either of these premises is dropped the argument vanishes.9 The questions of [Schelling’s] positive philosophy are not nonsensical, but can they be answered? Qua dialectically qualified, the facts demand an absolute in terms of which they may be explained; but qua facts,

6 7 8 9

From “Schelling’s Philosophy of Religion,” in GW 95. From “Schelling’s Philosophy of the Literary Arts,” in GW 76. RD 19. From “Kant’s Philosophy of Religion,” in GW 7.

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john burbidge they can be explained by no mere idea. The first principle of the positive philosophy cannot be an absolute Idea, but only an absolute Fact. But such a fact is beyond all possible human knowledge. For wherever knowledge grasps fact, it is fact dialectically qualified; and wherever it grasps an Absolute, it is mere idea.10

Philosophers, we became aware, are struggling with difficult and critical questions. They are not formulating obscure doctrines simply for their own amusement, nor are they constructing an arcane and idiosyncratic ideology which we must somehow decipher as if it were a code. We, too, are forced to think their thoughts. We, too, are faced with their dilemmas, and rejoice in their solutions, unexpected as they are. For Fackenheim rejects any form of extreme historicism. Historicism says that thought reflects the particular constraints of the times in which it is being thought. On this kind of reading, Plato developed his theory of ideas and his ideal republic because of the nature of Greek politics and science. Once we have moved beyond the city state and have emerged into the daylight of modern physics and biology, we can only view his philosophy as some kind of archaic survival to be stored away in a museum seldom visited. Any thinker is, thus, simply the product of his environment—either the unconscious libidinal impulses triggered by erotic relationships with mother or father (as Freud might have it), or the labour he is forced to undertake by the economic pressures of his age (as Marx would say), or the religious superstitions prevailing in her culture (as modern secularism has it). To be sure, the traditional advocates of the irrational foundation for rational thought are not thoroughgoing in their historicism. For their own theories somehow escape the relativism of those they attack, and become a kind of non-historical absolute. After all, to make historicism into a final principle is implicitly self-contradictory, since that claim itself would then simply reflect the age in which it found expression.11 Nonetheless one can make the bare principle of historicism into a universal truth, while continuing to affirm that one age is in principle unable to understand the reasoning that was so convincing in another.

From “Schelling’s Conception of Positive Philosophy,” in GW 114. Fackenheim makes this point in MH (reprinted) in GW 138. When Leo Strauss challenged him on the superficiality of this refutation, he undertook a more subtle articulation of the same thesis in “The Historicity and Transcendence of Philosophic Truth,” in GW 148–163. 10 11

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This possibility Fackenheim radically rejects. There is, he says, a perennial philosophy. For all that history introduces new situations that pose new problems and necessitate new solutions, there is nonetheless a continuity. Even after a revolution, whether Copernican, Kantian or proletarian, we have not leapt into another genus, from which we can find no bridge back into earlier times. There are reasons that expose the limitations of a past age and their attendant problems; there are reasons that motivate the quest for new solutions; and there are reasons used to justify the new as a resolution of the old. These reasons are to be grasped as reasons, demanding rigorous thought, avoiding facile escapes, testing serious proposals, and recognizing how the most successful results integrate all the various demands placed upon them. Such reasoning can never be reduced to the causal (and casual) impact of economic or psychological necessity. But there is another step in his reasoning. After all, philosophy can play around with arguments simply for the pleasure of finding syllogisms that produce intriguing, but inconsequential, conclusions. As in a word game, or logic puzzle, we may simply be interested in exercising our wits. Such sophistry reduces the philosophical enterprise to triviality. For Fackenheim, however, philosophy is concerned with sterner stuff. Its life is spent in the quest for truth. And truth is a transcendental, lying beyond the conventional domain of opinion and belief. Reason is potent because it provides a pathway that leads towards this goal. Yet it is a fallible guide. For those who reason are humans, and humans are finite, limited by their situation in the panorama of history, governed as much by immediate interests and passions as by the curiosity that seeks to unfold the mystery of the universe. And so reason is frequently used for ends that are temporary and insecure. The premises from which we begin are partial and uncertain; the inferences we draw reflect the restricted goals that we have in view. So truth is never self-evident, neither as immediately present to intuition, nor as the obvious result of reflective thought. Truth, the ultimate quest of the perennial philosophy, can begin to emerge through the exercise of philosophy, then, only if it is somehow already present, unambiguously, in human existence. What fascinates Fackenheim about the philosophers who make up the movement called German idealism is that they realized this requirement. One after another points to some part of our human experience where we are grasped by the transcendent. A long quotation from The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought makes this explicit:

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john burbidge In the minds of Kant and every one of his German idealistic successors, free philosophical Reason must have what may be called an existential matrix, or Sitz im Leben, in order to have reality of any kind, and in order to be furnished with what one may term experiential verification. The recognition of the need for such a matrix is built into every aspect of their thought: the Sitz im Leben of philosophic thought is a second theme with all these thinkers, additional to that of autonomous Reason. And this second theme is inextricably interwoven with the first. This assertion cannot here be demonstrated but only illustrated. Kant proves the possibility of moral freedom—on the grounds of the actuality of moral obligation. Fichte reenacts in philosophic thought the absolute Ego, which posits the non-Ego: this requires the prior existence of the moral Ego which confronts the non-Ego, as the “material of its duty rendered sensuous.” Schleiermacher asserts a philosophical “realism” that is “higher” than Fichte’s moral idealism: he bases it on a religious feeling of absolute dependence which discloses an actual dependence. Schelling puts forward a philosophical “real-idealism,” composed of philosophies of nature and consciousness: this real-idealism but reenacts in conscious thought what is already unconsciously enacted in life, coming to consciousness in the work of art. Of each of these pre-Hegelian thinkers it is true, to use Kantian language, that human life supplies the ratio cognoscendi of a truth of philosophic thought, whereas philosophical thought discovers the ratio essendi of a truth of nonphilosophic life.12

The same theme also determines the whole structure of Fackenheim’s study of Hegel. It is only because human life in the early nineteenth century has reached a stage where the Protestant religious conscience, the modern constitutional state and the achievements of German idealism are integrated into a single spiritual life and culture that philosophy for Hegel can finally come on the scene and articulate the full rational character of the Absolute. Only where we humans are presented with an absolute already embedded in life can we hope to comprehend the truth of all reality. Modern existentialism, then, did not begin with Kierkegaard. It was rather German idealism that first propounded the thesis that what happens in existence alone can set the context for grasping philosophic truth. And even when the late Schelling abandoned idealism and proposed a positive philosophy that wills to begin from an Absolutely Existent, prior to all possibilities of thought, he justifies such a break

12 Op. cit. 227. In a footnote Fackenheim adds: “This theme still dominates such a twentieth-century work as Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit.” And he refers to his article, ‘The Historicity and Transcendence of Philosophic Truth” (GW 148–163).

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with tradition not only on the despair of reason in ever finding a firm foothold for its reflections, but also on the basis of revelation and the “ecstasy of reason.” It is this existentialist strand that uniquely characterizes Fackenheim’s reading of the philosophers from Kant to Kierkegaard. For all of them the philosophy of religion is not an incidental addition to an otherwise complete system, but rather the culminating point where the whole enterprise is justified. For it is in the critical moments of religious life— whether the demands of the moral conscience, the ecstasy of artistic genius and artistic experience, the feelings of absolute dependence, the free life of the modern Protestant and post-revolutionary spirit, or the irrational irruption of revelation—that the transcendent truth becomes present in human existence and comprehensible to human reason. This insight, however, was not original to the German idealists. Though it had been forgotten in the Promethean attempt to storm the gates of truth by Descartes’ appeal to clear and distinct ideas or by Locke’s relying on the raw material of our sensory experience, it has had a long tradition. In the Middle Ages, Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers all recognized that a life of faith, lived in communion with the transcendent, is the precondition for understanding the nature of all things. So it is not surprising that, as undergraduates, first meeting Fackenheim in a course on medieval philosophy, we should have caught, even there, a glimpse of this, his fundamental conviction. Nor is this implicit existentialism necessarily restricted to traditional religious contexts. The examples of Fichte, with his appeal to moral conscience, and the early Schelling, with his appeal to the transcendence found in art, already suggest that there may be other modes of human existence that reveal the transcendent Absolute. But Fackenheim’s analysis of Heidegger makes clear that all such attempts to find the Archimedean fulcrum from which one can move the world are in danger of distorting whatever truth is revealed, transmitted as it is through the limited perspectives of the philosopher involved. This is why, for all that he is impressed with the comprehensive breadth of Hegel’s wisdom, Fackenheim ultimately ends up siding with the incomplete and inconclusive positive philosophy of the late Schelling. The transcendent can never become the possession of the philosopher, embedded in his historical Sitz im Leben. It breaks through into our life in revelatory moments of grace. This was the position adopted in Metaphysics and Historicity, and it found expression as well on our encounters with Fackenheim himself in those undergraduate classes from the mid-fifties.

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But unlike Schelling, and unlike all the German idealists, Fackenheim realized that it is never possible to develop a full systematic philosophy from this encounter with truth. If, before, we had thought it possible, now it is no longer even thinkable. For the irrationalities of the Holocaust and (indeed) of the new Israel break all systems into fragments. Thought responds to historical moments such as these where the transcendent (now no longer ecstatic but also permeated with dread) breaks through; but it can only tell incomplete stories or discover absolute, but non-specific, commands. It is the broken pot of Kabbalistic thought—the fragments that need to be mended—that would become the motif for Fackenheim’s mature philosophy.13 To the end of his days he would hold that the definitive post-Holocaust philosophy had yet to be written. Let me close with the recollections of another one of those who attended that lunch, back in 2003: My father was overseas from 1939 to 1945. He came home for a 30 day leave in August of 1945 and returned for a full year to sit on the Nuremburg Trials. He never spoke of this whole experience until shortly before his death in 1971. I did not realise in my innocence that my father was forbidden by law to speak of it. I had attributed his silence to the fact that it was too dreadful to utter. I thought he chose not to speak out of his wish to protect those who did not have to know. I thought that was wrong, but I respected his choice. Remember I was a child of the 40’s. . . . But I thought about it a lot. I wondered about mothers and children on both sides of the war, about children like myself living a European life under conditions over which they had no control. When Mr Fackenheim walked briskly into my life many years later something clicked. I knew a little about his background, but I also knew he was there to teach philosophy, and that I would learn nothing of his personal life in the classroom. That did not matter. Here was the embodiment of all the things I wanted to know about what wars do to people. I was sure if I listened carefully I would learn about survival. There certainly was no evidence of spiritual poverty in this man. I was right. In his course, and only in his course, my notes were very sparse. I just let the whole experience of listening to this man of daunting intelligence and huge humanity wash over me. From him I came to understand that what I was looking for was philosophy as a way of life—not just an academic pursuit. For that insight I thank him.14

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MW 253–54. A letter of May 10, 2005, from Anne (McDonald) Adams.

BETWEEN HALLE AND JERUSALEM Michael Oppenheim Emil Fackenheim’s last work, his much anticipated autobiography An Epitaph for German Judaism: From Halle to Jerusalem, should soon be appearing in print. It is an eloquent book, describing the deepest sense of betrayal that he and other German Jews felt when those with whom they had played as children turned upon them and sought their utter destruction. It is also the story of the inevitability of Fackenheim’s move to Jerusalem, in 1984, where he continued to write and teach until his death in 2003. Among other meanings, his residence in Jerusalem symbolized his ongoing defiance of the Nazi goal of announcing the death of both the Jews and Judaism. Fackenheim believed that the modern state of Israel stood as the greatest act of resistance, and he had to physically, as well as emotionally and intellectually, live there. However, Fackenheim’s philosophic legacy might best be illuminated not in terms of his movement from Halle to Jerusalem, but as an expression of his relationship with that community in which he lived during the time between. Emil Fackenheim wrote critical and original works of Jewish philosophy for more than fifty years. He became the most important and influential voice for that endeavor within North American Jewry and increasingly his work is being recognized by scholars of modern Western religious thought.1 Despite the contributions to Jewish thought that Fackenheim made, there are many critics of his work and of the whole discipline he represented. This essay will explore the relationship of Fackenheim’s work as a philosopher to the North American Jewish community, especially in the context of the community’s strong suspicion of modern Jewish philosophy.2 1 One issue of the important journal, Religious Studies Review 13, no. 3 (1987), devoted a group of articles to the works of Fackenheim. In a more contemporary vein, Emil Fackenheim is included in the Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers, published in 2005. These are just two small examples of the wider recognition that his work has received. 2 There is no overall consistency, as far as I can determine, in Fackenheim’s use of the words “philosophy” or “theology” in terms of identifying his own original positions.

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The suspicion or wariness that Jewish philosophy and theology elicit from many within the North American Jewish community is deep seated. It goes beyond the not unexpected reaction of the person on the street, as it were, for something so abstract and “impractical” as philosophy or theology. For even scholars of Judaic Studies are often deaf to the need for Jews to think seriously and critically about their religious beliefs. In the author’s “Preface” to a significant piece of Jewish theology, The Tremendum, Arthur Cohen showed a sense of outrage at this state of affairs. He described the “misinformed and naive conception” that maintains: . . . issues of Jewish belief are irrelevant to Jewish life and endurance, the emphatic weight falling upon matters of Jewish ethnicity or unreflectively upon the detail of Jewish observance, without any regard to the content and form of Jewish belief.3

Although the attitude Cohen described may be influenced by what some have observed as a basic North American aversion to philosophy and theology, there is more to the matter than this. For example, over forty years ago the Jewish philosopher Ernst Simon lamented the fact that many circles of Israelis held the belief that philosophy and theology were foreign to the practical, Halachic basis of traditional Judaism.4 Emil Fackenheim continued to write and to speak as a Jewish philosopher, despite this overall situation. To some extent, his works have even achieved a notoriety and popularity that belie the way the products of other Jewish philosophers and theologians are regarded. Some of the Jewish community’s interest in Fackenheim as a writer and speaker is tied to the particular subject of his reflections for the last three and one-half decades, the Holocaust. As is well known there is an insatiable

For example, he used both terms in the titles of his early books. A 1968 work was titled Quest for Past and Future: Essays in Jewish Theology, while in 1970 there appeared God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmation and Philosophical Reflection. His most important work, To Mend the World: Foundations of Future Jewish Thought, circumvented the issue, although he clearly saw this 1982 book as a work of philosophy. It appears that in the last two decades of his life, Fackenheim presented his own thought as a contribution to Jewish philosophy. This is particularly clear in the essays that were included in his book, Jewish Philosophers and Jewish Philosophy, published in 1996. 3 Arthur Cohen, The Tremendum: A Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust (New York: Crossroad, 1981), xvi. 4 This was one of the factors that Simon cited concerning the lack of response in Israel to the work of Franz Rosenzweig. See, Akiva Ernst Simon, “The Place of Rosenzweig in Jewish Education,” On Franz Rosenzweig ( Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1956), 36–40 (in Hebrew).

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hunger within the Jewish community for novels, poems, paintings and photographs, autobiographies, histories, and even works of philosophy related to the destruction of European Jewry. Although still suspicious of philosophy, some Jews have recognized there might be a need for this discipline in light of the Holocaust. The Holocaust clearly brings Jews who think at all about their confessions to reflect upon what they can any longer profess about God, history, and the Jewish people. Ever since the publication of Richard Rubenstein’s After Auschwitz in 1966 there have been a number of important philosophical reflections on the meaning of the Holocaust for modern Jewish belief. Behind the view by some within the community that Jewish thought may have a legitimate role and task after the Holocaust is the feeling that the Jewish people’s understanding of itself has become precarious. Although metaphysical notions have a minor place in contemporary North American Jewish life, the idea that there is something very special about the Jewish people is the one fundamental notion that persists. Jews in North America do not see themselves as simply another ethnic group, but, at a minimum, as a group with a special destiny. As Arthur Cohen wrote, “If there is one incontestable article of the Jewish unconscious, it has been the mythos of indestructibility and the moral obligation of tenacity.”5 As we will soon see, much of Fackenheim’s appeal lies in his ability to continue to give voice to this myth despite the threat that the Holocaust represents. The importance of the confrontation of Jewish thought with the Holocaust goes beyond the large number of writings it has caused and the reception these writings as a whole have received. The Jewish philosophical repose to the Holocaust marks a significant watershed in modern Jewish thought. It has led to the first stream of modern Jewish reflection that is not anchored in the problematic of Jewish Emancipation, that is, the Jewish entry into Western political, social and cultural life. From the beginning of this entry, the impetus for Jewish philosophy has been the endeavour to translate the Jewish experience into a language that would justify and explore that tradition for the sake of Jews who were perplexed about the meaning of being Jewish in the modern world. (A less central task was to legitimate the Jewish tradition for Judaism’s Jewish and non-Jewish cultured despisers.)

5

Cohen, The Tremendum, 53.

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The appropriate language that Jewish thinkers utilized, that is, the concepts, categories, and style that were employed, was taken from the major non-Jewish philosophical and theological systems. A brief review of the major figures of pre-Holocaust Jewish philosophy will underscore the point that the impetus for modern Jewish reflection has been this, often apologetic, effort at translation. The first modern Jewish thinker to write about the nature and task of Judaism was Moses Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn was forced to write his book of 1783, Jerusalem or on Religious Power and Judaism, by “enlightened” Christians who were expecting, and demanding in public, that he convert to Christianity. The book argues that Judaism is not an anachronism, since it is in harmony with current philosophical views about the relationships between religion and the state and between natural and revealed religion. He translates Judaism by stepping into current discussions of speculative and political philosophy and borrows terms and categories of such thinkers as Wolff, Leibniz, and Locke.6 During the nineteenth century the authors of systematic presentations of Jewish thought both borrowed from and argued against such important contemporary philosophers as Kant, Hegel, and Schelling. Among their motivations was the need to defend the tradition against the anti-Jewish bias of the great systems of that period. Thus as noted in Julius Guttmann’s classic Philosophies of Judaism, Solomon Formstecher elaborated the meaning of Jewish existence by utilizing the work of Schelling, while Samuel Hirsch was dependent upon Hegel, and Nachman Krochmal continued this dialogue by incorporating elements from post-Kantian idealism. Solomon Steinheim attacked idealism utilizing Jacobi, while Mortiz Lazarus and Hermann Cohen were strongly influenced by Kant. In the twentieth century, Kant and Hegel continued to be the backdrop for much German-Jewish thought, as well as an emerging influence of existentialism and phenomenology. Varieties of these streams can be found in the writings of such thinkers as Leo Baeck, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Abraham Heschel, and Emmanuel Levinas. The endeavour to create a Jewish state provided an impetus to Jewish thought that was more than just the interest to translate and

6 Alexander Altmann places Jerusalem fully within the context of Mendelssohn’s contemporaries in his exemplarily treatment, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (Philadelphia: Littman, 1973), 514–552.

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justify Judaism. However, the early writings of Zionism were devoid of a systematic philosophical or theological concern. The only possible exception to this was the work of Abraham Kook, but Kook’s powerful mystical writings did not set the stage for any prolonged new stream of Jewish thought. In more recent times, Eliezer Schweid, the first important Israeli-born philosopher, has produced major works, both on the history of Jewish philosophy and on the philosophic meaning and challenges of Zionism and the state of Israel.7 The Holocaust has forced Jewish thought to abandon the single task of translation and to struggle with a terrifying event in order to forge at least a hint of a meaning for Jewish existence. Jewish philosophers who write about the Holocaust still employ the intellectual language of the wider culture, but the confrontation with the event of the Holocaust and not with integration into non-Jewish society and culture provides its raison d’etre. In a significant reversal of the earlier pattern, creative Jewish philosophical visions, especially those of Emil Fackenheim, have come to influence Christian thought.8 The variety of Jewish responses to the Holocaust can be divided into two streams. On the one hand, there are those who insist the Holocaust does not provide a fundamentally new threat to Jewish existence and belief. They discuss the Holocaust in terms of the responses Jewish thought has used in the past in the face of persecution and suffering. Thus, there are works that explore the event of the Holocaust through such classic meaning-schemes as punishment for sin, Jewish suffering as atonement for others, divine mystery or eclipse.9 On the other hand, Jewish thinkers who experience the Holocaust as a watershed in Jewish history and as a unique threat to Jewish faith are forced to initiate a new chapter in Jewish philosophy and theology. In After Auschwitz, Richard Rubenstein maintained that Jewish faith was unable to sustain itself in the face of the Holocaust and announced the death of the biblical notion of God as Lord of history. However, by employing concepts taken from Freudian psychology, Gershom Scholem’s historical and philosophical reflections as well as Paul Tillich’s

7 See this author’s article, “Eliezer Schweid,” in Interpreters of Judaism in the Late Twentieth Century, ed. Steven T. Katz (Washington: B’nai B’rith, 1993), 301–324. 8 One example of Fackenheim’s impact can be seen in the interesting, although critical, essay by Gregory Baum, “Fackenheim and Christianity,” in GPJT 176–202. 9 Eliezer Berkovits, in Faith After the Holocaust (New York: Ktav, 1973), provides a good example of a more traditional approach to the Holocaust.

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theological corpus, Rubenstein offered a new understanding of the nature of God. One finds, for example, these suggestions: Since the world came into existence, so to speak, out of God’s nothingness, all conscious existence is beset by a conflict between the desire for survival, identity and individual self-maintenance and the yearning to return to its source in God’s nothingness. Redemption is return; existence is exile. We purchase identity at the price of estrangement. We know who we are only insofar as we know who we are not. We both crave and fear redemption because its reward and its price are the same: disappearance of the individual into the Source whence he came.10

Arthur Cohen is another who saw the Holocaust as unique and as constituting a watershed in the continuity of Jewish history and thought. He spoke of it as a revelation from below, “the Tremendum,” and as effecting a break or “caesura” in the Jewish tradition. Under the influence of Rosenzweig, and the Jewish mystical stream of the Lurianic Kabbalah, he offered a reformulated language about God. Cohen saw the notion of God as mirroring the depths and limits of creation and humanity. To affirm God or to act in the name of God meant for Cohen to creatively give to the world while respecting the limits of human reason and freedom. As he wrote, . . . what creation is for God is revelation for man, the silence of God becoming the speech of man. When God is denied, nothing can be named; when God is speculated, God remains the Something sought whose name is unknown; when God is affirmed the name of God is given; and when life is lived in community with God, God’s name is spoken as continuous presentness . . .11

Fackenheim also regarded the Holocaust as threat and rupture, but rather than offering a revised vision of the nature of God, he used elements of the Jewish past, including the Lurianic Kabbalah, to expand the understanding of divine revelation and redemption.12

Richard Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (Indianapolis: Macmillan, 1966), 219. 11 Cohen, The Tremendum, 94–95. 12 MW 253–254. 10

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Emil Fackenheim and the Jewish Community There is an intricate tie between the philosophical work of Emil Fackenheim and the feelings, hopes and fears of the North American Jewish Community. This link between philosopher and community is probably stronger in this instance than it is in the case of any other Jewish thinker in the modern period. Emil Fackenheim began writing later in the same decade that he was allowed to leave the Nazi proto-concentration camp of Sachsenhausen for Canada. His first essays of the late 1940s and early 1950s represented a neo-Orthodox philosophical or theological position influenced by Rosenzweig and Buber. He was very critical of those who sought to reduce the idea of God to some aspect of the struggle for human self-realization. Thus, at first, he was a critic of much in popular thought. A second stage of his work commenced, as he has explained it, in 1957 and continued until 1966.13 The “singled-out” Jewish condition became his point of departure. Fackenheim’s examination of this condition allowed him to explore the Jewish community’s own attempts to give meaning to the notions of God’s election of the Jewish people and the holiness of the people. He found that Jewish existence required references to both the human plane of history and to the biblical idea of the divine covenant. As Fackenheim continued to pursue the community’s perceptions of its destiny and role, he spoke more and more of the Holocaust. The third period of his writing began in 1967 as that subject emerged as his central focus.14 Fackenheim’s explicit work on the Holocaust followed upon what he once described as his great discovery. The discovery consisted in the realization that although few Jewish thinkers had sought a serious encounter with the Holocaust, the Jewish community had already commenced its own. As he wrote: Not until I faced this scandal [of Auschwitz] did I make what to me was, and still is, a momentous discovery. Jews throughout the world—rich and poor, learned and ignorant, believer and unbeliever—were already responding to Auschwitz, and in some measure had been doing so all along. Faced with the radical threat of extinction, they were stubbornly

“These Twenty Years: A Reappraisal,” in QPF 3–26. Fackenheim describes his work starting after the Six-Day War in 1967 as representing “the only truly radical change in thought in my whole career,” in the essay “The Development of My Thought,” Religious Studies Review, 205. 13 14

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michael oppenheim defying it, committing themselves, if to nothing more, to the survival of themselves and their children as Jews.15

The discovery represented his clear acknowledgement that his role as philosopher would no longer be that of critic, but of one who sustains the Jewish community in this, its most dangerous encounter. The particular correspondence between Fackenheim’s philosophical reflections and the place of the Holocaust in the life of North American Jewry can be illuminated by a suggestion made by the historian Jacob Neusner. In the book Stranger at Home, Neusner speaks of the reigning sacred myth of North American Jewry as the myth of “the Holocaust and redemption.” The event of the Holocaust is utilized by the Jewish community to answer two central but bewildering questions: What does it mean to be Jewish?, and What is special about the Jewish group in relation to other groups in society? The paradoxical answer to the first question is that there is no need to inquire into the meaning of being Jewish or the reasons for retaining this identity. To be Jewish is an unalterable fate and the individual is relieved of the need to struggle with the content of that fate. This answer is cryptically given in the retort, “Hitler knew you were Jewish.” In relation to the Holocaust as defining the distinctiveness of the Jewish group, Neusner wrote: It follows that, for American Jews, “the Holocaust” is that ethnic identity which is available to a group of people so far removed from culturally and socially distinctive characteristics as to be otherwise wholly “assimilated.” “The Holocaust” is the Jews’ special thing: it is what sets them apart from others while giving them a claim upon others. That is why Jews insist on “the uniqueness of the Holocaust.”16 The redemptive side of the myth focuses on the creation of the modern state of Israel. North American Jewry has selectively taken up elements of the Zionist view of history, especially the messianic framework that this view gives to mode+rn Jewish history. According to this, the degradation and almost complete destruction of the Jews eventually led to the resurrection of the Jewish people in its own state. As Neusner writes, Zionism “speaks of the formation and maintenance of the State of Israel as the compensation and consolation for the death of nearly six million European Jews.”17 15 QPF 19. This is the first example of what later became a major theme in his writings, especially as seen in MW, the notion that after the Holocaust thought must follow from life. 16 Jacob Neusner, Stranger at Home: “The Holocaust,” Zionism and American Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1981), 89. 17 Ibid., 8.

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The correspondence between Fackenheim’s philosophical work and the description of the sacred myth of North American Jewry is unmistakable. In Fackenheim’s small book, God’s Presence in History, he insisted that Jewish belief in the God of history could be rescued from the threat of the Holocaust, only because there is a hint of a presence emanating from that event. The divine presence is manifest in the commandment that “Jews are forbidden to hand Hitler posthumous victories.”18 Through “the commanding Voice of Auschwitz”19 Fackenheim was able to give voice to the Jewish community’s sense that there is some fundamental tie between the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews and their own struggles to remain Jews in a much different land. In describing this commanding presence of God, Fackenheim is quite explicit that he is merely translating responses of the community into philosophical and theological language. His proofs for the existence of this voice come from the ways that Jews seem to be reacting to the Holocaust, despite the fact that they often do not understand what is behind their own actions. According to Fackenheim, Jews feel a sacred duty to remember the Holocaust. This “duty to remember and to tell the tale”20 is felt by both religious and non-religious Jews. In addition, the Jewish community had been responding to the event through its determined efforts to continue as a group. For Fackenheim, the dedication by this generation to the Jewish survival of itself and its children is the clearest evidence that the community has heard some divine directive. Fackenheim’s argument for the uniqueness of the Holocaust is omnipresent and it consists of two contentions. First, six million Jews were killed not because of their faith or faithlessness, but because their great-grandparents continued to see themselves within the history of the covenant between God and Israel.21 Second, the killing served no other goal but the destruction of Jewry itself. For Fackenheim, the Holocaust points both to the human and the divine realm. While it was a terrifying act of humans, it also cannot be disconnected from Jewish belief in the ongoing covenant with God.22

GPH 84. Ibid. 20 Ibid., 85–86. 21 Ibid., 70. 22 Ibid. There is a more detailed treatment of this issue of uniqueness in MW 12–13. 18 19

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The careful and elaborate treatment that Fackenheim gives to this characterization of uniqueness is extremely important to him. As Neusner held, the characterization of uniqueness plays the paramount role of insisting that as the event is unique, so are the people unique or distinctive. In this sense, arguments about the uniqueness of the Holocaust are not just academic arguments, but passionate pleas that the Holocaust and its victim people should be important to everyone and must be remembered by everyone. To argue for this feature is to insist that the philosopher, historian, political scientist, or sociologist is forbidden to reduce this event to some type of general rule or to compare it with anything else. In a similar way, Fackenheim dismissed those philosophical and theological positions that would want to compare the Holocaust with other events in Jewish history, such as the expulsion of the Jews from Spain or the massacres during the Crusades.23 The second major pole in the sacred myth of North American Jewry, the state of Israel, also plays an important role in Fackenheim’s theological oeuvre. He sees an intimate connection between the state and the Holocaust, a connection that reflects the special destiny of the Jewish people. In God’s Presence in History he wrote: When at Jerusalem in 1967 the threat of total annihilation gave way to sudden salvation it was because of Auschwitz, not in spite of it, that there was an abiding astonishment. Yet the very clash between Auschwitz and Jerusalem produced a moment of truth—a wonder at a singled out millennial existence which, after Auschwitz, is still possible and actual.24

The existence of the state of Israel also has a messianic dimension for him. Israel demonstrates “that in one sense (if not in many others) a long exile has ended.”25 In Fackenheim’s most important philosophic work, To Mend the World, the state is portrayed as both a human and divine activity that is the foundation for all authentic Jewish thought and work in our time.26 It is very difficult to formulate a single judgment about the overall results of Fackenheim’s philosophical wrestling with the Holocaust. There are elements of subtlety and exquisite analysis intertwined with statements so daring that they appear, using Fackenheim’s own term,

23 24 25 26

An early statement of this is found in GPH 8–9. Ibid., 95–96. JRH 26. MW 312–313.

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“blasphemous.” He does not shrink from hyperbole bordering on contradiction, saying at one moment that something cannot be and in the next that it in fact is. For example, discussing the saving presence of God, the “tikkun” that can be found in the acts of those who resisted the Nazis, he has written: A Tikkun, here and now, is mandatory for a Tikkun, then and there, was actual. It is true that because a Tikkun of the rupture is impossible we cannot live, after the Holocaust, as men and women have lived before. However, if the impossible Tikkun were not also necessary, and hence possible, we could not live at all.27

The paradoxical style that Fackenheim has utilized in discussing the Holocaust as well as the radical conclusions that he has drawn from it mirror the paradoxes in the community’s own feelings about the event. Fackenheim gives expression to feelings about the divine in Jewish life, a divine that the people have great difficulty in putting into words. Further, the correspondences between Fackenheim’s theological work and the description of the sacred myth of North American Jewry were not presented in order to attack or ridicule either Fackenheim’s efforts or the authenticity of the Jewish community’s self-understanding. Both are legitimate efforts to struggle for some meaning within the context of a terrifying group of events and an environment so socially and culturally different from those of just a few generations ago. In large part, the special place that Emil Fackenheim has within the Jewish community comes from an attitude toward that community that distinguishes him from almost all scholars of North American Jewish life, whether they are historians, sociologists, theologians, or philosophers. Fackenheim has not been critical of the ways that the majority of North American Jews have come to express themselves as Jews. He does not lament the loss of ideal Eastern European and Immigrant cultures, nor attack North American Jews for not living in Israel, nor reveal a tremendous ambivalence in assessing the results of three hundred and fifty years of Jewish life in the new continent. The book titles of some of the most important scholars of this particular community manifest their deep misgivings: Charles Liebman’s The Ambivalent American Jew, Eugene Borowitz’s The Masks Jews Wear, and Jacob Neusner’s Stranger at Home. However, Fackenheim affirms, from the perspective of the Nazi effort to eradicate all Jewish life, that in such everyday acts as having 27

Ibid., 254.

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Jewish babies, Jews are living out their faithfulness to their tradition and community. It is instructive to compare Fackenheim with another twentieth century Jewish thinker, Mordecai Kaplan, who shared his sympathy and extremely accurate understanding of the North American Jewish community. Kaplan spoke of Judaism as a “civilization,” in which religion was just one element within a whole structure of “history, literature, language, social organization, folk sanctions, standards of conduct, social and spiritual ideals, [and] aesthetic values.”28 He provided a cultural definition of Judaism for the second and third generation of Jews of Eastern Europe that highlighted their sense of unity of the Jewish people. Kaplan’s view of the nature and requirements of the community during the last sixty years corresponds very closely to the portrait of that community that many scholars sketch. In particular, Charles Liebman saw in Kaplan’s thought an articulation of the “folk religion of American Jews.”29 This religion consisted of a pattern of ritual “supportive of Jewish communalism and ethnicity, of the Jewish home and peoplehood,” a commitment to Israel and to group survival, and, most importantly, a pattern of behaviour marked by deep social ties to other Jews.30 Despite the parallels between Kaplan and Fackenheim in terms of their articulation of the major axes of the community, what distinguishes them is the community’s overall dismissal of Kaplan as a thinker and its acceptance of Fackenheim. Kaplan was rejected, because he believed that the Jewish community’s sense of itself and its destiny could substantially be demythologized. He sought to redefine God in such a way as to purge that symbol of any supernatural content. While many Jews acted in concert with Kaplan’s views, they had great difficulty with him because of this demythologizing. Following the same logic, much of the appeal of Fackenheim consists in the fact that he reinterpreted, but eventually retained, the place of the divine within the Jewish people’s myth of itself and its destiny. Of course, the Holocaust was the centerpiece of this reinterpretation.

28 Mordecai Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization: Towards a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life (New York: Jewish Publication Society, 1972), 178. 29 Charles Liebman, “The Religion of American Jews” in The Jew in American Society, ed. Marshall Sklare (New York: Behrman House, 1974), 246. 30 Ibid., 242.

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The Encounter between Jewish Faith and Modernity A dimension of Fackenheim’s work somewhat less well known concerns his treatment of the encounter between Jewish faith and modernity. While Fackenheim recognizes that the overriding threat to Jewish belief comes from the Holocaust, he has seen that Jewish thought must also inquire into the intellectual climate in which Jewish life takes place. Following in the wake of Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber, he maintains that Jewish faith is not immune from the challenges of biblical criticism, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and philosophy. The teachers of suspicion such as Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud force modern religious persons of all traditions to ask questions about the authenticity, justice, and health of their religious traditions. In reaction to this environment, Fackenheim finds that modern Jewish faith cannot just mirror pre-modern varieties of Jewish belief. However, as did Rosenzweig and Buber, he contends that a questioning, searching faith that is based upon biblical images and metaphors is still possible for Jews, and he spoke of this as the stance of “immediacy after reflection.”31 Among the intellectual challenges Fackenheim highlights in many of his more philosophical works are “subjectivist reductionism” and existentialism. Subjectivist reductionism refers to the disposition, which has its source in psychology, to reduce all possible encounters between the individual and God into mere feelings.32 It is said that encounters with the divine are mere projections, illusions, or hallucinations. While this disposition is both omnipresent and vicious, it is not unchallengeable. Subjectivist reductionism, which is at the foundation of many secular stances, is based upon the unexamined presupposition that encounters with the divine are impossible. The conflict between religious belief, which is based upon the presupposition that encounters with the divine are possible, and psychological reductionism is a conflict between two equal and unassailable standpoints. However, Fackenheim insists that a commitment to Jewish life requires that the individual remain open to the possibility of divine encounter in terms of his or her life and in terms of the experiences of the community. Existentialist thought has always enticed Fackenheim and he does not see his situation as unique. Heidegger has been an especially interesting

31 32

GPH 47–49. QPF 229–243.

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figure for him. As with the other elements of modern secularism, Fackenheim has both learned from and critiqued existentialist thought. He has appropriated much of its style and points of departure. However, he has criticized the view maintained in many existentialist works that there is a single authentic portrait of the human condition.33 Fackenheim has replied that there is no single “human condition,” and that people can only be understood if they are left within, and not abstracted out of, their particular society, culture, and community. His sensitivity to the particularities and dilemmas of Jewish existence, especially in the modern period, has allowed him to offer this thoughtful critique. In addition to situating Jewish belief within the modern world, that is, to seeing the necessity of Jewish self-exposure to a variety of secular streams, Fackenheim has demanded that Jewish faith and existence be taken into account by those outside of that tradition. A self-exposure of modern philosophy to Judaism is as important and beneficial, in his eyes, as the self-exposure of Jewish belief to philosophy. In light of the complete absence of the former, and modern philosophy’s deep bias against Judaism, Fackenheim has attempted to begin this dialogue on his own. In the powerful essays in Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy he has succeeded in engaging the thought of such men as Kant, Hegel, Sartre, and Heidegger with examples of modern Jewish thought and with crucial events and experiences of the Jewish community. One example of the mutually beneficial encounter between Judaism and modern philosophy is the essay, “Abraham and the Kantians.” Here Fackenheim continues his examination of the meaning of Halacha, an examination that has been a persistent, if minor, theme in his work. He has always seen Halacha as essential to the presentation of what is particular to the divine-human encounter within Judaism. Although examinations of the meaning of Halacha became less important when his primary focus was the Holocaust, the Jewish response to that event was framed in terms of God’s commanding Voice and the commandments. He wrote, as we saw, that the authentic Jewish response to the Holocaust constituted the 614th commandment. In “Abraham and the Kantians,” Fackenheim uses Kant’s insistence that the moral law must be given by the self to itself as a backdrop 33

EJM 213–229.

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in order to present the special understanding of law that arises out of Jewish experience. Fackenheim argues that in the Halachic experience the Jew does not see the commandments as given by the self to itself or as forced on him or her from the outside. In living out God’s commandments the Jew experiences divine law not as heteronomous, but as something given as a gift of love, a gift the Jew freely chooses. In this way, Fackenheim is able to critique that Kantian notion of moral law by adducing the Jewish experience of law as a gift that insists upon free human acceptance, as well as illuminating the Jewish experience by contrasting it to the Kantian categories. There are two final elements to Fackenheim’s critical inquiry into the social, political, and cultural situation into which the modern Jew has been thrown. First, he has strongly criticized the whole process of Jewish emancipation, in which the Jew has been accepted into the modern state at the price of disappearing as a Jew. This is the real meaning of Clermont-Tonnerre’s famous statement in the French National Assembly that the “Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals.”34 The demand of Clermont-Tonnerre, based upon Christian triumphalism and anti-Semitism, has been incorporated into the notion of the modern “secular” state. In response, Fackenheim has called upon the heirs of the emancipators to acknowledge that participation in the life of the nations in which Jews live cannot be at the price of wiping away their particularity or seeing their lives as Jews as in any way lessening or endangering their lives as citizens.35 Second, Fackenheim has understood that Jews must support efforts for dialogue between Jews and Christians. Dialogue is necessitated by the fact the modern world is Christian or post-Christian at its foundation and, as the Holocaust proved, Christians have a dangerous power over the Jewish destiny. As one step in this dialogue, Fackenheim has declared that Jews should acknowledge that Christianity is a legitimate religious tradition. He asks, from Christians, that Judaism be recognized as a legitimate and autonomous tradition. He also insists that the practical consequence of the recognition be that Christians acknowledge

34 Quoted in The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, eds. Paul R. MendesFlohr and Jehuda Reinharz, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 104. 35 “Jewish Ethnicity in Mature Democratic Societies: Ideology and Reality,” in JRH 144–175.

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their responsibility to support the effort of Jews, especially in the case of the state of Israel, to acquire enough power to protect themselves from those who seek to destroy the Jewish community.36 Two major encounters resound in the theological work of Emil Fackenheim: that with the Holocaust and that with the challenges of modernity. In portraying these encounters and a range of authentic Jewish responses, Fackenheim offers a powerful argument or justification for the Jewish philosophical discipline as a whole. While many scholars and lay people within the North American Jewish community remain suspicious of philosophy, the need for it is incontestable. The principal factors behind the suspicion have already been described. The first is that philosophy and theology are somehow anathema to Judaism, or that they do not have an authentic place in Jewish thought. However, historical precedent belies the truth of this assertion, at least whenever Jewish communities came into significant social and intellectual contact with non-Jewish societies. Unless such times of past contact are to be completely jettisoned from Jewish history, there can be no basis for the contention that philosophy and theology are illegitimate in terms of Judaism. The second factor is that Jewish philosophy is not regarded as important to the community. This, also, is mistaken. No one would maintain that Jewish philosophy is the one element necessary for Jewish survival, or that Jewish philosophy is a substitute for a full structure of Jewish communal life, including educational, social, and religious institutions. Jewish philosophy is not meant to battle “assimilation” any more than it can make effective war against anti-Semitism. It cannot provide a Jewish structure for everyday life or convince anyone to either remain Jewish or to believe in some conception of the Jewish God. These are not its true tasks and Jewish philosophers do not suppose they are. Jewish philosophy is meant to help those already committed to community and to some sense of tradition to understand what these commitments entail for their lives. To understand this today, one must grapple with the Holocaust and with the modern situation. Fackenheim has maintained that there are no final answers to be handed down from on high about these challenges; he has sought hints or fragments of meaning.

36

QPF 10–15.

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The two most important contemporary commentators on North American Jewish life, as much as they understand that a community does not stand upon thought, recognize that there still must be thought. Charles Liebman, who at times has argued for intellectual compartmentalization and increase Jewish separation, has also said that the ultimate fate of the community in North America depends upon its ability to elaborate a universe of meaning that Jews share with each other. In his words: American Judaism is in competition with alternative meaning systems that might appeal to American Jews. It is in competition with professional associations and private nonsectarian groups, and is threatened by technological society, which denies the validity of any total meaning system. The future of American Judaism depends on its capacity to engage the individual at the personal and private level.37

Jacob Neusner has written that in a free society, the Jewish community of North America cannot expect to survive, much less flourish, by tribalization. Rather, he suggests: The real issue confronting American Judaism is going to be what Judaism has to offer the Jews so to enhance and ennoble, to sanctify, their lives, that, faced with so many options, they will remain loyal to the faith of their parents, not out of disdain for that of others, but out of love for their own.38

The work of Emil Fackenheim presents the most eloquent contemporary North American statement of that quest for meaning, for that within Judaism which can enhance, ennoble, and sanctify.

37 Charles Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiya, Religion and Politics in Israel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 14. 38 Neusner, Stranger at Home, 34.

FACKENHEIM’S HERMENEUTICAL CIRCLE Michael L. Morgan In Chapter I of To Mend the World, after contrasting the book’s contents with that of Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy, Emil Fackenheim points out: In the grim but ineluctable task of a direct confrontation with the Holocaust, our thought receives much help from historians, novelists, poets. It receives more help still—indispensable help—from witnesses that survived the ordeal and told the tale. But so far as thought (philosophical or theological) is concerned, one still is, except for a few comrades-in-arms, alone.1

Let me draw our attention to Fackenheim’s acknowledgment of the central importance to his inquiry of what he here calls the “indispensable help” of the testimony of survivors and witnesses. A page later, having identified the central task of the work, to show how Jewish thought “can both expose itself to the Holocaust and survive,” Fackenheim refers to the most important “help” that this testimony provides, “a shining light,” he calls it, “in this midnight of dark despair.”2 What he is referring to is the “resistance in thought and the resistance in life” that grounds the possibility of Jewish thought’s endurance, “To hear and obey the commanding voice of Auschwitz is an ‘ontological’ possibility, here and now, because the hearing and obeying was already an ‘ontic’ reality, then and there.”3 The crucial testimony, then, discloses “the shining light” of a resistance that is in some way paradigmatic. For those familiar with the work, it is no surprise that the testimony is that of Pelagia Lewinska, from her memoir Twenty Months in Auschwitz, when she describes her first awareness of the Nazi intent and remarked that she “felt under orders to live.”4 From the first moment that Fackenheim learned of those remarks, reading about them in Terence Des Pres’s The Survivor, 1 2 3 4

MW 22. MW 25. MW 25. Pelagia Lewinska, Twenty Months at Auschwitz (New York, Lyle Stuart, 1968), 41 ff., 50.

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when it was first published in 1976, their significance increased for him, culminating in their role in To Mend the World.5 Lewinska’s testimony Fackenheim later calls “a historic statement” and says that it is “pivotal” to the book. In Section 8 of Chapter IV, he engages in a descriptive account of various types of resistance during the Holocaust, but in the “critical analysis” of “resistance as an ontological category” in Section 9, it is Lewinska’s testimony that has pride of place. The thought that has tried in every way to confront and comprehend the evil of the death camps arrives at a “horrified surprise, or a surprised horror,” and this is a philosophical thought that is itself possible only because it was already exemplified in the Holocaust by resisting victims, preeminently by Pelagia Lewinska, whose grasp of the evil and her situation is “epistemologically ultimate.”6 At this pivotal moment in To Mend the World, Fackenheim draws the conclusion that “Resistance in extremity was a way of being,” which he calls the end of a necessary excursus, clearly a philosophical one, in which the impasse of thought trying to comprehend and cope with Auschwitz is now seen to be neither absolute nor permanent. Post-Holocaust thought is possible now because resistance in thought was actual then, and because then it led to actual acts of resistance, now it also must lead not just to thought but to life. All of this deserves careful, critical examination, much more than it has thus far received, but my purposes here point in a different direction. Pelagia Lewinska’s testimony is not the only testimony Fackenheim appropriates and explores. Various witnesses are considered in his descriptive account of resistance, including hasidim in Buchenwald and the Warsaw Ghetto fighters. But the role of these cases is to lead us to Lewinska’s culminating testimony, with its self-awareness and its self-conscious commitment to life. Later, however, in Sections 12–14, Fackenheim calls attention to cases of resistance for different purposes, as part of his articulation of post-Holocaust philosophy, Christianity, and Judaism. Post-Holocaust philosophical thought can occur today because there was already a resisting philosophical moment during that event, by Kurt Huber and the “White Rose” in Munich. Post-Holocaust Christianity is possible now because of the resistance of one such as

5 See Terence Des Pres, The Survivors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 62–63. 6 MW 247, 249.

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Bernhard Lichtenberg, who responded to Kristallnacht with a public prayer in behalf of Jews. And post-Holocaust Jewish life is possible for us because of the resistance of the Warsaw Ghetto fighters, the Buchenwald hasidim, and honorary Jews such as Pelagia Lewinska. The testimony by witnesses of acts of resistance and in particular the “indispensable testimony” of Pelagia Lewinska occur at different moments in Fackenheim’s central chapter in To Mend the World. First, they occur in the course of a philosophical analysis of exposure to the evil of Auschwitz and an attempt to grasp what the exposure leads to. Second, they occur in particular articulations of post-Holocaust life and thought. What separates these two stages of Fackenheim’s thinking may help us to understand the different roles that these citations play and more importantly to understand something important about Fackenheim’s entire enterprise in To Mend the World. The philosophical excursus, as he calls it, and the inquiries into post-Holocaust existence are separated by two important points. The first is the introduction of the notion of Tikkun; the second is the formulation of a what he calls a contemporary “hermeneutical teaching” that begins with historical situatedness. Let me say a word about each of these points. First, Tikkun. Fackenheim’s recovery of this Jewish concept is not a matter of scholarly inquiry but is itself an interpretive appropriation of a Jewish idea through a brief reflection on its liturgical and Kabbalistic settings as well as its use in the work of a Budapest hasid during the Holocaust. It is, then, itself an act of hermeneutical recovery of an element of the Jewish past via an encounter with its invocation during the Holocaust. In this case, however, this hermeneutical act of recovery is not conducted in order to articulate something about Jewish life exclusively. Rather it is intended to serve a philosophical purpose. Having argued that resistance during the Holocaust is ontologically ultimate and the ground of the possibility of all subsequent existence, Fackenheim returns to ask how thought—philosophical thought—does not meet an impasse but can go on. But thought is constituted by concepts, categories, and principles. Once thought reacts with surprised horror to the evil itself, it still seeks to think. If there is a sense of imperative or obligation about going on as thought, then how does thought understand its going on? That is, I believe, Fackenheim sees philosophy as having reached a point where its own conceptual resources, the resources of the Western philosophical tradition, are inadequate. This point is not about having the conceptual resources to grasp the evil of Auschwitz.

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It is about having the conceptual resources to articulate grasping the evil with horrified surprise and reacting by going on and responding in opposition to it. What is needed, as Fackenheim sees it, is a “new departure and a new category.”7 This new category must incorporate, with respect to the past and the present, a sense of total rupture or discontinuity and yet also, in some way, a sense of continuity and continuation, and it is Fackenheim’s contention that there is no such concept available within the philosophical tradition. Rather, for it, one must turn to Judaism, and it is the idea of tikkun that he believes and seeks to show incorporates these almost paradoxical components, absolute rupture and fragmentary mending. (It is worth noting two points concerning this new category. One is this: as long ago as the introduction to Quest for Past and Future and the first chapter of God’s Presence in History, Fackenheim had claimed that Midrash expresses fundamental contradictions in human existence that philosophy seeks to dissolve or resolve; this view of religion as acknowledging and seeking to live with the contradictory or paradoxical character of human existence is something that Fackenheim derives, I believe, from his reading of Kierkegaard. Second: the theme that Western philosophy has something important to learn from Judaism is one central theme of Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy and goes back to Fackenheim’s essays on Kant in the 1960s. It is tempting to think that in this regard Fackenheim has some affinity with Hermann Cohen and his claims about Messianism and Kantian ethics.) What the new category does is to provide a term, a concept, for discussing post-Holocaust life: if such life is an attempt to obey the imperative of going on exposed to Auschwitz, then it is a tikkun, and in fact it is this term, rather than “resistance” that Fackenheim now proceeds to use—for philosophy, Christianity, as well as for Judaism. This concept or category of tikkun, then, is the bridge between a philosophical analysis of resistance that seeks to ground the possibility of post-Holocaust life in an actual resistance to radical evil during that event and a hermeneutical articulation of what that post-Holocaust life ought to be. (In essence, all of this fills out the gap left in God’s Presence in History between the identification of the imperative to respond to Auschwitz and the formulation of it as a 614th Commandment, with its ramified content.)

7

MW 249, 250.

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The second point that separates the uses of the testimony of resistance and especially that of Pelagia Lewinska is the contemporary hermeneutic. In a note, Fackenheim explicitly refers to Heidegger, Gadamer, Bultmann, Ricoeur, Buber, and Rosenzweig as the figures he has in mind as the sources for this hermeneutical conception of human existence. For the moment, the crucial element of the hermeneutic is that it takes all human existence as historically situated, with all that implies about encountering one’s situation with presuppositions of all kinds, not being able to escape one’s locatedness in traditions, practices, and so forth. And what this means is that what follows are examples of post-Holocaust existence—philosophy, Christianity, and Judaism—and that they are just that, examples, of a myriad of such cases, indeed of all the cases of post-Holocaust life that is responsible and serious. Moreover, all post-Holocaust existence, like all human existence, is hermeneutical and historically situated. To understand itself, each example must understand its situation, its prejudices and presuppositions, and seek to recover the past for the present and future, if only fragmentarily, by returning to the past. The appropriation of the testimony about resistance during the Holocaust, or what Fackenheim now calls tikkun during the Holocaust, is thoroughly hermeneutical. It is engaged in from our situated point of view, and, if Fackenheim is right, since that situation is a post-Holocaust situation, the appropriation is shaped—fundamentally but not exclusively—by Auschwitz. Who, then, are the agents of such tikkun? The answer of course is that we are, all of us, all who live now and seek to go on with our lives—as philosophers, historians, Americans, Jews, Christians, Germans, and so forth. But who, then, was the agent of the earlier excursus, of the philosophical inquiry and analysis of resistance that yielded the account of thought’s encounter with the evil as horrified surprise and a surprised horror and utilized, so centrally, the testimony of Pelagia Lewinska? Clearly, that agent was Emil Fackenheim. The thought is his; the description of types of resistance and the philosophical analysis of resistance as an ontological category is his. But what then is its status? What kind of philosophical analysis is it? Is it a mode of the old thinking or the new? Does it too take place within the hermeneutical standpoint of the “authentic” post-Holocaust philosopher? And if it does, what does that mean for its results, for its conclusions? What is their status? How can it be both a philosophical grounding of the

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necessity and possibility of post-Holocaust philosophical thought and also a hermeneutical expression of it? In one sense, of course, Emil Fackenheim as philosopher and as the author of To Mend the World and its philosophical excursus on resistance as ontological ground is historically situated; his thinking and his life are set in North America (in those years), in Toronto, Canada, during the sixties and seventies and early eighties. He teaches at the University of Toronto, is immersed in the study of Kant, Hegel and German Idealism and is one among a circle of Jewish thinkers involved in exploring and clarifying a kind of Jewish existential theology. He is also, of course, motivated to confront the memories of Nazism and the Nazi atrocities and to rethink Judaism and Jewish life in its aftermath. And, in works from about 1966 to the writing of To Mend the World, he has been engaged in that project, while speaking widely of its significance and challenging others—often Christians—who attack the Jewish people, Israel, and Zionism. But in another sense, Emil Fackenheim as philosopher takes himself, in these central sections of Chapter IV of To Mend the World, to be engaging in a philosophical reflection of ultimate significance, from a detached, objective point of view, from the perspective of reason, with the aim of arriving at secure and unconditional philosophical conclusions about the necessity and possibility of post-Holocaust life—all life, as he says, not only some one mode of life, of a tikkun that is olam and not limited or parochial. That is, the author of the philosophical excursus wants to achieve philosophical detachment and objectivity. He will not be satisfied by a hermeneutically restricted or conditional set of conclusions. But how can Fackenheim think that he himself has accomplished this point of view? Does the later hermeneutical teaching, which Fackenheim accepts and endorses, not hold that all human existence is historically situated and hence qualified or conditioned by the specific presuppositions, traditions, communities, and more that always define our particular points of view? Does the truth of such a hermeneutic not compromise the objectivity of the earlier excursus and its conclusions about the ultimacy of resistance and about the special status of the case of Pelagia Lewinska? Let me put these questions in a slightly different way. Does the hermeneutical nature of all human existence and hence of all postHolocaust life, including that of the philosopher, in any way qualify the status of the earlier reflection as philosophy? Does it make it in some way less philosophical? Or does it make it differently philosophical?

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That earlier reflection was Hegelian in character, akin to that of the thought in Hegel’s Phenomenology that moves from the stance of natural consciousness to that of absolute knowledge and back, hovering back and forth, moving from one mode of natural consciousness to another, yet at each stage rising above that natural consciousness to ask what is false and what is true in it, what is left behind and what is recovered at the next stage of the dialectic. In To Mend the World, the modes of existence or consciousness that Fackenheim considers are modes of Nazi agency and then modes of resistance, at each stage thought trying to follow the agent’s self-understanding and yet reflecting on it, seeking to grasp what is experienced more and more fully, until thought goes as far as it can—by confronting the evil as a whole of horror with a horrified surprise and a surprised horror, with an apprehension that is at the same time a resistance, an act of opposition. But for Hegel, the perspective of the philosopher is rooted in its being absolute knowledge that can move from the perspective of various agents to its own absolute standpoint, back and forth. Does Fackenheim’s commitment to a historically situated hermeneutic of existence not exclude such an absolute standpoint? Does it not rule out the possibility of philosophical objectivity altogether? Does it do away with philosophy or alter it completely? And what is the relationship between the historically situated hermeneutic and the Holocaust? Does Fackenheim accept the hermeneutic for philosophical reasons or because of the radical nature of the evil of the Holocaust as a rupture? I believe that these are important and central questions regarding Fackenheim’s entire enterprise, in To Mend the World, and beyond. Moreover, I am quite confident that he himself was aware of the issues. He knew that in a sense To Mend the World would require a kind of “hovering” between perspectives or points of view, from engaged interpretation (which is my term, not his) to philosophical reflection, back and forth. But recognizing that there is a problem about his own status as a philosopher and about the status of the core of To Mend the World as philosophy and dealing with the problem are not one and the same. If Fackenheim did recognize the problem, how did he respond to it? Here is one possibility: Fackenheim was persuaded by the historical situatedness of human existence and its hermeneutical character by 1966 or so. This commitment is already reflected in his account of textual interpretation in Chapter One of God’s Presence in History, an account based on Collingwood’s notion of reenactment but one that is also based on his reading of Heidegger. But what convinced him of the

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hermeneutic was the study of Hegel (and Heidegger and Gadamer, but later). Because the historical character of the Hegelian system exposed philosophical knowledge to history, the Holocaust refuted the very idea of such absolute knowledge, leaving behind philosophical reflection on situated human experience but nothing beyond it. This realization did not depend upon the outcome of the later analysis in To Mend the World, that the necessary and possible thought directed at the Holocaust must incorporate action in opposition to it. What it did depend upon were the assumptions that there is no more complete case of philosophical thinking than the Hegelian system and that the evil of Auschwitz was such that even that system could not comprehend it. In principle, then, for Fackenheim, by 1966 or so, and certainly in the years through 1970, a philosophically framed understanding of Jewish existence after the Holocaust was immersed in history, and no feature of it was in principle immune to historical or empirical refutation. Nonetheless, insofar as he, Fackenheim, was a Jew and a philosopher, his own reflections always began with certain presuppositions, beliefs, conceptual resources, practical commitments, and so forth; what he did with them was then a hermeneutical matter. (There is no better overall account of this process than the one we find in What Is Judaism?, published in 1987.) But this means that whatever “objectivity” arises from these kinds of philosophical reflections, say the ones in To Mend the World about resistance as an ontological category, is an objectivity within this hermeneutical framework. The accounts may be persuasive, compelling, and arrived at by a process of reasoning and analysis that one finds convincing. For example, one might treat the analysis as a kind of best explanation of how to understand the testimony of Pelagia Lewinska, and since we do have that testimony and hence have reason to believe that she did in fact experience what she says she did, we might feel satisfied with Fackenheim’s dialectical examination that shows why thought should lead to a horrified surprise and a surprised horror gives us an account of what it was that was going on in Lewinska’s experience. We might judge it to be a better analysis than others that might be offered; in fact, we might think that no other could do equal justice to that experience. And since the experience was actual, it must have been possible, and, as I just suggested, we might take Fackenheim’s dialectical account as a kind of best explanation of how it was possible. We might, that is, read it as a sort of transcendental argument for the possibility of a comprehending thought that was necessarily integrated with a resisting action, all at once. In other words, even if we realize that Fackenheim’s

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account is based on his own situation, with his own presuppositions, we might take it to be persuasive and compelling, because it satisfies our concerns and convinces us. And that might be all the objectivity that we get and all we can hope for. This insight of ours—and his—would be grounded in the thought that since there is no such thing as a point of view completely detached from historical situatedness, there are no absolute or unconditional truths or principles or doctrines or concepts. Fackenheim uses the Rosenzweigian vocabulary of old and new thinking at times, and we can appropriate it here as well. That there is a philosophical view of things that is utterly detached from history and personal point of view is a construction of philosophy and a hallmark of the “old thinking,” but in fact, as the “new thinking” realizes, all thinking, even philosophical thinking (and scientific and religious as well), is personal and historically situated. (The unavoidability of the first person point of view is a central theme of Thomas Nagel’s The View from Nowhere.)8 Hence, when we give up the “old” notion of objectivity, we need not have given up on objectivity altogether. What we mean by objectivity, however, is the kind of firmness, stability, and persuasiveness that we seek for our understanding of things and sometimes achieve, in our lives. And we can expect such virtues from Fackenheim’s analysis of resistance as an ontological category and even think that his account has achieved them. I could go on to develop this way of reading Fackenheim’s thinking in the To Mend the World, but rather than do that here, let me ask whether this view of his thinking is one that he himself holds in that work. Does he himself say anything about the status of his own philosophical reflection in that work? If he sees the problem, as I have suggested, does he say anything about how it is solved or resolved? I think that Fackenheim says some things in To Mend the World that can help us to answer these questions. In the introductory chapter, as Fackenheim sketches the itinerary of the book, he does not directly answer our questions, but he does show very clearly that his stance as a philosopher is an issue for the work and how that stance influences the thinking in the excursus and prior to it.9 First, after outlining his original plan for the project “Radical Responses to Epoch-Making Events in Contemporary Jewish History,”

8 9

New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. MW 19–28.

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Fackenheim remarks that the “neatness of the systematic project was soon to dissolve in the process of execution.” In the original plan, the first chapter was to deal with philosophical foundations and not until chapters IV and V was he to arrive at the encounter with the Holocaust and the attempt to confront its utter uniqueness from various historically situated points of view. But, as he notes, in order to avoid losing the Holocaust in a priori conceptual reflections, it became necessary to place thought, “as it were, beween the concept ‘epoch-making event’ and this epoch-making event, prepared to be pulled in both directions . . . there had to be what may be called a selective anticipation of the ‘empirical’ . . . in the ‘a priori’.”10 Fackenheim calls this a change “at the empirical extreme”; it was a necessity grounded in the empirical uniqueness of the evils of Auschwitz. At the “a priori extreme” he notes a change as well, so that instead of beginning the project with bare philosophical speculation, he chose to engage “thinkers of the first rank” and use a more “goal-directed . . . historical-dialectical approach” by confronting “their thought with the events to which self-exposure is necessary”, namely the Holocaust.11 These comments, of course, do not speak directly to the status of the philosophical excursus on resistance. But these points, when taken together, are relevant to the questions I raised earlier. They concern the problems of anticipation and perspective. In general terms, these comments show that Fackenheim was aware that the philosophical preparations for the hermeneutical applications could not be completely severed from the introduction of the Holocaust and from the historical situatedness of post-Holocaust agents, nor could the philosophical preparations be carried out without attention to the way the Holocaust might shape those preparations. He admits that “such a method” of somehow thinking together the philosophical foundations and the hermeneutical articulations in terms of the Holocaust is “circular,” but, he says, “provided this circle is recognized, and the recognition of it permeates the whole discourse, it merely illustrates . . . that a philosophical writer with a systematic purpose cannot say everything that needs to be said.”12

10 11 12

MW 20. MW 20. MW 21.

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But the question I have been asking is, in these terms, “recognized” by whom? By the philosopher as detached and neutral, or by the historically situated philosopher? And what does this imply about the objectivity of the outcome? Later in To Mend the World, Fackenheim presents and then challenges Heidegger’s way of formulating and then coping with the ontic-ontological circle.13 Without examining his account in detail, we can distill from it, in the terms I have been using, the judgement that something is amiss with a historical situatedness that is either guided by vacuous standards or wholly historicized. In terms of the problem of the status of the philosophical excursus on resistance, then, and the role of Pelagia Lewinska’s testimony, presumably Fackenheim would not be happy with saying that they are integral to either a merely hermeneutical exercise or an utterly disengaged, detached one. Where, if anywhere, does objectivity lie? In a discussion of language, in the introduction to To Mend the World, Fackenheim addresses directly the questions of communicating the incommunicable and of objectivity.14 How, he asks, can the philosopher write about the Holocaust “in its totality,” about the world of the victims and of the criminals? This question is not ours, but since he is asking precisely about how the philosopher can conduct the analysis into the whole of horror and resistance to it, his answer may help us to see what he thinks about the point of view or stance of the philosopher who carries out that analysis. “One may wish to reply,” he says, “by resorting to a thought and a language that enter into that world and also seek a transcending comprehension of it.”15 This was Hegel’s strategy, but, he argues, it cannot be his. Why not? Because Hegel’s “ultimate Whole of wholes is one of wonder” whereas “the Holocaust . . . is a whole of horror. A transcending comprehension of it is impossible, for it would rest on the prior dissolution of a horror that is indissoluble. This horror leaves our thought and our language with but two choices. One is surrender. . . . The other is the ‘no’ of an ever-new, ever-again-surprised outrage . . . that would be lost by a ‘clinical’ tone of ‘objective’ detachment” or by an expression of the writer’s own feelings. What is necessary is a language and a thought “of sober, restrained, but at the same

13 14 15

MW 162–66. MW 26–28. MW 27.

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time unyielding outrage.”16 This is the perspective of the survivors, and it is one neither novelists nor historians, philosophers nor theologians should try to “transcend.” Can we apply this outcome to our question? Is the philosopher who engages in the analysis of resistance as an ontological category involved and engaged, hermeneutically situated in a post-Holocaust world? Is that analysis, in its own way, a response to that event? Is its objectivity compromised by its situatedness? Fackenheim seems to be saying that no philosophical analysis of the criminals or the victims should be disengaged and detached. If it enters into that world, it cannot simply then seek to transcend it. Rather it must follow the survivors themselves, thinking the event and yet with a “restrained and unyielding outrage.” Even the analysis of the survivor’s resistance itself must be an expression of such outrage; what philosophical thought does is to recast or rearticulate that outrage, that ‘no,’ in a different language, in different words, but its outcome is, in a sense, self-confirming. Is this a circle? And if it is, it is vicious? Do such philosophical conclusions have any objectivity at all? Clearly, there is some kind of circle here, but for Fackenheim it certainly is not vicious. Philosophy may have once had the luxury, if one wants to call it that, of being purely cognitive, exploratory, or even descriptive. Today, after Auschwitz, it cannot be that. Thinking about the Holocaust and then about suffering and atrocity in today’s world, it must think as resistance, with a “restrained but unyielding outrage”—it must think with a moral edge, as it were. Such a conception of philosophy may require some serious revision, or some serious and difficult recasting of the philosophical enterprise. But in a post-Holocaust world, it is unavoidable, and that is one of the great teachings of To Mend the World, one of the most profound Jewish philosophical texts of the twentieth century.

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MW 28.

THOUGHT GOING TO SCHOOL WITH LIFE? FACKENHEIM’S LAST PHILOSOPHICAL TESTAMENT1 Benjamin Pollock Nietzsche’s madman is mad, then, because he comes both too late and too soon: too late to have a god for company; too soon to be able to bear the new solitude.2

Emil Fackenheim’s philosophical response to the Holocaust is permeated by the worry that Auschwitz marks a rupture so severe that it compels any attempt to philosophize in its wake either to ignore the magnitude of this rupture, or to lose itself in a radical nihilism. “Perhaps no thought can exist in the same space as the Holocaust,” Fackenheim writes in To Mend the World. “Perhaps all thought, to assure its own survival, must be elsewhere.”3 In the writings which culminate in To Mend the World, a single realization may be said to save Fackenheim from post-Holocaust philosophical and spiritual despair. Contemporary thought would indeed remain incapacitated by the Holocaust, the “sphere of thought would stay paralyzed,” Fackenheim tells us, “were it not for the astounding fact that the very sphere of life that does the paralyzing also gives the basis for a mending. For if the wonder in which philosophy originates is turned into paralyzing horror by the ‘humanly impossible’ crime of the criminals, its paralysis is mended by the wonder at the victims who resisted a crime to which resistance itself was ‘humanly impossible.’ ”4 The possibility of an authentic response to the Holocaust in postHolocaust thinking thus depends, in Fackenheim’s account, on the actual response of those victims living through the Holocaust itself.5

1 This essay first appeared in AJS Review 31 (2007): 133–159. The author wishes to thank AJS Review and Cambridge University Press for permission to reprint it. 2 GPH 51. 3 MW 191. 4 “Preface to the Second Edition,” MW xxiv–xxv. 5 Cf., M. Morgan, “Fackenheim and the Holocaust,” Yad Vashem Studies 32 (2004): 16: “Fackenheim came to this answer to his central question: it is possible for us to resist Nazi purposes now, because resistance was actual then in a way that it understood itself as the victim of radical evil and yet as acts of resistance against it.”

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If contemporary thought is to survive the radical rupture of the Holocaust, Fackenheim concludes, “then it is clearly necessary for . . . thought . . . to go to school with life.”6 Philosophy after the Holocaust must bear witness to the resisting life it discovers in the midst of that rupture; and it must learn from that resisting life how to think resistance, how to resist the Nazi logic of destruction in thought. Without the resisting victims of the Holocaust as our teachers and guides, we would remain ever frozen in our “metaphysical paralysis” before Auschwitz. This is why, Fackenheim declares, for philosophy after the Holocaust “the going-to-school of thought with this life is not a temporary necessity but permanent.”7 “Thought going to school with life” thus comes to name, in the form of a slogan, the most “permanent” of Fackenheim’s methodological commitments, for it is Fackenheim’s explicit conviction that such schooling alone makes possible a thinking and a living, fragmentary as they may be, in this our post-Holocaust moment in history.8 But there is now reason to suspect that Fackenheim changed his mind decisively, in the last years of his life, regarding this most basic tenet of his philosophical response to the Holocaust, and thereby regarding the path he thought philosophy and religious thought must take in order to come to grips with the Holocaust in its truth. This reason comes in the form of a note Fackenheim left for us to ponder in his own personal copy of To Mend the World. I discovered this note on the day of Fackenheim’s funeral, on September 21, 2003, during a visit to Fackenheim’s Jerusalem apartment after his burial. Fackenheim’s personal copies of his own books had been set out on a coffee table in the middle of the apartment, and in the course of that afternoon I picked up Fackenheim’s copy of To Mend the World (second edition, 1989) and began thumbing through it. My attention was caught MW 15. MW 28. 8 Noting how the motto of “thought going to school with life” links To Mend the World with some of Fackenheim’s earliest writings on the Holocaust, Michael Morgan has pointed out that the specific form of “life” that teaches thought is reconceived over time. “In the works of the late sixties,” Morgan notes, “the ‘life’ that educates thought is the commitment to Jewish survival of post-Holocaust Jews, and what it teaches is the existence and content of an imperative to go on, to oppose Nazi purposes. In To Mend the World . . . the ‘life’ is that of the resisting victims, and what it teaches is that there is an imperative or duty and that the imperative can be heeded, that Jewish life after Auschwitz is not only necessary, it is also possible,” “The Central Problem of Fackenheim’s To Mend the World,” The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 5 (1996): 300. 6 7

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by a handwritten 3 × 5 note card clipped between page 200 and page 201 of the book, the very spot where the book begins its analysis of that “resistance” in life which serves to make possible post-Holocaust thought by book’s end. Right here, where the book’s “going-to-school-with-life . . . begins in earnest,”9 Fackenheim had attached the following note:

Fackenheim’s handwritten note card, clipped between pp. 200–01 of his personal copy of To Mend the World. I HAVE CHANGED MY MIND OR MAYBE IT IS TOO LATE AND TOO EARLY LIFE CANNOT NOW BE WITH IT, BUT THOUGHT CAN + MUST.10

The scene is worth painting in all its color: Fackenheim had been buried less than an hour before, and it is hard not to picture him laughing even at that very moment, terribly pleased at the monumental quandary he had posed with this note to all those who take his thought seriously. In this scribbled note Fackenheim would seem to have undermined completely the foundations of his own philosophical

9 MW 23, where Fackenheim directs the reader explicitly to the shift in the book on MW 200–201. 10 I have underlined and italicized the word “life” because it is doubly underlined on the note card.

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response to the Holocaust. For this note does not reflect a change of mind on some small detail or another within his thought, but rather a change of mind regarding the central tenet of his thought as a whole. “Life”—that living resistance during the Holocaust which was alone to make possible a fragmentary mending of life and thought after the Holocaust—“now cannot be with” the Holocaust; “thought,” on the other hand, “can and must.” What are we to make of this remarkable, eleventh-hour reversal of Fackenheim’s philosophical position, if it is, indeed, the reversal it would seem to be? What did Fackenheim intend by such a reconsideration of the core idea of his post-Holocaust thinking? Does he intend with this note to undermine what he long considered to be the sole possibility for an intellectually honest life after the Holocaust that neither ignores the event nor loses itself in it? Does it express a kind of despair over the power of life to respond to the evils of the Holocaust without either denying the extremity of that evil or falling into a radical nihilism? Does it express Fackenheim’s growing sense, in his last years, that the world was no longer quite as interested in facing the absolute, unprecedented evil Fackenheim perceived in the Holocaust? Or does it, to the contrary, express newfound faith in a hitherto untapped power of thought to confront the Holocaust whole of horror? In the coming pages, I will try to address these questions through an interpretation of the note card Fackenheim clipped into his personal copy of To Mend the World. I will first suggest that a concern with the question of the relationship between thought and life pervades Fackenheim’s thought from his earliest work on Hegel up through what we might designate, with a touch of drama, as this his last philosophical testament. Secondly, I will claim that with this announced “change of mind” Fackenheim was re-enacting—perhaps intentionally—a late change in Hegel’s thought to which Fackenheim himself often pointed. After setting up this Hegelian background, I will begin to present the evidence for what appear to me to be two plausible interpretations of the content of the note card itself. On the one hand, I will show, there are surprising precedents for Fackenheim’s announced change of mind already in To Mend the World. These precedents suggest that the note card’s apparently radical reversal of Fackenheim’s long-held philosophical position may instead very well be a late recognition on Fackenheim’s part of what are in fact long-standing tensions in his thought: tensions between competing assessments of the possibilities inherent to his post-Holocaust historical moment, and tensions between two very different

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notions of resistance. I will then proceed to examine the evidence suggesting that this note card does, indeed, stem from Fackenheim’s last years, and does amount to the radical change of mind it claims to be. Both interpretations of the note card, I will argue, shed unexpected light both on Fackenheim’s own post-Holocaust philosophical project, and on the possibility of post-Holocaust thought and life as a whole. *

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Fackenheim’s own philosophical preoccupation with the question of the relationship between thought and life can be traced back to his early work on Hegel. Indeed, his Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought declares “the problem of the relation between all of human life and an all-comprehensive philosophical thought” to be “the central problem of the whole Hegelian philosophy.”11 If ancient philosophers conceived of truth as transcendent to the contingent world in which they lived, if they could only “rise” to the realm of truth “by means of a flight from the contingent world,” Hegel’s uniqueness as a thinker, according to Fackenheim, lay in the way he sought to grasp truth as that absolute which is both identical to itself and at once manifest in all the manifold differences of “multicolored life.”12 As Fackenheim consistently noted, Hegel believed himself capable of grasping truth and life in their full systematic identity and difference only because “the times [we]re ripe for it,” because historical life had finally advanced to a point where complete knowledge was possible.13 Fackenheim understood Hegel’s much maligned claim regarding the “actuality of the rational and the rationality of the actual” to mean, first, that the very ideals of reason and freedom, promoted by and preserved in philosophy since ancient Greece, had attained their living actualization as a result of the movement of history leading through the founding of Christianity to the French Revolution in Hegel’s time. Only

11 RD 22. Cf., Graeme Nicholson, “The Passing of Hegel’s Germany,” in GPJT 47–8: “It should also be apparent that this relationship between life and thought is the central category in Fackenheim’s own thought. It is one reason why he must be called a Hegelian.” 12 RD 11, 28. 13 RD 33, 224. Cf. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes. Werke 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), 14 (Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977], 3–4. Cf. RD 232: “the actual existence of one specific historical world is the cardinal condition without which . . . the Hegelian philosophy cannot reach its ultimate goal.”

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this historical actualization of reason in Hegel’s own time, Fackenheim explained, enabled Hegel to demonstrate the rationality of the actual, and thereby, the unity of thought and life, in his system.14 It was Hegel’s insistence that his own systematic grasp of truth was grounded in the fact that the times were ripe for such a grasp of truth, that led Fackenheim to conclude that had Hegel lived in our time, had he lived after Auschwitz rather than before it, he would have been unable to ignore the radical rupture of real life that Auschwitz was, with the result being—according to Fackenheim—that Hegel would have been forced to recognize that the fragmentation of reality after the Holocaust permits of no universal mediation, no systematic unification. “Such are the crises that have befallen” us in the last half century, Fackenheim thus asserts, “that it may safely be said that, were he alive today, so realistic a philosopher as Hegel would not be Hegelian.”15 Fackenheim boldly repeated this claim throughout his intellectual career: that Hegel would not be a Hegelian were he alive today; that he (Fackenheim) could “imagine Hegel only as radically self-exposed to the realities”16 of the Holocaust; that were “Hegel torn between the ‘peace’ of a philosophical system and fidelity to the ‘actual world,’ ” he would “choos[e] the latter.”17 Fackenheim made this claim, strangely enough, despite the evidence he himself often brought to the contrary: for in the face of the division and discord in the real life of his own time, “so realistic a philosopher as Hegel” in fact did not always remain “self-exposed” to such realities. He did not choose fidelity to the actual world over the purity of philosophical thought. Fackenheim notes, time and again, that when faced with the selfishness, the decadence, and the divisiveness he witnessed around him in the last decade of his life, Hegel came to the uncharacteristic conclusion that “philosophic thought has no choice but to become a “separate sanctuary,” inhabited by philosophers, an “isolated order of priests” [who] cannot “mix with the world, but must leave to the world the task of settling how it might find its way out of its present state of disruption.”18 Hegel’s late

14 Cf. “On the Actuality of the Rational and the Rationality of the Actual,” Review of Metaphysics 23 (1969–70): 690–98; reprinted in GW 164–71. 15 RD 224. 16 EJM 158. 17 Fackenheim, “Would Hegel Today Be a Hegelian?” Dialogue 9 (1970): 225. 18 Hegel expresses this conclusion in his 1821 lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. See RD 234–35. Cf., G. W. F. Hegel, “The Passing Away of the Community,” Lec-

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philosophical rejection of actual life, so uncharacteristic of his systematic corpus, never ceased to perplex Fackenheim. “What an incredible, what a shattering turn of thought!”19 he wrote. “If anything runs counter to Hegel’s entire thought, it is precisely a flight by his modern thought from the modern world.”20 “Such a resort to flight would be tantamount to radical failure.”21 “[Hegel’s] thought stakes all on its ability to stay with the modern world. Thus Hegel’s final doubts have implications catastrophic for his philosophy as a whole.”22 Fackenheim’s perplexity over Hegel’s “final doubts” provides us, I think, with the proper backdrop upon which to view Fackenheim’s own scribbled reversal of the core idea of To Mend the World. We find in the note card Fackenheim left us a curious reenactment of Hegel’s own late reconsideration of his systematic achievements. Hegel appends to his systematic synthesis of life and thought reflections which appear to undermine that synthesis, which turn away from the fragmentation of life in order to preserve the purity of thought. Likewise, Fackenheim appends to his long-standing commitment to ground the possibility of post-Holocaust thinking in Holocaust and post-Holocaust life reflections that give up on that life in whose school thought was supposed to learn, reflections that convey a loss of faith in the ability of real life in our time to respond to the Holocaust in any meaningfully sufficient way; reflections that assert the sphere of thought alone as a “separate sanctuary,” if you will, in which the Holocaust may be confronted. Or rather, Fackenheim offers us a strange mirror inversion of Hegel’s “final doubts.” For in Fackenheim’s case, it is not the purity of a truth in thought that must go into hiding in “a separate philosophical sanctuary,” so that it be protected from the discord of reality, but rather it is the horror of Auschwitz, the radical evil of the Holocaust world that must be preserved, eerily, in its purity in thought, sealed away hermetically, as it were, until life has reached a moment when it can confront that evil without either losing itself in it, or reducing that evil to something banal. tures on the Philosophy of Religion, III: The Consummate Religion, trans. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, J. M. Stewart, with the assistance of H. S. Harris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 158–62. 19 RD 234–35. 20 EJM 155. 21 RD 236. 22 MW 119.

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And just as Fackenheim saw in Hegel’s “final doubts” about the amenability of a fragmented reality to his own absolute knowledge “implications catastrophic for his philosophy as a whole,” as being “tantamount to [the] radical failure” of Hegel’s system, it would appear that Fackenheim’s own “final doubts” are meant to drive us to consider whether Fackenheim’s whole philosophical quest to confront the Holocaust might not end in a confession of failure. Or, to put it another way, Fackenheim’s radical reversal of philosophical position expressed in these “late doubts” seems almost orchestrated to beg us to ask the question: would Fackenheim be a Fackenheimian were he alive today? *

*

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When Fackenheim claimed that Hegel would no longer be a Hegelian today, we may recall, he based his claim on an evaluation of his own historical moment: Hegel attained his systematic grasp of truth because the times were ripe for such knowledge; but after the Holocaust, “the historical conditions producing the actuality of the rational (and hence the rationality of the actual)” have “pass[ed] away.”23 It is thus not surprising to find that when Fackenheim expresses a change of mind in the note card before us regarding his own long-held philosophical position, this change of mind is accompanied by a question regarding the character of the historical moment at hand: “I have changed my mind or maybe it is too late and too early.” At least preliminarily, I think we can read this comment as expressing the following doubt: perhaps the times are not ripe for a philosophical response to the Holocaust, or—more specifically—perhaps the times are not ripe for a philosophical response to the Holocaust in which thought goes to school with life. Perhaps it is both “too late and too early” for such schooling. Before we ask what Fackenheim might mean by designating our times as “too late and too early” for thought to go to school with life, it is worth emphasizing that Fackenheim’s long-standing commitment to sending his own thought to school with life was itself grounded in historical considerations. Fackenheim highlights this historical character of his approach explicitly in To Mend the World. Here Fackenheim notes

23 “On the Actuality of the Rational and the Rationality of the Actual,” loc. cit., 698; reprinted in GW 171.

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that the question, “How does thought stand related to life, and life to thought?” has received different answers by the key thinkers of modern times. Thus, “Hegel affirms that thought can come only after life, and can only comprehend what already is,” while “Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger . . . all affirm that thought in some ways precedes and even helps shape forms of life.” Presenting his own response to the question, Fackenheim continues: “For our part . . . we find it impossible to furnish the question with an unequivocal, sweeping, and definitive answer. However, if it is indeed the case that Jewish life in our time is in advance of thought, then it is clearly necessary for Jewish thought (and not for it alone) to go to school with life.”24 While Fackenheim indeed proceeds to announce his conclusion that “Jewish life is in advance of Jewish thought,”25 and hence, that a “going-to-school-with-life” is now of the utmost urgency, his considerations regarding the question of the relation between thought and life here are telling. Fackenheim does not commit to “thought going to school with life” as “an unequivocal, sweeping, and definite” rule which philosophers at all times must adopt, but rather, such a philosophical approach to confronting the Holocaust is only called for, we see, if and insofar as “it is indeed the case that Jewish life in our time is in advance of thought.” Historically inflected, Fackenheim’s question regarding the relation between thought and life thus becomes the following: what is demanded of thought and what is possible for thought after the Holocaust—i.e., what must thought do and what can thought do—given that the life during the Holocaust, and life in our historical moment after the Holocaust, are of such-and-such a character? And Fackenheim’s answer, his philosophical commitment to a schooling with life is grounded—from the 614th Commandment through To Mend the World—in his assessment that his own times are ripe for such a schooling, because “life in our time is in advance of thought.”26 But what if the times are not ripe for such a philosophical approach to the Holocaust? It is significant that even in To Mend the World,

MW 14–15. Cf. MW 201. MW 14–15. 26 Cf. GPH 85: “I am able to make the above, fragmentary statement [re: the Commanding Voice of Auschwitz] . . . only because it no more than articulates what is being heard by Jews the world over—rich and poor, learned and ignorant, believing and secularist.” See also, note 7 above. 24 25

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in which Fackenheim asserts his methodological commitments in the strongest and most precise of terms—“the going-to-school of thought with this life is not a temporary necessity but permanent”27—he at once expresses concerns about whether he has indeed read the landscape of his post-Holocaust moment rightly. “One glance at contemporary thought suffices to show that the necessary schooling has hardly begun,” Fackenheim writes. “And the true question before us is whether a present attempt on our part, not to think future Jewish thought but merely to give foundations for it, does not, like Nietzsche’s madman of a century ago, come too soon.”28 I find it significant that Fackenheim’s observation, in this passage, that contemporary thinkers have not yet heeded the call to go to school with life, does not simply lead him to call more loudly for such schooling; rather, it leads him to question whether, in fact, it might not be “too soon” for any philosophical response to the Holocaust. Moreover, his allusion to Nietzsche’s madman in this context offers us a glimpse into what Fackenheim would have in mind in designating a given historical moment not merely as “too soon,” but as both “too late and too early.” In Nietzsche’s parable, the madman who comes to the marketplace speaking of the death of God ends up throwing down his lantern in frustration when he realizes that those in the marketplace do not understand him. “I come too early . . . I am not yet on time,” Nietzsche has the madman say. “This tremendous event is still on the way and wanders; it has not yet reached the ears of men; . . . deeds need time, even after they are done, to be seen and heard.”29 Reflecting on the timing of his own arrival, then, Nietzsche’s madman struggles to express the limbo-status of his moment. He has arrived after the occurrence of an event—the death of God—which changes everything. The deed is already done, and it is too late for humanity to live or think as if the event did not occur. On the other hand, even though it is already done, this deed “still needs time . . . to be seen and heard,” it is “still on the way,” “has not yet reached the ears of men.” As such, the madman comes too soon: for since the death of God has

MW 28. MW 29. 29 Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft, sec. 125, in Werke in Drei Bänden, ed., K. Schlechta (München: C. Hanser Verlag, 1955), II, 127 (The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann [New York: Vintage, 1974], 182; I have altered Kaufmann’s translation). 27 28

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not yet been grasped as what it is, no response to this new reality is yet possible. Moreover, until such a response is actual, there remains the possibility that this event will never be grasped for what it is—that the madman will remain alone among all beings in knowing what he knows. Commenting on Nietzsche’s parable in God’s Presence in History, Fackenheim writes, “Niezsche’s madman is mad, then, because he comes both too late and too soon: too late to have a god for company; too soon to be able to bear the new solitude.”30 Moreover, after he alludes to Nietzsche’s madman in the context of questioning the timeliness or untimeliness of his own endeavor in To Mend the World, Fackenheim proceeds to apply the two-sided temporal quandary faced by the madman to his own post-Holocaust moment. On the one hand, Fackenheim notes, there are “compelling precedents” in Jewish history to suggest that in the wake of historical catastrophes—e.g., the destruction of the temple, the expulsion from Spain—Jewish theological response has come only long after the events themselves. Or, in the terms of the madman: “deeds need time, even after they are done, to be seen and heard.” “Should there not be, then,” Fackenheim proceeds to ask, “a philosophical and theological moratorium on this subject, perhaps for centuries to come?”31 On the other hand, Fackenheim worries that given the dwindling number of Holocaust survivors still alive to testify to what they experienced, the window of time within which confronting the Holocaust would be possible might have already passed by—for without these eye-witnesses, how will others believe that such an inconceivable event has truly occurred? The earlier catastrophes were great but not beyond belief, and thus lived on in the memory of the generations until the time was ripe for a response. Our catastrophe, in contrast, is beyond belief and becomes ever more so with the passage of time. . . . As these words are being written, the survivors are planning a worldwide conference in Jerusalem, in a last and desperate attempt to communicate their incommunicable truth. . . . Their attempt is the last: in view of their ever-diminishing number, after this conference there will be none other.32

30 31 32

GPH 51. MW 29. Ibid.

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If historical precedents suggest that Jewish thought needs more time before it will be able to confront what has happened in the Holocaust, the particular fallout of this particular catastrophe suggests quite the contrary. Given the unbelievable, “incommunicable” truth of what happened to the victims at Auschwitz, and given the diminishing number of survivors, Fackenheim implies, it may in fact already grow too late for us to grasp the truth regarding the Holocaust and to respond thereto. We thus find, already in To Mend the World, that Fackenheim considers the possibility that the contemporary historical moment may not be ripe for a philosophical schooling with life, but rather that it may be “too late and too early” to enable the required response to the Holocaust. Despite his announced conclusion that “Jewish life is in advance of Jewish thought,” Fackenheim—like the madman prophesying in the wake of the death of God—does not yet know for certain whether the response demanded by the radical event he seeks to confront might not still be yet to come, or whether it might never come at all. The verdict is still out, we might say, on whether the Holocaust will ever be grasped in its truth, or whether it will instead fade out of human consciousness with the passing of time, whether the only opportunity for it to be grasped and confronted as it is has long passed. This possibility that the contemporary historical moment might not in fact be ripe for a schooling with life leads Fackenheim to a conclusion, in the introduction to To Mend the World, which—remarkably—opposes quite blatantly the very “going-to-school-with-life” methodology to which Fackenheim commits the book as a whole. If in fact life does not or does no longer or does not yet make post-Holocaust thought possible, Fackenheim proceeds to assert, then “thought cannot wait for a ripeness of time that may never arrive. Rather than hope for a wisdom that comes only after a day of life is done, it is gripped by the necessity to announce and help produce a new day while there is yet night.”33 Fackenheim’s conclusion here is remarkable given the call for thought to go to school with life which Fackenheim himself—only a single page earlier!—insists guides To Mend the World. It shows us that what appears in our scribbled note card to be a late change of mind might very well reflect an ambivalence within Fackenheim’s thought present already in To Mend the World. For immediately after his call for thought to go to

33

MW 29–30.

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school with life, Fackenheim suggests that it may in fact be the case that thought “cannot wait for a ripeness of time” which would come “only after a day of life is done”! The times may be ripe for a philosophical response to the Holocaust in which thought goes to school with life; but it may just as well be the case that it is both too early—in the light of past historical precedents—and too late—given the magnitude of the rupture of the Holocaust and the diminishing number of witnesses to it—to trust such a response. Fackenheim’s ambivalence here with regard to the question of what philosophy can and must do after the Holocaust is the product of his ambivalence between two competing assessment of his historical moment. Has the living response to the evil of the Holocaust both at Auschwitz and in its wake made the times ripe for thought to go to school with life? Or is it both too soon and too late for an authentic response to the Holocaust in life and thought? I would suggest that we view this ambivalence not as some sloppiness over principles on Fackenheim’s part, but rather, as an example of what happens when a philosopher is confronted by a question which remains bigger than the answer he or she gives to it. Fackenheim cannot shake the question of whether Jewish philosophy can indeed do what he is convinced it is called upon to do after the Holocaust. Early on in his thinking, he reaches the conclusion that the living responses to the Holocaust that have been actual make philosophy possible after Auschwitz, and his announced allegiance to a “thought going to school with life” in To Mend the World offers his most refined formulation of this answer. But even as Fackenheim stays committed to and even sharpens this answer, he remains plagued by the question itself: does “thought going to school with life” really offer an answer so satisfying that it puts an end to all doubts and uncertainty regarding the possibility of post-Holocaust philosophy? With so much riding on his own assessment of his historical moment, it is not surprising that Fackenheim’s very seriousness as a thinker led him to question his own conclusions, and to consider the very real possibility that the times were not ripe for thought to go to school with life after the Holocaust; that it remained, paradoxically, both “too late and too early” for “life”—and hence for any thought that would model itself upon life—to “be with it.” If this line of thinking indeed resembles the line of thinking that led Fackenheim to write of his change of mind on the note card, then perhaps we may claim that what the note card displays is the fact that the philosophical question

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Fackenheim asked in view of the Holocaust remained more consistent, more unchanging, more “permanently” before him than any answer he was able to give to it. *

*

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In a situation in which thought cannot wait for a ripeness of living time, we saw Fackenheim suggest, thought “is gripped by the necessity to announce and help produce a new day while there is yet night.” But when it comes to answering the question how thought can in fact help produce such a new day when life is not yet prepared to guide it, the rest of To Mend the World seems only to fall right back into the answer in question: thought can resist the Holocaust today only because life did so during the Holocaust itself ! That is to say, while Fackenheim is aware that “thought going to school with life” may not exhaust all doubts regarding the possibility of post-Holocaust philosophy, that it may not be able to shirk the fear that the times are not ripe for such a response, To Mend the World only holds together as a whole insofar as it remains committed to a thinking that is schooled before life. Thus, despite conceding his own doubts in the introduction to To Mend the World, Fackenheim never ceased to highlight this schooling of thought with life as the core teaching of the book. So, for example, in his reflections on “The Development of My Thought” in 1987, he points to “the critical turn upon which To Mend the World as a whole revolves,” a turn which occurs when “thought, shattered by the Holocaust, finds no way out except to rely on life, or more precisely, the life that was resistance-to-the-Holocaust-assault during the Holocaust itself.”34 In “A Reply to My Critics: A Testament of Thought,” published in the tribute volume Fackenheim: German Philosophy and Jewish Thought (1992), Fackenheim similarly praises Michael Morgan for identifying the ““heart of hearts” of the work [To Mend the World ]: the “rupture” and “mending” in Holocaust life, on which the “mending” of both Jewish and philosophical post-Holocaust thought entirely depends.”35 Even as late as 2002, the year before his death, Fackenheim opened a lecture at Yad Vashem by saying, “Sometimes life goes to school with philosophy, sometimes philosophy to school with life: after the Holocaust, the latter was the case, could not be otherwise.”36 “The Development of My Thought,” Religious Studies Review 13:3 (1987): 205. GPJT 276. 36 The text of this 2002 lecture, “Faith in God and Man after Auschwitz: Theological Implications,” is posted on-line at http://www.holocaust-trc.org/fackenheim.htm. 34 35

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Now, we have indeed recognized that there is considerably more ambiguity in Fackenheim’s position than he himself might have conceded. Nevertheless, in the light of Fackenheim’s continued allegiance to a thinking schooled before life, what is so curious about Fackenheim’s scribbled note card is not simply that Fackenheim denies therein the very power of life upon which post-Holocaust thought seemed to depend in To Mend the World, but that Fackenheim attributes in this note a contrary power to thought. To thought is now attributed the ability, and hence the vocation to “be with” the Holocaust directly. And the problem is that without the mediation of life, without the mediation of the living resistance of the victims of the Holocaust at whose feet Fackenheim “goes to school” in To Mend the World, it is entirely unclear how thought could ever grasp or even confront the Holocaust directly, given Fackenheim’s own philosophical premises. I would like to suggest that here too the little note card Fackenheim left us actually makes visible another, even more intriguing ambivalence in Fackenheim’s philosophical position in To Mend the World, this regarding the key category of “resistance.” I want to claim that there are, in fact, two rival notions of resistance which Fackenheim presents in the heart of To Mend the World, two notions between which Fackenheim wavers indecisively in the book. On the one hand, resistance is grasped as the Holocaust victims’ unprecedented, wonder-inspiring way of living or being, the novum whereby “our going-to-school-with-life begins in earnest.” Explaining this notion of resistance, Fackenheim writes, in extremity—when the Nazi logic of destruction had become the Final Solution—Kiddush Hahayyim [sanctification of life] revealed itself as a unique form of resistance no longer distinguishable from life itself. . . . For all the resistance fighters inside and outside Nazi-occupied Europe, resistance was a doing. For [those] Jews (and honorary Jews) caught by the full force of the Nazi logic of destruction, resistance was a way of being.37

According to this account of resistance, it is solely insofar as the resistance of the victims of the Holocaust amounts to an unprecedented way of being or living, that a post-Holocaust philosophy that goes to school with that way of living becomes possible.38 Thought may indeed MW 223–24 (emphasis mine). Cf., G. Nicholson, “The Passing of Hegel’s Germany,” 48: “Still more noteworthy in Fackenheim’s own thought—that has to go to school with life—is that a Jew today, or a philosopher today, is able to draw near in thought to the Holocaust only because of the religious witness borne there, in life and in death, of those who suffered.” 37 38

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be paralyzed by the Holocaust; but it is jump-started, Fackenheim suggests, by the wonder we experience before the fact of living resistance. For “thought,” Fackenheim tells us, “if it grasps but a single instance of such resistance, and of but the most prosaic sort, has no choice but to be radically, permanently astonished.”39 It is this notion of resistance as the victims’ unprecedented way of living or being, I want to suggest, that we find brought into question by Fackenheim’s note, that Fackenheim himself undermines when he says he’s “changed [his] mind,” that “life cannot now be with it.” And were this conception of resistance as a way of being or living Fackenheim’s last word on the subject in To Mend the World, then we would be compelled to conclude that the note card before us does indeed reveal an unprecedented reversal in Fackenheim’s thought. But I’d like to propose that Chapter IV, part 8 of To Mend the World juxtaposes against this notion of resistance as a form of life or being another, very different conception of resistance. What was it, Fackenheim asks himself at a crucial point in his discussion, which allowed those Holocaust victims who lived out a form of resistance to resist as they did? According to Fackenheim, the answer lies in the fact that some of these “ordinary men and women confronted and grasped this whole-of-horror even while they were in it and trapped by it. . . . without this confronting grasp, they could not have done what in fact they did.”40 Here, suddenly, without warning, we find the relationship between life and thought has been reversed in Fackenheim’s account. Now we are told that it is not life or being which resists Nazi evil out of its own power, to be imitated by any thought that wishes to be authentic after Auschwitz. On the contrary, resistance, in this and similar passages, first takes the form of thought or knowledge and only afterwards does this resisting thought make possible a resisting life.41 Without their grasp

MW 201. Cf., Reiner Munk, “Revelation and Resistance: A Reflection on the Thought of Emil L. Fackenheim,” GPJT 232: “Even though there were only a few individuals who offered this resistance, and even though it was possible only for a short time, it shows that life, in contrast to philosophy, was not wholly ‘paralysed’ by the Sho’ah. According to Fackenheim, the implication for modern thought is that it must become the apprentice of life: ‘Thought has to go to school with life’.” 40 MW 218. 41 M. Morgan certainly recognizes the way in which Fackenheim conceives of resistance as a form of thinking already performed by the Holocaust victims themselves, when he writes, “Our thinking of the event can be authentic because their’s was, and our resistance is both mandatory and possible because their resistance was actual,” “The Central Problem of To Mend the World,” 309. But Morgan does not ask how such 39

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of the Holocaust “whole-of-horrors,” those who resisted could not have done what they did! Fackenheim’s claims about “thought going to school with life” notwithstanding, it is this resisting thought that took place during the Holocaust and not the brave resistance of the victims in life, according to these passages, that makes post-Holocaust philosophy possible today. Thus, Fackenheim writes, “Authentic thought was actual during the Holocaust among the resisting victims; therefore such thought must be possible for us after the event: and being possible it is mandatory.”42 We find, then, in crucial passages within To Mend the World, a surprising renunciation of the very motto which is meant to guide that work, i.e., “thought going to school with life.” Our thought must go to school, in a sense, where it has always gone to school—with thought; only the thought this time is not the thought of an armchair philosopher, but of the philosophizing victim of Nazi horror. I think reading “resistance” in To Mend the World primarily as a category of thinking rather than of living, opens up some interesting possibilities for interpreting Fackenheim’s post-Holocaust philosophical project as a whole. Because now the resistance on the part of the Holocaust victims is not grasped as some demonstration of the fact that, when crushed in unprecedented fashion human life resists in unprecedented fashion. Instead, Fackenheim may be said to inherit a resisting form of thought from those Holocaust victims who themselves thought resistance. Post-Holocaust philosophy is possible for Fackenheim, according to this reading, not because of resistance in life but because of resistance in thought. Post-Holocaust philosophy is possible not because of some remarkable will to live that still managed to manifest itself in the death camps, but because philosophy, a new kind of philosophy was born there. In this vein, Fackenheim writes, “The evil of the Holocaust world is philosophically intelligible after Auschwitz, only in the exact sense in which it was already understood in Auschwitz by the resisting victims themselves. . . . No deeper or more ultimate grasp is possible for philosophical thought that comes after the event. This grasp is epistemologically ultimate.”43 a resisting-thought on the part of the victims is to be reconciled with Fackenheim’s claim that thought must go to school with life. 42 MW 249. 43 MW 247.

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Such passages suggest, once again, that the change of mind our note card reports to the effect that now “thought can and must” confront the Holocaust directly may in fact reflect a conception of Holocaust thinking already introduced in To Mend the World: the thought that can and must be with the Holocaust may be none other than the “epistemologically ultimate” grasp which the resisting victims attained during the event itself. If this is the notion of post-Holocaust thought to which the note card points, we may well ask what this epistemologically ultimate grasp of Auschwitz was. What exactly is this grasp of the Holocaust that is possible for us today only in the exact sense in which it was manifest as a way of thinking or knowing among the resisting victims themselves? Fackenheim gives us some guidelines for thinking about such resistance-thinking in To Mend the World, where he defines such resistance in thought in the following manner: The Holocaust whole-of-horrors is (for it has been); but it ought not to be (and not to have been), but it is (for it has been). Thought would lapse into escapism if it held fast to the ‘ought not’ alone; and it would lapse into paralyzed impotence if it confronted, nakedly, the devastating ‘is’ alone. Only by holding fast at once to the ‘is’ and the ‘ought not’ can thought achieve an authentic survival. Thought, that is, must take the form of resistance.44

Fackenheim here defines what he means by resisting thinking quite precisely: it is that thinking which ignores neither the reality of the Holocaust—the fact that what was inconceivable really happened—nor the truth that what happened in the Holocaust was ‘radically evil.” To ignore either one, Fackenheim has suggested, would be untruthful, unphilosophical. Resisting thinking offers a philosophically authentic way of grasping the Holocaust insofar as it “holds fast at once to the ‘is’ and the ‘ought not’ ” of the Holocaust, to the fact that it was but ought not to have been.45 In defining resisting thinking as a thought that thinks the “is” and the “ought-not” of the Holocaust together, Fackenheim is relating and opposing his post-Holocaust resistance thinking, once again, to the philosophy of Hegel. For one way of formulating that Hegelian motto which we examined earlier—“what is rational is actual, and what is

MW 239. Compare M. Morgan’s fine account of resistance-thought, “The Central Problem of To Mend the World,” 308–309. 44 45

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actual is rational”—is to say that in Hegel’s estimation history has realized the “ought” in the “is.” The realization of reason and freedom through history has brought together the ideals of reason and freedom which “ought to be,” with the actuality that “is.” Indeed, in his discussion of the “actuality of the rational and the rationality of the actual” in the introduction to the Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel mocks the Kantian distinction between what we know empirically “to be,” and what we know practically “ought to be.” Hegel scoffs, “as if the world had waited on [philosophy] to learn how it ought to be, and was not!”46 Fackenheim’s notion of resistance as thought seeks to oppose itself, quite explicitly, to both the Kantian and the Hegelian views of the relationship between what is and what ought to be. The Holocaust cannot be grasped in its truth, Fackenheim suggests, if it is taken as a necessary moment in the realization of what “ought to be” in “what is,” nor can it even be grasped indirectly, as one might propose Kant’s thought would suggest, as an empirical event to be judged according to a rational or moral standard of what “ought to be.” 47 The only philosophical way of speaking about the Holocaust truthfully is “to say no to it, or resist it.”48 When we re-read To Mend the World with Fackenheim’s scribbled claim in mind to the effect that “life cannot be with” the Holocaust while “thought must be with” the Holocaust, we thus discover there a notion of resistance-thinking which is not empirically schooled before the resistance-in-life of the Holocaust victims.49 Rather, we seem to be directed to think this resistance-thinking—this holding together of the “is” and the “ought-not” of the Holocaust at once—as a form of

46 Paragraph 6 of G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1830), hg. F. Nicolin u. O. Pöggeler, (Hamburg: Meiner, 1959), 39; translated as Hegel’s Logic, tr. W. Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 9–10. 47 Cf., L. McRobert’s “Kant and Radical Evil,” GPJT 35: “Both Kant and Fackenheim call for a turn from evil. The great difference between their positions is that Kant’s individual is not presented with an actual evil to resist, while Fackenheim’s is.” Despite Fackenheim’s protest to the contrary, R. Munk sees Fackenheim’s conception of resistance as deeply indebted to Kant’s categorical imperative. See his “Revelation and Resistance: A Reflection on the Thought of Emil L. Fackenheim,” 240. 48 MW 239. 49 R. Munk does appear to understand resistance in this fashion, when he writes, “Contemplating the Sho’ah we can observe that it was a reality (‘is’), but a reality that ought not to have existed (‘ought not’). For thought, this means that it must rebel against that reality. In line with Hegel, Fackenheim asserts that such rebellion is possible for thought only if this resistance was also present in everyday life during the Sho’ah,” “Revelation and Resistance: A Reflection on the Thought of Emil L. Fackenheim,” 231.

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thinking or understanding which first made possible the resistance-in-life of the Holocaust victims themselves. Fackenheim would here seem to grasp the resistance on the part of the victims as evidence of a universal truth-standard implicit within and shared by human beings, but one which has only first been revealed in the resistance of the Holocaust victims. Fackenheim’s famed deduction of “resistance as an ontological category,”50 I’d suggest, may thus be understood transcendentally: it is the category of human knowing or thinking that grounds the possibility of resistance to radical evil in life. It is this thinking together of the is and the ought-not of the Holocaust that was performed by the Holocaust victims themselves, a resistance in thought that made it possible for the victims to resist in life; a resistance in thought, Fackenheim suggests, that makes it possible for us to philosophize today. I want to claim therefore that Fackenheim’s scribbled suggestion that thought and thought alone is capable of being with the Holocaust, while diametrically opposed to his central claim that our post-Holocaust thinking must go to school with life, at one and the same time does have a precedent in To Mend the World. Moreover, once we accept this contrary account of resistance, it immediately becomes clear that basic practical conclusions which Fackenheim draws for contemporary thinking from the model of those who resisted the Nazi horrors only make sense under the assumption that it was life that went to school with thought in the Holocaust and not the reverse. Thus, when Fackenheim claims that our own resistance in thought must “point beyond the sphere of thought altogether, to a resistance which is not in ‘mere’ thought but rather in overt, flesh-and-blood action and life,” he roots the possibility of such a grounding of contemporary life in our resisting thought on the very evidence of such grounding of life in thought among the victims of the Holocaust itself: “Their resisting thought pointed to and helped make possible a resisting life; our post-Holocaust thought . . . would still lapse into unauthenticity if it remained in an academically-self enclosed circle—if it failed to point to, and help make possible, a post-Holocaust life.”51

50 Cf., “Resistance as an Ontological Category: An Essay in Critical Analysis,” MW 225–50. 51 MW 239, 249. Cf., M. Morgan, “Philosophy, History, and the Jewish Thinker: Philosophy and Jewish Thought in To Mend the World,” Fackenheim: German Philosophy and Jewish Thought, 156.

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While such a passage certainly continues to reflect Fackenheim’s long-standing commitment to “post-Holocaust life,”52 we could not be further here from a thinking that “goes to school with life.” Can a grounding of resisting life in resisting thought during the Holocaust be reconciled ultimately with Fackenheim’s expressed commitment to the grounding of thought in resisting life? Given the dialectical character of his thinking, we might attempt to reconcile these opposing strands of To Mend the World by suggesting that Fackenheim here is in fact thinking in even more Hegelian a fashion than he himself concedes.53 Fackenheim says of the way “To Mend the World’s thought goes itself to school with life,” that such a methodological commitment might appear “arbitrary, perhaps, for others, but not for a Hegelianafter-Hegel,” thinking, no doubt, of the way Hegel’s “owl of Minerva rises to flight only with the coming of dusk.”54 But as we have seen, Fackenheim’s early writings on Hegel repeatedly note that Hegel is only able to grasp the dialectical character of historical life in his time in thought because that life is itself understood as having realized the ideal of reason. Only the fact that “the Rational has become actual” through history, we recall, “renders possible the Hegelian philosophy—the recognition of the rationality in the Actual.”55 On this Hegelian model, we may suggest that Fackenheim does indeed “go to school” with the resistance carried out in life by those resisting victims at Auschwitz. But the very life with which we go to school in To Mend the World, has itself been made possible—on this dialectical reading—by the resisting thought of those victims

52 On the special import Fackenheim attributes to “amcha,” see, for example, Z. Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz: Tradition and Change in Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 147. See also D. Blumenthal’s account of Fackenheim as mediator “in-between history, amcha, humanity in general, and the sources of Jewish tradition,” in his “Emil Fackenheim: Theodicy and the Tikkun of Protest,” posted at http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/Fackenheim.html. 53 Cf., M. Kavka, Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 30: “Even when (as in his book of constructive post-Holocaust thought, To Mend the World ) he shows how history has revealed the failure of Hegelian dialectic, Fackenheim nevertheless maintains that this failure is part of the dialectic of history, which has dialectical results. Hegel’s conclusions may be wrong; Hegelian method is not.” 54 Fackenheim’s formulation of Hegel’s famous ending to the preface of his Philosophy of Right, MW 15. 55 “On the Actuality of the Rational and the Rationality of the Actual,” GW 170.

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themselves.56 Such a reconciliation would be plausible, of course, only if we were willing to ignore all of Fackenheim’s statements that reject such a reconciliation. Fackenheim himself, we have seen, despite his firm grounding in dialectical thinking, takes the two opposite positions we have reconciled to be firm enough in their opposition that he declares one as the motto of To Mend the World, and then declares a change of mind upon abandoning it. *

*

*

Our reading of the note card Fackenheim left us in his personal copy of To Mend the World has thus far shown the content of this card to be more accurately seen as marking Fackenheim’s explicit recognition of an ambivalence inherent to his thinking since To Mend the World, than as the change of mind which this note card announces itself to be. On this reading, Fackenheim’s scribbled note announcing a “change of mind” in fact points less to a last-breath, revolutionary change in his thinking than it does to a long-standing tension within his thought that might have gone unnoticed without the clue his note card provides. The note card thus serves to open our eyes to those different lines of thought, and different possibilities of what post-Holocaust Jewish philosophy can and should be, that are intertwined within Fackenheim’s corpus. Do the apparent precedents in To Mend the World for the key ideas in the note card suggest that we should take this note card itself as the continuation of those early reservations—written, conceivably, shortly after the second edition of To Mend the World—rather than as a late shift in thinking? Perhaps. But despite all the reasons that speak in its favor, there is yet something troubling about such a reading of the note card: it assumes that Fackenheim did not understand what he was doing when he wrote of his change of mind on the note card and clipped it onto those pages in which To Mend the World begins its schooling with life “in earnest.” It assumes that when Fackenheim thought he had changed his mind,

56 Another direction one might take in trying to reconcile Fackenheim’s suggestions that resistance was originally a way of living or a way of thinking, respectively, is to suggest that the Commanding Voice of Auschwitz (to which Fackenheim understands those who resisted to have been responding to) is a kind of “revelation” which seizes the human being in a way that translates equally into thought and being. Here one would have to explore further the touchy question of whether Fackenheim attributes revelatory significance to Auschwitz. On this last question, see Steven T. Katz’s valuable discussion in Post-Holocaust Dialogues: Critical Studies in Modern Jewish Thought (New York: NYU Press, 1983), 215–25.

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he was actually only developing further some underdeveloped strands of his earlier thinking. But the question remains: what if Fackenheim actually understood fully well what he was doing when he wrote the note card? What if—the ambivalence we have uncovered within his earlier writing notwithstanding—Fackenheim did indeed change his mind decisively in his last years? What I’d like to show in the remainder of this essay is that there is in fact evidence to support a very different reading of the note card than the one we have offered thus far. Examining the content of the note card within the context of the lectures and articles Fackenheim delivered and published in the last years of his life suggests rather convincingly that Fackenheim’s note card fits this late period, and that it merely articulates in nuce what these articles and lectures communicate more diffusely: that Fackenheim did indeed change his mind decisively, in the last years of his life, regarding the central claims of his post-Holocaust thought. Significantly, moreover, Fackenheim’s last writings suggest that the change to which the note card bears witness is the result of Fackenheim’s late reevaluation of precisely those issues which we have found to be consistently central to his thinking. We find in Fackenheim’s late writings, I will suggest, a reassessment of the contemporary historical moment, as well as both a reevaluation of the character of that life victimized at Auschwitz, and at once a drastic reconsideration of the character and purpose of post-Holocaust thought. Here too, I shall claim, amidst the changes in philosophical position in these last years, Fackenheim continues to ask himself the same question which we’ve seen plague him throughout his career: can philosophy in fact confront the Holocaust as it truly was without either ignoring the true magnitude of the rupture it represents or surrendering to despair? As we shall see, Fackenheim’s late reflections on this question are the darkest, and perhaps most searching, of all his writings. If Fackenheim did, indeed, change his mind in his later years regarding the task and possibility of post-Holocaust philosophy, then we may suggest that it was the problem of the “Muselmann” which provoked such a change of mind. “Muselmann” was the name given in the death camps to those prisoners who, while not yet dead, were seen as having lost all vestige of living spirit.57 According to Primo Levi,

57 “Muselmann” is of course the German word for “Muslim.” It is certainly an unsettling question why, amidst the absurdities that constituted “Lager jargon,” this term

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benjamin pollock the Muselmänner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continuously renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty really to suffer. One hesitates to call them living; one hesitates to call their death death.58

Already in To Mend the World, Fackenheim had devoted serious attention to Levi’s account of the “Muselmann,” declaring the “Muselmann” to be the “most original, most characteristic product of the entire Nazi Reich” and hence a “novum in human history.”59 In To Mend the World, the “Muselmann” represents, for Fackenheim, “a new way of living and dying” which ruptures all previously available accounts of what it means to be human. As such, Fackenheim concludes, the “Muselmann” represents “the achievement most revelatory of the essence of the whole Nazi world.”60 To Mend the World highlights the way the “Muselmann” exemplifies all that is “uniquely uncommon” about the victims of the Nazi world; but we have seen that only the resistance of those who did not become “Muselmänner” in the camps provides Fackenheim with the means of advancing towards new foundations for post-Holocaust thought in the book. The apparent gap between the call to recognize the “Muselmann” and the grounding of post-Holocaust thought on the basis of resisting life leads Susan Shapiro to suggest, in her critical tribute to Fackenheim, “For Thy Breach is Great Like the Sea: Who Can Heal Thee?” that while “Fackenheim in no way wants to slight or make secondary the mute testimony of the Muselmänner, his privileging of physical and spiritual resistance issues in such a denigration.”61

was used to describe those reduced to such a state. On this subject, see G. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, tr., D. Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 44–48; G. Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 138–46. 58 P. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, tr., S. Woolf (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 90, cited in MW 25, 99–100, 287. 59 MW 25, 100. 60 MW 131, 298. For a sensitive treatment of Fackenheim’s appropriation of Levi in To Mend the World, see David Patterson, “Man or Muselmann: Fackenheim’s Elaboration on Levi’s Question,” The Philosopher as Witness: Fackenheim and Responses to the Holocaust, forthcoming with SUNY Press. 61 “The Development of My Thought,” loc. cit., 211. Arthur A. Cohen expressed the similar complaint that Fackenheim’s positive foundation for post-Holocaust Jewish thought paled when juxtaposed to his own account of the rupture which it was supposed to mend. See “On Emil Fackenheim’s To Mend the World: A Review Essay,” Modern Judaism 3 (1983): 234.

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In the second edition of To Mend the World (1989), Fackenheim praises Shapiro’s article as “an excellent review . . . indeed, the best I’ve read.” He responds to her criticism, in a footnote, by suggesting that the dialectical movement of thinking in To Mend the World holds on to the “mute testimony of the Muselmänner,” that “the Muselmänner are not left behind as this thought reaches the resistance that mends its own ontological foundations.”62 But later writings seem to indicate that Fackenheim recognized Shapiro’s criticism as raising more serious problems for To Mend the World’s schooling before resisting life than he initially cared to admit. Might not such a privileging of resistance be seen as a form of the very reductionism Fackenheim sought so desperately to avoid in his post-Holocaust thinking? If the “life” that emerges most uniquely from a prolonged honest look at the Holocaust world is the “life” of those whom “one hesitates to call living,” how could Fackenheim “go to school” with resisting life without thereby ignoring precisely what needed most to be confronted? It seems to me that questions such as these led Fackenheim, in his later years, to wonder seriously whether his lifetime of post-Holocaust thinking had in fact fulfilled the duty imposed upon it by Auschwitz. Had he really gone far enough in his attempt to see the Holocaust for what it was? The increasingly critical attitude Fackenheim takes towards his own major works suggests that he was inclined to answer this question in the negative. Thus, already in The Jewish Bible after the Holocaust (1990), Fackenheim suggests that at the present moment—eight years after the publication of the first edition of To Mend the World!—“most of the evidence indicates that it is too soon, still, for a post-Holocaust theology worthy of the name—indeed, for settling whether such a thing is possible.”63 In his 1996 lecture “Jewish-Christian Relations after the

62 MW 336. I must confess that I do not see how Fackenheim’s response really answers to the problem Shapiro raises. For the movement of thinking to preserve the testimony of the “Muselmann” while yet transcending it and grounding post-Holocaust thought in resistance, one should have to be able to say, dialectically, that even for those in whom resistance was most absent, resistance somehow was still present (or, alternatively, that even in those who resisted, Muselmann-hood was nevertheless present). But Fackenheim “moves” from the “Muselmann” to resistance in the body of To Mend the World, not dialectically, but rather, by simply redirecting our attention from the Muselmann to those capable of resistance. See, e.g., MW 217: “We move on. One asks: Why did so many become Muselmänner? One ought to ask: How did not even one not become a Muselmann? The logic of destruction was irresistible: then how was it, nevertheless, resisted?” 63 JB 72.

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Holocaust,” he likewise asserts that “the theological thought required by the catastrophe has hardly begun.”64 And reflecting back on To Mend the World in the introduction he wrote to The God Within (1996), Fackenheim remarks, Such as it is, To Mend the World . . . is my magnum opus. It was first published in 1982. Over a decade has passed since then. The Holocaust ended half a century ago. Most of the survivors are gone. Holocaust literature has become a vast library. Quite a few theologians and some philosophers have written. Yet now I wonder whether the truly radical response required in either discipline is not still largely missing—whether it either is yet to come or will never come at all.65

Fackenheim’s series of comments here intimate real reservations regarding To Mend the World—“such as it is”—even as they declare the book to be his greatest work. Fackenheim implies here that To Mend the World does not offer the “truly radical response” to the Holocaust that is required in theology and philosophy. Even in his own post-Holocaust thinking, Fackenheim now finds no “post-Holocaust theology worthy of the name”; his work has not even settled whether such post-Holocaust thinking is possible. On the contrary, Fackenheim now seems to view his own body of work as evidence indicating that “it is too soon” still, for such a thinking, it leaves him pondering once again, in a Nietzschean mood, whether the appropriately radical philosophical or theological response to the Holocaust “is yet to come or will never come at all.” It appears likely to me that it is Fackenheim’s increased preoccupation with the “Muselmann” during the 1990s, which leads him to question whether his “going-to-school-with-life” approach of To Mend the World and earlier texts, had indeed been radical enough to confront the Holocaust world in its truth without evasion. But there is no need for guesswork when it comes to two of the last articles Fackenheim was to publish—“Abraham’s Covenant Under Assault: The Need for a PostHolocaust Theology, Jewish, Christian and Muslim,” (2000), and “In Memory of Leo Baeck, and Other Jewish Thinkers ‘In Dark Times’: Once More ‘After Auschwitz, Jerusalem’ ” (2002). For in these essays, Fackenheim explicitly cites the problem of the “Muselmann” as the spur leading him to reconsider his earlier work. Both articles devote Emil L. Fackenheim, “Jewish-Christian Relations after the Holocaust: Toward Post-Holocaust Theological Thought,” 1996 Joseph Cardinal Bernardin Jerusalem Lecture (Chicago, 1996), 4. 65 GW xix. 64

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attention to a late comment by Primo Levi on the “Muselmann” to the effect that the “Muselmänner” were not only the ultimate victims of Auschwitz, but were, additionally, the only “complete witnesses” to the radical evil perpetrated in the death camps. These very witnesses “who saw the Gorgon,” Levi asserts, .

have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are the ‘Muselmänner,’ the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance. They are the rule, we are the exception. . . . Even if they had paper and pen, the drowned would not have testified because their death had begun before that of their body. . . . We speak in their stead, by proxy.66

In his comments on this passage in these two late articles, Fackenheim makes it quite clear that he finds his own earlier “going to school with life” to be inadequate when held up in full view of the “Muselmann.” Thus, in “In Memory of Leo Baeck,” he writes, with regard to his 614th Commandment, These are the only words of mine which have become well-known; but, after Primo Levi on the Muselmänner, how can I still say them? In order to be more than mere words, hence cheap, the “commandment” itself must have been practiced in Auschwitz itself, if but by few. But Levi’s Muselmänner were many, too tired to understand, even life and death, hence could not understand—let alone obey—commandments: these victims, then, are ultimate.67

Included in this passage, interestingly, is the answer Fackenheim had long given to questions regarding the possibility of making philosophical statements about the Holocaust today together with the rejection of this selfsame answer. As we’ve seen, Fackenheim had long seen such statements as possible today only on the grounds of their actuality during the Holocaust itself: in order for Fackenheim to be able to formulate the 614th Commandment philosophically, “the ‘commandment’ itself must have been practiced in Auschwitz itself, if but by few.” But “after Primo Levi on the Muselmänner” this answer now no longer satisfies Fackenheim. To the contrary: it is now precisely the “Muselmann’s” inability to “understand—let alone obey— commandments,” the

P. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, tr. R. Rosenthal (New York: Vintage, 1989), 83–84. 67 “In Memory of Leo Baeck, and Other Jewish Thinkers ‘In Dark Times’; Once more, ‘After Auschwitz, Jerusalem,’ ” Judaism 51:3 (2002): 288. 66

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“Muselmann’s” inability to resist, that forces Fackenheim to recognize the “Muselmann” as the “ultimate” victim of Auschwitz. In the face of this victim, Fackenheim asks, “how can I still say” what I have said for so long? In remarkably similar terms, Fackenheim writes the following, in his “Abraham’s Covenant Under Assault,” regarding the kinds of living resistance privileged in To Mend the World: “A theology that attends to partial witnesses—the resistance fighters, the unbroken believers, the ‘Gentiles’ that risked their lives to help, ‘righteous’ beyond belief—but ignores the complete ones? None but the Muselmänner force theological thought directly—pitilessly, without cushioning comfort—to a world without pity and comfort.”68 These two dramatic passages show Fackenheim questioning his careerlong approach to post-Holocaust thinking in no uncertain terms. How can he still speak of a Commanding Voice heard “by few” at Auschwitz, Fackenheim asks himself, in the presence of the ultimate victims? How can he have privileged the testimony of those who resisted, whose testimony vis-à-vis the ultimate experience of the death camp is thereby only partial, while ignoring the “complete witnesses”? No resisting life can teach thought how to confront the fact of the “Muselmann,” for all such life has—by definition—been spared the abysmal truth to which only the “Muselmann” mutely bears witness. In these last years of his life, we find, Fackenheim arrives at the conclusion that only a thinking that confronts the “Muselmänner” directly as the ultimate victims and the complete witnesses of what occurred at Auschwitz, without turning away from them to take up the edifying subject of resistance in life, opens itself up to the truth of what happened there. On the path to this conclusion, Fackenheim is clearly haunted by the testimony—and the apparent suicide—of Primo Levi. Thus after

“Abraham’s Covenant Under Assault: The Need for a Post-Holocaust Theology, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim,” Good and Evil After Auschwitz: Ethical Implications for Today, ed. J. Bemporad, J. T. Pawlikowski, J. Sievers (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 2000), 5. Fackenheim’s self-criticism here echoes the criticism Z. Braiterman directs towards his work in (God) After Auschwitz, e.g., 150: “These small isolaged figures of resistance (pregnant women, a lonely philosophy professor, an isolated clergyman, desperate ghetto fighters) prove disproportionate to the gross fissure that Fackenheim hopes to heal by their example.” By introducing the Derridean notion of the “supplement,” Braiterman offers an interesting way of thinking about the way “life-affirming” acts and events after the Holocaust may be seen as contributing to a post-Holocaust mending without implying that such acts and events are in any way sufficient in themselves to realizing such a task. See (God) After Auschwitz, 158–60. 68

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quoting Levi’s account of the “Muselmann” as the only “complete witness,” Fackenheim adds: “Having written that, he took his life.”69 The implications Fackenheim wishes us to draw from the juxtaposition of Levi’s account of the “Muselmann” and his apparent suicide are clear: through To Mend the World, Fackenheim himself had not yet taken the phenomenon of the “Muselmann” for what it was. Levi did—with the result being that he had to put an end to his life.70 A confrontation with the Holocaust which indeed looks the “Muselmann” in the face exchanges the comfort of resistance narratives for inescapable nihilism. Life cannot but end itself, Fackenheim implies, if it confronts the “Muselmann” honestly. Life “cannot” “be with” this ultimate product of the Holocaust world, or, said otherwise, an authentic response to the Holocaust in life is impossible without ending in self-destruction. Having arrived at this conclusion, Fackenheim asks himself—in these last writings—“Now that Levi is dead, who is proxy?” That is to say: given the incapacity of life, who can confront the Muselmänner and stand in “by proxy,” bearing witness for them after the Holocaust? Fackenheim answers his own question by presenting the task of postHolocaust thinking in a whole new light: “It is impossible for fleshand-blood humans: there remains only thought.”71 “For humans of flesh-and-blood it is impossible, hence there remains only philosophy, possibly all of it, certainly the Jewish.”72 In consideration of the phenomenon of the “Muselmann,” we find, Fackenheim comes to the conclusion that the task of thought after the Holocaust is no longer to “go to school with life”; indeed, life, 69 I take this particular formulation from “Assault on Abraham: Thought After Fifty Years,” a paper Fackenheim gave at Bochum upon receiving an honorary doctorate from the Ruhr Universität, on May 20, 1998. It will appear in the appendix of Fackenheim’s forthcoming Memoirs to be published by University of Wisconsin Press. But compare “In Memory of Leo Baeck,” 288: “Some still wonder whether Levi did commit suicide; but, whether he did or not, he is no longer with us.” 70 On the relation between Levi’s writing and his apparent suicide, see also S. D. Ezrahi, “ ‘The Grave in the Air’: Unbound Metaphors in Post-Holocaust Poetry,” Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution”, ed. S. Friedlander (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 264: “If we read his own death back into his life retrospectively, as he bids us do with Celan, his equation of life and ‘responsibility’ render his suicide, no matter what the circumstances that might have induced it, an admission of the failure to meet that responsibility.” 71 “In Memory of Leo Baeck,” 288 72 This is the formulation Fackenheim used to make the same point in the original lecture version of this paper, presented at the 2001 conference marking Fackenheim’s 85th birthday. This version will appear in The Philosopher as Witness: Fackenheim and Responses to the Holocaust, forthcoming with SUNY Press.

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now, is understood to be incapable of confronting the “Muselmann” and at once surviving such confrontation. Instead, Fackenheim now declares it to be the vocation of thought alone to confront this ultimate “achievement most revelatory of the essence of the whole Nazi world” directly. Given Fackenheim’s career-long preoccupation with the meaning of “thought” itself, it is quite strange to consider what thought has become for him in these essays written towards the end of his life. Thinking is no longer dialectical, capable of grasping life through its movement of negation; thinking is not empirical, schooled at the hands of life; thinking does not resist here, as we found it does in the heart of To Mend the World; and it is certainly no longer a “tranquil thought,” or “cool deductive reason and measured inquiry.”73 Thinking now appears to entail nothing more and nothing less than looking the “Muselmann” unflinchingly in the eyes in order to see reflected there the abyss opened up by the Holocaust world. Thinking becomes bearing witness, by proxy, to the event in which this abyss opened up.74 And the philosophers who take up this vocation—recalling now Hegelian parallels—indeed do become “an isolated order of priests” preserving the truth of that abysmal event in a “separate sanctuary” until that moment—which may or may not come—in which “life” may be able to confront it and live.

73 Z. Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz, 146: “When Fackenheim claims that the Holocaust ruptures ‘thought,’ he means that it has shattered tranquil thought. . . . Affect interferes with cool deductive reason and measured inquiry.” 74 In Remnants of Auschwitz, G. Agamben similarly claims, “we will not understand what Auschwitz is if we do not first understand who or what the Muselmann is—if we do not learn to gaze with him upon the Gorgon” (52). In this image of the Gorgon, Agamben suggests, Levi reveals “that at the ‘bottom’ of the human being there is nothing other than an impossibility of seeing—this is the Gorgon, whose vision transforms the human being into a non-human” (54). Agamben likewise seeks to highlight the paradoxical character of Levi’s designation of the “Muselmänner” alone as the “complete witnesses,” in whose stead we speak “by proxy”: “testimony takes place where the speechless one makes the speaking one speak and where the one who speaks bears the impossibility of speaking in his own speech, such that the silent and the speaking, the inhuman and the human enter into a zone of indistinction in which it is impossible to establish the position of the subject, to identify the ‘imagined substance’ of the ‘I’ and, along with it, the true witness” (120). And yet, Agamben concludes, “in the Muselmann, the impossibility of bearing witness is no longer a mere privation. Instead, it has become real; it exists as such. If the survivor bears witness not to the gas chambers or to Auschwitz but to the Muselmann, if he speaks only on the basis of an impossibility of speaking, then his testimony cannot be denied” (164).

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We should no longer be surprised, finally, to find that in precisely Fackenheim’s last published articles, in which he reconsiders the respective capacities and vocations of life and thought after the Holocaust, he likewise questions what may be expected from his post-Holocaust moment. In his “In Memory of Leo Baeck,” he writes, It seems, then, that we are in the midst of a contest, lasting perhaps for another hundred years, at the end of which the Holocaust will either be denied or distorted beyond belief, or else—with patient scholarship, pious memory for which that past “will never go away” and—perhaps above all—an always-insufficient-philosophy be recognized for what it was.75

By end of his life, we find, Fackenheim has changed his mind about what he had long taken to be the only possibility for post-Holocaust thinking—i.e., one which goes to school with life. He comes to see in the Holocaust a rupture so extreme as to make a living response impossible, and he becomes convinced that it is thought alone which can take it upon itself to confront that rupture. Such a re-evaluation of the relative capacities of thought and life in responding to the Holocaust are accompanied, once more, by questions regarding how the contemporary historical moment should be understood. They lead him to ask himself whether the moment in which he writes marks a step towards the collective human “recognition” of the Holocaust as “what it was,” or rather a step towards the forgetting of the event, or its final denial or distortion. They lead him to propose, that is, that his present moment is “both too late and to early” for such a response in life.76 Fackenheim’s reflections in these late articles—on the deficiencies of his own career-long approach to post-Holocaust philosophy, on questions of thought, life, and the contemporary historical moment—are thus precisely those that might have produced the note card he left for us in his personal copy of To Mend the World: “I have changed my mind

75 “In Memory of Leo Baeck,” 283. Compare the original lecture version of this statement, which will appear in The Philosopher as Witness, forthcoming with SUNY Press: “It seems, then, that we are in the midst of a race, lasting perhaps for a hundred years, at the end of which the Holocaust will either be denied or—much the same—be distorted beyond recognition, or else—with patient scholarship, pious memory for which that past will never go away and an always-insufficient-philosophy be recognized for what it was. And of the hundred years only just over sixty are gone.” 76 Compare the similar sentiment Fackenheim expresses in “Abraham’s Covenant Under Assault,” 3: “It may be late—even too late—for experience; but is it too late for thought, theological thought?”

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or maybe it is too late and too early. Life cannot now be with it, but thought can and must.” *

*

*

The note card we have interpreted in this article has indeed made us aware of tensions between different lines of post-Holocaust thinking that were present in Fackenheim’s mature works, and it has thereby allowed us to discover possibilities for post-Holocaust thinking there which Fackenheim himself did not emphasize outright. But there is at once ample evidence to suggest that this note card comes from Fackenheim’s last years and communicates not a long-standing ambivalence, but rather the results of a sincere, renewed confrontation with the problem at hand.77 Fackenheim’s late turn to thought as the only medium through which the ultimate truth of the Holocaust may be confronted, opposes his long-standing commitment to go to school with Holocaust and post-Holocaust life. But we may suggest that even in this opposition, Fackenheim’s late turn shares its question in common with that earlier commitment: it is an alternative response to the very question we’ve seen plague Fackenheim throughout his work on the Holocaust: can philosophy confront the Holocaust in its truth without either ignoring what truly occurred or falling into nihilism? But if we take the note card as an expression of such a late turn, we must recognize, at once, how glaringly different Fackenheim’s response in it is from the more hopeful responses of his most productive period.

77 It would have been preferable to be able to end this article by dating Fackenheim’s writing of the note card itself. To do so responsibly, we would have to be able to supplement the analysis of the ideational content of the note card I have offered with an analysis of Fackenheim’s handwriting in the note card. This would allow us to locate Fackenheim’s handwriting at the time of writing the note card along the continuum of his handwriting as it evolved over his career. Suffice it to say that doing so would require both financial resources and access to Fackenheim’s handwritten manuscripts—most of which have not yet arrived at their final resting place in the Fackenheim archives in Ottawa—unavailable to me at the present. Without such verification, I can only speculate. I am inclined to date the card very late—within the last two or three years of his life. But I think that the most one can really say at this point—whether we take the note card to express the late recognition of earlier tensions in Fackenheim’s thought or an actual late change of mind—is that the card most likely was written some time after 1996. It is around this date that Fackenheim ceases (with one notable exception) to invoke his “thought going to school with life” motto in public and in writing, and it is in 1997 that we begin to see written expression of Fackenheim’s renewed confrontation with the problem of the “Muselmann.”

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For in a sense, this late response on Fackenheim’s part to the question of whether thought can confront the Holocaust without escapism or despair is no positive response at all. To the contrary: it is a concession that the problem being raised does not in fact admit of a resolution. Philosophy cannot respond to the Holocaust without either reduction or despair. In such a situation, Fackenheim suggests, philosophy must choose the despair brought on by confronting the “Muselmann” over reducing the Holocaust to the level of a more conceivable inhumanity. And Fackenheim assumes thought somehow to be strong enough to endure, to preserve this source of despair within its “separate sanctuary” until that time when it may yet be possible to expose life to the Holocaust without destroying it.

FACKENHEIM’S PARADOXICAL 614TH COMMANDMENT: SOME PERSONAL REFLECTIONS Martin J. Plax Emil Fackenheim is best known, to the degree he is known at all outside of scholarly circles, for having uttered what he identified as the 614th Commandment—that Jews are obligated not to give Hitler a posthumous victory. In uttering a Commandment, he meant it to have the force of law and obligation, in the same sense in which the 613 Commandments derived from the Torah are Law. Why did Fackenheim assert what he did in the language of Commandment? He recognized that the military and political defeat of the Nazis did not destroy the spirit and dreams of Hitler. By asserting a Commandment, he wished to emphasize that the survival of Jews and of Judaism is still a matter of dire emergency, not just for Jews, but for all humanity. He fulfilled his obligation stated in his Commandment by continuously finding new ways to prove not only that the Holocaust is unique in modern times, if not in all recorded human time, but that the future of humanity depends on understanding the true nature of the Holocaust. Two personal incidents may help prepare the reader to consider what I believe Fackenheim had in mind. In 1967, the year of the Six-Day War, I was teaching American Politics at SUNY Buffalo. In a class devoted to the powers of the American Presidency, I spoke about President Truman’s threat to use Federal troops to work in the mills in Youngstown, Ohio, after the unions had called a strike that shut down production of war supplies needed in the Korean War. While lecturing, I sensed that for the students, it was as though I were talking about something that happened in the previous century. After class I saw literary critic Leslie Fiedler and told him of my surprise at their lack of response. His response to me was even more surprising. “Well,” he said, “pretty soon Hitler will be like the Pharaoh.” Fiedler, always provocative, had been so again. Hitler would be transformed from an historical person into a mythical figure. I thought of this when first reading Fackenheim in the mid-1970s. In light of

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Fackenheim’s Commandment, this would mean that Hitler’s uniqueness and the uniqueness of the Holocaust would not only be lost, but could become readily deniable. Worse, the Holocaust itself could be denied as an historical occurrence. A more sinister implication was revealed to me when, in the late 1980s, as Cleveland Director for The American Jewish Committee, I attended a play, adapted from a novel by George Steiner, The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. The drama records a trek though a jungle. Hitler, an old man, had been discovered to have been hiding in South America and had been captured, as Eichmann had been. He was being brought to Israel for a trial. Over time, the captors become weaker as Hitler becomes stronger. At the end, in a long monologue, Hitler defiantly tells his captors that were it not for him, the State of Israel would not have come into existence and that the Jews owe him a great debt of gratitude for having ended their exile. In this speech Hitler portrays himself as an “agent” of History and makes the evil he did appear as a positive act of Providence. But it also reveals that in Steiner’s judgment, putting Hitler on trial has had an unintended consequence. It has resulted in an inversion of the immorality of the Nazis. This, it seems to me, was the challenge facing Fackenheim each time he articulated the 614th Commandment: how to put Hitler and the Holocaust on trial while simultaneously preventing or at least containing, this kind of moral inversion. To accomplish this task, Fackenheim also had to articulate why the survival of Judaism and the Jews continues to be a dire emergency. To skeptics, not to say anti-Semites, Fackenheim could have been accused of simply being concerned with the survival of his particular group and tradition, that is, he was expressing “mere self-interest.” But Fackenheim saw the emergency as a matter of concern for all humanity. The goal of his 614th Commandment, and the philosophic and theological investigations meant to support it, was to demonstrate that, contrary to the claims of both modern philosophy and modern theology, human beings are demonic by nature and that only in religious Judaism is this truth kept alive. He also sought to demonstrate that it was the Holocaust that made this truth available for all humanity to see. But while Judaism contains this wise warning, that does not mean that modern Jews, and even more, “non-Jews,” are inclined to take that warning seriously. Many Jews, enticed by the promise of liberal secularism to end anti-Semitism, have turned away from their traditional faith and from drawing the proper lessons from the Holocaust.

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So Fackenheim had to find ways for modern Jews to return to the faith of their ancestors and at the same time, not to allow people to easily compare Hitler with the Pharaoh. For the Holocaust to remain alive, and the justification for Judaism to be affirmed, faith in God’s Presence had to be defended and maintained against the secularism of modern science and simultaneously against modern Christian theology. While most of his work was devoted to exposing the errors of German Idealism, the 614th Commandment presupposes that in doing so, he sought to demonstrate why the attack on Biblical morality developed by the philosophers of modern natural right was problematic for all humanity. In the Leviathan, for example, Hobbes created new definitions of the human passions that “explained” the State of Nature and the reasons that men consented to leave it. But in those new definitions, Hobbes presupposed that human violence could be accounted for by “needs” that are only slightly different from those that could explain violence among animals. In providing these new scientific definitions, Hobbes replaced the Biblical concept of depravity with the idea that human evil is the same as animal evil; it is “innocent evil,”1 and can be “contained” if the needs giving rise to it are understood and satisfied. The transposition of depravity into animal evil provided the grounds for what eventually became the denial of depravity entirely. That was certainly evident in Rousseau’s poetic creation of the innocent savage in the State of Nature, who was, until forced to live with others, not dangerous and who, in the civil society created by the Social Contract, proved his innocence by his sincerity.2 Fackenheim’s 614th Commandment implied an obligation to challenge these claims and to demonstrate the fundamental depraved nature of humanity and of men’s fundamental dangerousness. He identified the source of these myths in the philosophy of history, which, he argued, evolved into the fanaticism that led to the Holocaust. Historical thinking challenged the certitude provided by the doctrine of timeless truth of traditional metaphysics. But that challenge resulted in skeptical paralysis, since the study of history disclosed a welter of world views without providing any criteria for choosing which one to live by. He observed that in an effort to escape that paralysis, Pragmatists

1 Leo Strauss, “Comments on Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political ” in Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1976, 87–88, 93. 2 See his Second Discourse or Discourse on Inequality among Men, in Roger Masters (ed.), The First and Second Discourses, NY. St. Martin’s Press, 1964, 150 ff.

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like William James sought to justify religious faith by claiming that one could believe in timeless truth and in the Divine because one had to believe in something. This, argued Fackenheim, was a “pretended faith,” and as such, it was no faith at all. The truth of this observation was affirmed by the fact that those aware of the contradiction embedded in this pretended faith found an escape from more skepticism in ideological fanaticism, which achieved certitude, and made itself true, not by reason but by physically eliminating all challenges and challengers. The 614th Commandment was also a Commandment to remain sane and not go mad in the face of the absurdity of the events that constitute the history of the modern world. No more evident absurdity exists than in the fact that, by turning Jewish body parts into products, the Nazis became like the Jews, whom they accused of depravity because of their commercial spirit. But that was not the only absurdity Fackenheim found in modern history. He actually described World War I as the War of Absurdity. That was because the West claimed it was a war fought to make the world safe for democracy, even though one of the allies was Czarist Russia. Furthermore, God was invoked on both sides, to justify killing. The German-Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen claimed that Judaism and Germanness were totally compatible and called on Jews to support Germany during the War. Christianity, said Fackenheim, never recovered from this contradiction. It was this contradiction that allowed Christians in Germany to deny there was any contradiction in calling themselves “Christian Nazis” in World War II. During World War II, a conflict between what Fackenheim characterized as “the half-truth vs. the total lie,” the Allies were casual about defending Democracy in Czechoslovakia, and yet went to war in defense of what Fackenheim characterized as “semi-fascist Poland.” Religiously, the absurdity was visible in the pacifist position of some American clergy who ignored Hitler’s murder of the Jews. Similarly, German churches were silent, claiming they were supporting the Augustinian separation of politics (Caesar) and religion (Church); all the while they were ignoring the evil or “anti-Christ” who was Caesar.3 The fact

Fackenheim even wondered whether Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s involvement in the assassination attempt on Hitler was politically motivated or religiously motivated. If the former, he said, it signals the invisible influence of secularism on religion. Was Bonhoeffer’s action done because of, or in spite of, his theology? The political half3

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that America did not accept Jewish refugees before the War and didn’t stop the trains to the death camps near the end of the War revealed just how hypocritical the West was regarding the Jews. Fackenheim’s analysis of such absurdities led him to the conclusion that there is a fundamental truth about the West: it suffers from a failure of nerve, and it is this which creates the conditions for giving Hitler his posthumous victory. This is not just a Jewish crisis, but a Christian one as well. This failure of nerve is at the root of the crisis of the West. Fackenheim understood that the failure of nerve came about as the result of a fundamental change brought about in the foundation of secular liberal democracy—namely, the demotion of courage as a prime value. In the name of peace, Thomas Hobbes substituted cowardice, the true passion at the root of the social contract. The contract was justified by Hobbes’ elevation of the fear of violent death, which is the basis of secular liberal democracy and the cautiousness of bourgeois society. In the face of secular-liberalism, modern Christian theologians came to adopt pacifism as a theological principle, which meant that they came to define “evil” as “not pacified.” But to this principle they added the doctrine of social justice, which had the effect of supporting a more radical politics, some of it directed against Jews, especially against the State of Israel. Nowhere was the problem more evident for Fackenheim than in the silence of the Christian world in 1967, when Israel’s very existence was threatened and in the later accusations made against Israel for its actions against Palestinian rebels, calling the Israelis “Nazis.” Nowhere was the moral inversion more evident that in the United Nations’ “Zionism is Racism” resolution. Fackenheim identified the source of these moral inversions in the capture of Christianity by modern philosophy, specifically, the philosophy of history. The secular liberal democratic vision refers to itself as Judeo-Christian.4 This synthesis was made possible by the historicizing of religion in general. He argued that the philosophy of history, especially the philosophy of Hegel, claimed to have resolved the conflict between reason and Christian revelation. This claim provided the ground for the justification of liberal secularism. truth for which America fought was that it claimed to be fighting Nazi racism, all the while allowing racism in America to flourish. 4 More recently, including Muslims among “The Children of Abraham.”

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Hegelian theology completed the task begun by Leibniz’s Theodicy, attempting to demonstrate, by reason, that man can be elevated above the Divine and ultimately replace Him. In his attempt to free man from the power of revelation, Leibniz began his attack by defending God, the Creator, against the charge of being the reason for evil in the world. He returned to the classic question, “If God, why evil?” in a new way. In the past, evil had to be endured. Leibniz reasoned that God allows for evil because it increases the over-all goodness of His creation. In effect, evil contributes to making the world the best possible of worlds. But by allowing evil to be exonerated because it bettered the bad, Leibniz rendered evil no longer evil and allowed wickedness to be no longer wicked.5 Instead of being a Punishing God, Leibniz’s, and subsequently, Hegel’s, God was a Saving or Forgiving God. For Fackenheim, the perilous existence of the Jewish people as a whole is a reminder of the risks of interpreting God as simply a Saving or Forgiving God. The Jewish God is also a Commanding God. That is why Fackenheim conceived of his challenge as finding ways to disengage Jewish theology from being defined by Christian (i.e., Hegelian) theology. This was necessary not simply because Christianity had been open to historicity and therefore provided the development of liberal-secularism. It was also because history’s God is not a living Presence. Rather, Man was transformed into Spirit and Hegel’s notion of Spirit meant that God was internalized. He therefore and ceased to astonish and ceased to Command. As his critique of German Idealism showed, internalized Absolutes could not remain absolute,6 but broke down into multiple forms of skepticisms, from which humans sought an escape by fleeing to various forms of ideological fanaticism. It was the Nazi’s ideological fanaticism acted out against the Jews by the Nazis that compelled Fackenheim to attempt to restore the truth of traditional metaphysics and the certitude it provides. He concluded that he had to answer the question of whether “the doctrine of historicity necessitates the surrender of the age-old idea of timeless metaphysical truth.”7 To answer this question, Fackenheim investigated the grounds of historicity. Modern physical sciences focused on describing and predicting

5 6 7

Odo Marquard, In Defense of the Accidental, N.Y. Odeon, 1991, Chapter Two. GPH 83. MH 16.

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physical change. Historicity, as a doctrine, was rooted in an extrapolation from these sciences. It argued that since physical nature was an historical process, so was human nature. Human “being” is a self-making or self-constituting process. In acting, man makes himself. “Reality” could then be described as “Process.” In defense of traditional metaphysics, Fackenheim responded that “history may show that man is subject to historical change; it does not prove that his very being is involved in this change.”8 He concluded that the doctrine of historicity is not a generalization based on empirical evidence, but an alternative metaphysical thesis. But that discovery did not result in a clear choice for traditional metaphysics, since Hegel’s revolutionary logic had made itself immune from refutation by the principles of traditional, mathematical logic.9 Fackenheim was forced to conclude that modern humanity was faced with an unending battle between the metaphysics of Being and the metaphysics of becoming. That became apparent to him when he examined modern Christian theology and discovered that modern theologians were more inclined towards philosophy of history than towards traditional revelation. Worse, they justified radical politics in the name of social justice, just as Hegel had justified violence in the name of the Providential “End of History.” Fackenheim protested against this kind of thinking. After Auschwitz, he asked rhetorically, can anyone claim that war served the purposes of Providence? Fackenheim concluded that modern humanity is in the grip of a theological-political predicament, constituted by the linking of the infinite God to a particular, finite, flesh-and-blood people.10 But this conclusion meant that he had to address the claim by the Jews of being the Chosen People. In what sense could this be true? Is not the choosing of a finite people by an infinite God a logical absurdity? Fackenheim had to demonstrate why it wasn’t. In the doctrine of idolatry (identified in the Second Commandment of the Decalogue) and the rabbinic teaching of man’s evil inclination,

Ibid., 13. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hegel’s Dialectic, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1971. Stanley Rosen, G.W.F. Hegel, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1974, Chapters 1–6. 10 “The Theo-Political Predicament in the Light of Jewish Experience,” in JRH 176–187. 8 9

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Fackenheim demonstrated that Judaism was a reminder of the perpetual presence of depravity.11 He argued that this meant that the metaphysics of becoming was not impartial in its quest for achieving the universal. Hegel had claimed to have reconciled past with present and promised an end to the master-slave dialectic, that is, the end of the opposition or the division between friends and enemies, and thus the End of History. He envisioned the possibility of Perpetual Peace with the creation of Universal State. When compared with Judaism, Fackenheim observed, Hegel’s Universal State, or the End of History, could only be built on mounds of dead bodies and dead faiths, among them Jews and Judaism. Fackenheim’s analysis of the grounds of historicity exposed the possibility of understanding the Holocaust’s uniqueness as based on the belief, by Hitler, that he could produce the End of History by exterminating the Jews, the people who he believed were the sole protectors of the metaphysics of Being. It was the resistance to assimilation on the part of the Jews after being offered citizenship that threatened the truth claims of historicity and stimulated ideological fanaticism, turning the Jews into the Providential, that is, the metaphysical Enemy. The only solution was the elimination of the one rival that was the reminder of the truth of human depravity. By this analysis Fackenheim concluded that the Holocaust was the first example of philosophic or metaphysical murder. Unlike the murders associated with the French Revolution, in this instance a political leader claimed to lead the metaphysical People, in an attempt to exterminate its metaphysical Rival.12

11 Here Fackenheim seems to follow Maimonides, who, in the Guide for the Perplexed, wrote that Idolatry was not an intellectual defect, but one of failed responsiveness to the Divine, the result of turning away from the habits and training induced by the Law (Torah). My thanks to Reid Heller for suggesting to me the continuity between Maimonides and Fackenheim. 12 As evidence of this claim, Fackenheim identified specific concrete examples of why, for one thing, the Nazis chose the killing of Jews over the effort to win the war. That was evidenced by the massive effort to deport Jews to the death camps even after it became clear to them that they would lose the war. Animal “instinct” for pure survival would have compelled a different behavior. Secondly, the Nazis turned the killing of Jews into the production of products, such as soap and lampshades. (The great Irony of the Nazis is that they became their Enemy, since in turning Jewish deaths into industries, they became what they demonized the Jews most of being—profiteers. In effect, they became like the Jews they despised.)

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Fackenheim strengthened his claim that the Holocaust was a metaphysical murder and therefore unique in human history, by refuting the secularist claims that the Holocaust was one more example of a lapse into “atavistic tribalism.” Such an explanation denied the reality and meaningfulness of the Biblical prohibition of idolatry. Modern secularists dismiss idolatry because modern science claims to be capable of “demythologizing” all idols. Religiously, idolatry had been dismissed because the actions of the Nazis—the Holocaust—have been interpreted as sin. But Fackenheim reminded us that, Biblically, sin is not idolatry.13 Fackenheim recalled the Second Commandment, which only exists because it follows the first. The Second Commandment reveals God as a jealous God. (By contrast, he noted, Hegel’s God is not envious, but universally tolerant.) Idolatry is worship of nonexistent gods, something that the Torah and Talmud find unintelligible. It involves the act of projection—projecting a feeling of fear, hope, pleasure or pain—onto an external object and then worshipping that object. In effect, by means of the projection, the object (Idol) takes on a life of its own. What makes it an idol is that it is finite and not infinite. The projection is initially the projection of animal passions. But what turns the projection into idolatry is that a dimension of infinity is added. There are examples of religious symbols in the Bible, such as the burning bush. A religious symbol expresses the inexpressible, but it does so inadequately. An idol, unlike a finite religious symbol, is Divine in itself. The attitude projected towards it is not symbolic, but literal and involves merging the finite and infinite. The idolater makes a total commitment to the idol, such as did the Nazis in Germany, when they linked the Volk and the Führer and claimed, thereby to have created a higher self. In light of idolatry, Fackenheim disputed the secularist-liberal ideology that explains Nazi Anti-Semitism as merely the result of ordinary prejudice. On the contrary, he argued, it is implacable hatred and mass murder elevated to pseudo-religious absoluteness as an end-in-itself, pursued even at the risk of losing the war. It is the demonic assertion that there is no God and therefore everything is permitted. It was this insight into idolatry that I believe provided the rationale for Fackenheim’s issuing the 614th Commandment. Jews are obligated

13

EJM Chapter 4.

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to survive and to insure that Judaism survives. That survival, however, must not be just physical survival; it must include, if not be guided by, the desire for spiritual survival. Fackenheim argued that spiritual survival required the revival of courage, by means of transcendental inspiration. (That is why his writing has the tone of a Biblical Prophet.) If the Jewish People is to survive, it must make a compelling case for its own survival, not just to fellow Jews, but to all of humanity. That is possible, he argued, only by recovering its self-understanding as a metaphysical People and become a “light unto the Nations” by demonstrating the political dangers, for all people, of abandoning the truth taught by the Second Commandment. Fackenheim’s task, in light of the 614th Commandment, therefore, was to transform the Jews from an historical People back to their roots as a metaphysical People. The metaphysical People must reject the idea of being an historical People, even while it lives among historical Peoples. In the end, the 614th Commandment was a commandment for spiritual sovereignty. Fackenheim’s call for the 614th is a call for the courage to force that separation and in doing so, support the Divinely promised immortality of the Jewish People. At stake was the question of what was authoritative for the Jewish People. For example, for many modern Jews, Passover is an obligatory holiday. While the telling of the story of God’s Saving Presence at the Passover Seder is meant to recreate that sense of astonishment, it is not evident that this is the meaning most commonly attributed to it. Rather, it is interpreted as a celebration of freedom. No more evidence need be adduced that freedom is the highest goal than to notice that the Biblical holiday that follows Passover, Shavuot (Festival of Weeks), which commemorates the giving of the Torah, is honored more in the breach than in the observance. This reveals the diminished importance of God’s Commanding Presence in modern Jewish life. It is an indication of the degree to which liberal-secularism has affected and is continuing to affect American Jews and the degree to which Christianity, but especially American Christianity, has silently redefined what Judaism in America is. Fackenheim’s perception of a dire emergency regarding the life and death of Judaism in a post-Holocaust world compelled him to consider some of the same issues taken up by the late Berlin law professor and political theologian Carl Schmitt, even though he came to some radically different conclusions.

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Carl Schmitt’s rebellion against liberalism was a rebellion against the neutralization of all morality brought about by historicity. He attacked the concept of culture because it portrayed the political as one of several equal modes of being. Instead, he argued that the political, by which he meant the division into friends and enemies, needed to be resurrected as the principle mode of existence, since all differences, be they ethical, economic, social or even aesthetic, could be politicized. For Schmitt, only in the recovery of the political could morality be recovered, and the morality that he sought to recover had the characteristic of being a Commandment. Schmitt’s attempt to recover the political meant that he supported the legitimacy of fighting and, potentially, killing. The result of his recovery of metaphysical politics was the Holocaust. Fackenheim, like Schmitt, issued a Commandment out of a sense that there was a dire emergency. But unlike Schmitt, Fackenheim issued a Commandment that was not meant to inspire physical fighting and killing, but rather, to inspire spiritual resistance to the metaphysics of becoming. Fackenheim sought to insure the courage to resist it by making a case for the belief that an external transcendent God still made Himself present.14 He challenged the belief that in the modern world transcendence had been lost beyond all chance of recovery. That belief is predicated on the way modern science understands itself as the search for uniformities in an effort to control nature. Seeking control, scientists don’t seek transcendence, since that exists “above” nature (meta—physis). When a modern scientist hears of claims of transcendence, what is “other-than-human” and “higher than-human,” as for example, in the language of the mystics, he (or she) is inclined to claim the experience can be accounted for as feeling projected onto reality, that is, as pure subjectivity. The voices of the Divine Presence are, therefore, merely human voices. Divine promises are interpreted by scientists as the mere projection of human hopes. Modern scientific and historical humanity, Fackenheim asserted, has lost the capacity for radical surprise. In fact, humanity is no longer even open to surprise,15 as were the Biblical Israelites who experienced

This is the theme of QPF. Curiously, in the Introduction to JRH, he reports a change in his own thinking. In an earlier book, QPF, he had not taken on the challenge that he is taking on in this book, which is the repudiation of the view that modern men can be immune from, and indifferent to, the accidents of “mere history,” xi. 14 15

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“epoch-making events,” such as the Saving Presence of God at the Red Sea and His Commanding Presence at Sinai. Fackenheim offered as evidence that radical surprise is still possible in the modern world, the Jewish response to the threat of annihilation of Israel in 1967. From the Diaspora, Jewish students left for Israel; older men mortgaged their homes; Jewish spokesmen risked offending Christian friends by screaming. All previous divisions within the Jewish community dissolved into one that divided those willing to stand up for Israel and those unwilling to do so. What those who stood up shared was the resolve not to let a second Holocaust occur. This was not simply group loyalty, he says. It was “a commanding Voice (that) speaks from Auschwitz. . . . in the form of Absolute Command.”16 What does the Voice command? That Jews must survive as Jews; that they must remember the martyrs of the Holocaust; that they must not deny or despair of God; and that they must not despair of the world as the place that is to become the kingdom of God. Since liberal secularists wouldn’t accept the Law as Command based on reason, Fackenheim was compelled to support his own Commandment with what he noted Nietzsche and Heidegger had turned to in their later writings—poetry. In Fackenheim’s case, that meant a turn to Midrash, an ever-present form of inquiry in Jewish history. This “turn,” ironically revealed that for him the best that philosophy could do is to prepare the ground for poetry, which Fackenheim expressed in the form of the 614th Commandment. Midrash, he claimed, is “the expression of a doubly representational religious existence.”17 It contains the “logical and literary forms from which it can preserve the ‘root experiences,’ despite contradictions.”18 Through stories, it acknowledges contradictions and expresses those contradictions. But Midrash does not attempt to dissolve them. Midrash keeps the unknown and unexplainable alive. It therefore is the source of what Fackenheim describes as “double astonishment”— both the experience of terror and the experience of joy. Fackenheim contrasted these experiences with scientific and historical curiosity, which is satisfied when a causal relationship is established and an explanation

16 17

125. 18

Ibid., 109. “Demythologizing and Remythologizing in Jewish Experience,” in JRH 112– GPH 18.

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of events is provided.19 In Midrash, Fackenheim discovered the dialectical relationship between present and past, which exists when the astonishment of past events is re-enacted and transcends the dichotomy of nature v. history. Hegel had taken Christianity as the Absolute Religion because it is, in his terms, doubly representational: God is man, so what seems the act of a human is God’s act, and vice versa. But the converse is simultaneously true. Fackenheim demonstrated why Judaism too is a doubly representational religious experience. He did so by means of a citation from Martin Buber’s I and Thou. Each human is given over to God and at the same time knows that the “giving over” depends on himself. So the Divine and the human live together in their Otherness and their Sameness. He cited three Midrashic stories, all of which aim to demonstrate why the survival of the Jewish People is a human imperative. Rabbi Azaryiah and Rabbi Aba in the name of Rabbi Yochanan said: When the Israelites heard at Sinai the word “I” [i.e., the first word of the ten Commandments], their souls left them, as it says, “If we hear the voice . . .any more, then we shall die” (Deut. 5:22). . . . The Word then returned to the Holy One, blessed be He, and said: “Sovereign of the universe, Thou art full of life, and Thy law is full of life, and Thou hast sent me to the dead, for they are all dead.” Thereupon, the Holy One, blessed be He, sweetened [i.e. softened] I the Word for them. Rabbi Sim’on bar Yohai said: . . . “Only when Israel does God’s will is His heavenly place secure.” . . . Nevertheless, Rabbi Sim’on bar Yochai also quoted “This is my Lord and I will praise him” (Exod. 15:2), and he said: “When I praise Him, He is glorified, and when I do not praise Him, He is, as it were, glorified in Himself.” “Ye are My witnesses, saith the Lord, and I am God.” (Isa. 43:12). That is, when ye are My witnesses, I am God, and when ye are not My witnesses I am, as it were, not God.’

Having repeated these stories, Fackenheim asked: What if the People Israel failed to witness God? There would no longer be a Covenant. This loss would be permanent were the Jewish People to disappear. Yet in the third story God indicates that without man, God is not God. Transcendence and infinitude would give way to historicity and man-made values. That condition is the condition that the Nazis believed they had achieved. But as Fackenheim pointed out, Nazism

19

Ibid., 41.

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internalized the idolatrous identification of finiteness and infinitude: the Führer embodied the Volk and the Volk realized itself in total sacrifice on behalf of the Führer. There was no Otherness between Volk and Führer. But because both were finite, Fackenheim claimed that Nazism was a kind of idolatry. To demonstrate that the God who issued a Commandment prohibiting idolatry was still alive, Fackenheim offered his own Midrash. It was about a visit he made with friends to Bergen-Belsen, then to Jerusalem in 1970. One of his friends reported to him of having gone to the Western Wall at 6 a.m. and being greeted by an old Jew who invited him to a celebration with schnapps and cookies. Each time the friend went to the Western Wall at that time of the morning he met the same old Jew and was invited to the same celebration. When inquiring about what kind of celebration it was, the old Jew said that he had survived Auschwitz and that he was a Kohain (Priest) and it is an obligation of the Priests to invoke the blessing of God on his People. He was obligated to hold this celebration every morning for as long as he lived. Fackenheim told the story, he said, because it was a sign the covenant between God and the Jewish People still exists. To conclude: Fackenheim’s challenge was to put Hitler on trial and at the same time prevent moral inversion. Was he successful? When we search for criteria of success, we discover that Fackenheim’s 614th Commandment leaves us with a paradox. Jewish survival is a duty, and after Auschwitz, is an act of faith. But the preservation of Judaism by means of remembering the Holocaust is not an end in itself. The Holocaust must be treated as more than an historical catastrophe to the Jewish People. It must be treated as a trans-historical metaphysical truth. That means that when Jews speak of the Holocaust to gentiles, they should speak of more than the murder of the six million. To limit the understanding of the Holocaust to that number merely invites comparisons of what People suffered most, that is, whose tragedy is the worst. In characterizing the Holocaust as the presence of depravity, and as a reminder of depravity, it may be possible to open the door to creating a genuine inter-religious dialogue aimed at finding consensus that humanity forgets depravity at everyone’s peril. Jews must transform victimization into testimony against modern demonic evil, everywhere. In saying this, Fackenheim directed Jews to turn from themselves to the world—to events like Hiroshima and Martin Luther King’s assassination. The imperative is to be open to the Commanding Voice that

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reveals to all—religious and secular alike—that humanity is created in God’s image and is therefore not self-made. If Jews are to be a “light unto the Nations,” it would be better to recognize that Fackenheim’s Commandment is a Commandment to recognize that “the Jewish problem” is “the human problem” and that the existence of depravity, without the hope for Divine Redemption in an unknown and unpredictable future, makes human life tragic. Modern Jews confront this tragic sense with an expression of hope, which is also a call to act: “Tikkun Olam.” But this should be translated, not as redeeming the world, but as Fackenheim himself noted in the title of his book To Mend the World. While Jews are obligated to work for redemption, it will not be brought about solely by human action. In the end, in spite of our best efforts, Jews have no choice but to wait for the Day of Redemption, when the chance of Hitler achieving a posthumous victory will no longer be a possibility. The falsity of the belief that humans as humans are not inherently dangerous will become evident, he argued, only if there will be “true peace for the state of Israel. (That will be) the final defeat of Hitler.” Until then, the continued struggle to maintain the existence of the Jewish people is binding on all of us.

PART TWO

THE PHILOSOPHICAL DIMENSION OF FACKENHEIM’S THOUGHT

HISTORICISM AND REVELATION IN EMIL FACKENHEIM’S SELF-DISTANCING FROM LEO STRAUSS Martin D. Yaffe I In what follows, I look at the strictly philosophical component in Emil Fackenheim’s Jewish thought.1 I ask: What does Fackenheim say we need to know—or can in principle come to know—about God and the world and human beings by our own unaided efforts, as distinct from what we are told or seem to be told about these things by the Torah or by Jewish tradition? In other words, what are his strictly philosophical views, as opposed to his Jewishly derived or Jewishly inspired views? A simpler way of asking this question might be to ask, using an oldfashioned term: What is Fackenheim’s natural theology? But this way of asking is too simple, since Fackenheim stands in a philosophical tradition that denies the instructiveness of the term nature in connection with theology. It is the tradition of post-Kantian German philosophy, including such thinkers as Hegel, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger (as well as Buber and Rosenzweig), to whom Fackenheim typically turns to clarify philosophical difficulties. What then is it, according to that tradition and to Fackenheim himself, which prevents or pre-empts the philosophical appeal to nature as found in the theological arguments of, say, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and especially Maimonides? The quick answer is history. But, again, this answer is too quick, since what is meant by it is this: Philosophical insights—including above all those

1 I find it hard, though sometimes necessary, to be in occasional disagreement with my teachers, especially a saintly if rigorous teacher like Emil Fackenheim. As a way of corroborating this necessity, I cite a Hasidic tale told to me impromptu and freely adapted to my circumstance by Professor Fackenheim—as I then knew him, though as an even younger person I knew him as Rabbi Fackenheim: “A great Zaddik was asked why he did not follow the example of his teacher in his own way of life. The Zaddik replied: ‘On the contrary, I do follow his example. For just as he left his teacher, so I leave mine.’ ” See QPF 187, with Gershom G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1946), 348.

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that appeal to nature—are at bottom so embedded in the particulars of this or that historical setting, that as the setting of, say, an Aquinas or a Maimonides passes, i.e., as time moves on, the philosophical insights of an Aquinas or a Maimonides need replacing so as to clear the way for us to make the necessarily independent effort to understand ourselves in our own particular setting here and now. Philosophy, accordingly, is overtaken by history. It is this last view, otherwise known as historicism, which attracts Fackenheim’s philosophical attention and to which he devotes his Metaphysics and Historicity of 1961.2 I will say more in a moment about Fackenheim’s effort in Metaphysics and Historicity to clarify, criticize and rehabilitate the historicist view. Meanwhile, if we ask historically or biographically what fi rst led Fackenheim, as a young rabbinical student in Berlin in the mid-1930s, to look to philosophy as a—or the—way to understand the truth of Judaism, we learn that it was his reading of Leo Strauss’s Philosophie und Gesetz (Philosophy and Law) of 1935.3 Much of what Fackenheim says about philosophy in general and historicism in particular stands out all the more clearly, the more one realizes that it is not only stimulated, but also anticipated and perhaps even superseded, by what Strauss says on those same subjects. I have in mind especially Fackenheim’s 1967 essay called “The Historicity and Transcendence of Philosophical Truth,”4 written in response to a personal letter from Strauss to the effect that Metaphysics and Historicity falls short in coming to grips with Heidegger’s historicism—a shortcoming that Fackenheim appreciatively concedes, even as he bends his efforts to face and fix it on his own.5 At this point I should emphasize that, in speaking as I do (in my title) of Fackenheim’s “self-distancing” from Strauss, I do not mean that Fackenheim is, by his own lights, a deviant or apostate “Straussian.”

2 MH is also found in GW 122–47. In what follows I cite both sources, separated by an “or.” 3 “Leo Strauss and Modern Judaism,” JPJP 97–105; cf. MW viii. Strauss, Philosophie und Gesetz: Beiträge zum Verständnis Maimunis und seine Vorläufer (Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1935); Philosophy and Law: Contributions to the Understanding of Maimonides and his Predecessors, trans. E. Adler (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1997). In what follows, I cite both the German original and the English translation, separated by an “or.” 4 Proceedings of the 7th International Congress of Philosophy I (Laval, Que., 1967): 77–92; reprinted in GW 148–63. 5 See GW 151. The letter seems to have been lost, although, if I may speak anecdotally, I recall Professor Fackenheim reading part of it aloud to me. Among other things, the letter praised the rigor of Fackenheim’s argument, in contrast to the less-than-formidable arguments of those whom Strauss called “the plum-soft existentialists.”

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On the contrary, while considering Strauss’s own critique of historicism—which Strauss makes in terms of what we may call the natural resistance to historicism of the pre-modern philosophical tradition stemming from Socrates—Fackenheim holds his ground, i.e., stays close to the historicism or near-historicism of the post-Kantians. Even so, given the biographical circumstances I have been calling attention to, the question I find myself facing is this: Is Fackenheim’s modified historicist view of philosophy better understood in terms of his own Metaphysics and Historicity and related writings, or in terms of Strauss’s Philosophie und Gesetz and related writings?6 To bring this question more fully into view, I proceed as follows. First, I briefly set Fackenheim’s autobiographical remarks about what he owes to Strauss’s Philosophie und Gesetz alongside Strauss’s larger argument in that book. Second, I compare the main points of Fackenheim’s treatment of historicism in Metaphysics and Historicity with some main points of Strauss’s parallel treatment in Chapter I of his Natural Right and History of 1953 (the chapter is called “Natural Right and the Historical Approach”).7 Finally, I consider Fackenheim’s second-thoughts of 1967 concerning Heidegger’s historicism in the light of Strauss’s explicit critique of Heidegger in his 1962 Preface to the English translation of his Die Religionskritik Spinozas (Spinoza’s Critique of Religion), originally published in 1930.8 II Autobiographically speaking, Fackenheim expresses a debt to Strauss’s Philosophie und Gesetz for first awakening him to the question of revelation in Judaism as a pressing philosophical question. By way of explanation, he recalls how his scholarly mentors at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (“Academy for the Science of Judaism”) spoke of traditional Jewish teachings—including creation, miracles and revelation—only as 6 For a penetrating discussion of Fackenheim’s relation to Strauss as regards his subsequent To Mend the World (1973) and related writings, see Kenneth Hart Green, “Leo Strauss’s Challenge to Emil Fackenheim: Heidegger, Radical Historicism, and Radical Evil,” pp. 125–60 of this volume. 7 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 9–34. 8 Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, trans. E. Sinclair (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), 1–31; reprinted in Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 224–59. In what follows I cite both sources, separated by an “or.”

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historical relics that were no longer a live option for the present-day Jew, teachings they viewed as one might view a once-vibrant corpse: “Judaism is dead,” Fackenheim cites a founder of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement, Moritz Steinschneider (1816–1907), as having said; “scholarship means giving it a decent burial.”9 Strauss’s book, however, suggested to Fackenheim that the reports of Judaism’s death might be exaggerated. The reports would be true, he learned from Strauss, if the modern Enlightenment’s critique of religious orthodoxy were true. But the truth of the modern critique, on the one hand, and its historical victory over orthodoxy, on the other, were not quite the same thing, since sometimes victories are shoddy.10 Differently stated: Hegel, following Schiller, proclaimed that world history is the world’s judgment;11 but might not that proclamation need revising if it turned out that modern Enlightenment, unlike the medieval enlightenment represented above all by Maimonides, was not competent to deal with such matters as creation, miracles and revelation? This question of Strauss’s gave Fackenheim sufficient incentive to reopen the “dusty old books”12 of Jewish tradition with a philosophical seriousness that was missing from the scholarly approach of his Wissenschaft des Judentums mentors. Now it is important to add that Strauss’s case concerning the crisis of modern Judaism is inseparable from his case concerning the crisis of modern philosophy. The connection is as follows. The philosophical founders of modern Enlightenment—whose centerpiece is the modern natural science of Galileo, Descartes and Newton—won their victory, such as it was, over religious orthodoxy by claiming to have discredited the “natural” or unsophisticated “world-view” explicated by Aristotle and also shared by the Bible. The Bible’s own “world-view,” however, includes the belief in creation, miracles and revelation, whereas these

9 JPJP 98. Steinschneider’s words as reported by Gotthold Weil were: “Wir haben nur noch die Aufgabe, die Überreste des Judentums, ehrenvoll zu bestatten.” See Weil, “Moritz Steinschneider.” Jüdische Rundschau 6 (8.2.1907): 53–55; the sentence quoted is on p. 54. I am indebted to Alan Udoff for alerting me to this source. 10 Here Strauss, Philosophie und Gesetz, 17, n. 2, or Philosophy and Law, 137, n. 7, cites the beginning of G. E. Lessing’s “Gedanken über die Herrnhuter.” See Gotthold Ephraim Lessings Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Karl Lachmann, rev. Franz Muncker (3rd ed.; 23 vols. in 24; Stuttgart: G. J. Göschen, 1895), vol. XIV, 154 f. 11 G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §341 (trans. Alan White [Newburyport, Mass.: Focus Philosophical Library, 2002], 258); Friedrich Schiller, “Resignation” (in Schillers Werke in Zwei Bänden, [München: Drömerische Verlagsanstalt, 1964], vol. I, 41–44; see the second-last stanza). 12 JPJP 98. Cf. Strauss, Philosophie und Gesetz, 18, or Philosophy and Law, 29.

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in turn stand or fall with the belief in an omnipotent and unfathomable God—a belief that, being neither self-contradictory nor evidently counterfactual, is not refutable by strictly scientific means. To discredit the biblical “world-view” in particular, then, the philosophical founders of modern Enlightenment resorted to three purely defensive strategies: first, what we may call a know-nothing strategy, limited to indicating that miracles, etc., were not knowable scientifically; second, a rhetorical strategy of mockery, which subjected the belief in miracles, etc., to ridicule while disguising the fact that what was being ridiculed had not actually been refuted;13 and finally, a strategy of planned or projected obsolescence—of showing or trying to show that the biblical God was no longer needed. In Strauss’s words, this last was the attempt to prove that the world and life are perfectly intelligible without the assumption of an unfathomable God. That is, the refutation of orthodoxy required the success of a system. Man had to establish himself theoretically and practically as master of the world and master of his life; the world created by him had to erase the world merely “given” to him; then orthodoxy would be more than refuted—it would be “outlived.”14

To say all this another way: if Strauss is correct, removing the Bible’s unfathomable God from the world and from human life is not a theoretical consequence of the modern scientific project to become the “masters and possessors of nature,”15 but its practical motive or goad. This conclusion is not contradicted by the historical fact of philosophical “systems” that, out of a longing for the lost belief of the past, tried to reconcile the modern-scientific and biblical “world-views” by “internalizing” the notions of creation, miracles and revelation, i.e., by regarding creation, miracles and revelation as intellectual constructs rather than as given realities. For the modern-scientific “world-view” too is an intellectual construct—or rather a series of constructs, each of which is conceived both as an improved version of any and all previous constructs and as susceptible to progressive remodeling in turn. Nor is this all, for the inherently progressive or tentative character of such constructs16 13 Strauss ascribes the insight that the (supposed) refutation consisted entirely in the ridicule to Lessing. 14 Philosophie und Gesetz, 21, or Philosophy and Law, 31 f. (Italics added, M.Y.) 15 The expression is René Descartes’. See his Discourse on Method, Part 6, ¶ 2 (trans. Richard Kennington [Newburyport, Mass.: Focus Philosophical Library, 2007], 49). 16 In his “Introduction” to Moses Mendelssohn’s Morning Hours and To Lessing’s Friends, written in the mid-1930s for a volume in the Jubilee Edition of Mendelssohn’s collected works (Berlin, 1929 ff.) whose publication was suppressed in 1938 and so

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soon required modern philosophy, along with modern science, to give up its “claim to have brought to light the truth about the world ‘in itself.’ ”17 Instead it had to admit, in all honesty or probity, the interim status of those constructs—their radical contingency or “historicity.” Accordingly, modern atheism rests at bottom not on the simple truth of the modern-scientific “world-view”—for this “world-view” is by its own account only one historically contingent “world-view” alongside others—but on the recognition that all such “world-views,” including its own, are potential snares that seduce their adherents into taking a temporary construct for an eternal truth. In short, the crisis of modern Judaism according to Strauss has to do with Judaism’s having accommodated itself all-too-hastily to the inherently unstable views of modern constructivist philosophy or science.

delayed till 1973, Strauss remarks: “The transitoriness of all systems—for demonstrative philosophy necessarily took on the form of a system, the system of an I that, like Leibniz, could speak of ‘mon système’—seemed to suggest ‘that the sensation of beauty and order, or taste, is far more durable and reliable than reason or convictions about philosophical truths’.” (Strauss, “Einleiting zu ‘Morgenstunden’ und ‘An die Freunde Lessings’,” in Moses Mendelssohns Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe [27 vols. in 36; facsimile reprint and continuation, Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann Verlag/Günther Holzboog, 1971 ff.], vol. III, pt. 2, LXVI.) Concerning the delay, see Alexander Altmann’s “Vorbemerkung” to vol. III, pt. 2” VII ff. Strauss’s latter quotation is from Mendelssohn’s Abhandlung über die Evidenz in metaphysischen Wissenschaften, vol. II, 269 (Treatise on Evidence in Metaphysical Sciences, in Moses Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings, trans. D. O. Dahlstrom [Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 253). For Leibniz’s expression, see Essais de théodicée, Préface, in Philosophische Schriften, ed. Carl Gerhart, vol. VI, 40–45 passim (Theodicy, ed. A Farrer, trans. F. M. Huggard [La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1985], 64–69 passim). See also JA III.2, LXII. Mendelssohn’s turning to aesthetics—and eventually to “sound commonsense” ( gesunder Menschenverstand )—to offset the shortcomings of (Leibnizian) philosophical systematics prefigures Fackenheim’s turning to revelation for similar purposes in Metaphysics and Historicity (see note 20, below, along with my discussion in section III, below), as it does, say, Franz Rosenzweig’s in The Star of Redemption (see Karl Löwith, “M. Heidegger and F. Rosenzweig: A Postscript to Being and Time,” in Löwith, Nature, History and Existentialism [Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966], 51–78, especially 54–60). Mendelssohn’s lifelong “confrontation with the difficulties that resulted from the demonstrative [i.e., systematic] character of modern philosophy” ( JA III.2, LXIV) is a central theme of Strauss’s aforementioned “Introduction.” Given the delay in the publication of JA III.2 till 1973, I see no reason to suppose that Fackenheim was familiar with the details of Strauss’s Mendelssohn interpretation during the writing of Metaphysics and Historicity and “On the Historicity and Transcendence of Philosophical Truth” (notes 2 and 4, above), though I have no way of knowing the full scope of Strauss’s occasional conversations with Fackenheim prior to these writings (cf. JPJP 100–102). 17 Philosophie und Gesetz, 22, or Philosophy and Law, 33.

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III Fackenheim’s Metaphysics and History aims at salvaging the intellectual integrity of post-Kantian constructivist philosophy—in its “existential” version, at least—by tracing its metaphysical pedigree. Given that Fackenheim sees the pertinent line of metaphysical thought as originating in Christian theologians like Jakob Böhme,18 it may not be entirely surprising that he concludes that biblical revelation, or at any rate a philosophical openness to that revelation, is indispensable for metaphysics here and now. In any case, I can only do partial justice to the subtlety, delicacy, consistency and penetration of Fackenheim’s argument, by showing (in less-refined language, perhaps) how it addresses the crisis concerning the metaphysical roots of modern thought as spelled out in Strauss’s Philosophie und Gesetz—what might be called the gap between promise and performance in modernity’s attempt to do away with the biblical God. The metaphysical concept Fackenheim discerns in Böhme and the post-Kantians is that of a self-creating God, a God characterized above all by the freedom to do what He wills—who creates Himself ex nihilo and will be what He will be, whose being therefore follows from His actions rather than vice versa, and whose image or likeness exists in each of His human creatures. Human beings as individuals, then, share in that same freedom rather than in any fixed or common nature. Fackenheim’s argument shows how human beings, so understood, find themselves in a setting that constrains them, or both forces and limits their choices, in at least three ways at the same time. Partly it is a setting that is not of their own making but which they can and must remake, or make their own, to some extent: this is, metaphysically speaking, their natural setting. Partly, too, it is a setting that is of their making collectively: this is their historical setting. And partly it is a setting where each individual must choose among the limited possibilities for thinking and acting which history provides then and there, so that each in choosing makes and shapes his or her own personality. This last setting, or this last feature of human beings’ overall situation, is that of the human individual as such. Derivatively, it is also that of the philosophizing individual, the individual in search of wisdom or comprehensive self-understanding. Even so, if the threefold analysis just

18

MH 30 f., n. 20, or GW 220 f., n. 21.

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given of the overall human situation is accurate and complete, then it is evidently impossible for any individual to arrive at such wisdom—or, what is the same thing, to know it when he or she got there—since a fortiori each individual is limited in the concepts from which to choose for articulating his or her self-understanding. Such, Fackenheim argues, is the human situation as understood by historicism; and simply to spell it out as a comprehensive teaching, as he does, is to expose its most obvious difficulty—namely, that it is self-contradictory in claiming to supply a comprehensive teaching that appears to be, on its own premises, unavailable. Either historicism as a shaky philosophical construct must be disowned, then, or it must undergo some structural repair to avoid collapsing in self-contradiction. In its own terms, Metaphysics and Historicity does both: it remodels historicism from the ground up so as to transform it into religious existentialism.19 It does so by adding a fourth component to the overall human situation already outlined. Individuals are sometimes called on to choose not just this or that action to add to their résumé of choices, in line with their established personality. On rare but all-important occasions, one faces choices that illuminate and possibly change one’s entire character, by altering one’s previous understanding of his or her life as a whole. What calls for such momentous choices is not to be found in one’s natural setting, for nature in historicism’s view is indifferent to questions of human self-understanding. Nor can such choices be understood as a product of one’s purely historical setting, where ex hypothesi everyone is more or less alike in being a creature of the time and no one is particularly singled out. Nor, finally, are the inducements for such choices merely something in one’s own, self-constituted and self-customized personality, since this is just what is being called into question by the impending choice. Nevertheless the burden to choose in such cases is placed on that individual alone, by some Other that calls for the choice yet leaves the individual free to choose appropriately—by making a choice that transparently establishes or renews the personal integrity of the chooser. Fackenheim capitalizes the first letter of the word “Other,” as if to leave little doubt that what singles out individuals by calling for such choices is the biblical God.20 Yet his argument, being philosophical rather than religious, is limited to pointing out the possibility (or perhaps the necessity) rather than the actuality of such 19 20

MH 62 ff. or GW 138 ff. MH 89 f. or GW 144.

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a call and of the trans-personal and trans-historical self-understanding that would accompany a proper response it. As for Strauss’s parallel critique of historicism in Natural Right and History, I touch on only two points. First, as Fackenheim himself would also read and acknowledge in Strauss’s personal letter, to dismiss historicism simply on the ground that it is self-contradictory is not adequate. Following the precedent set by Hegel, historicism in its most radical or atheist-existential version (namely, Heidegger’s)21 appeals to a privileged moment in history. In doing so, it does not and need not go so far as Hegel—who held that history has come to an end (with secularized Christianity and the modern administrative state), so that all philosophical riddles have been solved when looked at in hindsight, and philosophy is thereby transformed into wisdom pure and simple.22 Instead, dropping the Hegelian claim to have reached the end of history, radical historicism holds that, owing to the impossibility of seeing beyond the horizon of one’s own time, the basic philosophical riddles remain forever insoluble. Yet it avoids gross self-contradiction, by claiming that what discloses that insolubility is not philosophy so much as history itself, or at least the history of our own time.23 This disclosure, being essentially unpredictable and for all we know unrepeatable, is a unique and mysterious gift on the part of unfathomable fate. At any rate, it is not an achievement of the autonomous human mind. (Nor, we may add, is it a revelation on the part of the biblical God.)

21 In Natural Right and History, as in Philosophie und Gesetz, Strauss limits himself to analyzing Heidegger’s argument without so much as mentioning Heidegger’s name. If we consider this striking rhetorical fact together with the further fact that Strauss fails to provide a simple refutation of historicism but limits himself to investigating its principles, we may say that here, as there, his intent is rather to awaken a presumption in favor of non-historicist philosophy—by showing ad oculos that it is possible to separate the principles of an argument from its historical setting, at least in the case of Heidegger. Cf. Natural Right and History, 33, with Philosophie und Gesetz, 9, or Philosophy and Law, 21. 22 Cf. Natural Right and History, 29, 35, 96 n., 315 n. 23 Cf. GW 159 (on Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, 196): “. . . in the midst of its temporalhistorical condition, Dasein grasps the whole of its condition, in such ‘privileged’ disclosures as care, anxiety, death, ‘openness’ (Erschlossenheit), and ‘decisiveness’ (Entschlossenheit). These disclosures are privileged because in them Dasein comes to know the limitations within which it is. The knowledge, however, is not a rise above these limitations but rather their ‘authentic’ confrontation.” (The English italics and German interpolations are Fackenheim’s.) By “the whole of its condition,” Fackenheim (like Heidegger) seems to mean the whole of its condition as an individual; cf. Strauss’s point in my next paragraph, below.

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Second, then, Strauss infers that a satisfactory confrontation with radical historicism would have to begin by wondering whether it conceives history rightly in the first place. That is, is its nihilistic and atheistic claim—to the effect that the peculiar history of our time has laid bare an impenetrable opaqueness that surrounds and permeates human life—open to historical investigation? Could one, for example, trace the historical genesis of radical historicism with reasonable clarity? If so, we might at least be able to discover how far radical historicism is a product of its time. Such is the drift of Strauss’s own argument in Chapter I of Natural Right and History. He begins by differentiating historicism from the mere conventionalism, or moral relativism, of the ancient sophists (who, unlike modern historicists, did not deny the possibility of philosophy); and he goes on to find historicism’s immediate historical backdrop in the historiography of those nineteenth-century historians who regretted the upheaval of the French Revolution and, as conservatives, sought to redress the damage done from the promulgation of abstract and universal principles concerning natural right which underwrote the Revolution, by emphasizing instead the uniqueness of the various epochs of human history and the irreducibility of human life to such principles.24 Strauss suggests that those historians were hoping that history itself, or what would come to be called the “experience of history,” could generate alternative norms for understanding human life; but this did not happen, and, conservatives though they were (or that they were), they ended up sharing the same assumptions as their revolutionary predecessors and bequeathing them to subsequent historicists. Strauss spells out those shared assumptions as follows:

24 Strauss does not name these historians in Natural Right and History but limits himself to speaking of “the historical school.” In a footnote in the latter half of Natural Right and History’s concluding Chapter (VI.B, on Edmund Burke), he formulates the pertinent presupposition of that school by quoting Burke’s twentieth-century German translator Friedrich von Gentz as follows: “Konstitutionen können schlechterdings nicht gemacht werden, sie müssen sich, wie Natur-Werke, durch almahliche Entwicklung von selbst bilden. . . . Diese Wahrheit ist die kostbarste, vielleicht die einzige wirkliche neue (denn höchstens geahnt, aber nicht vollständig erkannt wurde sie zuvor), um welche die französische Revolution die höhere Staatswissenschaft bereichert hat” (313 n. 97; Strauss’s italics are not in his original source, von Gentz’s Staatswissenschaft und Briefe [2 vols.; Munich, 1921], vol. I, 344). [“Constitutions cannot simply be made; they must form themselves on their own, like works of nature, through gradual development. . . . This truth is the most valuable one, perhaps the only really new one ( for previously it had at best been suspected, but not fully understood ), concerning which the French Revolution has enriched higherlevel statesmanship.” (My translation, M.Y.)]

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It seems to us that what is called the “experience of history” is a bird’seye view of the history of thought, as that history came to be seen under the combined influence of the belief in necessary progress (or in the impossibility of returning to the thought of the past) and of the belief in the supreme value of diversity or uniqueness (or of the equal right of all epochs or civilizations).25

In other words, the aforementioned school of historians, like the revolutionaries who preceded and the historicists who followed, assumed uncritically, i.e., dogmatically, the (dubious) abstract and universal principles of the founders of modern Enlightenment—men like Hobbes and Locke, whom Strauss treats later on in Natural Right and History26— concerning the irreversibility of historical progress and the unassailability of human individuality. Stated most succinctly: historicism according to Strauss accepts unquestioningly the premises of modern individualism bequeathed by the Enlightenment. IV Certainly Fackenheim’s essay of 1967, in response to Strauss’s letter, does not contest that individualism (or, for that matter, call attention to it).27 Rather—if I may put Fackenheim’s question in somewhat figurative language—he limits himself to asking how Heidegger’s radical-atheistic existentialism in particular can claim to be located at a privileged moment in history, while lacking a source of light beyond itself by which to glimpse its location.28 Fackenheim construes his argument in terms of Plato’s well-known image of the cave.29 Or so he indicates by speaking repeatedly of history as that cave (albeit history 25 Natural Right and History, 22. Cf. Richard Kennington, “Strauss’s Natural Right and History,” in Leo Strauss’s Thought: Toward a Critical Engagement, ed. Alan Udoff (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1991), 233 f. 26 See Chapter V, “Modern Natural Right,” Part A (on Hobbes) and Part B (on Locke). 27 GW 149: “The present paper . . . treats the loss or surrender of eternal verities as merely a contingent fact.” 28 Cf., in general, GW 154: “How can philosophic thought be rooted in history, and emerge from history, and yet reach a truth which is transcendent? ” (The italics are Fackenheim’s.) Also, concerning Schelling, GW 150, with 233 n. 4: “. . . can the ‘Being’ which is beyond the ratio [i.e., beyond autonomous human reason as it engages in a search for ‘a radically universal, hence transhistorical, truth’], and to which the ratio points, both be beyond the ratio and yet establish rather than destroy the pointing ratio?” 29 Plato, Republic 514a–517a.

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as understood by historicism) and of the supra-historical truth needed for understanding history as the light shining into the cave from outside.30 Even so, he agrees with Heidegger rather than with Plato that whatever is outside the cave remains inaccessible as such to the wouldbe philosopher, i.e., not articulable on the part of unassisted human reason.31 Given in addition his citation from Hegel in the epigraph to his essay, which speaks of the unsettling implications of exposing the divine to the vicissitudes of history (as both Hegel and Fackenheim do),32 we may say that Fackenheim’s revised critique of Heidegger’s radicalatheistic existentialism is meant, at the same time, as a vindication of the religious existentialism of Metaphysics and Historicity. The vindication is as follows. Heidegger speaks of our time as one that has forgotten Being, although or because our forgetting is also fated as part of the (mysterious) history of Being. The task of recalling Being according to Heidegger is further impeded by language, the “house of Being,”33 which unfortunately is as historicized as Being itself. What is at stake in the recalling of Being is the integrity of what Heidegger calls Dasein (or of what Fackenheim would call the human situation), which requires a proper relationship to Being. A restored relationship may occur in the future, Heidegger allows. Meanwhile, however, language—and therefore reason—can only express the loss of that relationship poetically. Here Fackenheim points out that Heidegger leaves unclear what we are to make of his historicist poetics on strictly metaphysical, i.e., rational, grounds. Fackenheim implies that this difficulty might be surmounted by replacing Heidegger’s mysterious and implacable Being with the mysterious but not necessarily implacable Other (capitalized) of Metaphysics and Historicity. Since Strauss addresses

GW 151, 163. MH 90 or GW 144: “. . . existential metaphysics originates in the recognition of man’s human situation, as a dialectical mystery. . . . this metaphysics culminates in pointing to a vastly greater mystery, to the ultimate Other which situates man humanly. . . . The Other that is pointed to thus remains undefined, and is yet given names. But the names express mystery. They do not disclose it.” Contrast, e.g., Plato, Phaedo 99d ff. 32 GW 148: “Whenever we situate the divine within the historical, we always fall into the fluctuation and changeability that is proper to everything historical.” (See G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, ed. Georg Lasson [3 vols. in 5; Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1925–30], vol. I, 290; cf. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, trans. E. B. Speirs and J. Burdon Sanderson [3 vols.; London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1895; reprint; New York: Humanities Press, 1968], vol. I, 153.) 33 Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. and trans. David Farrell Krell (rev ed.; San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993), 216. 30 31

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this same issue in his parallel vindication, as far as it goes, of religious existentialism in his Spinoza Preface, let me turn there for possible further illumination. The issue comes up during a controversy Strauss reports between Heidegger and Buber over biblical revelation. Strauss ultimately traces the controversy to both parties’ uncritical acceptance of the doctrinaire individualism bequeathed by the Enlightenment—in a manner reminiscent of what he had argued earlier in Philosophie und Gesetz. Looking at Strauss’s direct comments on this controversy through the foreground of Fackenheim’s Metaphysics and Historicity lets us see something similar about the upper reaches or outer limits of Fackenheim’s own philosophical systematics, the crossover point where it appeals to biblical revelation to save it from historicism. Buber questions a claim of Heidegger’s to the effect that the biblical prophets appeal to God above all as the source of their hearers’ security. Heidegger’s claim is meant to fit with his overall view, in the wake of the Death of God as proclaimed by Nietzsche, that no such security is possible, i.e., that any such appeal would necessarily go unanswered.34 For Heidegger, the prophets’ appeal to God amounts to a futile escapism motivated by their resentment at human helplessness in the face of the transitoriness of things.35 What catches Strauss’s eye in the ensuing controversy is how Buber’s reply to Heidegger concedes a presupposition of Heidegger’s which Buber, with his own claim to a superior knowledge of the Bible, ought to have called into question. Buber replies that, contrary to what Heidegger claims, the prophets too aim at shattering their hearers’ sense of security. Buber’s reasoning is, or includes, that even having the temple of God in one’s midst is not a sufficient refuge against God’s unwished for moral demands aimed at restoring human integrity (in the manner we have already seen spelled out by Fackenheim).36 Remarkably, in his reply Buber not only does 34 As Strauss notes in passing, Heidegger replaces God by death (Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 11, or Liberalism Ancient and Modern, 235 f.). See also Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, trans. Marcus Brainard (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 45–51. 35 Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 11, or Liberalism Ancient and Modern, 235. As Strauss puts it, for Heidegger “there is no security, no happy ending, no divine shepherd; hope is replaced by thinking; the longing for eternity or belief in anything eternal is understood as stemming from ‘the spirit of revenge,’ from the desire to escape from all passing away into something that never passes away.” 36 Martin Buber, Eclipse of God (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957), 73: “The prophets of Israel . . . have always aimed to shatter all security and to proclaim in the

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not question the Heideggerian view that restoring human integrity requires that each human being be brought to face “the opened abyss of the final insecurity,”37 but ascribes this same view to the biblical prophets. At this point, Strauss finds himself siding with Heidegger, on the grounds that while the Bible teaches that (in Strauss’s words) “the security afforded by the temple of God is nothing,” it adds that “the security afforded by God is everything,” i.e., that despite appearances to the contrary there is particular providence and that human beings who trust in God are not completely forsaken.38 Why, Strauss wonders, does Buber skew or shortchange the biblical teaching here, as if trying to compete with Heidegger in inflating the terrifying while depreciating the comforting?39 The answer, Strauss suggests, has to do with how Buber reads God’s explicit promises or covenants in the Bible. Buber holds that everything the Bible says is what the human authors of the Bible say, even when God Himself is said to say it (the Ten Commandments, for example), on the premise that revelation per se, or rather the “experience” of revelation, is ineffable and therefore calls for interpretation that the revelation does not as such supply. Yet if so, Strauss infers, all interpretations, Jewish ones included, are man-made and “merely believed” rather than known to be true.40 But if this is the case, then such interpretations by no means escape the Heideggerian opened abyss of the final insecurity [sic] the unwished for God who demands that His human creatures become real, they become human, and confounds all who imagine that they can take refuge in the certainty that the temple of God is in their midst.” Cited by Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 10, or Liberalism Ancient and Modern, 234. Cf. notes 19, 23 and 31, above. 37 See the passage of Buber’s cited in the previous note. 38 Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 10, or Liberalism Ancient and Modern, 234 f.: “Surely the Bible teaches that in spite of all appearances to the contrary the world is guided by God or, to use the traditional term, that there is particular providence, that man is protected by God if he does not put his trust in flesh and blood but in God alone, that he is not completely exposed or forsaken, that he is not alone, that he has been created by a being which is, to use Buber’s expression, a Thou.” 39 Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 11, or Liberalism Ancient and Modern, 235. Strauss implies that it is a competition that Buber would likely lose, and indicates that seeking a competition is not the same as seeking the truth: “The controversy can easily degenerate into a race in which he wins who offers the smallest security and the greatest terror and regarding which it would not be difficult to guess who will be the winner. But just as an assertion does not become true because it is shown to be comforting, it does not become true because it is shown to be terrifying.” See also notes 33 and 34, above. 40 Cf. Strauss’s comparable critique of Rosenzweig’s Bible interpretation, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 14, or Liberalism Ancient and Modern, 238 f.: “The sacred law, as it were the public temple, which was a reality thus becomes a potential, a quarry or a storehouse out of which each individual takes the materials for building up his private shelter.”

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suspicion (in Strauss’s words) “of being attempts to render bearable and harmless the experience which admittedly comes from without down upon man and is undesired; or of being attempts to cover over man’s radical unprotectedness, loneliness and exposedness.”41 To sum up the bearing of Strauss’s comments so far: If the Buber-Heidegger controversy is a template for the Fackenheim-Heidegger controversy, or insofar as it is,42 it is hard to resist the inference that Fackenheim’s philosophical appeal to the biblical God qua Other for the purpose of correcting Heidegger’s radical historicism is at the same time a theologically dubious accommodation of the biblical God to that historicism. Nevertheless Strauss defends Buber. By Heidegger’s own philosophical standards (or lack of them, as Fackenheim might say), isn’t Heidegger’s atheism as much “merely believed” as Buber’s theism, Strauss asks, and isn’t “being based on belief, which is the pride of religion, a calamity for philosophy?”43 Strauss adds that Heidegger follows Nietzsche in resting his critique of the Bible on his own personal “probity,” i.e., intellectual honesty or integrity (Redlichkeit), yet probity is not the same as philosophy pure and simple; historically speaking, it is a biblical virtue, part of biblical morality, which, as Nietzsche also points out, needs for Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 11 f., or Liberalism Ancient and Modern, 236. Subsequently, in EJM 221 f., Fackenheim “go[es] beyond Buber” to elaborate the rivalry between Buber and Heidegger here as that between the former’s Jewish and the latter’s post-Christian views of salvation: “Each has a radical insecurity and a radical terror. The two insecurities and terrors, however, are not the same. Heidegger’s pagan insecurity is total because the future is wholly open to all possible gods. Buber’s Judaism does not share this total insecurity because, knowing that some gods will always be false, it refuses to be wholly open even now. On its part, however, this Judaism has a total insecurity of its own. This is the possibility that it might itself mistake false gods for the true God, and of this insecurity Heidegger shows not a trace. Which of these two insecurities inspires the greater terror? This question, today, divides the religious world.” (The italics are Fackenheim’s.) Examining Heidegger’s “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry” (in Heidegger, Existence and Being, trans. W. Brock [London: Vision Press, 1949]), Fackenheim goes on to defend Buber’s “Jewish” insecurity against Heidegger’s “pagan” insecurity as follows: In attributing to the poets the gift of naming the gods, a gift that has unfortunately been withdrawn till future notice, Heidegger overlooks the biblical God, who ( pace Heidegger) is hardly the mere product of human naming, since He not only can and does speak on His own, but also both creates the world in which human beings exist and establishes the Jewish people as a world-historical people (and contra Heidegger does the latter not merely by speaking). Cf. the comparable critique of Heidegger’s paganism by Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 235–61, with EJM 219 f. In all this, however, Fackenheim does not exactly face the issue at stake which Strauss is articulating, namely, the seeping of radical historicism into an interpretation of biblical revelation supposedly meant to offset the philosophical shortcomings of radical historicism. 43 Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 11 f., or Liberalism Ancient and Modern, 236. 41 42

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its intelligibility the support of the biblical God.44 In short, the biblical God turns out to be indispensable even or especially on Heideggerian premises, and so Buber would seem to win this argument (as, of course, would Fackenheim). Even so, the victory has a price—namely, as we have seen, inflating the personalizing or individualizing, i.e., historicizing of the Bible, at the expense of the public teaching of the Bible, i.e., of revelation as a putatively public phenomenon.45 Is this historicizing, in turn, philosophically defensible? Strauss finds much of the philosophical basis for it, such as it is, not in the post-Kantians to whom Fackenheim defers but in Spinoza, to whom his overall discussion here is devoted.46 Then again, Spinoza’s argument according to Strauss shares in the largely defensive and non-refutative character he

44 Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 12 f., or Liberalism Ancient and Modern, 236 f. Strauss cites, inter alia, Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §§343–44 (trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Random House, 1974], 279–83), Beyond Good and Evil, §227 (trans. Kaufmann, Basic Writings of Nietzsche [New York: Random House, 1967], 345 f.), and On the Genealogy of Morals, Part III, §27. (ibid., 595–97). Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 48f., comments: “Once intellectual probity is emancipated from the love of truth, the good—or bad—conscience becomes the highest court of appeal [inappellablen Instanz]. The comfort taken in one’s own resoluteness, fortitude, conscientiousness takes the place of binding knowledge. . . . Heidegger’s orientation towards ‘death or nothingness’ as the unoutstrippable, all-decisive possibility of being that each Dasein ‘enters into’ is no less suited than the religious reliance on the ‘wholly other’ [die religiöse Inanspruchnahme durch das ‘Ganz Andere’ ] ‘to cover over man’s radical unprotectedness, loneliness, and exposedness,’ to whose defense, after all, that orientation seems to have devoted itself.” (I have modified Brainard’s translation slightly; for the interpolations, see Heinrich Meier, Das theologische-politische Problem: Zum Thema von Leo Strauss [Stuttgart: Metzler, 2003], 78.) 45 See note 40, above. 46 See especially Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 16 f., 26 f., or Liberalism Ancient and Modern, 241, 252: “The philosophy of Kant’s great successors was consciously a synthesis of Spinoza’s and Kant’s philosophy. Spinoza’s characteristic contribution to this synthesis was a novel conception of God. He thus showed the way toward a new religion or religiousness which was to inspire a wholly new kind of society, a wholly new Church. He became the sole father of that new Church which was to be universal in fact, and not merely in claim as other churches, because its foundation was no longer any positive revelation—a Church whose rulers were not priests or pastors, but philosophers and artists and whose flock were the circles of culture and property.” “It must be added that according to Spinoza even the divine law in the strictest sense is of human origin; every law is prescribed by human beings to themselves or to other human beings.” On Spinoza as the philosophical founder of modern-scientific Bible criticism, see Strauss, “How to Study Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise,” in his Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1952), 142–201; reprinted in Leo Strauss: Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1997), 181–233. On Spinoza as the philosophical founder, in addition, of modern liberal democracy, see Martin D. Yaffe, “Interpretive Essay,” in Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, trans. Yaffe (Newburyport, Mass.: Focus Philosophical Library, 2004), 267–347.

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had pointed out earlier concerning the arguments of the philosophical founders of modern Enlightenment.47 V As we have already seen, Fackenheim understands his philosophical differences with Heidegger in terms of Plato’s image of the cave.48 Like Heidegger, however, he omits the central feature of that image, the partition separating the cave-dwellers from the cave-opening. 49 Behind the partition and unseen by the others, who gaze only at the cave’s rear wall, are a few men who shout and project images onto that wall; the images are those of artifacts displayed above the partition, whose shadows are cast by a fire between the partition and the opening. If Plato is describing our “historical world,” he does so from the viewpoint of the obstacles to philosophizing, which include the charm of those projected images.50 Strauss himself leaves little doubt that he considers historicism to be such an image,51 even as he agrees with Fackenheim that biblical revelation is not merely an image.52 Elsewhere

See section II, above. See notes 19 and 20, above. 49 Heidegger, The Essence of Truth, trans. Ted Sadler (London: Continuum, 2002), 18–23 (on Republic 514a2–515e3). 50 Natural Right and History, 11 f. Cf. Philosophie und Gesetz, 117 ff., or Philosophy and Law, 127 ff. 51 Natural Right and History, 12, 28 f., 33: “Whereas, according to the ancients, philosophizing means to leave the cave, according to our contemporaries all philosophizing essentially belongs to a ‘historical world,’ ‘culture,’ ‘civilization,’ ‘Weltanschauung,’ that is, to what Plato had called the cave. We shall call this view ‘historicism.’ ” “The historicist thesis expresses a fundamental experience which, by its nature, is incapable of adequate expression on the level of noncommitted or detached thought. . . . It belongs to a specific historical situation: that situation is not merely the condition of the historicist insight but its source.” “. . . if historicism cannot be taken for granted, the question becomes inevitable whether what was hailed in the nineteenth century as a discovery was not, in fact, an invention, that is, an arbitrary interpretation of phenomena which had always been known and which had been interpreted much more adequately prior to the emergence of ‘the historical consciousness’ than afterward.” 52 Consider, e.g., Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 15, or Liberalism Ancient and Modern, 237: “Considerations like those sketched in the foregoing paragraphs [sc., Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 8–15, or Liberalism Ancient and Modern, 232–37, about Rosenzweig as well as Buber and Heidegger] made one wonder whether an unqualified return to Jewish orthodoxy was not both possible and necessary—was not at the same time the solution to the problem of the Jew lost in the non-Jewish world and the only course compatible with sheer consistency or intellectual probity.” 47 48

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he praises Fackenheim for articulating the relation between philosophy and revelation perhaps as well as can be done from within historicism itself, i.e., on the premise of modern individualism first projected by the Enlightenment.53 Strauss is all the more appreciative for having considered as well, and at the same time, the pre-modern alternative to that premise.

53 Strauss, Letter of March 3, 1973, to Erwin A. Glikes. Strauss’s letter is quoted in full and commented on in depth by Green, “Leo Strauss’s Challenge to Emil Fackenheim,” loc. cit.

LEO STRAUSS’S CHALLENGE TO EMIL FACKENHEIM: HEIDEGGER, RADICAL HISTORICISM, AND DIABOLICAL EVIL Kenneth Hart Green Mr. Erwin A. Glikes President and Publisher Basic Books, Inc. 10 East 53d Street New York, New York 10022

March 3, 1973

Dear Mr. Glikes: To the best of my knowledge, Emil Fackenheim is among American Jews the one best equipped by virtue of his devoutness and his knowledge to pave the way for future Jewish thought through encounters between Judaism and modern philosophy. The Judaism which he courageously defends is traditional, rabbinical, non-mystical Judaism as authoritatively interpreted in the most profound Midrashim: before the tribunal of that Judaism modern philosophy must make good its claim that it has done or can do justice to Judaism, for it has hardly ever seriously tried to do so, although it always laid claim to universalism, to universal justice. Fackenheim calls his work “A Preface to Future Jewish Thought”: the time has not yet come for what one might call a new Jewish philosophy. Maimonides is indeed the greatest Jewish philosopher, yet his way is closed to Fackenheim for the simple reason that Fackenheim cannot accept, as Maimonides could, a divine presence as a publically verifiable phenomenon. In simplistic terms: the historical consciousness demands a radical revision of traditional theology; in somewhat more precise terms, Jewish thought after Auschwitz and the birth of the state of Israel can never be the same as it was before these shattering events. Fackenheim assigns the highest place among modern philosophers, very understandably, to Hegel—very understandably given Hegel’s intellectual greatness, spiritual freedom, and nobility of character. He discusses also quite a few writers of a lower rank. The contemporary thinker who attracts and repels him most is, not surprisingly, Heidegger. No word beyond what Fackenheim says need or can be said about Heidegger’s siding with Hitler. But one cannot hold it against Heidegger as Fackenheim does that Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit is still silent on “das Volk”: in that work Heidegger was still on his way from Reason to Language. Furthermore, however nauseating Heidegger’s conduct in 1933 was, we must not overlook the fact that both the young and the old Heidegger

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kenneth hart green remind one of an altar-boy who, without the slightest qualms, piously, if perhaps not altogether unhypocritically, officiates at an auto-da-fé. This is not the place to discuss whether this phenomenon would become more intelligible by the admission that there are demons, especially before the question “What is a demon?” has received a satisfactory answer. Yours sincerely, Leo Strauss1

What might at first glance seem like a routine or trivial piece of academic correspondence, may in fact shed important light on a littleknown connection between two major 20th century Jewish thinkers, Leo Strauss (1899–1973) and Emil L. Fackenheim (1916–2003). By this, I refer to the only known letter of recommendation (supra) that was written in 1973 by Strauss on behalf of Fackenheim. Though it is not evident who solicited the letter (whether it was Fackenheim or the publisher), Strauss wrote it in order to assist Fackenheim in getting a manuscript of his considered for publication as a book. But to begin with the beginning: what preceded the assistance that Strauss rendered to Fackenheim? Indeed, it is reasonable to ask further: how much was this help the reflection and result of a philosophic, and not merely a personal, connection between Strauss and Fackenheim?2 I shall not set it as my task to trace in detail the history of their connection (which will some day have to be written), although some matters cannot help but arise in the course of my discussion. While he still lived in Germany, Fackenheim retrospectively called Strauss a mentor based on what he had learned from his books, and in the subsequent years of his North

1 I would like to acknowledge my gratitude to Dr. Joseph Cropsey of the University of Chicago, administrator of the Literary Estate of Leo Strauss, with whose formal permission the letter is reprinted in full as an introduction to the present essay. I would also like to acknowledge my gratitude to Dr. Benjamin Pollock, who discovered the original photocopy of the letter among the papers of Emil L. Fackenheim in Jerusalem, and who showed me a copy of it while he was Wolfe Fellow at the University of Toronto in 2004–2005. He produced it at a most fortuitous moment, just as I was discussing with him my thinking on whether Fackenheim had consciously approached the idea of the Holocaust as a “demonic,” “diabolical,” or “satanic” revelation. I am currently finishing a lengthier discussion of this topic in book-form that, I hope, will appear in print in the next little while. 2 Thus far, two essays have already been written on the relations between Leo Strauss and Emil L. Fackenheim: Solomon Goldberg, “The Holocaust and the Foundations of Future Philosophy: Fackenheim and Strauss”; and Catherine Zuckert, “Fackenheim and Strauss.” They will both appear in a forthcoming volume edited by Michael L. Morgan and Benjamin Pollock, The Philosopher as Witness: Fackenheim and Responses to the Holocaust.

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American sojourn he referred to him as a friend.3 To be sure, Fackenheim was undoubtedly always aware of the generation gap, and the difference of academic stature, between them. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Strauss was already the author of several books and a full professor at the New School for Social Research in New York and at the University of Chicago, while Fackenheim was just embarking on his academic career at the University of Toronto. The name of Emil L. Fackenheim is usually associated with the effort to recover authentic theological significance for Jewish religious faith in the wake of the catastrophe of the Holocaust. Although much of his fame as a Jewish thinker rests on his “614th commandment,”4 his theology was driven by an endeavor to redefine and redirect modern Jewish thought in the post-World War II decades, as consummated in his magnum opus, To Mend the World (1982). The nucleus of that book consists in an attempt to restore religious faith (both Jewish and Christian), as well as philosophic integrity, through a dialectic of rupture, mending (tikkun), and return (teshuva).5 But it virtually culminates in a

See MW x (“Acknowledgments”). See Fackenheim, “The 614th Commandment,” in Judaism 16 (1967): 269–73; reprinted in JRH 19–24. The little book which would carry his message to the world was God’s Presence in History. He himself would decide that he preferred, instead of the better-known formulation “the 614th commandment,” the phrase “the commanding voice of Auschwitz,” because this formulation need not seem to presuppose anything religious, but could speak to secular Jews just as well. In “The 614th Commandment Reconsidered,” Fackenheim reflected retrospectively in 1993 on his 1967 “614th commandment,” in view of the great events and changes of the 25 years which had passed, and of the numerous criticisms to which it had been subjected. He organized his reflections around its four main contemporary “applications.” He affirmed that this “commandment” is still as true and binding, because it continues to conform with, and respond to, the objective facts of Jewish history and of the human situation, in the wake of the Holocaust. See JPJP 193–94. 5 Fackenheim’s threefold dialectic is neither Hegelian (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) nor Lurianic (contraction, breaking of the vessels, mending): its threefold structure makes it somehow vaguely redolent of both “systems,” yet it also differs quite dramatically with both. On the other hand, while Fackenheim’s dialectic might appear to resemble the Lurianic in much greater measure, he completely lacks its crucial element or moment of “contraction” (tzimtzum), as the point of departure in which the universe or created order begins: his point of departure remains philosophic or theistic, and not Gnostic. The fundamental order of things was not predisposed to chaos or evil or absence even prior to the rupture, as it was for Luria with the contraction which characterizes the original moment or rudimentary process of creation (in God Himself ), even prior to the breaking of the vessels. Fackenheim’s “rupture” seems closer to a completely unanticipated, and hence also unprepared for, emergence of demonic forces in history: it is, as it were, a breakthrough almost entirely against the original order. As much as eternity entering time is almost Fackenheim’s definition of revelation, the demonic 3 4

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protracted argument with Heidegger’s thought, an argument which Fackenheim had been conducting at irregular junctures at least since the late 1950s or the early 1960s. The name of Leo Strauss is usually associated with the attempt to recover the possibility of philosophy in its original sense,6 especially as pursued most prominently and vigorously in leading post-Socratic ancient and medieval forms. But this recovery

rupture in history of the original divine order is also a sort of breakthrough in which eternity enters time, even if of a “distorted” or “antithetical” eternity. This may seem similar to the Lurianic “breaking of the vessels,” but in his system it is anticipated or prepared by creation as contraction, which already contains fundamental distortion or antithesis in it: “evil” is virtually primordial. In other words, the source of or basis in Fackenheim’s thought for “distorted” or “antithetical” eternity breaking through in history (i.e., how such a thing is a possibility) is a complete mystery. Also different is the much greater weight put on the final phase in the dialectical process, which is differentiated as a two-stage development, both a mending and a return, although he also brings the two notions quite close to one another at a certain point (MW 317–20). This is the case even though it is also true that Luria’s system is also often noted for its emphatic focus on the last phase, i.e., his mending is—pure and simple—return, restitution, or redemption. 6 “Philosophy in its original sense” was also conceived according to the approach of Socrates and the Socratic school. Strauss thought that this school approached philosophy on the basis of political philosophy, and is almost by necessity always linked with theology. He defined “philosophy in the strict and classical sense” as “the quest for the eternal order or for the eternal cause or causes of all things.” In other words, it is a life spent in search of the truth (which is “not self-evident”) about the “eternal and unchangeable order within which History takes place and which is not in any way affected by History.” See Leo Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 471. (Hereinafter JPCM.) See also Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, ed. V. Gourevitch and M. S. Roth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 212. By these two sentences, Strauss has declared his efforts in thought unrelated to and distanced from any notion of modern thought as best articulated by Hegel, with his philosophy somehow continued in Heidegger or corrected by him. If any connection is appropriate, because of their common concern with History as essential to truth, it has been broken fatally, or at least besmirched as a creditable project, by the decline from what Strauss liked to call the heights of Hegel’s “rectitude” to the bottom-most point of Heidegger’s baseness. Heidegger helped to discredit the philosophic life, which began with the eternal hero of thinking, Socrates. But of course, for Strauss, Hegel still merited the honorific term “philosopher,” while about Heidegger it was always sufficient merely to call him a “thinker.” The former is a term for a necessarily noble and rare human type, while the latter covers a range of human types from the noble to the base. In Strauss’s letter on behalf of Fackenheim, Hegel (on the character of whose philosophic thought he commented through his argument with Kojève in On Tyranny) is counted among the highest ranks of the “modern philosophers,” and he is credited with “intellectual greatness, spiritual freedom, and nobility of character.” Heidegger, on the other hand, is located among the “writers of a lower rank,” a mere “contemporary thinker.” I cannot believe that this difference in the language used to characterize Hegel as opposed to Heidegger is purely casual or accidental, but rather it bears the marks of Strauss’s usual carefulness and deliberateness.

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of philosophy had emerged as an urgent matter even for Strauss only in the wake of Heidegger’s radical historicism that had made what Strauss called “oblivion of eternity” the fundamental principle of authentic thought. Heidegger’s radical historicism followed Nietzsche’s conscious “renunciation of the very notion of eternity,” which had issued in an “estrangement from man’s deepest desire.”7 Strauss’s aim was thus to correct this “estrangement” by a method of historical study that reminded modern man of what had been lost or forgotten. Fackenheim was deeply drawn to Strauss’s revived “political philosophy,” but he was also simultaneously torn between it and the appeal of the theological possibilities revived in Heidegger’s thought. Strauss’s judgment on Heidegger is an expression of stark polarities: Heidegger surpassed “in speculative intelligence all his contemporaries,” and he prepared a “revolution in thought” which would “dethrone” almost every philosophic school which had hitherto ruled in one or another precinct of the modern West. But he was also the philosophic “counterpart to what Hitler was politically.”8 In rendering a final judgment, Strauss was not disposed to rank Heidegger high among the truly great thinkers in the history of philosophy, although he appears to most people higher than he deserves in a spiritually-depleted era of much-diminished thinking. Strauss, who in the letter compares 7 See Leo Strauss, “What Is Political Philosophy?,” in What Is Political Philosophy? (New York: The Free Press, 1959), 55. To be sure, in context Strauss seems only to be discussing Nietzsche, Heidegger’s claimed mentor: “Modern thought reaches its culmination, its highest self-consciousness, in the most radical historicism, i.e., in explicitly condemning to oblivion the notion of eternity.” Once Fackenheim decides that it is impossible to elaborate an authentic modern Jewish thought unrelated to Heidegger, he will remain ambivalent about eternity as a useful “notion” (in Strauss’s words). But as will emerge, this thought, specifically as post-Holocaust thought, will itself be authentic precisely with momentary ascents to eternity or the absolute (which is a reasonable facsimile for Heidegger’s “being”) through acts of resistance against the absolute evil of Nazi Germany. It might be better to say that this possibility of a rise to the absolute, in historical acts of resistance against the most radical evil ever, is closer to Kant’s notion of the only momentary human contact with the “noumenal” through the (moral) act of freedom. But it has been corrected by the Hegelian notion that this act of freedom is not truly or primarily moral, but rather ultimately or essentially an intellectual act (even if unconscious) which exemplifies the historical moment in which a human progress toward freedom has occurred. 8 See Leo Strauss, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy,” in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 30–31; “An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism,” in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 28–29; “An Unspoken Prologue,” and “Restatement,” in JPCM 450, 471–72; On Tyranny, 212.

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Hegel and Heidegger (two of the philosophers whom Fackenheim frequently employs or argues against), makes clear that he thinks this is the case: “[Fackenheim] discusses also quite a few writers of a lower rank [than Hegel]. The contemporary thinker who attracts and repels him most is, not surprisingly, Heidegger.” Hence, the primary link between Strauss (the older man) and Fackenheim (the younger man) will, for our purposes, revolve around Heidegger. Both Jewish thinkers were compelled to wrestle with the looming presence of the German thinker Heidegger, who dominated most contemporary thought during the pre-, but especially during the post-, World War II era. To be sure, Strauss took Heidegger very seriously, because of the power of his thought, and because of the influence that it exercised. But this did not prevent him from warning Fackenheim against succumbing to the temptation to give too much credence to Heidegger as a deep thinker merely because of his ability to dominate in contemporary philosophic thought, and because his thought might appear so useful to theology for the defense of biblical faith against its modern philosophic critics and cultured despisers.9 According to Strauss, as also for Fackenheim, “the only question of importance . . . is the question whether Heidegger’s teaching is true or not.”10 Of course, for men like Strauss and Fackenheim, the concern with whether Heidegger’s teaching is true could never be just about his thought regarded in isolation. To adequately answer the question about the truth of his teaching, they also had to be concerned about how much his thought determined his actions. Heidegger, as rector of Freiburg University, had in an address to the students on 3 November 1933 praised and commended “der Führer”: Hitler “himself and he alone is German reality and its law, today and henceforth.”11 And both could not help but be depressingly aware that Heidegger was unrepentant about his association with Nazi Germany, since even in 1953 he could still refer to the ideology which animated this regime as possessing “inner truth and greatness.”12 9 Such a warning is also the burden of Strauss’s argument in “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” JPCM 146–53. 10 For Strauss, “An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism,” in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 29. For Fackenheim, EJM 213, 216. See also MW 151–52; “The Historicity and Transcendence of Philosophic Truth,” GW 149–51. 11 See MW 166–81, 189–90. 12 See Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” JPCM 140–41.

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Fackenheim—perhaps because of his rare acknowledgment of the unbroken links between Hegelianism and existentialism, and because of his recognition also of the continued dependence of existentialism on Heideggerian thought—recognized the need to resolve his conflicted attitude toward Heidegger, however much he claimed to maintain a preference for Hegel. Strauss—perhaps because of his disillusionment with Hegelianism, his rejection of existentialism, and his search for a premodern philosophic thought not affected by the “nihilistic” disintegration of modern philosophic thought—resolved not to derive his thought from or to ground it on Heidegger. Keenly aware of his complicity in radical evil both in thought and action, Strauss made a conscious effort to separate himself from Heidegger, while remaining aware of how much his thought continued (unfortunately) to exercise the greatest influence on contemporary thought. Though a massive moral ambiguity is still associated with Heidegger (profundity of thought combined with evil deeds), he survives (to use a contemporary political term) as the “hegemon,” the sole remaining superpower in the realm of the Western mind, which at the very least must be reckoned with. He has been able to shape the thought of the academic and political left in the postwar period with even greater thoroughness and far-reaching impact than he had been able to shape the thought of the academic and political right in the prewar period. This made it imperative that Strauss as well as Fackenheim had to know Heidegger’s thought thoroughly in order to truly separate from it. However, even if the link between Strauss and Fackenheim is ultimately about deeper issues than what concerns Heidegger, it was scarcely an unimportant consideration. Thus, responding to Heidegger’s thought was a key element in their mutual philosophic contacts, from the 1930s (though at first just through Strauss’s books since Fackenheim remained in Germany, while Strauss emigrated to France and England), to the 1950s through 1970s (in person while they both lived in North America). Fackenheim learned from Strauss why it is impossible for a Hegelian or post-Hegelian to consistently ally his thought with Heidegger’s. In spite of Fackenheim’s philosophic differences from Strauss (and these might be reduced, crudely but not entirely untruly, to the philosophic difference between Plato and Hegel), he recognized the greatness of Strauss as a thinker, as reflected in several written and spoken personal statements. Further, some of these clearly imply (even if they do not discuss in detail) that Strauss was for him the most

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significant, and perhaps the only serious, contemporary philosophic alternative to Heidegger.13 Indeed, he regarded himself as a student of Strauss (whom he called his “mentor”), and he credited Strauss as the thinker who inspired several of his own fundamental ideas, which his own work merely expanded on or was substantially guided by.14 It is surely no surprise, then, that Fackenheim dedicated his magnum opus, To Mend the World, “to the memory of Leo Strauss.”15 In the “Acknowledgments” he accounts for this dedication, which is there elucidated as follows: In conclusion I must explain the dedication. It is a gesture long overdue. Ever since my student days, it was Leo Strauss—first, the author of books, later also the personal mentor, this even when I no longer saw him, but often kept thinking of him—whose example has convinced me, more than that of any other Jewish thinker alive in my own lifetime, of the possibility, and therefore the necessity, of a Jewish philosophy for our age.16

In other words, Fackenheim credits the deepest impulse in his own work as a Jewish thinker almost entirely to Strauss (and curiously not to Franz Rosenzweig or to Martin Buber), even if he diverges from Strauss on some key issues. But on the fundamental issue, at least as Fackenheim presents it, i.e., the need for and possibility of a Jewish philosophy which is unique to our era, he claims they are in complete accord. Returning to Strauss’s letter on behalf of Fackenheim, we should note that it was dated 3 March 1973, thus being written only seven months prior to his own demise, on 18 October 1973. As such, this may well 13 He makes his view of Strauss’s philosophic stature unambiguously clear in the following statement: “Perhaps a time will come when Heidegger will be remembered mainly because, without him, Leo Strauss would not have been who he was and became.” See GPJT 298. See also “Leo Strauss and Modern Judaism,” JPJP 102–104. 14 The result of Metaphysics and Historicity was what he believed had been a “refutation” of Heidegger’s radical historicism. His correction of this “refutation” appears in “The Historicity and Transcendence of Philosophic Truth,” in the “Introduction” of which he credits Strauss with the criticism of this previous result that spurred him on to further and “deeper” reflection. See GW 151. Even if To Mend the World is dedicated to Strauss’s “memory” (MW viii), Fackenheim still criticizes him vigorously for what amounts to his tacit approach to the Holocaust (MW 262–64). To be sure, Fackenheim only acknowledges Strauss for his example, which he claims inspired his own efforts as a Jewish thinker (MW x). But then this is not to say that there may not still be important and perhaps even fundamental continuities in the contents of the thought of the two men. The book that I am currently working on (mentioned previously in note 1, supra) will deal with this issue in greater detail. 15 MW viii. 16 MW x.

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have been their last communication, at least in written form. Strauss addressed his letter to Erwin A. Glikes, who was then the president of Basic Books.17 Some of Strauss’s students had published books with this press, so it is possible that there had been previous contact between him and Glikes. The letter was written, it is not unreasonable to presume, at the request of Fackenheim, if only because it makes no mention of it being a response to any query by Glikes or by Basic Books. Not just from his literary remains but also from personal conversations with Fackenheim (in the 1970s and 1980s), and prior to my knowing he owned a copy of the letter, it is clear to me that he was well acquainted with the contents of this letter. (Had Strauss sent him a copy, or was one obtained from Glikes?) Of course, it is obvious that the well-known statement made by Strauss in praise of Fackenheim, which appeared on the cover of the first edition of Fackenheim’s book, To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (1982), also derives from this same letter. (“Emil Fackenheim is among American Jews the one best equipped by virtue of his devoutness and his knowledge to pave the way for future Jewish thought.”) As previously mentioned, the letter served as Strauss’s recommendation (rather peculiar, but for the first sentence) on Fackenheim’s behalf in order to urge Glikes and Basic Books to consider or to accept a manuscript. This would eventually become the book known as Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy: A Preface to Future Jewish Thought (1973), although it is possible to judge from Strauss’s letter that it had at least a key aspect of the title already set.18 (“Fackenheim calls his work ‘A Preface to Future Jewish Thought.’ ”) But is this all that it was, i.e., a letter of recommendation on behalf of a student turned professional academic, which professors write for one another rather routinely? Strauss’s wording, and the argument which

Erwin A. Glikes (1937–94) was a scholar of literature and an eminent editor who became a major force of American publishing in the 1980s by discovering the huge, untapped market for conservative books and authors. Supported in his first efforts at editing by Irving Kristol, he would enter the world of publishing, train Adam Bellow as an editor, and bring along such distinguished authors as Allan Bloom, Ruth Wisse, Norman Podhoretz, Deborah Lipstadt, Hayim H. Donin, and numerous others. He started at Basic Books, moved to Simon and Schuster, and finished his career at The Free Press. He is the editor of Of Poetry and Power: Poems Occasioned by the Presidency and Death of John F. Kennedy, which he edited together with Paul Schwaber, with a Foreword by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (New York: Basic Books, 1964). Strauss wrote to him during his first years as publisher and editor at Basic Books. 18 See EJM 5; also MW 21–22. 17

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the letter presents, would seem to make clear that he had looked at this manuscript fairly closely, and had not recommended it either sight unseen or by a brief perusal, based on what he previously knew of the author. This is to suggest that he had not based his recommendation of Fackenheim merely on his character (i.e., although, significantly, Strauss chose to highlight “his devoutness”), or merely on what is evident in his previous record of books and articles (i.e., Strauss’s assessment of Fackenheim’s “knowledge”). It seems reasonable to surmise that something—even if not everything—about Fackenheim’s argument, or in his project, made good sense to Strauss. So what might this something have been? And why not everything? In other words: is there a message communicated in this letter that is being conveyed not just to Glikes, but also to Fackenheim? Strauss was rarely, so far as I am aware, a casual writer, even in letters of recommendation for students or for colleagues. Furthermore, to read a letter properly requires it being read in terms of its addressee; and in the present case, I am suggesting that this was Fackenheim as much as it was Glikes. This requirement is certainly reasonable in the case of Strauss, since he himself taught that it is important to consider the “literary character” of any and all works by those he called “careful writers.” But in point of fact the evidence of this letter, on its own face, makes plain that he had reflected on the book, and had composed the letter, with great care. The letter contains, I think it is fair to say, Strauss’s serious even if oblique comment on Fackenheim’s project. So what is the subtle message of the wording and the argument? As has already been noted, it is surely significant that Strauss highlighted Fackenheim’s “devoutness,” and put it prior to his “knowledge”; but what is the precise significance of such highlighting, and of such priority? Is this pointing to Fackenheim’s character something that Strauss considered critical for the persuasiveness and cogency of his case, i.e., that a true theologian must be devout? Or is this pointing to a precariousness, or at least to a certain limitation, in Fackenheim’s theological position?19 Similarly, by Strauss’s mentioning Fackenheim’s ability to recognize Maimonides as “indeed the greatest Jewish philosopher,” is he offering unqualified praise of Fackenheim for his theological depth, and not only See Strauss, “Why We Remain Jews,” JPCM 323–29. Is Strauss stressing that Fackenheim is moved by a righteous and pious passion, which he can respect and even sympathize with; but by highlighting this passion, is he also trying to characterize it as a philosophic argument not cogent or deep enough to persuade him? 19

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his well-versed historical and philological training, as a Jewish scholar and thinker? Could Strauss have been suggesting that this book might have been enhanced by a closer acquaintance of its author precisely with Maimonides and his Guide,20 if not a modeling of himself on it? Such study of the “greatest Jewish philosopher” was a preoccupation of Strauss himself, and he had immersed himself in Maimonides’ great book for most of his life. Indeed, this book seems to have helped enormously in his own cognitive and, one might even say, “spiritual” life.21 It may be that Strauss was hinting at his own divergence from

20 Much will depend on how legitimate one considers the effort to read this letter as most carefully written, and hence on whether one can assume that even a letter of recommendation was composed by Strauss with his accustomed art of writing, i.e., with great deliberateness. Several circumstances are worth keeping in mind: this was not merely a “personal” letter; it was sent to a publisher of books, so he was aware that it might well be circulated and used beyond his immediate circle; therefore, it was not only aimed for “private” reading by a specific addressee-friend, but carried a potential component of “public” comment on important thinkers and issues. Of course, some will undoubtedly regard it as quite absurd to make so much of a letter of recommendation, and in general they might be right to dismiss any effort to so read it. But in the specific case of Strauss, I do not believe that this effort can be so readily dismissed. If so, then what special message might these remarks bear? Thus, one cannot help but notice that the comments on Maimonides are positioned, perhaps deliberately, in the middle of the middle paragraph. Since Strauss had been known to emphasize this form of positioning in literary works as a technique used for both concealment and highlighting, is there some special significance to be attributed to the “central” location of these comments on Maimonides? See Strauss, “How to Study Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise,” in Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1952), 185. That the issue of Maimonides is philosophically central, will be discussed in greater detail further along in this study. 21 To explore Strauss’s relation to Maimonides would involve too detailed a consideration for the present context. But for perhaps his two greatest efforts, see: “The Literary Character of the Guide for the Perplexed,” in Persecution and the Art of Writing, 38–94; and “How To Begin To Study The Guide of the Perplexed,” in Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), xi–lvi. On p. xi of “How To Begin,” Strauss mentions “about twenty-five years of frequently interrupted but never abandoned study.” However, the “about” is a significant qualification: in fact, it was closer to being forty years. For the reasons why he may have deliberately exaggerated the brevity of his study of Maimonides, see K. H. Green, Jew and Philosopher: The Return to Maimonides in the Jewish Thought of Leo Strauss (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), especially 222 n. 15. Though Fackenheim revered Maimonides as the greatest Jewish philosopher in the perspective of history and hence as a model to imitate, he never shared Strauss’s belief in the immediate philosophic, theological, and political relevance of Maimonides and of his Guide for contemporary thought. The closest move Fackenheim ever made in any of his works toward such a belief is manifest in one of his very first articles: “The Possibility of the Universe in al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and Maimonides,” in Proceedings of the American Academy of Jewish Research 16 (1947): 39–70. But this article is, to say the least, still primarily the work of a historical scholar, and not the work of a contemporary thinker or theologian,

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Fackenheim on the best direction in which “future Jewish thought” should move. Though he may not have been counseling Fackenheim (or any modern Jewish theologian) to merely embrace or imitate Maimonides, he may have been recommending him as a model of how to think through theological and political issues, and of how to employ the literary arts. At any rate, Strauss makes little blatant critical comment in his own name on Fackenheim’s project, other than to highlight that this book is a mere “preface to future Jewish thought,” and hence is not itself a completed modern Jewish philosophy: rather it is a tentative beginning. If I may venture a conjecture (not so much based on what is in the letter as on what I know of Strauss’s thinking), this tentativeness is something that would seem to have made good sense to Strauss. For him as much as for Fackenheim, Jewish thought in the wake of the “shattering events” of Auschwitz and the state of Israel truly “can never be the same” again. His own return to Maimonides was in the nature of what Fackenheim would have called a “recovery”: it was not an attempt to escape the historical “situation,” even if he diagnosed it differently than Fackenheim. Those who wish to continue (whether orthodox or liberal religious Jews, or secular Zionists—and these are the positions which still have integrity, never mind those which do not) as if nothing has changed, are the deluded ones.22 But what specifically has changed, what is the impact of such change, and how in general is Jewish thought to respond? Since Strauss was trying to help Fackenheim, he did not want to emphasize the difficulties; we are reduced to trying to read what was in his mind from the highly compressed and yet angled language of a rather strange letter of recommendation. But he also hints at some difficulties—by putting them, as it were, prominently “between the lines.”

as Fackenheim was to make himself. Nothing that he wrote subsequently, of which I am aware, treats Maimonides’ Guide (as opposed to his Mishneh Torah or similar works) as of immediate philosophic or theological relevance. To be sure, the Guide remained for him “the most authoritative work in Jewish philosophy.” See JTEF 7. But to state the obvious: “most authoritative” is not the same thing as “most relevant.” Certainly Fackenheim had no doubts that in the wake of the Holocaust, almost nothing of what Judaism was, or had believed, could any longer be appropriated or accepted immediately and unreflectively: this era represents a historical trauma of unprecedented proportions which must change almost everything. See WJ 9–11. But in point of fact, he had already been disconnected from Maimonides in his pre-1967 phase. See QPF 204–11. See also EJM 58–75, 81–82. 22 See Strauss, “Why We Remain Jews,” JPCM 323–29, for one such case of Jews who are fooling themselves about their situation.

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First, Strauss suggests that Fackenheim’s project is not continuous with Maimonides’ thought. However, by highlighting this discontinuity, is he also suggesting that Fackenheim would have been better advised to have attempted to make this project somehow continuous with at least some of the substance of what is contained in Maimonidean thought? This critical suggestion is further hinted at, in that the break with Maimonidean thought depends only on “what Fackenheim cannot accept.” By this mode of expression, was it perhaps Strauss’s intention to suggest that what Maimonides could accept, as opposed to “what Fackenheim cannot accept,” need not be put beyond what it is genuinely possible to make credible or defensible in contemporary theology? In other words, Strauss’s language is not unambiguously or unqualifiedly supportive of what Fackenheim (or those like him) can accept as legitimate. And hence for Strauss, it need not be represented as setting the standard with regard to what is eminently reasonable or imperative for the modern mind, and as a result also for the modern Jew. The merely personal or named element is surely stressed for a reason, i.e., what “Fackenheim cannot accept,” as opposed to “what no thoughtful or self-respecting modern Jew can accept.” And he appends no sort of addition, or even a hint of qualification, to suggest that this limit on, or condition of, belief need be unreservedly binding in the modern era on the man or woman who esteems both intellectual excellence and spiritual honesty, as well as honorableness and fidelity.23

Strauss compared Rosenzweig (one of Fackenheim’s chief mentors) with Maimonides, and he contrasted the attitude of “the orthodox Jew” (i.e., someone—it is safe to presume—who follows in the mode of Maimonides) with Rosenzweig, who “was unable simply to believe all biblical miracles,” although they were “susceptible of becoming credible to him.” “The orthodox Jew would reproach himself for his doubts . . . for he would not determine what he is obliged to believe by his individual and temporary capacity or incapacity to believe.” See Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” JPCM 153. On the other hand, in “Why We Remain Jews,” JPCM 344, he admits: “I believe—and I say this without any disrespect to any orthodox Jew—that it is hard for people, for most Jews today, to believe in verbal inspiration (I mean, in verbal inspiration of the Torah), and in miracles—or most of the miracles—and other things.” Yet he surrounds these apparent concessions to the view shared by Fackenheim, with two qualifying comments. First, he prefaces it with a reference to “the Jewish medieval thinkers,” like Yehuda Halevi and Maimonides: “I happen to know a bit” about their work. And as he observes, based on a scholarly career of uncovering the forgotten or obscured hidden depths of their work, “quite a few very powerful and important changes were made even by them.” In other words: changes can be made, even “very powerful and important” ones, yet the essence need not be lost or abandoned. Second, he finishes it with an appeal to save the fundamental doctrines of Jewish faith, like Creation, or like the belief in a verbally-inspired Torah, which Fackenheim regards as exhausted. Strauss urges a “postcritical Judaism,” which aims 23

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The tension between Fackenheim’s project and Maimonidean thought, which has been noted, is also conveyed in other slight touches. Although it was Fackenheim who originally characterized Maimonides as “the greatest Jewish philosopher,” it was Strauss who discovered this phrase in Fackenheim’s manuscript of hundreds of pages, and who was responsible for rendering it so prominent. Strauss also added the word “indeed” for emphasis: “Maimonides is indeed the greatest Jewish philosopher.”24 Moreover, the present tense (“is”) of Strauss’s judgment makes explicit something that was only implicit in Fackenheim’s statement: for Strauss, this seems to hint that indeed (i.e., for a certainty) Maimonides is still the greatest Jewish philosopher, and not merely a

not merely to accept “Rambam’s ‘Creator of the world,’ ” but rather “to restate the essence of Jewish faith” in a conceptually-refined modern fashion. “Postcritical Judaism,” one may presume, will see the tradition and its fundamental doctrines in light of whatever has been legitimately discovered as genuine knowledge by biblical (and other religious) criticism, but will not regard itself as refuted by such criticism. In other words: everything bold that he wishes to convey by this notion (“postcritical Judaism”) should imply the possibility of revision or recasting of fundamental doctrines, not their creation out of nothing. As an aside, it is noteworthy that while Strauss generously attributes the notion of “postcritical Judaism” to his friend, Rabbi Monford Harris (1920–2003), who taught Jewish Studies in Spertus College of Chicago, this is something which he had been discussing at least since 1952, in his lecture “Progress or Return?,” see JPCM 93–94. Of course, just because Strauss first started to use this phrase, and the notion it represents, in 1952, is no proof that he did not originally derive it from Harris, to whom he credits it. As for the notion of “postcritical,” it is legitimate to speak of it, one presumes, because something has happened which puts the era of criticism in the past. Is it possible that this end of an era was brought about by the criticism of criticism, which is best articulated in the thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger? We can put the criticism of criticism in the context of Strauss’s letter on behalf of Fackenheim, because it represents a dilemma to which both he and Fackenheim responded, each in their own way. We may state the dilemma as follows: whatever manner of challenge science still represents for Judaism (and it most definitely still represents a challenge), it is no longer the duty to merely surrender to and conform with the Truth, insofar as Judaism loves truth. For Strauss, the dilemma is best summarized in perhaps the deepest question for contemporary philosophic thought (rarely asked, and with answers even rarer): “Why science?” Since scientists so rarely confront the question, never mind their lack of an answer, Judaism is no longer quite so threatened by science, and hence by criticism. Once the question has been articulated, and the lack of an adequate answer made evident, the era of the “postcritical” begins. See, e.g., JPCM 122–23, 131–32, 304–05, 328–29, 378–79. Strauss noticed that Fackenheim dimly perceived this question in his growing focus on Heidegger, but Strauss was disturbed by Fackenheim’s not grasping its full implications, i.e., nihilism, which issues in the destruction of reason. What it should arouse, in Strauss’s mind, is an awakening to the coterminous need to recover something like the Maimonidean view as a dialectically balanced position, which is capable of criticism of both reason and revelation, while not surrendering—and not trying to deconstruct—either reason or revelation. 24 See EJM 81.

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revered hero of the past, even if Fackenheim’s project might seem to imply otherwise. However, because of what were, for Fackenheim, the evident difficulties of applying Maimonidean thought judiciously and persuasively to present-day challenges (which emerge in the section of his book dedicated to Hegel), it is clear that, for Fackenheim at least, this must be a judgment in the past tense. Thus, Fackenheim will neither follow Maimonides, nor try to rework and revise his thought for modern man. It is possible to say that Strauss himself attempted to do this: as a thinker who was never a mere antiquarian scholar, he explicated the great texts of Maimonides in order to interpret his thought and teaching for modern man, just as for all eras, and so to make it relevant again. But Fackenheim could not follow Maimonides (or imitate Strauss) in this regard because, according to Strauss’s reading of Fackenheim, “the historical consciousness” (i.e., not originally the “shattering events” of recent Jewish history) requires that Jewish thought must carry through “a radical revision” of everything contained in “traditional theology.” Fackenheim’s thought will undoubtedly claim to prepare such “a radical revision” of Jewish thought, or will even claim to constitute such a revision at least in its rudimentary form or essential elements. Strauss may not have doubted Fackenheim’s claim that something like “a radical revision” of Jewish thought is needed, but he doubted whether this could be accomplished through historicist thought (whether the moderate version available in Hegel, or the radical version available in the postHegelian Heidegger). Of course, even with his willingness to endorse the call of Fackenheim for the need for “a radical revision” of Jewish thought in the contemporary crisis of post-Holocaust theology, Strauss did not wish to endorse historicism, insofar as Fackenheim seems to lean in its direction. Strauss believed that one of the only things which it is not possible to honestly avoid or deny is history—but history, for Strauss, need not imply historicism. However, this makes the uses to which history may be put for Strauss quite different from those which Fackenheim envisioned, since he believed history could make a (theological) impact on being: God revealed Himself, and continues to reveal Himself, through history, which changes man, or at least the human situation.25 Such is a form of moderate historicism which, in Strauss’s

25 For Fackenheim on the significant difference between “the human situation” and “the historical situation” seen in the light of historicity, which terms are being used

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mind, has serious difficulties associated with it. Indeed, historicism as Strauss critically conceived it is the primary cause of the problem for Fackenheim that leads to the need and the call for “radical revision”; and so this cannot be the ultimate solution to the crisis which it provokes. Strauss recognized the crisis, but believed it could be better resolved through a modern effort to adapt or rework (and not a false attempt to merely embrace or imitate) Maimonidean thought. The relevance of Maimonides might very well be considered the point on which the minds of Strauss and Fackenheim began to divide. Of course, it is noteworthy that Strauss refines his reference to “the historical consciousness” and its importance for Fackenheim: this makes only the two specific historical events, i.e., the Holocaust and the state of Israel, capable of shattering Jewish thought. This shattering is so powerful that, as has been noted, Jewish thought (which embraces everything to do with Jews and Judaism) can never be the same again. Again, Strauss likely would not diverge from Fackenheim in discerning the shattering importance of those two specific historical events.26

somewhat “untechnically” in the present context, see GW 136–38, 140–44, or in the separate book, MH 48–61, 71–90. 26 At least with respect to the state of Israel, Strauss regards it as undoubtedly a good thing, and also as a salutary turning point in Jewish history, which it would be foolish to try to deny. “You are aware of the fact that there are Jews, a minority in this country, who regard the state of Israel as (to use a mild expression) a pain in the neck. I know these people, but one can simply say that they are the delusionists.” See “Why We Remain Jews,” JPCM 340. Hence, it is also of decisive importance for Jewish faith. For as Strauss clarifies about religious Zionism (which in his mind consists primarily of Jewish faith), it “may go so far as to regard the establishment of the state of Israel as the most important event in Jewish history since the completion of the Talmud.” He continues in his own name by adding: “The establishment of the state of Israel is the most profound modification of the galut which has occurred, but it is not the end of the galut.” Whatever he may mean by saying that this turn of events in Jewish history “is not the end of the galut,” he characterizes the state of Israel as “the most profound modification of the galut ” in order to declare it essentially, and even unconditionally, a good “modification.” It is entirely clear, in the context of his discussion, that this is his view: he comes so far as to call it “a blessing” for all Jews, ”whether they admit it or not.” See “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” JPCM 142–43. On the issue of whether the Jews have an essential and even unconditional good in the state of Israel, he and Fackenheim are seemingly of one mind. It may even be that Strauss exercised an influence on Fackenheim from his reading of the previously-referred to essays and lectures, getting him to gradually change his attitude of half-heartedness toward the state of Israel. It was his liberal Judaism, as this was originally construed by him, which brought on Fackenheim’s half-heartedness. In a lecture entitled “Existentialism,” delivered in February, 1956, at the Hillel House of the University of Chicago, edited by D. Bolotin, C. Bruell, and T. L. Pangle, and published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 22 (1994–95): 303–20, Strauss declared unambiguously

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However, he would likely continue to wonder whether Judaism can be legitimately reshaped, consequent on these events, in accordance with the requirements of “the historical consciousness” and still preserve its spiritual integrity. Though Strauss did not make too much of his hinted criticisms, since he was trying to help Fackenheim, his language is suggestive of a dissent against the notion that Jewish thought must be determined, or even “radically revised,” by the requirements of “the historical consciousness.” For Strauss, revamping Judaism in accord with the requirements of “the historical consciousness” cannot help but obscure the true dimensions and deeper causes of “the historical situation.” This consciousness maintains that the most essential truths about Being are produced or formed by, as well as subsequently reshaped by, history. Indeed, Being itself only emerges in the wake of history.27 According to the view preferred by Strauss, “Being is essentially immutable in itself and eternally identical with itself.” This is at least one reason why Strauss moved all his life in the direction of recovering a genuinely Maimonidean thought which—although he took history seriously—never considered history as the source of truth. In contrast, however highly Fackenheim may have ranked Maimonides as “the greatest” figure in the history of Jewish thought, he nevertheless put his greatness safely in the past, which made him ultimately a historical figure and not of primary relevance to the present. As such, what one might characterize as the position on Being which Maimonides represents, was not of utmost or immediate relevance for Fackenheim: history can and indeed must be a (even if not yet, the only) source of truth, in which revelations of Being have occurred, and continue to occur. Revelation, as Fackenheim comprehended it, designates the notion that God gave His truth not only in, but also through, history. Indeed, “elements” in the truth of God’s Being are conveyed as history. If this is the case, then it forever elevates and sanctifies history; it makes history capable about the state of Israel: “Or let me look for a moment at the Jewish problem. The nobility of Israel is literally beyond praise, the only bright spot for a contemporary Jew who knows where he comes from. And yet Israel does not afford a solution to the Jewish problem.” (See p. 307. The emphasis is added by the present writer.) A version of essentially the same lecture, but with some slight differences (such as with a different title, and with the absence of those introductory remarks about Jews and the state of Israel), which Strauss apparently delivered on a different occasion, appeared as: “An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism,” in Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. T. L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 27–46, especially 31. 27 See Strauss, “Restatement on Xenophon’s Hiero [The Last Paragraph],” in JPCM 471–72.

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of “conveying” further revelations of His truth, and even of His Being, in subsequent events. While Strauss and Fackenheim were in accord on several points in the realm of contemporary Jewish thought, there is no doubt that on this crucial issue (i.e., how much Being depends on history), they diverged to the point of holding almost diametrically opposed positions. Yet, as has already been noted, Fackenheim dedicated his magnum opus, To Mend the World, “to the memory of Leo Strauss.” It is difficult to know what Strauss would have made of the contents of this book. But one aspect of Strauss’s letter anticipates what Fackenheim would do in that book: it almost predicts the growing focus on and fascination with Heidegger. While the book for the sake of which the letter was written, i.e., Encounters, contains only about ten pages on Heidegger, the magnum opus contains almost thirty-four, densely-written pages on Heidegger.28 But of greater importance than the mere number of pages: Heidegger plays, in a certain respect, the pivotal or decisive role in the book. In the letter, Strauss was clearly aware of Fackenheim’s growing love-hate—or as he calls it, attraction-repulsion—relation with Heidegger and his thought. The letter is so constructed, seemingly for Fackenheim’s benefit, as to bring to light how the relation is not just an ambivalent, but is a seriously problematic, one. Fackenheim’s “radical revision of traditional [ Jewish] theology” seems to culminate in (and will, as of To Mend the World, revolve around) the confrontation with Heidegger. But this is rendered questionable for Strauss not just because of the radical historicism, since Fackenheim—until To Mend the World—still valiantly resisted it, and attempted to think through and beyond it.29 Rather, it was because the philosophic dependence on Compare EJM 213–23, with MW 149–82. I refer to the “radical historicism” of Heidegger, not to the moderate historicism of Hegel. See EJM 81–169—which is the heart and soul of the book—for his consideration of Hegelian philosophy set against Jewish history and faith. In these pages Hegel is shown not to have been able to “do justice to the divine-Jewish covenant,” as it manifests itself as a form of dynamic and dialectical tension in history, which moves constantly between two vital poles: divine-human distance or disproportionateness, and divine-human relation or closeness. Fackenheim accepts the Hegelian (historicist) challenge to illustrate and fulfill truth in history, but it is still unfolded on a canvas of history in which ideas (and not being qua being) play the leading role. It is in this context that Strauss speaks about Fackenheim’s thesis as a bringing of modern philosophy (and especially Hegel) “before the tribunal of classical Judaism,” i.e., the Hebrew Bible as interpreted by the classical Midrashim. It is a trial in which Fackenheim allows himself—as representative of “classical Judaism,” who is also fully trained in Western philosophy—to act as both advocate and judge. Thus, he examines the witnesses, 28 29

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Heidegger by Fackenheim (as a theist), in order to validate his theological project, tacitly issued—according to Strauss—in an unavoidable, even if unresolved, focus on what can be called the “demonic.” As Strauss seemed to anticipate, the focus on Heidegger’s thought and on radical evil leads directly to it. It is a category (i.e., “the demonic,” and hence dealing with “demons”) that, as Strauss was only able to imply, Fackenheim never quite faces adequately. For how else could Fackenheim explain the fact that the thinker (i.e., Heidegger) whose profundity he will attempt to theologically “reverse,”30 and against whose standards of thought he will measure the success or failure of his own system (i.e., whether it has issued in truth),31 could also be an agent, even if unwittingly so, of radical evil. This would especially be the case if Heidegger (who was regarded by Fackenheim not only as the greatest philosophic spokesman for Being in numerous centuries, but also as a thinker whose thought on Being

considers the evidence, and maintains a stance of impartiality, insofar as he wishes to discover if Judaism has been treated fairly. He did so because he wished to uncover whether modern philosophy (and especially Hegel, whom he revered for his profundity and rectitude) could “make good its claim.” This is the claim “that it has done or can do justice to Judaism.” Why is Judaism such a legitimate challenge to the completed system? Because, in spite of its particularism of tradition, faith, and people, even so it possesses a claim of its own concerning the truth about all things, which is not merely particular to it. As such, it can only legitimately have been dispensed with if, and after, its “truth” has been fully integrated with, and done justice by, the all-comprehending truth of modernity. But as Fackenheim was wont to show, according to Strauss, modern philosophy “has hardly ever seriously tried to do” justice to Judaism, “although it always laid claim to universalism, to universal justice.” This process brings Fackenheim to reach the judgment that even in the case of Hegel, the greatest of all the modern philosophers—however highly he valued the Jewish contribution of ideas to the final synthesis—he too was unable to do justice to Judaism. Indeed, had this elementary fact been duly considered closer to the start of that encompassing process by which modern thought has become almost thoroughly historicized, one could easily have prognosticated the deficiency and collapse of the system as both all-comprehending and capable of doing justice to everything. 30 I think of the title and the labor of a book which attempted to mount a truly systematic philosophic turnaround of thought from Heidegger: Stanley Rosen, The Question of Being: A Reversal of Heidegger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). But see also Herman Philipse, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being: A Critical Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 31 Thought is only authentic if it confronts Being as historical Ereignis, i.e., as an event which appropriates (an aspect of ) Being, even in its aiming for comprehensiveness. See MW 172–80. On the other hand, though he is unwilling to call his book either “a system or even an antisystem,” he is willing to speak about its “systematic progression,” i.e., toward a grasp of Being in its aimed-for comprehensiveness, and its being “a project of systematic thought.” See also MW 4–6, 19–20, 22–23.

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potentially “Judaizes philosophy”),32 is also an unrepentant political agent of what Fackenheim will call demonic evil. How could such a unique genius of pure thinking (as Fackenheim regarded him) be implicated in such unprecedented moral and historical evil? Considering the contours of Fackenheim’s faith, which is rooted in “personal” divine will and linked to the Buberian notion of encounter, Strauss suggests that consistency would require him to trace this succumbing to evil to Heidegger’s encounter with the demonic. In this encounter (perhaps occurring through the appeal of Hitler and the Nazis), he with his thought got caught in the grip of a demon. (This would seem to follow if we may assume that, for Fackenheim, the thought itself is 32 See EJM 213–23. To be sure, it is a judgment based on “prima facie evidence.” It seems to be primarily due to his view of Being, not as the Good or as Spirit, but as “a Presence.” Further, his notion of truth as “primordially unconcealedness” very much resembles what is conveyed in and by revelation. It is also a notion which “precedes or overcomes the subject-object dichotomy,” hence aiding theology to escape from the prison-house of philosophic or rationalistic notions of truth. Moreover, “unconcealedness is accessible [only] to an original ‘thinking,’ which is a ‘hearing’ rather than a ‘seeing,’ ” and which is also “a ‘thanking.’ ” These notions seem borrowed or adapted from authentic biblical theology. However, Fackenheim will raise radical doubts about whether this apparent “Judaization is actual,” with the help of general criticisms of Heidegger’s thought made in previous works by Hans Jonas, Martin Buber, Strauss, and Karl Löwith. On the other hand, Fackenheim will base his own specific moraltheological criticism of Heidegger on his completely deficient grasp of “idolatry.” He who wished to revive “the gods” (as a pagan rather than as an atheist), was unable to distinguish between true and false gods; he did not even appreciate why that distinction may be important, even vital. “In Heidegger’s later and possibly also in his earlier thought, between the possibilities of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ of ‘the Divine,’ the very possibility of idolatry has in principle disappeared.” Indeed, Fackenheim is willing to suggest that “this may well be the ultimate ground for Heidegger’s surrender to Nazism.” See also MW 150–52, 174–76. As he is even willing to speak of “Heidegger’s career” as a thinker, it “has its climax in a disclosure of, and participation in, Seinsgeschichte—the history of Being itself.” This is perhaps because he is willing to accept the plausibility of the fundamental premise that represents the “one bold, fateful, monumental turn in Heidegger’s thought: the Presence of Being is itself finite; and since Being is inseparable from its Presence, Being is finite as well.” (I have removed the emphasis. In Fackenheim’s original, everything following the colon is italicized.) How would we know about the “finiteness of Being” quite so definitively as a fact, even as a historical fact? This is something that is never quite explained. It is perhaps intuited, on the basis of an “encounter” with (finite) Presence as Being. Its truth would have to be a matter of testimony, not of knowledge conventionally defined, which has already been disallowed as lacking in “authenticity.” Might we suggest that, as a theological program, this aims to be the revenge of the gods on God, on the God Who banished them from nature and history? But might we also say that this program cannot achieve its aim because it is not the authentic gods who wreak vengeance, but rather the gods reconstructed in the image of God? Only a dogmatic finiteness (of the limited gods) could disallow from the start the possibility of access to the Infinite in Presence (of the one true God).

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not inherently demonic, and Being as Presence manifests the character of the “personal” in the highest, whether of God or of gods—or of demons.) This “personal” (demonic) will, perhaps in the guise of gods beyond good and evil, is what brought him to advance demonic evil. The fundamental difference between Fackenheim and Heidegger would then pertain to whether there is an absolute moral character of the “personal” in the highest Being, in the Presence, which would make for a choice either for God or for “false” gods, i.e., demons. For if Heidegger’s confrontation with Being was somehow of ultimate importance for all human thought (as Fackenheim seemed to view him as a thinker), it could not have been an encounter of the thinker with Being as God, since Heidegger’s thought itself is not, for Fackenheim, corrupt and corrupting. Rather, it had to be an unwitting and purely “personal” encounter (i.e., beyond thought) with Being, as God’s virtual opposite—or at least, as His antagonist (“satan,” as the original Hebrew would have had it)—insofar as the actions of Heidegger the man can be detached from, and may not be closely related to, his thought. Perhaps a “personal” demon (which cannot be reduced to just a character flaw or vicious trait) corrupted him, tempting him to succumb to evil.33 How else could Fackenheim make sense of Heidegger’s evil deeds if, as he suggests, his thought cannot rightly, or rather directly, be blamed?34 And while philosophy can in a certain sense still ultimately 33 Maimonides perceives precisely the connection between the need for moral excellence, in order to achieve not only intellectual perfection, but especially knowledge of the truth. He shows why deep character flaws as well as bad moral habits (encompassing both action and thought) can corrupt or mislead the thinking of a thinker. “The third condition [i.e., which enables a preference for the truth against the “blindness” produced by nurture, education, and advantage] concerns your morals. For whenever a man finds himself inclining—and to our mind it makes no difference if this happens because of his natural disposition or because of an acquired characteristic—towards lusts and pleasures or preferring anger and fury, giving the upper hand to his irascible faculty and letting go its reins, he shall be at fault and stumble wherever he goes. For he shall seek opinions that will help him in that toward which his nature inclines.” See Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed II, 23 (trans. Pines, 321). 34 Already in EJM 216–23, Fackenheim considers the relation between Heidegger’s philosophic thought, and his political words and actions, and asks how much his thought can be held responsible. Fackenheim’s 1973 book already took the issue very far: Heidegger himself not only joined the Nazi Party, but gave “his philosophical endorsement” to Nazism and to Hitler (and never apologized for, or retracted, his “philosophical” blessing). As a result, Fackenheim characterized the options as follows: “No serious critic or defender [of Heidegger] can leave the philosophy untouched by the device of blaming the man alone. And the possible positions in the controversy lie between the extremes that something in Heidegger’s philosophy ‘compelled’ a

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relegate evil to ignorance, religion cannot afford to do so, since it sees man (since Genesis 2–3) in light of his choice for or against God. For religion, evil occurs insofar as man is tempted away from God, and turns against Him. If the highest good is “personal,” as it would seem to have been for Fackenheim, so must the highest evil surely also be “personal,” even if only as a moral blindness or obtuseness to the true “personal” as the highest. Indeed, in this sort of case, i.e., an antiphilosophic genius succumbs to evil through supposed moral blindness or surrender to Nazism and that it was ‘unable to prevent’ that surrender.” There is a discussion (EJM 216–17, with 261 n. 38), of the various opinions and arguments then current. Fackenheim repeats essentially the same analysis of the plausible positions on Heidegger’s Nazism in MW 169–70 and n. 25, with little wish to discuss Heidegger’s moral culpability, as if it has little to do with his thought. In both texts he seems to favor as most judicious the judgment offered by John D. Caputo, “Heidegger’s Original Ethics,” The New Scholasticism 45 (1971): 127–38. (Yet to my mind, something of Fackenheim’s final judgment, rendered on MW 181, is deeply defective: “However, he has in no way reappraised his own philosophy which, while not responsible for his surrender to Nazism, had been unable to prevent it.” Can one say that this “philosophy” is in no way responsible for Heidegger’s surrender to Nazism? If so implicated, was Fackenheim’s judgment in certain measure due to a need to justify his wish to make use of Heidegger’s thought in his own thought?) Of course, this preceded the phase of the debate that was initiated in 1987 by Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). He brought together much of the previously-known evidence, and supplemented it with additional material; as a result, he executed a systematic bill of indictment, in which he refuted or dismissed as unsustainable almost every previous exoneration or rationalization. Thus far, the history of the debate which began almost following the end of World War II in 1945—about the relation between Heidegger’s philosophic thought, and his words and actions on behalf of Hitler and the Nazis—cannot be written, since it is still unfolding. For perhaps the most recent discussion, see Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger, l’introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie (Paris: Albin Michel, 2005). In the 1973 book for the sake of which Strauss wrote, Fackenheim asked whether (in the judgment of Hans Jonas) Heidegger’s political words and actions stand “ ‘to the shame of philosophy,’ ” or whether (apparently in his own judgment) they stand “to its everlasting shame.” He is driven to wonder whether a permanent and irreparable stain has not blemished the once-great and honorable name of philosophy. Strauss was, on the one hand, able to appreciate a certain sort of genius in Heidegger: he “surpassed in speculative intelligence all his contemporaries,” he “attempted to go a way not yet trodden by anyone or rather to think in a way in which philosophers at any rate have never thought before,” “no one has questioned the premise of philosophy as radically as Heidegger,” and “he dealt with something of the utmost importance to man as man.” On the other hand, he was also able to reach much less ambiguous, and hence much more damning, judgments on the relation between Heidegger’s philosophic thought, and his political words and actions: he was “intellectually the counterpart to what Hitler was politically,” “what I could not stomach was his moral teaching,” and “there is a straight line which leads from Heidegger’s resoluteness to his siding with the so-called Nazis in 1933.” See JPCM 450, 461. Still worth reading is the brief treatment of these issues by Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), especially 309–12. Bloom was, of course, not only a student of Strauss’s, but also a friend of Fackenheim’s, in their common period at the University of Toronto from 1970 to 1979.

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obtuseness, it is not clear that even philosophy (classically construed) would be able to regard as reasonable the “belief ” in the adequacy of ignorance to account for his doing evil and for his leading others to do evil. It too may need to resort to something like the “demonic” in order to account for such blindness or obtuseness, even if it is almost the opposite sort of “demon” to the one which kept Socrates from doing wrong.35 How did Fackenheim account for this strange “demon” that goaded Heidegger on to do wrong, and which urged him to allow his blindness or obtuseness to triumph?36 It is at this point that Strauss’s insights express a dilemma with which Fackenheim must wrestle, although he seems to want to avoid it. If he considers it illegitimate, vulgar, or reductionist to account for Heidegger’s vile actions in terms of his elevated thought, then there will have to be something in Fackenheim’s own thought that can help him to explain

35 Consider Apuleius, The God of Socrates, trans. Thomas Taylor (Somerset, UK: Prometheus Trust, 1997; originally: 1822), 233–55. The book, with its comments on “daimons,” is elucidated by C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 40–44, 117–18. Compare also with Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed II, 6 (trans. Shlomo Pines [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963], 261–65), with regard to his most radical statement on “angel”: “For all forces are angels.” On the other hand, he is aware that this use alone of the term will issue in a fairly vague and amorphous content. Thus, Maimonides adds a pointer to his reader, which he is supposed to apply to numerous contexts. To clarify a midrashic comment on the biblical text, he notes in passing something which establishes the priority of nature: “ ‘the Holy One, blessed be He, caused the angel put in charge of lust’—he means to say: the force of orgasm—‘to present himself to him,’ ” i.e., in the story of Judah and Tamar. For Plato on Socrates and his “daimonion,” see Apology of Socrates 40a–c. For Strauss, see “Jerusalem and Athens,” in JPCM 402–3. It is on this basis, the daimonion and the philosophic life, that Strauss compares and contrasts Socrates with the Hebrew biblical prophet. Socrates only heard a voice limiting him, “something divine and demonic,” rather than a voice commanding him. Consider also his remarks in Xenophon’s Socrates (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972), 3–8, 19–20, 22–26, 32, 104, 124–26, 129–31, 136–37; Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 49–63; On Plato’s ‘Symposium,’ ed. S. Benardete (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 174, 260; especially his only prolonged discussion of demons and the demonic, 188–97. This “divine and demonic” force relates to the aspect of the philosophic life (or rather, the philosophic soul and character) that keeps the genuine philosopher from doing evil. The stress, however, should be laid on “genuine”: such a type is, unfortunately, a very rare breed. It is in this context that one should judge the phrase “not . . . unhypocritical” which Strauss is careful to apply to Heidegger: he was also a calculator who gambled on his own advancement and lost, which makes him closer to being a “sophist.” 36 See EJM 220, and notes 31 and 33 supra. As previously mentioned, searching for a “high,” or philosophic, reason to account for Heidegger’s “surrender to Nazism” (which as such, he construes as something passive), Fackenheim mentions as “the ultimate ground” for this “surrender” that “the very possibility of idolatry has in principle disappeared” from his thought.

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it. Certainly he, most of all, cannot afford to ignore this dilemma: is this a thought that is not merely of interest to contemporary theology, but that can serve as its fundamental basis, even if in a corrected form? This basis refers to the notion of revelation as undefined divine presence sensed, and silent divine call heard. Heidegger’s actions implicate him in the crimes of an evil regime, something for which he never repented. These are not actions consistent with any notion of the philosopher that Fackenheim would want to endorse, since he was not the sort of religious thinker who was willing to use this type of evidence to condemn philosophy itself as congenitally depraved. As Strauss suggests, in order to validate his own theological project, Fackenheim would be well advised to make an effort to clarify with greater precision his views on the category of the demonic. For can Fackenheim so readily combine a keen mindfulness of Heidegger’s profundity of thought with his own sharp focus on radical evil while not paying serious attention to the radical evil committed by or associated with Heidegger himself ? How can Fackenheim make sense, in Heidegger’s case, of two strangely connected things: how can he have been both a deep thinker, and an evildoer, an accomplice and facilitator of evildoers, or even just an apologist for evildoers?37 Even in Fackenheim’s own view regarding

37 Mark Lilla has reflected on the political-philosophical issue of why powerful thinkers have so often supported tyranny in the 20th century: see The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York: New York Review Books, 2001). Concerning Heidegger, Lilla summarizes the judgment of Karl Jaspers. It was reached in the wake of their last substantial communication, a letter from Heidegger, justifying his conduct during the Hitler regime and his adherence to Nazism. It amounted to “a bizarre diatribe,” avoiding all of the serious issues, and certainly showing no remorse. It “finally drove [ Jaspers] to the conclusion that Heidegger was irredeemable—as a man and as a thinker. Heidegger was no longer for him the model of what a philosopher could be, but rather a demonic antiphilosopher consumed by dangerous fantasies.” For their letters, see The Heidegger-Jaspers Correspondence (1920–1963), eds. W. Biemel and H. Saner, trans. G. E. Aylesworth (Amherst, NY: Humanity Press, 2003), especially 185–91, 195–98; Martin Heidegger/Karl Jaspers Briefwechsel 1920–1963, eds. W. Biemel and H. Saner (Frankfurt: Klostermann & Munich: Piper, 1990), 196–203, 207–11. The phrase “demonic antiphilosopher” is Lilla’s own; however, it legitimately characterizes Jasper’s last view. It also fairly borrows a word from a biographical observation made by Jaspers, as an impression about Heidegger’s personality: “Sometimes it was as if a demon had crept into him.” (“Es konnte mir scheinen, als ob ein Dämon bei ihm eingeschlichen sei.”) To be sure, this “demon” in Heidegger that Jaspers diagnosed, may not have been quite the same “demon” which Strauss perceived in Heidegger. See “Philosophical Autobiography,” in The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers, ed. P. A. Schilpp (La Salle, IL: The Library of Living Philosophers/Open Court, 1981 [augmented edition]), 75–76; Karl Jaspers, Philosophische Autobiographie (Munich: Piper, 1977), 97–98. But perhaps if raised to a higher

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the deficiencies of Heidegger’s thought, he acknowledged that this thought, if followed through consistently, is completely unable even to recognize radical evil.38 According to what Strauss would seem to indicate, Fackenheim’s theological project tacitly issued in an unavoidable, even if unresolved, need for the demonic as a category, if only in order to explain Heidegger. For only a demon would allow him to make theological sense of what it seems so improbable to combine in

level, it happens to uncannily echo Strauss’s comment to Fackenheim (although Strauss in 1973 could not have known of the passage in the “Philosophical Autobiography” of Jaspers, since the section on Heidegger did not appear in print until 1977). In the letter of rebuke sent by Jaspers to Heidegger (dated July 24, 1952), he wrote what were for him fierce phrases, such as: “I am horrified . . . a view of things [which], in its indeterminacy, promote[s] destruction . . . without clearly saying at the same time that you recognize the power of what is evil . . . Is not this power of evil in Germany also what has constantly grown and, in fact, what prepares Stalin’s victory . . . Is not a philosophy that surmises and poetizes in such sentences in your letter, that produces a vision of something monstrous, is this not, in turn something that prepares the victory of totalitarianism by separating itself from reality? Just as, before 1933, philosophy to a great extent actually made ready the acceptance of Hitler?” In a passage which culminates his firm criticism, he characterizes Heidegger’s “dreams” and fantasies about politics in language which is very close to the thought of Strauss: “Can the political, which you consider played out, ever disappear? Hasn’t it only changed its forms and means? And mustn’t we actually recognize these?” (I use Lilla, p. 34, since he better translates the passage.) Last but not least, Jaspers condemns Heidegger for still wishing “to appear as a prophet who points to something supersensible on the basis of a secret revelation.” This was surely to imply that Heidegger had learned nothing from what he had lived through in Germany with Hitler and the Nazis. 38 As he seriously charges with respect to a philosopher (EJM 223), “the later as much as the earlier Heidegger remains incapable of recognizing radical evil.” But “the later Heidegger is turning from a philosopher into a Denker [thinker].” And Fackenheim will eventually call this form of thought (of the post-Being and Time Heidegger) “pagan” ultimately, i.e., a thought that can be reverential toward the gods, but not toward God. But if it is truly pagan (or at least “neo-pagan”), is this a form of thought that is in any sense duty-bound to recognize radical evil? And so is it fair to fault Heidegger for its absence from his thought? On the other hand, for the somewhat confused state of things in Fackenheim’s 1973 considerations, Heidegger’s later thought is also helpful to, and has a sort of affinity with, Jewish thought. Indeed, ”the power of the work of the later Denker to captivate the Jewish thinker far exceeds that even of Being and Time.” Based on what he claims is a Buberian (but which may actually have been originally a Heideggerian) distinction—between the Greek priority of “seeing,” and the Jewish priority of “hearing”—“one may well consider the later Heidegger to be engaged in no less startling an enterprise than the Judaization of the entire history of Western philosophy.” Of course, this will prove to have been an illusion, due to its paganism, but not so much as to entirely nullify the continued appeal of the thought of Heidegger to a Jewish thinker like Fackenheim. It would seem to have been precisely this continued, even if guilty, appeal of Heidegger’s thought to the Jewish thinker Fackenheim that Strauss was trying to warn against and to check, by pointing a sobering (for any rationalist) finger toward demons.

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a philosopher: profundity of thought, and obtuseness if not depravity in morality.39 If it is true that Strauss was suggesting to Fackenheim an unavoidable need for the category of the demonic, in order to resolve his dilemma about the use of Heidegger’s thought in his philosophical theology, Fackenheim was apparently not persuaded, and did not pursue this line of thought in any subsequent work. To be sure, Fackenheim’s book Encounters did address itself not to the demonic (which Strauss seemed to regard as requisite for theological reflection on evil), but instead to “the idolatrous,” which for him may be spoken about as a valid modern category that helps in comprehending the source of radical human evil. Fackenheim defines idolatry as “the actual, literal identification . . . of finiteness with infinity.”40 But this definition of idolatry led Fackenheim to further assert that ancient Judaism—as it changed from its biblical to its rabbinical form, in which the ancient focus on the root-evil of idols no longer seemed quite so immediately evident or threatening—did not dispense with or even mitigate its ban on idols. This was because “the ancient idol” was not regarded by those rabbinical teachers as “an irrelevance,” as if it had been material only to the religious situation of the biblical teachers, but rather they even augmented the idol, which they regarded as “the demonic rival of the One of Israel.”41 What for our purposes is remarkable about this statement is that in order to make sense of idolatry, Fackenheim was compelled to resort to the category of “the demonic,” which unfortunately he did not further elucidate. Instead, what concerned him was showing why the idol must not be confused with a “religious symbol.”

39 Strauss undoubtedly attributes to Heidegger’s character an element of childlikeness or naïveté, as well as a certain sort of German piety: “Furthermore, however nauseating Heidegger’s conduct in 1933 was, we must not overlook the fact that both the young and the old Heidegger remind one of an altar-boy who, without the slightest qualms, piously, if perhaps not altogether unhypocritically, officiates at an auto-da-fé.” But something else is present in Strauss’s assessment besides the forgivable, i.e., the blind religious enthusiasm and unconscious pious fervor of the child. For as “an altar-boy who . . . officiates at an auto-da-fé,” another element makes him resemble some childdemon or spawn of the devil from a contemporary horror movie. Thus, he is also characterized as morally corrupted or spiritually perverted, even in his childlike naïveté. He is still somehow remotely culpable, and hence worthy of utter condemnation, even if only as some sort of child-monster. See also the final judgment on Heidegger’s character rendered by Jaspers in his letter July 24, 1952, discussed in note 37 supra. 40 EJM 189, 192. 41 EJM 189.

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In a criticism of Paul Tillich,42 Fackenheim acknowledged that the Greek and Roman statues of the gods were perhaps closer to being religious symbols. But he refuses to accept this closeness as sufficient to equate the one with the other. What ancient Judaism legitimated as a religious symbol was only some thing in which God is momentarily present, but it was not allowed to be made a permanent site of God. Their persistent worry was that this symbol should not rival Him as a matter for human worship. “A burning bush can reveal the divine Presence,” but it is not itself the Presence. Hence, it is only a religious symbol. But those statues of the gods still remained projections of the infinite on the finite, “such as to produce not a symbolic but rather a literal and hence total identification of finiteness and infinitude.”

42 EJM 182–84, 189. He refers to Tillich’s Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1951). In contrast with this criticism, it seems likely that Fackenheim drew the essential contours of his notion of idolatry from Tillich. EJM 255–56 n. 21, furthers the debate: Fackenheim faults Tillich (as also Hegel and Heidegger) for denying the possibility of what he calls “absolute idolatry.” This (if I grasp his point correctly) may arise even, or perhaps especially, in the minds and hearts of those who have been immersed in the “comprehensive truth” of God. In other words, he seems to argue that knowing the “comprehensive truth” of God is no protection against, and may even be a support for, the temptation of an “absolute idolatry.” It seems that this can be rephrased as an “idolatry of the human as the absolute.” Man who aspires to radically make himself (in whatever aspect of the human) the one true God—to substitute himself for God, rather than just to deny God—is a much greater threat to God and man than the ancient, or any premodern, idolator. Were Fackenheim to have had the chance to reflect on Islamism, or what is also known as radical, fundamentalist, or militant Islam, with its tendency to embrace a Nazi-style anti-Semitism combined with a fanatically-obscurantist Holocaust-denial, he might have suggested that this is a perfect exemplification of “absolute idolatry,” if not beyond it. For its intention is to present itself as God, or at least as His unmediated spokesman and mouthpiece, which makes it capable of justifying and sanctifying murder as good. As we have been so unfortunate as to witness, it produces both radical evil, and a simultaneous unconsciousness or denial of its evil, because as God (or His unmediated and unreconstructed representative), it can legitimately deny that what it is doing is evil. This is an original and unprecedented form of modern evil, and especially of religious abomination; it is beyond what one might call (in the language of Fackenheim) “absolute idolatry,” and emerges as a true “monotheistic idolatry.” This is the case because in its supposedly “religious” cause, it unapologetically and unself-consciously embraces all of the modern devices (ideology, technology, mass persuasion, etc.), and employs them to do its radical evil, while denying that these were in any sense originally rooted in atheism and may in essence fundamentally remain so. The traditional religionist, on the other hand, always suspected this to be the case about the modern devices; hence about him one can at least say that he regarded them with mistrust and did his best to avoid them, which preserved a moral sense in him which is completely lacking in the Islamist. This connects with our main topic because it may well be the case that the moral corruptions of contemporary Islam, and of totalitarian Islamism, derive from, or at least relate directly to, its virtually “religious” commitment to Holocaust denial.

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With this improved definition of idolatry, we are able to better approach the emphatically “demonic” force attributed to the idol as rival of God. What this suggests is the crossing of a line: beyond mere human projection, suddenly there is the assumption of a fully autonomous or separate will in the idol, once “finiteness and infinitude” have been “literally” and “totally” identified. This is the sort of worship, he suggests, that brings the idol to life, as it were, for its worshiper; he is heart and mind in the grip of the idol, and it then emerges as a “demonic rival” of God. Perhaps this is shown by the fact that it can even seem to command the worshiper to act, in which the doing of evil originates. Thus Fackenheim’s idol, as “the demonic rival of the One of Israel,” seems to point in the direction of the possibility that the same definition of idolatry—i.e., the human projection of infinity on the finite, such that it is an “actual, literal identification,” tacitly permitting it to command its worshipers to act—would apply equally to “the demonic.” While Fackenheim seems occasionally willing to employ “the demonic” as a reciprocal term for “the idolatrous,” he still prefers (for not entirely transparent reasons) to highlight idolatry as the highest source of evil in human history. It may be that Strauss had detected, and was hinting at, a subtle but crucial connection between idolatry and the demonic in Fackenheim’s book, with idolatry representing the phase that his thought on radical evil had reached. If he had intended to link this with the demonic, the connection was never adequately explained. Indeed, setting aside the unarticulated connection between idolatry and the demonic, Fackenheim never adequately explains either what he actually intends by calling the idol (or anything else) “demonic,” or how—if God is truly omnipotent—it is then even possible in any sense for there to be a “rival” of God.43 One presumes that as an unambiguous theist, and as a defender of traditional monotheistic Judaism (whatever his philosophic concerns with hypothetical divine beings may have been), he intends this to express an imagined (or at best, postulated ) 43 Hans Kung, Does God Exist? (New York: Crossroad, 1978), 617–18, makes the claim that this is one of three principles which differentiate biblical monotheism, and make the Hebrew biblical God unique: first, no other gods; second, no consort (which may further imply no sexuality in God, although it is not something he says); third, “no evil rival God” (i.e., “the ‘antagonist’ or ‘accuser’ ” is not allowed “to prevail alongside the good principle” as an equal and opposite evil principle). He continues with brief remarks on the scholarly debate about “ ‘the demonic in Yahweh,’ ” versus the very idea of demons as antithetical to the “the Yahweh faith,” on p. 668.

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rival to the God of Israel, the one true God. Similarly, he discusses such topics in passing as how modern idolatry raises “specific possibilities for radical evil,”44 and proceeds to elaborate on the historical actuality of “modern idolatry” in Nazi Germany. This unprecedented form of idolatry uniquely established “a demonic compact between Volk and Führer,” a compact that even allowed “a demonic circularity” to form between them.45 It moved beyond ancient idolatry because it denied all “otherness” as transcendence. And something of a clue as to why the compact was demonic may consist in its being “a conscious compact”46 which was made “between Volk and Führer.” This was that reflective or deliberate act by which the Volk—fearing its finiteness or its nothingness—hopes consciously to become an actual infinity through its willed and, as it were, “creative” worship of the Führer. Each—both Volk and Führer —hopes by such almost mutual worship to raise itself (as Volk), and himself (as Führer), from being “nothings” to being “everything.” As Fackenheim seems to imply, it is idolatry as nihilism, i.e., it is idolatry as the “demonic compact between . . . two nothings,” which somehow makes for or generates the evil as the only thing which it “creates.” Such nihilism (which cannot know what it truly is to create) can only manifest itself “in a passion for infinite destruction.” The mutual worship of Volk and Führer,47 and the “conscious” or “creative” invocation of the Führer as a sort of god, which he will be made by the worship of the Volk and which it will be made in his worship of it, are attempts at “an exorcism of nothingness and indeed, the creatio ex nihilo of divinity.”48 EJM 190. EJM 194. 46 The emphasis has been added. 47 In Strauss’s letter, he makes a critical comment on Fackenheim’s faulting of Heidegger for his boosting of “das Volk” to an equivalent status with an authentic “community” rooted in its own historicity. (“But one cannot hold it against Heidegger as Fackenheim does that Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit is still silent on ‘das Volk’: in that work Heidegger was still on his way from Reason to Language.”) If one is entitled to assume that he knew of the contents of this letter, Fackenheim did not accept the thrust of the critical comment. At least in its general contours (although perhaps specific elements in his original discussion may have been changed), even so it appears to have been essentially retained. See EJM 216. 48 EJM 194–95. Perhaps the thoughts of a contemporary writer on the crisis of modern art will help to illuminate what Fackenheim seems to be trying to get at: Modernism is obsessed with originality. As Ortega [y Gasset] says, “The poet aggrandizes the world by adding to reality . . . the contents of his imagination.” Until recently the task of the artist was to work with what was given, to pay homage to God and nature, the presumption being that though he would never achieve perfection, he could approach it through the various disciplines that make 44 45

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Fackenheim’s notion of modern idolatry seems to have been grounded in the ideas of Nietzsche, and especially in his “prophecy” of nihilism. As he once wrote: “Man would rather will nothingness than not will.”49 To will nothingness (rather than nothing) is readily confused with the will to “infinite destruction,” since it can no longer recognize the notion of a Creator, and hence can no longer differentiate between good and evil, which it believes itself beyond. But whatever one may say about Fackenheim’s notion of idolatry, Strauss’s interest seems to have been excited by the specific ground in which his notion of idolatry is rooted. This is the ground that makes evil a definite and prior fact, since otherwise it is not clear why nihilism needs to value “infinite destruction”: evil is an affirmative and autonomous force to be reckoned with. But evil as an affirmative and autonomous force is a reasonable definition of what is meant by the demonic, once it is personalized or made something willed. Thus, Fackenheim’s unacknowledged dependence on “the demonic,” i.e., as the realm of being which seems to issue in the passionate intention, or the absolute drive, to do evil, may (and I speculate) derive from a wish. This is the wish for the activation of a primordial force that amounts to a perverse human (i.e., “personal” or willed) desire, not just to do evil, but to ground meaning and value in

use of what is already in the universe, of which there is plenty. At his boldest, the artist would, in the language of Broadway, do another take on what God had already created. Never would he presume to actually create, not only because it would be unpardonable vanity but because it would be ridiculous. Artists have now been laboring for generations under the mistaken assumption that they are aggrandizing reality when in fact they merely have been distorting it. Operating on the presumption that one can be a god leads very quickly to sterility, and though an entire cultural apparatus may be primed to say it isn’t so, what is sterile is sterile, and eventually you know . . . the presumption that the artist can create is the twin of the proposition that nothing matters, that the universe operates without consequence or meaning. Briefly stated and without evangelical impulse, if God does not exist and neither does His order, then we are all free to do as we wish, to make our own order, and the one that prevails will simply be the one that can marshal the greatest power. This, the rule of force, is the legacy of nihilism, which is the gift of the belief that the universe is devoid of purpose. Modernism is rooted in these ideas, its developments are channeled and limited by them, and it is no coincidence that modernism has been and is yet the handmaiden of this century’s matchless forces of destruction and alienation. Mark Helprin, “Against the Dehumanization of Art,” a lecture delivered on May 25, 1994, and published in the New Criterion 13, no. 1 (September 1994). 49 Nietzsche, “What is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?” in On the Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, Sections 1 and 28 (trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Vintage Books, 1967], 97, 163). The other version is as follows: “. . . the basic fact of the human will, its horror vacui: it needs a goal—and it will rather will nothingness than not will.”

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evil. And thus the wish is also for “self-sanctifying” human participation in the primordial force. Fackenheim was unwilling to acknowledge such a vital primordial force, almost separate from human nature, which operates unyieldingly in the universe so as to prompt man to ally his will with evil. Strauss seems to have thought that this notion—evil as a primordial force, willed by man, which either enters him from a demonic realm, or makes him receptive to demons—is fundamental to Fackenheim’s argument, even if unacknowledged by him. However, being unacknowledged, it makes Fackenheim’s focus on it somewhat obscured or misdirected. To help Fackenheim direct or clarify it properly, as Strauss obliquely suggests, he would have had to return to the original layer of his own theological postulate. Strauss was likewise in accord with Fackenheim’s critical stance toward “evil-in-general, even radical- and demonic-evil-in-general,” as a category for approaching the evil of history, and especially the radical evil of Holocaust, which rouses a scandal because of its particularity.50 Yet he also cannot rely merely on “the demonic,” since as a generic or universal term, it is too abstract, and it is never defined precisely from the start. Rather, Fackenheim must begin by addressing himself to “the demon,” since this would root his account of radical evil in an apparently concrete form of “actual life.” And even if there is no actual, demonstrated form of human or natural life known to us as demons, then at least it can be a form of imagined life, which resembles actual life or possesses an immediate likeness to it. But then Strauss seems to further suggest that he would need to factually answer three closely related questions. First: “Are there truly demons as a separate form of being?” Second: “If demons are only creatures of the human mind, do they imaginatively represent an actuality?” And third: “Depending

50 See MW xvi, 234: he calls it a “lapse into escapism.” See “Reply to My Critics,” in GPJT 260–61, for the insistence on the historical (as opposed to the singular or personal) as altering the significance of moral acts, and (I would add) as similarly altering the significance of evil deeds. It is neither truthful nor just for them to be treated homogeneously, or “in general.” Even if every murder is heinous, the law knows that each murder occurs in a specific set of circumstances. And this set of circumstances determines the meaning of the crime, the value of the type of defense (i.e., whether any exoneration is worth considering), and hence the degree and kind of heinousness. Such knowledge is highly relevant to the judge, to the historian—and to the theologian. To force every particular event to conform with a universal pattern, is to lose the possibility of religious significance. See the comment by Kierkegaard on the ancient destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem (“the power to make everything inexplicable”), which Fackenheim uses as epigraph to “Reply to My Critics.”

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on the answers offered to the previous questions, how precisely is a demon to be defined?”51 On these three issues, Strauss seems to argue for Fackenheim’s need to reflect on the specifically personal demon, and almost urges him toward the restoration of a discarded doctrine, which he suggests may be useful, whether or not it is true.52 Whatever 51 See EJM 213–23. Fackenheim never associates Heidegger with “demons” or with “the demonic”: he only uses such language about Hitler and Nazi Germany. It is Strauss who links Heidegger with “demons,” which link only alludes to Fackenheim’s thought. The closest connection that I can detect along this line in EJM (which Strauss may have been thinking of ) is the parallel Fackenheim formulates, wittingly or unwittingly, between ancient and modern “rivals” of God. First consider: “the ancient idol was not an irrelevance but rather the demonic rival of the One of Israel” (EJM 189). Next compare it with: “Heidegger’s primal thinking is not neutral to Christianity. It is not an atheistic enemy. It is a pagan rival” (EJM 219). The concern with gods is not best dealt with as Heidegger delineates it: the old gods have fled, and we are in need of new gods (EJM 222). Rather, it is better dealt with by the anxiety (or even terror) of Judaism in history, which remains the decisive issue, i.e., the anxiety (or even terror) not to construe, and not to substitute, “false gods for the true God” (EJM 221). 52 I adapt the title of a well-known article by Steven Schwarzschild, which he used (admittedly) in a completely different context and for completely different reasons: “On the Personal Messiah: Toward the Restoration of a Discarded Doctrine.” See Arguments and Doctrines: A Reader of Jewish Thinking in the Aftermath of the Holocaust, ed. A. A. Cohen (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 521–37. It could also remind one of the statement made by Lessing, in a well-known letter to Mendelssohn of 9 January 1777. Reading Adam Ferguson, he asks himself if it is “really good to contemplate and to concern oneself seriously with truths with which one has lived, and for the sake of peace must continue to live, in constant contradiction? . . . Among them are some which I have for a long time ceased to regard as truths. Still, it is not since yesterday that I have been concerned that while discarding certain prejudices I might have thrown away a little too much, which I shall have to retrieve.” Thus, some might ask the question: what business is it of a philosopher—or if you prefer, a philosophic thinker—like Strauss to discuss demons, for to some there is something unseemly about a philosopher even being willing to have them in his mind, other than to ridicule those who believe in them. I shall ignore the issue of the “daimonion” of Socrates, since that seems likely to have been an entirely different type of being than what we think of as demons or devils. But as I would then suggest, this problem can be honestly addressed by a philosopher if he approaches it in the right spirit. This spirit was best enunciated by a modern theological writer, who employed a wise paradox that Strauss would surely have been able to appreciate: “There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.” C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1950), 9. But on the issue raised by Strauss, perhaps the most authoritative commentary was offered by Lessing. See his “Leibniz on Eternal Punishment” (1773), in Philosophical and Theological Writings, ed. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 37–60. On the other hand, for a very different perspective consider Freud, who was fascinated—for purely psychological reasons—with the notions of the devil, and of demons. See, e.g., Sigmund Freud, “A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis,” in Art and Literature, Volume 14 in The Penguin Freud Library, trans. James Strachey, and ed. Albert Dickson (London: Penguin, 1990), 379–423. For commentary by a scholar who has taken the element of the

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the rehabilitation of the demons might consist in, Strauss seems at the very least to imply that this is a matter worthy of careful consideration, if only as a method of clarifying what radical evil actually is. But these issues cannot be disconnected from the classical topics of Jewish theology: they relate to what God is, insofar as His Being bears on the problem of evil. For how would it change our view of God if radical evil were an actuality in history? By suggesting that Fackenheim needs to consider whether Heidegger was not captivated by a “demon,” Strauss seems to indicate something else: Fackenheim should have entered and explored a different dimension of theology if he wanted to consistently pursue this line of thought concerning radical evil. In fact, he would have had to engage in an entirely different style in theology, however much he may have wanted to avoid such “mythic” thinking, since he generally preferred the philosophic.53 Thus, if the previous queries lead to a defense of demons as actual beings, and if they operate or dwell in a separate realm of being, the following questions must be asked. Is the realm of the demonic equal to, and separate from, the

demonic in Freud’s thought very seriously, and given it due (if somewhat idiosyncratic) attention, see: David Bakan, “The Devil as Suspended Superego,” Part IV in Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition (London: Free Association Books, 1990), 187–237; “The Projection of Agency on the Figure of Satan,” chapter III in The Duality of Human Existence (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 38–101. 53 Of course, as Strauss could not have known, in To Mend the World Fackenheim did move much closer to “mythical” thinking, with his notions borrowed from the Kabbala, such as “rupture” (bearing at least some resemblance to shevirat ha-keilim, the “breaking of the primordial [divine] vessels”), “mending” (tikkun), etc. To be sure, in “Reply to My Critics,” GPJT 276–77, he insists on the fact that these are borrowings, and that he remains in the circle of philosophic or rational thought. Whether the legitimacy of this borrowing is ever fully justified, is not so clear. And whether this amounts to a break from philosophic or rational thought, whatever he may claim, is also not so clear. Strauss seems to have detected the direction of his thought, but also perhaps expressed the wish for either a certain consistency, or for a logic to the divergence which has been accounted for. Already one of the first reviewers of To Mend the World, Arthur A. Cohen, faulted his book along these lines, even if not specifically for his quasi-mysticism: “The exposition of To Mend the World begins in philosophic argument and ends in metaphor. . . . The examples, for instance, which persuade Fackenheim that those who resisted l’univers concentrationnaire, who took the stand of absolute life in the midst of absolute death, began the work of tikkun olam, afford us excellent devices of rhetoric, but are nothing in the face of his exposition of rage before philosophy and its deceptions. . . . Fackenheim’s use of patchwork argument or, more kindly, mosaic language, in which scraps of poetry, bits of novels, clippings from newspapers, reports of outrageous stupidities or saintly gestures are set down cheek-by-jowl with high theological exposition, simply muddies tone and distorts style.” See Cohen, “On Emil Fackenheim’s To Mend the World: A Review Essay,” Modern Judaism 3 (1983): 225–36, especially 233, 235.

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realm of God? Is there one being, as major trends in Jewish tradition maintained, who rules the separate realm of the demons, who is usually known as “Satan” or “Samael,” and who is a true “demonic rival” of God? If he is not fully autonomous (i.e., is not a truly a “rival”), but remains subordinate to God, as is usually contended (since it cannot be rendered consistent with divine omnipotence), then what is his relation with God? And if God truly has “created evil,”54 how can it be justified for the good God to do so, especially in the matter of radical evil? Or is evil a fundamental aspect of the nature of things, which cannot be eradicated?55 Is a fundamental dualism present in God Himself, insofar

Isaiah 45:7. See also Proverbs 16:4, and Lamentations 3:38. Fackenheim faults Strauss because he did not “take evil sufficiently seriously,” and because one detects too much “restraint in him vis-à-vis evil altogether.” This is because he is rooted too much in philosophic thought, even in his reading of the Hebrew Bible. Notice his comment vis-à-vis Strauss and the Holocaust, that Strauss’s view (as with every philosophic view, as true for Plato as it was for Hegel, “though for different reasons”), is “not adequate” in the confrontation with “the diabolical evil” of the Holocaust. It is worth repeating, for emphasis, the significant adjective, to which he apparently had to resort: “the diabolical evil.” But he says nothing further on “the diabolical,” and whether it can truly be disjoined from the devil, as he seems to want to do. See “Leo Strauss and Modern Judaism,” JPJP 103. On the other hand, Steven B. Smith, in Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 98–99, 200, makes much of the attention which Strauss gives to evil, as an irreducible and permanent fact about the human things. (This is not to endorse the use that Smith makes of Strauss’s statements, in order to issue pronouncements on how Strauss would have judged contemporary politics or the current war against what some call “Islamofascism.” That evil is irreducible and permanent, is a statement about metaphysical evil; it did not prevent Strauss from recognizing the need to fight previous forms of defeatable political evil in modern history, like Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. If the current enemy of the West and liberal democracy, “Islamism,” is considered equivalent to its predecessors in terms of political evil, this would seem to suggest Strauss’s likely recognition of the need to fight the current enemy, just as he once supported fighting them. For Strauss, such political evils apparently can be, and need to be, resisted and defeated.) The idea that evil is a fundamental aspect of the nature of things, which cannot be eradicated if we want a world and human life, because this is rooted in a necessary aspect of things (i.e., privation), is the view of Maimonides, Guide III, 8–12, 22–24. It is difficult to imagine how Maimonides would have been able to conceptualize radical evil or to accept Fackenheim’s notion of it; but it seems likely that Fackenheim would interpret this lack as due to his good fortune in not having had to experience the Holocaust. On the other hand, it is difficult to say about Maimonides, as I believe it would be difficult to say about Strauss, that he did not take evil with sufficient seriousness; he was determined to give it its due, while not allowing it to entirely determine his view of things. Fackenheim, however, also rejects Strauss’s argument for the primacy of the high; in some cases of the very greatest evils, the low cannot be comprehended, and it is not able to “fully reveal itself ” for what it is, if viewed “from the standpoint of the high.” This is perhaps another way of saying that, for Fackenheim, philosophy is defeated by the Holocaust: it cannot grasp properly or do justice to “diabolical evil.” 54

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as He is Creator, which makes the world somehow God’s working through His duality, and which will not be resolved “until the Messiah arrives,” as the signal that this process “in God,” so to speak, has been completed? Or is this world so mixed with evil that it is unsalvageable, and we must transcend it to an “other world,” as the only way to make sense of it, or to escape its depravity?56 This is a series of problems that would have to be addressed by any Jewish thinker aiming to make use of “the demonic,” as Fackenheim seemed to want to do. Wishing to preserve faith in the good, all-powerful God who created the world, and yet confronting the Holocaust on the basis of the leading alternatives in Jewish thought for dealing with radical evil, Fackenheim (as of To Mend the World ) seems divided in his own mind between two alternate positions.57 First, he echoes the dominant stream of Jewish mysticism (to whom Schelling is very close), in which the fundamental dualism between good and evil is in God, and not just in man and the world. To sharpen the focus, the fundamental dualism is in man and the world because man and the world mirror God, and participate in the historical process of divine “unification.” In other words, human beings can through their deeds either help or hinder the process by which God works through His dualism in history and in nature. Second, he echoes the pure Jewish Gnostics (to whom both the pre- and 56 Partisans of an “other world” in Judaism divided among themselves as to how it is radically possible to escape the evil and depravity of this world. For some, they argued about whether the escape is something that follows individual life (World-to-Come), or only properly follows the collective history of humanity (End-of-Days). Similarly, they also divided on whether it only encompasses the soul (immortality), or whether it also embraces the body (resurrection). Maimonides’ medieval “Thirteen Principles” might seem to have settled the issue by virtue of his authoritative pronouncement on the Law. However, a glance at the centuries-long Maimonidean Controversy, at unending criticism of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, and at the variations on these themes elaborated by several schools of Kabbala, show, if nothing else, that speculation and argument on this issue was never settled, even among the most pietistic. See The Limits of Orthodox Theology: Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles Reappraised, by Marc B. Shapiro (Oxford: Littman Library, 2004), 139–56. 57 The alternative view, in which a powerful, active, separate, and “personal” force of being operates which is called the Devil and which (though subordinate to God) helps to account for evil by his rebellion against God, was perhaps most fully explored by John Milton in Paradise Lost. One of the advantages of recurring to Milton, in order to help make sense of evil, is the principle, standard, or motto by which he indicates what the devil stands for, since he is the only one who is willing to declare: “Evil, be thou my good.” (See Paradise Lost, Book IV, line 110.) However, it is not entirely clear whether Milton has elaborated a theology and politics that can fully make sense of this shocking choice as a truly radical possibility in a world created by a good and all-powerful God.

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post-World War II Heidegger, with important qualifications, is very close), in which nothing man can do will make much difference, because he is essentially abandoned to a world in which evil seems to dominate. I am not sure that Fackenheim ever completely resolved his own divided mind between these two positions, perhaps because he immersed himself so deeply in the darkness of radical evil. But in To Mend the World, this divided mind seems to slightly favor the dominant Lurianic stream of Jewish mysticism, which offers some light and hope against evil and the demonic. However, to even attempt to answer this question is not possible in the present context. I can only observe that Strauss urged Fackenheim to confront the logic of his position by pointing him in the direction in which it had to move him. Strauss highlighted in his letter Fackenheim’s seemingly unavoidable need for the category of the demons in order to make use of the demonic. He needed this category if he was both to deal properly with the full significance of radical evil, while standing firm to preserve the authentically theistic ground of his thought. That need was shown by his resorting (however tentatively) to “the demonic” even during his provisional attempt to articulate “modern idolatry” as a first solution to his deeper problem.

FACKENHEIM’S HEGELIAN RETURN TO CONTINGENCY Sharon Portnoff Part I When I asked Emil L. Fackenheim what he and Leo Strauss had talked about during his visits to the older philosopher in New York during the 1940s, he told me they had talked about philosophy and about the possibility of a return to an older way of thinking and a more just society.1 Given the events that had driven the thinkers from their native homes in Germany, both recognized the need for an alternative intellectual model. Both thinkers, Fackenheim told me, had recognized the adoption of the belief in historicism—the conviction that the foundations of human thought are rooted in particular, historical circumstances—as the source of the hermeticism of modern thought and, in turn, of the loss of common human decency.2 How, I asked, did their thought compare? Fackenheim formulated it by suggesting that Strauss sought a return to Aristotle and the ancients, while he, unwilling to concede the religious ramifications of history, sought a return to Hegel. This essay is an attempt to reconstruct Fackenheim’s side of that ongoing conversation, to think about why Fackenheim concluded that, in order to combat historicism in general and the belief in unrestrained human

1 Emil L. Fackenheim, personal interview with the present author, Jerusalem, August 2003. 2 Historicism holds first, that thinking about an object literally changes the object of thought, and, ultimately, in its most radical form, that human being makes itself. This position had disastrous political results, as natural ( physikon) or eternal standards were defeated (i.e., ignored). The disaster for philosophy—indeed, for human natural capacity—may be even more catastrophic. Transcendence is denied a priori, as knowledge comes to be understood as limited by what we make. The informative value of historical consciousness to thought is presumed, validating knowledge on the sole criterion of its progressive value. Philosophy, the quest for knowledge of the eternal things, and common sense, the recognition that thought begins and must accompany the contingent—indeed, the recognition that progressive thought is adopted without proof—, are abandoned. For Fackenheim’s more explicit attack on historicism, see MH; reprinted in GW 122–47. See also, Martin D. Yaffe, “Historicism and Revelation in Emil Fackenheim’s Self-Distancing from Leo Strauss,” in this volume.

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self-making in particular, Hegel’s model is better suited to contemporary need than Aristotle’s. And I will try also to point to something deeper: what is the meaning of Fackenheim’s return to Hegel—whom, after all, he concluded was wrong in important respects—and what does this return indicate about both Fackenheim’s conception of philosophy and also his debt to Strauss. To begin, we must ask why Strauss sought a return to the thought of Aristotle and the ancients as a means of countering the modern adoption of historicist thought. In Strauss’ reading, Aristotle had recognized the importance of particular historical circumstances, or of contingency, but had denied their essentiality to thought. For the ancients, the contingent (to symbebekos) accompanies, or even accompanies necessarily, but does not belong essentially to, for instance, the being of a Platonic Form.3 The supremely happy man of Aristotle’s Ethics, the man of self-sufficient intellect, cannot abandon the contingent—even in contemplation, he requires external goods.4 Prudence, or practical wisdom ( phronesis), necessarily accompanies contemplation for the embodied soul, and it is only through the crown of moral virtue—the actualization of natural virtue5—that the ideal of intellectual virtue can be achieved. The contingent, then, is not essential to thought, and knowledge for the ancients is not rooted in particular historical circumstances. Furthermore, the contingent can never become essential to thought. Aristotle understands the contingent as the effect of a mix of chance and purposiveness, but he recognizes also that chance can never strictly be the cause of anything: the contingent may be purposive, but its cause involves chance and is therefore inscrutable to man.6 One may ask, what causes Aristotle to know that there may exist things inscrutable to the human mind? Surely, this knowledge indicates a refusal to recognize—a flight from—the meaning of contingency? Aristotle suggests not. What causes us to know that there may exist things inscrutable to the human mind is intellectual intuition, the natural power of intelligence, or what is self-caused by intelligence. Intellectual intuition stands at the foundation of theoretical and practical knowledge: by recognizing the universal appropriate to the particulars of a given experience, intellectual intuition

See Phaedo 78d1. Nicomachean Ethics 1177b25–1178b30; see also Metaphysics 1072b14–30; and De Anima 408b1–32. 5 Nicomachean Ethics 1143b20–1143b35. 6 See, for instance, Physics 193b22, 198a5–13. 3 4

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at the same time retains its practical understanding of particulars.7 The tension between the transcendent and the contingent remains, with recognition of the role of each in human understanding. Aristotle recognizes that intellectual intuition is at work in experience, but he does not presume that this work (energeia) dissolves the distinction between intellection and experience. Contingency for Aristotle is the means—the necessary means—through which one recognizes the eternal, but it is a condition of—a “walking along with”—, and not a cause of, our coming to know the eternal.8 Historicism, then, is precluded within the terms of Aristotle’s thought. But—so Fackenheim may have countered during one of his visits to Strauss—Hegel also counters historicism. Like Aristotle, Hegel identifies as a fundamental question the relationship between transcendence—necessary for the incursion of God or as the impetus of thought—and contingency. While it is true that, unlike Aristotle, Hegel presumed the essentiality of historical context to thought—this, in order to affirm the validity of both revelation and philosophy in the modern context, a stance of fundamental significance to Fackenheim’s work—Hegel also recognizes that resolving the tension between transcendence and the contingent would put both religion and metaphysics at risk. If we do not want to deny transcendence a priori—Fackenheim formulates this denial as the internalization of God—, there can be no ultimate reconciliation between transcendence and contingency. Hegel’s refutation of historicism—more ambiguous than Aristotle’s—is contained in his recognition of the persistence of the tension between transcendence and the contingent, a tension that persists because certain elements of contingency in Hegel’s thought—the so-called “pre-philosophical religious dimension”—remain conditional to and not causal of our coming to know. For Hegel, then, there is recognition of the import of historical context to thought, even as the extent of this import is limited. Hegel refutes historicism, so Fackenheim claims, even before historicism arose. Fackenheim’s return to Hegel, and not to Aristotle, is motivated by his concern for what he understands as the uniquely Jewish modern

7 It is only in speech that the universal in which the particulars participate (metekhousin) is recognized. And the contemplation of this universal is the rest of the fully actualized soul. See, Laurence Berns, “Putting Things Back Together Again in Kant,” Interpretation 28 (2000–2001), 210–11. 8 See Phaedo 99b2–4.

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experience. This experience, so Fackenheim believes, must inform modern thought: the inclusion of the Holocaust as a causal element of reality is of pressing need because it provides the tools necessary to fight Hitler and “Hitler’s shadow.” If the Jewish experience of the Holocaust is omitted from the philosophical discourse, the specifically anti-Jewish biases embedded in modern thought will persist9 and, ultimately, will reveal themselves again in human experience. And so, just as Hegel reassesses Aristotle and Aristotle’s concern for eternity, Fackenheim reassesses Hegel and Hegel’s concern for both eternity and contingency. While Hegel’s conversation with Aristotle provides the link necessary to incorporate contingency into the philosophical discourse, Fackenheim’s conversation with Hegel allows him to include in that discourse the uniquely Jewish experience of modernity. But is the presumption of the essentiality of historical context to thought warranted? There have been many disasters in Jewish history, and yet Jews and Judaism have persisted. If Fackenheim recognizes the problem of reconciling transcendence and contingency as a permanent human problem, why not return to the position that more directly and more forcefully refutes historicism? Why not return, like Strauss, to Aristotle’s formulation?10 Fackenheim, in fact, recognizes the possibility of a return to the thought of the ancients,11 or to the Thomist dictum that there is nothing in the intellect that is not first in the senses.12 Why did Fackenheim deem it urgent—even at the risk of disrupting our recognition of philosophy’s concern for the transcendent and the eternal—that he return to Hegel to inform Hegel’s philosophical thought with Jewish experience?

9 Fackenheim cites the “rational” or systematic, rather than passionate, methodology of the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews as evidence that there existed for the Nazis a causal connection between thought and experience. To expose the specifically anti-Jewish bias of modern thought, Fackenheim put such thinkers as Kant and Kierkegaard in “encounter” with Jewish thought. See EJM. 10 For a more comprehensive comparison of the thought of Strauss and Fackenheim on the issue of historicism, see my dissertation, Leo Strauss and Emil L. Fackenheim in Conflict: Reason, Revelation, Historicism (2005), esp., ch. 4. See also, below, Part VII. 11 MH 97, 99; GW 146. 12 RD 224.

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Part II The most prominent aspect of Fackenheim’s work on Hegel is his willingness to understand Hegel in Hegel’s own terms. This is no easy task for the modern mind, which tends to conceive of our historicallyconditioned understandings of concepts as determinative, and often loses the source of this determination. In his essay “Hegel on the Actuality of the Rational and the Rationality of the Actual,” Fackenheim begins and ends without judgment as to whether Hegel’s conceptions of actuality and rationality are true, or correct.13 He insists that we understand neither Hegel’s work nor our own thought if we do not appropriately frame Hegel’s question. This is indeed a philosophical task. Fackenheim’s presumption is that Hegel’s question is worthy of being asked, just as all questions which bring to light the permanent human problems remain worthy of being asked, that there persist permanent human problems. The primary mistake of the modern critique of Hegel is to presume that Hegel’s philosophy is inevitably closed. Hegel formulates it this way: “What is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational.”14 Fackenheim recognizes in the modern critique of this formulation an error that results from a specifically modern bias. Presuming that the actual has priority over the rational, the modern thinker erroneously believes that Hegel has confused two different sorts of actuality.15 If Hegel means that the actual is all that is, to claim that the actual is the rational is scandalous. If Hegel means the actual as only what can be recognized within the rational, to claim that the actual is the rational is a tautology.

13 “Hegel on the Actuality of the Rational and the Rationality of the Actual,” GW 164–171, especially 167, 170–71. Because Fackenheim reserves philosophical judgment until after Hegel’s distinction is appropriately framed, he does not cite either Hegel’s Logic or Philosophy of Right, relying instead on the Encyclopedia in the essay. Because Fackenheim reserves historical judgment as to the post-Holocaust validity of Hegel’s formulation, Fackenheim ends the essay with a new question: Can the Hegelian distinction between the actual and the merely existent survive the gas chambers of Auschwitz? 14 Hegel, Philosophy of Right and Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences (para. 6, 3rd ed.), as cited in GW 164. 15 GW 164–5. Fackenheim dramatizes the need to eliminate the modern bias from our reading of Hegel in the form of this essay: each of its seven parts is a step on the journey away from modern misconceptions and toward Hegelian conceptions. Fackenheim’s essay declines to judge the success of Hegel’s definitions of actuality and rationality, but serves the very important purpose of posing the question correctly.

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Hegel may be wrong, but his error, according to Fackenheim, is not based on confusion.16 The confusion, rather, is ours. The source of our confusion is first, our overemphasis on the actual at the expense of the rational, or the belief that ontological assertions must be preceded by epistemological assertions of human knowledge. Second, our presumption that Hegel believed his system to be universally valid (or that Hegel presumes the actual to be all that is) misunderstands rationality, because it separates the rational from the actual given historical condition in which the rational arose. As a result of these two modern misconceptions, we limit Hegel’s rationality to epistemological subjectivism and preclude the possibility of the actual as inclusive of non-human design. Our conclusion that Hegel is looking only at human (moral, cultural, political, technological) achievements fails to recognize the givens in which Hegel’s formulation arose: a vital religion and “philosophical ‘culture’ which includes ‘knowledge’ of ‘God.’”17 Hegel’s rational, when appropriately contextualized, suggests the historically-conditioned truth of the inward relatedness of man, God and world; his actual is not mere existence, but what arises as a result of the rational moment. And it is from within this moment that one must find the next historically-conditioned rational. Our mistake arises from our misunderstanding the roles of both Hegel’s pre-philosophical dimension and the speculation which permeates Hegel’s conception of the actual. Part III Fackenheim reminds us of a remark Hegel made at the beginning of the nineteenth century.18 Comparing the need for prior epistemological justification for metaphysics to a swimmer who wants to learn to swim before entering the water, Hegel recognized that metaphysics justifies itself through its own process. And so, Fackenheim’s return to Hegel may be understood first as a demystifying of the modern mind, its impris16 Fackenheim supports this assertion by pointing out that Hegel must have been aware of the problem of actuality because, first, it is “obvious and elemental”; second, Hegel’s statement regarding the relationship between the actual and the rational is “formulated with obvious care”; third, Hegel’s formulation is “put in a prominent place”; and fourth, it is “repeated and defended in another, hardly less prominent place” (GW 165). 17 GW 164. 18 “Acknowledgments” in MH; not reprinted in GW.

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onment to epistemological subjectivism and belief in the thoroughly abstracting universality of rationality. Fackenheim, then, undertakes the journey of return—of careful listening to Hegel, a listening as uninformed as possible by contemporary need. In Fackenheim’s reading, the pre-philosophical religious dimension of Hegel’s thought provides the self-conscious limits of his system. It provides the context for the self-making which occurs in the synthesis of philosophy and religion, and, at the same time, highlights that the Hegelian system operates only in the sphere of human achievement: there exists a realm that is permanently beyond human self-making. Hegel would place limits on both the contingent and also the human freedom to inform or recognize the eternal through one’s own efforts. The persistence of this realm guarantees the persistence of metaphysics itself, and, indeed, of the possibility of non-human intervention in history. Because the pre-philosophical dimension precludes the acceptance of total human self-making, and prevents the total assimilation of the eternal into the contingent, metaphysics is preserved. At the same time, Hegel’s thought incorporates into metaphysics historical consciousness. Both can be true, because Hegel’s “synthesis” of religion and philosophy takes place in the context of the given pre-philosophical religious dimension, within the context of a “culture” which possesses, or, as it were, lives with, both religion and a philosophy open to knowledge of God. While it is true that Hegel’s thought does not perpetuate the major stream of metaphysics—the ontological—, it does, according to Fackenheim, perpetuate a minor stream—the meontological.19 The meontological 19 Fackenheim cites Aquinas as representative of the major tradition of metaphysics and of the principle operatio sequitur esse, and Schelling and Hegel, among others, as representative of the principle esse sequitur operationem (MH 30–32 n. 20; GW, 220–21 n. 21). So, for instance, Aquinas works in the ontological tradition, because, in the Summa Theologica (I, q. 75), and especially in Summa Contra Gentiles (II, 21 and III, 42), he posits that “. . . the perfection of the operation follows the perfection of the substance.” Being, in other words, precedes process. The meontological tradition, on the other hand, posits that process, or pure freedom and the desire to become something, becomes something in its moving both backward and forward. So, for instance, Hegel: “The supreme form of Nought as a separate principle would be Freedom” (Hegel, Logic, sec. 87; also cited in MH 31 n. 20; GW 221 n. 21). Fackenheim suggests that the ontological tradition, in its rejection of the meontological tradition, grounds itself on the principle of the four causes (see Aristotle, Physics 194b16–195b30; Metaphysics 1025b4–18)—an efficient cause cannot cause itself, unless, absurdly, it could exist prior to itself. In this framework, the material cause would exist as a given, but would not be essential to a thing. In the meontological tradition, on the other hand, the Nothing, or the Process, “. . . would have to be at once material and efficient cause, and be creative of the formal and final [causes] . . .” (MH 32, n. 20; GW 221, n. 21). Given the presuppositions of the meontological tradition, the ontological tradition would have

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tradition of metaphysics would prioritize process over being: human freedom would extend so far as divine Freedom would allow. Just so, Hegel’s assertion that experience is informative to thought does not destroy religion: ultimately God is the agent of Freedom. Neither does it destroy metaphysics: even as Hegel historicizes metaphysics, the metaphysical tradition is perpetuated insofar as this historicized metaphysics is commonly held by various 20th century “metaphysicians.”20 At the same time, the possibility that metaphysics is essentially tied to history opens up the possibility of a radical transformation of metaphysics, a transformation focused specifically on the role of the essentiality or non-essentiality of contingency.21 Even as Hegel posits the informative value of experience to speculation, speculation itself is intrinsically bound to his historical thought. Hegel’s value, then, Fackenheim concludes, lies in his work as a speculative historian.22 In order to understand Hegel in his own terms, one must recognize in his thought a direct connection between ontology and history. Without this recognition, one would overlook either the given, non-universal, aspect of Hegel’s rationality and arrive at a “mere abstract and empty possibility,” or the given historically-conditioned actuality and “. . . mistake for a permanent nature what is in fact a specific historical product.”23 As a philosopher, Hegel had based his assertion of the end of history on theoretical metaphysics: his moment in time defined, according to him, the moment at which philosophy had succeeded in attaining wisdom. Hegel, while affirming that there is no further need to seek wisdom, affirmed also, paradoxically, the supreme value of philosophy—and it is this latter affirmation that makes Hegel a suitable thinker for a contemporary philosopher. Furthermore, Hegel’s philosophy does not presume to know what will happen, only what has happened already.

to abandon the principle of the four causes, and could therefore no longer sustain its argument as incontrovertible. 20 This view is held in common, for instance, by Nietzsche, Collingwood, Dilthey, Croce, Dewey and Heidegger (MH 11; GW 124). 21 While Hegel’s thought necessitates the continual return to past or present contingent history for thought’s progression, he does not presume the essentiality of future contingency to thought. One might say that Hegel’s introduction of historical consciousness into philosophical thought complicates teleology by introducing a freedom limited by non-human agency. 22 Fackenheim cites two ways in which the ontologist may turn into the historian, either as the speculative historian, as Hegel became, or the “historian pure and simple,” in the way of Croce and Collingwood. See MH 27; GW 128. 23 Ibid.

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Philosophy had come to its maturity, but that does not prescribe its further uselessness. Hegel’s suggestion that World Spirit may have been transferred from Europe to the New World necessitates the perpetuation of the quest for wisdom. Focusing on Hegel’s affirmation of the supreme value of philosophy—and his perpetuation of the meontological tradition of metaphysics—Fackenheim explicitly rejects the reading that Hegel asserts there is no further need to seek wisdom. While Hegel’s work as a philosopher, or the reading of his work as an ontological historian, must be abandoned, no such requirement exists for his work as a speculative historian. His rationality must be understood as non-universal, insofar as it is historically conditioned; his actuality must be understood as informed by the given effects of the relationship between man’s and God’s reason. Hegel’s philosophy, despite its assertion of the absolute moment, remains open,24 because the ground of knowing within the Hegelian system is not reason, but the activity of mind (noesis) that holds on to the particulars, even as they point to the universal.25 Part IV Fackenheim finds in Hegel’s pre-philosophical religious dimension its distinction from radical historicism, from the belief that there is no limit or context for human self-making. Hegel located the need for both the freedom of human self-making, and also a limitation to that self-making, within human being itself: he recognized the paradox at the basis of human existence. If human being is a self-making, it has both situated or finite and non-situated or infinite aspects; it is both human and also is capable of philosophical self-recognition. While the aspects of man’s being must integrate themselves to create a self-identity, they are unable to do so. Were the infinite aspect to reduce itself to finitude, “. . . the result would be a relapse into historicism.”26 Were the finite to “reduce itself to the infinite aspect, man would cease to be human.”27 Hegel See EJM 263 n. 58. From the perspective of traditional metaphysics, one may recognize this process as a movement from potential aliquid to actual aliquid, such that the process is not out of nothing and is temporal. Fackenheim seems rather to want to suggest the possibility of its beginnings in a mystery-miracle: the process is both out of nothing and non-temporal, because it is eternally in the fore- and after-knowledge of an omniscient God. 26 MH 68; GW 139. 27 Ibid. 24 25

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insists on the role of contingency as informative to thought, because he insists on understanding religion in its own terms before transfiguring it into philosophy: pre-transfigured religion describes itself as openness to a particular event addressed to a particular person or people.28 At the same time, Hegel posits the pre-philosophical dimension as the limit to contingency’s informing of thought. On the other hand, the informative value of contingency to thought can be sustained only if it were possible to transfigure the contingent into the (rationally-informed) actual. The problem in establishing a representation of pre-philosophical religion adequate to being transfigured into philosophy, is defining how the human being is to recognize God from within the realm of the finite. The effort to transfigure religion into thought is hampered by the limitations placed on the human being by both his contingency, and also the necessity, in order to allow the possibility of an encounter with God, of retaining his contingency. The human being, because he has only a finite standpoint, has no means by which to assume God’s activity: human activities, while they have contact with the infinite, can achieve only partial truths.29 Yet Hegel, referring to the Christian assertion of the identity between the divine and human infinite perspectives, suggests that the human being, by recognizing God as both within and also outside himself, is able to recognize human finite experience through an infinite perspective, even as he recognizes himself as distinct, insofar as he resides in the finite realm, from the infinite. Because God is present within the human being, Hegel’s philosophy is capable of understanding absolutely, certain aspects of human existence; because God is present outside the human being, philosophy’s absolute understanding is nevertheless bound to the contingency of human existence. By positing the identity between God and the human divine perspective, not only is Hegel able to preserve the ability of absolute transhistorical truth to inform his thought, but also he is able to assert the possibility that pre-philosophi-

28 Fackenheim writes: God “. . . is known only through His revelation; and that is not timeless. It is addressed not to man as such, but to this man, or this people, here and now. Moreover, the content of this revelation does not consist of timelessly true propositions; whether it is God’s commandment, His promise, or God Himself, it is not abstractable from the moment to which it belongs, nor from those to whom it is addressed. Clearly, then, Biblical man’s thinking about God cannot be detached from his person” (Fackenheim, “Franz Rosenzweig and the New Thinking,” in JTEF 60–1 [italics in original]). 29 RD 17.

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cal religion can be transfigured into philosophy: because the human being is capable of achieving an infinite perspective, even as he remains finite, also he is capable of differentiating God’s transcendence from God’s immanence. Hegel suggests that, in order to achieve an infinite standpoint, the human being cannot rely simply on finite reflection on finite experience, which reliance would issue only in contingent knowledge. Rather, in order to achieve an infinite standpoint, even while remaining bound to the finite, the human being must reenact finite experience. Through the union of the infinite, or the divine perspective in man that is capable of reflecting on reenactment, and the discordance between the human and the divine in man, or the aspect of man that experiences, reexperiences, and reflects on his experience, the human being can recognize his experience as, and translate his experience into, idea. Man’s recognition of his ability to recognize the non-situated, accomplished by his divine nature through the reenactment of finite experience, is simultaneous with his recognition, accomplished by the duality of the divine and the human nature in man, of the non-situated. Through the “union of union and nonunion,”30 the absolute appears in the world. Finite experience is transfigured into infinite thought, even while thought itself is transferred into the realm of experience.31 Part V Hegel, then, like the ancients, recognized that contingency accompanies our coming to know the absolute. But Hegel’s intention was to synthesize the ancient claim to metaphysics with the modern claim to historical consciousness. The distinction between the ancient and Hegel’s views can be traced to Hegel’s inclusion of contingency as a cause in our coming to know the eternal: contingency is essential to thought,

RD 26. Hegel’s conclusion is validated only on the presumption that he inherited from the ancients concepts developed already from their fundamental forms. Compare, for instance, Plato’s suggestion that all philosophers deserve the epithet “divine” (Sophist 216C); or Aristotle’s suggestion that “if the intellect is divine compared with man, the life of the intellect must be divine compared with the life of a human being” (Nichomachean Ethics 1177b32). Human beings do not engage in a process of becoming more like the divine; rather, human beings manifest the divine in themselves by acting in a manner akin to the gods. 30 31

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because human experience participates, so to speak, in God’s Freedom. But this understanding of contingency marks the beginning of progressive thought: the end of our coming to know, like contingency, can no longer be constant. Ideas, because they presume belief in progress, are presented to us as already historically-conscious. Hegel writes, The manner of study in ancient times is distinct from that of modern times, in that the former consisted in the veritable training and perfecting of the natural consciousness. Trying its powers at each part of its life severally, and philosophizing about everything it came across, the natural consciousness transformed itself into a universality of abstract understanding which was active in every matter and in every respect. In modern times, however, the individual finds the abstract form ready made.32

For Hegel there is no need to return to the fundamental concepts of the ancients, since the first-hand experiences from which these concepts derive have been, through the application of historical consciousness, at least partially developed. By claiming that a new philosophy could be established and built from the distinction between the thought of the ancients and the moderns, Hegel serves as the thinker whose incorporation of historical thought claimed to negate further need for the fundamental concepts of ancient thought. At the same time, Hegel’s “separation” (as Fackenheim reads him) of what he called the actual from the merely existent, his application of the belief in progress to the human understanding, even while acknowledging realms which are exempt, as below (the merely existent) or beyond (the pre-philosophical dimension), human understanding, from that progress—his positing of a pre-philosophical dimension—preserves the basis of metaphysics.33 Part VI While Fackenheim recognizes in Hegel’s thought a powerful response to the challenge of historicism, he recognizes also that Hegel failed to 32 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (2nd ed.; London, 1931), 94, as modified in Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1959), 75 n. 4. 33 Fackenheim compares Hegel’s rationality to Plato’s idealism: in both concepts the objects of thought exist as entities external to the human being. See GW 166. Yet, unlike Plato, Hegel distinguishes between the actual and the rational: “the world is not identified with or dissipated into God even though God is its Creator and Redeemer” (GW 167).

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sustain the “struggle” between the infinite and finite aspects of human being as historically situated self-making, a struggle implicit in Hegel’s response to historicism.34 Because he feared that philosophy would otherwise become impossible, Hegel asserted the primacy of man’s infinite aspect, sublating man’s finite, into his infinite, aspect.35 This sublation destroyed the possibility of contingency, as first-hand experience, to inform thought. Ironically, according to Fackenheim, it was not philosophical considerations that destroyed Hegel’s “transhistorical synthesis of the historical and the transhistorical,” but rather “. . . the recalcitrance of subsequent history.”36 Hegel’s synthesis may have been philosophically valid for a particular time, a particular place and a particular religion, but it is no longer valid. Hegel’s failure in this regard has enormous ramifications: his failure to retain the tension between the non-situated and situated aspects of man’s being sublated the basis for the pre-philosophical religious dimension and resulted in the emergence of historicism even after Hegel had offered an adequate refutation of it. If the belief in religion is replaced by a “religious” belief in progress, so too the religious dimension of Hegel’s thought ceases to uphold the claim to metaphysics—even to its meontological tradition. If the prephilosophical dimension of Hegel’s thought is sublated, or superseded, by the actual, so too metaphysics, both the rational and also the distinction between the actual and the merely existent, becomes superfluous. The re-creation of the moment of divine-human/human-divine encounter, might itself become part of the progressive development, might itself sublate the necessity of both informing human thought with what is eternally beyond human understanding, and also of recognizing MH 69; GW 140. There were for Hegel, according to Fackenheim, other considerations, resulting from his Christian convictions, that encouraged Hegel to abandon this “struggle” (MH 69 n. 40; GW 226 n. 41). 36 MH 69–70; GW 140. Hegel’s Rational State did not come to be. While Fackenheim suggests that he had not thought about the Holocaust directly prior to 1967, and that he had used philosophy and theology as the means of his avoidance (GW xix), here Fackenheim refers, if not to the event itself, then to the idea of the Holocaust: we must confront the horror of the Holocaust with a horror of our own (MW 263). The Holocaust has indelibly changed “human nature” (MW 99), making any synthesis of the finite and infinite aspects of man mere escapism from historical reality. Fackenheim’s reasons for positing the indelible change in human nature are complex, but one may point to Fackenheim’s assertion of the event’s uniqueness. Alternatively formulated, philosophy has been rendered impotent by its having lost its battle with history; Hegel could not conquer history philosophically. 34 35

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the dangerous possibility of incorporating into human thought what may merely exist below human thought. Part VII Why, then, does Fackenheim affirm the need to return to Hegel and not to the thought of the ancients? The ancients, like Hegel, recognized the ultimate insufficiency of philosophy to provide a rational comprehension of the whole; recognized the need for something beyond philosophy to complete philosophy; recognized the necessary role of the contingent in coming to know. Why include contingency as a causal element in our coming to know reality? Why posit a pre-philosophical religious dimension that provides context for historically-conditioned thought? First, one must begin where one is. Fackenheim writes: “All genuine dialogical thought begins not in a vacuum but ‘where one is.’ Its post-Hegelian setting makes this ‘where one is’ more than an arbitrary personal given but also, and at the same time, a given in the Western religious-secular situation.”37 Modern thought, in order to affirm the possibility of the existence of natural insight, must use history as a means of returning to the fundamental concepts that are the result of first hand experience. In this return, a fundamental distinction must be made between the historical context in which an idea emerges—the sort of historical consciousness of Plato38—and the historical context from which an idea emerges. The former may provide clues to the “literary character”39 of a philosopher’s writing, how to read a philosopher, taking into account the contingent elements which he himself did or did not take into account. To read with the presumption that contingency is essential to thought unilaterally denies the possibility of natural insight. What is required is a philosophy of history, whose function is to trace the development from the complex idea with which the modern thinker is presented, to the idea’s fundamental concept. This philosophy of history MW 129. Plato had understood thought that is bound to a particular worldview as the product of prisoners in the cave. See Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1965), 12. 39 See Leo Strauss, “The Literary Character of the Guide for the Perplexed, in Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1952; Chicago: University of Chicago, 1988). 37

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is not historicism, but rather an historically-conscious methodology by which to separate the historical from the philosophical (if not the eternal, then at least the permanent). This is precisely why Fackenheim, though he is ultimately critical of Hegel, takes such pains to understand Hegel in his own terms: Hegel’s thought begins a process of dialogical openness between philosophy and history, which, if maintained, both need not decay into historicism, and also can be, in a sense, self-corrective. Fackenheim’s work on Hegel is a study of Hegel as the last moment, so to speak, that the ancients had voice. It returns to the first hand experience of religion as the starting point for Hegel’s more developed abstract metaphysical ideas. At the same time, Fackenheim’s work on Hegel dramatizes the need for such a return: it is Fackenheim’s first hand experience of the “more developed” forms of Hegelian thought that motivates Fackenheim’s thought.40 Second, Fackenheim posits a pre-philosophical dimension, because he denies that the demythologized religion which is presumed to be the modern universal condition applies to Judaism: new midrashim are being written.41 This fact indicates that Jewish religious existence, the Jewish pre-philosophical dimension, so to speak, persists. But categories of this existence have changed—Jewish existence must now address the near collapse of the covenant in the gas chambers and the near miracle of the founding of the State of Israel. These changes will require a new means of informing Jewish religious thought—not, alas, as the philosophical recognition of the self-activity of thought, nor as the identity of the infinite and finite perspectives, but rather as an informing of the covenant with noetic thought, with those moments of contemplation in which, as Aristotle described, we become god-like in our understanding.42 Human existence itself is in desperate need of these insights.

We refer here, on the one hand, to the decay of Hegel’s thought into left-wing and right-wing Hegelianism. See MW 120–27; and W. A. Shearson, “The Fragmented Middle: Hegel and Kierkegaard,” in GPJT 74–75 and 88 n. 84. On the other hand, we refer to Fackenheim’s Holocaust experience of the Hegelian broken middle. 41 JRH 124. Furthermore, once religion is transfigured into philosophy, the validity of the distinction between lumen naturale and lumen supernaturale becomes questionable; without the distinction, there is no basis on which to posit “religion-in-general.” See JRH 112. 42 See Nicomachean Ethics 1177b32. 40

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Finally, because resistance to evil must take place in the realm of thoughtful action, and not exclusively in the realm of philosophy, Fackenheim dissolves the distinction between the conditional and causal aspects of experience. Fackenheim rejects the return to the eternal of Plato or Aristotle’s thought, because such a return both denounces the holy43—the work of mending the world (tikkun olam)—and allows an unwarranted escapism from political reality.44 While Fackenheim rejects as well Hegel’s prioritizing of man’s non-situated aspect, and his locating the pre-philosophical dimension within the realm of the eternal, he adopts Hegel’s redefinition of contingency as a cause, rather than a condition, of our coming to know because the most pressing present need is to bring God essentially into the world, even if this can be accomplished through only human freedom. The prephilosophical religious dimension—human experience of commitment and inadequacy—provides the motivation for, and safeguard against, unrestrained human self-making, even if there is no God. Hegel lost sight of the inadequacy of human efforts to attain comprehensive knowledge of transcendence. While Hegel’s failure, his giving up the struggle between the infinite and the finite, or between eternity and historical consciousness, is not inevitable from within the terms of his philosophy, it results in the idea of an oddly pre-determined future, a future premised on freedom, but ultimately closed to chance, to the contingency that non-essentially accompanies thought. Paradoxically, Hegel himself made possible the conditions that led to the end of this pre-determination: because the Hegelian system requires the demonstration of its mediation of all external claims, Hegelian thought must

43 Hegel recognized Judaism as the religion of holiness; Christianity is the manifest religion. See Hegel, Encyclopedia #564 ff., as cited in MW 114 n. See also Leviticus 19. 44 Fackenheim characterizes Strauss’ return to the ancients as both “too optimistic”—believing the world can improve without rigorous human action—and “not optimistic enough”—believing that human action cannot ameliorate the human condition. See Morgan, “Introduction to Part I,” JPJP 4; and Emil L. Fackenheim, “Leo Strauss and Modern Judaism,” JPJP 103–104. Strauss’ lack of optimism was not, I imagine, lost on Strauss himself. He writes that, because there is in Plato or Aristotle’s thought no divine promise to back up the demand for morality, “[a]ccording to Plato, for example, evil will never cease on earth, whereas according to the Bible the end of days will bring perfect redemption” (Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, ed. Kenneth Hart Green [Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1997], 109). Fackenheim parts ways with Buber as well on this point.

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denounce all imperialist claims, including its own, as one-sided.45 By eliminating what Fackenheim calls the Constantinianism46 from Hegel’s thought, Fackenheim reaffirms both transcendence and future contingency—and, furthermore, reaffirms a form of Hegelian thinking. Fackenheim’s battle is poised toward the future, as he strategizes a path by which Jewish experiences of the Holocaust and of the founding of the State of Israel may (uneasily) co-exist in the minds of all Jews, both religious and secular.47 His is a hope built on blood and birthright, but reaching beyond what has occurred already. Fackenheim’s immediate adoption of Hegel’s limited historicism, despite the latter’s post-Christianity, or inability to see historical movement as anything but progressing along the trajectory established by his pre-philosophical dimension, reflects Fackenheim’s sense of the urgency of the problem of modern blindness to fundamental concepts. Hegel provides for us the sort of historicism of which we moderns are most needful: an attention to the loss of recognizing things within the context of either the standard of the eternal or the faith in the temporal, or, most accurately, both. Fackenheim’s return to Hegel requires his taking with the utmost seriousness the possibilities of both philosophy’s uncovering the eternal human problems, and also revelatory experience, because the only place from which knowledge of the absolute, or revelatory experience, can arise, if it will, is from our first hand experience of concepts and/or our immediate engagement with contingent things. Fackenheim’s adoption of Hegel’s thought, on the one hand, may be likened to the return to the cave of the philosopher-king.48 On the other, it reaffirms the commitment to a life lived in openness to God’s commandments. By thinking carefully about Fackenheim’s work on Hegel, and retracing his steps in reaching his conclusions, we ourselves preserve the basis of metaphysics by reaffirming the irresolvability of the question 45 MW 127–28. This is the source of Fackenheim’s often cited statement that “Hegel today would not be a Hegelian” (RD 224). 46 Fackenheim defines Constantinianism as “the theopolitical praxis of two beliefs: that the Christian revealed truth is the complete revealed truth; and that the truth itself is not divided into ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ but rather is one and indivisible” (MW 127). While Fackenheim focuses primarily on Christian and post-Christian Constantinianism, he suggests the possibility that Constantinianism might apply as well to Islam (ibid). 47 See, for instance, MW 144–5. 48 Republic 519b–521c. Strauss refers to it rather as the pit beneath Plato’s cave (Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing [Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1952], 155).

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of the relationship between transcendence and contingency. Philosophy, as Stauss had indicated to Fackenheim, and as Fackenheim has indicated to us, is reaffirmed through our practice of philosophizing. Fackenheim writes that “we . . . can neither understand nor critically appraise [Hegel’s] philosophy unless we watch it seek and reach its goal.”49 Neither can we understand Fackenheim’s.

49 MW 106 n. While Fackenheim recognizes that “Hegel’s philosophy fails respecting its highest objective and therefore as a whole” (MW 105), the above sentence, appearing in Fackenheim’s magum opus, in which he attempts to integrate himself as philosopher and theologian, suggests Hegel’s continued relevance to Fackenheim’s work to establish the “foundations of future [or ‘post-Holocaust’] Jewish thought.”

JUDAISM AND THE TRAGIC VISION: EMIL FACKENHEIM ON THE PROBLEM OF DIRTY HANDS Sam Ajzenstat Already in his earliest writings, Emil Fackenheim gives forceful expression to insights he will spend the rest of his career trying to bring together. First is an explicit recognition of a tragic dimension in moral life which he finds in the heart of the Torah, not in the usual way in the evils that good people suffer, but in a more surprising and challenging way in the evils they may be required to inflict on others. This insight alone, however, would not be tragic without his equal recognition over against it of a demand for moral purity and for some kind of ultimate integration of these contradictory demands that can reconcile us with ourselves and God. Fackenheim’s third early insight is that the best attempts at reconciliation in modern philosophy—those of German idealism—allowed themselves a solution that was both complacent and morally disastrous. The central part of his career is a detailed demonstration of modern philosophy’s failure to overcome tragedy without belittling its horror. The way is thus prepared for him to argue that it is Judaism, precisely because it gives the most uncompromising account of the tragic situation, that is in a position to provide the most honest approach to coping with it. Once we focus on the interplay of these themes, we can not only see Fackenheim’s career as closer to a single line of argument than he sometimes depicts it. We can also get a fairer and more trenchant picture than his critics often give of why the project fails. This focus is available in the most illuminating way in Chapter 2 of his Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy,1 “Abraham and the Kantians: Moral Duties and Divine Commandments.” But before turning to that elusive, complicated and often confusing chapter, we need some guideposts to alert us to crucial transitions in it. We can find these by looking for the first, relatively straightforward appearance in his earliest

1

EJM 31–77. This chapter will be called the Akedah chapter.

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writings of our three themes—the Jewish tragic vision, the demand for integration, and the failure of modern philosophy, especially Kant. “Modern men have become aware of the tragic element in life.”2 But what is this tragic element? Since Fackenheim is writing in 1948, it is reasonable to suppose that he is thinking of the Holocaust. But if so, it seems rather tame to say that what we have become aware of is that “there are conflicts in existence which can never be solved by a little more effort.” Fackenheim almost immediately sounds a more genuinely tragic note when he quotes Irving Kristol about the horrible realization “that evil may come by doing good.” But to see a tragic dilemma in this, we have to have repudiated a Kantian setting aside of consequences that would “do justice though the heavens fall.” Presumably on the assumption that we are not allowed to ignore consequences, Fackenheim takes the next step. We are “compelled to commit or condone evil for the sake of preventing an evil believed to be greater.” Almost immediately, it is true, he withdraws a bit from this insight, by adding that “the tragedy is that we do not know whether the evil we condone will not in the end be greater than the evil we seek to avert—or be identical with it.” But the deeper insight here is surely that the basic tragedy is as bad or worse if the evil act does succeed in averting what in some sense can be called a greater evil. “Greater” here has no straightforwardly univocal meaning. For otherwise a correct utilitarian calculus could save us from the intractable moral conflict that Fackenheim wants to confront us with when he speaks of “the moral paradox that some of the evil we do or condone is both unavoidable and inexcusable.”3 For if I am not a utilitarian, such acts are avoidable; and if I am a utilitarian, such acts are not inexcusable. In spite of some evasiveness, which we shall find resurfacing later, the tragic view that Fackenheim is revealing is one that asks me to see myself as living under two contradictory absolutes, neither of which can admit that its violation would be a lesser evil. For only then can an act be both “unavoidable and inexcusable.” Since Fackenheim’s critique of Kant in the Akedah chapter will be centered on the moral status of the Akedah (The Binding of Isaac), we should note a strong connection in Fackenheim’s mind from the start Fackenheim, “In Praise of Abraham, Our Father,” QPF 58. The chapter is cited hereinafter as “Abraham.” The next few characterizations of tragedy are all on QPF 58. 3 “Abraham,” QPF 64. 2

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between the dirty hands dilemma of “unavoidable and inexcusable” and Abraham. In the early material, Abraham’s distinction and claim to be our guide is that “he lived in an extreme form” an existence in which we must face “the alternative only between evils.”4 This is far beyond mere ignorance of how our good intentions will turn out. We should be alterted to find that Fackenheim’s main debate with Kant will not be over the sheer fact of revelation, as the Akedah chapter’s title suggests, but over the possibility of an obligation to the “unavoidable and inexcusable.” In the early essays I’ve drawn on for Fackenheim’s account of a tragic vision in Judaism there is also the apparently very different claim that “(m)an will at all times seek ultimate integration. It is intolerable to him that his life as a whole should not have a unity through which he can assess meaning to all its aspects.”5 In much of the early work his focus is on exposing the inadequate conception of integration as integration of the self either on rational or psychological grounds in liberal Judaism and modern ethics generally. For better or worse, he is not one of those philosophers who gives up the reality of integration. But it is to his credit that the sense of integration cannot be allowed to sweep the tragic vision under the rug. The experience of “unavoidable and inexcusable” is just as primal a given as Sinai or the Red Sea but—if he can make it work—no more so. Whether tragedy and integration can co-exist is the question. Fackenheim’s repudiation, for example, of liberal “ethical monotheism,” or the substitution of a God-idea for God as full accounts of Judaism comes down to their inability to find a place in reality for dirty hands dilemmas. The pure God-idea of ethical monotheism can demand of us only the ethical, the whole ethical and nothing but the ethical. Such high moral idealism gives its followers no equipment to help them cope in a responsible way with the reality of dirty hands dilemmas. On this account the liberal can hold on to his liberal God only by denying that there are such dilemmas or else admit the dilemmas and let go of his God. What I have called Fackenheim’s third early insight links this religious critique to the critique of philosophy. Whatever truth there may be in the claim that Fackenheim begins to stage “encounters between Judaism

4 5

“Abraham,” QPF 64. “Self-Realization and the Search for God,” QPF 27. Hereinafter cited as “Self.”

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and modern philosophy” only in his later work similar structures appear in his accounts of both from the beginning. The most striking attempts of modern philosophy to bring the tragic vision and a vision of ultimate harmony together through the concept of history in Kant and in Hegel6 have the same unacceptable result as ethical monotheism’s refusal to take the tragic vision seriously. Liberal Judaism’s dilemma is thus also visible, for example, in the breakdown of Hegelianism into Right and Left factions. Fackenheim’s earliest exploration of this insight is his classic article “Kant’s Concept of History.”7 It is easy to miss the crucial role of dirty-hands dilemmas in Kant’s turn to history. I suggest without further elaboration that Kant is accepting the fact that even though morality rationally requires of us that we ignore consequences for the sake of principle, such high-mindedness can only become operative where political structures offer a reasonable guarantee of good consequences for good behavior. An integrated life is a normative necessity, but through most of history not a concrete option. It can become real only in the future, through a social evolution fueled by “intelligent devils” to the extent that they find their advantage to lie in simulating structures of justice. Until then, it is far from clear that we are entitled to demand an absolute commitment of justice from anyone. Against this background, Kant constructs an evolutionary social psychology of ethical development.8 Fackenheim repudiates this part of Kant’s argument as “the deathmarch of human freedom.” What is much less obvious is what sort of ultimate integration Fackenheim has to offer, both as genuine and yet as preserving the ineradicable sharpness of moral tragedy. The Kant that he criticizes in the Akedah chapter is not the one that gives up principle in the face of circumstance, but the more familiar one that refuses to do so. It is Fackenheim who now sounds as if he is coming to see something like Kant’s bow in the direction of history as the only way to reconcile the demand for unification with a facing of the tragic 6 A project most beautifully expressed in Hegel’s “the union of union and disunion,” a phrase which for all his criticism of Hegel never lost its fascination for Fackenheim as is clear from MW. 7 Kantstudien 48, (1957): 381–98; reprinted in GW 43–49. 8 I discuss this material in “Liberalism Between Nature and Culture: Kant’s Exegesis of Genesis 2–6” in Liberal Democracy and the Bible, ed. Kim Parker (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), 129–154 and in an unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, The Evolution of the A Priori: Kant’s Science of Man (University of Pennsylvania, 1986).

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vision. Reading the later work in the light of the earlier will force us to ask whether Fackenheim is not finally vulnerable to his own earlier criticism of the Kant of the historical essays. And it will then turn out to be far from clear what sort of ultimate integration he can offer both as genuine and yet as preserving moral tragedy. In the early essays, a wide enough variety of situations are called “tragic” so as to distract us from the dirty hands theme towards easier problems with easier solutions. Sometimes, as we have seen, what is “tragic” is not the necessity for unjust acts but merely our ignorance of whether our just acts will have good results. At other times, the focus is on moral weakness, as when a passage is quoted suggesting that the problem is “the strength of the evil inclination,” so that all that is required of us is the best effort we can make to resist it (“God says, ‘Remove [the evil inclination] a little in this world and I will rid you of it altogether in the world to come’”).9 This is not an unworthy thought, but it encourages us to forget the context set by the statement only a few pages before, that the real tragedy is that “there are conflicts in existence which can never be solved by a little more effort.” In this way, Fackenheim seems to conflate two utterly different problems: one, our failure to be pure, and the other, the dirty-hands insight that moral purity fails to be a full account of our moral situation. As a result, we are offered the comfort of a kind of restoration of harmony for the more intractable dirty-hands problem that is really only appropriate to less ambiguous situations. When he does so, his work takes on an “edifying” tone. This is not to say that Fackenheim is wrong either to take note of the normal moral weakness of our failure to be just when justice is what is required or to appeal to contrition, trust in forgiveness and a dependence on grace to guard us against the total alienation from ourselves and God that such weakness might otherwise doom us to. His crucial philosophical or theological question, however, is what can restore moral integration when the problem is not normal moral weakness but the combination of “unavoidable and inexcusable.” These ambiguities will provide us with helpful warning bells when we turn to the Akedah chapter, because they continue to plague his quest for integration throughout his career. Thus his early attempt to make a case for integration through a midrashic claim that makes God “demand

9

“Abraham,” QPF 61.

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according to our power”10 reappears in the Akedah chapter twenty years later in the claim that God does not ask us to do the impossible. Our attention is thus directed to the question whether he ever found a way of squaring the claim that the impossible is not demanded of us with the claim that today we “have in many things the alternative only between evils.” If not, we need to understand both why he should not have followed his insight into the tragic Jewish vision to its natural conclusion that the impossible sometimes is asked of us, and what his refusal to do so led to. Early ambiguities about the problem of punishment are also relevant to the later account of our relationship with God. In the interest of holding open restoration of moral harmony, Fackenheim stresses that “divine mercy is . . . absolute and unqualified.”11 But, presumably in the interest of stopping us from using such mercy to evade the anguish of the moral life, he also quotes two rather less comforting Talmudic sentences: “He who says God is indulgent, his life shall be outlawed,” and “If the evil inclination says to you, ‘Sin and God will forgive you,’ believe it not.” Even in the case of ordinary moral failure, the understandable requirement that mercy both must be and must not be taken for granted is not easy to make concrete. In dirty-hands cases, the problem is much worse. To do injustice for the sake of justice cannot be excused as a case of moral weakness; that is what makes it inexcusable, hence especially deserving of punishment. But if it is also unavoidable, must it not be supremely forgivable, hence not deserving of punishment and certainly not by God, whom, if it really was unavoidable, we must think of as having commanded it? This is the most important question we shall have to bring to the discussion of Fackenheim’s later work. The charge is often made against him that he has drawn from the Holocaust a justification of utter moral unscrupulousness, especially in defense of the State of Israel. I shall argue (1) that he can defend himself against this charge only by holding fast to his early insight into a Jewish tragic vision; (2) that he can do this only by continuing to hold to a peculiarly Jewish, non-Kierkegaardian fear and trembling, in which, however much acts of injustice may sometimes be unavoidable, they continue to be acts of injustice and hence are inexcusable; (3) that to do this he must commit

10 11

“Self,” QPF 48. “Self,” QPF 40.

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himself to a God—discernible in the Torah—Who will sometimes give us commands that He will subsequently punish us for obeying. Hints, at least, of this understanding run through Fackenheim’s early essays. But it sometimes looks as if he was unable to hold on to this difficult vision to the bitter end. The word “tragic” disappears in the later work. Its absence there is a symptom of an increasing inability to see the unavoidable as inexcusable. The two great driving forces of Fackenheim’s work, the tragic vision and the vision of a fully unified, integrated ethical life come to seem to him, I think, incapable of coexisting, and much of his later argument can be understood as a giving up of the former for the sake of the latter. A God who will sometimes punish us for obeying him is tragic. The God that Fackenheim will insist on in the Akedah chapter no longer is. Unlike the God of the tragic vision, he does not demand the impossible but is one with whom we can feel complete unity of wills, and of whose commands we can entirely say that “the primordial manifestation is not subsequent to but in the commandments; primordial human joy is not in a future subsequent to the life of the commandment but in that life itself.”12 To say this is to move towards the view that what we must do to survive cannot, for that very reason, be unjust. For a Judaism that takes tragedy seriously and hence accepts the possibility of commandments to perform the inexcusable would be forced to seek primordial human joy, if it continued to seek it at all, precisely subsequent to rather than wholly present in the life of the commandment. It is the loss of the paradoxical equilibrium between “unavoidable and inexcusable” rather than its affirmation that edges Fackenheim finally in a morally disastrous direction very like the modern liberal religion that he had attacked in which, among other things, a tragic Zionism must give way to a messianic Zionism. Nevertheless, we can find, even in some of his latest works, a residue of the tragic vision. The subliminal persistence of that vision, I shall argue, is what allowed him to convincingly deny that he ever committed himself to a suspension of the ethical in the pursuit of Jewish survival. With this background we shall now turn to the Akedah chapter.

12

EJM 52 (Fackenheim’s italics).

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Fackenheim begins his account of Kantian ethics by noting Kant’s response to the Akedah: Abraham should simply have refused to obey so obviously unjust a command. But he almost immediately moves beyond the question of revelation to the basic condition of ethical life. To understand Fackenheim’s argument, we must see that the overriding concern of Kantian ethics is the unification of my will, and of my will with the wills of all others. Kant is as much concerned as Kierkegaard is that it be possible “to will one thing.” To meet this requirement, we must be able to find a way of vetting our personal desires, inclinations or feelings of obligation so that only the ones that would have to be ratified by all others could be identified as what I really want, hence as expressions of self-determination or autonomy. Only autonomy can radically unify me with others. The categorical imperative is thus Kant’s rational formula for achieving a vantage point from which my will, while remaining radically mine, becomes one with the will of all others in what Fackenheim calls a two-term relationship. For Kant, the demand for universality is the only way of achieving that integration which I am arguing is his and Fackenheim’s deepest concern. We do not need a detailed description of Kantian ethics to understand what is broadly envisaged in the two-term relationship. A definitive brief description was given long before Kant by a repository of received wisdom, Shakespeare’s Polonius: This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow as the night the day Thou canst not then be false to any man.13

In Polonius’ mouth we have to see this as a complacent justification of self-interest. But it is easy to overlook that what it plays on is the highminded idealism which sees a genuine fusion of wills as ethically not only necessary but also possible. The ideal of ethical fusion is shared by Kant and Fackenheim. What Fackenheim in the Akedah chapter finds lacking in Kant is easy to misunderstand. Thus, although he is concerned to widen the two-term into a three-term relationship that makes God a participant in the ethical situation through revelation, he does not deny that Kant, in his own way, is also concerned to see

13

Hamlet 1.3.78–80.

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ethics as three-termed. On the contrary, he explicitly describes Kant not only as allowing for the possibility of revelation, but also as seeing ethics as involving a relation with God: For Kant, the oneness of the human with the divine is automatic once virtue is achieved. For prophets and rabbis, such oneness is far from automatic even for the virtuous man, and, in a sense, for him least of all. For prophets and rabbis there is a radical gulf between God, who is God, and man, who is only human. How then is a oneness of wills possible at all?14

Oneness of wills with God is thus not at issue between Kant and Fackenheim. The problem lies elsewhere. To get a little closer to understanding what it is, we have to get a clearer sense of what the three-term relationship as Fackenheim envisages it adds which is missing in Kant’s account of it. We can briefly eliminate some other accounts of the problem. Ethical naturalists routinely accuse ethical theists of claiming that revelation gives them knowledge of the fundamental imperatives that we cannot get from our natural understanding. But Fackenheim does not make this claim and quotes traditional sources to show that Judaism is not committed to it. In one of these, it is said of the revealed moral laws that “had they not been written by God, [they] would have had to be written by men.”15 But if this were the case, it would be reasonable to accept the view that we have seen Fackenheim attributing to Kant that oneness with God comes after the achievement of virtue, even if automatically. In other places more central to his overall approach, however, Fackenheim does not allow the experience of oneness to be subsequent to knowledge of the law. The difficult question of how the idea of a natural source of ethical knowledge can be squared with Fackenheim’s apparent view that moral knowledge is our free interpretive response to a primal experience of Presence, I do not discuss here. But we should note that Fackenheim’s quest for integration with God may not be consistent with the admission of a genuine moral knowledge, e.g., in Kant, that does not include it. We have to go a bit deeper into the EJM 51. EJM 38. In another passage Fackenheim quotes, less conclusive but still suggestive of the idea that we may move from the law to God rather than vice versa, God says, “Would they had deserted me and kept my Torah; for . . . the leaven which is in it would have brought them back to me (53).” 14 15

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question whether Fackenheim’s account of primal Presence is enough to explain his opposition to Kant. What is the fundamental difference between the two views of the place of God in ethics? A possible answer that I think must also be set aside as not bringing us to the heart of the issue between Fackenheim and Kant relates to what underlies Fackenheim’s earlier critique of the ethical monotheism of liberal Judaism. The philosophical root of the replacement of God by the God-idea which worries him in liberal Judaism lies in Kant’s argument that God is available to us only as an Idea of Reason, because His self-sufficiency, i.e., His in-itselfness or independence of relations to anything other than Himself, makes Him incapable of being experienced.16 As we shall see in a moment, one of the things that makes the God-idea inadequate for Fackenheim both in Kant and in liberal Judaism is not that it fails to give us our duties but that it gives only a mediate relation to God. Direct or immediate awareness of Presence is ruled out. But we should note the possibililty that what we shall find Fackenheim arguing begs the essential question. Even an unmediated apprehension of Presence will not guarantee a oneness of wills between ourselves and God as long as our basic moral experience is of a dividedness of wills within ourselves and between ourselves and our neighbors. To speak Jewishly, any experience that the Lord is One may well simply exacerbate our experience that we are not. The Akedah chapter, though it prepares the way for Fackenheim’s attempt to respond to this possibility, may no longer succeed as honestly as he had earlier in taking it seriously.17

16 Fackenheim discusses this aspect of what makes revelation hard for moderns to accept in MW. 17 A closely related issue may be put as follows. It would be unfair to accuse Kantian moral philosophy of reducing the idea of the particular human beings we live among to mere “human-ideas.” Kant does not deny the existence of non-ethical personal relationships of great importance between us. The question that underlies his response to the Akedah, for example, is whether the demands that arise out of our intimate communion with each other should or should not be allowed to override the more abstract universal relations that integrate us with everyone. His answer is not only no. He also takes it, that any experience we might have of God, however personal and immediate, would underwrite that abstract universality. He may very well be wrong but only if the primal Presence can be experienced as asking us to violate the moral law. As long as Fackenheim speaks only of the Presence within the commandments and has not yet turned, as he soon will, to the question of whether that Presence can really be found within the violation of the commandment, what he says must beg the question of integration.

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In the context of these remarks, we may now turn to a closer comparison between Fackenheim’s version of the three-term ethic and what, without violating Fackenheim’s intention, we are entitled to call Kant’s. I will begin by elaborating on how Kant sees the three-term relationship, so that we can get a better idea of what Fackenheim can object to in it. Recall that the basic requirement of a three-term relationship for Fackenheim is that it effect a oneness of wills between myself, all of my human neighbors, who as rational beings constitute collectively a second term, and God. Kant’s Three-Term Ethic For Kant, what impels me towards autonomy is a rational impulsion to act as if my will were not merely self-determining, but self-determining in the radical sense of self-sufficient, complete in itself and so independent of need. It is true that since he also argues that self-sufficiency cannot be experienced, the idea of such a being (which in ethics he calls a divine will) is in some sense created by reason. But we are not free not to create it. Reason finds itself forced to defer to it and consequently to recognize an obligation to imitate its self-sufficiency in action. The formula for that imitation, the categorical imperative, is what grounds my radical oneness with my neighbor. Why not say then that Kant is coming as close as possible within the limits of modern theory of knowledge to a three-term imitatio Dei, in which the act that unifies me with my neighbor is precisely the act that unifies me with God, or at least with the Idea of God? For Fackenheim, none of this is enough to give Kant a three-term ethics. In terms reminiscent of Plato’s Euthyphro, he argues that if the source of moral commandment is “self-legislating reason” as in Kant, then “one is obliged not to regard laws as moral because God has given them, but rather to attribute them to God because they are intrinsically moral, i.e., apart from all God-givenness.”18 The best that Kant can offer is an inferred or mediate relation with God. “Kant holds that mediating between man and God, moral law rules out or renders irrelevant, an immediate divine commanding Presence.”19 Kierkegaard also, accepting

18 19

EJM 36. EJM 48.

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Kant’s dichotomy between law and commanding Presence, reverses Kant’s choice and gives Presence priority over law, hence the power to suspend it. The three-term relationship that Fackenheim wishes to draw from Jewish sources will not separate the experience of the law from the experience of Presence. They are distinguishable since the former is a free response to the latter, but they are inseparable. “[D]espite the mediating function of the divine revealed law, the Divine is still present in commanding immediacy.” And this is so even when “moral law has assumed permanence and intrinsic value.”20 If this were all, we would be tempted to say that the difference between Fackenheim and Kant, though important, is one of religious epistemology rather than religious ethics. For Kant, everyone’s moral experience can be uncovered so as to disclose the postulate of a divine will. For Judaism, on Fackenheim’s description, the experience of the divine will leads to the moral law. More than that, when we consider Kant’s inability to explain how such ideas as divine will or thing-in-itself enter human thought, even the epistemological difference diminishes, since we may think that Kant needs some sort of Presence too. As long as the purely moral law itself is substantially the same in both cases and linked to a notion of the divine, why shouldn’t we be content to let rationalists and mystics cherish their own different ideas of how the link works? Fackenheim’s debate with Kant in the first part of the chapter is inconclusive because the question on which they most deeply differ, the question whether there can be a revelation that demands a violation of the moral law, has not yet come into focus. All we know is that Kant would say no. But how Fackenheim can disagree with him becomes difficult to see in the light of his discussion of St. Paul. Paul and the Flight from Tragedy Fackenheim concludes his debate with Kant with a brief discussion of St. Paul, the point of which may not be immediately evident. For our present purposes, this passage serves to show something that Fackenheim may not have intended. In its light, it becomes clear that his claim that the Jewish ethic involves a three-person relation that includes a oneness of wills not only with our neighbor but with God requires

20

EJM 48.

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him to give up the claim that there is a tragic dimension in Judaism, at least in the most radical terms in which he previously understood it. The confrontation with Paul is a clear repudiation of tragic Judaism. What is confusing about it is that it leads to that part of the chapter in which Fackenheim seems to re-affirm the basic considerations that led him to Jewish tragic vision in the first place. Fackenheim’s account of what he means by Paul’s failure to appropriate the three-term ethics of Judaism is brief and leaves important questions unanswered. But the main lines are clear and consistent with generally accepted accounts. In Judaism, at least, Paul experiences God’s commandments as completely beyond human power to obey. In them “man was obligated to do the humanly impossible.” For Judaism, on the other hand, “their performance [is] a human possibility.”21 On this basis, it is difficult to see how the dirty hands problem can any longer arise for Fackenheim. He is in complete agreement with Paul in rejecting a tragic ethic that we would experience as demanding the impossible. The only issue between them is whether Judaism has such an ethic. Paul thinks yes. Fackenheim would once have agreed with him, but is now opting for oneness of wills with God instead. And there is reason to think that at least some of the traditional rabbis would have agreed with Paul. The point is not that Paul misunderstood Judaism, but that he could not endure it. And we may be forced to say something similar about Fackenheim, at least in this phase. For Fackenheim, very much as for Martin Buber, revelation is seen as a genuine dialogue between God, a commanding Presence “incommensurate with all things human,” and us, whom He nevertheless sets free to respond because of “the divine love that, handing the commandments over for human appropriation, makes their performance a human possibility.”22 What seems to be envisaged here is a single experience that unifies the is and the ought, because we do not experience obligation only “normatively” as a bare ought. We also experience it dynamically, as an empowering loving action that elicits a free response that is therefore as much our action as God’s. It is in this context that Fackenheim tells us that “In Judaism the primordial manifestation of divine love is not subsequent to but in the commandments.”23

21 22 23

EJM 52. EJM 52. EJM 52 (Fackenheim’s italics).

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It is easy to overlook how much Fackenheim allows Paul to set the terms of the discussion. What Paul seeks in a Christian experience of unity of wills with Christ, Fackenheim claims already exists in Judaism as a unity of wills with a God Who is nevertheless totally incommensurate with us. Not only must unity of wills with the moral source be possible for both, but there cannot be an ethical experience of impossible demands. As we shall shortly see, it is possible to deny both these claims without betraying Judaism. For the impossible to be asked of us might mean a number of things. For Paul, it often seems to mean something like weakness of will, which acknowledges the law but cannot obey it.24 If that is what he means, his solution—and Fackenheim’s—could help by giving us an experience of oneness with a loving, empowering source, for Paul beyond the law, for Fackenheim within the law, that “hands over” its power of love to us, clearing away impediments of fear and self-concerned-desire. But Fackenheim has made us aware of another sense of impossible demands, conspicuous throughout the Akedah chapter, which his reply to Paul cannot help us with. The question the chapter starts with and comes back to at its climax is not whether Abraham can obey, but whether he ought to. When we note that the title Fackenheim has given to the section in which he argues that post-Holocaust Jews are obligated to repudiate Abraham’s example is “The Impossible Question,” it is hard not to conclude that he is at the end readier to admit than he was before that God or the moral life makes impossible demands on us after all. But to admit that would present Fackenheim with a dilemma that cannot arise for Paul. Paul is able to interpret any claim like Kant’s that I ought not to obey a divine command, as never a matter of principle at all, but mere impiety, a result of the weakness and fear in the natural man that makes him unable to place his trust entirely in an ultimate force outside of himself, hence, in effect, a sin that the law cannot cure but Christ does. The dilemma that Fackenheim is exposed to when he opens up the possibility that there might be disobedience of the divine law on moral principle, as he does by the end of the chapter, is that he can see the disobedience as real disobedience or somehow as itself obedience. In either case, the claim for a three-term relationship is undermined. This is most obvious in the first case, but it occurs also in the second. For if I see the obligation to disobey a divine command

24

See Romans 7, especially vv. 12–25.

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as itself a divine command, then I am facing contradictory, hence impossible demands, and can hardly claim the unity of wills with the commander that the three-term ethic requires. But, as I’ve already suggested, what we should question in Fackenheim will turn out to be not that his thought produces this dilemma, but the implications of his determination to escape between its horns in order to hold fast to the three-term relationship. A crucial implication of Fackenheim’s insistence on the three-term ethic in his response to Paul is this. If the law is “handed over to us for our free appropriation,” and the commanding Presence, as he also claims, does not actually issue concrete commands, but leaves it to us not just to appropriate the law but to say, on the basis of our experience, what the law is,25 how can there be such a thing as an honest misappropriation of the law? Judaism can hardly hold, nor can any sensible ethics, that the commands of morality are just what any sincere person thinks they are. But isn’t that what a consummated three-term ethics, not to mention Fackenheim’s version of a two-term ethics, has to argue for? If it does, then Fackenheim’s insistence that Judaism can achieve spiritual harmony, merely turns him into an example of Paul’s actual caricature of Judaism. Paul’s objection to Judaism is not that it despairs over man’s inability to meet God’s impossible demands, but that it doesn’t. In line with the traditional Christian caricature of the Pharisees, Paul claims that Jews are complacently oblivious to their inability to bridge the distance between themselves and God. Speaking of his Jewish “brethren” he puts it this way at Romans 10:2–3: “I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but it is not enlightened. For being ignorant of the righteousness that comes from God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness.” He would no doubt say the same about Fackenheim. Two answers are open to Fackenheim, and we have to take seriously the possibility that in the light of his own best thought he gives the wrong one. Accepting Paul’s longing for oneness with God, he feels constrained to argue that Judaism provides it, hence that Jews are not alienated. But in the light of the tragic vision, he should instead have argued that the merit of Judaism is its recognition of a basic element of ineradicable alienation in our spiritual and moral lives, while it is

25

EJM 45–46.

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Christianity which is too sure of the unity of wills with God through Christ. That reply would put us on guard against any religion, ethics, or politics that insisted too sanguinely on the concrete achievement of a unity of will with each other and with God.26 Fackenheim’s debate with Paul serves him as an opportunity to flesh out the idea of a oneness of wills with God in a three-term ethic by including in it the clause that there are no impossible duties. But if there are no impossible duties, then there is nothing either in religious ethics or in ethics generally that is both “unavoidable and inexcusable.” Hence there is no moral tragedy. Such considerations, however, do not lead Fackenheim back either to Kant or to the “ethical monotheism” that he had found inadequate in liberal Judaism. He does not, in other words give up the understanding that murder may sometimes be unavoidable. But in order to hold on to that understanding along with the belief that God does not demand the impossible, he will be tempted at least for a while in the work that follows Encounters to explore the idea that what is unavoidable cannot possibly be inexcusable, hence that in doing it we are after all experiencing a union of wills with God. I shall eventually suggest that this was a temporary aberration from which he finally felt the need to return to the genuine tragic vision. The Akedah chapter is, I think, evidence that Fackenheim is still unsure whether horrible necessities are tragic, that is, do or do not require a giving up of oneness of wills with God. The underlying ambiguity comes out especially clearly when Fackenheim turns to Kierkegaard. The critique of Kierkegaard’s reading of the Akedah, to put it briefly seems to be that in the light of rabbinic sources it is both too tragic and not tragic enough.27

26 It may be the idea of an achieved three-term ethic as somehow our “normal” state, that led Fackenheim to see the Holocaust as more unprecedented than it really was and to a search in his poignantly desperate final writings for a way of restoring a radical unity of will with God and our neighbors that Judaism does not claim we ever had not even in the Garden of Eden or will have except perhaps in a “world to come.” 27 This is not the place to canvas the possibility that Kierkegaard’s position is a more balanced and even a more rabbinic one than Fackenheim is willing to allow. But it seems to me worth considering.

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How Much Fear and Trembling? Fackenheim takes exception to two of the most celebrated aspects of Kierkegaard’s account of the Akedah. The first aspect, the one that seems to me to suggest that it is too tragic, is that in this ultimate encounter with God, Kierkegaard’s Abraham is isolated from all other human beings. He has no way of explaining to anyone his acceptance of the command to sacrifice his son. The second, which we can think of as not tragic enough for Fackenheim, is the characterization of Abraham as at once a knight of resignation and a knight of faith. Abraham is fully resigned to giving Isaac up but he also paradoxically has the faith that he will get his beloved son back. Fackenheim cites midrashic texts in order to question both these readings. It appears that for traditional Judaism the Akedah did not suggest radically lonely individualism. Abraham tells Isaac what God has asked him to do and Isaac voluntarily agrees. The Akedah is thus transformed from an anti-social sacrifice of another’s life to a case of what Judaism calls “the sanctification of the name,” the self-sacrifice of one’s own life in order not to repudiate one’s faith. Fackenheim, speaking for Judaism, offers a conception of ethics in which no service to a transcendent principle or deity, even one as radical as the Akedah, can detach us from our essentially communal being hence from the oneness of wills that marks the three-term relationship. Kierkegaard is wrong to see Abraham as isolated. We can understand why Fackenheim with his emphasis on oneness of wills would argue in this way. It is his other argument against Kierkegaard, the one concerning Abraham’s combination of faith and resignation that is more difficult to understand. Fackenheim’s determination to confront the possibility that the Akedah was seen by Abraham as an uncompromising demand that he kill his son seems at odds with his other claim against Kierkegaard that the Akedah did not isolate Abraham and destroy community.28 More confusing, however, is that the evidence Fackenheim presents for thinking that the return of Isaac was not initially intended and so, even if only initially, really did break the covenant, is highly inconclusive and in the long run supports

28 Though I cannot argue it here, I think that neither Kierkegaard nor Fackenheim can resolve the tension between the two claims by separating oneness with God from oneness with man. Certainly for Fackenheim these are deeply interconnected.

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the idea behind Fackenheim’s other criticism that the Akedah did not destroy Abraham’s oneness of will either with Isaac or with God. All of Fackenheim’s arguments come out so strongly in defense of oneness that one has to ask why he makes a point of arguing against the idea that Abraham believed he would get Isaac back. In one of the midrashic passages Fackenheim cites to show that Abraham has “actually renounced Isaac,” Abraham does not have the faith that Isaac will somehow be restored to him.29 And he is presumaby right. For in a further midrash quoted to show that God is completely serious when he demands Isaac’s life we are told that “even the angels lament that the covenant is broken,”30 which is to say that God has broken his promise regarding the seed of Abraham. But midrashic angels are often simple beings whose function is to fail to grasp the ambiguities of existence, “straight-men,” as it were, overreacting one-dimensionally to the victories and defeats of Israel, so that God can set them straight. Thus, in a celebrated midrash which Jews often add to their Passover readings, God rebukes the angels for rejoicing at the drowning of the Egyptians in the Red Sea, “My handiwork is drowning in the sea; would ye utter song before me?”31 Just as their only thought is to rejoice when the Egyptians are destroyed, their only thought is to weep when God demands the sacrifice of Isaac. But the midrash sees both situations as more ambiguous than angels can grasp. Fackenheim here seems a bit too much on the side of the angels. For he leaves out the sentence in which God told them in no uncertain terms that the covenant was not broken: “Do you see how Abraham my friend proclaims the unity of my name in the world?”32 Fackenheim might have quoted this sentence to support his repudiation of the tragic view by suggesting that we are not to see the Akedah as destroying oneness of wills between Abraham and God. But we can see why he might not want to. The midrashic claim here that God sees Abraham as having affirmed His unity by accepting the command to sacrifice Isaac casts a strange light on any attempt to understand the 29 EJM 64. This is not to say that Abraham is merely a knight of resignation. At the very beginning of the chapter Fackenheim has pointed out that it is precisely Abraham’s faith that is understood to be the saving event of Judaism (33). Abraham must be a knight of faith, but a different faith than that envisaged by Kierkegaard. 30 EJM 64. 31 Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin 39b. 32 Louis Ginzberg, Tbe Legends of the Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1913), I, 281.

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world as a reflection of unity, whether the unity of God or as a pure philosopher might more comfortably put it, the unity of the good. We can hardly fail to see at least some irony in idea that Abraham understands the unity of God best precisely when he accepts the idea that He might make a promise and later be ready not to keep it. What might it mean to say that the moral order of the world, understood either as God or more abstractly, can be self-contradictory or change radically, without losing radical oneness?33 Given Fackenheim’s account of the Holocaust we might have expected him to be extremely responsive to the midrash’s paradoxical sense that the covenant, even at its most unbroken, encompasses contradictory demands—that the undivided God has created a divided world for us to live in through a covenant that does not rule out mixed messages and so denies us a consummated unity of wills with Him or with ourselves at the same time as it gives us a desire for it. Again, there is talmudic precedent for such a view. Just after the passage on the angels at the Red Sea we find the following: “He himself does not rejoice, yet He causes others to rejoice.” However we interpret this statement, it does not encourage us to think of the covenantal relationship as a merging of wills. We are thus left unsure both as to why, given his great concern to defend the three-person ethic, Fackenheim would claim that Abraham truly renounced Isaac and why, having made that claim, he would find it important to argue that this renunciation did not isolate him? Regarding renunciation he does not have to claim on Jewish grounds that the covenant requires unquestioning obedience. The problem of why Abraham did not question God’s command here, as he did elsewhere, is as alive in the rabbinic literature as it is in Kant. Nor do the Jewish texts uniformly presuppose oneness of wills, though some do. As for the isolation of Abraham, Fackenheim’s apparent attempt to bind Judaism, and ethics generally, within the boundaries of a purely communal conception of the individual is especially hard to understand in the light of his insistent claim that those who experienced the Holocaust

33 Fackenheim’s struggles with historicism earlier involved similar questions. But whereas the problem then was whether a historical being could know eternal laws, the problem now is precisely that we do know eternal laws but may find ourselves in historical situations in which we also feel an obligation to violate them. The problem of history, we might say, is no longer an absence of binding moral imperatives but the presence of too many.

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cannot possibly share that experience with anyone else. Traditional Jewish texts do not have an explicit theory of the self and do not take it upon themselves to declare just what degree of cosmic loneliness might be heretical. They can therefore do justice to the phenomenological experience of the tense and unresolved co-existence of the communal individual on the one hand whose community can include God and on the other, “the lonely man of faith.” It may be that Fackenheim has this uneasy combination at the back of his mind. If so, he might just as well have argued that Kierkegaard is right on both claims rather than wrong on both, that in the dialectic of our relations both with God and others we both trust and do not trust. But his avowed purpose is different. Instead of taking the Akedah as a teaching concerning the nuanced and sometimes anguished nature of such relations, a teaching he himself has opened the way to in his earlier writings, he takes it instead as a teaching that oneness of wills can always override even the worse challenges. We are well on the way towards the loss of the tragic vision. Towards the Impossible Question Whatever else Fackenheim says of Abraham’s situation in the Akedah chapter, he does not call it tragic. In the light of his early writings, we are entitled to wonder why. Surely there could hardly be a more fitting word for it. Yet, as we have seen, well over half of the chapter seems to be devoted to an account of a Jewish ethic which makes tragedy impossible. This is a far cry from Fackenheim’s starting point, where he argued not only that the tragic vision was distinctive of Judaism but that Abraham’s life especially was marked by the recognition of the combination “unavoidable and inexcusable.” Where but in the Akedah could we look for that recognition? Yet in the Akedah chapter it looks to be neither the one nor the other. As I suggested above, however, situations appear in the middle of the chapter which would earlier have been called tragic but whose tragic status is now, to say the least, uncertain. The key to what is happening lies in Fackenheim’s account of revelation. To grasp the unity of the chapter, we need to recall that the crucial difference between the idea of revelation that Fackenheim acknowledges is present in Kant and Fackenheim’s own account is not that Fackenheim’s succeeds in grounding morality and Kant’s does not, but that Fackenheim’s is a

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revelation which can also ground what we would previously have called immorality, while relieving us of having to call it that. In the Akedah chapter, there is only an intimation that tragedy can be allowed to reappear, an intimation that Fackenheim will pursue in later works. We must look again in somewhat more detail at the issue of revelation. Fackenheim seems at first to see revelation in terms reminiscent of Martin Buber, as that experience of Presence in free response to which we articulate the moral law. The response that the Presence supremely elicits from us is justice. This is a conception of revelation that we have already seen him using in his discussion of Paul to show that the divine Presence that makes it possible rather than impossible for us to obey the law is experienced in the law and not subsequent to it. The reciprocal relation between experience of Presence and experience of moral law that Fackenheim evokes in these passages could surely be accepted by a Kantian in his own terms simply by arguing that the categorical imperative is the human response to the contemplation of the idea of a divine will. Religiously or philosophically, we have not gotten to the root of Fackenheim’s dissatisfaction with Kant as long as we see this Presence only as opening our eyes to our neighbors’ moral claims on us. At first this does seem to be all that Fackenheim is saying. The three-term relationship is three-term precisely because it preserves the two-term human relationship. The Jewish claim that “God Himself enters into the relationship” is “at its heart and core” the claim that God confronts man with the demand to turn to his human neighbor, and in doing so turn back to God Himself. “Micah’s celebrated summary of the commandments [Micah 6:8] does more than list three commandments that exist side by side. For there is no humble walking before God unless it manifests itself in justice and mercy to the human neighbor. And there can be only fragmentary justice and mercy unless they culminate in humility before God.”34 We may note that when Fackenheim speaks in this way he is not saying anything that Kant could not accept even if in somewhat different terms. It is Fackenheim who, when he recognized the reality of tragedy, deviated from Micah’s prescription. For if walking humbly with God “only manifests itself in justice,” we cannot be commanded to do injustice. The citation of Micah thus strongly suggests that by

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EJM 49.

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the time he has reached the Akedah chapter Fackenheim is as ready as any ethical monotheist to identify God’s will with justice and repudiate anything like tragic necessity. What actually happens is quite different. When he begins to talk about what crucially distinguishes his view of revelation from Kant’s, he is setting out on a path which will bring him quite smoothly within a few pages to an unmistakably dirty-hands situation. Kant’s God affirms justice. The trouble with Him is that this is all He can do. Fackenheim’s God must also be capable of destroying it: In the pristine moment, the divine commanding Presence does not communicate a finite content that the human recipient might appraise and appropriate in the light of familiar standards. On the contrary, it calls into question all familiar content, and, indeed, all standards. Whatever may be true of subsequent history, there can be no mistaking the initial voice for one already familiar, such as conscience, reason or “spiritual creativity.”35

The experience of the ultimate creative source as beyond limit or form but somehow grounding a structured world of boundaries is not unknown in a variety of religions and philosophies, and Fackenheim is not wrong to see something of it in the Torah. What needs to be questioned is whether he is entitled to hold on to Micah and to ethics as unification of wills in the face of the double vision of the source as both building up and tearing down.36 What that vision implies in the Jewish sources is an anti-utopianism for which the insistence on a full union of wills between ourselves and the ultimate source is precisely destructive of normal life and something we need to be buffered against. On this understanding, Jews, and all others, are required to relinquish not only a fully consummated three-term relationship but a fully consummated two-term relationship as well. Absolute unity of wills with God, as Jewish sources recognize, can only destroy human community. And a Kantian unity of wills with our fellows, as Fackenheim was well aware, would turn community into tyranny if we could achieve it.37 The teaching we shall ultimately have to draw from Fackenheim’s genuine

EJM 45. The reference to Nietzsche’s child on the beach as an image of Dionysus and Apollo is not accidental. 37 The danger of craving oneness with God appears in Jewish sources, for example, in some midrashic readings of the story of Nadab and Abihu (Leviticus 10:1–2). For Fackenheim on Kant, see his “Kant’s Concept of History” (note 7, above). 35 36

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insights is that we are required both by Judaism and any benign ethicopolitical understanding to keep our distance both from God and from our fellow humans. Fackenheim makes us wait quite a long time before he introduces the more devastating ambiguities of the God that calls all standards into question. The crucial turn comes more than twenty pages after the passage I have just quoted. Having stated succinctly both the similarity and the difference of Kantian and Jewish ethics as the acceptance by both of the intrinsic value of moral law, but the acceptance by Judaism but not by Kant of—and he rubs in the phrase—“pristine moments of divine Presence in which every content and all standards are called into question,” Fackenheim adds: But how can Jewish morality hold fast to such value when it accepts pristine moments of divine Presence in which every content and all standards are called into question? Above we found ourselves forced to ask whether, after all, circumstances might not arise in which Jeremiah would call, in the name of his God, for injustice, hatred and murder.38

We are finally back with the dirty hands theme that will dominate the rest of the chapter. In the twenty pages before that he has argued for a not unfamiliar theology to the effect that the God not bound by moral obligation, because not bound at all, nevertheless binds us to our neighbors out of grace or loving care. In the light of what is to come these pages must be counted as an evasion. The Akedah chapter’s final section, “The Impossible Question,” begins with an eye-witness account of the murder of a group of Jews who were “rounded up, told to undress, were shot, and alive or dead, thrown into ditches.”39 Just before they are shot, a father comforts his ten-year-old, pointing to the sky and seeming to explain something. Can this be called a sanctification of the name? Fackenheim’s point, I think, is not to reject sanctification of the name but to rehabilitate the traditional account by translating it from acquiescence to protest. Whatever the father thinks he is saying to his son, the modern Jew (and the modern philosopher) can only accept it because the phrase “I am accepting the will of God” can be taken as a way of saying to one’s SS executioner, “I am not an instrument of your will.” 38 39

EJM 68. EJM 76.

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In this chapter, Fackenheim is not yet explicitly thinking of resistance and the preservation of one’s life as themselves a kind of sanctification of the name. On the contrary, the two can seem to be opposite values. After Auschwitz, “Jewish life is more sacred than Jewish death, even if it is for the sanctification of the divine name.” But in terms of the questions we have been discussing, what does this statement amount to? Surely life was always preferred to death if there was an honorable option without the need to deny that sometimes there was no honorable option in which case sanctification of the name was a thing of high value. Are we being told that even a dishonorable life is preferable to death? In a chapter that has just brought us around to the possibility of having to commit murder, that may be the case. We need a clearer picture than we yet have of the relation between the Akedah, the sanctification of the name and the tragic vision. Fackenheim normally connects Abraham with the tragedy of “unavoidable and inexcusable.” But why? It is not obvious in the Akedah chapter but clearer elsewhere where we can see a persistent link between sacrificing one’s children and bringing them up as Jews. Is it enough to say that he sees a Jewish education, especially after the Holocaust, as kind of human sacrifice? At times, Fackenheim goes out of his way to make the dilemma even more horrible. After the Holocaust to make them Jews is to risk making them future victims. But in a world of radical and eternal antisemitism to raise them as non-Jews is to risk making them future executioners.40 But that risk does not touch the deepest form of the tragic vision. As we saw, in his early writings Fackenheim describes as tragic our ignorance of the results of our attempts to do good. The possibility of producing a Nazi by raising a non-Jew falls into that category. But quite apart from its unlikelihood, it is not the worst tragedy he identifies which is to find the inexcusable to be unavoidable. It is hard to doubt that Fackenheim, especially after the formation of the State of Israel, came more and more to see that the choice between victim and executioner did not depend on whether one was raised as a Jew or a non-Jew, but was fully there for those who were raised as Jews if they were also Israelis. How to react to this possibility presents as precisely as possible a tragic dilemma and the answer is not obvious. But to deny that the dilemma can be real is surely to live in a

40

This theme is especially conspicuous in JRH. See, for example, JRH 136.

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fantasy world. Our question here, however, is not the practical one of what to do but the theoretical one of whether it is possible to square this dilemma with any idea that we have a way of uniting our wills to God’s will, let alone each others’. Fackenheim addresses these issues after Encounters in To Mend the World in a way I have already said we ought to find worrisome not because of its acceptance of dirty hands but because of its way of retaining oneness of wills with God. But contrary to what some think, his treatment of the current dirty hands problem as a unique crisis draws whatever strength it has not so much from his account of what it bodes for Jews, for whom it is likely not as unique a crisis as he suggests, as from his account of what it bodes for human consciousness as such. It is his account of this crisis that will allow us to size up just how tragic a choice we may actually face. Here I will be able to give only a very brief account without trying to decide whether his account is ultimately sober or wildly alarmist. But we shall be able to form some judgment as to whether his sense of crisis is so great that it leads him to think of what we might have to do about it as so much more unavoidable than ever that he can no longer see it as at the same time inexcusable. This loss of the tragic balance would be the best evidence that can be marshaled by those who would paint Fackenheim as someone who has been turned by the holocaust into an unscrupulous promoter of Israel with no accounting of the cost. Before looking for the lines along which we can defend him against this charge we must get some sense of what it is based on. Tragedy Lost: Does Necessity Trump Morality? A summary account of To Mend the World, drawing on themes we have been discussing must focus first on the question of what it is about the Holocaust that makes it demand uniquely drastic remedies. Fackenheim vacillates in a confusing way as to whether the Holocaust is a unique attempt to destroy Jews or to destroy the human as such, alternatives he sees as connected but in a very unclear way. The more revealing and powerful argument is the one about humanity, and I confine myself to it. In this perspective, the Holocaust is seen as a nihilistic experiment in dehumanization completely for its own sake. In at least some people, all the characteristics on which humanistic ideas of respect are based are successfully wiped out. Once they are gone, there is no longer anything

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that one can treat with respect, even if one wanted to. Whether or not such living dead might have animal rights, their human rights are gone because they are no longer human. Historicism or relativism is horribly vindicated. Whatever rules there may be in heaven, on earth rules about how human beings ought to be treated are only as permanent as the human beings. The situation Fackenheim conjures up is not unlike the closing pages of Orwell’s 1984. The lesson is that when the institutions, practices, rules that keep us from being turned into zombies are gone, they are gone forever. Action to save them may not only have to be drastic; it has to be done while there is still time, because tomorrow no one may be aware enough to care about them. Paradoxically, the proof produced more convincingly by Hitler than by anyone that values are at the mercy of history, should make me fight as hard as I can to protect them from history while I still have them.41 In a practical sense, in any case, a kind of historicism would seem to have won the day. We defend what we know only while we know it. It is easy enough to see how this view of the world, which, though extreme, is not obviously mistaken, could not only encourage unscrupulous remedies but make it seem only perverse to regard such remedies as inexcusable. The truly inexcusable thing would be to be too scrupulous to use them. What needs to be added is that for atheists and believers alike it can come to seem that saving humanity is something that God ought to be doing but isn’t. We have to do what He clearly ought to and must want to. Just as the primal Presence is beyond good and evil, so may we be in pursuit of a good cause. And He can hardly hold us guilty for doing His work for Him. The loss of that sense that the unavoidable can also be inexcusable is a loss of the tragic vision and the consequent loss of one of the forces that moderates our actions in the face of crisis. A tendency to think in this way would surely be exacerbated by a belief in the possibility of a merging of wills between ourselves and God. And I think it is fair to say that Fackenheim’s account of such merging is especially open to abuse because his account of revelation provides no effective way of distinguishing merging from a simple

41 It would be worth examining the relation between this attitude and the pragmatic make-believe and ideological fanaticism that Fackenheim finds wanting as responses to historicism in MH 4–7; reprinted in GW 123.

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substitution of my mind for God’s. The danger, we may say once again, is not in the recognition of the occasional necessity for injustice but in the additional loss of constraints when a sense of integration with our moral source combines with the loss of the tragic vision.42 A hint that Fackenheim, against his best instincts, is tempted to move from an understandable sense of crisis to a tendency to identify human acts as exercising a kind of divine initiative appears in his treatment of Israel in To Mend the World. For all that he characterizes the mending that Israel represents as fragmentary, his willingness to endorse the Chief Rabbi’s prayer in which Israel is seen as a first step, a “seed” towards the coming of the Messiah both draws on and in turn encourages us to identify human acts with acts of God. There is an irony in that the train of thought I think can be found in To Mend the World is something like the one Fackenheim had mercilessly criticized in Kant’s writings on history. Those essays are Kant’s attempt to cope with the dependence of moral consciousness on historical circumstance. Though moral imperatives may be a priori in themselves, Kant understands them to have entered our minds through psychological processes and to be sustained by social conditioning as we evolve towards true self-sufficiency sometime in the future. As we saw above, the result is that we are dependent on “intelligent devils” for the education that moralizes us. Furthermore, there is no question for Kant of evaluating the devils morally and finding them inexcusable. There isn’t any morality yet, hence no responsibility, hence no tragedy. In detail these writings are quite different from Fackenheim’s. But both are trying to cope with the vulnerability of human moral consciousness, and both can see no solution other than a human determination to mold the future. Presuming that Fackenheim at least temporarily lost precious restraints, is there any hint that he may have had them restored to him? I want to look now at some reason to believe that a basis of tragic ambiguity once more influenced his thought towards the end of his career. 42 A similar result to that of the oneness-of-wills doctrine may be found in those hermeneuts who on the basis of the real difficulty of distinguishing text from interpretation enthuse over the idea that God has handed the establishment of the meaning of scripture over to us with the result that scripture means what we say it means. Fackenheim does not believe this but he never explained how his own doctrine of “handing over” as described in the Akedah chapter, can avoid it. I have discussed this issue at some length in the article cited in note 44, below.

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Tragedy Regained: Fackenheim and Baum on the Suspension of the Ethical Some of Fackeneim’s readers certainly concluded that the Holocaust turned him into an unscrupulous opportunist in defense of the survival at any cost of the Jewish people and the State of Israel. One was Gregory Baum. In a reply to Baum quite late in his career, Fackenheim embarks on the only way of defending himself against this charge without simply pretending that ignoring difficult realities for the sake of absolute moral principles can be a viable solution. But it is easy to miss the point of his remarks. In his response to Baum’s highly moralistic criticism, evading reality by proclaiming absolute adherence to moral principles and in effect denying that there are tragic situations may seem to be precisely what he is doing. What we have to see is why Fackenheim’s vehement repudiation of Kierkegaard’s teleological suspension of the ethical is not a denial of the tragic vision but a reaffirmation of it.43 Fackenheim’s most famous set piece is his claim that after the Holocaust Jews need to add to the 613 commandments of traditional Judaism a new one forbidding them to give Hitler posthumous victories. In Baum’s hands, Fackenheim says, “My ‘614th commandment’ (summed up by him [Baum] as ‘Jews after Auschwitz, survive!’) becomes, so far as Jewish behavior towards Arabs in concerned, a Kierkegaardian ‘teleological suspension of the ethical,’ a doctrine (as already mentioned) rejected by me even in its own context, and horrifying in this one.” We can note some puzzles. Baum intends to charge Fackenheim with condoning what Baum sees as Israeli injustice towards Arabs for the sake of national survival. But Kierkegaard’s suspension of the ethical could not be more different. His Abraham is releasing his grasp on the national survival of which Isaac is the guarantee. It is the exact opposite of the choosing of survival against purity of which Baum accuses Fackenheim. Consequently, as Fackenheim can hardly be unaware, in rejecting a Kierkegaardian suspension of the ethical he is, far from replying to Baum’s obvious accusation, evading it, telling us nothing about whether he thinks injustice must ever to be chosen for the sake of survival. He may only be saying that he thinks it horrifying to sacrifice the world

43 The exchange appears GPJT. Baum’s comments are in “Fackenheim and Christianity,” GPJT 176–202, Fackenheim’s in “A Reply to My Critics: A Testament of Thought,” GPJT 281–90.

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for the sake of God. As we’ll see, Fackenheim rejects Kierkegaard’s phrase not to affirm his moral purity, but to deny simple moral purity. He understands, as Baum does not seem to, that Kierkegaard uses the phrase to wipe out moral ambiguity without genuinely facing it. That the ethical is not suspended is precisely why there is moral ambiguity and moral tragedy. If our dirty-hands acts suspended the ethical, they might be unavoidable but would cease to be inexcusable. Without explicitly saying so, he is accepting some of Baum’s description of him while at the same time accusing Baum (and Kierkegaard) in turn of misunderstanding the complexities of the moral situation. Fackenheim will eventually need to address the implied utopianism in Baum’s accusation, yet here he sidesteps it by taking advantage of Baum’s mistake in the way it is formulated. The same tactic for avoiding a direct statement that injustice just is necessary in some situations in answer to an outrageously one-sided attack, informs his reply to Rosemary Reuther in the same place. To her claim that in effect the Holocaust has spooked him into believing that Arabs must be viewed as Nazis, he replies by correcting her formulation rather than confronting the underlying charge. On the basis of his constant claim that the Holocaust is a unique event which nothing else can be compared to, he gives the stunningly irrelevant answer that he would never compare anyone, Arabs included, to Nazis. Once again the question, however skewed by Reuther’s inability to state it except as an accusation, is whether it is ever necessary for a state to permit an injustice for the sake of survival. This is a problem that has to be faced by people who, unlike Nazis, care a great deal about not treating others unjustly. But since she apparently thinks that the answer is no, she finds moral equivalence irresistible. Why then does Fackenheim not go on the offensive and point out that their moral purism leads them to lump generally decent regimes that reluctantly avert their eyes from some necessary injustice for the sake of justice in with those that have no respect for justice whatsoever? I would guess that Fackenheim has a strategic reason for not going into these things here. In the highly charged ideological atmosphere that the with-me-or-against-me moralism of Baum and Reuther produces, any attempt to give a more nuanced, more ambiguous account of what moral life is really like would misfire. How could a phrase like “unavoidable but inexcusable” seem like anything but self-serving hypocrisy in this company? The best he can hope to do is to assure readers as strongly as possible that he truly does not set ethics aside

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and does not think Arabs identical to Nazis and leave the complications for elsewhere. To say as much as he does, however, is enough to reassert a sense of the tragedy he feels in even the smallest deviations from purity that Israelis find themselves forced to practice. Tragic Vision in Jewish Tradition The combination of “unavoidable and inexcusable” in Fackenheim’s account of the Jewish tragic vision, far from ratifying an easygoing willingness to invoke necessity to justify injustice, acts instead in the spirit of the rabbinic injunction to “put a fence around the law.” In a world in which we know we cannot escape a degree of evil-doing, decency demands that there be a strong counter-pressure to keep that evil as infrequent and small as possible, even at the cost of some risk. The tragic formula balances the risk of not doing the injustice against the risk of doing it. That the latter risk is not simply that the action will be punished but that the punishment will fit the crime is an inducement to be very sober in our assessment of necessity. And the higher a moral ideal forms the background of such assessments, the more tragic even minor infractions will seem. The Torah and rabbinic texts are full of examples that weigh against the assumption that Fackenheim’s tragic vision must be meant as an opening of the floodgates to unimaginably horrible atrocities, though there are alongside of them texts that focus just as sharply on the risks of keeping one’s inexcusable acts within bounds of moderation. The Jewish tradition on its tragic side thus places those who take both the real and the ideal seriously, somewhere between too much and too little. One or two examples will help to make clearer what the tragic vision as Fackenheim at his best understands it, amounts to. Thus, in the classic case, the rabbis of the midrashic period who recognize that Jacob had to be punished for lying to his father do not necessarily conclude that he could or should have avoided doing it. And they do not confine themselves to the obvious punishment built into the story, by which Jacob, who disguised himself as his older brother to trick his father into blessing him, is structurally “paid back” when Leah disguises herself as her younger sister to trick him into marrying her. They are able to parlay this punishment into a plausibly worked-out extravaganza of punishments including the exile

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in Egypt and Haman’s plot to exterminate all the Jews in Persia many hundreds of years later.44 Even more relevant as an answer to such criticisms as Baum’s and Reuther’s is God’s refusal to let King David build a temple on the grounds that “You have shed much blood and waged great wars; you shall not build a house to my name, because you have shed so much blood before me upon the earth.”45 In the story’s own terms, are we not being asked to see those great wars both as obedience and disobedience to God, something that paradoxically separates David from God in the very act of joining him to Him? Does the idea of a dialogic revelation that “hands over” to us freedom of response, help us understand why David should be in a very real sense punished for a free response of obedience?46 Passages like this can help us to see that Fackenheim’s 614th Commandment even if it does demand of Jews that they defer to the conditions of their survival does not counsel endless atrocities. As a man of war, David simply defended his country in a way that we cannot say went beyond ordinary military necessity. He is depicted as a man who fought bravely and honorably at the command of God and as a result was denied the closest possible communion with Him.

44 I have discussed the ethical and religious implications of this way of interpreting this story and others more extrensively in “On Not Submitting to God’s Righteousness: Jacob’s ‘Reading’ of God” in Betweeen the Human and the Divine: Philosophical and Theological Hermeneutics, ed. Andrzei Wiercinski (Toronto: The Hermeneutic Press, 2002), 242–60. That some commentators understand the story in these terms does not make reading it in terms of the “unavoidable and inexcusable” normative. But it is enough to see it as possible. And the more stories that can be clustered together under that interpretation the more convincing it may come to seem as what the Hebrew Scriptures teach. A similar comment applies to the account of David and the Temple, which follows. But for discussion of passages in which the rabbinic tradition does seem to suspend or “uproot” laws, mostly of a ritual kind, see Eliezer Berkovits, Not in Heaven: The Nature and Function of Halakha (New York: Ktav, 1983), 57 and 64. See also Aharon Lichtenstein, “Does Jewish Tradition Recognize an Ethic Independent of Halakha?” in Modern Jewish Ethics: Theory and Practice, ed. Marvin Fox (Ohio State University Press, 1975). 45 I Chronicles 22:8. 46 A number of different interpretations of this passage are possible, especially since a very different account of God’s unwillingness to have David build him a house is given at I Chronicles 17:1–15. Here again, as in the Jacob story, the issue is only whether it can be illuminating to trace a line of moral ambiguity through the Biblical text and whether traditional Jewish exegetes lend any support to Fackenheim appeal to a tragic vision.

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But while these stories help to make graphic and convincing Fackenheim’s understanding of the tragic vision, they also, I think, warn us against accepting his commitment to a oneness of wills in Judaism between man and God. A God of mixed messages is one that supremely fits our condition. And at his best Fackenheim knows it, and when impatience for oneness with God does not overcome his more seasoned Jewish perception, he teaches it to us. For his sake as well as for our own, we must hope that there is a world to come, for there at least there would certainly be oneness of wills with God.

A TIME FOR EMIL FACKENHEIM, A TIME FOR BARUCH SPINOZA Heidi Morrison Ravven In To Mend the World Emil Fackenheim poses modern Jewish identity as a philosophical issue about which we must each make a choice, and that choice is between Baruch Spinoza and Franz Rosenzweig. Baruch Spinoza chose to identify as a “free man-in-general”, Fackenheim suggests, whereas Rosenzweig chose to be “a free Jew-in-particular”.1 Events have proven both choices anachronistic, Fackenheim goes on to argue, Rosenzweig’s because envisioning Jewish identity as eternal and unchanging is as invalidated as much as Spinoza’s privatizing of Jewish identity in the modern liberal society by the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel. Fackenheim goes on to devote considerable effort to explaining Spinoza’s and Rosenzweig’s modern revisions of Jewish identity. At the end of the chapter, surprisingly, Fackenheim seems to side with, or use as his alter ego, a New Spinoza, one who would live in our time and therefore have revised his views in response to recent history. It seems that Fackenheim considers Spinoza as the more likely of the two to have permitted a historical dimension into his conception of Jewish identity. The sticking point for Fackenheim seems to be whether Spinoza had an adequate understanding of human evil and whether Spinoza’s entire philosophical project of an incipient scientific account of human emotion (and hence of human nature and a revision of ethics) not only needs to be updated but has been invalidated as a plausible line of inquiry by the Nazi Holocaust. Fackenheim argues that our time has not only shown what the evil in human nature consists in, and therefore Spinoza if he lived in the mid to late 20th century would have had to come to grips with that disclosure of evil and couldn’t have avoided it, but also Fackenheim makes the astounding and certainly controversial claim that human nature after Auschwitz is not the same as it was before. That is to say, Auschwitz is the fall of man, so to speak.

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MW 33.

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heidi morrison ravven The mind accepts the possibility of Auschwitz, in the last analysis, solely because of its actuality. Here . . . it is already clear that the Holocaust challenges far more than merely Spinoza’s version of a science of human nature. Called into question is the very idea of such a science: “Human nature” after the Holocaust is not what it was before.2

Fackenheim is arguing for two claims in this section: the first is that Spinoza did not have an adequate grasp of human evil; the second more radical claim is that human nature has changed and can no longer be grasped or really pinned down. Thus by implication Spinoza’s project is in principle impossible and not merely not adequate to the facts as we now know them. In support of his claim that Spinoza’s grasp of evil is inadequate, Fackenheim cites the passage from the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Chapter XVII, in which Spinoza writes that no person can ever completely cede his autonomy to another so that a tyranny could be instituted that would last forever without any disruption or objection, the populace having become like robots.3 And Fackenheim cites Orwell’s 1984 in this context as illustrative of what he means also implying that we have all been witness to just such a historic turn. Fackenheim concludes that “though Machiavellian, Spinoza was not Machiavellian enough.”4 Now the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus is all about exposing our vulnerability to the ruthless deception of the weak by the powerful not only through individual lies but through pernicious ideology institutionally developed and enforced (that’s superstition). It is about how institutions are manipulated to create social conformity, what Spinoza calls in the Tractatus Politicus the Group Mind, by the use of veiled appeals to authority and various seductive and coercive measures, real and symbolic. Fackenheim is certainly right when he suggests that Spinoza understands human beings as more often than not acting on narrow self-interest for Spinoza maintains that Ambition5 is the main human motive and also that envy and ambition are ubiquitous in human relations. Nevertheless Fackenheim is generally right, I think, that Spinoza neither in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus nor in the Ethics accounts adequately for vengeance and sadism as motives, for the desire to

MW 99. Seymour Feldman, “Introduction” to Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-politicus, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), xvii. 4 MW 98. 5 Ethics, Part III, Proposition 31 Scholium. 2 3

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humiliate and retaliate and scapegoat on any scale even approaching that of the Holocaust and with such coordination of motive. Spinoza is certainly concerned with powerful hatreds and envy6 and holds that “He who hates someone will endeavor to injure him unless he fears that he will suffer a greater injury in return”.7 His general picture of human nature is not pretty: “Human nature is in general so constituted that men pity the unfortunate and envy the fortunate, in the latter case with a hatred proportionate to their love of what they think another possesses. . . . They are prone to envy and ambition.” But I doubt that Spinoza adequately accounted for the desire to humiliate others as a political motive, a motive of the mob under certain historical circumstances, a motive evident, among others, in the Nazi Holocaust. Spinoza does have much to say, however, about how emotions become directed at objects that have nothing to do with their real causes. In fact he claims that human beings are not consciously aware of the causes of our emotions at all so the risk of scapegoating is extremely high. And he identifies prejudice as a motive for directing emotions at mistaken objects.8 So there are tools here for understanding aspects of the human motives and deceptions and social processes evident in the Nazi Holocaust. But did he come to grips with genocide and genocide on a nationwide and international scale and using industrial organizational practices? Certainly not. So Fackenheim is surely right that Spinoza would have added a chapter to the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus perhaps and some more propositions to Book III, “On Human Bondage,” of the Ethics if he had lived through the 20th century. Nonetheless, in Spinoza’s account of the emotions there are many explanatory principles and deep insights from which a fuller account of human depravity and especially of group behavior and social psychology can be extended and elaborated. Fackenheim’s more radical claim, however, that human nature itself changed in the Holocaust is harder to maintain and would certainly not be something Spinoza would agree to. Spinoza was deeply committed to the position that nature is always and everywhere the same. And one now wonders in hindsight if Fackenheim’s claim is not hyperbole and from today’s more sober perspective needs to be trimmed.

6 7 8

Ethics, Part III, Proposition 35. Ethics, Part III, Proposition 39. Ethics, Part III, Proposition 46.

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I think that Fackenheim’s return to Spinoza at the end of the chapter to rehabilitate him as an imagined contemporary Spinoza who has seen what we’ve seen stems from Spinoza’s proto-Zionism, which resonates with Fackenheim’s own philosophical historicism and with his Judaism entering history and political life perhaps more than does Franz Rosenzweig’s Judaism as symbolizing eternity. Fackenheim contrasts Spinoza’s proto-Zionism with what he regards as Spinoza’s rejection of diaspora Judaism. Many of Fackenheim’s (and others’) claims that Spinoza belittles Judaism and seems to favor Christianity in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus do not, I believe and have argued elsewhere, stand up to a more careful reading of the text on its own terms. I will not go into detail about these here. Nevertheless, I would like to introduce a point of overriding importance that Fackenheim seems to have missed: in Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Chapter XVII, Spinoza argues for the choice of the ancient Hebrew Commonwealth as the model for the ideal democratic liberal polity, to be instituted in particular in Holland but recommended for all modern liberal societies everywhere. Fackenheim has missed this in insisting repeatedly (and falsely, in my view) that Spinoza espoused assimilation for Jews in modern liberal polities. Spinoza wished to make all religious affiliations in the modern democratic polity he envisioned voluntary and their unique and ceremonial aspects privatized, but Fackenheim is mistaken that Spinoza regarded Judaism as having no lasting significance in Western liberal modernity. It is in a sense true that in Spinoza’s democratic polity traditional halachic Judaism would lose its normative status and cache and acquire the status of one voluntary religious particularization among others, yet all of these were at bottom, in his estimation, vital moral educators of the citizen. Fackenheim at one point recognizes and admits that this is Spinoza’s position and not assimilation in the sense of any hope or expectation of the withering of Jewish identity and practice—or the end of any other religious or cultural identity, for that matter. He believed that the moral basis or component of religion was vital to the success of any polity, even and especially of the modern liberal society. Spinoza makes a bold Jewish move that has escaped Fackenheim’s notice: in socio-political structure and political ideology, rather than in halachic detail, Spinoza explicitly selects the ancient Jewish Commonwealth for his model of the ideal modern polity, the paradigm for his theory of democracy. This is as significant as Spinoza’s incipient Zionism. And it puts a far different spin on Spinoza’s relationship to Judaism and the Jewish community than we might initially expect. In the end, Spinoza’s aspiration is to

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bring what he believed to be the substance and significance of Judaism to the universal stage. So in an important respect, Spinoza envisioned a modernity in which all enlightened polities would become Jewish—in institutional and governmental structure and ethico-political values, and so all citizens of modern liberal polities would, ironically, be enacting a Jewish identity—although of course not in name. And at the same time, Spinoza believed, there might also be an Israel, and that polity, unlike the modern democratic one, a revival in detail and not just in universalized concept, of the ancient biblical state. But returning to the question of both Spinoza’s and Rosenzweig’s lack of attention to the historic moment in their philosophies points us to an insight of crucial importance to Fackenheim’s own philosophic understanding generally and of Judaism in particular: A philosophy and an interpretation, a living vision and practice of Judaism, must be appropriate to the historic moment. For Fackenheim that moment was characterized by the necessity of a response to the Nazi genocide and to the establishment of a Jewish state in its ancient homeland. But I want to introduce a perhaps more than a little heretical response. While the historical question raised by Emil Fackenheim is the right one, I would like to suggest that the answer perhaps has changed as the historical moment has now moved on. I believe we may be in a time when Spinoza’s answers are becoming again, in modified and updated form, the right ones. For while Fackenheim’s answers spoke to a time of enormous threat both to the Jewish people and to its nation, Spinoza’s speak to and for a time (if indeed it was not written in such a time) of Jewish strength and expansiveness. Fackenheim is all about closing oneself to the world in the face of danger, of being group-self-protective. But I think we perhaps can begin to observe that danger focused on us is now passing. Spinoza is all about opening ourselves to the world from which we can learn and grow. The posture he teaches us to adopt in the Ethics is openness, not relativism but openness, learning from others and not prejudging one’s boundaries; letting the chips fall where they may while growing in our attachments, deepening our memories, and reinvigorating and reframing our identities and identifications. Perhaps we are ready to entertain a bit of Spinozism again. For must we reify the Holocaust moment forever? Is closure to be our eternal posture? Is Jewish history to stop with Emil Fackenheim’s moment? Are we to reify our experience (and identification) as victims in recent (and less recent) history for all times and places? Is the Holocaust a timeless truth for us as Jews? Isn’t that, as much as our disappearance would, to grant

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to Hitler a posthumous victory? Perhaps we should also not exempt ourselves from self-critique about our own potential for nationalist atrocities as a working out of this group-self protective posture and of other lessons perhaps too well learned. So I think our question, in Spinozist fashion, ought to be, Can members of a minority or marginal group risk openness? (This question has been raised by feminists, too: Can women risk openness or must we as feminists merely assert our “difference”?) We are really talking here about fundamental biological characteristics of organisms, approach and withdrawal, degrees of osmosis and impermeability. Can we afford to open our cell walls without becoming flooded (assimilation) or gobbled up as prey (genocidal violence)? Are there locations of enough safety to risk growth—selective taking in of the environment for our own (individual and group) enhancement and self-directed and self-determined transformation? Are we so traumatized that one historic time and place has us in a never ending repetition complex? Perhaps it is still too early to ask this question without pervasive cries of treachery as the communal response. That was true for Spinoza who might not have been excommunicated had the Marrano experience not still been so alive both nearby in the Iberian peninsula and also in the recent memory and ongoing identity of Dutch Jews including those of his family. Yet Spinoza had the benefit of living in the Netherlands, one of the most tolerant places in Europe and refuge to a number of philosophers in that period, including Hobbes and Descartes, as well as to both Marranos escaping the Iberian Inquisition and Ashkenazim escaping Polish pogroms. Golden Ages are times when we can dare to be open and learn from others without merely mimicking them. If we throw out Spinoza because we perceive his openness to others and to the wider world as a threat, who indeed are we and what are we, and what is Judaism, to become? The memories of our Golden Ages, especially of the Golden Age of Spain and what it produced of true genius—to which Spinoza was heir and to which he gave significant modern expression—ought to guide our reflections. Spinoza did not hold a narrow kind of loyalty above all other values. Learning, growing through learning was more important than a loyalty that constricts and uncritical acceptance of authority. Are we to give up our hope for growth as the price of survival? Is survival worth the price of a pre-committed constriction? Openness and learning are not equivalent to assimilation. To say so is a slur. Spinoza was profoundly conscious of subordination as the mainspring of most people’s beliefs

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and attitudes, and he addressed much of his philosophy to overcoming such beholdenness, through fear and hope, punishments and rewards, as driving our beliefs. So assimilation of all kinds was exactly what he wanted to free the human person from. He regarded the psychological and sociological processes driving assimilation (to a dominant group, for example) as exactly the same ones that drive identification with one’s own original group. For both forms of identification are all too often the mere products of our hopes and fears, and they are equally limiting, potentially corruptive, and also, both too often manifest a posture of subordination. They are both examples of how groups use coercion and rewards to direct and mold desires, that is, to fashion selves or identities, identifications. The only other option was the freedom or openness that Spinoza wrote the Ethics to recommend, an openness that leads to an identification with wider social and natural worlds while not forsaking one’s point of origin and memory (a position that has recently been trumpeted by Kwame Anthony Appiah as “Rooted Cosmopolitanism” in his breakthrough book, The Ethics of Identity).9 Although he was one of the principal thinkers who rehabilitated Spinoza for European philosophy in the early 19th century, Johann Gottfried von Herder nevertheless was wrong about the well springs of group creativity: creativity does not arise from cultural insularity—or ‘purity’—but from bringing wider learning and new ideas, cross fertilization, to an already deep education in one’s own culture. Allen Wood in his book on Kant’s ethics points out that we today are not adequately aware of how Herderian we still are10—and how much the more so for those of us with deep Zionist roots. But Herder got this wrong. Do we have to follow forever in his footsteps?

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Allen W. Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought, (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 233. 9

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PART THREE

THE RELIGIOUS DIMENSION OF FACKENHEIM’S THOUGHT

RABBI FACKENHEIM AND PHILOSOPHICAL ENCOUNTER WITH ELIJAH’S WAGER James A. Diamond In his preface to Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy, Fackenheim adjures his readers to be mindful of the “systematic impulse” of combining two disciplines—Jewish thought and philosophy—which informs an enterprise that otherwise appears as a collection of disparate essays. It was an impulse, he tells us, he was “forced to hold apart for nearly three decades.”1 In other words, his systematic impulse was suppressed by a “systematic resistance.” That resistance ceased because of his admission; “Obeying that impulse I consider a demand at this hour in Jewish history.” Succumbing to this impulse was Fackenheim’s own acting out what he advocated was the historicity of human nature, a nature that cannot escape its own human situatedness, perpetually engaged in a process of self-making. Fackenheim’s own particular situatedness was being Jewish at a certain point in history, consciousness of which transformed history for him into “Jewish history.” More importantly, the normative framing of his “impulse” in terms of “demand” and “obedience” raises the stakes of his project to a performance of a mitzvah, a particularly Jewish prescription for action. He has therefore also assumed the mantle of the Jewish theologian who he has warned not “to ignore contemporary history. For the God of history cannot be God of either past or future unless He is still God of the present.”2 What liberated him from the restraints forcing him to maintain a rigid separation between Jewish thought and philosophy for a prolonged period was, I argue, the realization that the rabbinic tradition offers philosophically sophisticated responses to what he considered to be formidable challenges to Jewish religious existence posed by modern philosophy. Biblical figures such as Elijah and Abraham, as conceived by the classical rabbis, strike philosophically at the very heart of, primarily, Hegel’s relegation of Judaism to a curious anachronism

1 2

EMJ vii. GPH 31.

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and, secondarily, to Kant’s recommendation of expediting its demise by euthanasia.3 His “encounters” were launched from the standpoint of the credentials upon which he was accepted to the PhD program in philosophy at the University of Toronto in 1941—a refugee from Nazi Germany with a rabbinic diploma.4 Hegel’s Grundidee of Judaism is shattered by a Jewish self-understanding of its own nature, which can only be culled from the midrashic tradition.5 Therefore, whether Fackenheim’s “impulse” is vindicated or not, is dependent on how successful he is in philosophically reconstructing rabbinic reconstructions of biblical Judaism, including reconstructions of the authors of rabbinic self-reflections themselves (e.g. R. Akiva). Can Fackenheim himself be counted as authentically contributing to the ongoing Jewish midrashic project? The two pivotal omissions from the grundidee, supplied by Jewish self-understanding, are covenantal intimacy and messianic expectation. Thus, “Had Hegel’s thought permitted rabbinic Judaism to speak with its own voice these two doctrines would necessarily have moved from the margin to the center.”6 The literary forms that can best accommodate its fragmentary and contradictory expression are parable, story and metaphor which, Fackenheim claims, become normative for the contemporary Jewish theologian. Midrash, he protests, is a mode of Jewish thought largely ignored by philosophy and, when combined with a Christian bias of an identity between Judaism and the Old Testament that has been superseded by the New Testament, leads to all kinds of distorted conceptions of Judaism. Midrash, he claims, must be taken into account “for all its deceptively simple

3 Fackenheim’s citation of Martin Buber’s trenchant assessment of Heidegger’s understanding of the Jewish prophets would equally apply to both Hegel and Kant: “I have never in our time encountered on a high philosophical plane such a far-reaching misunderstanding of the prophets of Israel.”, in his “What is Jewish Philosophy?”, in JPJP 178, citing from Eclipse of God (NY, 1957), p. 73. 4 See his Acknowledgments in GW xv. 5 Robert Eisen has recently charted Fackenheim’s ongoing struggle with the precise role midrash could play in Holocaust theology which he characterizes as a “restlessness” that ultimately ends in “a series of fragmentary reflections on midrash that never settle into a convincing position.” See his “Midrash in Emil Fackenheim’s Holocaust Theology,” Harvard Theological Review 96:3 (2003), pp. 369–92, at p. 392. Eisen’s thoughtful argument demands serious consideration. However, for the purposes of this study I would only note that Eisen’s characterization of Fackenheim’s position vis-à-vis midrash is equally apt of midrash itself—fragmentary, elusive, and open-ended. 6 EJM 119.

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story form, [it] is profound and sophisticated theology.”7 If we take him at his word, then the key to appreciating the project of uniting Jewish thought with philosophy is Rabbi rather than Professor Fackenheim. Elijah, because of his biblical public challenge to Baal, his private desert theophany, and his post-biblical reception as the herald of the messianic era is paradigmatic of philosophers’ such as Hegel’s, failure to fully appreciate this rabbinic theology. Elijah’s biblical and rabbinic persona serves to fill the vacuum left by the philosophers’ ignorance of Jewish self-understanding. Much of the philosophical distortion of Judaism I believe flows from misconceiving Sinai, the radically formative event/revelation of Jewish history, as an imposition of positive law crushing all human freedom and suppressing human participation whereas, as Fackenheim points out, it is in fact a hybrid of “human freedom and Divine grace.”8 The space reserved for human involvement in Divine law reaches almost absurd limits in the midrashic image of Moses being incapable of comprehending rabbinic debates regarding his own law or, indeed, dumbfounded as to the very source of a law he himself is credited by second century Tannaim with being the source of.9 Elijah’s very challenge to the prophets of Baal involves, what the Rabbis perceive, as a violation of Divine law, which prohibits sacrifices on private altars outside of the Temple.10 He is the source of the human authority to suspend divine law for the sake of preserving its long-term integrity.11 Elijah’s challenge then is rooted in human freedom and, since Elijah also portends the Messianic era, he challenges Hegel’s notion of Sinai by pointing “to a messianic future that is the joint achievement of human freedom and Divine grace.”12 Certainly, Elijah does not fit the Hegelian profile of unremitting obedience where any expression of human political change is tantamount to “apostasy”.13 In addition, what emerges from the particular confrontation is the acknowledgment of a universal being which transcends particularity in the national

EJM 15. EJM 97. 9 Babylonian Talmud, Menachot, 29b. 10 See Palestinian Talmud, Taanith, 2:8; Megillah 1:11. 11 See Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, Yesodei Hatorah 9:3. Elijah’s test is the normative ideal of meeting the demands of the hour (horaat shaah) with extraordinary, and extralegal, measures. 12 EJM 97. 13 See Fackenheim’s characterization of Hegel on this, EJM 95. 7 8

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refrain “Yahweh is the Lord.” (1 Kings 18:39), a refrain that reaches its crescendo in what was to become the climactic declaration of every Jew at the finale of the Day of Atonement. Elijah’s ordeal has, in a sense, achieved a transcendence of his own particularity expressed by his own name which means “the Lord is my God,”14 and of another parochial national proclamation by Israel that “Yahweh is our God” (Deut. 6:4).15 Fackenheim rejects the casting of Carmel as an empirical model where Elijah conducts an experiment to validate a God hypothesis. Had the result been otherwise, Elijah’s faith would not have been undermined. As Fackenheim asserts, although it is illegitimate to ask what Elijah would have done in such a case, “it is already quite clear what he would not have done”—he would not have considered it a verification of the alternative, the false god Baal.16 The critical aspect of Judaism that is totally overlooked by the empiricists is the “possibility of citing God against Himself.” Here, Elijah’s response to Fackenheim’s hypothetical would already be preconditioned by the long-standing Abrahamic tradition of theological protest and “Elijah would have done likewise had the necessity arisen.” He would have been moved to lament that, “already forsaken by men, he was now forsaken by Adonai as well, and continued to do His work alone.”17 However there was no need for Fackenheim to speculate, for the Rabbis attribute this very move to Elijah’s daring reasoning with God to goad Him into guaranteeing the test’s success. Elijah demands God’s compliance “for you have turned their hearts backwards” (v. 37).18 R. Eleazar considered this as “insolence toward the above” which, rather than the expected negative reaction, elicits divine concession.19 The actual implementation of the

14 This is in opposition to the claim that it “conveys the same meaning as Elijah’s name” in The First Book of Kings, J. Robinson (Cambridge Univ. Press, London, 1972), p. 213. 15 See for instance V. Fritz, 1&2 Kings: A Continental Commentary, trans., A. Hagedorn (Fortress Press, Minn., 2003) who sees this as a confession that “Yahweh is solely and exclusively recognized as the God of Israel and of the whole world . . .” (p. 193). 16 EJM 15. 17 Ibid., p. 22. Fackenheim imagines Elijah’s response to divine rejection even more audaciously in his WJ 218–219 consisting of a cry against God: “Till now I was only almost alone. Now I am quite alone, for You have abandoned me too. But I will not abandon You. I will remain at my post.” 18 The Jewish Publication Society’s translation The Prophets note this phrase as “meaning of Hebrew uncertain” (Pa., 1978), p. 271. 19 BT, Berakhot, 31b–32a.

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test and its outcome need only be reported for its historical context but, for Jewish self-understanding the narrative could have ended with Elijah’s provocation. Elijah’s truth will prevail in spite of God if need be and, in so doing, he qualifies himself as the traditional harbinger of the end of history, who is most fit to exclaim and throw down the gauntlet for transcendence. Midrashic characterization further compounds Elijah’s audacity and vindicates Fackenheim’s attunement to its Jewish message. Elijah’s taunt is considered an ultimatum modeled after his predecessor Moses at the Korach rebellion, which threatens God that, in the event of failure, he will become a kofer (heretic), in other words he will disavow Him.20 Note that the emphasis here is on the renouncement of the source of his commission not the mission itself. Elijah is not claiming that an unresponsive God will frustrate his message. Regardless of the outcome, of one thing we can be certain, Elijah will not submit to the tribalism of the false Baal. He will remain committed even at the cost of losing his credentials as a prophet. Fackenheim’s Elijah has, in a sense already subscribed to the midrashic theological posture that was to become so crucial to the vitality of Halacha—the Deuteronomic declaration It is not in heaven (30:12). God Himself is barred from interfering with the ongoing revelation of His Torah conducted via rabbinic interpretation and debate. Jewish debate must be resolved democratically, a process which precludes God’s participation. The voice of God as interpreted by rabbis trumps the voice of God himself should He interject into a realm He does not belong. This curious halakhic principle is so sacrosanct that Maimonides considered anyone who appeals to personal revelation as an endorsement of his particular legal position to have committed a capital offense.21 In some sense Judaism stands or falls on its learned purveyors’ ability to withstand any transcendent intrusion into the rabbinic academy. The rabbinic locus classicus of this principle is itself a vindication of Fackenheim’s certainty as to what Elijah would not do in the face of divine refutation. The following text is stunningly revealing as to the role the rabbis had assumed for themselves in the ongoing process of hearing God’s word when God no longer speaks:

20 Bamidbar Rabbah, 18:12 quoted approvingly by both Rashi and R. David Kimchi in their respective commentaries to this verse. 21 Mishneh Torah, Laws of the Foundations of the Torah 9:1.

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james a. diamond R. Eliezer declared it clean, and the Sages declared it unclean; and this was the oven of ‘Aknai Why [the oven of ] ‘Aknai?—Said Rab Judah in Samuel’s name: [It means] that they encompassed it with arguments2 as a snake, and proved it unclean. It has been taught: On that day R. Eliezer brought forward every imaginable argument, but they did not accept them. Said he to them: ‘If the halachah agrees with me, let this carob-tree prove it!’ Thereupon the carob-tree was torn a hundred cubits out of its place—others affirm, four hundred cubits. ‘No proof can be brought from a carob-tree,’ they retorted. Again he said to them: ‘If the halachah agrees with me, let the stream of water prove it!’ Whereupon the stream of water flowed backwards—‘No proof can be brought from a stream of water,’ they rejoined. Again he urged: ‘If the halachah agrees with me, let the walls of the schoolhouse prove it,’ whereupon the walls inclined to fall. But R. Joshua rebuked them, saying: ‘When scholars are engaged in a halachic dispute, what have ye to interfere?’ Hence they did not fall, in honour of R. Joshua, nor did they resume the upright, in honour of R. Eliezer; and they are still standing thus inclined. Again he said to them: ‘If the halachah agrees with me, let it be proved from Heaven!’ Whereupon a Heavenly Voice cried out: ‘Why do ye dispute with R. Eliezer, seeing that in all matters the halachah agrees with him!’ But R. Joshua arose and exclaimed: ‘It is not in heaven.’ What did he mean by this?—Said R. Jeremiah: That the Torah had already been given at Mount Sinai; we pay no attention to a Heavenly Voice, because Thou hast long since written in the Torah at Mount Sinai, After the majority must one incline. R. Nathan met Elijah and asked him: What did the Holy One, Blessed be He, do in that hour?—He laughed [with joy], he replied, saying, ‘My sons have defeated Me, My sons have defeated Me.’22

Just as Rabbi Joshua was not swayed from his commitment to a rubric of the Torah by a spectacular divine sign of approval of his opponent’s position so Elijah would have dismissed any such sign in favor of his opponents. In fact, it is Elijah who confirms God’s approval of R. Joshua’s position bearing personal witness to His happily conceding defeat at the hands of “His children”. Elijah appeared to confirm for the Rabbis the very theology he himself had instituted at Carmel. Elijah also embodies then, what Fackenheim has identified as the very core of the Jewish covenant, which consists of a paradoxical relationship between divine infinity and human finitude. Without the space carved out by Elijah and the rabbis for this human freedom, “the infinite God would devour the finite person’s freedom and his very identity.”23

22 23

See BT, Bava Metsia 59b. (Soncino Press, London). “Self Realization and the Search for God”, in QPR 39.

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On the other hand, that same freedom is limited by the divine Presence to whose endorsement Elijah attests.24 Fackenheim devoted much effort to turning back the philosophical assault of historicism on the transcendence or timelessness of philosophic truth.25 In that endeavor he enlists the support of Kant to raise the possibility of human freedom as a transcendent philosophic truth and Hegel who allows for a transcendent grasp of history since his “philosophic grasp of history occurs at the end of history.”26 Perhaps it would have been adequate for Elijah’s Carmel phase to have ended even earlier in the narrative with his confrontational rebuke of Israelite syncretism: “How long will you keep hopping on two boughs?” (1 Kings 18:20) (ad matai atem poschim al shetei seiipim).27 The root of the Hebrew term translated here as “hopping” is psh which can also mean, “lame”, and has been taken by most commentators to refer to the erratic physical movement of those who suffer that handicap. Gersonides, for example, understands Elijah’s analogy as a lame person who sometimes supports himself on one leg and sometimes on the other and likewise Israel waffled between God and Baal. David Kimchi, similarly, takes Elijah as posing the image of a piseach who is lame in both legs because one who is lame in one will support himself on the other, but one who is lame in both can’t even decide on which leg to stand. However, Kimchi, based on philological grounds, introduces a novel reinterpretation of the “boughs” being hopped on, which renders them “machshavot” or “thoughts”. Here Elijah has launched his own assault on the Hegelian challenge to Judaism which offers only two alternatives, both of which are devastating: either it ignores history altogether becoming a “worldless monk” or it opens itself up to it and suffers an inevitable “self-dissolution” into it.28 Elijah here personifies a third alternative which Fackenheim fires back at Hegel as “a far darker

24 Human independence is taken so seriously by the Rabbis that they midrashically empower it to the absurd extent of rendering God dependant on man. See the midrashim Fackenheim favors on this point in the chapter just cited. Critical for the present discussion is Fackenheim’s assessment that these highly anthropomorphic midrashim constitute, in some sense, pure philosophy since “they are symbolic terms designed to describe a relation which cannot be grasped in any terms other than symbolic.” QPR 39. 25 See especially GW 122–63. 26 GW 155–157. 27 A more contemporary Yiddish version of this would be mir kennen nisht tanzen oyf tsvai chassenes. 28 EJM 88.

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‘riddle’ ” than he could ever have dreamt of—that Jewish religious self-understanding has maintained distinctions, such as that between one true God and all false gods, “in response to three thousand years of world historical change rather than at the price of withdrawal from it.” [emphasis mine].29 Elijah remains firm in his fealty to a transcendent philosophical truth in the face of transitory competing truths which can only encourage the waffling Elijah witnesses. The urgency that Fackenheim sees as facing contemporary man, equally gripped Elijah “Never have men had so much cause to seek transcending wisdom . . . for never has yesterday’s wisdom become stale so quickly”.30 Elijah, in addition to his “covenantal intimacy”, also addresses the other major omission of the Hegelian grundidee of Judaism—messianic expectation. Elijah, the purveyor of a transcendent truth, is also the traditional harbinger of the messianic epoch and, consequently, his appearance on the scene always anticipates the end of history at which point his truth will have withstood the currents of world history. The primary biblical locus which inspired Elijah’s legendary messianic status is the very end of Malachi where the prophet envisions a utopian era pioneered by Elijah: Lo, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before the coming of the awesome fearful day of the Lord. He shall reconcile fathers with sons and sons with their fathers so that, when I come, I do not strike the whole land with utter destruction. (3:23–24).

Reconciliation of past and present guarantees the possibility of the future and the summit of history. In addition, the specific task entrusted to Elijah as a prelude to that “fearful” day, symbolizes the refutation of what Fackenheim perceived as Heidegger’s challenge—since all philosophical thinking is historically conditioned, “all ‘rational’ argument between philosophies across the ages is impossible”.31 The reconciliation to be achieved by Elijah “across the ages” (“fathers and sons”) renders dialogue possible through the restoration of transcendence. No better statement of Elijah’s commission can be found than Maimonides’ on the significance of his role as the precursor of the messianic era. At the end of the Mishnaic tractate Eduyot, there is a rabbinic debate as to the precise nature of Elijah’s task which concludes with the majority opinion

29 30 31

EJM, 88, 89. GW 122. GW 149.

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citing Malachi 3:23–24 as their prooftext for denying his involvement in “excluding or reinstating” community members in good standing by uncovering some stain on their family pedigree. Elijah’s role is circumscribed solely to “making peace in the world.” (8:7). Maimonides’ explication of this position is that “true corruption does not involve heredity but rather everyone is related to the truth and the Torah is the father of all whereas all evils consist of the hatred between men.”32 All biological lineage ( yichus) collapses in the transcendent truth of the Torah which constitutes the common ground of all humanity. Who, more than Heidegger, should be chastened by this particular affirmation of transcendent philosophic truth? The postscript to the Carmel trial, Elijah’s own personal theophany at Mt. Horeb (the “mountain of God” 1 Kings 19:8) captures Fackenheim’s rejoinder both to the empiricists and to Heidegger. Seeking refuge in a cave at Horeb, Elijah is confronted by a dramatic display of brute forces of nature. Fierce earth shattering winds, earthquakes and fire all pass by but God is nowhere to be found. All the natural upheavals are followed by a “still small voice” at which point Elijah exits the cave and stands at its entrance. It is the Elijah within history who already fixes his gaze on the end of history. Elijah was forced to flee because, ultimately, Carmel, as an “experiment” had failed. It failed because the veracity of divine encounter is not dependent on sensory data. Carmel and its aftermath jointly demonstrate Fackenheim’s distinction that “there is no faith when there is actual hearing but no listening . . . and there already is faith when there is listening openness while yet no voice is heard.”33 The supreme irony of Carmel may very well be that , in spite of all the noise of the idolaters, “no sound and no response and no listening” (18:26, 29) were forthcoming from Baal. The pagan God mirrors the pagan faith of “no listening”. Elijah’s faith, on the other hand, is epitomized by the silence of Horeb rather than the noise of Carmel. Moreover, if the still small voice is imagined as transcendence, it is that which allows Elijah’s exit from the cave while the preceding cataclysmic forces keep him trapped within the cave. Elijah, then, is perfectly cast as Fackenheim’s ideal philosopher who “ may be unable to escape from the cave of history . . . however . . . a light from beyond

32 Perush Hamishnayot (Commentary on the Mishnah), (Heb.) trans., J. Kafih, (Mossad HaRav Kook, Jerusalem, 1963). 33 EJM 27.

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the cave shines into the cave itself, and that it lights up both the lives of men who must live in history and the philosophic thought which seeks to understand it.”34 Finally, Elijah’s death (or non-death) is the culmination of a series of root experiences that consequentially flow from Fackenheim’s understanding of the Carmel wager. The focus of the narrative is not so much on Elijah’s spectacular departure from earth as it is on the relationship between the master and his student, Elisha, and the latter’s willingness to let go. Elisha’s future as a prophet hinges on his ability to witness his master’s death at which point he will be granted his wish of aspiring to a large part of the greatness of his master (or greater depending on how one reads 1 Kings 2:9).35 For Fackenheim, the God of very first verse of Genesis fuels all of Jewish history as a “beginning—“God remained the beginning throughout the entire history of ancient Israel.”36 Every crucial juncture of Jewish history is marked by a beginning and Fackenheim singles out the wager at Carmel, among others, as averting a possible end “because the God who was in the beginning continued to be in the beginning again and again.”37 It is only Elisha’s vision of his master’s separation, that is his resignation to and acceptance of it, that enables him to continue the legacy of Elijah, because God is “in the beginning again”. The “sons of the prophets” who were not witness to Elijah’s departure press to search for Elijah for they are precisely the “professional prophets” who hand down their profession to their children, who do not operate with “beginnings”. Elisha is a true Israelite prophet whose source of prophecy is, according to Fackenheim, a God who is “not familiar in advance and subject to manipulation.”38 Instead of searching for Elijah—for the past, for the familiar—Elisha’s first inquiry is “Where is the Lord, the God of Elijah?” (2:14). Having himself witnessed, as it were (kivyachol), the twentieth century’s version of the “whirlwind” (searah) which carried off Elijah, Fackenheim’s life goal was to struggle with the very same question. Though the caesura of the Holocaust defies mending Fackenheim never abandoned the project of bridging

GW 163. See for instance David Kimhi’s and the JPS translation of pi shenayim as “two thirds” as opposed to “twice as much” in BT Sanhedrin 105b. 36 WJ 276. 37 WJ 276. 38 WJ 277. 34

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the divide between philosophy and Jewish thought. However, that bridge may only remain as a partial crossing until that point within history when Elijah resolves all the accumulated doubt throughout history. Teku, the Talmudic term for an unresolved halakhic debate that must remain moot assumed a traditional allusion to a time when there would be clarity and resolution of doubt. None other than Elijah would have the ultimate last say in these disputes. As the Zohar points out, teku remains tentative until it is finally reconciled with its final missing Hebrew character, the nun. That new ending changes teku to tikun,39 a transformation of controversy, fragmentation, dispute and doubt into a mending of the world. In Memoriam: A Philosophic Midrashic Eulogy There is a Talmudic pericope regarding the obligation to memorialize both the righteous and the wicked, each obviously remembered for very different reasons. The righteous are celebrated for the purpose of “blessing” and the wicked are remembered as a target of scorn. This rabbinic legacy of the classical age is profoundly pertinent for the memory of Emil Fackenheim z”l. A discussion is recorded as follows: Ravina said to one of the Rabbis who expounded [arranged] Aggada in his presence, ‘What is the source of the rabbinic saying “The memory of the righteous shall be for a blessing”? He said to him, it is written the memory of the righteous shall be for a blessing (Prov. 10:7). Where is its source in the Torah [as opposed to the Prophets]? From the verse Shall I hide from Abraham that which I am doing? (Gen. 18:17) and it is written [immediately afterward] And Abraham shall become a great and mighty nation (Gen. 18:18) What is the source of the rabbinic saying “And the name of the wicked shall rot”? He responded, it is written But the name of the wicked shall rot (Prov. 10:7). Where is its source in the Torah? It is written And he transported his tent to Sodom (Gen. 13:12) and then it is written And the people of Sodom were extremely wicked and sinners against the Lord (Gen. 13:13).40

The same verse in Proverbs is the prophetic source for preserving the respective memories of both the righteous and the wicked, the former positively and the latter negatively.

39 40

Zohar, 27b. BT, Yomah 38b.

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Though the Mosaic sources marshaled in support of the same principle are separated by five biblical chapters in Genesis, they both relate to the identical narrative- the destruction of Sodom. The decision to let Abraham in on the divine plan to eradicate an entire society follows a divine deliberation on whether such disclosure is in fact a good idea, or should it remain concealed from Abraham. Gen. 18:18, the predestined future of Abraham as a great and mighty nation constitutes an argument, in itself, in favor of disclosure. That nation assumes the Abrahamic legacy of righteousness and justice (tzedakah umishpat), the very notions with which Abraham responds to the divine revelation of the impending annihilation of Sodom. Firstly, failure to discriminate between the righteous (tsaddik) and the wicked would result in the collapsing of all moral distinctions so that the tsaddik and the rasha fare alike (Gen. 18:25). Secondly, it would disqualify the judge, in this instance the Supreme Judge, who rendered the verdict by its patent injustice, shall not the judge (shofet) of the whole earth deal justly (mishpat). The revelation that is the alternative to “concealment” here consists in affording man the opportunity to advocate a morality that is of intrinsic value, to exercise his moral autonomy but, an autonomy that is triggered by a “divine commanding Presence”. It is actually in this confrontation between God and Abraham, in Abraham’s defense of the innocent, where Fackenheim’s response to the Kantian dilemma is perfectly represented—“The revealed morality of Judaism demands a three-term relationship—nothing less than a relationship involving man, his human neighbor, and God Himself.”41 Had Abraham acted wholly independent of God, his performance of a moral command would have remained fragmentary,” for if such performance discloses the human neighbor, as well as him who performs the commandment, as being of intrinsic value, it is ultimately because the divine commanding Presence so discloses them . . . This is why, even if beginning with the acceptance of the disclosure only, a man is finally led to confront the Divine discloser; why performance of the commandment for its own sake points to its performance for God’s sake.”42 Abraham’s exercise of his moral autonomy is rooted in God’s decision not to conceal and therefore conjures up a link between the intrinsic value of human life and a divine EMJ 48. See also QPR 221–24. This three-term relationship rejects the Kantian premise that the moral law is a bar between man and its divine Giver and instead considers it a bridge. (QPR 222). 42 EMJ 49. 41

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presence that discloses itself. In many ways, it is in fact the model of Abraham’s challenge to God’s impending injustice, more than that of the Akedah that captures Fackenheim’s three-term relationship. Nahmanides’ explication of God’s motivation to disclose his plan to Abraham also understands Gen. 18:18, and more specifically the latter colon of the verse, and all the nations of the earth will be blessed though him, as the persuasive factor in favor of disclosure. In so doing he already portends this Fackenheimian response to Kant. Future generations would be appalled by Abraham’s assumed acquiescence in the wanton destruction of his neighbors and so God must allow for what He knows will be Abraham’s reaction—“For I [God] know that he [Abraham] acknowledges and understands that I love justice (tsedakah) and law (mishpat), that is, I adjudicate with justice . . . and therefore if he leaves in the way of law and justice he will pray that I spare them . . . therefore it is fitting that he becomes privy to the divine secret.” Abraham’s advocacy of all individuals as ends advances as a result of a divine presence and a divine revelation. God Himself has called into question the categorical imperative eliciting the shock of Abraham’s commitment to its universal application. Divinity has not only provided the gift of humanity’s intrinsic worth (“image of God”—tselem elohim) but constantly provides the opportunity to reaffirm it. What Judaism has over Kant, is an affirmation of moral principles because of, what Fackenheim has termed, a ‘perpetually reenacted radical surprise’.43 In both the Akedah and the challenge of Sodom Abraham is confronted with a divine presence which calls into question that which in fact cannot be questioned leading to an acknowledgment of “the value of humanity as a gift that Divinity might have withheld and that is yet given forever.”44 The beauty of this Midrash, read in light of Fackenheim, is that the very obligation to preserve the memory of the tsaddik is grounded in its etymological base of tsedek or justice. Every time the zts”l (associating the memory of the righteous with blessing) is recited over the mention of a deceased tsaddik’s name, it resonates with the pristine provocation by God of Abraham’s sense of absolute tsedek. Conversely, the mandate for preserving the memory of evil for the sake of obliterating it, is based on Lot’s making his home in Sodom which is a direct consequence of a parting of the ways with Abraham.

43 44

EMJ 70. EMJ 70.

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“Parting” ( pared) is a leitwort of this passage in Genesis 13, charting a three staged distancing between Lot and Abraham, signifying a welcoming of Sodom by the former and a rejection by the latter. Abraham autonomously demands separation (hipared mealai Gen. 13:9); an empirical separation of “brothers” ensues (and they separated, man from his brother, 13:11); and God reveals Himself to Abraham as a consequence of this separation (13:14)45 directing his gaze to what is other than Sodom. In a structural reversal of Genesis 18 where God’s revelation is prior to Abraham’s initiative, Gen. 13 constructs the three-term edifice which provides the theological framework for Gen. 18. Once again, in Fackenheimian terms, man (Abraham) rejects immorality (distances from Lot who heads toward Sodom); becomes alienated from his fellow man who opts for the immoral; and finally man’s choice attracts divine confirmation of his alternatives (nonSodom) thus religiously ontologizing (divine commanding presence) his moral choice. The subsequent “remembering a Tsaddik for a blessing” is already anticipated by “rotting the name of the wicked”. The two cola of the verse in Proverbs which is the prophetic prooftext for both can be read causally as “A tsaddik is remembered for a blessing because he has rotted the name of the wicked”. In Emil Fackenheim we have a meeting ground between Torah and philosophy much of which was taken up with providing the philosophical underpinnings for achieving the second half of Proverbs 10:7. If only for this, he merits the addendum zekher tsaddik livrakha.

45 See Rashi’s comment on this verse quoting Tanchuma, Vayetse 10, “As long as the wicked one was with him, God’s speech was withheld from him.”

TIKKUN IN FACKENHEIM’S LEBEN-DENKEN AS A TRACE OF LURIANIC KABBALAH Aubrey L. Glazer There is a crack A crack in everything That’s how the light gets in. —Leonard Cohen . . . one must mend by way of return —Hayyim Vital

Is it possible for a philosopher to hear his legs praying while marching with Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. for civil rights in Selma, Alabama or to mend the world by freeing Refuseniks in Riga, Leningrad, Minsk and Moscow? Such action seems to put philosophy squarely into question. Such a philosopher is on the cusp of philosophy. How might the echo of a lone philosopher’s “Final Statement of the Accused” before being murdered by Volksgericht1 or the public prayers of a Domprobst2 affect tikkun in a post-Holocaust age? As a way of life in advance of thought, Judaism challenges philosophy by questioning its foundational love of knowledge (Sophia) at the expense of action. Public resistance by a philosopher’s thoughts or public prayers, in the eyes of Emil Fackenheim, constitute activism worthy of reflection if there is a philosophy

1 MW 267: “There was no purer resistance to the Nazi regime than the handful of Munich students who called themselves the “White Rose”. They knew that their action—distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets at the late date of 1943—was almost sure to be futile. They knew, too, that they were almost certain to be caught and put to death. They knew it: yet they did it. And they were caught and brutally, legally, murdered. Appropriately enough, the court decreeing their murder was a Volksgericht, the most assiduous of all institutions administering the Fürher’s law. . . . Kurt Huber was a professor of philosophy. His posthumous papers contain a “Final Statement of the Accused,” which in substance, if not in actual words, was delivered before the court.” 2 MW 289: “The date was November 10, 1938, the day of Kristallnacht . . . Few did anything. Domprobst [ Prior] Bernard Lichtenberg of the Hedwigskirche walked, saw, and did just one thing. He went back to his church and prayed publicly “on behalf of the Jews and the poor concentration camp prisoners.” And he continued to recite his public prayer every day until, on October 23, 1941, he was at length arrested.”

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that still dares to think! Such thinking affects an ethical life in the face of cataclysmic evil. As a Jewish “life-thinker”, I argue that Fackenheim embodies an important mode of Jewish thinking through his uniquely neo-Lurianic activism. It is this activism that correlates tikkun to teshuvah. Our intention is to call to mind the Lurianic context of Fackenheim’s “life-thinking” so as to affect a newfound appreciation of his hermeneutic strategy as well as to evaluate its influence upon neo-Lurianic Kabbalah spiritual activism in a post-Holocaust age. There is much beyond the renowned 1967 dictum of the 614th commandment worthy of further reflection, especially in one of Emil Fackenheim’s most overlooked but critical works, To Mend the World (1982), wherein he sets forth foundations for a future Jewish thought from the ashes of Auschwitz. The present investigation limits its reflections to Fackenheim’s contributions toward this future thinking.3 By claiming that “Jewish life in our time is in advance of thought”,4 Fackenheim advocates for a paradigm shift in doing Jewish philosophy, whereby “it is clearly necessary for Jewish thought to go to school with life.”5 Such an ethics as first philosophy is born from the ashes of any systematic philosophy. It could be argued that Rosenzweig already exhausted any future for interpolating neo-Hegelianism into Jewish philosophy. Thus Fackenheim returns to a more ancient paradigm with which to correlate his “life-thinking.” The cracked condition of the world sends Fackenheim into an existential maelstrom, forcing him to return to the primordial teachings of sixteenth century Kabbalist, R. Isaac Luria of Safed. Our key concern here is the implications of this move for a post-Holocaust thinker. In exploring the traces of tikkun in Fackenheim’s To Mend The World, I argue that this Toronto philosopher is not merely doing theology (as

3 A sustained reflection on that other philosopher, Heschel, who heard his legs praying when marching for civil rights, remains a desideratum. For the beginning of this task, see Susannah Heschel, “God-talk, Friendship, and Activism: Theological Affinity and the Relationship Between Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King, Jr.”, United Jewish Communities, www.ujc.org/content_display.html?ArticleID=5206. See also, Or N. Rose, Abraham Joshua Heschel: Man of Spirit, Man of Action. JPS, Philadelphia 2003. Compare with the recent centennial forum edited by Rose featuring three rabbis applying Heschel’s mystical teachings to their unique forms of activism, Tikkun, January/Feburary 2007. 4 MW 15. 5 Ibid.

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Lévinas claims),6 but something much more radical. Fackenheim is consciously misreading7 the forms of a theosophic cosmology toward its next step after Rosenzweig’s “speech-thinking” or Sprache-Denken— namely, as “life-thinking” or Leben-Denken. But what is the nature of this Leben-Denken that enacts ethics as first philosophy from only a modicum of Lurianic Kabbalah’s form? Fackenheim’s turn or kehre away from systematic philosophy (alike in motion while worlds apart in form from Heidegger’s kehre) to confront the rupture that opens to the other side of the abyss8 that is Leben-Denken, I argue is only possible in his bold misreading—a creative mending of sorts—of a trope in Lurianic Kabbalah, especially in his correlation of tikkun with teshuvah. Why and to what effect does Fackenheim single out mending or reconciling known as tikkun as the axis of his life-thinking?9 Why the explicit focus only on this final term of a larger cosmogonic narrative, namely the Lurianic tripartite model of withdrawal or tzimtzum,10 and shattering or shevirah,11 which culminates in rectification or tikkun?12 How far is Fackenheim willing to misread Lurianic Kabbalah and how farreaching could this crucial misreading become in terms of its influence back upon philosophy? How does one navigate Fackenheim’s hopes 6 For Lévinas’ ongoing reflections on Fackenheim between 1978–1986, see Richard A. Cohen, “What Good is the Holocaust: On Suffering and Evil,” Philosophy Today, Summer 1999, pp. 177, 179–180. 7 Misreading is invaluable as both a reading and writing strategy. Our usage regarding Fackenheim’s “life thinking” is extrapolated from Bloom whereby every great poet (and in turn every great thinker) is given to rereading and thereby misreading her precursor in terms of anxiety of influence, such that: “Poetic Influence—when it involves two strong, authentic poets,—always precedes by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation.” See H. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (2nd ed.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 30. 8 MW15. 9 The caveat being, of course, that Vital does suggest some correlation between tikkun and teshuvah in his own writings on Lurianic Kabbalah regarding intentions for the month of ’Elul which is dedicated to teshuvah, see H. Vital, Peri ’Etz Hayyim vol. 2, Sha‘ar Rosh haShanah, fol. 444b–445a. In that context, Vital recalls the practice of mending through the imaginal envisioning of the Tetragram, whereby “one must mend [that transgression] by way of return . . .” 10 H. Vital, ’Etz Hayyim vol. 1, Sha‘ar Hishtalshelut, fol. 43b–47b. 11 H. Vital, ’Etz Hayyim vol. 1, Sha‘ar Shevirat haKelim, fol. 117b–137a. Although Fackenheim does continually evoke the trope of “rupture” which could be seen as synonymous with “shattering”, the term shevirah itself does not figure into Fackenheim’s schema. Rather his turn to Hebrew remains consistently with tikkun and teshuvah, perhaps as an act of recovering terms that are current but emptied in a more mass Judaism. 12 H. Vital, ’Etz Hayyim vol. 1, Sha‘ar haKlalim: Seder haTikkun, fol. 3b–5b; ibid., ’Etz Hayyim vol. 1, Sha‘ar haTikkun, fol. 137a–144b.

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for tikkun with the realities of the ensuing teshuvah? Does Fackenheim’s tikkun succumb to the same particularistic limitations that plague sixteenth century Lurianic Kabbalah? The challenge remains discerning whether this tikkun can truly mend the entire world that is both Jewish and other as the universalistic impulse in daily liturgy demands, letaqen ’olam bemalkhut shadai, namely, to mend the world by way of the divine kingdom? Is Fackenheim’s misreading of Lurianic Kabbalah what keeps his action existential (dare one say parochial) when compared with Heschel’s misreading of neo-Lurianic Kabbalah that opens action to the greater world of civil rights? What is accomplished by Fackenheim’s correlation of teshuvah13 to tikkun in this post-Holocaust age? How Fackenheim’s response to such existentialism (or parochialism) affects the post-Holocaust tikkun at the foundation of his life-thinking remains one of his greatest challenges and contributions to Jewish thinking. To begin this reflection it is crucial to first review how Lurianic Kabbalah understands tikkun. Recall that in Lurianic Kabbalah, the tripartite model of birthing the cosmos into being begins with the withdrawal or tzimtzum of ’Ein Sof or Without End as it makes room for the possibility of finite existence within the overwhelming reality of the infinite. Until this moment, there has been no distinction between anything; the infinite is all. This moment of withdrawal or tzimtzum marks differentiation, even within the divine, insofar as now— before the beginning can begin— one must speak of God as Creator, separate from the Without End. Within the “symbolic constellations”14 of the Kabbalah is a reality 13 Fackenheim seems to be intuiting that some allusion is made to teshuvah in the language of hazarah and ha‘assafah, see H. Vital, ’Etz Hayyim, vol. 1, Sha‘ar haTikkun, fol. 137a. 14 I am indebted to Hindy Najman’s thoughtful critique and close reading of Michael Fishbane’s iteration of “myth” in her unpublished paper, “Symbols and Constellations in Early Rabbinic Interpretation” (Panel on Mythmaking and Exegesis: Reflections on Michael Fishbane’s Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking: Assoiation for Jewish Studies, Chicago, December 20, 2005). After further discussion with Najman, I agree that “myth” remains a term foreign to Jewish thinking (which Fishbane acknowledges) as such it is worthwhile to explore Fishbane’s project by first returning to the AdornoBenjamin notion of “constellations” insofar as it relates to symbolism, see T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, (New York: Continuum, 1995), 162: “By themselves, constellations represent from without what the concept has cut away within: the “more” which the concept is equally desirous and incapable of being. By gathering around the object of cognition, the concepts potentially determine each other’s interior. They attain, in thinking, what was necessarily excised from thinking.” Compare with “myth” in M. Fishbane, Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking (Oxford University Press, New York, 2003). Fishbane’s response of “myth” as an expression of Jewish thinking intrinsic to Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms deserves further reflec-

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that Fackenheim reflects on self-limitation and retreat, explaining how such a vulnerable reality becomes transparent: God Himself is in a state of Tzimtzum—a “retreat from the world”— without which the very being of the world would be impossible. These and similar symbols go in their reference beyond rupture in history, to a rupture of cosmic dimensions that involves no less than the “life and action” of Divinity itself.15

Fackenheim’s reading of Lurianic Kabbalah is attentive to the radical way a life could be lived if imprinted with such a consciousness. The scope of life-thinking would have need to redress a mending of both cosmic and historic realities. This realization reiterates with a newfound urgency the role of humankind in a theurgy that has even political ramifications. It is not just God that acts upon the human, but equally so the human that acts upon God. So protesting and freeing Refuseniks, for example, as an historic reality now takes on cosmic significance in terms of tikkun. Yet Fackenheim continues to wonder how any tikkun is still possible, given the totalizing scope of the rupture experienced in all facets of existence—whether somatic, historic or cosmological. Such a life-thinker then must write from a place of rupture, for— . . . it is that rupture that our Tikkun is to mend. But how is this possible when we ourselves share in the cosmic condition of brokenness? Yet just in response to this problematic the kabbalistic Tikkun shows its profoundest energy. It is precisely if the rupture, or the threat of it, is total, that all powers must be summoned for a mending. If the threat is to man [sic], there is need to invoke divine as well as human power. If the threat is to God— the “exile” is an “element in God Himself ”—then human power must aid the divine. And if this can be said without blasphemy, it is because the human aid is itself aided by the Divine. “The impulse below calls forth an impulse above.”16

The commitment to a reciprocal partnership between God and human is crucial to Fackenheim’s “life-thinking”. Unless there is an arousing call from below, here on earth, there will be no response to otherwise initiate that calling from beyond. What kind of “human power” is

tion, as Cassirer proffered the human to be a symbolic being or homo symbolicus whose cognitive capacities manifest in language reflect their origin in the symbolic world or mundus symbolicus, see E. Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (3 vols.; Yale University Press, New Haven 1961), vol. 1, 86–114. 15 MW 253. 16 Ibid.

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appropriate as a response for Fackenheim at this point is not fully articulated. But “life-thinking” is rendered as a form of tikkun that Fackenheim sometimes terms kiddush ha-«ayyim17 or the sanctification of existence. This seemingly humanist mysticism being advocated by Fackenheim, I argue, will impact on his misreading of teshuvah into correlation with tikkun. Taking note of this misreading beckons a return to the next step of this richly textured cosmogony in the narrative of Lurianic Kabbalah. Its concern is how the desire to reveal overwhelms ’Ein Sof ’s concealment in infinity, causing a shattering or shevirah in its attempt to come into fi nite containment. Through this process of multiple destructions, creation is possible, eventually leading to what Leibniz came to call, after the renowned midrash, the best of possible worlds. What stands as the most critical of the latter stages in this cosmogonic narrative, for Vital, is the very act of tikkun. But just how is it that tikkun remains so important that its after-life18 continues to preoccupy a post-Holocaust thinker like Fackenheim? Tikkun imbues every moment of Jewish existence. This existential shift is in keeping with Fackenheim’s “life-thinking” shift onwards from Rosenzweig’s “new-thinking.” As a thinker, Fackenheim needs a much more comprehensive form than Rosenzweig to capture the existential urgency of his thought. The poethical nuance of tikkun works to this end, and it is significant for Fackenheim that in Lurianic Kabbalah the distinction between the somatic and cosmological levels of meaning is slippery. Namely, that tikkun ha-olam requires tikkun ha-nefesh. A commitment to cosmic restoration presupposes that a somatic restoration is underway. How one embodies a connection to the cosmos matters deeply to Fackenheim. Such communal urgency focused upon redemption is already implied in Lurianic Kabbalah. For tikkun can also refer to the devotional consequence of a specific ritualized moment, like prostrations or nefilat ’appayim. Such a ritualized moment accomplishes two things at once: it both enacts tikkun somatically as well as cosmologically. Somatically, tikkun raises up the sparks of holiness from extraneous fields or qelippot (shards) while the adept is rejuvenated through an ecstatic

MW 254. For a deeper reflection on the afterlife of this Lurianic trope in Hebrew culture from Iraq to Israel, see A. Glazer, “Rebirthing Redemption: Hermeneutics of gilgul from Beit Lehem Yehudah into Pedaya’s Poetry,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts, 11 (2004): 49–83. 17 18

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experience. Cosmologically tikkun uplifts “the sparks of holiness from the qelippot along with those that reside within the three lower spiritual worlds.”19 The diversity of ritual tikkunim created by Luria and applied to devotional, communal practice within his confraternity is remarkable, as noted by Fine: The project of tikkun, the liberation of divine light in all it forms from its entrapment in the material sphere, its return to its source on high, and the ascent of all the worlds to their proper place within the structure of the cosmos, required the most elaborate and painstaking regimen of contemplative devotion. The ritual practices that Isaac Luria taught his disciples were intended to accomplish nothing less than repair the defects engendered by the primordial processes of divine emanation and by the primal transgression of humankind.20

The Lurianic model for contemplative community revolves around the social nature of devotion. In Fackenheim’s misreading of this contemplative practice into activism, it takes place due to the sociality intrinsic to this or that devotion. The act of aligning the communal consciousness of devotional practice and action with messianic redemption is a crucial moment within Fackenheim’s life-thinking. Recall how palpable the experience of redemption can become in Lurianic Kabbalah when ritualized through tikkun.21 The stakes are even higher in a post-Holocaust context. This primal transgression of humankind, for Fackenheim, is nothing other than the Shoah, whereas tikkun, for Luria, is the necessary elixir to the cosmogonic myth explaining the beginning of time and conflicted life in a post-Expulsion world.22 That primordial moment gives birth to the psychic reality whereby, for Fackenheim, “. . . some souls departed from Adam prior to his transgression and ascended to the realm of the divine without being implicated in his sin, all other souls eventually fell into the realm of the qelippot.”23 The transposition of this cosmic drama into history is Fackenheim’s natural misreading

19 L. Fine, Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and his Kabbalistic Fellowship (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 244. 20 Ibid., 244. 21 S. Magid, “Conjugal Union, Mourning and Talmud Torah in R. Isaac Luria’s Tikkun Hazot,” Daat 36 (1996): xvii–xlv. See also M. Idel, Messianic Mystics (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1996). 22 S. Magid, “The politics of (un)conversion: the “mixed multitude” (’erev rav) as conversos in Rabbi Hayyim Vital’s Ets ha-da’at tov,” Jewish Quarterly Review 95 (2004–2005): 625–66. 23 MW 144.

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of Tikkun as the necessary, “life-thinking” response to the epoch-making event in contemporary Jewish history. Confronting the radical evil and cruelty of the world empowers such a life-thinker to resist and transform its qelippot or husks, giving meaning and hope to existence. Fackenheim articulates this more fully when he writes that: The continuity is broken, and thought, if it is not itself to be and remain broken, requires a new departure and a new category. Only thus can the imperative that brooks no compromise be obeyed. Historical continuity is shattered because “at Auschwitz not only man died, but also the idea of man”; because our estrangement from God has become so “cruel” that, even if He were to speak to us, we have no way of understanding how to “recognize” Him. We need a new departure and a new category because the Holocaust is not a “relapse into barbarism,” a “phase in an historical dialectic,” a radical-but-merely-“parochial” catastrophe. It is a total rupture.24

That this “total rupture” deeply affects Fackenheim’s hermeneutics of mystical activism is evident throughout every page of To Mend the World. Despite this death of the idea of (hu)man, Fackenheim returns to many of the humanist-inclined mystical sources that inspire the returning, “accidental remnant”25 of a People forever struggling to never be without a Book.26 But his re-turn is self-consciously ruptured and the application of these mystical forms is necessarily fragmented, as Fackenheim reflects upon Lurianic Kabbalah. Fackenheim’s existential commitment to life-thinking means that existence itself is hermeneutical27 and must inform how we read everything, including any possible contemporary kabbalistic reading: We have seen that during the Holocaust the Nazi logic of destruction murdered kabbalistic no less that nonkabbalistic Jews—and their Tikkun with them. A would-be kabbalistic Tikkun of our own post-Holocaust rupture would inevitably be a flight from that rupture, and hence from our post-Holocaust situation as a whole, into an eternity that could only be spurious.28

MW 250. MW 321: “But the nearly impossible has in our time become almost actual. The holy remnant has become an accidental remnant.” 26 MW 328. 27 MW 258. 28 MW 300. 24 25

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Fackenheim is charging all life-thinkers to confront the reality that the transcendence any mysticism advocates may fall prey to escapism rather than remain committed to activism. Yet such a constellation of symbolic forms are the glowing embers of an otherwise murdered symbolism. The only way to continue to read these symbolic constellations, for Fackenheim, is through the lens of Israel. He derives this Zionist lens from within the Zoharic equation that unifies God, Torah and Israel.29 It is here in the singular term of Israel that Fackenheim recovers the imperative for Zionism and its activism. All other humanist mysticism or messianic idealism is dead for the life-thinker. Despite this dead-end, Fackenheim delimits the esoteric into a mundane mysticism, whereby tikkun is the only way out of the utter nihilism that is inevitably born from total rupture. While Fackenheim misreads tikkun into his radical “life-thinking” paradigm, his writing reflects a more nuanced understanding of tikkun within Lurianic Kabbalah. An instance of Fackenheim’s familiarity with Lurianic Kabbalah is evinced vis-à-vis communal ritual, in his brief allusion to what he poetically translates as the “midnight mending” or tikkun «atzot.30 Along the same cosmogonic narrative that births the divine presence into the world, there is another moment of distinct rupture or tearing known as nessirah.31 This tearing at the fabric of the divine personae or parzufim32 is critical for face-to-face relationality to take place, or mashgi«in ’apin be‘apin. Fackenheim provokes the reader further by referring to this tikkun «atzot, (also known by its other name, Tikkun Ra«el, that is a mending of the tear in the persona of Rachel) through his innovative misreading into a collective, post-Holocaust ritual context: The Muselmänner would live and be whole. The drowned and burned children of Rachel would be resurrected. And at that time—the End of all Time—all the unspeakable anguish would be remembered no more . . . After that rupture no less a Tikkun would be adequate.33

MW 327. Halperin appears to have been just as taken with Fackenheim’s translation so as to adapt into his own recent work on another neo-Lurianic thinker, see A. M. Cardozo, Abraham Miguel Cardozo: Selected Writings, trans. D. Halperin (New York: Paulist Press, 2001). 31 H. Vital, ’Etz Hayyim, vol. 1, Sha‘ar HaKlalim, fol. 21b–23b; Vital, ’Etz Hayyim vol. 2, Sh‘ar haParzufim, fol. 69–87 32 H. Vital, ’Etz Hayyim, vol. 2, Sha‘ar HaNessirah, fol. 69a–109ab. 33 MW 255. 29 30

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The abyss beyond the tears of Rachel perennially weeping for her children is still bridged, for Fackenheim, through Zionism. It is nothing short of a national resurrection that offers a real possibility of this collective post-Holocaust tikkun. It is not by ’aliyah (although this becomes the path of Fackenheim’s final years) but by way of teshuvah. Fackenheim accomplishes this by turning to the neglected writings of mystical Zionist, R. Yissachar Shlomo Taikhtel, a leading disciple of the Munkazcher Rebbe. Taikhtel’s chief work, ’Em HaBanim—one that correlated a neo-Lurianic perspective in its spirituality while remaining Zionist in politics—was composed in the Budapest of 1943.34 Taikhtel’s radical work of Jewish thinking, ’Em HaBanim, outlives its author who is murdered in Auschwitz, leaving behind these words, nearly heretical, in his own milieu: Now if we shall rise and ascend to Zion we can yet bring about a Tikkun of the souls of the people Israel who were murdered as martyrs since it is on their account that we are stimulated to return to our ancestral inheritance . . . Thus we bring about their rebirth.35

It is telling that Fackenheim then chooses to recover and comment upon a somewhat forgotten, neo-Lurianic thinker like Taikhtel. Much in the same way that Taikhtel was branded a heretic by the ultra-Orthodox community of his time for his Zionist views, so too Fackenheim sees himself branded a heretic by the philosophical community of his day for his mystical activism. This hermeneutic of witnessing, so prevalent throughout To Mend the World,36 is what draws Fackenheim to a neoLurianic Zionist like Taikhtel rather than say a Palestinian poet like Mahmoud Darwish. There are, for Fackenheim, limits to the scope of witnessing the suffering of an other when it comes to conceptualizing the homeland. It is in this light then that we might consider Fackenheim’s comments upon the neo-Lurianic Zionism of the ’Em HaBanim:

34 Taikhtel represents a unique voice in the late hasidic world that seriously engaged and challenged Zionism as a religious way of thinking. For further reflection on the implications of this thinker to Jewish thought, see P. Schindler, HasidicRresponses to the Holocaust in the Light of HasidicTthought (Hoboken, N.J.: Ktav, 1990). Compare with Y. S. Taikhtel, ’Em Habanim Semeha: Restoration of Zion as a Response During the Holocaust (Hoboken, N.J.: Ktav, 1999). I am grateful to Schindler for bringing Taikhtel’s contribution to the unfolding of hasidic thought to my attention. 35 MW 255. 36 Fackenheim closes the book with a reflection on witnessing expressed in Midrash Psalms 123:1, see MW 331.

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The author of this statement, a religious Zionist, was surely ignorant of the worst. However, what he knew was enough to destroy any notion of the Holocaust as a providential means to even the noblest Zionist ends: a state; a state blessed with justice at home and peace abroad; a state home to all persecuted if not all Jews. The attempt to justify the Holocaust as an evil means to any good however glorious would be blasphemous—and is impossible. But Rabbi Taikhtel’s statement leaves us in no doubt that its author was innocent of blasphemy. The Tikkun he envisaged was not a good requiring and thus retroactively justifying the evil that it was to mend. Rather was it—both “the impulse below” and the “impulse above”— of a wholly different order. The return would not be of some esoteric mystics to an esoteric place in the land; it would be of the whole people to the whole Land. Israel’s exile would come to an absolute end. So would the exile of the nations, of the cosmos, of the Godhead itself.37

Throughout To Mend the World, Fackenheim is acutely aware of how catastrophe demands a ritualized communal response from lifethinking—de facto relational—in order to be efficacious in mending a shattered world. It is not enough for mystics to return to the mundane plane, rather people need to be more holistic, embodying a kind of mystical activism. To truly understand and apply Lurianic Kabbalah to life-thinking as does Fackenheim, it is essential to realize that this esoteric wisdom works only as an embodied phenomenon, as evinced by his Zionism. This means two things, according to Fine’s recent research on Lurianic Kabbalah: firstly, that community is at the heart of Lurianic Kabbalah; secondly, that Luria and his disciples were committed to a life of praxis rather than speculation.38 Embodying praxis in community is the foundation of Fackenheim’s life-thinking, moving from community to nation. In order for Fackenheim’s life-thinking to work in a post-Holocaust context, he realizes the critical components of community and ritual as well as explaining the vibrant after-life of Lurianic Kabbalah. This Safedian mystical confraternity surrounding Luria was able to make such a deep imprint upon the collective psyche of Judaism, in large part, due to its ability to harness community through redemptive ritual. To paraphrase this insight through Fackenheim’s phraseology—Jewish ritual is in advance of thought, thus it is necessary for Jewish thought to go to school with the ritual responses to life. The harmony of the cosmos is contingent upon the performance of embodied ritual so 37 38

MW 255. Fine, Physician of the Soul, 9–14.

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as to render “the mythic [sic] story as ‘real’,” according to Fine, “by existentially embodying it.”39 How Fackenheim chooses to embody his blasphemous reading of history (as witnessed by the other) remains a limitation to this way of life-thinking. It is in this very moment of limitation, I would argue, that the hermeneutics of poethics could come into play. Although Fackenheim reads much poetry of witness, like that of Celan and others, he is not able to completely uncover the poethics that would open him to even the possibility of a suffering other. Despite this limitation vis-à-vis alterity, the way that Fackenheim existentially embodies his reading of Lurianic Kabbalah moves beyond the esoteric into a kind of mundane mysticism, and I would argue here lies his contribution. As a philosopher situating himself clearly in search “. . . of what may be called a post-Hegelian, religiosecular [sic] truth,” Fackenheim begins by confronting the breakdown of the modern Jewish problematic vis-à-vis philosophy. Confronting this clash between “secularism and a post secular commitment to revelation,” Fackenheim seeks to widen the scope of thinking to the clash within modernity as a whole as it is playing itself out most vibrantly for him in Israel.40 In misreading neo-Lurianic thinkers like Taikhtel this means that teshuvah for Fackenheim is a return that “. . . would be of the whole people to the whole land.”41 How teshuvah enacts a fragmentary tikkun for Fackenheim is evident in his reflections on post-Holocaust thinking and action vis-à-vis Zionism, especially as such activism plays itself out in the respective philosophical and Christian communities. What has philosophy learned from this catastrophe? “The awful legacy for philosophy is that the annihilation of human personality robs the Idea of Humanity of its indispensable basis.”42 No longer can one speak of the Kantian categorical imperative to enact the universal ethical way; rather all that remains for future philosophers to recover is the trial of Kurt Huber43 instead of the trial of Socrates. The possibility of tikkun or mending of humanity happens through the actions of some men and women who resisted, like Huber, so that the Idea of Humanity could be mended.44 This is not a call to return to Huber’s 39 Ibid., 14. The challenges inherent to Fine’s usage of “mythic” are the same as discussed earlier vis-à-vis Fishbane; see above, note 14. 40 MW 23. 41 MW 255. 42 MW 273. 43 See above, notes 1, 2. 44 MW 276.

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old-fashioned philosophy, rather the tikkun for Fackenheim becomes an act of recovering Huber’s performativity of resistance in behalf of an old-fashioned Fichtean philosophy toward “a post-Holocaust philosophical consciousness.”45 The central stage for such performativity is ultimately a life-thinking that takes place in Israel. The setting for this stage is the three monotheistic faiths. What then has Christianity learned from this catastrophe? The awful legacy for Christianity begins by recognizing the rupture caused by the silent acquiescence of murder guided by the supersessionism of the New Testament, and the misguidance of the Holy Spirit. After Auschwitz, the challenge for every thinking Christian is one of theological self-understanding.46 Fackenheim points to a hope nascent in radical-yet-orthodox Christian theologians like David Tracy and Roy Eckhardt, whereby self-understanding means that “[s]ince a merely human error within divinely inspired Truth could hardly have power against the Truth, anti-Jewish passages in the Christian Scriptures such as Matthew 27:25—“His blood be on us and our children” (italics added)—are no merely human element; they are diabolical.”47 Unless Christian theological self-understanding begins with the confrontation of its own intrinsic, radical evil, then any future commitments to transcendence become spurious. Any dialogical openness once possible for Fackenheim in a post-Hegelian encounter with philosophical supersessionism is also ruptured by a world of “radical evil that (being radical) has a transcendent dimension of its own . . .”48 Fackenheim’s self-awareness as a Jewish thinker is remarkable, holding up the ideal of not falling prey to an “. . . unconscious or uncritical Jewish parochialism,”49 especially when addressing Christianity. He is sure to refer to Christian theologians like Tracy and Eckhardt as well as other lifelong friends who redeem Christianity for him in deed, not just creed. Fackenheim’s thinking is rigorous in its prescience of any looming triumphant parochialism as regards Zionism or the Holocuast, writing as he does as his own advocatus diabolus: It might be said that this is only natural, that the Holocaust itself is parochial. It is relevant to Germans and Jews. Perhaps it is relevant even

45 46 47 48 49

Ibid. MW MW MW MW

284. 260 n. 319. 250.

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aubrey l. glazer to the whole West and all of Christendom. But, except for these, it is irrelevant to a world for which, therefore, the task of a post-Holocaust Tikkun does not arise. But the Holocaust calls into question not this or that way of being human, but all ways. It ruptures civilizations, cultures, religions, not within this or that social or historical context, but within all possible contexts. Hence a Tikkun of the Holocaust (if a Tikkun there is) transcends its limited context in significance. It is Good News to the world. The thought we are in search of—philosophical, Christian, and Jewish itself—will therefore have one universality: that of a witness. Its Tikkun will be what in Jewish tradition Tikkun is always meant to be—Tikkun Olam.50

If indeed this tikkun calls into question all ways of being, then there will have to be some coming to terms with the truth of Fackenheim’s encounter with the non-Jewish other (especially Israeli Arabs and Palestinians residing in Israel). The (post)-Zionist challenge remains, (although Fackenheim would bristle at any such rumination!) embedded in the active indictments of history. Those would include witnessing the tears for the “drowned and burned children” encountered in the poetry of a Palestinian Celan, like Darwish.51 Fackenheim as thinker grounded in historicist hermeneutics can never escape his responsibility for radical responses to the epoch-making events in contemporary Jewish history, as current as anti-Zionist rhetoric (ca. 1982) intrinsic to United Nations resolutions against Israel or platforms of the PLO.52 It remains an epoch-making event, nothing short of a people’s willto-power, according to Fackenheim, that the “Jewish emergence from powerlessness”53 was ever to be realized. Once the “holy remnant” becomes an “accidental remnant,” Fackenheim sees Zionism as the inevitable collective embodiment of such a historicist hermeneutics. The only possibility of tikkun for Fackenheim in the face of such ineffable catastrophe is the form of teshuvah which begins with a safe haven for a people—the contemporary, religio-secular, State of Israel. But the inability to see or witness the suffering of the other dwelling in one’s midst of Zion raises serious concerns about the existential (and now inevitably parochial) limitations of this post-Holocaust tikkun.

MW 262. M. Darwish, Victims of a Map: [a bilingual anthology of Arab Poetry] (London: Al Saqi Books, 1984). 52 MW 304 n. 53 MW 304. 50

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While Fackenheim admits near the closing of his reflections that “absolute transcendence of time is not attainable in our time,” 54 one wonders where this need for any modicum of transcendence or absolutism is to be found anywhere at all. Throughout the course of Fackenheim’s rigorous and impassioned rationalizations for Zionism, one again wonders whether that missing modicum of transcendence or absolutism is repressed only to be projected through his impassioned stance vis-à-vis Israel vs. Palestine. Tikkun would imply healing and reconciliation rather than deportation or other solutions. When the Zoharic triad of God-Torah-Israel ruptures into the possibility of recovery through a singular messianic fragment, i.e. Israel,55 there is always the danger of falling prey to the absolutism of this very term. One need only look as far as thinkers like R. Tzvi Yehudah Kook and the Gush ’Emunim with their obligation to live and occupy a “Greater Israel” as effacing any possibility of the poethics56 offered by real tikkun. While such messianic fragmentation may have been one of Fackenheim’s blind-spots, it also remains a cornerstone of his commitment to “life-thinking” seeing that this philosopher makes ’aliyah to embody his thinking in the only place left in the world open to the “accidental remnant”—Israel. After the absence so palpable at Auschwitz, that inaccessibility of a Messianic future for Fackenheim means “. . . we must stay without singled-out, this-wordly anguish, and cannot escape from it.”57 Overcoming the fragmentation of our precarious eternity is impossible; but this very impossibility is what inspires Fackenheim to embrace tikkun as a real enactment of “life-thinking.” Such activism confronts our inescapable anguish that is constantly re-turning to us. It is an anguish to recognize that the eternal process whereby life mends the cracks in thought begins through re-turning to the tikkun of this very ruptured world.

MW 324. MW 329. 56 The possibility of poethics appears to be born of the conversation between CalleGruber and Cixous, see H. Cixous and M. Calle-Gruber, “Inter Views,” Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing, trans. E. Prenowitz (London 1997), 79; Cixous and CalleGruber, Mireille Calle-Gruber et Cixous, Hélène Cixous: Photos de Racines (Paris, 1994), 88. For more on poethics in Zionism, see my Ph.D. dissertation (University of Toronto, 2005), Fractured Fragments Sitting in Travail: Afterwords on (re)birthing Redemption in Hebrew Hermeneutics, Chapter 8, “Beyond Afterwords.” 57 MW 330. 54 55

IN SEARCH OF A MEANINGFUL RESPONSE TO THE HOLOCAUST: REFLECTIONS ON FACKENHEIM’S 614TH COMMANDMENT Lionel Rubinoff Introduction All writing about the Holocaust is in the grip of a paradox; the event must be communicated yet is incommunicable. And the writer must accept this paradox and endure. —Emil Fackenheim

As we try to make sense of the seemingly uncontrollable display of barbarism and collapse of civility that has plagued mankind throughout much of its history, and continues to escalate rather than diminish as we sail into the twenty-first century, we are tempted seriously to bring into question the longstanding faith of the Western tradition that education and culture (as measured by the achievements of philosophy, science, technology and the arts) promotes, if not guarantees, immunity from evil. As George Steiner points out, the Western culture is founded on the presumption that if people read good books, study and master the principles and logic of ethical theory, frequent museums, subscribe to the opera, love symphonies and poetry, certain decencies will follow. Inspired by the teachings of Socrates, Plato, Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill, to name only a few, we derive solace from the illusion that human savagery, hatred and killing are caused by lack of education, that most if not all wrong-doing is the result of ignorance. People, who read and understand philosophy, read and write poetry, won’t believe in stupid murderous slogans. People who love Bach, Mozart and Beethoven are not going to commit violent and unfair acts against each other. People who spend their lives reading Virgil, Goethe and Shakespeare will better understand and communicate with one another across differences and disagreements.1 Matthew Arnold, for example, is typical of the intellectual who is wedded to the belief that culture

1 “The Freakish Passion: A Conversation with George Steiner by Elizabeth Hall,” Psychology Today, vol. 6 (February, 1973).

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palliates, if it does not altogether neutralize, the ravages of modern, aggressive, mercantile, and brutalizing urban existence. This conviction has persisted throughout the history of the West and has sustained our illusions well into the modern era.2 Consider as well the strength of our conviction, derived from the Judaeo-Christian tradition, that persons who have served God might expect some relief from the evils that are the lot of the god-less and god-forsaken. To believe in God does not of course mean that one has necessarily earned divine protection from adversity. It means rather that through believing in God we acquire the power to transform ourselves into beings capable of resisting temptations to commit evil acts. Like culture, religion—so we have been led to believe—is humanity’s challenge to improve itself qua human. And even if believing in the existence of God should prove to be nothing more than a grand illusion it is at least, as Freud observes, a most useful fiction, an illusion of immense therapeutic benefit to mankind.3 Sadly, however, it would seem that rather than having been purified and humbled by the combined forces of religion, education and culture, the human psyche is far from having been purged of its propensity for violence, barbarism, and radical evil. In the words of Albert Memmi: How vain and futile are all theoretical and philosophical constructions of the mind when compared to the brutal realities of the world of men! The European philosophers build the most rigorous and virtuous moral codes, and their politicians, brought up by these teachers, foment murders as a means of government.4

Arguably, the most dreadful chapter in the history of radical evil is the Nazi Holocaust, an event that took place in a country whose intellectual, artistic, and cultural achievements were of unquestionable beauty and brilliance. Nevertheless, the melancholy lesson we have learned from Auschwitz is that murder and culture do not exclude each other, that it is possible for persons steeped in the religious and cultural traditions of the West both to love philosophy and poetry and yet murder children. For, as Elie Weisel laments, there is no escaping from the fact that “in 2 See Arnold, M. “Culture and Anarchy,” in The Portable Matthew Arnold (New York: Viking Press, 1949), 473 ff. 3 See The Future of An Illusion, transl. by W. D. Robson-Scott (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1957), esp. ch. 3. 4 The Pillar of Salt, transl. by Edouard Roti (New York: Orion Press, 1962), 269.

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the middle of the twentieth century, in the heart of civilized Europe, a massive enterprise was manufacturing death on a large scale” while the rest of the civilized world looked on with semi indifference.5 It is today a matter of shame that, notwithstanding the resolve of the civilized world that what happened at Auschwitz shall never again be repeated, we have been forced by our powerlessness to watch helplessly on the sidelines as atrocity after atrocity—not by any means to be equated with the Holocaust, but deplorable and unconscionable nevertheless—continue to be committed with an astonishing display of unrepentant savagery. While it is a clear that the Holocaust represents a formidable challenge to both secular humanism and religious faith there are profound differences in their approaches to this challenge. From the secular standpoint of liberal humanism the Holocaust is just one more catastrophic event in the history of evil, one more example, as Arnold Toynbee has suggested, of man’s inhumanity to man, an event that, like all historical events, cries out for causal explanation.6 At the same time, it represents the failure of Western culture to protect the innocent from such abuses of power. Accordingly, the question for secular humanism is: How, in the face of Auschwitz, can we continue to place our faith in education and culture as a barrier against barbarism and the ravages of evil? By contrast, for the practicing religious Jew the Holocaust represents the negation of the divine covenant on whose terms Jews have traditionally based their faith and lived their lives. Questions are thus raised about whether, after Auschwitz, it is possible to continue as a believing and practicing Jew. For Emil Fackenheim, with whose thought this essay is chiefly concerned,7 Auschwitz is the symbol of a radical evil that, at first sight, could only occur in a world in which either God was absent or else was powerless to prevent. But, as Fackenheim would be quick to remind us, this is not the God with whom Jews, past, present and future, 5 Introduction to David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews (New York, Pantheon, 1985), viii. 6 Cited by Emil Fackenheim, MW xiii. 7 The present essay is a revised and expanded version of the following previously published essays that draw upon the works of Emil Fackenheim: “Auschwitz and the Theology of the Holocaust,” in Speaking of God Today, eds. Paul D. Opsahl and Marc H. Tanenbaum (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974); “Auschwitz and the Pathology of Jew-Hatred,” in Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era? ed. Eva Fleischner (New York: KTAV Publishing House & The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, 1977); “Jewish Identity and the Challenge of Auschwitz,” in Jewish Identity, eds. David Theo Goldberg and Michael Krausz (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993).

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have entered into a covenant, the God who promised that by keeping the covenant, Jews, and indeed all of humanity, will some day find redemption and fulfillment in a Messianic age that will be the reward of their faith and fidelity. As well, it is questionable, from the standpoint of Jewish religious faith, whether an event like the Holocaust even lends itself to explanation like other ordinary events in history. Perhaps, as Weisel insists: “Only those who experienced Auschwitz know what it was. Others will never know.” No one, other than the victims themselves, can ever hope to understand, comprehend, and explain, as historians, what happened there.8 Except for those who directly experienced this event there can be neither verstehen nor erklaren. Even for the victims the event “resists explanation,” both the “historical kind which seeks causes and the theological kind which seeks meaning and purpose.”9 The Messianic promise between man and God has been the foundation of the Jewish faith and the driving force behind the Jewish commitment to bear witness through both faith and action. Notwithstanding their history as victims of continuous persecution, Jews have for the most part continued to bear the responsibility for bringing about the Messianic age, have continued to strive for justice for all mankind. However, after Auschwitz it is difficult, if not impossible, to believe that God intends to keep His part of the bargain. As Auschwitz challenges the faith of secular Jews in the efficacy of education and culture so does it challenge the faith of religious Jews in the efficacy of believing in a divine presence, a challenge that strikes at the foundations of the Jewish faith at its very core.10 The question for religious Jews, writes Fackenheim, is well stated by Martin Buber: How is a Jewish life with God possible after Auschwitz? More to the point: How do Jews continue to speak of God after Auschwitz and to read meaning into the Jewish Bible, traditionally regarded as revelation? “Dare we,” asks Buber, “recommend to the survivors of Oswiecim (Auschwitz), to the

8 Preface to the new translation of Night, transl. by Marion Weisel (New York: Hill & Wang, 2006), ix–x. 9 Fackenheim, “The Holocaust and the State of Israel: Their Relation” in Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era? ed. Eva Fleischner (New York: KTAV Publishing House, Inc. & The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, 1977), 209. 10 See Elie Weisel, “Preface” to Night (see note 8), x–xi. “In the beginning there was faith . . . We believed in God, trusted in man, and lived with the illusion that every one of us has been entrusted with a sacred spark from the Shekhinah’s flame; that every one of us carries in his eyes and in his soul a reflection of God’s image. That was the source if not the cause of all our ordeals.”

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Job of the gas chambers: ‘Call to Him, for He is kind, for His mercy endureth forever’”?11 To this Fackenheim adds, [O]ne need but rehear the screams of unnumbered Jewish children thrown into the Auschwitz flames alive—thrown into them for the ‘crime’ of birth—in order to conclude that, along with Jews, murdered in the Holocaust was Jewish martyrdom. Thus, one comes ever closer to Jewish despair: to the view that the Torah, received at Sinai, and re-received through the millennia, can be received no more; that with their dying breath Jews at Lublin—those among them who understood—gave it back.12

It is to these and other such daunting questions that Fackenheim responds, in his uniquely courageous effort to confront and comprehend the Holocaust. The Radical Uniqueness of the Holocaust It would be no exaggeration to claim that, for the contemporary Jew, the Holocaust is the most decisive of all events. Like Nietzsche’s “death of God,” “there never was a greater event” and on account of it all who are born after it belong to a different history than any history hitherto.13 For Fackenheim, not just the Jewish world, but the world, “can never again be the same.”14 However, unlike Nietzsche’s event, which ushered in a “higher” and morally superior history for mankind, Auschwitz appears as the eclipse of history, and indeed, of reason itself, if by history is understood—as it must be by every believing Jew—the march of faith-inspired reason toward human redemption and fulfillment of the covenant between man and God. How is it possible to reconcile belief in the God of Abraham with such an expression of radical evil? What does it mean even to ask such a question? Is such a display of radical evil capable of historical re-enactment, explanation, and understanding? The very attempt to explain it at all presupposes that, like natural catastrophes, it can be placed within the context of

11 “The Dialogue Between Heaven and Earth,” in At The Turning (New York: Farrar & Strauss, 1952), 61. The biblical reference is to Psalm 118. 12 “A Reply to My Critics: A Testament of Thought,” in GPJT 274. 13 The Joyful Wisdom. translated by Thomas Common (New York: Fredrick Ungar, 1960), 168. 14 Fackenheim, “The Holocaust and The State of Israel: Their Relation” (see note 9), 209.

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causality. In which case, it might be argued: just as natural catastrophes can be explained without necessarily abandoning the idea of an orderly universe so events like Auschwitz can be explained as historically catastrophic without necessarily abandoning the idea of history as the march of reason, or ruling out the possibility that it resulted from identifiable causes—such as, for example, a universal tendency in human nature, or a combination of historically situated social and political circumstances, including scapegoating and a long history of European anti-Semitism, all of which are within our power to control. To reason thus, however, risks placing the holocaust within the class of events of which it can be said, tout comprendre, c’est tout pardoner.15 For Fackenheim, such approaches are simply unacceptable. Not only do they the uniqueness of Auschwitz, they are, as already noted, profoundly incompatible with the Hebrew understanding of the covenant between man and God upon which the Jewish faith is founded. Yet it is precisely such a faith that sets the Jew apart from all others and thus forces us to confront the question: “How do we continue to speak of the Hebrew God after the Holocaust and what is the meaning of the Jewish Bible in a post-Holocaust world”? For Fackenheim, the challenge before us is to confront the Holocaust in its uniqueness as a radical evil to which no other historical events can be compared—an observation shared by Lawrence L. Langer when he confesses that “we try to accept a period of history that will never attain closure because there is no vision of human experience sufficient to contain it.”16 There is a growing consensus among Holocaust scholars that unlike the ordinary events of history, Auschwitz is an event for which its perpetrators cannot be provided with the usual excuses, such as ignorance, ideology, or even insanity and psychopathy, and for whom, therefore, there is no possibility of forgiveness and redemption. Historians can explain how “the final solution” was engineered, but not why it happened—not why in the sense that once we understand the causes we understand what might have been done to have predicted and prevented it from happening. What cannot be explained is the “madness” of a regime devoted to making the entire world Judenrein. The really “big question,” according to Fackenheim, for which historiography, as it

See Emil Fackenheim, “Holocaust and Weltanschauung,” in GW 172 ff. “Forward,” to Witness, ed. Joshua M. Greene and Shiva Kumar (New York: The Free Press, 2000), xvi. 15 16

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has traditionally been practiced, is unable to find an answer, is why an entire nation succumbed to a Weltanschauung anchored in a categorical imperative that required the extermination of an entire people for no other crime than “birth,” and why this remained sacrosanct not only unto the death of Hitler and the demise of the Reich but in Nibelungenlike Treue, even beyond.17 Fackenheim’s appeal to the nationalsozialistische Weltanschauung as a source from which we might find an answer to the “big question,” provides a more meaningful and insightful basis for understanding than explanations that appeal to causes such as human nature, insanity and scapegoating. The decisions of Nazi policy makers may have been insane and may have served the purposes of scapegoating, but neither insanity nor scapegoating is what motivated apparently rational decisions-makers, experts in the exercise of calculative, logical reasoning, to make such decisions. To fully understand, Fackenheim explains, we must turn to Hitler’s personal Weltanschauung, which became the official Weltanschauung of the entire Nazi regime, whose granite-like pillars were the absolutely uncontestable convictions that “the Jews are the authors of all evils and the poisoners of the world,” and “Hitler (who filled the role of the Führer) was always right.” These two mutually self-confirming pillars of the nationalsozialistische Weltanschauung remained sacrosanct to the end. The Jews being the poisoners of the world proved that Hitler, the Führer, was always right and the Führer always being right proved that the Jews were the poisoners of the world. The later proposition found expression in an obscure Nazi philosopher’s novel version of Kant’s categorical imperative, to which none other than Adolf Eichman appealed in his own defense: act always such that your actions would be approved by the Führer himself, as if your will coincides with the presumed will of the Führer. The predicament for the historian is to explain how it was possible for such a Weltanschauung to capture the allegiance of the entire Third Reich and serve the purpose of bringing about Geslchlossenheit—a state of affairs that required the destruction of world Jewry. For, if Jews are indeed the poisoners of the world then the 17 GW 181. In an interview conducted in 1979 Fackenheim offers the following explanation for why he thought the Holocaust differed from other mass killings: “Genocide is horrible, yet human when motivated by Xenophobia or greed for money, power or territory. The killing of Jews was ideological murder for its own sake. Torture and murder became ends in themselves. Some Germans were even willing to die for their conviction that Jews should be exterminated, as if they were vermin.” Cited by Ron Csillag, Toronto Star, Sat, September 27th, 2003, F 11.

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truth of the Weltanschauung, for those to whom anti-Semitism serves as a granite-like pillar, can only be confirmed through their extermination. Not to desire this would be to question the truth of the proposition and hence of the entire Weltanschauung, including the veracity of Hitler’s judgment. Anti-Semitism thus becomes a requirement of being a loyal defender of the Reich, while opposing it is a betrayal and an act of treason. The solution to the problem posed by the Jews must therefore be “final,” and remain so to the end. Just as the fight against a disease like smallpox requires the extermination of every last virus that causes it, so must loyal Germans wage war against the Jews.18 There is an uncanny resemblance between Fackenheim’s account of the response of Nazi Germany to the Führer’s command that Jews must be exterminated and Kierkegaard’s account of Abraham’s response to God’s command that he sacrifice Isaac. Kierkegaard referred to Abraham’s response as a “teleological suspension of the ethical.” The willingness of Nazi Germany to sacrifice the Jews is an equally unquestioning suspension of the ethical. In Kierkegaard’s account, as expounded in Fear and Trembling, that which from the standpoint of rational ethics (the ethical) is purely evil is suddenly transformed (for the duration of the situation in which Abraham finds himself ) into

18 This, in essence, is the explanation put forward by Fackenheim in “Holocaust and Weltanschauung” (see note 15). The following narrative offers a glimpse of what it was like to experience first-hand the hatred for Jews that permeated Germany and Austria during the Nazi Era. “We had lived until yesterday in a rational world. Now everyone around us—our schoolmates, neighbours, and teachers; our tradesmen, policemen and bureaucrats—have all gone mad! They had been harboring a hatred for us which we had grown accustomed to calling ‘prejudice’. What a gentle word that was! What a euphemism! In fact they hated us, with a hatred as old as their religion; they were born hating us, raised hating us, and now with the Anschluss, the veneer of civilization which had protected us from their hatred was stripped away.” (Edith Hahn Beer with Susan Dworkin, The Nazi Officer’s Wife. New York: Rob Weisbach Books, William Morrow & Co., 1999, 56). Lest we be lulled into believing that such a Weltanschauung was possible only in Nazi Germany the following account by Alan Dershowitz, of his encounter with a group of anti-Israel protesters, might give us pause for thought. Referring to the event in question as an example of “eroticized hatred,” Dershowitz writes: “That is what I saw: passionate hatred, ecstatic hatred, orgasmic hatred. . . . When I looked into their faces, I could imagine young Nazis in the 1930’s in Hitler’s Germany. They had no doubt that they were right and I was pure evil for my support of the Jewish state . . . There was no place for nuance here. It was black and white, good versus evil, and any Jew who supported Israel was pure evil, deserving of torture [and] violence.” The full text of Dershowitz’s account of this event which took place in front of Faneuil Hall in Boston on March 5, 2004, is available on the Israel Insider website. It would be no great exaggeration to suggest that it may be an easy progression from Jew-hatred based on Jewish support of Israel to Jew-hatred based on birth.

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that which is purely good, because it has become pleasing to God. In Hitler’s Germany what from the standpoint of tradition-based rational ethics or absolute morality is evil becomes good because it pleases the Führer. From the standpoint of rational ethics duties are derived from principles such as, for example, the categorical imperative “to treat others always as ends and never as means,” a principle that from the standpoint of religion can be identified with the will of a God whose intellect is prior to His will. However, when God’s will is conceived as prior to his intellect (as is the case with the Hebrew God) and duties are conceived as only “what pleases one’s God,” duties are relativized and founded exclusively in the personal relationship between the individual and God—or, in the case of the Nazis, the Führer, whose will has now replaced the will of God. Accordingly, in Nazi Germany duty is no longer something derived from rational principals but lies exclusively in the personal relationship between the individual and the Führer. Duty is whatever the Führer wills. In the idolatrous Weltanschauung of Nazi Germany the Führer’s will is thus placed above reason and logic. One does not seek truth by means of logical reasoning and critique, as did Socrates and his followers; it is rather that truth is regarded as whatever pleases the Führer. Once the Führer has spoken nothing remains but to follow his orders and to act always in such a way that it may be regarded as an expression of his will.19 But here the comparison ends. In the case of Abraham, the suspension of the ethical is temporary, a test of faith that casts Abraham into the realm of the “absurd” and creates a tension between God’s will and the ethical. For, while Abraham’s God is indeed a God whose will is

19 The emphasis on equating one’s civic duty with Hitler’s will finds expression in several places throughout Nora Waln’s first hand account of the rise of National Socialism in Germany (The Approaching Storm: One Woman’s Story of Germany 1934–1938 [New York: Soho Press, 1967]). Thus, for example, the Foreign Minister, Baron von Neurath is quoted as declaring: “All the shame and all the evil we have suffered since Versailles had their origin in our humiliation and disarmament by the Versailles dictate. We must all stand solidly behind Adolph Hitler and show the outer world that his will and his demands are identical with those of the whole German Nation (66–67).” “I learned,” writes the author, “that according to the Nationalist Socialist idea, the will of the Führer is the will of the German people, and that logically ‘he who does not stand with the Führer is no longer German (124).” Furthermore, she writes, “All National Socialists are pledged to blind obedience (ibid).” Indeed, she writes, such is the departure from Germany’s traditional respect for the rule of law, that through a series of sweeping amendments to the constitution and legal codes, the police, under national Socialism, rather than upholding the constitution and rule of law now have the task of putting into force the will of the Führer (129).

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prior to His intellect, He is the God who has chosen Abraham as the father of the Jewish nation. Yet, in the situation in which Abraham now finds himself, there is never any doubt that God’s command to sacrifice Isaac violates the very ethical order that He himself had established in His covenant with Abraham—a fact that is bound to be experienced by Abraham as absurd and self-contradictory. Nevertheless, Abraham is willing to embrace the absurd and comply, and his faith that God will yet honour the original covenant is rewarded by a further divine command that relieves Abraham of his duty to suspend the ethical. By contrast, in the idolatrous and perverse Nazi Weltanschauung there is no ethical order against which Hitler’s sacrifice of the Jews can be measured, and no tension, therefore, between duty and conscience. There is only Hitler’s will and, in the spirit of true Orwellian brotherhood, his decrees are not simply tests of faith but eternal truths which define not only the personal relationship of all Germans to their Führer but the very personhood of Hitler’s loyal subjects and willing executioners. In the Nazi Weltanschauung, to be a German at all is to be at one with Hitler’s will. It is as if the moral universe—to the extent that there is one—begins and ends with the will of the Führer. With the Nazis, religion and philosophy thus give way to idolatry, the realm of Moloch in which, as Martin Buber explains, “honest men lie and compassionate men torture. And they really and truly believe that brother-murder will prepare the way for brotherhood. There appears to be no escape from the most evil of all idolatry.”20 To comprehend how it was humanly possible for such a Weltanschauung to provide Geschlossenheit for an entire nation, without resorting to such excuses as insanity, or scapegoating, is a challenge that, according to Fackenheim, traditional models of historiography are simply unable to meet. Fackenheim’s analysis leads to the conclusion that the perpetrators of the final solution did it because they wanted to, and not simply because they were authoritarian personalities conditioned to following orders. They followed orders because they believed absolutely in the twin pillars of Hitler’s Weltanschauung, yet, like Abraham responding to the voice of his God, they did so as agents of free will. But what possible explanation could there be for such an exercise of the will, the willing of evil for evils sake?

20

Eclipse of God (Humanities Press International, 1952, 1988), 120.

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In Fackenheim’s view, notwithstanding the risks inherent in the effort to bring such displays of radical evil before the court of rational understanding, there is a sense in which precisely such a confrontation is nevertheless a sine qua non of authentic Jewish existence, if not of all human existence. Fackenheim would no doubt agree with Goethe when he reminds us that: “What from our fathers we inherit as tradition, we must earn in order to possess it.”21 For Jews living in a postHolocaust world, a confrontation with Auschwitz is the only way in which the meaning of the Messianic covenant, that defines tradition, can be appropriated and serve as a meaningful catalyst in the historical process whereby past present and future coalesce in the gradual unfolding of an authentic Jewish existence worthy of the human name. Such a confrontation takes the form of an imaginative re-living (erlebnis) of the event in ways that are analogous to the re-living of sacred events. Just as traditional Judaism urges Jews of all generations to re-affirm the covenant by living over again the miraculous and sacred events of biblical times through which God reveals Himself, so must we also relive the horrors and nightmares of the past—those moments in which we experience what appears to be the absence of God. Catastrophe no less than blessedness defines the context within which as Jews we are called upon to affirm our commitment as Jews. Fackenheim suggests that just as Rabbinic Judaism made an epochmaking response to such grave historical events as the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., a response that was itself epoch-making and made possible the survival of the Jewish people, so must contemporary Rabbinic Judaism respond to the Holocaust. No meaning or purpose will ever be found in the event, and one does not glorify God by associating His will with it—which is nothing short of a sacrilege. When confronting catastrophe Jewish thought at its deepest level does not express itself in explanatory systems but rather in conflicting Midrashim, the goal of which is not how to explain God but how to live with Him. Thus, Fackenheim argues, “to find meaning in the Holocaust is impossible, but to seek a response is inescapable.”22 As a consequence of the destruction of Jerusalem the Jewish people were cast into exile. But, pleads Fackenheim: “A people cannot last

Faust, Part One, lines, 682 ff. Fackenheim, “The Holocaust and the State of Israel: Their relation,” (see note 9) 211. 21 22

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in a disastrous exile unless it can view that exile as meaningful, and unless it has an abiding hope. In short, existence in Galut required Galut Judaism, defined by the beliefs that exile, while it lasts, must be patiently endured, and that its end is a secret in the keeping of God.”23 It is likewise, according to Fackenheim, that a Rabbinic response to the Holocaust is necessary if there is to be Jewish survival as Jews in a post-Holocaust world; and “for Jewish thought in our time to situate rabbinic Judaism historically—as an epoch-making response to an historic challenge—is no light matter. It is a fateful step.”24 Hegel conjectured that for Diaspora Judaism exile and estrangement is ontological. If so, after Auschwitz this ontology is intolerable. No longer can Jews accept exile as a source of identity. Such a fateful step changes forever the Jewish perspective on past present and future. However we understand this confrontation or fateful step it should not lead us to revise the meaning of exile so that it now becomes a chapter in the unfolding of some grand cosmic drama. The Messianic covenant, as Fackenheim understands it, is essentially the promise to exist between revelation and redemption and to work toward redemption through both witness and pious observance of Halakha. In this process it is the Jewish people themselves who bear the responsibility for bringing about the conditions under which the meaning of their past can be made to bear fruit. There is all the difference between the posture of bearing witness, while waiting for the Messiah, and the posture of conceiving oneself and one’s people as a mere medium through which the inexorable laws of history and/or providence work themselves out. Thus, just as the confrontation with Auschwitz must avoid the temptation to explain it as an expression of evil-in-general, so must we avoid the scandal of seeking justification through theodicy. Scholars confronting Auschwitz cannot ask with Hegel, “To what principle, to what final purpose, have these monstrous sacrifices been offered”? For Hegel, that principle is freedom, which is God’s purpose with history and the world, and it is for the sake of freedom that “all the sacrifices have been offered on the vast alter of the earth throughout the long lapse of the ages.”25 Hegel refers to this as “the cunning of reason.” It is Fackenheim’s view that: “A total and uncompromising

23 24 25

Fackenheim, MW 17. Ibid. Reason in History (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), 27, 25.

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sweep must be made of these and other such explanations, all designed to give purpose to Auschwitz No purpose, religious or otherwise nonreligious, will ever be found in Auschwitz. The very attempt to find one is blasphemous.”26 Confronting the Holocaust through Immediacy after Reflection For Fackenheim, the radical uniqueness of the holocaust lies as much in its refusal to be comprehended in terms of the normal categories and methodologies of scientific inquiry and historiography as in the atrocities committed upon its victims. Indeed, Fackenheim confesses: “All writing about the Holocaust is in the grip of a paradox: the event must be communicated, yet is incommunicable. And the writer must accept this paradox and endure.”27 Nevertheless, it is essential that we make an effort to confront it through an existential encounter that takes the form of an imaginative re-living. For those who lived through the Holocaust and survived it is a duty to bear witness for both the dead and the living by keeping the memory alive.28 For the rest of us, perhaps all that can be expected is for each of us to suffer the event as an imagined personal encounter, as we do with the celebration of the Exodus and the Passover. Rather than pretending to an understanding in the sense in which social scientists and historians give us explanations and theories, the personal encounter finds expression by continuing to recite and listen to the story in such a way that it inspires a renewed commitment to Jewish survival. What is the character of this affirmation? It is with respect to this question that Fackenheim’s response to the Holocaust takes on a special significance. For the authentic Jew, explains Fackenheim, tradition can sometimes be affirmed by stepping outside that tradition and its accompanying commitments, thus calling it into question. This is a basic requirement of the Midrashic tradition. According to the dialectic implicit in this notion of criticism, which Fackenheim compares with Kierkegaard’s notion of “immediacy after reflection,” the believer exposes his/her faith to criticism. This brings him/her into the midst of doubt and despair

26 27 28

“Jewish Faith and the Holocaust,” Commentary 46 (1968): 31. Fackenheim, MW 26. See Weisel, Night, xv.

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with respect to his/her formerly held beliefs. He/she then steps back once again and becomes critical of the criticism, with the result that, although he/she has transcended and suspended his/her original commitments, he/she is yet able to return to them, albeit transformed. In this transformed state the believer continues to participate in tradition and celebrate his/her fundamental commitment to uphold the Messianic faith and covenant. The difference is that this celebration of tradition no longer occurs in a religious immediacy that has never been challenged, and has never exposed itself to the risk of total despair.29 Auschwitz constitutes such a challenge to Jewish faith. No longer can Jews read the Bible as a testament to a God who “sleeps not and slumbers not.” (Psalm 121:4) So enormous are the events of recent history that the Jewish Bible, which is, after all, the source of tradition, “must be read by Jews today—read, listened to, struggled with, if necessary fought against—as though they had never read it before.”30 This is especially so for Diaspoa Jewry for whom the interpretative practices of the Midrashic traditions are ontologically and historically at the heart of Jewish identity. And however we interpret the Bible after Auschwitz, we cannot, as Irving Greenberg laments, avoid facing the very question raised by Buber and Fackenheim, the question whether even those who continue to believe after such an event dare to talk about a God who loves and cares without making a mockery of those who suffered.31 The radical uniqueness of Auschwitz lies in its radical absurdity. Consider. Both God and the rest of mankind allowed Jews to be punished and subjected to the most appalling expression of pure demonic evil in the history of mankind for the “crime” of simply having been born Jewish and for having maintained fidelity to a covenant that not only promised survival to the Jewish people but identified that survival as a condition for the renewal of the world and for all mankind. Yet it seems that the more faithful Jews have been, the more has their survival been threatened. Thus every generation of Jews seems destined to repeat the words of Psalm 44:17–24: We have not forgotten Thee, Neither have we been false to Thy covenant; we have not gone back on our purpose, nor have our feet strayed from 29 See Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, transl. by David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), 101–103. 30 Fackenheim, JB vii–viii. 31 “Cloud of Smoke,” in Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era, ed. Eva Fleischner (see note 7) 9–11.

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the path. Yet Thou hast crushed us . . . and covered us with the darkness of death. . . . We are done to death all day long, and are treated as sheep for slaughter. Bestir thyself Lord; why dost thy sleep? Awake; do not reject us . . . why dost thou hide thy face, heedless of our misery and our sufferings.

For Fackenheim the most daunting of the contradictions to be explained in the Jewish encounter with post-Holocaust religious immediacy—especially for Jews who, like the psalmist, decry what appears to have been the absence of their God during times of crisis—is the contradiction of being religiously obliged to have Jewish children, and morally obliged not to expose distant heirs to the danger, however remote, of being murdered solely on account of their Jewish ancestry.32 To face up to such contradictions and absurdities and respond to them is unquestionably the greatest test the Jew has ever had to endure. Not the least daunting of the challenges facing the authentic Jew willing to risk such confrontations is the attempt, on the one hand, to respond without denying one’s tradition, while not despairing for the future, on the other. How is such a stance conceivable? In Quest for Past and Present Fackenheim reminds us that the essence of Judaism lies neither in an unchanging universality nor in the unique immediacy of the individual; it lies rather in an openness which listens and responds, works and waits, in a context defined by tradition. It is receptiveness to the uniqueness of revelation within the context of tradition that is the source of Judaism’s strength as a living faith.33 Thus, if I understand Fackenheim correctly: that a Jew “listens” from within the context of an eighteenth-century ghetto in eastern Europe, or from within the context of the twentieth-century post-Auschwitz world of suburban North-America, is the source of uniqueness. This is immediacy. That he listens in his post-Auschwitz “here-and now,” as a descendent of those who have traveled the route to Auschwitz from Mt. Sinai, is the source of his return to tradition. The essence of Judaism thus emerges dialectically from the tension between immediacy and tradition: a resolution to be achieved in post-reflection immediacy, or, immediacy-after-reflection. How, asks Fackenheim, can such tensions be resolved? To begin with, it must be possible to establish a measure of internal coherence

32 33

Fackenheim, MW 13. QPF 3 ff.

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between, on the one hand, the secular world of North-American Judaism, and, on the other, between Auschwitz and tradition. In the course of responding to just such a challenge Fackenheim addresses himself to three specific questions: (1) Why a commitment to any religious truth? (2) Why a commitment to Judaism? And (3) How do we respond Jewishly in the here and now?34 Or, to be more specific, how do we carry on the tradition of the Midrash (consisting of commentary, debate, and challenges to tradition) into the post-Holocaust world of the twentieth century and beyond? The fundamental premise of Fackenheim’s Midrashic response to the first two questions is that the very raising of such questions is itself an event of Jewish significance. For, whether or not the questioner is explicitly aware of it, she/he raises her/his question as a Jew questioning the grounds of her/his Jewish commitment, in order that by doing so it becomes possible to re-confirm, or re-establish, her/his commitment to be a Jew religiously. But for this to occur the Jewish response must arise within the context of the immediacy of the here-and-now—postHolocaust world—so that, however firmly rooted in past revelatory events, one is always open to present and future as sources of radical surprise. The Torah was given at Sinai, yet it is given whenever a man receives it, and a man must often hear the old commandment in new ways. There are times in history when evil can be explained as deserved punishment, others when no such explanation is possible—when divine power is “as it were” suspended and God Himself suffers in exile. Such openness is necessary if history is to be serious.35

The test of this capacity for openness, according to Fackenheim, is nowhere greater than in the challenge of Auschwitz. Auschwitz is the scandal of evil for evil’s sake and Jews were the singled out victims. The vulnerability to radical surprise that characterizes Jewish theology and Jewish existence lies precisely in the fact that it must be prepared to confront such events as Auschwitz with an openness that risks shattering one’s faith at its very core. For Fackenheim the Jewish response to an event like Auschwitz takes the form of both memory and witness. Not to remember would be blasphemy. Not to bear witness would be a betrayal. Or, as Weisel

34 35

Ibid., 15. Ibid., 17.

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puts it: “To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”36 Fackenheim cites the Bal Shem Tov, the founder of Hassidism, as pronouncing the last word on the importance of memory: “Forgetfulness leads to exile, but memory leads to redemption.”37 For Jews, to respond through memory and witness is to commit themselves to survival as Jews. Can there be any greater act of faith? In accordance with the Midrashic tradition, to be a Jew after Auschwitz is to overcome precisely the despair that finds expression in Psalm 44:17–24. To some extent this is done by confronting and bearing witness against the demonic forces that gave birth to and sustained Auschwitz in all of their guises, such as, for example, the various modes of rationality which facilitated the flourishing of the Nazi ideology and Weltanschauung. It is to assert, as the foundation of one’s existence as a believing Jew, that a repeat of this evil—whomever the intended victims—will not be tolerated and allowed to prevail. For Fackenheim, to be a Jew after Auschwitz is to stake one’s life, and that of one’s children and their descendants, on this conviction. Thus re-experienced, Auschwitz is nothing short of revelation; a revelation through which one is commanded to survive as a Jew through memory and witness in order that Hitler may not be permitted a posthumous victory. Jews are forbidden as well to despair of God, and of the world as the domain of God, lest the world be handed over to the forces of Auschwitz. For a Jew, to break this commandment would be to do the unthinkable—to respond to Hitler by doing his work.38 At the same time, whether or not one responds to this commandment is an act of free will, a choice to be made without any guarantee or objective “proof ” that such a revelation is actually present. Such a “leap of faith” lies at the heart of the Midrashic response. Let us explore this approach in more detail. The Re-affirmation of Faith and the Paradox of God’s Presence In the foregoing reconstruction of Fackenheim’s confrontation with Auschwitz we are presented with the proposition that whatever the

36 37 38

“Preface” to Night, xv. GPJT 299. QPF 20.

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response to Auschwitz it must, following Jewish tradition, take the form of a stubborn persistence in one’s Jewishness, rather than an attempt to abandon or escape from it.39 Although Fackenheim believes that the tradition of universal secular humanism does not succeed in capturing either the paradox of God’s presence in history or the essence of Auschwitz, he can at least respect it and enter into dialogue with it. However, he will not attempt to dialogue with inauthentic Jews who use Auschwitz as an excuse for abandoning their commitment to Judaism, as do those on whose behalf Norman Podhoretz exclaims, in response to the ideology of Jew hatred that led to Auschwitz: “In thinking about the Jews I have wondered whether their survival as a distinct group was worth one single hair on the head of a single infant. Did the Jews have to survive [as Jews] so that six million people should some one day be burned in the ovens of Auschwitz”?40 Of course, it is not unreasonable for a group of people who have suffered persecution, as have the Jews, to emerge from an experience such as Auschwitz with the temptation to question the very basis of their historic existence. This, after all, is precisely what is required by the methodology of immediacy-after-reflection and the Midrashic tradition of self-questioning. However, such reflection risks succumbing to the temptation to indulge in self-hate, rather than re-affirming tradition. Thus, for example, Albert Memmi depicts Jewish history as “one long contemplation of Jewish misfortune,” a tragedy best summed up, according to Memmi, in the words of Clara Malraux when she exclaims: “You cannot explain to others what it is to be a Jew nowadays. It is as though you suddenly discovered you had syphilis, as it was to have Syphilis in other times when there was no known treatment for it.”41 Such also is the self-perception of Mischa Gordon in Boris Pasternak’s novel Dr. Zhivago. How is it, Gordon wonders, “that a human being with arms and legs, like everyone else, and with a language and way of life common to all the rest, could be so different—a being liked by so few and loved by no one. He could not understand how it was that if you were worse than other people you could not improve yourself

QPF 3. “My Negro Problem And Yours,” Commentary (Feb. 1963): 101. 41 Portrait of a Jew, transl. by Elizabeth Abbott (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1963), 21, 26. See also, The Liberation of the Jew, transl. by Judy Hyun (New York: Viking Press, 1973) (esp. ch. 7), and The Pillar of Salt, transl. by Eduuard Roti (New York: Orion Press, 1962). 39 40

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by trying. What did it mean to be a Jew? What was the purpose of it? What was the reward or the justification of this unarmed challenge which brought nothing but grief.”42 To these questions Mischa Gordon could find no answer. In his case, responding to Jew-hatred by questioning the foundation of Jewish belief led him to the conclusion, shared by many secular Jews, that assimilation was the only rational response. Gordon, like so many other Jews, both before and after Auschwitz, has decided that to remain a Jew is as irrational as the cruelties perpetrated upon them, as irrational, even, as the traits attributed to them in order to condone the malice and sadism from which they suffer. While Fackenheim regards submission to the assimilationist responses of Jews like Mischa Gordon as inauthentic, this does not mean that he expects authentic Jews to be unshaken in their beliefs. On the contrary, as we have already noted, the real test of faith in the post-Holocaust world comes only when the Jew risks self-exposure to both secularism and secular nihilism. As well, religious immediacy must expose itself to the threat of reductionism, the reduction of religion to psychology, and historical nihilism that uses Auschwitz as evidence of the futility of belief. Nevertheless, as previously noted, for the authentic Jew, tradition can be affirmed only by stepping outside that tradition and calling it into question in the spirit of Kierkegaard’s notion of “immediacy after reflection.” According to the dialectic of “immediacy after reflection,” as previously described, in contrast to the believer whose faith is founded in a religious immediacy that has never thought of stepping outside the traditional framework, the true believer in search of truth courageously exposes his faith to criticism only to be returned to his original beliefs transformed. John Stuart Mill demanded no less a willingness to risk exposure to criticism of one’s most fundamental beliefs in his advice to anyone in search of the truth.43 In keeping with the spirit of this notion, the Jew, through the dialectic of criticism, continues to participate in tradition and re-experiences the primordial root experiences upon which Judaism is founded. But he does this as a believer who has exposed himself to the possibility of a total dissipation of the divine presence and the faith that this presence makes possible. Auschwitz and

42 Transl. by Max Hayward & Manya Harari (London: Collins and Harvill Press, 1958), 22; see also, 117–118. 43 See, On Liberty, Bobbs-Merrill ed., Ch. 2: 23, 26, 43.

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the Nazi logic of the concentration camp, even more than the logic of scientific-secular rationalism, constitutes a profound challenge to the faith of religious immediacy, and every individual Jew is obliged, each in his/her own way, to confront this challenge. This, according to Fackenheim, is the burden of post-Holocaust Judaism.44 For Fackenheim, as already noted, the tradition from which the Jew begins and to which he/she returns, following his/her encounter with immediacy after reflection, is the tradition of the Midrash which takes the form of a stubborn persistence of Jewishness, rather than, as in the case of the assimilationist, an attempt to abandon or escape from it.45 But, once again, the question arises: How, in the face of Auschwitz, is it possible and indeed necessary for the Jew of today to be a witness to the world?46 The Midrash confirms God’s presence in history, but it does so by both confirming and suffering the contradictions inherent in that presence. The Root Experience as the Source of Tradition The essence of the Midrashic tradition lies in the direct experience of God’s presence in history, aptly described by Fackenheim as a “root experience.” Midrashic rationality thus contrasts profoundly with the rationality of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought that seems compelled to deny that presence. The study of nature reveals not God but blind natural laws; the outcome of “accidental collocations of atoms,”47 while the study of history reveals humanity at the mercy of human passions. Indeed, the expulsion of God from both nature and history is a characteristic mark of modernity. The contemporary theologian is thus faced with the dilemma of either embracing modern science’s affirmation of the “death of God,” or, affirming, at most, the providence of a God over nature and history, a providence caused by a God who may somehow use nature and history for His inscrutable purposes but who is Himself absent from both realms of being.

See GPH 49. See Elie Weisel, “Jewish Values in a Post-Holocaust Future: A Symposium,” Judaism 16 (1967): 269. 46 Fackenheim,GPH 8; QPF 4. 47 Russell, Bertrand, “A Free Man’s Worship,” in Mysticism and Logic (Pelican Books, 1953), 51. 44

45

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Yet, as Fackenheim cautions, even this weakened doctrine is difficult to maintain. From the philosopher’s perspective we ask: How can divine providence rule over history and yet allow human freedom within it? For the historian, the question is: How can one believe in providential history in the face of evil? Finally, the scientist asks: How do we reconcile God’s presence in nature in the face of the apparent indifference of nature to the affairs of men?48 Confronted by such questions, modern, post-Enlightenment theologians have abandoned the stage manager theory of God in favor of a neo-immanentist’s theory, according to which either God’s presence is itself the product of historical-human activity, so that His very being is synonymous with the progressive realization of human freedom, as in Hegel, or else, while God’s being transcends history, His presence can nevertheless be detected through the experience of a providence in the form of progress which is immanent in human freedom. According to the first model, meaning is both created in as well as realized through history, while according to the second model, meaning, although it pre-exists to history, is nevertheless realized progressively through history. Traditional responses to the challenges posed by the desacralization of nature and history sought refuge in the doctrines of progress and the cunning of reason. Followers of St. Thomas, for example, argued that tyrants serve providential ends, for if it were not for tyrants there would be no opportunity for martyrdom. Followers of philosophers like Kant and Hegel have seriously proposed that even war serves the purposes of Providence. Hegel, as previously noted, begins his lectures on the philosophy of history with the declaration that, even though reason is the law of the world, history confronts us with a display of passion, violence and evil49 How is it possible to reconcile the rationalists’ faith in reason with the actual facts of history? Hegel’s solution is to adopt the first model referred to above, according to which reason is an immanent principle which reaches its own perfection, the accomplishment of greatness, only in and through natural and historical existence; that is to say, through the very display of the passions that inspire the evils and sacrifices of happiness that bring the rule of reason and our belief in the goodness of providence into question. Nevertheless, Hegel

48 See Becker, Carl, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932, 1955), 14–15. 49 Reason in History, 26, 29, 31.

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argues, it is precisely for the purpose of realizing the ultimate happiness of freedom that “these monstrous sacrifices have been offered” on the vast alter of the earth throughout the long lapse of ages.50 Hegel thus confronts us with the following paradox. While it is the purpose of reason to purge the world of the passions of evil and achieve universal freedom, it is only by means of such apparent “irrationalities” that this goal can be achieved—a consequence, as we have noted, of what Hegel refers to as “the cunning of reason.” What is more, it would seem that once the purpose of history has been fulfilled, we will have eliminated the conditions of suffering and longing that, although caused by evil, yet inspire greatness, in all of its various manifestations. Paradoxically, then, once the purpose of history has been fulfilled, we will bear witness to not only the end of history but to human creativity as well; or, at least, to the kind of creativity that is inspired by the provocations of evil and irrationalism. Fackenheim’s response to Hegel’s theodicy is clear and unequivocal—that after Auschwitz such apologias are not only obscene they are blasphemous. This may be compared with Voltaire’s response to the Leibnitzian doctrine of the “best of all possible worlds,” which, after the Lisbon earthquake, struck Voltaire as a philosophical obscenity. If anything, Auschwitz would seem to have destroyed the possibility of any continuing belief in the providence of Hegel’s “cunning of reason,” while the many catastrophes of nature fast remove any confidence in the providential character of nature. After these dread events how can one believe in any kind of God, let alone a God of History? When contemplating such questions I am tempted to agree with Camus when he observes that we appear to live in a world in which evil and virtue are mere chance or caprice, a world in which murder and culture go hand in hand and we are as free to stoke the crematory fires as to work for justice51 Most scandalous of all, I suggest, is the fact that the legitimation of Auschwitz by Hitler’s willing executioners who condoned it was achieved by means of the very same language and appeal to “selfevident” truths that provide the discourse for common-sense morality and utilitarian reasoning. How then is it possible to restore confidence in the rapprochement between faith and reason that lies at the foundation of traditional doctrines of morality and progress?

50 51

Ibid., 25, 27. The Rebel, translated by Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage, 1956), 5.

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If, from the standpoint of common sense morality, the challenge of Auschwitz is daunting, the challenge to Judaism is especially so, since it is the Jewish people who were the first to affirm the God of history. Not only is the collective survival of Jews as a people bound up with their relationship to God, but the faith upon which they are inspired to bear witness to Him through moral conduct and the pursuit of justice for all mankind rests absolutely upon the reality of past experiences affirming God’s actual presence in history. The paradigm case of such a “root” experience, according to Fackenheim, is the experience of the parting of the Red Sea during the exodus—an event that Martin Buber singles out as the paradigm case of the miraculous.52 It would thus be a total contradiction of Jewish tradition either to turn away from God altogether, as in the proclamation of the death of God, or else seek God outside of history—a God who, although He welcomes the human soul in the Civitas Dei, or eternity, is indifferent to human suffering in the Civitas Terrena. Nor is a retreat into mystical inwardness acceptable. Traditional Jewish faith has not only refused to despair of God, it refuses as well to disconnect Him from history and seek escape in individualistic, quasi-mystical forms of otherworldliness.53 Is this, asks Fackenheim, merely the result of blind stubbornness? Or can the Midrashic tradition be authenticated through willingness to risk “immediacy-after-reflection”? As already noted, for Jews like Pasternak’s Misha Gordon and the hero of Albert Memmi’s Pillar of Salt, to remain Jewish in the face of Auschwitz—not to speak of the entire history of anti-Semitism that has been tolerated by Western culture—is as irrational as the persecution of Jews because they are Jews. By contrast, Fackenheim’s response to the history of persecution is to re-live the “root-experiences” which have given birth to the Jewish tradition. The essence of the root experience lies in the direct experience of God’s presence in history and is accompanied, on the side of the witness, by an experience of “abiding astonishment.” The two primary forms of root experiences are (i) the experience of “saving presence” in which God is experienced as “sole power,” and (ii) the experience of “commanding voice.” The prototype of “saving presence” is the parting of the Red Sea, while the events at Sinai, in which Moses

52 Buber, Martin, Moses (Oxford & London: Phaidon Press, 1946), 75–77. See also, Fackenheim, GPH 8 ff. 53 Fackenheim, GPH 7.

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receives the Ten Commandments is the prototype of “commanding voice.” Both events occurred during a period in which Jews were the victims of persecution. In reality, the two experiences overlap, so that even in “saving presence” there is “commanding voice,” thus inspiring the Israelites to walk through the divided sea, an act requiring a profound exercise of the will on the part of the Israelites. It is thus only by heeding the commanding voice that salvation is achieved. By itself the human will is not only blind it is impotent. If, in this example, we are presented with the paradigmatic form of the divine presence, then such a presence is nothing short of paradoxical. As “sole power” in the form of “saving presence,” God’s presence is an acknowledgement that mankind lacks the freedom of self-determination, the power to will its own survival and salvation. At the same time, as “commanding” presence, God is experienced as addressing human freedom, requiring an exercise of the will. Thus the freedom that is suspended by “sole power” is required and indeed restored by commanding presence. In accordance with Midrashic tradition Fackenheim develops and elaborates upon the paradox of God’s presence in history as follows. As the example of the parting of the Red Sea illustrates, the divine commanding presence can be divine, commanding and present only if it is doubly present, as both the affirmation and negation of human freedom. This means that the human astonishment which accompanies the experience of that presence must be a double astonishment, the astonishment of experiencing oneself as both free and yet limited, a feeling that parallels the equally astonishing experience of being between revelation and redemption, of suffering the experience that one is not—and the faith that one will be—what God means one ultimately to be. As sole power, to which we are drawn in submission, the divine commanding presence destroys human freedom; as gracious power of commanding presence, it not only restores it exalts that freedom. Human freedom is thus made a part of the covenant with divinity itself, and the human astonishment which is terror at a presence at once divine and commanding turns into a second astonishment which is joy at a grace that restores and exalts human freedom by its commanding presence. According to the Midrash, all generations of Israel were present at Sinai and the Torah is therefore given whenever someone receives it, regardless of time or place in history. Each historical generation thus earns its heritage by re-enacting for itself, through both memory and deed, the reception of the Torah. What is more, root experiences must

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continuously be re-enacted. There is no possibility of “closing the file” on such remembered events. Root experiences cannot, therefore, be forgotten. Indeed, the very being of the root experience is to be remembered, and in each recovery of that memory is added a fresh immediacy, a new form of uniqueness. What is more, the experience must be re-enacted as paradox. Whether it is the reception of the Torah or the parting of the Red Sea, re-enactment of the divine presence and submission to the commanding voice inherent in these events exposes the all persuasive dialectical contradictions and tensions between divine transcendence and divine involvement and between divine power and human freedom. The purpose of Midrashic reflection on the paradoxes inherent in root experiences is not to resolve the contradictions to the satisfaction of rational thought—a perfectly legitimate aspiration of science and philosophy. Its purpose is rather to express and celebrate the re-enactment,54 in much the same way, I suggest, that the artist, poet and musician celebrate the look and feel of objects that may also offer themselves for dissection by science. As Fackenheim acknowledges, to so regard the nature of Midrashic reflection is no mere triviality. To suffer and express the experiencing of a contradiction that reason discloses, but that neither reason nor faith can resolve on their own, is to approach the boundaries of mystery with a fear and trembling sufficient to shake a person’s being at its very foundations. There is all the difference between the abiding astonishment accompanying the immediacy that precedes the reflection and the abiding astonishment that survives and accompanies the celebration of the mystery that is the immediacy after reflection. There is likewise a profound difference in the very quality of the being of the person who has undergone such an experience. Root Experiences, Auschwitz and Revelation What applies to the re-enactment of root experiences such as the Exodus and the revelation at Sinai applies also to the re-enactment of the history of evil—the memory of events that suggests the absence rather than presence of God. In this regard, the greatest challenge to the hermeneutic associated with the Midrashic tradition is the Holocaust,

54

GPH 20.

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whose symbol is Auschwitz. It is difficult enough to comprehend the possibility of a hermeneutic of evil. It is utterly incomprehensible how there could be immediacy-after-reflection on Auschwitz—unless we are to regard Auschwitz as itself a root experience; that is to say, as the source of an encounter with a divine presence. Yet, as we have already noted—and preposterous as it may seem—this is precisely what Fackenheim proposes. Following Elie Weisel’s suggestion that the Holocaust may be compared with Sinai as having revelatory significance, Fackenheim, with a boldness and daring unparalleled, I suggest, in the history of recent theology, turns his ear to the Holocaust and listens. And what he hears, through the re-enactment of the Holocaust, conceived as a root experience, is, to his astonishment, the previously referred to “commanding voice of Auschwitz.” Thus is revealed the 614th commandment, according to which, to repeat, the authentic Jew is forbidden to hand Hitler yet another posthumous victory. Jews are forbidden to hand Hitler posthumous victories. They are commanded to survive as Jews, lest the Jewish people perish. They are commanded to remember the victims of Auschwitz lest their memory perish. They are forbidden to despair of man and his world, and to escape into either cynicism or otherworldliness, lest they cooperate in delivering the world over to the forces of Auschwitz. Finally, they are forbidden to despair of the God of Israel, lest Judaism perish. . . . A Jew may not respond to Hitler’s attempt to destroy Judaism by himself cooperating in its destruction.55

How is such a commandment to be obeyed in a post-Auschwitz world? If the double astonishment that accompanies the revelation at Sinai is difficult to bear, what can be said of the astonishment that accompanies the revelation of Auschwitz? The astonishment is made all the deeper by the fact that whereas, at Sinai, the Jew hears the commanding voice of a God who is present, at Auschwitz, he hears a commanding voice at the same time that he experiences the absence of God. The commanding voice of Auschwitz is the voice of a God in exile, a confession that leads us to wonder if the notion of Auschwitz as revelation is merely the result of madness, the madness of a Midrashic tradition tortured by paradox after paradox until it finally breaks down altogether. Is this perhaps the real legacy of Auschwitz—that in its attempt to preserve

55 GPH 84. See also, Weisel, “Jewish Values,” (see note 45), 272–3; and Fackenheim, “Jewish Faith and the Holocaust,” Commentary 46 (1968): 30–36.

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the authenticity of the Midrashic tradition the Midrashic response of contemporary Galut Judaism has been overcome by madness? Perhaps it is madness to think this way—to suggest the possibility that even in Auschwitz there is revelation. Yet it may be the only way back to sanity; the only path by means of which we are able to elevate ourselves above the despair and sense of hopelessness in which we feel imprisoned when confronted by evil. As a symbol of evil, Auschwitz is the ultimate denial of life and the celebration of life, the negation of everything that makes the human worthy of the human name. But, whereas the Holocaust is the negation of life and everything human, to recognize and respond with abiding astonishment to Fackenheim’s 614th commandment preserves the memory of the dead by restoring and celebrating the life that was taken away from them, and thus reclaims for the survivors and descendents of Auschwitz the right to exist once again between revelation and redemption. For the Jew this means saying yes to a continuing Jewish presence on earth worthy of the Jewish name. What is affirmed, then, through the memory of Auschwitz, is not the demonic madness that produced it, but the divine madness of our response to it. In short, what is revealed at Auschwitz is an obligation to future generations, an obligation grounded in the commitment that, for humanity in general, it is imperative that there be a continuing human presence on earth worthy of the human name, while, for Jews in particular, every generation after Auschwitz is obliged to maintain a continuing Jewish presence that honors the terms of the covenant between man and God. For Fackenheim this means more than a continuing existence in exile. It means rebuilding the house of David and a return to Jerusalem—which, in the post-Holocaust world finds expression and fulfillment in the founding and preservation of the State of Israel. In short, as Ron Csillag emphasized in his obituary upon Fackenheim’s death in September 2003, Fackenheim believed that the Holocaust “must be understood [by Jews] as a moral imperative for their progeny to carry on their existence, and that the State of Israel is a rebuke to those who still hate the Jewish people and would still destroy them.”56 It is necessary, writes Fackenheim, not only “to perceive

56

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a bond between the Holocaust and the State of Israel, but also to so act as to make it unbreakable.”57 It is therefore not surprising that, for Fackenheim, foremost among the challenges facing the Jewish people after the Holocaust is an attempt to interpret the passage in Ezekiel (3:24) in which God promises to bring the Jewish people to their own land.58 Since, after Auschwitz, Jewish survival will depend upon a restoration of Jewish faith, what greater inspiration for faith can there be than a revival of hope in the fulfillment of the Messianic promise, a hope that was destroyed with the murder of children at Auschwitz? For Fackenheim, as we have noted, the foundation of this hope is provided by the creation of the State of Israel—an event that, although brought about by human effort, can yet give credence to the Biblical prophecy. Through an ingenious interpretation of the book of Esther in which Jewish survival, although inspired by a belief in God and faith in the possibility of divine intervention is in fact achieved without divine intervention, Fackenheim offers the following post-Holocaust reading of the above-mentioned passage from Ezekiel. Could it be, Fackenheim conjectures, that the God of Israel and His promise to Israel, after all, are a myth, which, like all myth, requires demythologization. But, as in the book of Esther, the mythic divine promise needed to be believed by Jews, if they were to survive. It needed to be believed in much the same way that the Jews who experienced the parting of the red sea as a miracle believed that this event confirmed God’s promise to them. Hence Mordecai, who learns by his own means of Haman’s plot to exterminate the Jews, tells Esther that if she will not use her influence with the king to intervene on behalf of the threatened Jewish community, deliverance will come to her people “from another place” (Esther 4:14) Based on the information provided by Mordecai, Esther responds as requested and the Jews are saved. In this story, thanks to a series of fortuitous coincidences, Mordecai and Esther were able to take matters into their own hands, rather than relying upon and waiting for divine intervention. This does not, of course, preclude experiencing deliverance from Haman’s demonic conspiracy to annihilate the Jewish people as a miracle. For, as Fackenheim explains, following the lead of Martin Buber, the miraculous

57 58

“The Holocaust and the State of Israel,” (see note 7), 209. JB 49.

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is not a property of the event itself but lies rather in the experiencing of the event by persons who remain open to faith, as was clearly the case with the parting of the Red Sea during the Exodus.59 Revelation, Redemption and the Return to Jerusalem From the perspective of a demythologized book of Esther the determination of post-Holocaust Jews to end exile through the creation of the State of Israel may thus be viewed as a collective decision by Jews themselves to stop relying on others, whether divine or human. Jews took the collective Jewish secular courage in their collective hands and brought about an end to Jewish exile by “going up to the land.” But they did so as Jews, in the faith and hope that by doing so the Messianic promise will be fulfilled. Is this, asks Fackenheim, the true, the final meaning of the Ezekiel passage?60 Whereas one might have expected the Jews after the Holocaust to abandon their faith and throw away the bible, Jews instead opened a new page in history with the creation of the State of Israel. With “a unique intertwining of religious faith and secular courage—they resurrected the murdered hope.”61 Whereas for centuries the interpretive practices of Judaism have been ontologically and historically at the heart of Jewish identity, to the point where, it might be argued, it is the knowledge and observance of the text (not just the bible, but the Midrash, Mishna and Talmud) that has served as a homeland for Jews, After Auschwitz, such a homeland is no longer acceptable. Instead, the homeland of the text gives way to a re-built house of David anchored solidly in the land. It is for the same reason that, as we have already noted, after Auschwitz, Jews can no longer accept exile as a homeland and source of identity. Thus, the ontology of estrangement must likewise give way to a re-birth of the house of David. This is the “fateful” step that has been taken by Galut Judaism. Buber has asked: “How is a Jewish life with God possible after the Holocaust”? Fackenheim’s answer is that “a Jewish ‘life with God’ is still possible . . . in Israel.” In this judgment Fackenheim likens Israel to “a new Mordecai for a new age in the history of Judaism, guarding

59 60 61

See Buber, Moses (see note 52), 74–79. JB 65. Ibid., 69.

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the Jewish remnant and obliged to guard it—but strong enough for the task only through hope for help from ‘another place’.”62 For, if after what has occurred, there is still Jewish faith at all, it is, I am convinced, exclusively because of the fact that after the great catastrophe there arose a Jewish State. Through the centuries the Jewish people never forgot Jerusalem. After the Holocaust this people would have fallen prey to despair, had they not returned to Jerusalem.63

Fackenheim’s 614th commandment is thus in keeping with the traditional Midrashic obligation to survive as a Jew in order that the Messianic promise of God to man may be fulfilled. Out of respect for tradition, Jews are required to survive as Jews by re-enacting the root experiences of Judaism in the context of the Jew’s contemporary situation—which in the present instance is a post-Auschwitz world. Writing against the background of a world spinning out of control in the late 50’s the American poet Kenneth Rexroth wrote: “Against the ruin of the world there is only one defense, the creative act.”64 Accordingly, Fackenheim’s 614th commandment may be interpreted as commanding that, in addition to returning to Jerusalem, Jewish survival will depend upon the Messianic obligation to survive through creativity. The essence of this dimension of Messianism is contained, I suggest, in a remark by Martin Buber about the teachings of the Ba’al shem Tov, who explained the meaning of man’s being created in the image of God in this way: “The man of true piety takes unto himself the quality of fervor, for He is hallowed and become like the Holy one, blessed be He, when He created His world.” Responding to this passage, Buber writes: It was then that I experienced the Hasidic soul. The primarily Jewish opened to me, flowering to newly conscious expression in the darkness of exile: man being created in the image of God I grasped as deed, as becoming, as task. And primarily Jewish reality was a primal human reality: the context of religiousness opened to me there.65

From Hassidism, then, Buber learned how to find the essence of religion in creativity. As God made man, so man must remake the world as well as himself. The essence of piety is creativity, a creativity rooted in love,

Ibid., 95. Ibid., 103. 64 “Disengagement: The Art of the Beat Generation,” New World Writing 11 (New York: New American Library, 1957): 352. 65 Ibid., 103. 62 63

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not simply passive submission to inevitability. Nor does creativity mean material success. Hassidic creativity embraces the two central areas of Jewish concern, which are, man’s duties to God and man’s duties to himself, both of which are expressions of love. Only from these two expressions of creative love can despair be transcended. Let us pursue the relevance of Hassidic creativity to the Midrashic response to the Holocaust in greater detail. Following the spirit inherent in the Bal Shem Tov’s affirmation of Judaism, Fackenheim’s 614th commandment can be restated as follows. Auschwitz was an attempt to exterminate Jews. As such it was the symbol of destruction, the end of creation. It was also a glorification of satanic intoxication with power and technology. Midrashic stubbornness, therefore, commands not only survival but also survival through creativity and love, survival by means of the logic and ethic of justice rather than by power and domination. Even though all the forces of technology and power were turned against them in the execution of the “final solution,” Jews must show themselves to be greater than the forces that seek to destroy them. The Jew comprehends the advantage that power has over innocence and refuses to be implicated in the assassination of innocence that is so often the legacy of those determined to make over the world in the image of their fanatical ideologies. To so regard the finitude of the human condition and its vulnerability in the face of power is no doubt a cause for despair. Yet amidst that despair there is joy, the joy of realizing that in spite of the advantage that the forces of demonic evil have over innocence, the human person has the freedom to create. Freedom to create expresses itself, on the one hand, through the collective sharing of memory, and on the other, through “caring,” as opposed to domination. If the post-Auschwitz world is now characterized by the domination of Faust over Prometheus, then Jews are dedicated to restoring the rationality of caring, of listening with the heart, as Buber puts it. The true language of celebration, in response to openness to the commanding voice of Auschwitz is to be found, not in the discourse of functional rationality, as expressed in the “final solution,” but in the discourses of mitzvah and simcha and what Fackenheim refers to as kiddush ha-chayim, the sanctification of life. For, as Weisel emphasizes, the holocaust destroyed not only human beings, it destroyed the very idea of humanity itself. [It] is not simply a relapse into barbarism but a total incomprehensible rupture of the idea of humanity and estrangement from God—an

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It would thus not be far fetched, according to Fackenheim, to suggest “that the Holocaust, once confronted threatens to destroy all things ever humanly cherished, hence both the True, the Good, the Beautiful, of philosophy and the saving Word of the biblical God.”67 It is against such despair that “the only defense is the creative act,” which, for Fackenheim, takes the form of an affirmation of life, kiddush ha-chayim. Resistance, Redemption and Tikkun In the anti-world of Auschwitz the objective was total and absolute dehumanization of the victims. Consider the following account of the concentration camp system. The concentration camp system . . .was created by the logic of Nazi behaviour, and it resulted in a hell where the individual was totally depersonalized, becoming, at best, a robot who had to obey every order given to him by a higher authority—be it from fellow prisoners or from the masters of that hell—and at worst he or she was a robot used until he or she became useless and could be discarded and burnt or buried. The claim of this “univers concentrationnaire” was to absolute control and absolute submission. It follows that had even one prisoner kept to moral and social norms that opposed the concentration camp system, the system as such would have failed, precisely because its claim was to totality.68

It was for this reason that among the victims of Auschwitz, the affirmation of life took the form of “resistance” in both thought and action. Indeed, Fackenheim emphasizes, resistance-in-thought to the Holocaust would degenerate into academic self-satisfaction “unless it climaxed in

Legends of Our Time (New York: Avon 1968), 230. “Reply to My Critics,” in GPJT 276. 68 Yehuda Bauer, “Reflections Concerning Holocaust History,” in Fackenheim, eds. Greenspan & Nicholson (see note 12), 170. Even outside the concentration camp life for Jews was a depersonalized, dehumanizing and humiliating hell. See, for example, Witness: Voices from the Holocaust, ed. by Joshia M. Greene and Shiva Kumar (New York: The Free Press, 2000); and Edith Hahn Beer with Susan Dworkin, The Nazi Officer’s Wife (see note 12), esp. chaps. 5 & 6, which consists of a first-hand account of life within the slave labor farms and factories to which many Jews were sent during the early years of the war. 66 67

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calling for, praying for, working for, resistance in life.”69 Jewish resistance in the camps and ghettos during the Holocaust, their insistence on praying when forbidden to do so, the pregnant mothers who refused to abort their babies—these were all signs that the Jewish faith could survive an event designed to extinguish it once and for all. They may also be seen as responding to a command to survive. After Auschwitz, resistance consists of re-building the house of David in the spirit of Buber’s re-making the world in the image of God—a very specific re-building in the faith that, as Fackenheim puts it: “A human beginning, here below, calls forth a divine response, coming from above.”70 However, explains Fackenheim: If [after Auschwitz] there is no positive Absolute—for philosophy, the True, the Good, the Beautiful; for faith ( Jewish but also Christian) the trustworthy Word of God—there is at least an absolute negative, the Holocaust world of radical evil, and with this one positive absolute, the necessity—moral, religious, philosophical to resist it.

In the post-Auschwitz world such resistance finds expression through a human driven Tikkun that is believed to be not only necessary but also possible—even if we can only hope for but not count upon, a Tikkun from above.71 Resistance to the Holocaust world of radical evil, for those who listen to and choose to abide by Fackenheim’s 614th commandment, requires that we confront and expose the corrupt rationality that made it possible for the architects of the Third Reich to plan, engineer and execute the final solution in the first place. In responding to the commanding voice of Auschwitz, as I believe Fackenheim intends us to, we incur a universal obligation to reject both the logic of nihilism and the logic and ethic of domination—the logic and ethic whereby self-appointed superior beings grant themselves the authority to assert mastery over inferior others. Such is the logic and ethic that lies at the basis of racism, as well as speciesism, colonialism and the domination of women and nature. The enslavement of human reason to the ethic and logic of domination was made possible by the systematic desacralization of both nature and history, which is the legacy of the Enlightenment. The antidote to such logic lies in the re-sacralization of both nature

69 70 71

MW 247. MW xxxix, xliv. “Reply to My Critics,” in GPJT 279.

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and history, and a renewed effort to contribute to tikkun, the healing of the world. Fackenheim’s rendering of the commanding voice of Auschwitz may be compared with Rabbi Michael Lerner’s commentary on what he hears when he listens to the voice of Jewish tradition both before and after Auschwitz. For Lerner, the editor of Tikkun magazine, the voice of Jewish tradition is embodied in the Shema prayer: “Hear O Israel, YHVH (the force in the universe that makes possible human liberation and a breaking of the bonds of all the various forms of slavery) is Elohenu (the creator of the universe, the organizer of the processes of nature), YHVH is one (that is, the totality of all being and all reality).” The governing force of the universe, writes Lerner, is the force that makes for the possibility of human liberation. Moreover, because we have benefited from the workings of that power in history (that is, because we have gone from slavery in Egypt to self-governing freedom), we are under an obligation to testify to the possibility of human liberation from every form of slavery. The Jewish religion embodies the memory of that struggle and witnesses the possibility of liberation. The weekly observance of Shabbat, the seasonal holidays, the prayers are thus all built around retelling the story and reminding us of its lessons.72 The noblest words in the Jewish tradition, Lerner continues, are spoken when most Jews are in synagogue: just before Yizkor (the memorial service for the dead) on Yom Kippur. On that occasion, we read the chapter of the book of Isaiah in which the prophet denounces the Jews assembled for their own Yom Kippur feast, and reminds them what it means for Jews to bear witness. [58: 6–8] “Is this not the fast that I have chosen,” thunders Isaiah in the voice of God, “to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and fight against oppression”?73 Precisely this commandment is repeated in Micah, 6:8, where it is written: “It has been told thee, O man, what is good, and what the Lord doth require of thee: only to do justly, and to have mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.”

72 “ ‘thirtysomething’ and Judaism: Notes on the Task of Television and Screenwriters,” Tikkun: A Bimonthly Jewish Critique of Politics, Culture & Society 5:6 (1990): 6. 73 Ibid., 7.

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The Hisoricity of God’s Presence According to the logic of the Midrash, as Fackenheim explains it, a God who is present in history must be present differently than if He were present in the form of pure transcendence. To be present historically means to be subject to the conditions of historicity, in which case, God manifests Himself differently according to the exigencies of the historical moment. This is the ground of pluralism and the obligation to respect the diversity of divine expression. At the same time pluralism opens the danger of a slippery slop leading to relativism, in the form of an idolatrous worship of sheer diversity without unity, which paradoxically dissipates respect. For, as Camus points out in The Rebel, to regard all appearances equally, without recognition of any distinction among values with respect to their inherent worthiness, is equivalent to an admission that there is no reason to prefer one value to another. One is thus more easily seduced into believing whatever suits the purposes of those who have the power to impose their will. The idolatry of diversity thus encourages a war of all with all, to be waged by selfappointed custodians of truth inspired by self-serving ideologies, rather than by the sole power of a commanding presence. But this, explains Fackenheim, is precisely what the Midrash seeks to avoid. The Midrash teaches that while a God manifest in history manifests Himself differently—as mighty hero doing battle as in the case of the Red Sea, as old man full of mercy as at Sinai—He is nevertheless manifest in each moment as the one sole universal power of every moment, which in turn demands a correspondingly human recognition of its universality. The Midrash rejects the right of humans to bestow value upon things by means of an arbitrary, self-serving exercise of power. The idolatry of pluralism is thus abolished in favor of recognizing the unity of an all pervasive truth which is grounded in the unity of a God who commands respect for truth by virtue of its inherent power, and which indeed commands us to reject idolatry in all of its forms. And so it is said, “Who is like unto thee, O Lord, among the mighty”? (Exod. 15:11)74 The Midrashic reaffirmation of the unity of God spells an end to idolatrous pluralism, as it does to the idolatrous deification of the will

74 See also Mekilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, ed. and trans. Jacob Z. Lauterbach (3 vols.; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1933), vol. 2, 24 f.

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of finite individuals, such as the Führer, and re-establishes faith in the unity of a universal truth that takes precedence over the gratuitous exercise of the will. At the same time, explains Fackenheim, we are exposed to a number of serious contradictions. The first is suggested by the fact that a God who, by Himself, was, is, and shall be, must yet be present differently if His presence is to be within history. Yet is it not precisely God’s transcendence from history and the world of finitude and imperfections that accounts for the possibility of His power? In the second place, the God who is Lord of history was, is, and shall be sovereign as sole power. Yet even in a supreme manifestation of His power, He stands in need of human recognition and glorification; and the fact that this glorification is momentarily given by all nations reveals more poignantly the paradox of a subsequent relapse into pluralistic idolatry by all nations, Israel included. Confronting this contradiction and commenting upon the verse, “This is my God and I will glorify Him.” (Exod. 15) Rabbi Ishmael asks: “Is it possible for a man of flesh and blood to add to the glory of his creator”?75 The paradox of God’s presence in history is that, on the one hand, unless divine presence requires human recognition man loses all significance and his obedience would seem at best purely abstract. On the other hand, if human recognition and glorification is required, then even a saving presence, not to speak of a commanding presence, is incomplete without it. The question thus persists: How can human praise and recognition add to the divine glory and yet human failure to give praise not diminish it? Or, How can human failure weaken the power on high? “Ye are my witness, saith the Lord . . . [and] I am the Lord.” (Isaiah 43:10–12) Within the Midrashic tradition this may be interpreted as meaning: “When ye are my witness, I am God, and when ye are not my witness, I am, as it were, not God.” Or, when the Israelites do God’s will, they add to the power of God on high. When the Israelites do not do God’s will, they, as it were, weaken the great power of God.76 But once again the question arises: How is human recognition and the freedom thus presupposed to be reconciled with a divine power that is affirmed through recognition? As we have already noted, a saving presence requires recognition for a divine act which conceivably, if

75 76

“Melrilta de-rabbi Ishmael,” Rabbinic Essays 2:25–6; Fackenheim, GPH 21 ff. Fackenheim, GPH 23.

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only momentarily, overwhelms human freedom. The paradox is that to affirm the glory of God in this context which a parte subjecti presupposes freedom, is, simultaneously an affirmation of human powerlessness in the presence of such an all-powerful God. At the same time, the commanding presence affirmed requires not simply recognition but action, in which case, rather than freedom being overwhelmed by divine presence it must be affirmed. And what are affirmed are not simply the freedom to affirm but the freedom and indeed the necessity to act. This is how it is both possible and necessary for the Jew not to forsake his Jewish heritage, an imperative that is poignantly illustrated in Philip Roth’s story, “Eli the Fanatic,”77 which serves as a modern parable for an understanding of the challenges addressed by Fackenheim’s approach to the Holocaust. In this story, the assimilated Jews of the fictional community of Woodenton are shaken by the sudden appearance of a bearded man dressed in a wide-brimmed black Talmudic hat and gown representing the traditional garb of eastern European Jewry. The stranger, as it turns out, is employed by a Yeshiva for displaced children of the Holocaust. Eli Peck, a lawyer, is engaged by the leaders of the Jewish community—which has long ago abandoned the more “extreme” symbols of Jewish identity—to negotiate with the Yeshiva in the hope of persuading it to relocate. When the Director, Leo Tzuref, refuses to consider relocation Eli attempts to persuade him at least to convince the man with the black hat to dress more appropriately. His refusal to consider even this, on the grounds that “the suit the gentleman wears is all he’s got,” could be viewed as an expression of the stubborn refusal of Jews to grant Hitler a posthumous victory by giving up their Jewish identity and assimilating. Surprisingly, in the course of attempting to persuade the Yeshiva director to co-operate, Eli himself undergoes an experience not unlike Fackenheim’s Kierkegaardian “immediacy-after-reflection.” He begins to confront his own attempt to challenge the foundations of his belief in the Jewish God and the covenant that has traditionally supported the Jewish faith. Although Eli regards himself as a modern, emancipated, liberal and assimilated Jew, who has long given up the “extreme” habits that make Jews stand out as Jews, his attempt to rationalize the case for assimilation brings Eli to the brink of the very madness that he had previously associated with Jewish stubbornness and which he believed to be the main reason for

77

Goodbye Columbus and Five Short Stories (London: Gorgi Books, 1964, 1973).

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the persecution of the Jewish people—of which the residents of the Yeshiva have been the victims. But he now understands the meaning of this madness and emerges with a renewed commitment to the very Jewish faith that he believed he had long abandoned. It is this teshuva, or turning around of the soul, that leads him to abandon all efforts to persuade the Yeshiva Director of the errors of his ways and don for himself the very clothes whose removal from the Yeshiva employee he had previously insisted upon as a condition of being allowed to remain in Woodenton. The story ends with the sight of Eli wandering the streets of Woodenton proudly proclaiming himself to be the father of his new-born child and wearing the very clothes that prompted the Jewish community to engage Eli in the first place—the clothes that symbolizes the revival of Jewish identity and stubborn refusal of the Jewish people to assimilate, and thus represents Eli’s personal resistance to assimilation and his return to Jerusalem—not just as an individual but as a father who is courageously committed to a continuing presence of the Jewish people. Jewish Existence as a Voyage of Despair Overcome through Tikkun The paradox of God’s presence in history is that He is both sole power and yet dependent upon human recognition, that He both acknowledges humanity’s powerlessness yet affirms human freedom—an affirmation that under some conditions expresses itself in a choice, bordering on madness, to re-affirm the tradition that has been challenged at its core. Fackenheim argues that the contradictions between divine transcendence and divine involvement and between divine power and human freedom are not resolved by appeal to logic. They can only be experienced, and, if I may venture a suggestion, suffered through as one suffers and internalizes the tensions inherent in great works of art. This idea finds eloquent expression in Hegel’s description of the tension between the historically situated realm of the finite and the transcendent infinite. In thinking I lift myself up to the absolute above all that is finite, and am infinite consciousness, while I am at the same time finite consciousness, and indeed am such in accordance with my whole empirical character. Both sides seek each other, and both flee from each other . . . I am the

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conflict . . . I am not one of those taking part in the strife, but I am both the combatants, and am the strife itself.78

However, explains Fackenheim, unless obedience and disobedience, recognition or no recognition, man’s exercise of or escape from freedom—all of which takes place within the realm of the historically situated finite—made a difference, divinity could not be historically present as commanding, and unless there was at least some perceptual evidence of salvation, God could not be present as saving. It may not be possible to account for these conditions. Yet they must be presupposed. And, because they remain unresolved, there is the need for a final consummation in the future in the form of a Messianic age that can only be achieved by listening to and accepting the injunction of the commanding voice of Auschwitz—and by accepting it in the context of the obligation to perform both the mitzvahs commanded by divine law and the social diagnosis that alone makes possible the performance of those mitzvahs through which the Messianic promise will be realized. For this reason, Fackenheim insists, Jews must remember Auschwitz and be its witness, and they must do so in the spirit of the true meaning of the prophetic tradition. Just as Midrashic stubbornness commands recognition of divine presence in spite of the fragmentariness of theological speculation, so Jewish social and personal existence is commanded to live by trust, rather than by formal logic and argumentation. My mechanic might persuade me to replace my carburetor by appeal to arguments and the principles of automotive engineering. There is simply no comparable way of arguing the case in support of the obligation to posterity, let alone an obligation to bear witness to the covenant. However, the lack of a logical resolution for the paradox of divine existence is no excuse for nihilism and despair. Jewish existence demands an affirmation of values even in the midst of tension and suffering. At the same time, it is important that we exist without illusions. According to Midrashic, existential logic, God’s power is diminished by human failure to embrace the values of tikkun, the healing or mending of the world, through compassion, creativity, and the pursuit of justice for all mankind. It is important that we not confuse this way of bearing witness with progress

78 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, translated by E. B. Spiers and J. B. Sanderson (3 vols.; London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1895; reprint; New York: Humanities Press, 1968), vol. I, 63–64.

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and the perfection of technique—a confusion that is often the source of much evil in the world. Precisely this confusion forms the basis of George Steiner’s condemnation of Auschwitz as a prime example of the failure of Western culture to accomplish the traditional goals of classical humanism, a failure resulting from the hubris of Western man’s idolatry of identifying God’s presence as power, technology, technique and mastery.79 But while Steiner’s critique of modernity may accurately describe the source of our contemporary malaise it is not a satisfactory explanation for something as horrendous as Auschwitz. Steiner erroneously equates Auschwitz with evil-in-general. His critique fails to acknowledge Fackenheim’s conclusion that because the evil expressed at Auschwitz transcends anything that has hitherto appeared on the stage of human history it will forever resist rational explanation. Nevertheless, even though he has failed to explain Auschwitz Steiner’s attempt to confront it has at least resulted in a renewed commitment to the fundamental values of humanity that were so utterly violated by the horrors of Auschwitz—the same values that have been consistently emphasized throughout the religious prophetic tradition. What we are asked to remember, then, through the memory of Auschwitz, are not just the idols of the culture that gave birth to the “final solution,” but the Jewish soul, as expressed in creativity, love and the pursuit of freedom and justice through tikkun. Re-building the House of David and the Return to Jerusalem Resisting rational explanations, Auschwitz will forever resist religious explanations as well. In particular, Fackenheim insists, the attempt to find either a secular or religious purpose in Auschwitz is doomed to total failure. Some have sought refuge in the ancient “for our sins we are punished.” But it does not require much sophistication to rule this out as totally unacceptable. Secular Jews might connect the Holocaust with the creation of the State of Israel as a sanctuary for protecting Jews from future persecution. But while there is undoubtedly a causal connection here, to translate this into a purpose is clearly a vicious example of the fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc and therefore unacceptable. The creation of the State of Israel may be viewed as a response to

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“Jewish Values in the Post-Holocaust Future,” Judaism (see note 45), 276–281.

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the commanding voice of Auschwitz—Fackenheim’s 614th commandment—but not as the purpose for the sake of which Jews were sacrificed on the alter of progress, the product of Hegel’s “cunning of reason.” Nor can the Holocaust be used as the sole justification for defending the continuing existence of Israel. To link these events together by depicting Israel as a consolation prize for the Holocaust, and refuge for Jews seeking protection from persecution, is surely, argues Fackenheim, to diminish them both. If Israel is a free and independent state it is not simply because Jews require a safe haven from persecution, but because Jews have chosen to re-build the house of David and return to Jerusalem in order that the Messianic promise of God to mankind can be fulfilled. What is more, according to Fackenheim, the return to Jerusalem is for the sake not only of Jews, but Christians and Muslims as well. Fackenheim cites a text from a sermon delivered by Rabbi Dow Marmur as a correct reading of his 614th commandment, which Fackenheim believes has often been misunderstood—an endorsement that confirms my own reading of this aspect of his thought. We are first of all commanded to survive as Jews, lest the Jewish people perish. We are commanded, second, to remember in our very guts and bones the martyrs of the Holocaust, lest their memory perish. We are forbidden, third, to deny or despair of God, however much we may have to contend with Him or with belief in Him, lest Judaism perish. We are forbidden, finally, to despair of the world as the place which is to become the kingdom of God, lest we help make it a meaningless place in which God is dead or irrelevant and everything is permitted.80

The italicized words, according to Fackenheim, are the subject of Marmur’s sermon, the title of which is: “From Silence [i.e. wordless grief ] to survival [i.e., of the Jewish people in general and the State of Israel in particular] to solidarity [i.e., with other sufferers, Palestinian Arabs included].” Fackenheim cites his approval of this text, so understood, as evidence that his Zionism does not imply demonization of and indifference towards Arabs. Indeed, he goes on to explain: “Had there been no first Jewish return to Jerusalem, neither the Christian nor the Muslim faith would have arisen: what if the second Jewish return were as significant for the future of the two faiths as the first has been for the past? Peace will come to Jerusalem, I believe, when

80

GPJT 282.

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Christians and Muslims worship in the city, not despite the Jewish return but because of it.”81 It must be emphasized that such a stance is not intended to give meaning and purpose to Auschwitz—which, as we have noted, is vehemently rejected by Fackenheim. It is intended, rather, to give meaning and purpose to the courageous decision by Jews to resist despair and rebuild the house of David at their own risk and for the sake of a faith without guarantees. The difference between the religious Jew and secularist is that for the secular minded the values associated with human decency are grounded in the universal structure of rationality. For the religious Jew they are grounded in faith, the very faith from which rationality itself derives its authority.82 For Fackenheim the distinction between seeking an explanation for Auschwitz and searching for an authentic meaningful response is the sine qua non for any attempt to promote a continuing Jewish existence worthy of the Jewish name. Yet, laments Fackenheim, there is no precedent for such a response in either Jewish or non-Jewish history. Jews cannot seek refuge in nihilistic conceptions of divine impotence and powerlessness nor can they simply retreat into mystical otherworldliness. Since the Nazi logic deprived Jews of the choice between dying as Jews or else giving up their faith, post-Holocaust Jewry cannot seek refuge in the redeeming power of martyrdom. Above all, they cannot they seek refuge in the view that Auschwitz is punishment for the sins of Israel. This is what makes Jewish existence today unique, without support from analogues anywhere in the past. This is the scandal of Auschwitz—that once confronted by Jewish faith, the death camps threaten total despair, not only for faith, but for “any secularism that would take its place.”83 Yet such a risk is unavoidable if we are to have any hope of emerging from “immediacy-after-reflection” with a renewed commitment to a covenant that, while recognizing a divine presence, no longer depends upon divine guarantees. In short, the novel character of post-Auschwitz existence is that fidelity to the divine covenant—a pledge that requires Jews to survive as Jews committed to tikkun, the Ibid., 290. Precisely this relationship between faith and reason, the conception of reason as faith cultivating itself, lies at the basis of R. G. Collingwood’s analysis of the relationship between religion and philosophy. See Lionel Rubinoff, ed., Faith and Reason: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion by R. G. Collingwood (Chicago: Quadrangle Press, 1968). 83 Fackenheim, “Jewish Faith and the Holocaust” Commentary (see note 26), 32; GPH 79. 81 82

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mending of the world—no longer depends upon God keeping his promises. By returning to Jerusalem, as Fackenheim would have it, the Jew, in essence, will be fulfilling the prophecy of Amos (ch. 9:14–15). However, whereas in Amos it is God who promises that, having returned Jews to the promised land, “they shall never again be uprooted from Israel,” post-Auschwitz Jews no longer take this promise for granted and, in response to the 614th commandment, while hoping for help “from another place,” have nevertheless taken it upon themselves to fulfill it, in the faith that “a human beginning here below calls forth a divine response coming from above.” It is Fackenheim’s conviction that precisely such a novel response, unprecedented in past history, is what is required if Jews are to survive into the future as Jews committed to the covenant. Conclusion It is Fackenheim’s view that however we come to characterize the failure of a theology of the Holocaust to provide explanations, one thing is certain with respect to the theology of response. Does it not follow, after Auschwitz, that any Jewish willingness to suffer martyrdom will constitute an encouragement to potential criminals? After Auschwitz, is not even the saintliness Jew driven to the inexorable conclusion that—ironical as it may seem—he owes a moral obligation to the anti-semites of the world not to encourage them by admitting to and accepting his own powerlessness? In short, after Auschwitz Jews can no longer allow themselves to sanctify God through martyrdom, by submitting themselves to death. There is no revelation in Auschwitz in the sense of purpose, but there is nonetheless revelation in the Jewish response to their experiencing of a commanding voice. The Jew is commanded to survive as Jew, in order that the covenant between man and God may be honored and the messianic promise fulfilled. And whereas survival might once have been regarded as without meaning, in the post-Auschwitz age a Jewish commitment to survival is itself a monumental act of faith and faithfulness, as expressed in the pursuit of tikkun—the condition of justice and spiritual fulfillment for all mankind. Fackenheim’s response to Auschwitz may thus be summed up, in his own words: Even to do no more than remain a Jew after Auschwitz is to confront the demons of Auschwitz in all their guises, and to bear witness against

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lionel rubinoff them. It is to believe that these demons cannot, will not, and must not prevail, and to stake on that belief one’s own life and the life of one’s children, and one’s children’s children. To be a Jew after Auschwitz is to have wrested hope for the Jew and for the world—from the abyss of total despair. In the words of a speaker at a recent gathering of Bergen-Belsen survivors, the Jew after Auschwitz has a second Shma Yisrael: no second Auschwitz, no second Bergen-Belsen, no second Buchenwald—anywhere in the world, for anyone in the world.84

The commanding voice at Auschwitz thus decrees that a Jew may not respond to Hitler’s attempt to destroy Judaism totally by himself co-operating in that destruction. In ancient Jewish times, Fackenheim reminds us, the unthinkable Jewish sin was idolatry. Today it is to respond to Hitler by doing his work. To this idolatry the post-Auschwitz Jew responds by not only re-building the house of David but by reaffirming that ancient tradition whereby Jews bind themselves to each other and to the past through the rituals of commemoration. Foremost among these rituals is the Yitzkor service for the dead, and to be a Jew is thus to be part of the community woven by memory—the memory whose knots are tied up by Yizkor, by the continuity that is summed up in the holy words: Yizkor Elohim nishmat avi mori—may God remember the name of. . . . At the same time, as Michael Lerner insists, such words must be cited together with the previously cited words of Isaiah, and Micha, reminding us what it means to bear witness both to the covenant and to the memory of the dead: “feed the hungry,” “clothe the naked,” “fight against oppression.” In short—if I might venture a conclusion that combines both Fackenheim’s response to the Holocaust and Lerner’s emphasis on social justice—the memory that is commemorated through the ritual of the Yizkor and the return to Jerusalem is not only the memory of the “dead,” it is, to repeat once again Fackenheim’s words, a kiddush hachayim, the affirmation of all things humanly cherished that were consumed by the ovens and gas chambers of Auschwitz and buried together with its victims—the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. In short, if the transcendence of evil is achieved by re-enacting it through memory, it lies also in the contemplation and practice of the good and the decent.

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“Jewish Faith and the Holocaust” (see note 26), 32.

EMIL FACKENHEIM AND THE LEVITICAL ORDER OF THINKING Michael Kigel “In Auschwitz died, not only man, but also the idea of man.” Albeit articulated by Elie Wiesel,1 this pronouncement is Emil Fackenheim’s Wort. It is the final echo of another Wort uttered less than a century earlier by Nietzsche. What is this “idea,” l’idée de l’homme, such that it constitutes more than humanity itself, “not only man, but also . . .”? What did this ideacide add to the homicide at Auschwitz? Or perhaps, since the word “idea” has presumably been chosen for its coolness, for rhetorical effect, because no appropriate term can be found to suggest the warmth of the very heart of humanity that Wiesel seems to have in mind, as he adds paraphrastically, “At Auschwitz the world incinerated its own heart”; in other words, since the word “idea” is meant to signal even more humanity than the word “man” can suggest, then, contrariwise, how does the word “man” let the word “idea” stand on its shoulders, raising it to its ironic suggestiveness to begin with, when it is painfully obvious, because it painfully goes without saying, that, whatever died in Auschwitz in addition to “man,” before that, on the simplest level, considerably less than “man” died in Auschwitz, namely the Jews died there? Is this the nadir of understatement then—something compatible with “not only the Jews died in Auschwitz, after all, but also . . .”—or, on the contrary, the height of arrogance and the subterfuge of a ressentiment that speaks in a coded language in which one says “man” and “man at his most human” but means the Jew? Has vindication finally been found for Yehudah Halevi’s metaphor that says, if humanity is a body, then the Jew is the heart of the body?2 Have the Jews finally avenged themselves on the word “man,” finally sealed their primogenitary claim to the title of Adam?3 Is the Jew the idea of man? With this last question, which sounds out of joint for more than one reason, yet which seems Elie Wiesel, Le chant des morts (Paris: de Seuil, 1966), 210. Kuzari 2:36. Cf. also 1:95. 3 See the Rashbi’s interpretation of Ez. 34:31, “You [Israel] are Man,” in Yevamot 61a, a claim that well exceeds that of Ex. 4:22, “My firstborn is Israel.” But cf. R’ 1 2

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to flow quite naturally from the duly out-of-joint sentence that Fackenheim appropriates from Wiesel and sets down as the cornerstone Wort of his hardest book, To Mend the World,4 it becomes clear that philosophy, otherwise expert in handling matters relating to ideas, is wholly unprepared to carry out an autopsy of the idea of man. For philosophy, death is not something that can be predicated of ideas, eternal as they are by definition. Because Auschwitz can nonetheless make this predication of an idea, philosophy itself succumbs to what Adorno calls “paralysis.”5 (Again medical imagery imposes itself.) But if every philosophical approach to Auschwitz has been paralyzed from the start, a confrontation with Auschwitz is nevertheless possible, indeed impossible to avoid, because Auschwitz’s approach to philosophy has already taken place. That is how the idea of man died. At the same time, Wiesel’s cardiological metaphor implies that more than an autopsy is at stake. “At Auschwitz the world incinerated its own heart.” The heart itself, the humanity encased within the idea of man, is dead and may be cut out and subjected to a postmortem examination. But the body is still intact, so far, and therefore it should be possible, in principle, to transplant a new heart (to borrow Jeremiah’s language) into the place of the old one. What does that mean? If we recognize European philosophy in its vital connection to both the idea of man and European humanity itself, it means that on the basis of the findings of the post-mortem question, (1) What was European philosophy such that its idea of man could die at Auschwitz? it is possible to ask as well, (2) What kind of philosophical procedure might conceivably replace the dead idea with a living one? And also, (3) How might the Jews assist in such an operation? 1. What was European Philosophy such that Auschwitz could Murder the Idea of Man? The heart of European philosophy was the idea of man. If philosophy is paralyzed from making any approach to Auschwitz, this is not Meir’s teaching in Sanhedrin 59a (cf. Avoda Zara 3a, Bava Kama 38a) which contains the essence of the third part of the present essay. 4 Fackenheim was well-aware that this book was his magnum opus: see MW xxviii; cf. “A Reply to My Critics” in GPJT 275; GW. xix; “The Development of My Thought,” Religious Studies Review 13 (1987): 205. 5 This diagnosis from Negative Dialektik is repeatedly cited by Fackenheim; e.g., MW 193, 200.

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because the case is too difficult for philosophical “medicine” to handle, but because the philosophical surgeon who might have performed the operation himself has an empty chest cavity. Fackenheim is not unaware of a certain arbitrariness inherent in the overall plan for To Mend the World,6 something that shows up in his choosing a single idea to embody the very heart of philosophy. And yet this arbitrariness seems no less venial, at the very least, than the one behind Nietzsche’s choice. In fact, the same necessity is at work in both choices. The immediate justification for Fackenheim’s choice is the context in which the fate of the idea of man is examined most explicitly, where Fackenheim shows “astonishment” over the fact that the same Nazi Germany in which the same properly German articulation of the idea could be fluent on the lips of both the head of the Gestapo’s special Judenreferat, Adolf Eichmann,7 and a little-known German philosophy professor martyred in “the most significant trial for philosophy since that of Socartes”.8 The properly German articulation of the idea of man is Kant’s categorical imperative. To be precise, the idea of man destroyed at Auschwitz, or rather the idea of man as it was destroyed at Auschwitz, had assumed the shape given to it by Kant’s well-known, well-nigh commonplace, formulation of the imperative in the Grundlegung which defines the human being (Menschheit) as what is to be treated “never simply as a means, always also as an end” (“jederzeit zugleich als Zweck, niemals bloß als Mittel”).9 That humanity is the only thing in the universe that counts as an “end in itself,” the only thing that stands apart from every economy and every commerce because it is the only thing that has no “price,” but has only “dignity” (Würde),10 this one idea, according to Fackenheim, stands apart as “the noblest achievement” of philosophy.11 It goes without saying that the notion of the dignity of man is not original to Kant. It is older than the natural law theorists of the 17th century and older than Pico’s monumental Oratio de hominis dignitate. If Pico’s own Heptaplus is to be believed, in fact, the notion is as old as the first chapter of Genesis where God decides to make man in the image of His own divine 6 Fackenheim, “A Reply to My Critics,” GPJT 277–278; “The Development of My Thought,” 205. 7 MW 270–72. 8 MW 275. 9 Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, in Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 4 (Berlin: Reimer, 1902), 429. 10 Ibid., 434 f. 11 MW 277.

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dignity. What makes Kant’s formula the decisive expression of the idea of man in the history of philosophy is the fact that this was the shape it had finally settled into after its many metamorphoses, the shape of die Idee der Menschheit als Zweck an sich selbst,12 when it was shattered in Auschwitz. The “Kantian logic,” as it were, of Auschwitz—that is, the essentially still-Kantian form that perseveres in the deliberately antiKantian logic of Auschwitz, a perseverance typical of such inversions of thought—is unmistakable. That human personality is an end in itself is the heart and soul of Kant’s categorical imperative. As for the Third Reich, its heart and soul was the aim to destroy just this principle—by no means only in the case of Jews, “inferior races,” and enemies of the Reich, but also, and perhaps above all, in the case of the “master race” itself.13

“—by no means only in the case of Jews”: this point of clarification is critical for understanding why the “logic of destruction” proper to Nazi thinking was aimed at the idea of man and not simply the idea of the Jew. Fackenheim notes the consistency and clarity with which this logic drove Hitler to “a Führerbefehl in the doomed Berlin bunker. Hitler ordered the flooding of the Berlin subways, the hiding place of men, women and children. This would not stop the Russian armies. However, it would drown German children.”14 In much the same cast of mind, Eichmann redirected trains heading to the collapsing Russian front back to the Auschwitz transports, the death of Jews being more important than the lives of German soldiers who were dying from lack of supplies.15 This was not a “tough decision” into which Eichmann was cornered. Only a superficial analysis can assume that the German soldiers in Stalingrad were martyred by Eichmann for the greater cause represented by the Final Solution. Beneath the heroic rhetoric, the German soldiers were no means to a glorious end. Rather, their “sacrifice” Kant, Grundlegung, 429. MW 272. 14 MW 188. Two very apropos stories are related by Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Viking Press, 1964), 110–11. In the first, a female party leader comforts a group of peasants in 1944 with the assurance that “the Führer ‘in his great goodness had prepared for the whole German people a mild death through gassing in case the war should have an unhappy end.’ ” The second story is similar. And the reporter adds: “I look around furtively, but no one seems to find this statement out of the ordinary.” It is difficult to say what would be more revealing, and disturbing, about the mindset of the Germans under Nazism: that such assurances reflected Hitler’s plans accurately, or that they did not. 15 MW 230, 12. Cf. GPH 70. 12 13

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was, in essence, of a piece with the “sacrifice” of the Jews in a world in which no human life qualifies as a genuine end in itself. The Third Reich made much use of Nietzschean phrases. However, it revealed itself not as a Will-to-Power but rather as a Will-to-Destruction which, being universal, was a Will-to-Self-Destruction as well. (The burning Jewish children at Auschwitz was its climax, the drowning German children in Berlin its apocalypse.)16

It is not insignificant how closely the wording of Kant’s imperative is followed in this respect as well. As the formula takes pains to emphasize: “Act in such a way that you treat humankind equally in your own person [sowohl in deiner Person] as in the person of any other always also as an end . . .”.17 While the emphasis certainly has important applications in Kantian morality, it is difficult not to raise an eyebrow while reading it. Did Kant know something about the psyche of his countrymen that we don’t know? How oddly unintuitive the formula reads, for example, when contrasted with the biblical “Love thy neighbour as thyself ” (Lev. 19:18) which assumes Kant’s “equally” (sowohl) as something so obvious that the entire purpose of the commandment is to temper and guide the vigorous momentum of its obviousness. Now, on one level, of course, Nazi ideology reserved the status of humanity for “Aryans” alone,18 a reservation essential for establishing a license to exterminate the Jewish “vermin” and “virus” that was, not just sub-human, but anti-human.19 But even more profound than the ideology of racism was the fidelity to the logical consistency that essentially equalized the “person” of the Jew with the “person” of the German. The same unintuitive sowohl seems to lie behind the other well-known formula of the categorical imperative, namely the requirement to act according to a maxim that can become a universal law.20 For this too makes suicide “irrational” rather than simply the very last expedient of any normal human being—as if beneath the obvious difficulty presented to moral life by natural human selfishness there lay the

MW 264–265. Kant, Grundlegung, 429. 18 MW 271. Fackenheim cites Jean Améry’s observations regarding this exclusivity. And he assumes it to be at work in Eichmann’s invocation of the categorical imperative, to the surprise of his judges in 1961, which he followed through with an “approximately correct definition,” as Arendt noted. 19 Fackenheim, “The Holocaust and Philosophy,” JTEF 136 ff. 20 Kant, Grundlegung, 421 f. 16 17

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deeper difficulty of an unnatural selflessness. How are we to understand the established German passion for a geschlossene Weltanschauung21 that evidently exceeded any simple predilection for logics that have a crisp, clear sound like the clicking of boots? That the mass murder of Jews logically implied the mass suicide of Germans, thereby frustrating even the basic needs of racism, namely the simple requirement that the racist remain alive in his hatred—how do we portray this to our own minds without drawing a caricature? The task is not an easy one, perhaps because at this axiomatic depth there is no middle ground between Nazi logic and the logic that ultimately looks to the Jews for its basic axioms. Greece is of no help here. European philosophy seems to be dragged back into the monumental moment in Israelite history when the suigenocidal inclinations of a Volk declared themselves against Israel in a zealous attack targeting the women and the children first, not long after Israel’s Exodus from Egypt. The nation called Amalek would seem to be the spiritual progenitor of Nazi Germany. Not in any historical sense, to be sure, but in a spiritual sense that can be fixed and authorized halakhically.22 At the time of the Exodus, while the whole world trembled at the news of the divine “Man of War” who had drowned the entire Egyptian army in the Red Sea, Amalek set out on a national suicide mission against the LORD’s people, simply to prove it could be done: simply to cool down the faith of the Israelites and therefore the possibility of faith altogether.23 Amalakite and Nazi logic alike, in short, are cases of cutting 21 Fackenheim, “Holocaust and Weltanschauung: Philosophical Reflections on Why They Did It,” GW 172–85. This analysis of Geschlossenheit should be compared to Jean-Luc Nancy’s analysis of Nazi “immanence” in La Communauté désoeuvrée (Paris: Christin Bourgois, 1986), 35–36. By way of critique, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe points out that Nancy fails to take into account the Nazi “will to live” and the “Thousand Year Reich” (La fiction du politique [Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1987], 111 f., n. 25). However, this in turn seems to miss the irony of the very number “thousand” and Hitler’s private passion for Roman ruins (see Peter Cohen’s 1989 documentary film The Architecture of Doom). 22 The psak I have in mind, made by Rabbi Moshe Soloveitchik, is explained in its Maimonidean derivation by his son, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik in “Kol Dodi Dofek,” Ish HaEmunah ( Jerusalem: Mossad HaRav Kook, 1974), 101–102, n. 23. 23 Among other germane insights into the nature of Amalek in section Ki Teitze of Midrash Tanhuma, we find (in ch. 9) the parable made famous by Rashi: “Rabbi Huniah said: To what may this be compared? To a bath full of boiling water into which no human being can descend. A miscreant came and jumped in. Even though he was scalded, he cooled it down for others. Just this happened when Israel left Egypt. The Holy One, blessed be He, split the Red Sea before them and then drowned the Egyptians in it. Thus a fear of them fell upon all the nations. As it says: ‘The chiefs of

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off one’s own nose to spite one’s face. Superficially, again, they bear resemblance to self-sacrificial gestures aimed at a higher purpose. Yet the absence of any higher ideology is conspicuous. As Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy have shown in their analysis of Mein Kampf and Rosenberg’s Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts, Nazi ideology is not so much a mythology as a “myth of myth,” a deep and old Germanic desire, never realized, for a ideology with granite roof and walls in which to house a “German identity” of cosmic proportions and significance.24 Similarly, Amalek has no characteristic form of idolatry worth mentioning.25 In rabbinic literature its demonic temperament is characterized in terms that are much broader than any specific form of idol-worship can contain. Idolatry implies an affirmation of something in the world as the highest value,26 something to which every other value, even life itself, can be sacrificed. In the Amalekite rejection of the God, however, the world itself would be sacrificed and with it every possibility of idolatry. It

Edom were confounded etc.’ (Ex. 15). When Amalek came and engaged them, even though they were paid back in their own coin, they cooled [the Israelites] in the eyes of the nations of the world.” This midrash is a lexical interpretation of Deut. 25:17 f., “Remember what Amalek did to you on the way when you were leaving Egypt, how he happened upon you on the way . . .”; instead of “happened upon you” the word ‫ קרך‬can be read as “cooled you off.” If Fackenheim was unable to see Amalek as the conspicuous precedent to the Nazis, and hence as a threat to his claim for the uniqueness of Auschwitz, this is evidently because his thinking had yet to emerge from its relatively narrow conception of Halakha. Does Fackenheim’s project not fall under Maimonides’ codification in Sefer HaMitzvot, 59, 188, 189 and Hilkhot Melakhim 5:5? Were Fackenheim’s criteria defining the unprecedented nature of Nazi aims (e.g. MW 12) not already anticipated by the Malbim’s definition of the Amalekite war as a “war without reason” (HaTorah vehaMitzvah on Deut 25:18)? Since the phrase “614th Commandment” is primarily meant rhetorically by Fackenheim, rejecting it as “heresy” can at most be a matter of taste and sensibility. Where the symptomatic significance of the phrase shows up with dire consequences is in the more systemic misunderstanding of the “rabbinic” (and Rosenzweig’s) understanding of history itself, of time itself in its prescriptive essence, vis-à-vis the epochality of Sinai. Amalek can be an “old symbol” (MW 10) only to the extent that the prescriptive temporality of Halakha is rendered secondary to “history” and “God’s presence in history” in the grand biblical style, that nostalgically cherished Heilsgeschichte. But the value of Fackenheim’s 614th Commandment, and indeed its imperative, is not compromised in essence by the precedent to Auschwitz at Rephidim. 24 See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Le myth nazi (La Tour d’Aigues: de l’Aube, 1991). 25 When Bilaam hails it as “first of the nations” (Num. 24:20), we may wonder whether the very eagerness for nationhood is not a idolatrous desire for, and hence failure to attain to, actual idolatry? 26 Avoda Zara 54b.

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is such a desire for cosmicide that lay at the earthen heart of the Nazi “ideology” of Blut und Boden.27 That the Nazi myth was Nihilismus pure and simple was evident already in 1938 to Hermann Rauschning for example.28 How the prosaic sense of nihilism is rooted in a deeper poetic sense of nihilism, the sense grasped by Nietzsche and Heidegger, however, is something that only became apparent in Auschwitz. In its prosaic sense, nihilism names an ideology; it is Nazism. But for Nietzsche, nihilism names a hidden tumour that had been growing quietly within the European psyche since Plato. It is as a diagnosis of this tumour that Nietzsche’s Wort ‘Gott is tot’ was already meaningful sixty years before Auschwitz with the publication of the Gay Science in 1882 (sec. 125). “God is dead” means that the idea of God is dead in a civilization constructed from Platonic ideas. In this sense, the pronouncement is not very different from “The idea of man is dead.” At the opening of his last “work,” Nietzsche asks: “What does nihilism mean? That the uppermost values devaluate themselves.”29 It is because “God” has been named the highest value in European civilization that the shorthand definition of nihilism states simply, poetically, “God is dead.”30 If the idea of man appears in the Platonically-minded history of Europe as having a value to any degree lower than highest value, the value assigned to God, this is only due to the very mechanics of the highest value: “Man has fundamentally lost faith in his own value when no infinitely valuable totality works through him: i.e., he conceived such a totality in order to be able to have faith in his own value.”31 In other words, “God is dead” shows itself to really mean “The idea of man is dead” just as soon as man arrives at the philosophical realization that humanity has been looking up to a suprasensory realm for some value other than its own from which to suspend this idea. And the best setting for such a realization is a quiet writing desk, for example in Sils Maria in summertime. Is it not this same conclusion, more or less, that Wiesel arrived at in Auschwitz?

27 These conclusions do not really contradict Fackenheim’s looser characterization of Nazism as a species of idolatry in EJM 184 ff. 28 See “Holocaust and Weltanschauung,” GW 178 ff. 29 Friedrich Nietzsche, Wille zur Macht, Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 8 (München: Musarion, 1926), 11. 30 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Bd. 2 (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961) 32–48. See also 223–30 for Heidegger’s analysis of how the Platonic idea became the building-block of European values and civilization. 31 Nietzsche, Wille zur Macht, 15.

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To be sure, the death of the idea of man in Auschwitz in 1942 is deeply connected to the 1882 obituary of God. And so long as God, for the European, still made the Platonic realm of ideas his abode, the overturning of this Olympian realm finally realized by Nietzsche’s “inversion of Plato” could in fact toll the death of God and man alike in their disincarnate dimension. But the Wort that Fackenheim takes from Wiesel speaks of something else. Its speaks of the body of the idea of God. In Auschwitz, Nietzsche’s still-Platonic, still-metaphysical saying finds its flesh-and-blood meaning for the first time in the voice Wiesel hears upon being forced to stare at body of a boy writhing in a noose for thirty-five minutes until the body relinquished its soul. The passage from Night is quoted often enough. Anyone who has read it, having already read the prologue of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra where the same words are used, has also understood that Nietzsche could never have written these words:32 “Where is God? Where is He?” someone behind me asked. At a sign from the head of the camp, the three chairs tipped over. . . . I heard a voice within me answer . . .: “Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging on this gallows . . .

The “death of God” remains an issue for the diagnosis of European nihilism only until God, as idea, finds embodiment in the Jew. Evidently, Hitler grasped the necessity of killing the body of the Jew in order to kill the idea of the God of the Jews. (Why the Jew in particular embodied, or represented, this idea for Hitler, we will consider in a moment. First the Jew needs to be considered as a human being.) Until Auschwitz, in other words, the poetic sense of nihilism could have a much wider, and even deeper, application in describing Europe than the prosaic sense; but as such remained nothing more than a diagnosis of an undecided course of events. It took Auschwitz to show that the poetic sense of nihilism could take on a prosaic reality. Was Auschwitz a philosophical exercise? In an “ontic” sense, yes. By putting into question the old philosophical givens about the dignity of human life in an empirical manner,33 Nazi logic was able to produce a demonstration, a kind of laboratory test, to show clearly how human dignity

As quoted in GPH 77. Emmanuel Levinas asks: “Did Nietzsche’s Wort about the death of God not assume the significance of a quasi-empirical fact in the extermination camps?” “La souffrance inutile,” Entre Nous: Essai sur le penser-à-l’autre (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1979), 115. 32 33

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was in fact, not at all a given, but ontically dependent on thought. Fackenheim rightly credits Heidegger with uncovering the ontic nature of thought,34 what Heidegger later came to problematize more fully as the poiesis of thought,35 meaning the power of thought to “produce” and “build” reality, a power that makes thought both historically determined—“cursed” by historicism—and historically determining—capable of cursing history. Is it a coincidence that the same thinker who made this remarkable philosophical discovery was also prepared in 1933 to put it to the test within the framework of an ideology that could only welcome this kind of poetic thinking to bolster its “inner truth and greatness”? If the credit goes to Heidegger for having brought to light this power to curse—which of course always comes hand-in-hand with the power to bless—crouching within European history,36 Hitler’s accomplishment was to have grasped this discovery of Heidegger by the horns, even without having read him, and to have decisively brought its power fully into the light as curse.37 Philosophy prior to Auschwitz was never simply an academic pursuit in cultured European society. The pursuit of the idea of man was Europe itself. It was the ontic-poetic “building” of Europe, of the structure of European civilization.38 The idea of man was the heart of European philosophy, its uppermost value, and specifically the uppermost value of what Levinas has called its true “first philosophy,” namely ethics. And European civilization was the arms and legs, the toes and fingers, of this ethics. It was with the precision of a highly skilled surgeon, consequently, that the Nazi Destruktion located the most vital organ of philosophy.39

MW 163. See Robert Bernasconi, Heidegger in Question (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1993), 2–24. 36 As Fackenheim says of Heidegger’s infamous Rektoratsrede: “when he endorsed in advance the Führer’s actions as German ‘reality’ and ‘law,’ he did so not, like countless others, impelled by personal fear, opportunism, or the hysteria of the time, but rather deliberately and with the weight of his philosophy behind it.” (MW 169) 37 What Fackenheim calls the unthinkable “leap from ideology to execution” (EJM 192–94). 38 “. . . not only thought but existence as well is hermeneutical.” (MW 258) 39 The complex problem that remains for a full analysis of this ontische Destruktion is that of accounting for its own account of itself. The incident, cited by Fackenheim, of Auschwitz Kommandant Höss’s murder of two crying children and their crying mother, which he played out as a tragic drama in “his own tender self ” as he was murdering them (MW 242) suggests that the Nazi mind was in fact aiming at a philosophical suicide rather than a literal suicide, a kind of Nietzschean “self-overcoming 34 35

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2. What Kind of Philosophical Procedure might Hope to Replace the Dead Idea of Man with a Living One? Taken as a serious philosophical doctrine [Kant’s] philosophical Idea of Humanity must have, and according to Kant does have, a matrix or Boden in actual humanity. Kant, in short, believes in humanity: but is that belief warranted? Perhaps it was in Kant’s time. Arguably it was once warranted at any time if only because, while indemonstrable, this belief was at least also irrefutable. . . . It is true that Kant’s belief in humanity could at no time be verified. However, not until the advent of the Holocaust world was this belief refuted, for here the reality that is object of the belief was itself systematically annihilated.40

Who was the philosopher who first made this terrible discovery, that the idea of man was not like an a priori idea but in fact empirically vulnerable to refutation by evidence? Not the “greatest philosopher of the age”—whose greatness is very much bound up with how incisively he uncovered the poetic-empirical vulnerability of ideas—but “an obscure German professor of philosophy” who, without necessarily grasping this poiesis of ideas, had a superior grasp of the moral question concerning its ground.41 On April 19, 1943, Professor Kurt Huber stood accused before a tribunal in the People’s Court in Munich for his active involvement with the “White Rose,” a student group that had been distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets throughout Germany since the spring of 1942. In his final statement before the court, Huber invoked Kant’s categorical imperative as the cornerstone of all political welfare, and also concluded with a poem by Fichte re-stating Kant’s imperative.42 Perhaps the last Kantian in Nazi Germany,43 Huber was summarily sentence to death, and decapitated by guillotine a year later. The show-trial of Kurt Huber, as already mentioned, is regarded by Fackenheim as nothing less than “the most significant trial for philosophy

of Man” leading to greater “health.” What remains to be shown is how Höss’s hunger for dramatic pathos is an insatiable need to overcome any self-overcoming. An example of such an analysis is carried out by Hans Jürgen Syberbeg in his Hitler: ein Film aus Deutschland (Reinbeck: Rowohlt, 1978). See Lacoue-Labarthe, La fiction du politique, pp. 94 ff. As the latter shows, the analysis belongs to aesthetics. 40 MW 273. 41 MW 266 ff. 42 A shortened version of Huber’s final statement can be found in Inge Scholl, Die Weiße Rose (Frankfurt: Verlag der Frankfurter Hefte, 1952), 81–83. 43 The other being a dog named Bobby remembered by Emmanuel Levinas in Difficile Liberté (Paris: Albin Michel, 1976), 199–202.

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since that of Socrates.” The fact that Huber was a small player in the history of philosophy and that his importance “lies in his deed more than in his thought”,44 does not diminish the importance of this deed precisely for thought. Many resisted the Nazi regime and many were executed for their resistance. “What marks Huber off from the others is that he invoked philosophy in behalf of his action”.45 The philosophical significance of Huber’s actions lies in his attunement to the “inner voice of conscience”—invoked twice by Huber in his final statement. In this respect too he is the counterpart of Socrates who, in moments of great doubt, trusted in the voice of his daimonion, at the empirical limit of his thinking, if not the empirical basis of his mind. But the most important similarity between these two trials is the fact that they were both cases of what Lyotard calls a differend,46 meaning a dispute between two parties over which no qualified judge can preside because the very rule of judgement is in the hands of one of the parties, in this case the defendant. Huber himself uses a phrase in his apologia that typifies such cases: “History will justify my actions.” In such cases, justice is unavoidably eschatological. The defendant speaks over the courtroom, addressing “history,” because his prosecutors are also his judges. And the fact that both of these defendants, in Munich as in ancient Athens, had to pay for the truth of their arguments with their lives reveals the poetic-empirical depth of philosophy’s struggle to survive in the confrontation with voices that would drown out the inner voice of conscience. It reveals, in a word, philosophy’s resistance. The word is key in Fackenheim’s description of what thought can and must be after Auschwitz. It unlocks the fundamental task in the “mending” of Auschwitz’s rupture of thought, and as such corresponds to the fundamental task of tikkun olam. One key page in To Mend the World seems to me to explain this key word: page 239.47 It is worth reproducing in full. The philosopher may feel—he believes nothing human is alien to him—that this whole [of horror] is not unintelligible after all. He wants to understand Eichmann and Himmler, for he wants to understand Aus-

MW 268. Ibid. 46 Jean-François Lyotard, Le Différend (Paris: Minuit, 1983). 47 It strikes me as the key page of section 9, C–E, what Fackenheim calls “the climax and turning point of this work in its entirety” (MW 199 n.). Cf. Michael Morgan, “Philosophy, History, and the Jewish Thinker,” GPJT 150. 44 45

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chwitz. He wants to understand Auschwitz, for he wants to understand Eichmann and Himmler. Thus his understanding gets inside them and their world, bold enough not to be stopped by Eichmann’s smirk [during the video presentation in the darkened courtroom at the 1961 trial in Jerusalem] and Himmler’s gloves [which he requested in order to throw a body into a burning pit, exclaiming “Thank God! At last I too have burned a Jew with my own hands.”]. To get inside them is to get into the ideas behind the smirk and the gloves; and whereas this is not necessarily to accept these ideas it is in any case to obtain a kind of empathy. And thus it comes to pass, little by little, that a philosopher’s comprehension of the Holocaust whole-of-horror turns into a surrender, for which the horror has vanished from the whole and the Unwelt has become a Welt like any other. In this way, one obtains a glimpse of the Ph.D.s among the murderers, and shudders. The truth disclosed in this shudder is that to grasp the Holocaust wholeof-horror is not to comprehend or transcend it, but rather to say no to it, or resist it. The Holocaust whole-of-horror is (for it has been); but it ought not to be (and not to have been). It ought not to be (and have been), but it is (for it has been). Thought would lapse into escapism if it held fast to the ‘ought not’ alone; and it would lapse into paralyzed impotence if it confronted, nakedly, the devastating ‘is’ alone. Only by holding fast at once to the ‘is’ and ‘ought not’ can thought achieve an authentic survival. Thought, that is, must take the form of resistance.

What does it mean for thought to resist Auschwitz? It means to resist the empirical refutation of the idea of humanity. But what does that mean—to “resist a refutation”? If Auschwitz constitutes a kind of argument, would a resistance to Auschwitz not itself have to take the form of a counter-argument? What kind of thinking does such a resistance require? A new kind of ethics? European philosophy, perhaps right up until 1942—the year of the Wannsee Conference, the year which claimed half of the total number of Jews murdered by the Nazis—was in essence a critical thinking, meaning a thinking that arrives at the truth by judging between two opposing arguments. Within ethics, applied to the idea of man, such a thinking was confident it could arrive at positive conclusions, such as the affirmation of the dignity of humanity. This confidence is in full force and flower in Kantian ethics with the establishment of the “ought” on the basis of a critical insight into what it “is.” In order to effect this remarkable translation of a prescriptive trope into a descriptive one and thereby institute a “metaphysics of morals,”48 all that

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was necessary was to argue for the axiom that humanity is an end in itself—“is” again being the operative word. On what does Kant base this argument? At bottom, like any argument, it is a rhetorical appeal to something perfectly obvious, in this case the absurdity of putting humanity in the marketplace as an item for exchange. Thus everything depends on the incisive impression to be made by the notion of a priceless human dignity on the judiciousness of critical thinking which would be simply too afraid to think humanity otherwise. And it is at this axiomatic level, where rhetoric and the obvious stand on opposite sides of a mirror, that critical ethical thinking comes face to face with Auschwitz. For critical thinking, if it is truly critical, also hears the argument for the other side, which in this case says why human existence is not an end in itself. All that is needed to make this argument coherent is a certain fearlessness—like that of Amalek who “did not fear God” (Deut. 25:18)—that puts all humanity, including one’s own person, into a Kingdom of Means. This was Auschwitz—but also, in a way, Stalingrad for the blond youths of the Wehrmacht—something that for Kant was unthinkable, yet what Kant made thinkable simply by articulating the contrary argument, namely, a fungible humanity. Faced with this argument, how can critical thinking recover the idea of man without laying out all its rhetoric, all its prejudice, for everyone to see, thus clearly exhibiting its failure to be critical? It cannot. Because it is possible and logically coherent, howbeit strange, to describe humanity as essentially fungible, critical thinking must honour the truth of such a description, however evil this truth may be. From the standpoint of truth, such critical thinking is strictly innocent. From the standpoint of goodness, however, this innocence is tantamount to the temptation of thought, the temptation to think Auschwitz at all costs;49 to think it, no doubt, in the name of freedom of thought and criticism, in the innocent belief that “nothing human is alien” to thought, no evil is too much to think, not Himmler’s gloves and not Eichmann’s smirk. This is how Nazi thinking calls critical thinking on its bluff. Critical thinking feeds its confidence on the fiction that it has raised philosophical apologetics to the height of actual judgement, when in fact it is still

49 As Terrence Des Pres writes in his letter to Fackenheim: “ . . . although I am quite willing to admit that in me as in all men there is the fullest range of good and evil, there is surely much damage and much danger to be borne if I use myself, as I did with survivors, to write about the criminals. I might even be able to do it well, but at what cost?” Quoted in MW 27 n.

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based on prejudices. The Nazi “re-evaluation of values” does not claim to be free of prejudice either; on the contrary, by methodically realizing its prejudices, it succeeds in debunking the philosophical fiction of a critical, unprejudiced affirmation of the Good, the “ought,” dignity, man, God, etc. All these items were incinerated at Auschwitz. And this is were resistance begins. This is where the kind of thinking required by resistance announces itself. Something is heard, says Fackenheim. In the clearing, the Lichtung, flooded in a blinding light, of Auschwitz, a prescriptive order opens up like ground opening up beneath one’s feet, manifesting its implacable authority, for the first time since men philosophized on Europe’s soil, over the descriptive order of truths. This order is so uncompromisingly prescriptive, in fact, that, at a grammatical level, it must even regard an ethical “ought” with strong suspicion. For the word “ought,” simply because it settles comfortably into the sentence structures of descriptive grammar, bears escapist tendencies, dreaming of a future “is” in which there is no Auschwitz. Strictly speaking, one cannot predicate Auschwitz’s possible future or non-future with so much as an “ought.” Auschwitz always is. There is nothing to say about it prescriptively. The only “prescriptive saying” that is adequate to Auschwitz is: “to say No to it.” The word “No” is the basic form, tense and inflection of the entire grammar of resistance. Together with thought, grammar itself, in its privileged descriptive trope favoured by European languages, is disfigured by Auschwitz and shackled to its Commanding Voice. In his first philosophical confrontation with this voice in 1967 which produced the “The 614th Commandment”,50 Fackenheim took pains to spell out in detail the contents of its message to Jews. And in subsequent writings, most notably God’s Presence in History (1970), he continued to return to this first articulation. It took fifteen years and the publication of To Mend the World (1982) for the 614th Commandment, perhaps still principally addressed to Jews, to reveal its message concerning humanity, indeed, to reveal that this message had always concerned nothing less than the whole of humanity. To Mend the World concerns the idea of man. Its concern is to show how humanity, and nothing less, is the concern of Auschwitz. The “conscious idea” behind Auschwitz, as Pelagia Lewinska writes, was “to destroy our human dignity, to efface

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every vestige of humanity”.51 “If I could enclose all the evil of our time in one image,” writes Primo Levi, “I would choose this image which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of thought is to be seen”.52 Levi calls the book from which this quote is taken: Se questo è un uomo, “If This is a Man.” These are only two such quotations from To Mend the World. Fackenheim relies on these testimonies, especially that of Lewinska (“not a Jewess but a Polish noblewoman”), for the “historic statement” to humanity contained in the 614th Commandment, heard in the Voice of Auschwitz: . . . . From the instant when I grasped the motivating principle [behind Auschwitz] . . . it was as if I had been awakened from a dream. . . . I felt under orders to live. . . . And if I did die in Auschwitz, it would be as a human being, I would hold on to my dignity. I was not going to become the contemptible, disgusting brute my enemy wished me to be. . . . And a terrible struggle began which went on day and night.53

The thinking that turns its ear to this voice is a thinking whose first order of business it is to obey what the voice commands. Understanding the commandment is of secondary importance. The prioritization implied in the epoch-making response of Israel before Mount Sinai, “We will do and we will listen” (Ex. 24:7), a priority said to have been known hitherto only to the ministering angels,54 becomes vital again before Auschwitz. If critical thinking appears late on the scene, historically speaking, supplanting prejudice with judiciousness, Auschwitz, like Sinai, demands a kind of “immediacy after reflection” whereby all the judiciousness required within moral life is secondary to a prejudicial acceptance of moral life as a whole. While moral thinking, like halakhic thinking, remains thoroughly critical and analytical, the heart that pumps life throughout its entire critical apparatus, must be recognized as a pure prejudice.55

MW 25, 217. MW 294. 53 MW 25; Fackenheim’s italics. 54 Shabbat 88a. 55 Thus even if halakhic thinking contains a dimension akin to the rationalism of Natural Law, this itself would be dead without a prejudiced heart; not so much because physis is less than Creation as because ratio is less than Torah—even in so far as mishpatim or the seven Noahide laws are concerned. For this reason, I am reluctant to follow David Novak’s rejection of Fackenheim in his Natural Law in Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998), 6–9, 179 f. 51 52

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And the prejudicial thinking that presumably belongs to this commandment and this resistance? How does this thinking work? With critical thinking dead, at least at this axiomatic ground zero, is it possible to think at all? If “we will listen” begins only after “we will do,” does this raw “doing” not operate in uncompromised prescription? Or is there such a thing as a thinking that strictly belongs to the prescriptive order, in other words, a thinking that is prejudiced and yet no less broad-minded than critical thinking? The comparison of Sinai with Auschwitz that Fackenheim, again, borrows from Wiesel, suggests that such a thinking is to be found in revelation.56 The comparison, of course, pertains only to the prescriptive force of revelation, any other point of comparison being grotesque.57 But this is not to say that Voice of Auschwitz cannot contain an actual message, a divine message expressing divine wisdom, to be precise, and hence a message to which the first response, whatever else it may be, must also somehow be thoughtful. Hence, while one might even go so far as to leave the identity of the One Who Commands under a question mark,58 either because of agnosticism or because theology is the cherished hiding place of procrastination, the fact that the commandment is the product of a revelation is something

56 Taking his cue from a “change of mind” scribbled down by Fackenheim on a note found “sewn into the lining of his doublet,” Benjamin Pollock (“Thought Going to School with Life? Fackenheim’s Last Philosophical Testament,” AJS Review 31 [2007]:133–59; reprinted in the present volume) has provided us with good reason to believe that Fackenheim ultimately despaired of educating thought in the “school of life” (MW 15, 28, passim). Is it any wonder that thought falls apart when it looks into the eyes of the Muselmann, eyes in which, as Levi says, “not a trace of thought is to be seen”? But if Fackenheim ultimately, and rightly, despairs of thought ever learning how to resist from living human exemplars, it has always been true for Fackenheim that “THOUGHT CAN + MUST” ultimately get its schooling from a divine teacher who speaks, teaches and commands with a Sinai-sized Voice. The Torah predates and survives every tzaddik. Again, I do not think Pollock is wrong. He bases his analysis on the emphasis placed by Michael Morgan (“The Central Problem of Fackenheim’s To Mend the World,” The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 5 [1996], 301 f.) on Fackenheim’s rejection in MW of an earlier “glibness” in GPH (92–93) whereby he had held resistance to be possible on theological grounds. This emphasis concerning the possibility (the “can” behind the “ought”) of resistance, be it human or divine, is not at issue here. If anything, I suppose, Pollock’s analysis underscores the need to re-examine how revelation might be the “central problem” for Fackenheim’s resistance to Auschwitz. 57 Hence Elie Wiesel, from whom the Sinai-Auschwitz comparison is borrowed (see GPH 84), also tempers his rhetoric when he qualifies Auschwitz as the Anti-Sinai. See Irving Abrahams (ed.), Against Silence: The Voice and Vision of Elie Wiesel, Vol. 1 (New York: Holocaust Library, 1985), 43–44. 58 See MW 218: “One takes and does not ask who gives.”

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that cannot be left under question. More correctly, the prescription is as such a revelation. A divine prescription is an articulation of divine wisdom. Even the Jew who avows agnosticism cannot “regard this mitzvah as the product of self-sufficient human reason, realizing itself in an ever-advancing history of autonomous human enlightenment. The 614th commandment must be, to him, an abrupt and absolute given, revealed in the midst of total catastrophe”.59 Resistance to Auschwitz is predicated on revelation at Auschwitz. With the prospect of a thinking attuned to revelation, finally, we arrive at the point in which the critical thinking epitomized in Kant and his idea of man shows itself to be in a kind of economic alliance with Auschwitz behind the scenes of its war against Auschwitz and the resulting defeat. Fackenheim has shown how the allergic reaction suffered by German philosophy with its passion for self-sufficient human reason to the full-blooded revelations of biblical thinking achieved with Fichte the “historic breakthrough to God internalized, to the God Within”.60 Fichte was Kant’s most brilliant student. That the Fichtean collapse of religion into morality was not easily acceptable for Kant is a reading of Kant that Fackenheim advocates.61 But in his penetrating examination of Kant’s approach to Genesis 22 in Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy, Fackenheim also shows how Kant was single-handedly responsible in the history of philosophy for rendering revelation irrelevant for morality, if not inimical to morality. For Kant, the idea of man cannot be predicated on revelation. The text that Fackenheim singles out as the first “prominent statement” of the Kantian revolution in moral thought that renders revelation irrelevant is none other than the same text in Grundlegung in which we find that “noblest achievement” of philosophy refuted at Auschwitz.62 In this text what Kant effectively argues is that the idea of man cannot be the product of revelation because that would render morality “heteronomous,” meaning that its authority to legislate the good would be external to the will of the individual and therefore could only win over this will by intimidating it or cajoling it with external motivations, promises of reward or threats of punishment. With its legislative powers heteronomous, revealed morality defeats its own purposes by opening 59 60 61 62

JRH 23. GW 58. GW 3–19, EJM 42 f. EJM 39 ff.

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up a freedom to chose something other than morality. The will, after all, may simply refuse to be intimidated or cajoled. “According to Kant, then, there may be much that can induce us or force us to obey. But no law in heaven or on earth can obligate us to obey unless we accept ourselves as obligated to obey”.63 The will is, as Kant himself puts it, “not merely subject to the law, but is so subject that it must be considered as also making the law for itself and precisely on this account as first of all subject to the law (of which it can regard itself as the author).”64 This principle of autonomy follows directly from the idea of humanity as an end in itself. It is because humanity is an end in itself that the will of a human being may rely on no legislative power outside of itself to author the moral law. A revealed morality, in particular, would make humanity into a means to a divine end. And even such a compromise of the absolute self-sufficiency of human dignity, it seems, is not permissible for Kant. The very notion of an “end” in moral teleology will not permit any serious relevance to divine revelation. In this “two-term morality,” as Fackenheim calls it, human beings, bearing the responsibility to treat each other as ends in themselves, need only appeal to the moral law legislated by their very humanity. By contrast, Judaism is said to embody a “three-term” morality in which God is part of the equation: “He confronts man with the demand to turn to his human neighbor, and in doing so, turn back to God Himself ”; because between two human beings “there can be only fragmentary justice and mercy unless they culminate in humility before God”.65 Why is this humility before God essential for human justice? Because the human being is made in the image of God. “The intrinsic value of human personality, which is for Kant the possession of common reason, is in Judaism the gift of divine Grace, forever regiven and reappropriated”.66 Where for Kant the idea of man is a “given” in the scientific sense of the word, a datum for which no specific origin is assigned or need be assigned, for Judaism, the idea of man is given in the strong sense of the word, given by One who gives, who gives that the gift may be received. The creation of Adam was itself a revelation of the idea of man. In the context of morality, this means that the image of God is first and foremost a semantic and educational moment. The image of God is a message, 63 64 65 66

EJM 40. Quoted by Fackenheim in EJM 39; Kant, Grundlegung, 431. EJM 49. EJM 69.

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a lesson, a commandment. As the Sefer Yetzirah teaches, the molecular constitution of man is alphabetical. To dwell on the metaphysical and physical status of this divine image and its embodiment in flesh and bone, on the fact that man “is” Godlike, is worse than a mistake in thought, for the degree to which the divine image of man is perceived as a fait accompli corresponds to the strength of the alibi to which man can appeal in order to explain why he fails to see, or rather, fails to hear the phrase “in His image” as a commandment. For Kant, whose idea of man is at best a “secularized faith in that image” of God,67 a recidivism to the revealed version of the image compromises the legislative force of the idea. But how much more was this legislative force compromised by Auschwitz, where the autonomy of the human will was refuted empirically as humanity had become an unnecessary hypothesis? Was it not precisely because the legislative force of morality was wholly arrogated by human autonomy for itself, particularly under Kant’s encouragement, that this autonomy could now be shrugged off ? Neither we nor Fackenheim could be so fatuous as to blame Immanuel Kant for Auschwitz. But the critical moral thinking that found its clearest voice in Kant, in which the description of the idea of man reached maturation, is suggestive of the poetical-philosophical background against which Auschwitz revealed that humanity is something that needs to be prescribed and revealed. The question of what philosophy can be after Auschwitz, in short, finds its basic orientation in a revealed-prescriptive humanity. The image of God is not the idea of man. It belongs to a different order of thought. After Auschwitz, philosophy can revive something like an “idea” of man only by resisting the temptation to arrive at it through critical thought, and, instead, by bending its ear with extreme prejudice to the prescriptive order in which this idea-like prescript is revealed. This conclusion pertains to the task of thinking in general after Auschwitz. And Fackenheim is not alone in his sustained efforts to find a thinking adequate to the task. The same emphases on prescription and revelation can be found in what I am calling the order of levitical thinking, for example, in the works of Emmanuel Levinas and of Rav Soloveitchik.68 The fact that these three thinkers are Jewish cannot be

EJM 68. Levinas’s essay “Souffrance inutile” (op. cit.) is merely the most thematic upsurge of his levitical confrontation with Auschwitz. As for Rav Soloveitchik’s levitical-halakhic 67 68

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supposed by anyone to be incidental. Still, there is room to further thematize the need for Jewish thought in the task at hand. What I am after is the most outrageous consequence for philosophy resulting from autopsy of the idea of man in To Mend the World, namely, the claim that philosophy will never open its eyes again if Jewish thought is not solicited to rebuild philosophy’s heart from scratch.69 (The obligation to be “ministerial to the text” of Fackenheim, as of any other thinker belonging to this ministerial order, by introducing interpretations wherever the text does not carry the entire weight of its office is, I hope, self-evident.) 3. How might the Jews Assist in the Transplant Procedure of the Heart of Philosophy? Enough of man, then. What about the Jew—the one who “also” died in Auschwitz? How does Fackenheim’s 614th commandment, which commands Jews to survive as Jews lest Hitler win a posthumous victory, relate to what the Voice of Auschwitz expects humanity in general to look for in philosophy? In his 1971 review essay of God’s Presence in History, the best critique of Fackenheim’s thought that I have come across, Michael Wyschogrod questions the basis of Fackenheim’s “fixation” on Auschwitz as the Great Crime against humanity, when the crimes of Stalin and Mao, of Hiroshima and Cambodia, were equal to it, and even surpassed it, in terms of destruction of human life. The claim is particularly disgraceful, argues Wyschogrod, since Fackenheim holds that the uniqueness of the crime of Auschwitz can be demonstrated from a strictly humanistic standpoint, and is not rooted in the idiosyncratic empathy of a Jewish philosopher for his people. By what logic can humanity at large be expected to acknowledge the uniqueness of Jewish suffering? Would such an acknowledgement not be tantamount to a mere inversion of antisemitism: a bigoted “semitism”? “It is necessary to recognize that, from any universally humanistic framework, the destruction of European Jewry is one notable chapter in the long record of man’s inhumanity

approach in “Kol Dodi Dofek” (op. cit.), it could not have been otherwise; cf. also his “A Halakhic Approach to Suffering,” The Torah U-Madda Journal 8 (1998–1999): 3–24. 69 Cf. Morgan, “Philosophy, History and the Jewish Thinker,” GPJT 144.

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against man”.70 Perhaps most Jewish thinkers, not just Wyschogrod, are unable to see, or at least cannot bring themselves to openly state that they see, the fate of the European Jews as anything more than “paradigmatic” of human suffering.71 Not satisfied with criticism, however, Wyschogrod offers a positive explanation of the Jewish claim to uniqueness, an explanation he does not find in Fackenheim’s text of 1970. And it is the only kind of explanation, it seems to me, that has any hope of making the claim justifiable in a world where Adam and Noah came before Abraham. What, asks Wyschogrod, makes the fate of the people Israel so special? The fate of Israel is of central concern because Israel is the elect people of God through whom God’s redemptive work is done in the world. However tragic human suffering is on the human plane, what happens to Israel is directly tied to its role as that nation to which God attaches His name and through which He will redeem man. He who strikes Israel, therefore, engages himself in battle with God and it is for this reason that the history of Israel is the fulcrum of human history. The suffering of others must, therefore, be seen in the light of Israel’s suffering. The travail of man is not abandoned, precisely because Israel suffers and, thereby, God’s presence is drawn into human history and redemption enters the horizon of human existence.72

Wyschogrod, as I say, hits the nail on the head. But is such an explanation altogether missing from Fackenheim’s thought? Is it not possible to make Wyschogrod’s critique work for Fackenheim’s text? If an explanation of Israel’s uniqueness such as Wyschogrod’s is missing from God’s Presence in History, I would suggest this is, ironically, because the 614th Commandment is formulated in the context of that work only with reference to Jews themselves. In that context, there is room both for worrying about an excessive fixation on Jewish suffering and for forgiving the exaggerated love that a Jewish thinker might feel for his brothers and sisters after Auschwitz. As time buries wounds, memory, and the bodies of survivors, and the exaggeration becomes harder to forgive, however, then indeed if the commandment still refers only to Jews, who are neither more nor less human than the other children of Adam and Noah, any claim to the uniqueness of Auschwitz must

Michael Wyschogrod, “Faith and the Holocaust: A Review Essay of Emil Fackenheim’s God’s Presence in History,” Judaism 20 (1970–71): 292. 71 Levinas, “La souffrance inutile,” 97. 72 Wyschogrod, “Faith and the Holocaust,” 293. 70

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answer to the charge of racism. But in To Mend the World, where the commandment is explicitly examined by Fackenheim in its reference to humanity at large, where the commandment is about humanity, not simply about Jews, there, not only is it forgivable that this commandment is communicated to Jews, but the very uniqueness of Auschwitz emerges from the fact that the commanding voice speaks to Jews and not to humanity at large. What is unique is the ministry of the Jews to humanity, the election of Israel to this ministry, a ministry charged with the task of administering the revelation of the image of God (“the idea of man”) to humanity. What Wyschogrod calls “God’s redemptive work in the world” is precisely the task that Fackenheim claims the Voice of Auschwitz is commanding Israel to “return” to. Whether and how Israel may have strayed from this ministry in the European Diaspora is not a question for Fackenheim. Even less is any notion of punishment in question in this divine call to return. The strictly prescriptive order of the Voice of Auschwitz precedes and precludes any prophetic pretension to such questions which, besides being numb-skulled and pusillanimous, are, as Fackenheim often says, obscene and blasphemous. The most that a philosopher, faced with the death of the idea of man, can attribute to the Voice of Auschwitz is a call to the task of drawing down some kind of substitute for the dead idea from another order of thinking. How is it that Hitler, of all people, was granted divine authority to mobilize the hardware and manpower to build the vocal chords of the Voice of Auschwitz, and thereby to assume the authority to define Judaism itself ? If Judaism after Auschwitz defines itself as a resistance to further victories for Hitler, does this not reduce Judaism, and therefore any future philosophy, to an Anti-Hitlerianism? Was it not Fackenheim who refuted Sartre’s thesis that the existence of the Jew hinges dialectically on the existence of the anti-Semite so that Judaism should therefore disappear once the anti-Semite disappears?73 Why does this refutation not apply to the Hitlerian orientation of the 614th Commandment itself ? To be sure, Judaism is defined by many things besides Auschwitz, just as it has been defined since Sinai by many things besides Amalek—at least six hundred and twelve other things. But just as Amalek defines Judaism in a dialectical manner, at least until Messianic days,

73

EJM 207 ff.

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there is no reason to reject the ugly truth that Hitler was indeed given the power to define Judaism—not in general and for all time but—in its immediate and present historical task. To overcome this dialectical definition may in fact be part of the very definition of Judaism itself and the very task itself, just as the commandment to “remember Amalek” is, precisely speaking, a commandment to remember to erase the memory of Amalek.74 The deliberate circularity in this biblical language underscores the impossibility of seeing beyond the dialectical definition of Israel, which definition is at work in the circular commandment itself, until the eschatological fulfillment of the commandment arrives and the erasure of the memory of Amalek is so comprehensive that it renders impossible any further remembering of Amalek and thus any further need for the commandment itself. What the commandment means for now, in other words, is that the “idea of man” is still being refuted, or, to put it more plainly still, that humanity still remains unredeemed. From this dialectical, Amalekite definition of Israel, and the definition of Israel effected by its office to humanity, an explanation of “why they did it” emerges that is intelligible within a properly Jewish, halakhic cast of mind, rather than within, for example, psychological or economic hermeneutic frameworks. Hitler murdered the ministers of humanity because he wanted to murder humanity. This is a basic logical sequence proper to the Nazi logic of destruction. The suicide of Germany depended on the homicide of the Jews. The clearest indication of this is the “euthanasia” programs authorized by Hitler in 1939, three years prior to the Wannsee Conference.75 In order to murder humanity, Hitler needed to destroy the idea of humanity. In philosophical circles, this idea was already destroyed by Nietzsche and was presently being dissected by Heidegger. But in order to destroy this idea in its physical hold on humanity, he needed to murder the conscience of humanity that Sinai76 imprinted upon the hearts of those human beings chosen by God to protect the idea of man at its pre-philosophical source; to promote it, to embody it, and thus to teach it to the seed of Adam. The need to “remember the Holocaust,” together with the intrinsic value that this remembering has for Jews, can only have universal significance if it is bound up with the mission of reminding humanity of its humanity whenever it would forget it. Cf. Ex. 17:14 and Deut. 25:17–19. Henry Friedlander, The Origins of the Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). 76 Shabbat 89a bottom, Iyun Yaakov ad loc. 74 75

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This levitical character of this mission, and the election of Israel to this mission, is explicitly announced in the preface to the giving of the Torah at Sinai, in Exodus 19:5–6: “And now, if you listen closely to My voice and keep my covenant, you will be a treasure to Me from among all the people, for all the earth is Mine. You will be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”77 I do not know of a better exposition of this verse than the one I find in the 16th century cosmopolite Italian commentator, Rabbi Ovadia Sforno: “In this will you be a treasure among them, by being a kingdom of priests, understanding and teaching the whole human species to call out in the Name of the LORD and serve Him in unity. So shall the task of Israel be in the future, as it says ‘Priests of the LORD shall you be called, ministers of our God’ (Is. 61:6), and ‘For from Zion shall the Torah shall go forth’ (Is. 2:3).” The connection that the Sforno makes between the two verses from Isaiah is not casual. To be a priest is to teach Torah. Torah goes forth from Zion because that is where the priests serve in the Temple. As Moses himself defines the essential levitical task in his blessing to the tribe of Levi: “They will teach Your judgements to Jacob, and Your Torah to Israel” (Deut. 32:10). And this is why the “priesthood” is assigned to Israel in the prefatory breath before the revelation and giving of the Torah at Sinai. What Levi is to Israel, Israel is to Adam. Apart from the biblical commission at Sinai to this heiretic teaching vocation, to which Israel responded with “We will do,” Fackenheim’s claims for the uniqueness of Auschwitz, much like any other Jewish claim to uniqueness and chosenness, would be groundless, indeed

77 R’ Abraham Isaac Kook has made an explicit connection between this mission of Israel and the counter-mission of Amalek (Midbar Shur, Zakhor; in light of R’ Kook’s distinction between the world-mission of Kingdom of Priests and the more introverted assignment of becoming a Holy Nation, it should be clear that this essay only addresses the former.). But the significance of Amalek for the whole of Jewish history is unmistakable. As Rabbi Yehuda teaches in Sanhedrin 20b, the Messianic era involves the fulfillment of three commandments: (1) the manifestation of the King Messiah, who will establish peace in Israel, (2) the war against Amalek, and (3) the rebuilding of the Holy Temple. Rabbi Yose then explains that the order is important; the events are not simultaneous. The destruction of Amalek is to be the activity that occupies the Jews between the establishment of the political order and the establishment of the heiretic order. It is the last thing required before the springs of holiness can be turned on like taps in Jerusalem, to flood the world in Torah until a veritable global deluge (Is. 11:9; cf. Maimonides, Mishne Torah, Hilkhot Melakhim 12:5), as the priests of humanity achieve the means to continue perfecting their own mission in establishing a priesthood for themselves, the priests’ priests.

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chauvinistic, indeed, contrary to the very statement of the mission. Apart from this commission, it is impossible to say what the difference is between the trial of Huber in Munich and the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem. The differend imposes itself whenever the rules of one Volk stand opposed to those of another. If the Holy Nation stands apart from other nations, it cannot do so by managing to be a nation more successfully than other nations. It can only attain to holiness in so far as the very manner of its “nationhood” stands apart from every other manner and definition of nationhood. The “nationhood” of the Holy Nation is bound up with its service to other nations. The prescriptive humanity that for several centuries in Europe took shelter in the philosophical idea of man is the rule of judgement that the Jerusalem court possessed and the Munich court did not. Does this not mean that the whole of European philosophy must, since Auschwitz, be reinterpreted retrospectively as a Jewish undertaking, at least in its axiomatic depths? Might we excavate—as Nietzsche began to do, for his own reasons—the Jewish grounds upon which Kant’s moral philosophy rests, which the Torah transmitted to Kant through the auspices of Christianity? And further back in time, the catholicization of the Torah’s “idea of man” since the destruction of the second Temple? Such a transcendental deduction, in which the body of the Jew, as it were, would be shown to be the transcendental horizon of the idea of man in European philosophy, which deduction would be tantamount to accepting that only a halakhically-minded thinker can henceforth teach us how to read Plato, is beyond the scope of the present study. But ultimately it is also beyond the scope of the present kind of study. For whatever philosophical archeology can reveal about this idea’s ultimate ground and origin still finds expression in Plato’s Greek. What lies at the source of the idea of man—the “image of God” revealed in the Torah—cannot ultimately be thought in terms of any idea, nor by way of any pre-Platonic poetic thinking. But short of widening the scope beyond what philosophy has eyes to see, it is nevertheless feasible, and even imperative, to proceed in the divine assurance that not everything is lost in translation.78 Even the idea of man, hanging on the gallows, retains its ugly power to remind us of its divine twin.79

78 79

See Deut. 27:8, Sota 32a; and Deut. 1:5, Tanchuma, Dvarim 2. Sanhedrin 46b.

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The philosophical mirror-play that ends in the self-hatred crouching within the idea of man perverts, and therefore originates in, a greater love than Adam knew, a love first revealed only to Noah (Gen. 9:6). As Rabbi Akiva teaches in Avot (3:14)— Beloved is man in that he was created in the image of God. More beloved still in that it was made known to him that he was made in the image of God.

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CONTRIBUTORS

ARNOLD AGES is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Waterloo, (Ontario, Canada). He received his undergraduate training at Carleton University (Ottawa) and his Ph.D. at the Ohio State University. He is the author of five books and 85 scholarly papers on French intellectual history and literature. He was the first recipient of the Killam Award, Canada’s highest academic honor. He currently serves as Scholar-in-Residence at Toronto’s Beth Tzedec Synagogue. He has translated Elie Wiesel’s Foreword from the original French for this volume. SAM AJZENSTAT taught philosophy at McMaster University, receiving the President’s Award for Excellence in Instruction and the Student Union Lifetime Teaching Award. He speaks frequently at the Stratford Festival, CBC Radio and CTS TV on Shakespeare, opera and the Torah. JOHN W. BURBIDGE, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Trent University, first encountered Emil Fackenheim when he was an undergraduate student in 1955, and over ten years later did his doctoral studies under Fackenheim’s direction. His thesis became the basis for a number of works on Hegel: On Hegel’s Logic; Hegel on Logic and Religion; Real Processes: How Logic and Chemistry Combine in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature; and Hegel’s Systematic Contingency. He is also the editor of Fackenheim’s The God Within: Kant, Schelling, and Historicity. JAMES A. DIAMOND, the Joseph and Wolf Lebovic Chair of Jewish Studies, and Director of the Friedberg Genizah Project, at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, holds a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, an LL.B. from Osgoode Hall Law School and an LL.M. from New York University School of Law. His research interests are in Biblical exegesis and hermeneutics, medieval Jewish thought, and Maimonides. His publications include Maimonides and the Hermeneutics of Concealment, (winner of Canadian Jewish Book Award, 2002), Converts, Heretics and Lepers: Maimonides and the Outsider, and articles in such journals as AJS Review, Jewish History, Jewish Quarterly Review, Jewish Studies Quarterly, Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, Medieval Philosophy and Theology, Philosophy and Literature and Vetus Testamentum. AUBREY GLAZER, Ph.D. (University of Toronto), currently serves as senior rabbi of the Jewish Community Center of Harrison, N.Y. His research in Hebrew Hermeneutics continues to correlate Hebrew Poetry and Jewish Mysticism for new pathways of Jewish Thinking. His work has been published in Hebrew Studies: A Journal Devoted to Hebrew Language and Literature; Kabbalah: A Journal for the Study of Mystical Texts; Ariel: The Israeli Review of Arts and Letters; and God’s Voice From the Void: Old & New Studies in Bratzlav Hasidism. KENNETH HART GREEN is Associate Professor in the Department and Centre for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. Green is the author of Jew and Philosopher: The Return to Maimonides in the Jewish Thought of Leo Strauss, and the editor of Leo Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought. He serves as editor of two series for SUNY Press: “The Jewish Writings of Leo Strauss,” and “The Thought of Leo Strauss and His Legacy.” He is also the

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author of articles on diverse figures in Jewish thought, including Judah Halevi, Moses Mendelssohn, and Franz Rosenzweig. MICHAEL KIGEL enrolled at the University of Toronto as an undergraduate in Philosophy the same year Emil Fackeheim left the university and Toronto to make Aliyah. He has translated Job and the Excess of Evil by Philippe Nemo and Emmanuel Levinas: his Life and Legacy by Salomon Malka. He is the producer and host of two Jewish television shows, Passages and Messages (CTS), and is the founding director of KosherTube.com. Most to the point, he is the proud inheritor of Emil Fackenheim’s old rickety 40 lb. mechanical Underwood typewriter left behind in Toronto in 1984. MICHAEL L. MORGAN, Chancellor’s Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, is the author of several books, including Platonic Piety and Beyond Auschwitz. Together with Paul Franks, he has translated and edited Franz Rosenzweig: Philosophical and Theological Writings. He has edited Emil Fackenheim: Jewish Philosophers and Jewish Philosophy and Spinoza: Complete Works and, with Peter Eli Gordon, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy. His book Discovering Levinas has recently been published by Cambridge University Press. The Philosopher as Witness: Fackenheim and Responses to the Holocaust, which he has co-edited with Benjamin Pollack, will appear shortly. MICHAEL OPPENHEIM is a Professor in the Department of Religion at Concordia University, Montreal. His latest book, Jewish Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: Narrating the Interhuman, compares the work of modern Jewish philosophers of encounter with the insights of a relational stream of early post-Freudian psychoanalysts. His most recent article is “Loving the Neighbor: Some Reflections on Narcissism” (in Modern Judaism). MARTIN J. PLAX is a member of the Adjunct Faculty in the Department of Political Science at Cleveland State University. From 1976 to 2002 he was the Cleveland Area Director for The American Jewish Committee. His recent publications include: “The Rule of Law and the Establishment Clause,” in Jews and the Public Square, ed. Alan Mittleman, Jonathan Sarna and Robert Licht; “The Roots of Socratic Philanthropy and the Rule of Law: Plato’s Crito,” and “Profit and Envy: the Hipparchus” (both in Polis); “The Holocaust as Moral Instruction,” and “Shakespeare, Shylock and Us” (both in Society); and a review of Heinrich Meier’s Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem (in Philosophy in Review). BENJAMIN POLLOCK is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Michigan State University. He has published articles in the field of Modern Jewish Philosophy and is currently completing a book manuscript on the concept of “system” governing Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption. The Philosopher as Witness: Fackenheim and Responses to the Holocaust, which he has co-edited with Michael L. Morgan, will appear shortly. SHARON PORTNOFF is Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Pomona College and Lecturer in the Writing Program at Boston University. She holds a B.A. from St. John’s College, Annapolis, an M.Ed. from Harvard University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from The Jewish Theological Seminary of America. She has delivered papers on Primo Levi, Dante, Louis Zukofsky and Emil L. Fackenheim, and her poetry has appeared in Midstream and Chants. She is currently working on a book, tentatively titled The Interface of Fiction and Reality: Primo Levi’s Use of Dante’s Inferno in Se questo è un uomo. HEIDI MORRISON RAVVEN is Professor of Religious Studies at Hamilton College. She edited with Lenn E. Goodman Jewish Themes in Spinoza’s Philosophy. She is the

contributors

333

recipient of a four-year grant from the Ford Foundation to write a book titled What Happened to Ethics?, which will first trace the ongoing Christian theological presuppositions of standard philosophical ethics and then offer recommendations for the rethinking of ethics via contemporary neuroscience and Spinoza’s moral psychology. LIONEL RUBINOFF is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies at Trent University in Peterborough Canada. He has previously taught at York University and the University of Toronto, where he obtained his doctorate and studied under the direction of Emil Fackenheim. He is the author of numerous articles and books including The Pornography of Power, a critical edition of F. H. Bradley’s The Presuppositions of Critical History, Faith and Reason: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion by R. G. Collingwood, Tradition and Revolution, Collingwood and The Reform of Metaphysics and, with co-editor W. J. van der Dussen, Objectivity Method and Creativity. Nobel Peace Prize winner ELIE WIESEL has worked on behalf of oppressed people for much of his adult life. His personal experience of the Holocaust has led him to use his talents as an author, teacher and storyteller to defend human rights and peace throughout the world. His more than forty books have won numerous awards, including the Prix Médicis for A Beggar in Jerusalem, the Prix Livre Inter for The Testament, and the Grand Prize for Literature from the City of Paris for The Fifth Son. He has written two volumes of memoirs, All Rivers Run to the Sea and And the Sea is Never Full, in addition to his accounts of the Holocaust. After the war, Wiesel had studied in Paris and later became a journalist in that city, yet he had remained silent about what he had endured in the death camps. During an interview with the French writer François Mauriac, Wiesel was persuaded to end that silence. He subsequently wrote La Nuit (Night), which has been translated into thirty languages and has sold millions of copies since its 1958 publication. Since 1976, Wiesel has been the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University, where he also holds the title of University Professor. MARTIN D. YAFFE, Professor of Philosophy and Religion Studies at University of North Texas, holds a B.A. from University of Toronto and a Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University. He is the author of Shylock and the Jewish Question, editor of Judaism and Environmental Ethics: A Reader, co-translator of Aquinas’ Literal Exposition on the Book of Job, and translator of Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise, the philosophical founding-document of both modern biblical criticism and modern liberal democracy. He is currently completing a translation from the German of Leo Strauss’s essays on Moses Mendelssohn.

NAME INDEX

Ajzenstat, Sam 5, 8, 10 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 217 Aquinas 107, 108 Aristotle 9, 10, 107, 161, 162, 163, 164, 175, 176 Arnold, Matthew 251 Baeck, Leo 28 Ba’al Shem Tov 267, 280 Baum, Gregory 10, 206, 207, 209 Böhme, Jakob 113 Borowitz, Eugene 35 Buber, Martin 3, 4, 9, 28, 31, 37, 47, 54–5, 101, 107, 119, 120, 121, 122, 132, 144, 191, 199, 260, 273, 279, 280, 283 Bultmann, Rudolf 47 Burbridge, John 6, 7 Cohen, Arthur 26, 27, 30 Cohen, Hermann 28, 46, 92 Descartes, Rene 23, 216 Des Pres, Terrence 43 Diamond, James A. 4, 11, 12 Eckhardt, Roy

247

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 2, 17, 22, 23, 312 Fiedler, Leslie 89 Formstecher, Solomon 28 Freud, Sigmund 37, 252 Glazer, Aubrey 5, 11, 12 Gadamer, Hans Georg 47 Gersonides 227 Green, Kenneth Hart 8, 9 Guttmann, Julius 28 Halevi, Yehudah 295 Hegel, G. W. F. 2, 9, 10, 11, 12, 17, 18, 19,22, 23, 28, 38, 48, 49, 53, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 72, 73, 75, 94, 95, 96, 97, 107, 110, 115, 125, 130, 131, 139, 161, 162–174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 182, 221, 222, 223, 227, 228, 262, 270, 272, 288

Heidegger 2, 3, 9, 23, 38, 47, 49, 63, 64, 100, 107, 108, 109, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 125, 129, 130, 131, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 150, 157, 228, 229, 304 Heschel, Abraham Joshua 9, 28 Hirsch, Samuel 28 Hobbes, Thomas 91, 93, 117, 216 Huber, Kurt 44, 246, 247, 305, 306, 320 James, William

92

Kant, Immanuel 2, 10, 18, 19, 22, 28, 38, 39, 46, 48, 73, 107, 109, 113, 122, 180, 181, 182, 183, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 194, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 205, 222, 227, 233, 246, 257, 271, 297, 298, 299, 305, 307, 308, 312, 313, 314, 320 Kaplan, Mordecai 36 Kierkegaard 10, 22, 46, 107, 184, 186, 189, 194, 195, 206, 207, 258, 263, 269 Kigel, Michael 11, 13 Kimchi, David 227 Kook, Abraham Issac 29 Krochmal, Nachman 28 Lazarus, Moritz 28 Lerner, R. Michael 284, 293 Levi, Primo 77–8, 81, 82, 83, 310 Levinas, Emmanuel 28, 237, 304, 314 Lewinska, Pelagia 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 53, 309–10 Lichtenberg, Bernhard 45 Liebman, Charles 35 Liebniz 28, 94, 272 Locke, John 23, 28, 117 Luria, R. Isaac 160, 236–47 Maimonides, Moses 107, 108, 110, 125, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141 Marmur, R. Dov 291 Marx, Karl 37, 63

336

name index

Memmi, Albert 252, 268, 273 Mendelssohn, Moses 28 Mill, John Stuart 251, 269 Morgan, Michael 5, 6, 7, 68 Nachmanides 233 Nagel, Thomas 49 Neusner, Jacob 32, 35, 41 Nietzsche, Friedrich 37, 63, 64, 65, 80, 100, 107, 119, 121, 154, 255, 295, 297, 303, 320 Oppenheim, Michael 6, 7 Outram, Richard 17 St. Paul 190–4, 199 Plato 9, 107, 117, 118, 123, 131, 174, 176, 189, 251, 303, 320 Plax, Martin 5, 6, 8 Pollack, Benjamin 5, 6, 7 Portnoff, Sharon 4, 8, 9, 10 Rauchning, Hermann 302 Reuther, Rosemary 207, 209 Ravven, Heidi 8, 10, 11 Rexroth, Kenneth 280 Ricoeur, Paul 47 Rosenzweig, Franz 4, 9, 28, 30, 31, 37, 47, 49, 107, 132, 211, 214, 215, 236, 237, 240 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 91 Rubinoff, Lionel 5, 6, 11, 12, 13 Rubinstein, Richard 28, 30

Sartre, Jean Paul 38, 317 Schelling, Friedrich 2, 3, 22, 23, 24, 27, 28, 29, 159 Schiller, Friedrich 110 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 22 Schmitt, Carl 98–9 Scholem, Gershom 29, 107 Sforno, Jacob 319 Shapiro, Susan 78, 79 Simon, Ernst 26 Socrates 109, 147, 251, 259, 306 Soloveitchik, Rav Joseph B. 314 Spinoza, Baruch 3, 10, 122, 211–7 Steiner, George 251, 290 Steinheim, Solomon 28 Steinschneider, Moritz 110 Strauss, Leo 8, 9, 10, 20n11, 108–13, 115–24, 125–44, 147, 148, 150, 155–7, 161, 162, 164, 178 Taikhtel, R. Yissachar 244, 245 Tillich, Paul 29, 30, 151 Tracy, David 5, 247 Voltaire

272

Wiesel, Elie 5, 252, 254, 276, 281, 295, 302, 303, 311 Wolff, Christian Freiherr 28 Wood, Allen 217 Wyschograd, Michael 315, 316, 317 Yaffe, Martin D.

4, 8, 9, 10

SUBJECT INDEX

Akkedah challenge to three-term ethical relationship 195, 196, 197, 198, 200, 202 challenge to two-term ethical relationship 200 as “dirty-hands” dilemma 181 Kant’s view 186 as teleological suspension of ethical 258 Amalek as spiritual progenitor of Nazis 300 Buber, Martin view of transcendence 4 view of role of prophets 119–22 Elijah as philosophic paradigm 223, 224, 226, 228, 229, 230 and teku 231 Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy 38, 142, 203, 312 evil (see also Fackenheim; idolatry) and absurdity 92–3 antidotes, in Western thought 251–5 biblical and rabbinic sense 91, 95–6 and dualism 158, 159 and failure of nerve 93, 98 as inherently human 8, 90, 91, 103, 143–9 “innocent evil” 91 and moral inversion 93 and nature of duty 259, 260 relation to tragic element 180 and theodicy 262 Fackenheim, Emil approach to teaching 8–9 brief biography 1 influence of Buber 31 influence of Hegel 2 influence of Rosenzweig 31 influence of Strauss 9, 108–10, 126–7, 132 loss of tragic ambiguity 194, 203, 205

misreading of Luria 240 Nietzsche’s madman as parable 64–5 relevance of Maimonides 137–9, 141 role of dialogue 39, 40 view of evil 91 view of existentialism 23, 37, 38, 114, 118, 123 view of Hegel 167, 172, 177 view of Heidegger 143, 144, 145 view of historicism 2, 20, 23, 95, 107, 113–4, 161, 175–6, 221 view of Holocaust 4, 5, 6, 24, 30, 31, 32, 35, 52, 53–4, 55–6, 86, 89 view of Jewish emancipation 39 view of law and tradition 13, 39, 221 view of resistance in thought 43, 44, 98, 99 view of revelation 2, 3, 4, 23, 30, 36, 113, 141, 142, 177, 199, 204 view of Spinoza 213 view of subjectivist reductionism 37 view of thought 57–8, 59, 85, 306 view of transcendence 98, 101, 178 God’s Presence in History 65, 316 The God Within 18

33, 34, 46, 49,

historicism/history (see also Fackenheim) and the Bible 122 and human existence 47, 48, 49, 50, 51 and fanaticism 92 and neo-immanentist theory 271, 273 versus philosophical objectivity 49, 51 and pretended faith 92 view of Hegel 22, 75, 94, 95, 96, 163, 165–171, 173, 271–2 view of Heidegger 2, 3, 129 view of Nazis 203, 204 view of Schmitt 99

338

subject index

view of Spinoza 2111, 212, 213 view of Strauss 115–7, 139, 161 Holocaust (see also 614th commandment) Christian response 247 connection with covenant 33 and moratorium 64, 65, 66, 67, 79, 80 “Muselmann” 77–8, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84 as metaphysical murder 96 as negation of divine covenant 255 as negative revelation 9, 13 nihilism as response 83 as novum in history 4, 8, 24 as punishment for sin 29, 290 re-living to seek response 261, 262, 263 as “sacred myth” 32 uniqueness 32, 34, 89, 255–6, 264 as watershed in Jewish belief 29–30 writings on 27, 28 “idea of man” 295–6, 304 in Huber’s view 305, 306 in Nazi view 299, 301, 302 post-Holocaust 314 idolatry in Bible 95–6 connection with demonic 152, 160 Fackenhein’s view 97, 151, 152, 153, 154 Maimonides’ view 96n11 Nazism as 97, 102 “is-ought” 307, 309 Israel, role of 34, 215, 277–9, 291 The Jewish Bible after the Holocaust 79 Jewish role 27, 89, 90 (see also Israel, role of; Zionism, role of ) activism as challenge to philosophy 235 avoidance of assimilation 269 avoidance of self-hate 268 as embodiment of God 303 fidelity to covenant without God’s promises 292–3 creativity 280–1, 282 “immediacy after reflection” 37, 265 Jewish philosophy 25–6, 38, 40, 41 as metaphysical people 98 re-living the Holocaust 263, 266, 275–6

re-living other root experiences 273, 274, 275 as reminder of humanity 318, 319 response to tragedy 179, 210 risk of openness 215, 216 teshuvah as return of entire people 246 as witness to God 286, 288, 289, 290 view of Spinoza 214, 215, 217 Midrash affirming God’s presence in history 270, 285 as expression of contradictions 46, 100, 101, 263, 270, 275 as sophisticated theology 222, 223 pre-philosophical religious dimension 167, 169, 170, 175 Quest for Past and Future 46 The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought 59 resistance (see also Fackenheim) 69, 70, 72, 73, 74, 78, 82 Sinai, and freedom 223 614th commandment 5, 6, 33, 38, 46, 48, 63, 81, 90, 91, 103, 127, 206, 276, 280–1, 291, 294 Strauss, Leo relevance of Maimonides 140, 141 view of Aristotle 161, 162, 163 view of Heidegger 129, 130, 131, 142–3 view of philosophy 112, 128 thought (see also Fackenheim) and dignity 303–4 Hegel’s view 60, 61 and resistance 70, 71, 72, 73 three-term ethical relationship (see also Akkedah) Fackenheim’s view 186, 187, 190, 190–1, 194, 210, 313 Kant’s view 187 relationship to tragic vision 194 revelation to Abraham of Sodom plans 232, 233, 234 St. Paul’s view 191, 192, 193

subject index tikkun, role of 35, 45, 46, 48, 103, 236, 237–8, 240–1, 242, 243, 248, 283, 293 To Mend the World 34, 43, 44, 45, 48, 49, 50, 51, 53, 54, 56, 62, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 79, 80, 83, 85, 132, 133, 142, 159, 160, 203, 205, 211, 242, 244, 245, 306, 309, 310, 315, 317

339

transcendence (see also Fackenheim) 225, 226 two-term ethical relationship 186 What is Judaism? 50 Zionism, role of

29, 244