At First Glance...
Welcome to At First Glance. Here you will find quick takes by the CLAL faculty on new books, articles and movies, new music and fashions and on cultural trends more generally. Here we will keep you abreast of what we, in our journeys around the country, find most interesting and notable in Jewish and general culture. And, in just a few sentences, we will try to indicate why. Every other week you will find something new on this page.
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Emil Fackenheim as Lurianic Philosopher
By Eugene B. Borowitz
To Mend the World (New York: Schocken Books, 1983), Emil Fackenheim's recently
published book, is difficult, noble, searching, rich and impressive. It constitutes the first step in bringing to a
climax his life's work as a leader in contemporary Jewish philosophical theology. We would naturally anticipate great intellectual
rewards from reading it, but we are also presented with an elemental, passionate,
inspiring statement of enduring Jewish faith.
Somewhat more than
half the book retraces and rethinks the issues Fackenheim has raised during the three plus
decades of his existentialist reworking of Jewish thought.
He approaches them afresh by analyzing the work of some thinkers on whom he
has not previously concentrated, notably Spinoza and Rosenzweig. He reaches no radically new conclusions, but now
holds his hard won views with greater clarity and conviction.
He studies Spinoza as
the prototypical Jew who accepts modernity and therefore embraces rationalist philosophy. Fackenheim accedes to Spinoza's rejection of the
literal authority of Scripture, but points out that Spinoza's attack on the Bible has only
proved it was not revealed. The argument has
not refuted the possibility of revelation in general.
Modern Jews cannot follow Spinoza if they affirm the continuing validity of
Judaism and acknowledge the ultimate inadequacy of reason (surely required by the
Holocaust, Fackenheim's own ultimate criterion). We
must then find a way to combine Spinoza's post-ghetto thoughtfulness with the Ultimate
which grounds and "guides" human existence.
For Fackenheim, this sets the agenda of modern Jewish thought.
To this end, he next
examines the thought of Franz Rosenzweig, who philosophically asserts the reality of
revelation without wiping out the virtues of either personal autonomy or broad humanistic
learning. But Rosenzweig, too, cannot
satisfy modern Jews. In staking everything on
his liberal notion of revelation, Rosenzweig denied that Jews are truly involved in human
history: This invalidates him as a proper
interpreter not only of the Jewish past but, more important, of the Holocaust, which
Fackenheim considers determinative for all future Jewish philosophy.
God's Exit From History
Hence he turns to
Hegel, a thinker who can detect the transcending- commanding reality which operates within human history. This move continues Fackenheim's estrangement from
Kant, initiated in his Encounters Between Judaism
and Modern Philosophy (1973). But that
match does not take. Hegel does see the
transcendent in events. But his philosophy of
history has the effect of then swallowing up their truth in the greater meaning of
succeeding happenings. Now Fackenheim's
famous insistence upon the qualitative uniqueness of the Holocaust makes its overriding
demands: this event cannot be assimilated to
anything! One who evades, or buries, or
mitigates, or "explains," or couples the Holocaust with any other occurrence
commits the unpardonable sin. The
contemporary Jewish thinker must, therefore, make the absolute oneness of this malevolence
the core and criterion of all authentic future Jewish thought.
Fackenheim now
makes a daring move, perhaps foreshadowed in Encounters. He utilizes the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Naturally, this immediately requires dissolving
any connection between the ideas taken and Heidegger's support of the Nazis, particularly
his refusal after World War II to retract or repent in any way. Fackenheim believes we can avoid the potential
moral degeneracy lurking in Heidegger's ideas though we adopt one of his key concepts:
when we authentically face up to our death, our lives are touched with transcendence
(Heidegger's philosophical equivalent to religion's Ultimate One). This understanding
becomes the philosophic bedrock upon which future Jewish theology can be built. For it discloses how we may confront the
Holocaust in all its terrifying uniqueness and yet have true, if transformed, Jewish
faith.
In this four-part
intellectual development, God has gradually been left behind. What was everything to
Spinoza, what independently engaged us in Rosenzweig, what immanently coursed through
history in Hegel, is absent from Heidegger. The Sinaitic theophany which was banished from
thought only to reappear as "contentless" revelation and then the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, has now
become a secularized experience of transcendence.
After Auschwitz, God
may not be dead for Fackenheim, but he can no longer detect God's presence in history.
Uniqueness Of The
Holocaust Reasserted
The construction of
the new system now begins and here, in the final third of the book, Fackenheim moves on to
somewhat new positions. But the basic
premise of his thinking -- the event that is one (the Holocaust) -- will exercise such
sovereignty over all that follows that Fackenheim pauses to restate his thesis about the
Holocaust's uniqueness. Almost all
contemporary philosophy and theology, because they hide from this truth, are rendered
irrelevant. One may even ask whether
acknowledging the absolute exceptionality of the Holocaust does not invalidate all
cognitive reflection and shatter the possibility of intellectual systems. To some extent that is true. Placing a qualitatively unique,
"revelatory" event at the beginning of one's thinking destroys the adequacy of
ideas.
If ideas are now
inadequate, we must give life and acts priority, a decidedly traditional Jewish notion. Fackenheim points to two Jewish religious
action-concepts as the cornerstones of his post-Holocaust Judaism: teshuvah, "repentance" or
“turning;" and tikkun, the 16th
century mystical idea of Solomon Luria, that Jewish deeds can repair, “mend,”
the breaks God permitted/made in the process of creating. Utilizing the Heideggerian sense
of transcendence, Fackenheirri points to various acts of tikkun which took place during the Holocaust and
asserts their undying authority for subsequent Jewish generations. For against the Nazis'
ultimate assertion of the hegemony of death now stand the deeds of spiritual resistance
manifesting the transcendent value of personal existence. (Some non-Jews also gave the lie
to the Holocaust but, as the only people singled out for extermination, Jewish resistance
to the Jewish fate speaks with a uniquely compelling quality.)
Taking up the
responsibilities of survivorship entails devotion to Jewish continuity in whatever form we
favor. We cannot then say that only religious
Jews are "good Jews." Indeed, the
Holocaust dissolves our old religious certainties. It
also eliminates the old distinctions between religious and secular Jews. Today, genuine Jewishness must be judged in terms
of the acts of tikkun performed in the death
camps. By their power we dare to live as Jews
despite Auschwitz, and by our imitation of them we not only show our devotion to the dead,
but practice the only true form of humanhood now available.
Our Acts Are
Limited
Whatever we do will
necessarily be flawed and limited. Our tikkunim can never match theirs. Even the State of Israel, as close to a genuine
Jewish response to the Holocaust as anything later might be, is only a partial act of
mending. Even it shares the universal signs
of metaphysical galut, exile. And our future thinking, of which this book is
admittedly but a first step, will always remain fragmentary and incomplete, a conclusion
which shapes the episodic nature of the last parts of this book.
Two and a half years
of freedom from his academic responsibilities enabled Emil Fackenheim to produce this
master work. It will be mandatory if
demanding reading for any serious student of Jewish thought in our time. In its philosophic sophistication and Jewish
devotion, I cannot think of its equivalent in recent decades.
The grateful student may nonetheless find some things about this work quite curious. Of the four I wish to mention, one is minor yet not insignificant. For all its thoroughgoing repudiation of the Nazis and the "good" Germans who did nothing, the philosophic tone of this book seems oppressively Germanic. One has the eerie sense that Jews seeking philosophical resources to overcome the calamity produced by German culture cannot escape from it.
But Is The
Holocaust Truly Unique?
The second matter
concerns the foundation on which all of Fackenheim's massive cognitive structure rests. For years, his assertion of the qualitative
uniqueness of the Holocaust has drawn rejoinders. Yet
he does not give a searching response to the criticism.
He twice turns to this issue directly (pp. 9-13 and 181-188), but only adds
fresh examples of the Nazi cruelty as additional evidence for his previous conclusion. He analyzes neither the notion of uniqueness
itself nor the alternative explanations of Nazi evil in the rigorous way he employs when
considering, say, the less central notions of Spinoza or Rosenzweig. Positing a qualitatively unique event entails such
momentous consequences, one would think that establishing it beyond cavil would be the
central task of a theology based upon it. But
Fackenheim does not want to spend long considering whether the Nazis' perverted behavior
might have come from a radically distorted but not uniquely demonic set of values, or
whether their racial murderousness truly might have parallels, as, for example, in ancient
national blood feuds.
He may have felt that
to assume the old categories of analysis and demonstration still hold, and to require the
Holocaust to prove its exceptionality in terms of them is as good as denying that anything
uncommon happened. To press him for more,
then, only reveals how "unauthentic," as he terms it, our thought remains.
But what if, in all
openness and Jewish loyalty, as best we can assess these, we find the Holocaust to be
"only" the worst or among the worst cases of real or possible evil? Are we not entitled to demand the most scrupulous
examination of the concept on which we are being asked to stake our lives? And if our thought is thereby termed
"unauthentic," are we not justified in calling such an intellectual response
defensiveness?
What Of Leo Baeck's
Example?
Two lesser matters
are also worthy of attention. Most peculiar
is the omission of one of the most obvious examples of tikkun, the life of Leo Baeck. The edlerly Berlin liberal rabbi, the head of the
German Jewish community under the Nazis, faced them in full comprehension of their evil,
but with utter spiritual transcendence. His
human and Jewish leadership of the inmates in Theresienstadt may perhaps be downgraded by
noting that he was not in a death camp, but "merely" in the "show"
concentration camp. Yet he was the one great
modern Jewish thinker who personally tested his philosophy under the Nazi terror. He also headed the tiny rabbinic school that
ordained Emil Fackenheim in 1938. But Baeck's
case would decisively count against Fackenheim's uniqueness thesis. What Baeck wrote as a
survivor testifies to his considered conclusion that the fiendishness of the Nazis had
changed nothing about the awesome human freedom to do good and evil which he had
eloquently described in The Essence of Judaism
long before Hitler.
Finally, there is
the odd form of this philosophy of Judaism. Its
central image is of unmerited death following on gruesome suffering. No other such horrid a death ever occurred. Yet our faith also brings the good news that we
were not defeated by this awesome tragedy. Because
of what the dying did, we need not despair. Fackenheim
no longer points to the resurrection of Jewish national sovereignty in the State of Israel
as the triumphant evidence of our people's conquering will-to-live (arid never has
considered it compensation for the Holocaust). Now
he finds the redemptive affirmation of life in the deeds of tikkun performed in the sepulcher of the death
camps. Their validity rises to heights we can
never attain. Subsequent generations must
make their facing their unique suffering the saving model of our lives. For we now live authentically only by the grace of
their accomplishment.
I do not recall any
other Jewish theology with such a contour. To
be sure, Fackenheim's view of Jewish uniqueness now derives not from Sinai's gift of the
Tree of Life, but from a qualitatively unique event of Jewish dying. Hence future Jewish thought, as he envisions it,
must grow from a root experience of unparalleled negativity. Yet if the event was utterly incomparable, the
religion authentically derived from it should also be different, not only from all prior
Jewish thinking, but from any previous religious thought.
Fackenheim's theology is not, however, a radically surprising structure in
the history of human religion. In form, it is
similar to what we have heard elsewhere. This
fact, too, casts doubt on his assertion of the uniqueness of the Holocaust, the central
premise of his system.
Buy
Emil Fackenheim's To Mend the World from Barnes and Noble by clicking here.
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