Frederick Krantz
Israzine, Jan. 26, 2024
“… Is the grim truth not rather that a second holocaust has been made more likely, not less likely, by the fact of the first? For there are few signs anywhere of that radical repentance, which alone could rid the world of Hitler’s shadow.”
In the light of the trauma caused by the October 7 Gaza massacre by Hamas and Israel’s ongoing battle to crush the murderers and ensure safe future borders, it is well to recall the powerful oeuvre of Emil Fackenheim z”l, the German-Jewish Holocaust survivor and rabbi who became, as a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, one of our time’s most profound Jewish thinkers.
Emil was known for his wrestling with the deep religious and secular trauma of the Nazis’ drive to exterminate the Jewish people and the relative indifference to it of the “civilized” world. His books plumb its meaning for both religious and secular Jews and Judaism. His reflections on the Holocaust, the miraculous establishment of the Jewish State of Israel, and the initial trauma of the 1967 Six Days War (and exaltation after Israel’s victory and the re-unification of Jerusalem, where he died in 2003 after making Aliyah in 1984), are of direct relevance today.
As we here and in Israel cope with the realization that the great human and societal success and achievements of the Zionist movement remain fragile and at peril, Emil’s powerful “614th mitzvah”, “Thou shalt not give post-humous victories to Hitler,” is directly relevant. The U.N., E.U., “Progressive Democrats in the Biden Administration and “River to the Sea” thuggish demonstrators on U.S. campuses and streets, the Chinese and Russian backers of Iran, whose proxies (Hamas and Hezbollah and the Houthis included)—all seek to impose the discredited will o’ the wisp of a “two-state solution” on Israel, which a broad political consensus issuing from Oct.7 sees as threatening and dangerous. And this despite the brutal aggression of one of the prospective parties, the “innocent” Palestinians, and this even as Israelis desperately seek to free the remaining 136 (of the initial 247) surviving [one prays] innocent Hamas hostages.
Fackenheim confronted Israel’s isolation in 1967, as its pre-emptive strike foiled the Arab states’ Soviet-backed aggression. But then Richard Nixon was President and came to Israel’s direct defense, whereas today, the Biden Administration, despite President Joe Biden’s initial visit and “Don’t” warning to Iran, remains a “wobbly” (to quote Margaret Thatcher) ally. Today, the Arab aggression, unbuffered by the expanse of the Sinai peninsula and Golan Heights hills, came directly across the southern border and almost linked up with Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank). And while the relatively “traditional” regular army-fought 1967 war was over in six days, today Israel finds itself in the 111th day (and counting) of a conflict involving rooting terrorists out of 300 miles of booby-trapped underground tunnels, as things along the northern border with Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon may be heating up (and the head of the snake, Iran, may well already have several nuclear devices).
In this context, Emil Fackenheim’s meditation on the meaning of Holocaust, the revival of Jewish national autonomy in Israel, and the existential trauma of a sudden Great Power-backed war against the still-young Jewish State is of direct relevance. We must realize that the fact that Israel is a Jewish state, a fact its enemies clearly understand, explains much of the direct regional animus and indirect international indifference and hostility towards its fate. That it is a Jewish state is, as Emil seeks to explain, at the same time, its great strength, for God’s presence in history, with us even in exile, is what has sustained us, religious and secular, as a people across ancient and modern centuries of persecution, marginalization, and longed-for return.
And will sustain us now despite the tragic sadness and trauma of the present moment.
(In addition to God’s Presence in History [1968), excerpted below, other works in Emil Fackenheim’s rich scholarly body of philosophical-theological reflections on Jewish and modern history include The Jewish Return Into History [1970], Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy [197], To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought [1982), and What is Judaism? An Interpretation for the Present Age [1999]. His posthumous autobiography, An Epitaph for German Judaism: From Halle to Jerusalem, was published in 2007).
Excerpted from “God’s Presence in History”
“. . .Rabbinic faith and thought were uniquely tested when, in 70 C.E., the Temple was destroyed by Titus, and still more when, after the Bar Kochba revolt, Hadrian transformed Jerusalem into a pagan city (135 C.E.). Rarely in all the subsequent centuries was there to be a comparable clash between the root experiences of Judaism and present historical realities, and the well-nigh inescapable temptation of the times was to flee from history into either gnostic individualism or apocalyptic otherworldliness. The rabbis, however, remained within the Midrashic framework and, indeed, responded to the radical crisis with the most profound thought ever produced within that framework. This was because they both faced the present with unyielding realism and held fast to the root experiences of Judaism with unyielding stubbornness.
Never before had the conflict between past and present been so radical. . . No rabbi described Titus as God’s instrument. No rabbi understood the paganization of Jerusalem as an event that was divinely willed. [Yet] what hope for a Messianic divine Presence could have remained in an age of so total a divine self-concealment?
In this extreme crisis, the rabbis struck out boldly in a new direction. . .here as elsewhere, Rabbi Akiba is bolder than any other rabbinic theologian:
. . .whithersoever Israel was exiled, the Shekhinah [the holy spirit], as it were, went with them. [From] Egypt. . .to Babylon. . .to Elam. . .to Edom. And when they return in the future, the Shekhinah, as it were, will return with them, as it is said, “That then the Lord thy God will return with thy captivity” (Deut. 30:3). Note that it does not say, “The Lord will bring back” (veheshib), but it says, “He will return” (ve-shab).
. . .The ancient rabbis remained within the Midrashic framework . . .ever since the Nazi Holocaust, Jewish theology has faced the necessity of questioning the Midrashic framework inside as well. The rabbis confronted Titus and Hadrian; they were spared the necessity of confronting Hitler. In the present age in which Jewish existence is uniquely embattled, the Jewish faith in God’s presence in history is no less uniquely embattled. The Jewish theologian would be ill-advised were he, in an attempt to protect Jewish faith in the God of history, to ignore contemporary history. For the God of Israel cannot be God of either past or future unless He is still God of the present. . .
After Auschwitz, however, ours is a worse question. One would dearly like to believe that the shock of the Holocaust has made a second holocaust impossible anywhere. Is the grim truth not rather that a second holocaust has been made more likely, not less likely, by the fact of the first? For there are few signs anywhere of that radical repentance, which alone could rid the world of Hitler’s shadow. . .
After Auschwitz, is not even the saintliest Jew driven to the inexorable conclusion that he owes the moral obligation to the antisemites of the world not to encourage them by his own powerlessness?. . . In the [age of] Midrash the fear of God still exists among the nations, and Israel survives, albeit powerless and scattered among the nations. In Nazi Europe, however, the fear of God was dead, and Jews were hunted without mercy or scruple. . .Was God absent at Auschwitz? Is He in eclipse even now? May pious Jews pray as loudly as they like because God cannot or does not hear?. . .What if our present is without hope?. . .If all present access to the God of history is wholly lost, the God of history is Himself lost. [Did Hitler succeed] in murdering not only one-third of the Jewish people but the Jewish faith as well? Only one response may seem to remain—the cry of total despair— “there is no judgement and no judge.”
But this conclusion has been. Reached long ago [ever since the Age of the Enlightenment] by the Jewish secularist, albeit for totally different reasons and to a totally different effect. . . However, . . .A Jew who confronts Auschwitz and reaffirms his Jewishness discovers that every form of modern secularism is equally in crisis. . .had normalcy remained the overriding goal, the Jewish response to the Holocaust should have been the exact opposite of the one that actually was and is being given. . .
Any Jew, then or now, making normalcy his supreme goal should have been, and still should be, in flight from this singled-out condition in total disarray. In fact, however, secularists no less than religious Jews have responded with a reaffirmation of their Jewish existence such as no social scientist would have predicted, even if the Holocaust had never occurred. . .For a Jew today, merely to affirm his Jewish existence is to accept his singled-out condition; it is to oppose the demons of Auschwitz. . .it is to stake on that absolute opposition nothing less than his life and the lives of his children and the lives of his children’s children.
. . .Jewish survival after Auschwitz cannot be grasped in terms of humanly created ideals but only as an imposed commandment, And the Jewish secularist, no less than the believer, is absolutely singled out by a Voice as truly other than man-made ideals—an imperative as truly given–as was the Voice of Sinai. . .What does the Voice of Auschwitz command? 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. . .In ancient times, the unthinkable Jewish sin was idolatry. Today, it is to respond to Hitler by doing his work. . .
The commanding Voice of Auschwitz singles Jews out. Jewish survival is a commandment that brooks no compromise. It was this Voice which was heard by the Jews of Israel in May and June 1967 when they refused to lie down and be slaughtered. . . .
God’s Presence in History. Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections.
(1968—dedicated to Elie Wiesel).