The Devastation of Philosophy: Nazi Jurisprudence, the Shoah, and Fackenheim's Transcendental Wonder of Resistance
James A. Diamond on Kenneth Hart Green's The Philosophy of Emil Fackenheim: From Revelation to the Holocaust
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The term Holocaust has become the widely accepted epithet for the systematic murder of six million Jews during the second world war as an end in itself. It consisted of a war against the Jews carried out on a parallel front against a purely civilian population alongside the Nazi general military campaign as the historian Lucy Dawidowicz characterized it. The term’s etymological roots can be traced back to biblical sacrifices wholly consumed in tribute to God, but when applied to that twentieth century event it raises disturbing inferences regarding the roles of the perpetrators, victims, and God. It conjures a pornographic image of Nazis as priests murdering Jews as sacrifices to a God who derives pleasure from it.
The Hebrew term Shoah (devastation, catastrophe) is more apt, yet the difficulty in naming this unprecedented assault on an entire people already intimates the problems there might be dealing with its meaning from a philosophical perspective. The theological stakes are particularly acute since the murderous scope of that assault on Jews rose to covenantal shattering proportions against the very nation considered God’s chosen people. Could the various traditional rationalizations of suffering as punitive, redemptive, or purgative, normally offered within the rubric of what is called theodicy, or justification of divine providence, still be viable in the shadow of Auschwitz? Can God be immunized from culpability by taking refuge in ‘hiddenness’, as various rabbinic traditions have depicted God’s posture during human suffering? Alternatively, can God’s ‘eclipse’ (as the philosopher Martin Buber imagined it), excuse an abdication of responsibility for mass atrocities on an unfathomable scale?
Moving beyond Jewish theology, is the blind faith of a writer like Francois Mauriac, Nobel Laureate and devout Catholic, who declared, “All is grace. If the Eternal is the Eternal, the last word for each one of us belongs to Him,” a philosophically viable stance beyond the subjective realm of personal individual faith? Mauriac’s religious confession is conspicuous for its appearance in his foreword to Elie Wiesel’s Night published in English in 1960, the most widely read survivor account of Auschwitz. Yet even this faith is placed in doubt in the very next sentence when he expresses regret for his initial response upon hearing Wiesel’s story, “This is what I should have told this Jewish child. But I could only embrace him, weeping.” Perhaps weeping and embracing emerging spontaneously without the distance of reflection is in fact the only authentic response to such horror.
As Kenneth Green (one of the leading authorities on Leo Strauss and student of Fackenheim) so meticulously and skillfully demonstrates in his recent book, The Philosophy of Emil Fackenheim: From Revelation to the Holocaust, no one has canvassed all these questions or wrestled with possibilities that toggle between dismal hopelessness and tentative hopefulness, with the philosophical sophistication, courage, and persistence of Emil Fackenheim. Fackenheim’s philosophical attention to the Holocaust was prompted by the 1967 Six Day War between Israel and its surrounding Arab countries. He was provoked by what he viewed as another attempt to annihilate the Jews so soon after the Shoah. It compelled him to draw on different linguistic reservoirs such as midrash and kabbalah, when “staring into an abyss of radical evil.” Yet these modes of discourse are seemingly antithetical to philosophy.
Painstakingly conducted, Green’s is a work of deep reflection, thinking and rethinking what was an eminent twentieth century philosopher’s decades long struggle with the philosophical and theological implications of the Holocaust. Fackenheim’s scholarly career began with a doctorate related to medieval philosophy, his first major publication being a comparison between Maimonides and leading Islamic thinkers on the issue of creation (The Possibility of the Universe in Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and Maimonides). It ended, albeit an extended ending spanning nearly four decades, focusing single-mindedly on the Holocaust. Though Maimonides looms large in Green’s study, as he would in virtually any other study of Jewish thought, his importance lies mainly in Fackenheim’s targeting a number of ‘fatal flaws’ in medieval Jewish philosophy. The most important of those for the future of Jewish thought after the Shoah is the failure to adequately account for evil and innocent suffering as constituents of a world created and governed by a just and good God, by dismissing them as a negation of good rather than some substantive reality. Treating very ‘real’ and experienced evil as an absence, akin to darkness being the absence of light, or what Maimonides considered a “privation of good”, was no longer tenable in the face of the Shoah’s monstrously palpable evil.
Starkly put, the Shoah, involved the doctrinaire systematic dehumanization and subsequent murder of millions of people, including over a million children, for the ‘crime,’ as Nazi ideology and jurisprudence formulated it, of simply being born. Indeed, the very application of such terms as jurisprudence, doctrine, and ideology to genocide itself poses one of the profound challenges Fackenheim grappled with—the notion that there was ‘thought’ driving mass murder. Nazism’s unwavering commitment to murdering every single Jew on the planet amounted to “nothing less than a worldview, intended to ‘transcend history altogether,’ by making the Jews and their eradication ‘into a cosmic principle.’” Because that biological ‘principle’ was applied to Jews indiscriminately, regardless of choice, belief, or conduct, its ideological trigger also unprecedently ruled out the very possibility of martyrdom (as had been the case for many centuries of Jewish persecution) that might at least ennoble the deaths of its victims. As such, since Judaism subscribes to a God who acts within history and is forged in a historical national revelation, the Holocaust’s sustained genocidal ferocity calls divine governance into question, not just more acutely than other evils, but uniquely so. Again, starkly put, “If God is good, He should have been present; if He was not present, He is not good.”
The philosophical stakes for Fackenheim, a renowned authority on Kant and Hegel, went far beyond the confines of Jews and Judaism—they extended to the very foundations of civilization, religion, theology, and ultimately to the very future of his own craft, that of thinking and thought itself. Theodor Adorno, another fellow German Jewish philosopher, who like Fackenheim was forced into exile for the crime of being born a Jew according to Nazi legislation, argued that Auschwitz cast such a pall over the search for purposiveness and meaning in the world as to call for an end to the philosophical discipline of metaphysics altogether. Confronting the horrors of the Shoah he boldly claimed, “the assertion that what is has meaning, and the affirmative character that has been attributed to metaphysics almost without exception, become a mockery; and in the face of the victims, it becomes downright immoral.”
Yet Fackenheim pushed the crisis for thought posed by the Shoah even deeper. Herein lies the fundamental and most controversial notion that underlies Fackenheim’s formidable efforts to ‘reason’ through the unprecedented evil of the Shoah: it is that the gravity of the evil perpetrated was not simply quantitatively distinct. Rather, it had reached a level that defied all prior theological, philosophical, and moral categories, causing what can only be thought of as some ontological breach, rather than another instance of inhumanity and suffering to be added to the interminable list that preceded it.
Kenneth Hart Green, The Philosophy ofEmil Fackenheim: From Revelation to Holocaust. Cambridge University Press 2020. pp. 416. $135 (hardcover)
Accordingly, it presents what he termed alternatively a ‘rupture,’ ‘caesura.’ or ‘novum,’ both historically and intellectually. He went as far as to consider it a tear in the very fabric of all Being, or what philosophers have tried to ascertain as the fundamental nature of reality and existence, and theologians have identified with God himself. Fackenheim, the professional philosopher and trained reform rabbi, was left in the precarious position then of being shorn of the conceptual reservoir with which he was most familiar. After all, for the philosopher to abandon reason, and for the rabbi to surrender his canonical precedents, which in Fackenheim’s case would be the Hebrew Bible and the complex rabbinic interpretive prism through which it was filtered, would be tantamount to a loss of no less than a raison d’etre.
One of the most extraordinary moments in the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the pivotal bureaucrat who worked diligently to ensure the efficient and cost-effective murder of millions of human beings, was when philosophy itself was desecrated. (One shudders to even describe the treatment of human beings in such clinical bureaucratic terms!) The Eichmann trial had exposed on a world stage the quantitatively unprecedented extent of Nazism’s genocidal campaign against Jews. However, there was a philosophically devastating moment during the proceedings when the accused amplified the qualitative evil of its crimes to an unprecedented level in the annals of criminal jurisprudence. Eichmann soberly testified that the atrocities he administered were carried out in accordance with a supreme moral principle known as the ‘categorical imperative,’ famously posited by Immanuel Kant, one of the seminal philosophers in the history of western thought. Of course, it was a contemptible distortion.
The dedicated idealistic zeal which fueled Eichmann’s genocidal aims fulfils only one requirement of the imperative, which demands an act to be performed purely for its own sake and not for any ulterior motivations. However, he violated another critical prerequisite, which is to treat all human beings as ends in themselves, not as means or objects. History had never seen a greater debasement of the human form than that presided over by the accused, consisting of a methodical process of degradation, dehumanization, and experimentation, leading to death by asphyxiation in gas chambers, followed by remains reduced to such commodities as fertilizer. Nothing conveys more the depravity of this dehumanization than the eyewitness account of survivors, preserved in Claude Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah, who were forced to disinter the remains of Jews executed en masse, so they could be incinerated: “the Germans even forbade us to use the words ''corpse'' or ''victim”. The dead were blocks of wood, shit...Anyone who said ''corpse'' or ''victim'' was beaten. The Germans made us refer to the bodies as figuren, that is as puppets, as dolls, or as Schmattes, which means 'rags'.” Here was a major perpetrator of the Shoah, marshalling a corrupted version of Kant’s sublime ethical formulation in his defense, despite his actions having systematically drained the dignity of human beings that Kant held so sacrosanct. This surely constituted for the philosopher Emil Fackenheim a crime against thought itself.
The methodical annihilation of Kant’s very Idea of Humanity was “the awful legacy of Auschwitz to all humanity.” Eichmann’s ideological commitment to genocide has been in fact substantiated by an interview he gave prior to his capture when he stated, “If we had killed 10.3 million Jews, I would say with satisfaction, ‘Good, we destroyed an enemy.’ Then we would have fulfilled our mission.” So much for Hannah Arendt’s theory of thoughtless bureaucratic obedience to account for Eichmann and countless other zealously murderous architects of the Shoah she classified as “banality.” As Elie Wiesel put it, not only man but the Idea of Man died as well at Auschwitz. Green’s exhaustive study is in a profound sense an extended investigation of how Fackenheim channeled Wiesel’s lyrical perception into a philosophical one.
One of Fackenheim’s major dilemmas was how or should philosophy approach particular historical events. The question whether the fluctuating contingent nature of history could be a proper subject of philosophy, which is concerned with universal immutable truths, is a vexing one that courses through the breadth of the book. Fackenheim was no stranger to this dilemma, having penned a full-length study on the issue titled Metaphysics and Historicity early in his career which he launched with his characteristically succinct and elegant formulation:
“History is a predicament for man who must live in it. In order to act in history, he must seek to rise above it. He needs perspectives in terms of which to understand his situation, and timeless truths and values in terms of which to act in it. Yet the perspectives which he finds often merely reflect his age; and what he accepts as timelessly true and valid is apt to be merely the opinion which is in fashion.”
Extensive philosophical background is necessary to appreciate his inquiry into this historical challenge involving philosophers with whom Fackenheim was persistently in dialogue such as Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Kierkegaard. However, I will only mention one who is particularly noteworthy regarding the subject of the Shoah for the philosophically scandalous antinomy between the caliber of his thought and the depravity of his actions: Martin Heidegger
Heidegger is universally acknowledged as one of, if not the, most profound thinkers of the twentieth century. Yet he also swore loyalty to Nazi ideology and its Fuhrer, extolling publicly the “inner truth and greatness” of the National Socialist movement. As Green shows, Fackenheim’s struggle with Heidegger’s thought involved an inordinately honest thirst for philosophical answers that entailed an inordinate separation of the ideas from the man. The case of Heidegger discredits forever all the usual cliches accounting for hatred, discrimination, and racism, resorting to inanities such as—‘If only he could be more informed, more aware, more educated, think more objectively, more deeply, get to know personally the victims of racism …’ The crisis for philosophy would seem insurmountable when arguably the most educated, informed, aware thinker in the world—whose most loyal and adept students were themselves Jewish—and whom Fackenheim himself considered “a thinker of great power and originality as well as rare profundity,” could choose freely to embrace Nazism with the full weight of his philosophy behind it.
The Transcendent Notion of Resistance: Fackenheim’s Most Important Legacy
Though I was familiar with Fackenheim’s thought previously, it was only after reading Green’s probing study that I appreciated the existential depth of desperation informing Fackenheim’s quest for an appropriately reasoned response to the Shoah that he always acknowledged consciously and subconsciously was unattainable. Fackenheim canvassed a near dizzying array of options while negotiating a tightrope of formulations, reevaluations, retractions, endorsements, and rejections, to fend off being irredeemably sucked into that despairing abyss. Ultimately, he acknowledged the dangers of discovering meaning in the Holocaust, for “no such “meaning” can be found, and should not be sought, because any “purpose” attributed to those events would seem to “justify” them. Therefore, searching for meaning is “neither reasonable, nor faithful, nor decent.” Fackenheim’s good friend Elie Wiesel claimed that Fackenheim “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.” However, Green’s extensive study reveals like no other that Fackenheim shared the same anguish, distinguishing himself only in the sense that as a philosopher he could not disavow his very nature to explore and investigate systematically despite the open-endedness to which he knew his thought was condemned. Rather than ‘answers,’ he understood that whatever conclusions reached would be fragmentary at best.
What precisely are those primary fragments Fackenheim offered, or at the very least experimented with, that Green explores so intensely in his book? The most well-known is his 614th Commandment, urging Jews to survive and perpetuate Jewishness in all its dimensions lest history unfolds in completing Nazism’s unfinished business. Yet, as Green demonstrates throughout the book, far less known is how Fackenheim oscillated over its precise articulation, wrestling with its religious connotations, and particularly its claims regarding its source in revelation. Placing it squarely within a familiar biblical/rabbinic framework of an originating revelatory event traditionally accepted to have dictated 613 commandments, he added a new one that mandated Jewish survival as an end in itself, formulated thus: “To deny Hitler the posthumous victory of destroying [Jewish] faith was a moral religious commandment… the 614th commandment: for post-Holocaust Judaism it would be as binding as if it had been revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai.” However, it resonates with troubling implications, positing some divine presence in the very heart of an evil that paradoxically precluded that very Presence. How could there be a positive revelation from the depths of such consummate absence? The weight of its binding normative authority would also limit its application to religious Jews. As a result, Fackenheim whittled down its religious connotations moving away from its direct association with Sinai and Torah to a more neutral “commanding voice of Auschwitz,” increasingly rendering “fainter its claim to religious authority.” Yet, all the while he clung to it as some portal, generating a universal moral norm obligating resistance to evil.
But here is what I found most problematic with Fackenheim’s philosophical theology, particularly as examined in the final chapters of Green’s work, titled respectively, Diabolical Revelation and the Holocaust, Negative Absolute and Fragmentary Transcendence, and Revelation of the Diabolical Truth in History: as these chapter headings indicate, while moving away from divine revelation, and at the same time, salvaging some transcendent authority for moral imperatives rooted in Auschwitz, he resorted to characterizing its source as a “negative Absolute” variously emanating from ‘demonic,’ ‘diabolical,’ and even ‘Satanic’ forces. It is difficult to understand how this does not amount to some form of dualistic gnosticism, acknowledging Evil as some ontologically independent power. Fackenheim’s own wrestling with this notion reminds me of Elisha ben Abuyah, that other ancient rabbinic ‘heretic’ who embarked on a mystical journey along with his friend Rabbi Akiva transcending their persecutory circumstances suffered below. On entering the inner precinct of God’s abode above he observed what led him to shudder at the possibility there may be “two powers in heaven.” On the one hand, the “negative Absolute” does qualify as a Jewish response, being deeply entrenched in a major Jewish current of theology, in kabbalistic constructs of evil a la Isaac Luria. Luria’s theory of the world’s origins proposed some primordial cataclysmic divine withdrawal or contraction within Himself leaving a space in which the creation could unfold, yet also posing a danger of demonic empowerment (sitra ahra). On the other hand, its adaptation for comprehending the nature of the Shoah doesn’t seem to enhance its philosophical credibility. Green himself is skeptical, respectfully but critically employing terms such as ‘unclear’, ‘strange’, and finally resigning to the judgment that Fackenheim “never quite explains how philosophy legitimately ‘borrows’ notions from Kabbalah.” The classical rabbis could not tolerate Isaiah’s insistence on a monotheism which extolled a God “who creates light and forms darkness, who makes peace and creates evil.” They instead liturgically tempered the last phrase for public consumption by substituting it for creates everything. However, for Fackenheim, when evil assumes the face of Auschwitz, it is sacrilegious to conceive of God as its Creator.
It is noteworthy that Hans Jonas, another contemporary exiled German Jewish philosopher and student of Heidegger, also resorted to kabbalistic myth in his provocative essay, The Concept of God after Auschwitz: A Jewish Voice. When confronting the incongruity between a good God and Auschwitz, rather than sacrifice the goodness that is indispensable to God’s being, he adapted the Lurianic myth of ‘contraction’ (tzimtzum) to construct a God who voluntarily surrendered His omnipotence for the sake of human freedom regardless of the evil it often entails. Fackenheim himself resorted to the notion of tzimtzum, borrowed from the chasidic master, R. Kalonymous Kalman Shapira, whose sermons delivered, transcribed, and buried in the Warsaw Ghetto, comprise a sacred artifact, attesting to spiritual resistance on par with the armed resistance of the ghetto uprising. Without contracting Himself, God’s infinite grief over the devastation would have infiltrated the world and destroyed it. Regardless, Fackenheim would agree with Jonas’ rationale for his turn to kabbalah since, “the final paradox is better protected by the symbols of myth than by the concepts of thought.” It is not surprising that in the same way the philosopher turned to mysticism when philosophical language eluded him, Primo Levi (the survivor atheist) turned to religious language when his secularism lacked the formula to convey the degree of evil he encountered in Auschwitz. In the case of the Musselman, the non-humans “who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer,” Levi describes that state of being from which all humanity had been drained as an obliteration of the tzelem Elohim, the ‘image of God’ the ‘divine spark.’
As Green shows by meticulously tracing the ever-evolving phases of his thought, Fackenheim’s claims for the revelatory source of his new commandment, endowing it with religious authority, became weaker, nearly to the point of its abandonment. However, despite its problems, I believe it remains the most powerful amalgam, pragmatically and intellectually, of theology, philosophy, and rhetoric that I know of for the benefit of Jewish survival. By elevating Holocaust evil to transcendent dimensions, he ipso facto raises acts of resistance to the same level. Accordingly, he imbues them with another central kabbalistic concept of tikkun, or mending, a notion he develops fully in his 1982 work To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Thought. Past resistance to the Nazis in diverse spiritual and physical forms provide the critical logic that opposes the “logic of destruction.” Its very occurrence provides both its possibility and a model signifying a “world-historical truth…on which rests any authentic Jewish future and any future Jewish identity.”
Green refers to concrete paradigms cited by Fackenheim of resistance mounted during the Shoah, which he considered so powerful as to provide an antidote to the ‘diabolical’ evil they confronted. A heroic act of resistance is “a novum of inexhaustible wonder, just as the Holocaust itself is a novum of inexhaustible horror.” Resistance reaches its crescendo on a national scale in the establishment of the State of Israel as the supreme fulfillment of that 614th commandment, redemptive not only for all Jews, both orthodox and secular, but universally so. As Green concludes, the resistance embodied in the heroic successes of the Zionist project flow directly from resistance effected during the Holocaust, “offering hope of survival not only to the Jews but to all mankind and hope also for restoring (belief in) God.” This idea closes the circle in the span of Fackenheim’s struggle with the fraught nihilistic implications of the Holocaust since its impetus was the Six Day War of 1967 and its looming possibility of another Holocaust that roused his theology “from its dogmatic slumber and quickly turned him toward an unyielding focus on the Holocaust.” But this transcendent notion of resistance leads to what I believe is Fackenheim’s most important legacy, not only for Jews but for a world that seeks to make sense of evil all around us, of human rights violations around the globe. Such a philosophy goes beyond mere survival of circumstance because it asserts the human right to dignity and freedom from oppression, it provides a reason; resistance is the assertion of tzelem Elohim, it is brandishing a living flame in the face of every force that seeks to obliterate the divine spark.
The absolute diabolical cosmic principle that impelled Nazism’s hatred of Jews toward its terrifying inevitable conclusion was rendered feasible because of Jewish vulnerability and age-old tenuous stateless exilic predicament. As a result, securing a national Jewish homeland is transformed from a mere geopolitical solution to powerlessness into an absolute moral necessity. Throughout his corpus Fackenheim never wavered from the categorical assertion that the state of Israel “is nothing less than an orienting reality for all Jewish and indeed all post-Holocaust thought.” His dedication to this orienting reality consummated with his own emigration from Canada (aliyah) to Israel, at great personal sacrifice, appropriating it as his own existential reality. Green’s study elucidates the philosophical scaffolding that frameworks Zionism as an ontological extension of the resistance offered during the Holocaust. The current vile and mindless chants emanating from across the entire political and social spectrum, identifying the Jewish state as evil incarnate is fueled by a noxious mix of antisemitism and consummate historical ignorance. Most would be well served to simply acquaint themselves with a modicum of Jewish history over the last two millennia leading up to the national liberation movement known as Zionism and the ultimate restoration of, and repatriation of Jews to, a Jewish republic. Those who are more philosophically inclined can do no better than to plumb Fackenheim’s oeuvre first, followed by Green’s invaluable guide to his thought, to appreciate its virtues.
Fackenheim’s philosophical theology identifying tikkun, or mending of the world, veritably with “Israel itself” is now, in the face of the growing herd of voices seeking to dismantle it, more urgent than ever. I do not refer to legitimate criticism of state policies—to which Israel is not immune—but rather anti-Zionism. What this amounts to is no less than the sole call in the world to relinquish political sovereignty of a nation that is the sole historical victim to near total extinction made possible by its very statelessness, and of the sole ancient people to reclaim its indigenous roots. Only ‘diabolical’ antisemitism can account for such animus.
Finally, Fackenheim titled the last chapter of his book What is Judaism, which he confesses he would not have been able to complete without Rabbi Shapira’s sermons, “God in the Age of Auschwitz and the Rebuilt Jerusalem.” It opens with Elie Wiesel’s patently blasphemous, yet ultimately pious, ‘death’ of God hanging in the body of a child on the gallows in Auschwitz recounted in in his autobiographical Night. It then ends with Israeli children chanting “am yisrael hai, od avinu hai, the Jewish people lives, our Father still lives,” in the streets of the State of Israel. In other words, the chapter is “crucial” because it forms the bridge between Auschwitz and Jerusalem, between a defenseless Jewish child murdered in the diaspora and a secure group of Jewish children in their homeland. It is a tightrope between a strangled God and a revived One. I do not mean even remotely to imply that a rebuilt Jerusalem somehow rationalizes the evil of Auschwitz which, as Fackenheim himself makes clear, would be an unspeakable blasphemy. I use the term ‘bridge’ in the sense of negotiating an abyss with one end tethered to the other, yet forever tenuous and in danger of collapse.
Most recently the demonic has reappeared to silence the song of am yisrael hai, od avinu hai, obscenely captured recently in the images of murder and the kidnapping of Jewish children while chanting “God is great.” Rabbi Shapira, the chasidic master who struggled to comprehend the raging evil that engulfed him in the Warsaw Ghetto to which he and his family succumbed, and Emil Fackenheim the philosopher, both enter as vital links in that bridge which dangles between a Jewish past and a viable Jewish future that remains somehow faithful to its nationhood and its God.
James A. Diamond, LL.M., PhD, is the Joseph and Wolf Lebovic Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of Waterloo. He has published widely on all areas of Jewish thought in many leading peer reviewed scholarly journals, such as Harvard Theological Review and the Journal of Religion. His books include Maimonides and the Hermeneutics of Concealment(SUNY Press), Converts, Heretics, and Lepers: Maimonides and the Outsider, (University of Notre Dame Press), Maimonides and the Shaping of the Jewish Canon (Cambridge University Press), Reinventing Maimonides in Contemporary Jewish Thought, co-authored with Menachem Kellner (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization), and Jewish Theology Unbound(Oxford University Press). He is currently completing a book titled Sermons from the Warsaw Ghetto: An Uprising of Spoken Word and Written Text to be published by the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization.
