JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

end of that paper, he acknowledged the role that Elie *Wiesel’s
autobiographical, fictional reflections might play in showing
how Jewish faith could be exposed to those horrors and yet
survive. The next spring, on March 24, 1967, at a symposium
convened by the American Jewish Committee and organized
by the editor of its journal Judaism, Steven Schwarzchild,
“Jewish Values in a Post-Holocaust Future,” Fackenheim first
formulated and presented his imperative for authentic Jewish
response to the Holocaust, what he called the 614th commandment,
“Jews are forbidden to give Hitler any posthumous victories.”
He elaborated the reasoning that led to this imperative
and its hermeneutical content in “Jewish Faith and the Holocaust,”
which appeared in Commentary and, in a slightly different
form, in the introduction to his book of essays, Quest
for Past and Future. Its argument received its most developed
form in the third chapter of God’s Presence in History, published
in 1970 and based on his 1968 Deems Lectures at New
York University.
In these central writings, Fackenheim argued that no intellectual
understanding – historical, political, theological, or
psychological – of the evil of Auschwitz is possible; the event
has no “meaning” or “purpose.” Even the most comprehensive
philosophical systems, the Hegelian system most of all,
founder on the rock of radical evil. But while no such intellectual
comprehension is satisfying and hence no intellectual
response acceptable, an existential response is necessary. No
theoretical, philosophical, or theological source, however, is
capable of framing what a genuine response should be. At this
point, thought must go to school with life; one can and must
turn to actual lived experience, during and after the event, to
grasp how Jews have responded and hence how one ought to
respond. Ongoing Jewish life, Fackenheim claims, can be interpreted
as a response to a sense of obligation or duty, and this
duty is a duty to oppose all that Nazism sought to accomplish
in its hatred of Jews and Judaism and in its rejection of human
dignity and worth. While for secular Jews, such a duty has no
ground but is accepted as binding without one, for believing
Jews, the only ground that is possible is the Voice of a Commanding
God. Hence, for them, it has the status of a divine
command, alongside but not superseding the other, traditional
613 Biblical commandments. It is, in his famous formulation,
a 614th commandment.
Fackenheim had arrived at this imperative of resistance
to Nazi purposes, this duty of genuine post-Holocaust Jewish
existence, alongside an ongoing reflection on revelation and
modernity and as an expression of a newly appreciated necessity
of exposing faith and obligation to a post-Holocaust situation.
His journey had capitalized on several crucial insights.
One was that after Auschwitz, as he put it, even Hegel would
not be a Hegelian, i.e., that Auschwitz was a case of evil for
evil’s sake and was therefore unassimilable to any prior conceptual
system. Even the most systematic philosophic thought
was historically situated and was ruptured by the horrors of
the death camps. Second was the commitment to existential-dialectical
thinking about the human condition and to
fackenheim, emil
its hermeneutical character. Third was the recognition that
while Auschwitz threatened all prior systems, ways of life,
and beliefs, Judaism must and could survive exposure to it.
The work of Elie Wiesel and Wiesel’s life itself confirmed this
hope and this realization.
In the 1970s Fackenheim’s thought extended the lines
of thinking that we have summarized. First, in his book Encounters
Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy he explored
how modern philosophy had ignored or distorted Judaism and
had exposed its own inadequacies in so doing. Second, he applied
the framework just described to a variety of themes –
most notably to the State of Israel, its reestablishment and defense,
but also to the belief in God, the relationship between
Jews and Christians, and the necessity of struggling against
all attempts to diminish human dignity and the value of human
life. These efforts continued throughout his life and in
effect amount to a ramification of the interpretation of the
614th commandment, for Jews, Christians, philosophers, historians,
Germans, and others. Finally, he turned to important
philosophical problems with his existential and hermeneutical
argument. The crucial problem had to do with the possibility
of performing the imperative of resistance or, as one
might put it, the possibility of confronting the radical threat
of rupture and not giving way to total despair. This was to become
the central problem of his magnum opus, To Mend the
World, published in 1983 (with new introductory material in
1987 and again in 1993).
In the earlier period, culminating in 1970, Fackenheim
had argued from the necessity of the commandment or imperative
to its possibility, either on Kantian grounds, that
duty entails the freedom to perform it, or on Rosenzweigian
grounds, that along with the commandments that God grants
in an act of grace, He also gives humankind out of the same
love the freedom to perform them. By the late 1970s Fackenheim
had come to see the extent to which both responses
failed to respect the victims of the Nazi horrors. In the crucial
chapter of To Mend the World, he systematically and dialectically
explores the agency of evil and its victims, in order
to arrive at a moment when the victim’s lucid understanding
grasps the whole of horror, and yet reacts to it and in opposition
to it with surprise. He confirms this intellectual grasp with
an emblematic case of victims of the camps and the atrocities,
who both see clearly what they are being subjected to, what
the evil is, and sense a duty to oppose it in their life. He then
goes on to claim that this episode constitutes an ontological
ground of resistance, and that Judaism, through the idea of a
cosmic rupture and a human act that respects and yet opposes
it, what is called in the Jewish mystical tradition (Kabbalah)
tikkun olam, provides philosophy with a concept essential to
grasp the possibility of genuine post-Holocaust life. To Mend
the World proceeds to apply these lessons in three domains –
philosophy, Christianity, and Jewish existence, in each case
locating an emblematic case of tikkun (mending or repair)
that respects the evil of Auschwitz as a total and unqualified
rupture and yet finds a route to hope and recovery. Hegel, he
ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 6 673