The Historiography of the Holocaust

472 Josh Cohen
After Auschwitz, the creation of the state portends a recovery of pre-Biblical
paganism: ‘Increasingly, Israel’s return to the earth elicits a return to the archaic
earth religion of ancient Palestine.’ This return, moreover, far from being counterhistorical,
is ‘fully in keeping with the twentieth century’s return to primal origins
and primal circularities’ (AA, p. 205; Rubinstein’s emphasis). The restoration of
the Land to the People of Israel is a restoration of immanence to the Divine,
and ‘of humanity...to its only true hearth – the bosom of Mother Earth’ (AA,
p. 209). 6 As such, it is symptomatic of a more general world-cultural movement
against the estrangement wrought by technological modernity.
If this neo-pagan god dwells in phenomenal nature rather than a noumenal
super-nature, Rubinstein is none the less careful, particularly in his more
recent essays, not to represent Him as a determinate and incarnate form.
Indeed, it is in his attempt to reimagine the Divine that he identifies some
valuable motifs in Jewish tradition, notably the Kabbalistic ‘En-Sof, that which
is without limit or end’ (AA, p. 298). As infinite Source or Ground of Being that
conditions all, but cannot be identified with any finite being, God is ‘no-thing ...
the dark unnameable Abyss’ (AA, p. 298).
The explicit echo of Heidegger here is unmistakable. As that which is simultaneously
radically distinct and indissociable from finite being, Heideggerian
Being perhaps lends itself to this rewriting as immanent God of nature. Yet an
ambiguity attaches itself to Rubinstein’s use of Heidegger; if Being is the infinite
Ground that refuses identification with any entity, it is also the primordial
origin or omphalos from which humanity finds itself estranged. As the primary
agent through which the people of Israel overcome this estrangement, the
state of Israel is the condition for the recovery of this lost origin. Rubinstein
himself makes the link between Zionism and Heidegger unambiguously:
One of the most important but least noticed aspects of Zionism is the extent
to which it represents a Jewish expression of the twentieth century’s urge to
return to primal origins. This is evident in many of the cultural endeavours
of our times. In philosophy, Martin Heidegger has characterized his thought
as an attempt to get behind more than two thousand years of European
philosophy’s estrangement from ‘Being’. (AA, p. 201)
The diagnosis of estrangement from Being authorizes Zionism not in ethical or
political but in sacral terms; the Land of Israel is the authentic repository of
Being to which the state grants the people access. Rubinstein’s radical shift in
theological orientation is intended to escape the theodicy into which, as he sees
it, we are inexorably led by the traditional Biblical concept of God as Redeemer
of History.
Yet Rubinstein’s transformed ‘immanent’ God of the earth fails to escape
the temptations of theodicy. As holy Abyss, God remains the source, if not