Emil L. Fackenheim: A Jewish Philosopher's Response to the Holocaust (review)

David Patterson's new book addresses a need long felt by a number of us working in Jewish Studies. Alongside Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Emmanuel Levinas, and others, Emil Fackenheim has been among a handful of European Jewish thinkers inviting us (implicitly or explicitly) to engage what is undoubtedly the most important event of modern Jewish history, if not of Jewish history, since 586 BCE. His conception of a "614th Commandment" and his reflections in To Mend the World and elsewhere have profoundly altered our thinking. And yet their implications have rarely been developed. "[O]f all the thinkers to attempt a philosophical response to the Holocaust—German, Jewish, or otherwise," Patterson notes, "Emil Fackenheim was the most prolific and the most profound…Fackenheim saw the philosophical implications of the Event for Jewish thought, for Judaism, for the Jewish people, for and the State of Israel—and for philosophy itself" (xiii). Patterson styles his volume less as an account or critique of Fackenheim's ideas than a stepping through the gateway they open for us, undertaking "the task of incorporating his thinking into an understanding of the Shoah that may take us to yet another level, an understanding of what went into its making, and of what it might mean for the future of Jewish life and Jewish thought" (xiii).

Patterson pursues this goal in seven chapters. In his "Introduction," he lays out the core from which the rest follows. The singularity of the Holocaust derives not from its "unprecedented nature," "the exterminationist policy of a modern state," "the development of technology for purposes of murder," or "the criminalization of Jewish being"—as countless historians have argued—but from "its metaphysical dimensions as an instance of divine revelation in the midst of a human assault upon the divine" (24). Nazism proceeded "not just by eliminating the divine prohibition against murder through the extermination of the ancient Jewish testimony to it" but equally "by making murder a defining principle of the National Socialist worldview" (24). "The murder camp," Fackenheim writes, "was not an accidental by-product of the Nazi empire. It was its pure essence" (24). Because Nazism, for Fackenheim, "idolatrously identifies finiteness and infinitude, it is an idealism totally without ideals," a "modern idolatry" that "is the result of a thinking about human autonomy that in principle renders revelation impossible" (24). Hence, Fackenheim's "614th commandment": the refusal to allow Hitler a posthumous victory by "a retrieval or mending of the Voice from Sinai that forbids murder" (24).

Philosophy is clearly central to this discussion. The speculative ontological tradition that begins with Socrates and the Greeks and reaches its contemporary apogee in the work of Martin Heidegger (a "card-carrying, unrepentant Nazi" who failed to acknowledge "the Dasein or being-there" of a people "the Nazis sought to erase") is at once for Fackenheim the problem and the solution. Devoted since Seneca to reason, to eliminating doubt by substituting the egoistic mind for God, and, since Kant and Hegel, to substituting the universal category for the concrete human being, philosophy also holds within its hands the remedy: namely, to think the world not as nihilist philosophers have done, but with Franz Rosenzweig's understanding of creation, revelation, and redemption, or the biblical understanding of the covenantal God of Abraham, or the classical rabbinical understanding of teshuvah (not simply "repentance," but the abandonment of sin and the return to God), or with tikkun haolam as Fackenheim proposes it (the mending or healing or restitution of the world).

Fackenheim is after nothing less than "the recovery of God's life in this world and with it our own" (25). Thus, tikkun for him implies "(1) the recovery of Jewish tradition; (2) the recovery from an illness"; and (3) a commitment to a certain open-endedness in both endeavors. Recovering tradition means recovering "the category of the holy"; the illness is "the indifference that has rendered humanity deaf to the cry of the other...