Open Wounds: The Crisis of Jewish Thought in the Aftermath of the Holocaust

7. Jewish Thought and a Post-Holocaust Tikkun Haolam

7 Jewish Thought and a Post-Holocaust Tikkun Haolam Every Mitzvah aims to make a dwelling-place for God in the world—to bring God to the light within the world, not above it. A Mitzvah seeks to find God in the natural, not the supernatural. —R. Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Torah Studies A few years ago, I visited Emil Fackenheim at his home in Jerusalem, as was my custom whenever I was in the Holy City. I was sitting on the side of his good ear, listening to him discuss his engagement with the Holocaust. Suddenly he fell silent. His lower lip began to tremble. Tears rolled down his cheeks. “I just realized what I’ve been trying to do for the last thirty-five years,” he said, his voice hushed in desperation. “I’ve been trying to undo it. But I can’t . . . I can’t!” In these simple words, Fackenheim expressed the profound longing that overwhelms so many students and scholars of the Holocaust: we want to undo it. Failing that, we want to fix it. Indeed, we want to fix the world itself, realizing as we do that Auschwitz is not some historical tragedy that we can put behind us. This breaking of the body of Israel has left the world itself broken. And there is no getting over it. Like the ashes of its dead, Auschwitz is in us, and it will not leave us alone: it nags. The longing to fix it is a longing to mend not only the world but also the soul and 173 substance of who we are. And because our broken humanity begins with the Jews, we look to a term from the Jewish tradition: we look to a tikkun haolam, a mending of the world. Even where there is little concern for ways in which Hebrew might inform post-Holocaust thought, many turn to this Hebrew concept for the notion most needful. With the Holocaust, however, there occurs a breach in thought and tradition that occludes our hearing and alters our understanding of this most needful notion. Prior to that breach, the mending of creation fell within categories that belonged to an intelligible world, where relationships among human beings were linked to a higher relation. Even in times of tragedy, there was still a general sense of high and low by which the tragic took on meaning. But with the Holocaust, tragedy itself is undermined : an antiworld inserts itself into the world, in an assault against every form of the meaning, truth, and sanctity that would distinguish human and Divine being. “Throughout the ages,” Fackenheim points out, “pious Jews have died saying the Shema Yisrael—‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One’ (Deuteronomy 6:4). The Nazi murder machine was systematically designed to stifle this Shema Yisrael on Jewish lips before it murdered Jews themselves.”1 Stifling the “Hear, O Israel,” the antiworld threatens the hearing and the response most essential to tikkun haolam. And yet the phrase tikkun haolam itself has been broken and abused by most who use it, both among Christians and among Jews. True, the words mean a “repair” or “mending of the world.” But most thinkers use the term in a purely social and moral sense, without addressing what it means in its original contexts of Jewish teaching and tradition. More than invoking a moral order or a renewed social consciousness, in the Jewish tradition tikkun haolam refers to the process of making God, world, and humanity, and the relationships that bind them together, once again hale, whole, and holy. Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan describes it as the removal of “the barriers that prevent us from hearing God’s voice.”2 Therefore, if it does not attend to the commanding Voice of Hashem—in prayer and in Torah study, as well as in good deeds—it is not tikkun haolam. The phrase, moreover, has meanings and shades of meaning rooted in the talmudic and mystical traditions, which, even if rendered problematic by the Shoah, must nevertheless inform Jewish thought in the 174 Jewish Thought and a Post-Holocaust Tikkun Haolam aftermath of Auschwitz if that thinking is indeed to be Jewish. Otherwise , we have no sense of what has changed or what to do about it. Further , if we are to open up the mystical teachings, we can do so only by first establishing some understanding of...