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Covenant, History, and the Holocaust: Revisiting Emil Fackenheim's Jewish Philosophy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2016
Extract
In the twentieth century, historical circumstance in the form of the Holocaust led to theodicy's returning to the forefront of the philosophical agenda, particularly in Jewish thought. As a result, post-Holocaust theology is almost always an element of introductory courses on modern and contemporary Jewish philosophy, if not introductory courses on modern Judaism simpliciter. Many working in the field of Jewish philosophy, therefore, probably first encounter Emil Fackenheim (1916–2003), and the infamous turn of phrase that ensured his immortality in the realm of Jewish thought, early on in their studies. Fackenheim was one of the most influential post-Holocaust philosophical voices in what soon became a cacophony. This German-born philosopher's (and ordained Reform rabbi's) concept of the 614th commandment—not to grant Hitler a posthumous victory (in his own words “the only statement of mine that ever became famous”)—has captured the imagination of many a student and often made a lasting impression. Yet it seems that one of the concerns at the forefront of this new expansive monograph on Fackenheim's philosophy is that for the majority, this constitutes both their first and last exposure to his thought, leaving them with an extremely contracted view of his conceptual palate. The result, noted in the book's introduction, is that Fackenheim has never really been considered a Jewish philosopher worthy of mention in the same breath as Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, or even latterly Emmanuel Levinas and Joseph Soloveitchik. In this volume, a case is presented for including him on that list.
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- Review Essay*
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- Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 2016
Footnotes
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Michael L. Morgan, Fackenheim's Jewish Philosophy: An Introduction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013). 416 pp. $85.00 hb. $34.95 pb. Page references to Morgan's book appear in parentheses in the text.
References
1 Fackenheim, Emil, To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994) 10Google Scholar.
2 It is a little surprising that he never actually engaged with any of these thinkers. As Morgan points out, he simply never read most of them, though he may have read Gadamer and Ricoeur by the early 1980’s (352 n. 2).
3 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 5.
4 While the book generally makes Fackenheim's thought accessible without sacrificing rigor, the Hegel chapter in particular is likely to be a challenge for those without a prior philosophical background.
5 Seeskin, Kenneth, “Emil Fackenheim,” in Interpreters of Judaism in the Late Twentieth Century (ed. Katz, Steven T.; Washington, DC: B'nai B'rith Books, 1993) 42Google Scholar. Morgan notes, though disagrees with, those according to whom Fackenheim was engaged in rhetoric or literature rather than philosophy from the late 1960’s onward (247).
6 The centrality of the interplay between transcendence and historicism in Fackenheim's thought also features prominently in Fackenheim: Philosopher, Theologian, Jew (ed. Sharon Portnoff, James A. Diamond, and Martin D. Yaffe; Leiden: Brill, 2008), one of two strong and relatively recent collections of essays on Fackenheim's work, the other being The Philosopher as Witness: Fackenheim and Responses to the Holocaust (ed. Michael L. Morgan and Benjamin Pollock; Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008).
7 The parallels between these figures are somewhat less surprising given that they were part of a group of Jewish thinkers who emerged in the US in the late 1950’s and 1960’s. See Morgan, Michael, Beyond Auschwitz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar chapter 3. The use of the term “group” here is not only figurative. All of them participated in meetings convened by Hartman and Irving Greenberg in the late 1960’s. See Cooper, Simon, Contemporary Covenantal Thought: Interpretations of Covenant in the Thought of David Hartman and Eugene Borowitz (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2012) 47–58Google Scholar. Elie Wiesel also mentions one of these meetings in his foreword to Fackenheim: Philosopher, Theologian, Jew, and in the first edition of God's Presence in History, Fackenheim acknowledges the group as the forum in which he first delivered the paper on which the book was based. See Fackenheim, Emil, God's Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections (New York: New York University Press, 1970) vGoogle Scholar.
8 Hartman, David, A Living Covenant (New York: The Free Press, 1985) 14Google Scholar.
9 Soloveitchik, Joseph B., “Majesty and Humility,” Tradition 17.2 (1978) 25–37Google Scholar, at 25. Again, Eugene Borowitz's covenantal theology contains similar, if somewhat less pronounced, dialectical elements. See Cooper, Contemporary Covenantal Thought, 212–17.
10 Soloveitchik, “Majesty and Humility,” 26.
11 Soloveitchik, “Majesty and Humility,” 25–26 [italics added].
12 Fackenheim, Emil, The Jewish Return into History (New York: Schocken, 1978) 31Google Scholar.
13 Ibid., 24.
14 We will later return, however, to the question of whether such rhetorical choices are quite so “mere.”
15 Fackenheim, Emil, Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy (New York: Basic Books, 1973) 157Google Scholar [italics in original].
16 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 15.
17 Benjamin Pollock, “Thought Going to School with Life: Fackenheim's Last Philosophical Testament,” in Fackenheim: Philosopher, Theologian, Jew, 55–88, at 82.
18 Pollock writes of this idea of ontologically basic resistance as being “the category of human knowing or thinking that grounds the possibility of resistance to radical evil in life,” and the Holocaust, as the most radical evil of all for Fackenheim, would be the first time this “category” had revealed itself. See Pollock, “Thought Going to School with Life,” 74.
19 Michael Oppenheim, “Between Halle and Jerusalem,” in Fackenheim: Philosopher, Theologian, Jew, 25–41, at 33.
20 Even Morgan's account of Fackenheim's early understanding of Kant seems open to a phenomenological reading. According to Morgan, Fackenheim treats Kant's postulates of reason, particularly the immortality of the soul and the existence of God, not as theoretical resolutions to conflicts in Kant's system, but he instead writes that “believing in the soul's immortality and God's existence expresses them” (89).
21 Marx, Karl, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings (ed. McLellan, David; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) 156–58Google Scholar, at 158.
22 Given the immense influence of Rosenzweig on Fackenheim, it is interesting to note that in his 2009 monograph Benjamin Pollock puts forward a parallel view of Rosenzweig's conception of philosophy, according to which human redemptive activity is the task of philosophy. System becomes a program for us to attempt to realize rather than a solution or a set of answers. Thus, Pollock argues that The Star of Redemption is dedicated to what he calls “the task of system,” which involves knowledge that “at once directs [its readers] toward realizing the redemptive unity of that very ‘All’ through the actions, decisions, and relations of concrete life” (Pollock, Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of Philosophy [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009] 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar [italics added]).
23 Indeed, this might in part explain the view taken by some that after the Holocaust this promising philosopher took a wrong turn.
24 Elie Wiesel, foreword to Fackenheim: Philosopher, Theologian, Jew, xi–xiii, at xiii.
25 I am grateful to David Shatz for helping me to clarify my thoughts regarding the issues discussed in this section.