I am in the philosophy section of the University of Toronto bookstore, looking for something by Hannah Arendt, whom I studied under in the 1960s. “Thanks for that column today,” says a man beside me. “You might like this book by Agamben, on states of exception.” The newspaper column he’s referring to was on torture and “the new normal” since 9/11. He hands me the volume and leaves. It’s slim and costs $13.85. I replace it and go, but as I cross College Street I realize it’s about something that has been preoccupying me, so I return.
That night, I wake at three and read it. Giorgio Agamben, an Italian prof, writes that the “state of exception,” also called state of siege, martial law, or state of emergency, has been common since World War I. In Canada, it was called the War Measures Act (now the Emergencies Act), and it was last invoked in 1970, on the day I returned from a student decade in the US. Agamben traces it back through history, including Germany’s Weimar Republic, pre-Hitler. He quotes Walter Benjamin on exception as the new normal. He even mentions Taubes. That would be Jacob Taubes, with whom I did my MA in religion before moving on to philosophy. Nobody quotes Taubes. The night of the blackout in 1965, I found him humming nigunim in the dark in his office — he came from a line of rabbis. We wandered Broadway, stepping into candlelit bars. But I digress. I was talking about the idea of uniqueness, or exception, associated for me with the Holocaust.
Among Toronto Jews in the 1950s, the Holocaust was inescapable. At Holy Blossom Temple, the grade threes did a unit on it. They composed a letter from someone their age in Nazi Germany. “Hello cousin Jake,” wrote one eight-year-old. “Here in Germany things are bad. There is an awful man named Hitler. He should be called Shitler.” They gathered on a sunny Sunday morning to hear a shaliach, an emissary from Israel, say, “The world is finally learning, through Israel, that Jewish blood costs as much as anyone’s.” Outside stood the stolid homes of Forest Hill. We were comfortable scions of a people for whom, as Shylock said, “sufferance is the badge.” It was hard to reconcile.
Gradually, the Holocaust acquired that centrality for more and more people. Every crisis evoked it. One had to learn from Munich to prevent another Auschwitz, and so on. It was used to justify interventions in Kosovo and Iraq. Saddam Hussein was worse than Hitler. Osama bin Laden was like Hitler and Stalin — it was as if one could not act until the action had been linked with Holocaust terminology.
But I don’t mean to cover the vast cultural space occupied by the Holocaust — its history as an idea. I want to focus on something smaller: its more compact autobiography in individual cases, in order to explore how the private itineraries of ideas can illuminate them. If that seems obvious — hey, who I am affects what I think — I don’t mean it as modestly as it sounds. Ideas have been treated deferentially in the Western tradition, from Plato, for whom they actually existed in another realm, to our age of experts, with authority in their “fields”: politics, sports, terrorism. There has also been a backlash, in extreme versions of postmodernism, as if ideas have no integrity apart from personal agendas. I want to examine this, not in theory, but through a particular example — the Holocaust — in my experience.
I became a teenage religious existentialist under the influence of philosopher and rabbi Emil Fackenheim. I met him at Holy Blossom, where he taught Jewish thought. I hung around there during adolescence as some kids hung around the mall, because I was trying to avoid home and my difficult dad. (So I now think. Who really knows?) We were a precocious lot, and Heinz Warschauer, the education director, thought challenging us might keep us involved “post-confirmation.” It did. We were enthralled by Emil’s accent, gentle manner, impish look, cigars, and redoubtable mind. We had Emil contests to see who could mimic him. We’d phone each other and pretend to be Emil. But his ideas dazzled me most. He believed in God, no apologies, yet was clearly brilliant. He even allowed for divine revelation and immortality. I’d thought those were reserved for the aged and the credulous. It even had scandal value: insisting on spiritual meaning in our crass, acquisitive community. I went for it.
I’d ride my bike to his duplex. I never said I was coming. I used to show up on people’s doorsteps, in search, I think, of parent proxies. You don’t call ahead for an appointment with your dad. Emil always invited me up. We’d sit in his study and talk about his latest book: philosophy of religion from Kant to Kierkegaard. I grasped little, but his attention and respect were precious.
He was ordained in Nazi Germany but escaped to the UK. When war broke out, he was interned as an enemy alien and sent to Canada with other German nationals, including Nazis. They were all held in camps. On his release, he rabbied for a while but got a Ph.D. in philosophy and began an academic career. In the camp, he met Heinz, who gloomily presided over the Holy B. school and convinced Emil to write a textbook on Jewish theology. It explored arguments for God’s existence and Jewish survival, among other things. Emil belonged to a mid-century surge of religious existentialism that challenged such smug modern verities as progress and rationality in the wake of the war and the Holocaust. It took categories like sin and God seriously. He wrote in magazines like Commentary. To me, it meant you could be brilliant, outrageous, and famous.
In class, the Holocaust might arise while discussing, say, morality. Then Emil would tell us it had been a unique historical event. “Because it was evil for evil’s sake,” he’d almost whisper, more hypnotically than ever. As evidence, he argued that the resources needed for mass murder undermined the German war effort and diverted scarce materials from military use. The Nazis knew it but persisted. It was unreasonable, he said, and self-destructive. It proved the Holocaust was evil. It served no other end.
This argument fascinated me. It stayed with me long after we lost touch — as if it held a meaning I’d finally discern if I turned it over and over, as the Talmud says one should do with the Torah. Perhaps we all have intellectual touchstones — arguments, images, phrases — that seize us and that we in turn seize.
I wondered, even then, if the Nazis really were irrational. Perhaps they employed a bizarre logic. If Jews were the ultimate cancer, a germ infecting the species, then destroying them might trump such short-term goals as military victory. If it looked likely that they’d lose the war, as it did once the US entered, there might even be a ghastly selflessness in trying to destroy the viral race — even as one perished. It all followed only, of course, if you granted the inane premises: that race exists in a meaningful way; that it is the chief determiner of global history; that there is such a thing as global history; that individual lives matter little compared with grand patterns; and that Jews are a vile race. None of this shook my sense of the Holocaust as a unique horror. But it made me think; it set me up to ask other questions in coming years. The trick, I now feel, lies in figuring out the questions that were on your mind, which led you to accept or reject certain answers or attitudes. What is bugging you. What was bugging me?
During the 1960s, Emil attended yearly gatherings in the Laurentians of like-minded Jewish thinkers. There, he said, he met the high priest of Auschwitz. It was Elie Wiesel. Wiesel’s readiness to confront the Holocaust stunned Emil. I went one year, as part of a small “youth” contingent. On a long walk, Emil told me he realized that for twenty years he had been trying to clear a place for faith after Auschwitz, yet all along he’d failed to tackle faith’s main stumbling block: the Holocaust.
It was a turning point. He finished a book on Hegel and began writing about faith — not so much after Auschwitz as in its harsh shadow. He also declared that there was now a 614th commandment (the traditional number of laws in the Torah is 613) — Emil later sometimes called it the eleventh commandment — for Jews after Auschwitz: thou shalt not allow Hitler posthumous victories. Emil said that had been his purpose in all he had written on faith: denying Hitler another triumph. His life and thought were permanently recast. I suppose that happens in life. But for most intellectuals, the existential fulcrum tends to become obscured until only the abstract conclusions are visible. The biographical elements get hived off from the conceptual results. Emil took the opposite route. From then on, he wrote everything based on who he was and what he had lived through.
In June 1967, Emil despairingly watched the outburst of war between Israel and the Arab states. He feared Hitler was about to win another victory. Then Israel suddenly and totally triumphed. In our conversations at the time, it seemed clear to me that Emil felt that was in some sophisticated sense a miracle, that God had intervened. The presence of God in history was part of his theology. He did not affirm literal revelation of scripture, but he believed in an existential encounter between the “Eternal Thou” and the Jewish people. It was a bold way to introduce a transcendent quality into worldly reality. Applied to the Middle East in 1967, though, it was risky. For to claim that Israel owed victory to divine intervention, one had to accept the version of events provided by Israeli officials and the Western media — and that was questionable. Perhaps Israel had not been so exposed. What if its resources were in fact superior, and its leaders knew that but for strategic reasons claimed the situation was dire? In that case, Emil’s anxiety and that of others, including me, was due to propaganda, and there was no need for intercession from above. He had begun moving down a dangerous path, placing his faith at the mercy of diplomatic and journalistic exercises.
We stayed close. When I left to study in the US and Israel, he handed me on to others, who handed me on to others. In 1964, he officiated at my wedding. He gave an exquisite Midrash, a rabbinic sermon, on marriage. It was one reason I stayed in an ill-starred marriage as long as I did — the sad thought of him preaching in vain.
