Fackenhiem and Kristallnacht - Talk Given at the opening of the Weiner Library Exhibition 'Shattered'

I was invited to speak at the opening of the new Weiner Library exhibition - Shattered - on Kristallnacht.

Following some initial remarks, this is the body of my talk.

I want to talk about the survivor of Kristallnacht who has had the most powerful impact on how I think about the Holocaust - actually how I think about pretty well everything.

Emil Fackenheim was a post-doctoral student in philosophy in Halle at the time - Halle - the birthplace of Hayden - he writes in his memoirs - also the birthplace of Heydrich - the architect of the Final Solution.

In the afterword to a Festschrift in his honour - published in the 1990s he writes -

On 9^th November, 1938 synagogues were set on fire all over Germany. Among the thousands of Jews carried off to concentration camps were my father, my younger brought and I: [Emil was taken to Sachenhausen for three months until he was released and managed to escape first to Scotland, then Canada]: in the big house in Halle, my mother was alone. Our family’s best friends, the Lewins, suggested that she move in with them, and this she did. Why, alone of all Halle’s Jewish males, aged 16 and over, was Curt Lewin untouched? He was protected by his neighbour, none other than [Rudolf] Heydrich, so that for several weeks, my mother lived under the same roof with the coldest, most ruthless, most systematic of all the destroyers.’[1]

I wanted to know more about  Fackenheim’s memories of that fateful night - and where better to come than the Weiner Library. Happily, you have a copy of his memoir - An Epitaph for German Judaism - on your catalogue. Rather unhappily the copy seems to have been lost. In a sad way, it’s a little typical. Fackenheim is remembered - if remembered at all for only one idea, in a book published in 1978. He felt that a book published 16 years later, about a much more powerful idea was the true distillation of over 50 years grappling with the thought-challenge of the Holocaust.

Here’s the problem.

Millions were brutally murdered, babies were thrown, alive, into burning pits. Kristallnacht, in its awfulness, was merely a taste of things to come. The list of horrors is unremitting and uncompromising in its awfulness, and if we - as human beings reveal ourselves of capable of such awfulness - and we have - what is the point of everything.

In this later and pivotal book, To Mend the World, Fackenheim quotes twice this passage from the great Christian existentialist, Soren Kiekergaard. He uses the same the passage again as the epigram in his reply to the articles published in his honour in the Festschrift.

Should we say, ‘There have elapsed now nearly two thousand years since those days, such a horror the world never saw before and never again will see; we thank God that we live in peace and security, that the screams of anguish from those days reach us only very faintly; we will hope and believe that our days and those of our children may pass in quietness unaffected by the storms of existence? We do not feel strong enough to reflect on such things, but are ready to thank God that we are not subjected to such trials.’ Can anything be imagined more cowardly and more disconsolate than such talk? Is then the inexplicable explained by that that it occurred only once in the world? Or is not this the inexplicable, that it did occur? And has not this fact, that it did occur, the power to make everything inexplicable, even the most explicable events.[2]

This is the problem of the Holocaust. If small babies were thrown, alive, into the furnace - and they were[3]... If the awfulness of Kristallnacht was only the precursor of what was to come - and it was... then what is the point? What is the point of any of it all? What’s the point of a Chanukiyah lit to remind Jews of their triumph in a military campaign some 2000 years earlier. What, frankly, is the point of a library to document quite how bad it was and whether it was Franz or Heinz who died on this day or that. Doesn’t everything, Fackenheim is tormented by the notion, lapse into in-authenticity when facing the Holocaust?

That’s a question to make you swallow hard.

Fackenheim suggests his problem is the ‘brute facticity,’[4] of the Holocaust - ‘A spectre haunts my thoughts [he writes] - the spectre of historicism.’[5]

Over there, in that corner, is a scrap of a report from a clandestine resistance organisation, smuggled out of Germany in a shampoo sachet. Does it matter - it didn’t help?

Over there, are the reports of the JCIO, carefully detailing the testimony of those who were there and personally witnessed the destruction of the Holocaust. Does it matter?

If Fackenheim’s first foray in post-Holocaust thought began with the question;

In the face of the Holocaust what should the authentic Jew do and why?[6]

Over the decades that followed his interests shifted to the more inchoate and more universal problem;

Can there ever be an authentic response, in the face of the Holocaust?[7]

To Mend the World is full of historical excurses into the Holocaust. But Fackenheim finds something truly precious in the rubble of the destruction of European Jewry. He finds the very building blocks of a response. Auschwitz brings us all to a halt. But it is not the end of our tale, rather, its beginning. As Fackenheim says;

It is at this point that our going-to-school-with-life … begins in earnest…And only in [the] context of [engaging with the destruction of the Holocaust] can the “central question” of our whole inquiry be both asked and answered.[8]

History provides not only the ‘Q’, but also the ‘A’.

Central to Fackenheim’s commitment to look to the dark places of history until the darkness becomes its own source of possibility. It brings, if not a downright epiphany, then at least its own reward. We have his record of the moment.

[While studying the story of Pelagia Lewinska[9]] I made what to me was, and still is, a momentous discovery: that while religious thinkers were vainly struggling for a response to Auschwitz, Jews throughout the world had been responding all along … with an unexpected will to live – with under the circumstances, an incredible commitment to Jewish group survival.[10]

The answer, claims Fackenheim, was there all along, waiting in history for someone to come and find it.

The evil of the Holocaust world is philosophically intelligible after Auschwitz in the exact sense in which it was already understood in Auschwitz – and Buchenwald, Lublin and the Warsaw Ghetto – by the resisting victims themselves… No deeper or more ultimate grasp is possible for philosophical thought that comes … after the event. This grasp – their grasp – is epistemologically ultimate.[11]

Lewinska, who discovered that in the face of Nazi de-humanisation she felt commanded never to surrender her humanity, becomes the model for the possibility of choosing a path of ‘faithfulness unto death.’[12] The Buchenwald Hasidim, who swapped FOUR rations of bread for a pair of tefilin, become the paradigm for the possibility of retaining categories of commandedness[13] in a post-Auschwitz world. Shimon Dubnov was the greatest historian of hasidism, at the time of the Holocaust. This is Professor Ismar Schorsch, former Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary where I received my Rabbinic education,

No Jewish historian ever had a greater impact on his time than Simon Dubnov. He died at the hands of the Nazis in Riga in December 1941 at the age of 81. Because he was too frail and infirm to deport, they shot him in the ghetto. Those who witnessed the murder reported that Dubnov's last words were, "Jews, write it down." And they did, in Kovno, Warsaw, Lodz and elsewhere. In his spirit, Jews organized collective and clandestine efforts to record the terrifying faces of the Final Solution. Unarmed and unaided, they found solace in assembling the evidence that would one day convict their mass murderers in the court of human history. Dubnov died as he had lived, devoted to the power of historical consciousness.[14]

Fackenheim would say Dubnow - and those unnamed heroes who dedicated their lives, sometimes quite literally, to documenting the Holocaust from within the Holocaust - within the thing itself - did something else, they justified documentation as an authentic response to the brute facticity of the Shoah.

It’s not that these heroes of research and record thought that they could undo the horrors of the Holocaust, and certainly not that they didn’t know exactly what was going on. They knew the futility of their action and were aware of their all-but-certain-death; ‘they knew it, but they did it.’[15] This, claims Fackenheim, was holy, authentic and meaningful. And whereas before this epiphany we feared there could be no authentic response in the face of the rupture of such horror, once an archetypal reaction is discovered to be authentic the path is open for other possible responses. Notwithstanding the futility of life and the failure of piety and the certainty of death in our contemporary existence, we too are capable of achieving holiness, authenticity – even meaning.

My heart was struck by the wonderful testimonies, over there, and collected in that wonderful volume - honour to recognise the work of Ruth Levitt and so many others associated with the Library in its production.

Fackenheim uses a very Jewish term for the category of an authentic response to the utter catastrophe of the Holocaust. The term is Tikkun - it means to mend or repair, but he means it very specifically in the context of Lurianic Kabbalah

Tikkun follows Shvirah.

Brokenness - I wonder - and if you can find the copy of Fackenheims Epitaph to German Jewry, I would love to come back and check - I wonder if the brokenness of that awful night of broken glass close on 80 years ago may be more integral to the thought of this bravest of thinkers on the Holocaust than has been so far realised.

That brings me back to this wonderful Chanukiayh - the point about a flame is that it is fragile. We don’t light a flame at Chanukah - and the family of Helen especially - don’t light a flame because we know it is always going to be OK in the end. We light it, authentically, because we know of the fragility and the brokenness. And we still believe in the light that can be shed. For that authentic refusal to surrender to the awfulness of the darkness, of the darkness of that night - and the darkness of everything that followed - I gain huge succour. So to you all, thank you.

---

[1] P.254-255

[2] P. 251, attributed to Kierkegaard, Either/Or (1959) II pp 344 ff

[3] Cited in Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Future Jewish Thought (New York: Schocken, 1982), hereafter MW, p. 212. Op cit p.340 n. 15 offers a fuller bibliographic citation for this testimony.

[4] F. German Philosophy & Jewish Thought ed Greenspan & Nicholson, A Reply to My Critics p.276

[5] p.274

[6] The driving question of Emil Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History (New York, Harper & Row, 1970), hereafter GPH.

[7] The driving question of MW. This framework is based on Morgan’s “The Central Problem of Fackenheim’s To Mend The World” Journal of Jewish Thought (1996) 5:297-312 at p. 299.

[8] MW 23-24.

[9] Auschwitz survivor and author of Twenty Months At Auschwitz (London, Lyle Stuart Inc., 1968)

[10] Emil Fackenheim, The Quest for Past and Future (Bloomington, IN, Beacon, 1968) pp. 19-20

[11] MW p. 248.

[12] GPH p. 74, see discussion of Lewinska in MW pp25, 217, 219, 223, 229, 248, 302.

[13] Though the notion of commandedness is clearly central for Fackenheim he does not advocate the wholesale importation of pre-Modern Halachic norms into a post-Holocaust world. The notion that the ‘religious Jew who has stayed with his God may be forced into new, possibly revolutionary relationships with Him’ is a central tenant of Fackenheim’s self-claimed canonical statement of the Commanding Voice of Auschwitz, GPH p. 84. See discussion of the Buchenwald Hasidim in MW pp.218, 223, 229, 254 & 303.

[14]  http://www.jtsa.edu/the-power-of-jewish-history

[15] MW 266-267.

The Bet is Still On - Yizkor Yom Kippur 5778

The best book I’ve read in the last year is an oddly named book by the French writer, Laurent Binet. It’s called HHhH.[1] In part HHhH is the story of the Nazi, Reinhard Heydrich, known as the Butcher of Prague. Heydrich was intimately complicit in Kristallnacht and convened the conference where the Final Solution was most fully articulated.

I’ve read a bunch of books about Nazis. I am sure many of us have. But what makes Binet’s work particularly interesting is that it’s not a book about a Nazi. It’s rather a book about writing a book about a Nazi. Having introduced us to Heydrich’s brutality, Binet steps out from behind the fourth wall. ‘You see,’ he writes, ‘Heydrich is the target [of this book] not [it’s] protagonist. Everything I’ve written about him [to this point] is by way of background.’  And if that sounds a bit arch, a bit - forgive my generalisation - a bit French, bear with me. Because Binet is on to something deeply important.

The book unfolds, Binet recalls the events of Heydrich’s life. He introduces us to his heroes; Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš; two Czech partisans, trained in England and sent by the Czech Government-in-exile to assassinate Prague’s Butcher. On the fateful day, as Heydrich’s car slows - as the assassins knew it would - at the corner where they planned to strike, Gabčík’s gun jams. The plan - so carefully considered - looks to be failing. But then Kubiš has a moment to lob a grenade in Heydrich’s direction and does. It seems to affect only minor damage on Heydrich the target. But then septicaemia sets in and the Butcher of Prague dies an invalid’s death a week later. Binet goes on to tell the story of Lidice, the Czech town of 500 razed to the ground by the Nazi’s as punishment for the assassination - razed on the entirely erroneous notion that its inhabitants had something to do with the plot. And finally Binet recounts the final moments of Gabčík and Kubiš, holed up in the basement of a Prague Church, keeping 800 Nazis at bay [through a day and long into the night], until at last, they too suffer the same mortal consequence that met their target.

And all through this brilliant storytelling, Binet keeps peeking out from behind the fourth wall, asking us, and asking himself - does it matter? In the shadow of the Holocaust, and millions murdered in so many awful ways, does it matter that the butcher Heydrich dies on a hospital gurney while Gabčík and Kubiš die in a heroic last stand. In the face of the impossible awfulness of Nazi brutality does any of this matter?

Back in the earliest pages of the book, as we first meet Heydrich the child, Binet tells us his target grew up in the German village of Halle. He supposes he ought, at that point, wax lyrical about the village, but admits that he doesn’t know which of the two German towns called Halle Heydrich actually was from, ‘For the time being,’ he tells us ‘I’m not sure it’s important.’ Binet asks if it matters that the gun jammed, or if it matters that more Czech’s died because of the assassination that would have died had Heydrich been left to get on with his awful existence.

As the Nazi’s destroy Lidice and every man and most of the women who lived in the town, Gabcik and Kubis hide in a Prague basement, in despair at the wave of Nazi destruction unleashed in the aftermath of their ultimately successful assasination. They knew, they surely knew that their plotting could result in their own death, but did they consider the mass deaths of innocents their actions would provoke? Was it worth it? ‘Gabcik and Kubis weep from rage and powerlessness,’ Binet writes, ‘No one ever manages to persuade them that Heydrich’s death was good for anything . Perhaps,’ he continues, ‘I am writing this book to make them understand that they are wrong.’

HHhH becomes a book about the possibility of meaning, it’s a challenge posed in the face of Nazi brutality. But it’s a challenge, I suspect, we all feel sometimes. Particularly especially at this point on this day, with our memories of those who are no longer here; some taken peacefully at the ends of long fulfilled lives, others taken too early or too bitterly.

Soren Kierkegaard once wrote, a “single event of inexplicable horror ‘has the power to make everything inexplicable, including the most explicable events.’”[2]

This is part of the problem of the Holocaust, it can strip us of all understanding, it can make it seem impossible to care about anything anymore.

And here I find myself drawn into the awful debate, now some 30 years old, surrounding the death of one of the bravest souls ever to have looked into the furnace of Auschwitz; Primo Levi. [3] In 1987 Levi was found dead at the bottom of a flight of stairs in his apartment building. Almost immediately Eli Wiesel pronounced, “Primo Levi died at Auschwitz ... forty years later.” The coroner in seeming agreement called his death a suicide. The American homme des lettres, Leon Wieseltier felt the loss not only of the man, Levi, but everything Levi stood for. "[Levi],” wrote Wieseltier, “spoke for the bet that there is no blow from which the soul may not recover. When he smashed his body, he smashed his bet.”

There’s a certain dangerous, seductive romance given succour by considering Levi’s death a suicide - the whiff of Juliette, taking her life as Romeo lies apparently dead before her. Here, the Levi, takes his life having completed his last great work, having said everything there is to say about the appalling failures of human possibility.

It’s just that - much like Romeo’s apparent death - this dark dangerous romantic vision of Levi might be quite wrong. In the years since his death the notion that Levi gave up on life as a direct result of his suffering in the camps has taken a battering. For one thing Levi himself is recorded active, engaged and excited by life and the various diary commitments he had set out for himself in the weeks after his death. He told his friends he no longer felt under the weight of the experiences of his formative years. And the fall down the stairs is a strange way to commit suicide - especially for a chemist - who could, surely have found easier paths towards death if that was indeed what he had chosen. Levi’s friend and cardiologist, David Mendel, observed that drugs Levi was taking often lower the blood pressure. Mendel imagines Levi on the point of fainting, reaching for banisters to steady himself and instead toppling.

Maybe Levi didn’t accept that the value of life is always trumped by the power of darkness and death.

Maybe Wieseltier’s bet, that there is no blow from which the soul may not recover, that there is no hell which some element of human virtue cannot penetrate, illuminate and palliate is still on.

Maybe life is still worth living - and living fully and heroically and as brightly as we are capable.

We are teetering on a knife-edge, trying to discover if there is anything authentic to do in a world where human will treat human with such abject violence and hatred; a world where the good and the evil suffer the same inevitable mortal consequence. And we are grasping for something that allows us to feel the bet is still on.

Let me draw one more voice into this conversation - Emil Fackenheim - by some twist of fate or coincidence, born in Halle, Saxony in 1916. That turns out to be the very same village in which the butcher of Prague, Heydrich was born 12 years earlier. Fackenheim, by 1939 a Rabbi, fled the Sauchsenhausen concentration camp in which he was detained in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, to become one of the most significant thinkers in 20^th Century Jewry.

To read Fackenheim’s work, To Mend the World, is to feel Fackenheim being eaten away at by the notion that the Holocaust strips the life from ... life. Perhaps everything, he suggests is inauthentic after the Holocaust.

But no. Fackenheim, Binet and even Primo Levi, ultimately don’t suggest life is inauthentic, despite their deep investigations into the very darkest of times. They each emerge, if not with a jolly spring in their step, with a sense of the value of a life lived heroically, frankly, the value of a life lived at all. The stories of those who survived and those who did not, are for each of these three writers, full of authentic responses to the extraordinary gift of life even as their, so often tragically, are cut short. The acts of violence are never recounted as voiding the possibility of finding and creating meaning in these stories.

Fackenheim in particular, latches on to moments of heroism; sometimes the dramatic stories - such as Heydrich’s assassins Gabčík and Kubiš;’ sometimes the simpler triumphs of a survivor like Pelagia Lewinska. Lewinska spent 20 month’s in Auschwitz and her great triumph lay in nothing more than refusing to allow the Nazis to strip from her her belief in the value of behaving with human decency - she’s a hero too. Levi tells stories like these with a cooler spirit, but, I think, with pride nonetheless. Fackenheim’s point is that these  acts of heroism can’t be deemed inauthentic, or meaningless because they were performed in full understanding of the consequences. When a group of German philosophers, called the White Rose, sprayed ‘Down with Hitler’ on the walls of Munich in 1943, they knew they were courting death, and that by a certain standard that their actions would surely be futile. But they went ahead. ‘They knew it,’ wrote Fackenheim, ‘but they did it.’^[4] And this, the philosopher writes, makes activism after the Holocaust capable of touching authenticity.

Or try this example, from HHhH. It comes from a section where Binet considers Theresienstadt, the so called ‘model’ concentration camp where the Nazis encouraged Jews to have a ‘relatively well developed cultural life with art and theatre.’ The Red Cross were fooled by the demonstrations of culture on show. But the Jewish residents weren’t. Of the 140,000 Jews imprisoned at Theresienstadt, only 17,000 survived. Binet cites Milan Kundera, ‘They were under no illusions: [they knew] their cultural life was exhibited by Nazi propaganda as an alibi; but should that be a reason to refuse freedom, however precarious and fraudulent? Their response was utterly clear: their creations, their art shows, their concerts, their loves, the whole array of their lives were incomparably more important than their jailers’ macabre theatrics. That was their [bet][5]. It should be ours too.’

Weiseltier’s bet, it seems, can survive the Holocaust because it was undertaken also in the midst of the Holocaust.

At the heart of all these articulations of possibility in the face of death, and in the face of the Holocaust most particularly, lies something irreducibly spiritual, perhaps we might even call it religious. I’m not trying to co-opt any of these thinkers and writers. But, for me, considering art, rebellion and even refusing to lose one’s humanity as meaningful bespeaks our belief that we are not just flesh and bones. We are not just material. We contain something other. We need something more than the material and, most remarkably, we become capable of creating something other than the material. As humans we create something other than material even when we are deprived of all material things; even in the midst of the Holocaust. And the heart of this thing that survives even such darkness as the Holocaust, are stories.

Binet writes that ‘The Nazis kept files, but burnt books.’ Files are the quotidian account of what will pass in time. But books are repositories of our soul, playgrounds for our imagination and homes of our dreams. Of course the Nazis were afraid of books. Of course they sought refuge in the reductive false security of ledgers. But the stories have survived. They have survived because stories of life are more powerful than numbers. The actions of the spirit are more powerful than the losses of the material - as much as the material we have lost hurt us so. That’s, of course, what we are all doing here, at Yizkor, remembering stories, even when the material presene of those we have lost and lost has gone.

As we tell stories, as we remind ourselves of all those we mourn. We remind ourselves of those destroyed by the Nazis and of those who have perished since in ways less brutal. But more than any of this we remind ourselves that life is more important than the material.

We remind ourselves of the value of a life lived beyond the realm of the material.

We remind ourselves that the bet is still on.

We remind ourselves that there is a point to living.

Even - in fact especially - as we consider the lives of those who have gone.

May all these lives be for a blessing.

---

[1] Originally published, in French, in 2010, and winner of the Prix Goncourt Du Premier Roman of that year. I read it in Sam Taylor’s 2012 translation, published by Harvill Secker.

[2] Cited in Kierkegaard’s name but with no citation in Emil Fackenheim’s To Mend the World, p.191.

[3] Much of the discussion of Levi draws on http://bostonreview.net/diego-gambetta-primo-levi-last-moments

[4] MW 266-267.

[5] ‘wager’ in the original.

Yom HaShoah - Holocaust and Authenticity

Want to talk about the Holocaust.

It's a lovely day, we have a lovely BM to celebrate, but still it's worth talking about the Holocaust, in the week of Yom HaShoah - the Day of Holocaust memory - in particular. For Jewish communities across the world this is way we emerge from the festival of our freedom - Passover. We celebrate being free and then, on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, we commemorate the worst act in our history, and the worst act in human history.

There is something spiritually powerful about locating a commemoration of the Holocaust in the week after Passover, almost as if to say - you were slaved, you are now free, but never forget how fragile that freedom is, how easily all the things we free Jews take for granted - the ability to practice our religion, the ability to walk down the streets knowing that the police are on our side, even the ability to inhale fresh air - were taken from us again, only a blink of the eye ago.

But the reason for the co-incidence of Passover and Yom HaShoah is both simpler and equally powerful. The date was chosen to commemorate the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Soon after their conquest of Poland the Nazis commanded Jews to concentrate in tiny ports of cities they once thrived in. Some four hundred thousand Jews were concentrated into a 3.3km2 area of Warsaw. To give you a sense of what that means; the London Borough of Camden is as half as numerous and seven times the size. And then the deportations started; 7,000 Jews a day were taken East, supposedly for resettlement. 

Actually they were taken to their death at Treblinka. In two months 300,000 Jews were, to use the jargon liquidated. When the Germans came into the Ghetto on the first day of Passover 1943 the remaining survivors, already sick, hungry and weakened, decided to fight. A week after the Passover they had their greatest success, but the Nazis simply regrouped and came back again, in larger number and with more powerful weaponry. The revolutionaries never had a chance at victory in anything like the generally held sense of the term. Their leader, Mordechai Anilewicz, knowing the end was coming committed suicide, rather than fall into the hands of the Nazis.

The Nazi commandant, Jurgen Stroop, held that some 71,000 Jews were killed or deported during the revolt. But does that mean the revolution failed.

On the afternoon of 19 April two boys climbed up on the roof of a building on the Muranowski Square and raised two flags, the red-and-white Polish flag and the blue-and-white banner of the ŻZW. These flags remained there, highly visible from the Warsaw streets, for four days. After the war, the Nzai commander charged with the overthrow of the revolt, Jurgen Stroop recalled:

" flags were of great political and moral importance. It reminded hundreds of thousands of the Polish cause, it excited them and unified the population of the General Government, but especially Jews and Poles. Flags and national colours are a means of combat exactly like a rapid-fire weapon, like thousands of such weapons. We all knew that  The Reichsfuehrer [Himmler] bellowed [at me] into the phone: 'Stroop, you must at all costs bring down those two flags!'"

What does it mean to have flown those flags. Does it, did it ever, mean anything in the face of simple, brutal, heinous, murder?

Does anything?

Does anything mean anything in the face of simple, brutal, heinous murder?

You can, if you spend too long in the annals of the Holocaust start to wonder, you can become more than a little depressed at the state of humanity.

The great C20 Rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel, who fled Berlin in 1938, once called racism 'a maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.' Why are we, as a human race, still so unreasonable. Even today, even still.

Here's something I found just this year, it's a clandestine poster, produced in the Warsaw Ghetto by the ZOB - the Jewish Combat Organisation. It reads,  "All people are equal brothers; Brown, White, Black and Yellow. To separate peoples, colors, races – Is but an act of cheating!"

Why are we still cheating? it's enough to make you give up .... well give up on everything. What's the point?

All of this brings me to an intellectual hero of mine, Emil Fackenheim, another Jew who escaped the Nazis by the skin of his teeth, Fackenheim was arrested on Kristallnacht - the Night of Broken Glass in November 1938 and detained in Saccenhausen, but escaped to Scotland, and then Canada. He was an ordained Rabbi, but really a philosopher. He began his academic career as an expert on Kant and Hegel. But there was something about the Holocaust that gnawed away at his ability to do regular scholarship. It gnawed for two decades and then, in the 1960s Fackenheim started to write about the Holocaust.

Can we confront the Holocaust and yet not despair [he wrote]. The contradiction is too staggering and every authentic escape is barred. We have lived this contradiction for twenty years without being able to face it. Unless I am mistaken, we are now beginning to [do that]. And from this beginning confrontation there emerges what I will boldly term a 614th Commandment, the authentic Jew of today is forbidden to hand Hitler yet another posthumous victory.

It's one of the most famous passages of my Jewish youth. Fackenheim references the 613 traditional commandments found in the Torah Ben you read so beautifully from this morning. And to this he adds this other command, the command not to give in, not to hand Hitler a posthumous victory.

We are forbidden [he went on to say] we are forbidden to deny or despair of God however much we may have to contend with him or our belief in him, lest Judaism perish. We are forbidden, finally, to despair of the world ... lest we make it a meaningless place where God is irrelevant and everything is permitted.

Powerful words, but the sense you have is that there is something not quite fully articulated in Fackenheim's 1970 work, The Jewish Return Into History. And 15 years later Fackenheim is back, with a new book, and a deeper version of the same problem.

Can there ever be, he writes in To Mend the World, an authentic response in the face of the Holocaust?

It's no longer just about being a Jew. Fackenheim, the philosopher, has fallen out of love with philosophy - Heidigger, one of the greatest thinkers of his generation was a proto-Nazi. If a philosopher of Heidigger's calibre, Fackenheim writes, can be responsible for something as awful as giving Nazism intellectual support then maybe philosophy is no longer worth the paper it's written 's on. He cites Kierkegaard's chilling assertion that a “single event of inexplicable horror ‘has the power to make everything inexplicable, including the most [otherwise] explicable events.’” It's a kind of depression. What's the point of celebrating, dancing, living even, when the Holocaust has happened and has shown all these responses to the gift of life to be so worthless. The key word for Fackenheim is 'authentic.' What could be an authentic response to Auschwitz, to Hitler, to the Holocaust - what could you possibly do that would mean anything in the face of that barbarism?

Fortunately Fackenheim is able to dig himself out of the dark pit into which he descends

[It was while studying the story of an Auschwitz survivor Pelagia Lewinska] I made what to me was, and still is, a momentous discovery: [he wrote] that while religious thinkers were vainly struggling for a response to Auschwitz, Jews throughout the world had been responding all along…with an unexpected will to live—with under the circumstances, an incredible commitment to Jewish group survival.[1]

Somehow, even in the depths of the hell that was the Warsaw Ghetto Jews put on plays, educated their children, even produced posters proclaiming the importance of treating every human being the same, no matter their faith, creed or colour. Those actions, writes Fackenheim, were authentic because they were forged in the midst of the awful events themselves.

There were Hasidim in Buchenwald who swapped four servings of bread for a chance to wear tefilin. That makes wearing tefilin today an authentic response to the Holocaust. There was even a group of philosophy students who plotted to assassinate Hitler. The plot failed, they were all murdered, but their bravery rescues, says Fackenheim, the value of engaging in philosophic thought.

And of course the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was authentic, even if it didn't bring an end to the Nazi oppression. It's a beacon of the power of human beings to claim their own destiny, even when the breadth of choice is so parlous. To fly a flag, to launch a revolt against more mighty and more numerous opposition is authentic. We can respond authentically to the Holocaust, taught Fackenheim, despite its horror, by committing ourselves to models of response that were discovered in the midst of the event itself. A response is not about making things better, it's about authenticity, it's about the expression of humanity still counting for something.

This, in part is why we need to keep telling these stories of so long ago, stories of authentic responses to horror. It's to remind ourselves that there is a possibility to live authentically post-Holocaust.  It's why I tell myself these stories. It's why I'm sharing these stories with you today.

Ben, you are a Jewish adult now, these are your stories too, this is your charge, to tell these stories, to respond authentically, and never to hand Hitler a posthumous victory.

It's a challenge for us all,

Shabbat shalom

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[1] Emil Fackenheim, The Quest for Past and Future (Bloomington, IN: Beacon, 1968), pp. 19–20.