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What Was I Thinking?
The Autobiography of An Idea And Other Essays
By Rick Salutin ECW PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Rick Salutin
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77090-734-8
CHAPTER 1
UNIQUENESS OF THE HOLOCAUST: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN IDEA
Our apparatus for acquiring knowledge is not designed for knowledge.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
I'M STANDING IN THE PHILOSOPHY section of the bookstore at the University of Toronto one day in the early 2000s. I stepped in here bereft, after dropping off my poor laptop at the computer shop next door for service. They'll call when it's ready. I can't write or check email. I might as well read. I'm looking for something by Hannah Arendt, with whom I studied philosophy in New York in the 1960s. I'd gone into philosophy after dropping out of rabbinical seminary. It seemed a natural transition; I still hankered for meaning, but my faith was fading.
"Thanks a lot for that column this morning," says a man scanning the shelves beside me. "You're welcome," I say, blanking on the column, as I often do the day after I write one. "Based on what you said," he goes on, "you might be interested in the new book by Agamben, on the state of exception." Oh yes, the column was about torture and "the new normal" since 9/11. I don't know Agamben. I think of Agrabah, capital of a desert sultanate in the Disney film Aladdin. I'm up on kid culture these days.
He hands me the book from the shelf and moves on. It's slim and costs $15.95. I reshelve it, but as I'm crossing College, realize it's akin to a subject that has been preoccupying me, so I return and buy it. When I awake at three that night, I read it. Agamben, an Italian academic, says the state of exception — also known as a state of siege, martial law, or a state of emergency, depending on national proclivities — has been a normal political condition since the end of the First World War. In Canada it's known as the War Measures Act and was last invoked in October 1970, on the day I returned from my student decade in the U.S. Agamben traces the modern beginnings of states of exception to Germany but, surprisingly, not Nazi Germany. Rather, he connects it to the progressive Weimar Republic of pre-Hitler years. He quotes Walter Benjamin on the state of exception being the new normal, though not in that phrase. There's even a reference to "Taubes," who would be Jacob, with whom I did an M.A. in religion, before switching to philosophy. Nobody quotes Taubes. I didn't know he published a book in the '80s. On the night of the east coast blackout in 1965, I found him humming nigunim in the dark in his office — he came from a line of rabbis. We wandered up and down Broadway together, stepping into restaurants and bars that were operating by candlelight. But I digress. I'd recently been pondering the idea of uniqueness, or exception, associated for me with the Holocaust.
* * *
FOR TORONTO JEWS IN THE 1950s, the Holocaust was inescapable, the centre of everything serious — politics, morality, faith, identity. When I taught a grade three class at Holy Blossom Temple, we did a unit on it. We asked the kids to compose a letter from someone their age living in Nazi Germany. "Hello cousin Hymie," wrote Rickie Beck. "I hope things are good in Canada. Here in Nazi Germany there is a bad man named Hitler. He should be called Shitler." We herded our students into the second-floor auditorium one Sunday morning and listened to a shaliach, an emissary from Israel, say, "The world is finally learning, because of the state of Israel, that Jewish blood is as expensive to shed as anyone's." Sunlight streamed through the high windows. Across Bathurst, the stolid brick homes of Forest Hill Village stood calmly. We were comfortable scions of a people for whom, as Shylock said, "sufferance is the badge." How hard it all was to reconcile.
Over the next half a century, the Holocaust took on that kind of centrality more widely — in the West, at any rate. It became a focal point for historical and political discussion; nearly every contemporary crisis and confrontation evoked it. One needed to learn from Munich in order to prevent another Auschwitz, etc. After the Cold War ended, the Holocaust became a virtually mandatory element for justifying interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq. The first George Bush said Saddam Hussein was worse than Hitler. Bill Clinton bombed Bosnia and Serbia to forestall another genocide. The second George Bush compared Osama bin Laden to Hitler plus Stalin. Ethnic cleansing, a new term for the brutal territorial transfers and violence that had been routine in 20th-century conflicts, became identified almost exclusively with Nazism, as if they invented it. It was as though one could not talk or act internationally unless the subject matter had been correlated with the Holocaust
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 — the fact that 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 respective "fields": politics, sports, terrorism. There's also been a backlash, in some versions of postmodernism, as if ideas have no integrity apart from personal agendas. I want to examine these matters through the example of the idea of the Holocaust in my experience.
* * *
I BECAME A TEENAGE RELIGIOUS existentialist under the influence of Emil Fackenheim. I met him at Holy Blossom, where he taught us Jewish thought. I hung around there during adolescence, as some kids hang 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 Warshauer, the principal, 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. He believed in God, no apologies — yet he was clearly brilliant. He even gave some shrift to divine revelation and immortality. I'd thought those were reserved for the aged and credulous. It also had scandal value by insisting on spiritual meaning in our crass, acquisitive community. I went for it.
I used to ride my CCM bicycle down from Eglinton Avenue at the end of a high school day and wait for him outside the duplex he shared in the lower village with his wife, Rose, his former student. I don't think I ever said I was coming; I used to show up on people's doorsteps in search of, I think, parent or family substitutes. You don't call ahead to make an appointment with your (proto) dad. Many of the people I conscripted in this way had been teachers at the Holy B. Emil would unfailingly invite me upstairs, and we'd sit in his study. He'd talk to me about his latest book — it was on philosophy of religion from Fichte to Kierkegaard. I understood little, but his attention and respect were precious.
He'd been ordained in Nazi Germany by the sainted (as he was always called) rabbi, Leo Baeck. Emil then escaped to the U.K. 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 together in what were widely called concentration camps. (Those were not a Nazi invention, though extermination camps were.) Eventually, with the war still on, the interned Jews were released. Emil rabbi'ed for a while but also acquired a Ph.D. in philosophy and began an academic career. In the camp he'd met Heinz, who gloomily presided over the Holy B. school and convinced Emil to write a textbook on Jewish theology. It explored the classic arguments for belief in God, Jewish survival, etc. Emil belonged to a mid-20th-century surge of religious existentialist thinkers whose starting point was concrete human crises versus abstract theories. They challenged smug modern verities like progress and rationality, in the wake of the Second World War and Holocaust. They took categories like sin and God seriously. Emil wrote in magazines like Commentary. To me it proved you could be brilliant, outrageous, and a successful writer.
In classes, he didn't focus on the Holocaust, but it would arise during a discussion about, perhaps, right and wrong. Then Emil would tell us it had been a unique historical event. "Because the Holocaust was evil for evil's sake," he'd almost whisper, hypnotically. His proof was that the mass murder of Jews in the final years of the war seriously undermined the German effort by diverting scarce resources needed for military purposes. In spite of that, the Nazis persisted. It was unreasonable; it was self-destructive. That's why he called it evil for its own sake. It served no other purpose.
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 each biblical phrase. Perhaps we all have intellectual touchstones — arguments, images, phrases that seize us and that we in turn seize. They suit us, so we make the most of them.
I puzzled, even then, about whether it made sense to say that Nazi leaders were irrational in their policy of exterminating Jews. Maybe there was a macabre but consistent logic playing out. If Jews were the ultimate cancer, the poisonous germ infecting the human species that had to be expunged in order to cure the organism and let it thrive, then destroying them might take precedence over shorter-term goals like winning the war. In that case, the Nazis were being both self-preservative and altruistic by pursuing genocide. In fact, if it looked likely that they were going to lose the war, as it did once the U.S. entered, there might be a ghastly selflessness in pursuing the long-term goal of eliminating the viral race for the sake of the species, even as one perished oneself. It all follows only if you accept the inane, insane premises: that race exists in some meaningful sense, that it is the overriding determinant in global history (and there is, therefore, such a thing as global history as a meaningful category), that humanity and individuals count little in making moral judgements compared to matters of race, and that Jews are a vile race. None of this shook my acceptance of the Holocaust as the epicentre of moral seriousness and a unique horror in history. But it made me think: it gave me a start point for asking other questions.
The confirmation textbook that Emil wrote at Heinz's urging (or needling) mentioned none of this concerning the Holocaust. It was called Paths to Jewish Belief. He wrote it with gusto since the competing textbook, by an American rabbi, took a naturalistic, humanistic approach. Its chapters were oh-so reasonable: they contained no embarrassing stuff about a personal God who might actually be present in a personal way to human beings. Such things would have smacked of superstition back then; they'd have sounded like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof long before Fiddler became a beloved Broadway classic. My parents' generation were modern Jews of the 1950s; they wanted to be proudly Jewish, as well as contemporary and scientific. Emil, though, and other religious existentialists, like Protestant Paul Tillich and Catholic Jacques Maritain, wrestled with concepts like sin, prayer, and God.
So his book took up, in turn, questions of God, the afterlife, morality, the purpose of Jewish existence, the plausibility of prayer. It was no catechism; it was a demanding, reasoned discussion, using traditional sources but also informed by Emil's knowledge of modern philosophy. In his writing in journals at the time, he pursued similar topics for adult readers. I read them too — or tried. "Man will always pursue ultimate integration," one of those articles begins. I put it down and puzzled over it for weeks. (I still sometimes wonder about that line. I'm starting to think he may have been wrong.) He even wrote a piece for Commentary, before it became the catechism of the neo-cons, called "Apologia for a Confirmation Text," which did exactly what its title said.
In the mid-1960s, during my postgrad years, Emil began attending yearly gatherings, in the Laurentians outside Montreal, of likeminded Jewish thinkers from orthodox, conservative, and reform branches. The meetings were created and hosted by a Montreal orthodox rabbi, David Hartman, who eventually moved to Israel. Emil returned from his first attendance there and said he had met the high priest of Auschwitz. It was Elie Wiesel. What staggered him about Wiesel was his willingness to confront the Holocaust directly. I went one year as part of a small youth contingent. On a long walk, Emil told me he'd recently realized that, for 20 years, he'd been attempting to clear a place for faith after Auschwitz, yet he'd failed to tackle faith's main stumbling block: the Holocaust itself. He had been preoccupied with showing that faith was not precluded after Auschwitz, that it was not unreasonable even if it wasn't quite reasonable. But the subject he never wrote about in all those years was the Holocaust. He'd come to feel, without disowning those thoughts and essays, that they'd been a way for him to avoid the event that had deformed his own life and his generation.
That realization was a turning point. He wound down his philosophical concerns with a book on Hegel's philosophy of religion and turned increasingly toward the subject of faith — not so much after Auschwitz as in its shadow. He became, in a sense, the theological counterpart to Wiesel the novelist. He coined a phrase for which he became renowned: The 11th commandment for Jews after Auschwitz: thou shalt not allow Hitler posthumous victories. He said he realized this was what he'd been trying to do in all his writings on the non-impossibility of faith in the modern era: deny Hitler a posthumous victory. He also called it the 614th commandment, referring to the 613 rules of observance enumerated for traditional Jews in a medieval Hebrew treatise. His writing and thought dwelt on these themes for the rest of his life. Some of it was collected in a book, To Mend the World, based on a kabbalistic phrase referring to religious observance as a means to heal not only the individual soul but also the damaged structure of the cosmos. His life and thought took a deeply existential turn in the sense that each was recast by the actual circumstances of his experience and from then on proceeded differently. That may happen in the lives of many intellectuals, but you don't normally hear about it. The existential fulcrum gets papered over, literally, by books and articles. Only the theoretical conclusions stay in view: the biographical elements get hived off or ignored, as if they are incidental to the abstractions and generalizations they produce. But Emil was clear and honest. From then on, he based everything he wrote on who he was and what he'd lived through. In retrospect, 20 years of intellectual detour was not a long time for so profound a transformation to incubate in a context as fraught and dramatic as that of a Jew who came of age in Nazi Germany.
In June 1967, he followed the buildup to the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab states in a mood of alarm and despair. It looked as if Hitler was about to win another victory. Then came Israel's sudden and total triumph. Emil declared it the equivalent of a miracle and announced that God had intervened in history. The presence of God in history, not just in the lives of individuals, had been a centrepiece in his theology of revelation. He was no fundamentalist: he never espoused the literal revelation of scripture on Mount Sinai to Moses. But like Martin Buber, he believed in an encounter between the "Eternal Thou" and the Jewish people, similar to the mystical or spiritual experience of individuals. In the abstract, this was a daring stance for a modern intellectual: it was a way to introduce a transcendent element into daily experience. It gave traditional scriptural religion a place in modern secular reality.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from What Was I Thinking? by Rick Salutin. Copyright © 2015 Rick Salutin. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
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