What is Judaism? An Interpretation for the Present Age.
Emil Fackenheim, Syracuse University Press, 1987
reviewed by Allan Gould
The most accessible book written by Emil Fackenheim, a great Jewish philosopher
This month, as a kind of personal Kaddish, I have chosen to review one of the finest books by the late Emil Fackenheim, of Germany, Canada and Israel, who passed away in Jerusalem at the age of 87 just before last Rosh Hashana. My wife and I had the honour of considering him and his late wife Rose among our closest friends. Before they and their children moved to Israel in the early 1980s, we had dozens of Shabbat meals at their Briar Hill home, where we would often pass food plates to Raul Hilberg, the major Holocaust historian whose Destruction of European Jewry is the seminal book on that period, and to Yehuda Bauer (Bricha; A History of the Holocaust; Out of the Ashes), another giant of that era.
So, how to honour the dead? Especially when the deceased was one of the finest Jewish minds of the last century? (And one filled with Canadian content, too: after his birth and youth in Germany, and his arrest and brief internment in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Fackenheim ended up in Canada before the war was over—imprisoned as an enemy alien!—where he became one of the most respected philosophy professors at the University of Toronto, before moving to his beloved Jerusalem).
Most look upon To Mend the World as Emil Fackenheim's greatest work, but I find another more accessible. Several of his books on Hegel and other German philosophers are heavy going, so I wish to examine What Is Judaism? (sub-titled An Interpretation for the Present Age). It was first published in 1987 in hardcover, and it is good to report that Syracuse University Press has kept it in print; it's now in paperback, and it is an admirable work, even if one never had the joy of knowing this passionate, witty, wise, delightful human being. Emil had the quite remarkable ability to make words dance off the page with humour and power, even when writing in a language which was his second, even his third.
When he began to develop this admirable book not long after he moved to Jerusalem, Emil told me that he wanted to "write an updated version of Milton Steinberg's Basic Judaism," a long-outdated but still valuable study of our faith. Fackenheim did far more, of course; what else could one expect from the world's greatest Hegelian scholar, who had been driven to rediscover his Judaism and brilliantly confront the Holocaust after the Six Day War? He had been horrified to see our people once again threatened with destruction, less than three decades after his own arrest on the first night of Kristallnacht, in early November, 1938.
Ever the scholar and philosopher (but never stuffy), he chose consciously not to write treatises or defenses of dietary laws or the Sabbath or the Reform faith in which he had earned his rarely-used rabbinical degree, back in his German homeland, but instead divided his book into three parts: Past ("Presupposed Components of Judaism"), Present ("The Life of Judaism Through the Ages"), and, of course, Future ("Judaism in an Age of Renewed Jewish Statehood.") The State of Israel, its creation and its survival, were all central to the way he saw his religion, and this profoundly-felt Zionism permeates this beautiful, essential book.
Fackenheim's writing style could be wordy, and even breathless. But just read aloud the following portion of a paragraph from an introductory section ("The Religious Situation of a Jew Today"), and see how profound, and yes, how witty, he could be about the "great product of modern Jewish secularism, Zionism":
. . .not much more than half a century after Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) the movement founded by him has produced results that no other modern nationalism can boast of, among them a state founded, maintained, developed, and defended by a people that—so it was once thought—had lost the arts of statecraft and self-defense forever; the replanting and reforestation of a land that—so it once seemed—was unredeemable swamp and desert; the ingathering of a people from all corners of the earth on a territory—so the experts once asserted—with not enough room left to swing a cat; the reviving of a language that—so even Herzl once feared—was dead beyond revival; and, last but not least, the physical rebuilding of the one city on earth, Jerusalem—so the consensus of mankind once held, Jews only excepted—that was meant to remain forever of the spirit only, i.e., holy ruins. Today only outright lies can dispose of the Jewish people as a chimerical nation. Every honest person, and certainly every Jew seeking to come to grips with his religious situation, must come to confront the fact of the State of Israel. He must do so for better or for worse.
What a stunning declaration, made all the more important by the recent outbursts of world-wide anti-semitism and Muslim Jew-hatred. Fackenheim had an uneven Jewish education—his modern Hebrew was never fluent, which made the final two decades of his long life, spent in Israel, more difficult than they had to be—but he knew that Midrash was often the key to the ineffable, even absurd aspects of Jewish existence and survival: how the people who were purportedly chosen by God as "a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" could so often be brutalized, maimed, slaughtered. So, this wonderful text overflows with Midrash—those often profound rabbinic legends and fill-in-the-blanks, which attempted to explain the more mystifying aspects of our faith. The book is also filled with references to Fackenheim's own experiences—in Nazi Germany, meeting and studying (illegally) with refuseniks in the former Soviet Union, the saving of Ethiopian Jewry by Israel, his own personal aliyah, his daughter's experiences on a kibbutz, and more, making it all the more personal, meaningful, emotional.
Here, for example, is his "take" on how Judaism differs from most other faiths in history, in his section on "The Ethics of Judaism." After talking about doing "mitzvahs" and "being a mensch," he shoots for the heart of the matter: "God Himself behaves like a mensch when He loves widows and orphans. But who except Jews (and following them, Christians) has ever heard of a God loving widows and orphans? A God (or gods) loving heroes, sages, and martyrs one has heard of. All these, however—the martyrs included—are winners. Widows and orphans, in contrast, are losers. Perhaps Divinity can love even these, provided they are its own, much like a person who loves his widowed mother or his orphaned nephew or niece. That this is so with the "Old Testament" God has long been stock-in-trade propaganda of the kind of Christian who knows no other way of exalting his New Testament than by denigrating the Old. However, this particular canard—that the Jewish God loves Jews only—is disposed of by the fact that He loves the stranger as well: 'The Lord your God. . .executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the stranger.'" (Deut. 10:17)
Early in What is Judaism?, Emil Fackenheim quotes a Midrash which he claims "could serve as a motto of this whole book": 'When was the Torah given? It is given whenever a person receives it."
Books such as this—and they are so rare, much like Emil Fackenheim was so rare, in his deep and abiding love of his people and the State of Israel, and the survival of both—can help us to continue to "receive" the Torah every day of our lives, and not merely in synagogue, or on Simchat Torah, when we quite literally celebrate the original moment of this amazing gift from God.
Not by chance, Fackenheim concludes this relatively brief volume (it is just under 300 pages) with an "Epilogue" consisting of one final Midrash, and it is a deeply moving one:
A Midrash asks why the Divine covenant with Abraham was required. The answer: "This may be compared to a house on fire. People ask, Does the house have no owner? Through the children of Abraham, God says, 'I am the owner of the house.'"
A Jew today still willing to convey this message has a question of his own: if the house has an owner, why does He not put the fire out? Perhaps He can and yet will. Perhaps He cannot or will not. But if He cannot or will not, a Jew today must do what he can to put the fire out himself. A kabbalistic saying is to the effect that the effort from below calls forth a response from above.
Emil Fackenheim's life was a gift to every Jew and every Gentile as well, even if most of the latter are not fully aware of it. (At one point in What is Judaism?, he expresses shock that the entire world—especially Christianity—does not rejoice in the rebirth of the Jewish people in their own land; how can they fail to see the importance, the glory, the proof of God's presence in history in that very fact?)
My loss of Emil Fackenheim is personal, as well as intellectual. But should you purchase this extraordinary book (and it is available on online book websites, as well as most of Toronto's Jewish bookstores), you will feel the loss of Emil Fackenheim as well. And you will feel, as well, the exquisite gain we all had, from his 87 years on this earth, and from the impressive body of writing he left us.
