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.
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.
Comments