He and his family then immigrated to Israel in 1983. He taught at the Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for several years. Fackenheim died in Jerusalem on September 19, 2003.
Fackenheim's 614th Commandment
In the postwar period Fackenheim pursued two intellectual interests. First, he began a philosophical examination of faith and reason from Kant (1724–1804) to Kierkegaard (1813–1855), with special attention to Hegel (1770–1831). Second, he explored the role of revelation in modern culture, in particular dealing with Jewish faith, autonomy, the challenge of naturalism and secularism, and the defense of revelation in the thought of Martin Buber (1878–1965) and Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929).
Until 1966 Fackenheim largely avoided dealing with the Nazi assault on Jews and Judaism and the atrocities of the death camps. On March 26, 1967, at a symposium titled "Jewish Values in the Post–Holocaust Future," convened by the American Jewish Committee and organized by the editor of its journal Judaism, Steven Schwarzschild, Fackenheim first formulated and presented his imperative for authentic Jewish response to the Holocaust, what he called the 614th commandment: "The authentic Jew of today is forbidden to hand Hitler yet another, posthumous victory." He elaborated the reasoning that led to this imperative and its hermeneutical content in "Jewish Faith and the Holocaust," which appeared in Commentary and, in a slightly different form, in the introduction to his collection of essays, Quest for Past and Future (1968).
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