German-born rabbi, theologian, and religious existentialist; best known for his view that the Holocaust represents a new revelation, through which God presented a 614th commandment forbidding Jews to cease practicing Judaism, which would have the impact of handing Hitler a posthumous victory. Fackenheim rejects interpretations that deem the Holocaust the result of Jews’ sin and, in general, repudiates the idea that any “explanation” of the Holocaust is possible. Instead he employs a model of dialogical revelation, similar to that proposed by Martin Buber, in which revelation is the personal encounter of an I with the Eternal Thou (God).
Fackenheim insists that, despite their outrage at God and humankind, Jews must continue to believe. God, he argues, is always present in history, even if we cannot understand what God is doing or why he allows suffering to occur. Most important, Fackenheim asserts that, from the death camps, as from Sinai, God commanded Israel, imparting what he terms the “614th commandment,” which imposed upon the Jewish people a sacred obligation to survive. In the face of the death camps, Jewish existence itself becomes a holy act. Under this new commandment, Jews are forbidden to despair of redemption or to become cynical about the world and humanity.
Such cynicism is an abdication of responsibility for the repair of the world and results in the delivery of the world into the hands of Nazism. Most important, in the face of the Holocaust, Jews are “forbidden to despair of the God of Israel, lest Judaism perish.” The voice that speaks from Auschwitz demands that no Jew reject his faith. To do so is to contribute to the demise of the Jewish people and religion, so as to participate in the accomplishment of the work Hitler himself could not complete.
In his depiction of a God who speaks from Auschwitz, Fackenheim invests the age-old Jewish will for survival with transcendental importance. Insofar as the Nazis wished to eradicate Jews from the earth, Jews are commanded to withstand annihilation. Paradoxically, in this approach, Hitler, rather than the Torah revealed at Sinai, makes it incumbent upon Jews after the Holocaust to remain Jewish and to observe the teachings of Judaism. To accept the religion and precepts of the God of Sinai is to deny the evil desired by Hitler. But, conversely, to reject the God of Sinai or to deny one’s standing as a Jew—no matter what one’s reason for doing to—is to affirm Hitler’s plan and program. This, of course, no Jew can do.
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