In memory of Leo Baeck, and other Jewish thinkers "in dark times": once more, "After Auschwitz, Jerusalem"

Remembering Leo Baeck

I LAST SPOKE AT HEBREW UNION COLLEGE, JERUSALEM, ON

November 7, 2000,just prior to the anniversary of Kristallnacht-the event I was to understand, many years after-as the beginning of the Holocaust. Two days later, on November 9, someone in Berlin would mention its late Rabbi Leo Baeck-his name, at least-but I doubted there would be more: who would still have known him? But I had been a student of his, in 1935-1938, at the Berlin Hochschule fur die Wissenschaft des Judentums.

Even before I got there in 1935, Baeck had distributed a prayer, to be read in Berlin synagogues on Kol Nidre, which-as always at this beginning of Yom Kippur-"confessed Jewish sins, individual and collective," but also, at Kol Nidre that year, voiced "revulsion at the lies, the false charges made against our faith and its defenders," then adding "let us trample these abominations beneath our feet." This was Baeck at his militant: he had been Feldrabbiner in the Great War. The prayer ended as a plea that these "soft words" be "heard." However, Heil-Hitler-barks and pseudo-Christian-"prayers" were much too noisy: the soft prayer was not heard.

For this and other acts of courage Baeck was jailed, several times.

In all that followed, Baeck showed the same rectitude, and also an uncommon perspicacity, for he knew, early on, that this was the end of German Judaism.

Yet he vowed to stay in Berlin so long as even a minyan was left, kept his vow, hence was deported to the Nazi Musterlager, Theresienstadt.

He survived by accident, went on teaching in London and Cincinnati, but never spoke of the horrors he knew: he wanted Jewish faith to live--if no longer in Germany, then elsewhere, the German liberal version included--rather than die in despair: thus he took the horrors he knew to his grave. (1)

The Dictum of Jewish Philosopher Hans Jonas

I mention one more fact--just one horror Baeck knew: he learned of the fate awaiting Jews boarding those trains. Innocent as they were, they wondered: would they take them to a work camp? To some sort of newly-established settlement?

Baeck thus had a problem: should he tell? But if one knew, soon all would know. He decided on silence: the horror he took to his grave included this silence.

In this decision, was he right? Basic for philosophy--especially the "existentialist," such as Martin Heidegger's--is that doctors knowing their patients will die must tell them the truth; but while the doomed doctor's patient can speak to lawyers and, of course, to family, in contrast, at Auschwitz each would die alone: for that death philosophy, however "existential"--stress though it may loneliness-vis-a-vis-death-has not been--never will be--existential enough.

Philosophic thought must go one step further: in the Holocaust, "much more was real than is possible." We owe this dictum, mind-boggling as it is, to philosopher Hans Jonas; to put less briefly what Jonas put all-too-briefly, since to explain radical evil is ipso facto to diminish it, i.e., make it less than radical, the more self-critical philosophy is, the more ruthless must it be in facing the Holocaust as at once "real-and-impossible"; still otherwise put--this, as philosopher, I must stress--in this extremity, as well as others, if there are others comparable--the sole freedom remaining for reason-vis-a-vis the Holocaust, if in no other case--is self-destruction; this is, surely superior to a merely-passive stance, i.e., facing it as it was and-rather than destroying itself-merely be destroyed by it: vis-a-vis the Holocaust, reason is not shattered, but decides to be shattered.

Hence scoundrels will always get away with asserting there never was a Holocaust, but at most some trivial event: this future was already predicted by the perpetrators: in Auschwitz they enjoyed scoffing at their victims: "if a few of you should survive, who will believe you?" It seems, then, that we are in the midst of a contest, lasting perhaps for another hundred years, at the end of which the Holocaust will either be denied or distorted beyond belief, or else--with patient scholarship, pious memory for which that past "will never go away" and--perhaps above all--an always-insufficient-philosophy be recognized for what it was.

Why do I call philosophy "insufficient"? I have already said it, but repeat it for emphasis: philosophy is rational, and reason explains, but explaining absolute evil ipso facto makes it less-than-absolute. As for historians, they can show absolute evil, but cannot explain it. (2)

Mordecai Kaplan and Moshe Davis

I had long been too much of a "Buberite" (of which more in a moment) to take Mordecai Kaplan seriously on God. If, nevertheless, I once gave a lecture in his honor, it was mostly because of Moshe Davis: Moshe had absorbed Kaplan's critique of Jewish thought as indifferent to Jewish "peoplehood," and invented a concept of "Jewish civilization"; in our Jewish crisis, Moshe had made Aliyah in response, had applied Kaplan's concept to the Hebrew University by founding, within it the "Institute of Contemporary Jewry"; and, by the way, had done more than anyone else to bring us to Jerusalem.