Judaism without God

With the terrible pogrom that took place in my hometown, Amsterdam, and the ongoing Anti-Semitism in Europe, the United States, and indeed worldwide, it is time to give proper attention to one of the great mistakes of modern Jewish history. This is the myth that if Jews would only “normalize” themselves, anti-Semitism would come to an end; that when Jews would have their own homeland, a government and army, live their lives like all the other citizens of this world and do away with their strange customs, they would then live in peace with their neighbors.

This constantly repeated mantra has proven to be entirely wrong and in fact, dangerous.

The celebrated liberal Jewish thinker professor Emile Fackenheim (1916-2003) is best known for his writings on the Holocaust and Jewish peoplehood. Discussing the Holocaust, Fackenheim states that it is no longer possible for Jews to deny their “singular” condition. The Holocaust has proven that as never before.^[1]

Whatever the reason for this phenomenon, Jews have to stop deluding themselves that they are just one member in a community of nations. They are not and never were.

Secular Zionism made a fundamental mistake when it prophesied that once the Jews had their own homeland and state, anti-Semitism would end, and that there would then no longer be a need to remain Jewish. The creation of a secular Israeli nation would be sufficient to make Jews “normal”.

In perhaps his most quoted observation, Fackenheim states that the authentic Jew of today is forbidden to hand Hitler yet another posthumous victory: by assimilating. Since Hitler made it a crime to be a Jew and wanted to destroy the Jewish people, it is therefore an obligation for every Jew to make sure that he and his children remain Jewish. Fackenheim calls this the 614th commandment, over and above the 613 commandments of the Torah.^[2]

The how and why of Jewish continuity

It is not entirely clear from the writings of Fackenheim why he wants the Jews to survive. It seems that he is saying that Jews have no other option. It is a force majeure. But as to why this should be the case, he does not elaborate. It is however entirely clear that the continuation of the peoplehood of the Jewish people is for him a sine qua non. The Jewish people is not allowed to disintegrate.

In fact, this was the foundation of classical Zionism and it is a basic assumption of nearly every Jew who lives in the State of Israel or is a member of a Jewish community outside Israel. It should be patently obvious to every Jew that however much he tries to turn into a non-Jew and assimilate, it will not work. He will always be a Jew even if he would be baptized. It is as if there is a subconscious awareness of God’s word to the prophet Yechezkel: (20:32-34) “As for what enters your mind, as for what you say, that we will be like the nations, like the families of the land, it shall not be…”

Fackenheim struggles mightily with the question of how we can remain Jews when we are no longer observant. On the one hand he believes that after the Holocaust, it is no longer possible to remain fully religiously observant. After all, he believes that the conventional Jewish tradition does not have the wherewithal to solve the problem of God’s existence and His responsibility for evil in the wake of the Holocaust. The evil of the Holocaust does not fit into any earlier category of ongoing anti-Semitism; it is unprecedented, and its barbarism cannot be compared to earlier pogroms and expressions of anti-Semitism. The Holocaust was an “epoch making event”, totally outside the realm of Jewish history. And it must be treated as such.^[3]

As such, full traditional observance is no longer possible. Our world has to come to terms with a belief system that has been partially shattered by the Holocaust.

At the same time, Fackenheim fully realizes that without observance there will not be a Jewish future. The Jewish people will assimilate and disappear. All of his philosophical writings are imbued with this ambivalence.

Many Jewish thinkers do not agree with Emile Fackenheim’s assertion that the Holocaust is unique. While it is true that an unprecedented number of Jews—fully a third of the global Jewish population—were slaughtered in the Holocaust, in no way was the actual evil different from many earlier pogroms. It did not create more of a religious crisis than any other catastrophe in Jewish history.

The Jewish tradition has dealt with the barbaric 210 years of slavery in Egypt, the destruction of the Temples, the evil of the Roman and Greek empires, the collapse of the early Jewish Commonwealth, the inquisition in Spain and Portugal and their numerous pogroms. The Holocaust is cut from the same cloth: it is just a link in a chain of ongoing barbarism.

Whatever differences these thinkers have concerning the Holocaust, they all agree with Fackenheim that Jews have an obligation to remain Jews.

The necessity of religious observance

The problem, however, is that Jewish history proves over and over again that the moment Jews stop being observant, assimilation sets in, and within a short period of time Jews stop being Jews and their grandchildren are lost to the Jewish people.

The question is haunting: Why stay Jewish when we reject the very thing that kept us alive for thousands of years as Jews? It is clear that Judaism and religious observance are responsible for our survival.