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TIKKUN IN FACKENHEIM’S LEBEN-DENKEN AS A TRACE OF

Aubrey L. Glazer

There is a crack A crack in everything That’s how the light gets in. —Leonard Cohen . . . one must mend by way of return —Hayyim Vital Is it possible for a philosopher to hear his legs praying while marching with Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. for civil rights in Selma, Alabama or to mend the world by freeing Refuseniks in Riga, Leningrad, Minsk and Moscow? Such action seems to put squarely into ques- tion. Such a philosopher is on the cusp of philosophy. How might the echo of a lone philosopher’s “Final Statement of the Accused” before being murdered by Volksgericht1 or the public of a Domprobst2 affect tikkun in a post-Holocaust age? As a way of life in advance of thought, challenges philosophy by questioning its foundational love of knowledge (Sophia) at the expense of action. Public resistance by a philosopher’s thoughts or public prayers, in the eyes of Emil Fack- enheim, constitute activism worthy of refl ection if there is a philosophy

1 MW 267: “There was no purer resistance to the Nazi regime than the handful of Munich students who called themselves the “White Rose”. They knew that their action—distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets at the late date of 1943—was almost sure to be futile. They knew, too, that they were almost certain to be caught and put to death. They knew it: yet they did it. And they were caught and brutally, legally, murdered. Appropriately enough, the court decreeing their murder was a Volksgericht, the most assiduous of all institutions administering the Fürher’s law. . . . Kurt Huber was a professor of philosophy. His posthumous papers contain a “Final Statement of the Accused,” which in substance, if not in actual words, was delivered before the court.” 2 MW 289: “The date was November 10, 1938, the day of Kristallnacht . . . Few did anything. Domprobst [Prior] Bernard Lichtenberg of the Hedwigskirche walked, saw, and did just one thing. He went back to his church and prayed publicly “on behalf of the and the poor concentration camp prisoners.” And he continued to recite his public every day until, on October 23, 1941, he was at length arrested.” 236 aubrey l. glazer that still dares to think! Such thinking affects an ethical life in the face of cataclysmic evil. As a Jewish “life-thinker”, I argue that Fackenheim embodies an important mode of Jewish thinking through his uniquely neo-Lurianic activism. It is this activism that correlates tikkun to teshuvah. Our intention is to call to mind the Lurianic context of Fackenheim’s “life-thinking” so as to affect a newfound appreciation of his herme- neutic strategy as well as to evaluate its infl uence upon neo-Lurianic Kabbalah spiritual activism in a post-Holocaust age. There is much beyond the renowned 1967 dictum of the 614th com- mandment worthy of further refl ection, especially in one of Emil Fack- enheim’s most overlooked but critical works, To Mend the World (1982), wherein he sets forth foundations for a future Jewish thought from the ashes of Auschwitz. The present investigation limits its refl ections to Fackenheim’s contributions toward this future thinking.3 By claiming that “Jewish life in our is in advance of thought”,4 Fackenheim advocates for a paradigm shift in doing , whereby “it is clearly necessary for Jewish thought to go to school with life.”5 Such an ethics as fi rst philosophy is born from the ashes of any systematic philosophy. It could be argued that Rosenzweig already exhausted any future for interpolating neo-Hegelianism into Jewish philosophy. Thus Fackenheim returns to a more ancient paradigm with which to correlate his “life-thinking.” The cracked condition of the world sends Fackenheim into an existential maelstrom, forcing him to return to the primordial teachings of sixteenth century Kabbalist, R. Luria of . Our key concern here is the implications of this move for a post-Holocaust thinker. In exploring the traces of tikkun in Fackenheim’s To Mend The World, I argue that this Toronto philosopher is not merely doing (as

3 A sustained refl ection on that other philosopher, Heschel, who heard his legs praying when marching for civil rights, remains a desideratum. For the beginning of this task, see Susannah Heschel, “-talk, Friendship, and Activism: Theological Affi nity and the Relationship Between Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King, Jr.”, United Jewish Communities, www.ujc.org/content_display.html?ArticleID=5206. See also, Or N. Rose, : Man of , Man of Action. JPS, Philadelphia 2003. Compare with the recent centennial forum edited by Rose featuring three rab- bis applying Heschel’s mystical teachings to their unique forms of activism, Tikkun, January/Feburary 2007. 4 MW 15. 5 Ibid.