The Journal of Jewish Thought and , 2003, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 69–96

Post-Holocaust vs. Postmodern: Emil Fackenheim’s Evolving Dialogue with

Marc A. Krell* University of Arizona, Tucson, USA

Since ’s Six Day War in 1967, Emil Fackenheim has demonstrated a growing tension between two conflicting discourses in his evolving dialogue with Christianity: a post-Holocaust apologetic in which Jewish survival is championed over against an unrepentant Christianity, and a postmodern “recentering” of and Christianity around a ruptured biblical text that they both share after .1 On the one hand, Fackenheim represents a “first wave” of Jewish philosophers and theologians who attempted to use their respective disciplines to reveal the “meaning” of the Holocaust. They claimed that traditional categories could not process this unprece- dented event and therefore required radically new conceptual frameworks through

* Tel: 520-206-9741. E-mail: [email protected] 1As we will see, Fackenheim’s attitude toward Christianity changes from one of appreciation and allegiance immediately following the Holocaust to antagonism following Israel’s Six Day War in 1967. For a discussion of Fackenheim’s evolving views toward Christianity, see Emil Fackenheim, Quest for Past and Future: Essays in Jewish (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), pp. 20–25; The Jewish Return into History: Reflections in the Age of Auschwitz and a New (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), pp. 32–44. Cf. Gregory Baum, “Fackenheim and Christianity,” in Fackenheim: German Philosophy and Jewish Thought, ed. Louis Greenspan and Graeme Nicholson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), pp. 177–182, 187; Laurie McRobert, “Emil L. Fackenheim: Encounters with Christianity,” Toronto Journal of Theology, vol. 5 (1989), no. 2, pp. 206–207. Despite his post-Holocaust apologetic vis-`a-vis Christianity, John McCumber claims that Fackenheim is engaging in a postmodern hermeneutic when describing the Holocaust as a rupture which can be mended through a rereading of the biblical text. McCumber observes that Fackenheim “recenters” the around previously marginal themes that become new, provisional centers produced by Jewish and Christian readers after the Holocaust, replacing the foundational theological and ethical motifs that have been ruptured by the Shoah. See McCumber, “The Holocaust as Master Rupture, Foucault, Fackenheim and ‘Postmodernity,’ ” in Postmodernism and the Holocaust, Value Inquiry Book Series, vol. 72, ed. Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), pp. 245–250. Ironically, in his 1967 book, The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought, Fackenheim used the terms “postmodern” and “post- Christian” interchangeably to refer to the fragmentation of western thought and religion. He would later replace the term postmodern with that of “post-Holocaust.” See Fackenheim, The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1967), pp. 235–236, 241–242. Cf. Zachary Braiterman, () After Auschwitz: Tradition and Change in Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 136, 189, n. 6.

ISSN 1053-699X print; ISSN 1477-285X online/03/010069-28 © 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1053699032000133636 70 M.A. Krell which to grasp its utter uniqueness.2 However, many of these Jewish and Christian post- Holocaust theologians actually preserved pre-Holocaust theological motifs while transvaluing them in a post-Holocaust framework. In this “new” paradigm, the theological signifiers may have changed, yet the divine signified actually remained the same. These post-Holocaust, “extratextual” approaches locate religious meaning outside of the text in essential experiences that it symbolizes which have ontological significance.3 For Jewish thinkers Fackenheim and as well as liberal Protestants A. Roy Eckardt, Paul van Buren and Franklin Littell, the Holocaust is an unprecedented revelatory event with extraordinary implications. Out of the ashes of Auschwitz, both and Christians are called to reevaluate and reconstruct their relationship with God and each other in different ways. For a neo-orthodox Protestant thinker like Jurgen Moltmann and Catholic theologians John Pawlikowski and , the Holocaust has universal, ontological significance because of what it reveals about the divine-human relationship and the Christ event through the experience of human .4

2Jacob Meskin observes that this first wave of post-Holocaust Jewish thinkers includes the work of , Irving Greenberg, Steven Katz, Emil Fackenheim and Richard Rubenstein among others. Meskin argues that in response to this first wave of post-Holocaust Jewish thought, a new wave of philosophers has arisen whose work is characterized by a greater humility and a desire to engage in a tighter conceptual analysis of historical issues in an attempt to clarify important concepts and raise new questions. See Meskin, “The Jewish Transformation of Modern Thought: Levinas and Philosophy After the Holocaust,” Cross Currents, vol. 47, no. 4 (Winter 1997/1998), pp. 505–506. 3I discuss “extratextual” theological approaches in “Decentering Judaism and Christianity: Using Feminist Theory to Construct a Postmodern Jewish-,” Cross Currents, vol. 50, no. 4 (Winter 2000/2001), pp. 474–475, 478–481. In that essay, I contrast the “extratextual,” experiential responses to the Holocaust of Richard Rubenstein, Eliezer Berkovits and Irving Greenberg, with the postliberal “intratextual” theology promoted by the Protestant thinker George Lindbeck and the “intertextual” theological approach advocated by the Christian feminist theologian Mary McClintock Fulkerson. Both the “intratextual” and “intertextual” approaches ground theology in a cultural-linguistic paradigm that reorients theology in the social and discursive mediums that constitute it, instead of in an objective reality posited by a doctrinal proposition or in an abstract, core experience that are both isolated from the communal, historical context in which cultures develop. However, the intertextual approach allows for the possibility of meaning to be produced through the relationship between cultural texts or discourses rather than within one particular discourse. See Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1984), pp. 16–25, 30–34, 114, and Fulkerson, Changing the Subject: Women’s Discourses and (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), p. 165. 4In my book, Intersecting Pathways: Modern Jewish Theologians in Conversation with Christianity, I compare Fackenheim’s post-Holocaust theology to that of Greenberg, yet I do not discuss Fackenheim’s relationship with Christianity. I do, however, discuss Greenberg’s dialogue with Paul van Buren and A. Roy Eckardt which was a constitutive element of his post-Holocaust theology. See Marc A. Krell, Intersecting Pathways: Modern Jewish Theologians in Conversation with Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 106–107, 118–129. For an extended discussion of the above Protestant theological approaches to the Holocaust and the State of Israel, see Stephen R. Haynes, Reluctant Witnesses: Jews and the Christian Imagination (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995), pp. 120–140. Haynes discusses Moltmann’s theology in Prospects for Post-Holocaust Theology: “Israel” in the of Karl Barth, Jurgen¨ Moltmann and Paul van Buren. American Academy of Religion Academy Series, ed. Susan Thistlethwaite, no. 77 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991). Cf. Moltmann, The Crucified God (New York: Harper and Row, 1974). John Pawlikowski describes his emerging theological response to the Holocaust and the State of Israel in a series of articles: “The Evolution of Christian-Jewish Dialogue, Christian Jewish Relations, vol. 17, no. 4 (1994), pp. 23–32, “The Shoah: Continuing Theological Challenge for Christianity,” in Contemporary Christian Religious Responses to the Shoah, ed. Steven L. Jacobs (Lanham/New York/London: University Press of America, 1993), pp. 139–165, “ in Light of the Jewish-Christian Dialogue,” in Proceedings of the Forty-ninth Annual Convention, Catholic Theological Society of America (1994), pp. 120–134, “Christian Theological Concerns after the Holocaust,” in Visions of the Other: Jewish and Christian Theologians Assess the Dialogue, ed. Eugene J. Fisher (New York/Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1994), pp. 28–51. Some of his most recent comments on the