After Auschwitz, Jerusalem: In Memory of My Teacher, Leo Baeck

Judaism, Wntr, 2001 by Emil L. Fackenheim

I BEGIN BY THANKING PROFESSOR AMIR WHO HAS introduced me. The fact that it was he who introduced me has been emotional for me if only because his father, Yehoshua Amir, was a fellow student of mine, back until 1938, of Leo Baeck's at the Hochschule fur die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin. Then he came on Aljyah, soon was expert in Hebrew, good enough not only to teach but also, no mean task, to translate Franz Rosenzweig's Stern der Erlosung.

Once, as Hebrew teacher he welcomed Holocaust survivors in Israel, it must have been in the late 1940s or early 1950s, for Hanukkah. In 1978, at a conference in Cologne, Germany he quoted what he said to them: [1]

Friends, let us kindle the Hanukkah light What can I tell you ? I know where you come from. I can understand, if one of you tells me "`no longer believe in anything, not in God, not in man, not in life. I have seen too much." But you have come to Israel, and perhaps for the first time in many, many years you feel: here I am wanted, here I am accepted, and here I am loved. You know we want to give you everything we can: a language, a place to live, company, friends, in a word, home. And now we kindle the Hanukkah light. Perhaps you too can say in this hour: "a miracle has happened to us."

In the midst of a world of darkness--death, lie and blood--we have found a jug of pure oil and with this oil we have kindled alight. A first light in a new candlestick in the world.

This has been, and is, my attempt to give an answer to Auschwitz.

Gunther B. Ginzel, the editor of the book, adds: "The 220 participants in the seminar were so deeply touched by Amir's lecture that the attempt of a discussion afterwards did not take place. This was largely due to the visibly moved Rabbi Amir who, 40 years earlier, hand in hand with his father, had stood before the burning synagogue in Essen. This behavior of the listeners is all the more remarkable since more then half the participants were born after the end of the war."

The lecture that had begun this way was given at Hebrew Union College, Jerusalem, on November 7, 2000, and two days after there must have been memorial observances of Kristallnacht, 1938, in Berlin and Vienna. But I doubt whether stress was placed on Leo Baeck (in whose memory my lecture is given), and I doubt even more whether stress was laid, in either place, on "After Auschwitz, Jerusalem," my main topic. (My lecture itself will show that the comma is not superfluous.)

For those old enough to remember, and those too young to have experienced it, Kristallnacht 1938 was the last occasion the Hitler regime could have been toppled-by the world without, or Germans brave enough, righteous enough, but not all that many--and there would have been no war, no 50 million dead, no Holocaust.

For me there is a resemblance between Berlin, 1935-1938 and Jerusalem 1983--today: Berlin then was, Jerusalem is now, the place of Jewish action, Jewish events. But there is one difference, and it is truly vast: Berlin was where some of us, I included, got out, with great luck, by action. In Jerusalem I will stay, also with great luck, this time with no action of mine involved, ad meah v-esrim till "a hundred and twenty."

Rabbi Leo Baeck stayed in Berlin, on a principle that was momentous: he would stay there so long as even a minyan was left. He knew the Nazis wanted Germany to be judenrein, but could not have known of the practice, carried out by none more diabolically, systematically than Reinhard Heydrich, of my own home town of Halle, toward his--as it were, "messianic"--goal, not by mass expulsion but by mass murder at Treblinka, Auschwitz, other places.

As German-born, American-educated historian Klaus Fischer has written, such as Reinhard Heydrich forced Jews "to organize their own destruction, and pay for every penny of it, a scheme worthy of the worst sadists." [2]

Philosophers must find anew, more adequate definition of "sadism": the Marquis de Sade is no longer enough.

In his younger days Leo Baeck had already fought for Judaism, in a review of Adolf von Harnack's supposedly liberal, in fact fashionably anti-Jewish Essence of Christianity, and later had written his own famous, much revised, much reprinted "Essence of Judaism."

But now, already at 60, Baeck, with war on Nazism a new necessity, had begun his own campaign by 1935, in a Kol Nidre prayer, distributed in Berlin synagogues. Its climax was as follows:

We stand before our God. With the same resolution with which we have confessed our sins, personal and collective, let us say that we perceive with revulsion the lies uttered against us, the false charges made against our faith and its defenders. Let us trample these abominations beneath our feet.

His prayer ended:

We are filled with sorrow and affliction. Standing in silence before our God we express what lies on our souls. May this mute prayer go forth and be heard above all other sound. [3]

But, with their bark of Heil Hitler, even in the prayers of Deutsche Christen, the Berlin mute prayer was not heard. But for this and subsequent efforts, Baeck was jailed, five times.