Fackenheim’s book God’s Presence in History is an attempt to grapple with Auschwitz. One of his main assertions is that Hitler wanted to exterminate the Jewish population and also Judaism as a living faith. He therefore claims that, since Hitler failed in his first aim, Jews should not grant him victory in his second. That is, Jews must keep the Jewish faith alive. Yet how is this possible after Auschwitz?
Fackenheim discusses another challenge to Jewish faith, that of the subjective turn and its claims on religious experience. As moderns we can ask (to put it crudely) whether an experience really is indicative of a reality independent of our minds. This is so serious it renders the ancient Midrashic framework in ‘ruins’. Once we step outside of a framework we can never fully re-enter it. (Interesting parallels to the situation of pluralism). He takes Nietzsche’s formulations of God’s death as a ‘rival faith’. He concludes, however, that faith and secularity are mutually irrefutable. He counsels ‘immediacy after reflection’ (Kierkegaard), which ‘remains self-exposed to the possibility of a total dissipation of every divine Presence, and yet confronts this possibility with a forever re-enacted risk of commitment.’ Although aware of the possibility of being wrong, the Jew must continue to commit to the possibility of the divine presence, in part through a participation in liturgical celebration. So this is a kind of gamble, that one imagines can lead only to a faith that is self-questioning, self-doubting; that is open to ideology critique of itself. This is the kind of faith we need; it is the opposite of fundamentalism. One could also wonder if its belief in the possibility of divine presence and action carries some kind of spiritual power that death of God theologies did/do not.
We are left, then, with a kind of fideism, but one that claims fideism is all we have. Our beliefs, whether secular or theist or something else, are ultimately ungrounded. This is probably why Fackenheim treats the witness of past generations as so important. He suggests that Judaism arises out of ‘root experiences’ that were (regarded as) God’s acts, and that these produce philosophical contradictions. Yet, in continuing to hold to these root experiences, these contraditions must be endured, rather than resolved by collapsing or denying some element of the experience. This makes Midrashic thought irreducibly fragmentary, but Judaism then regards such fragmentation as a necessary property of all thought.
The outcome seems to be that four thousands years of Jewish witness to God’s ability to act must not yet be abandoned, even though no-one is yet (ever?) able to know how to re-evaluate faith in the light of Auschwitz. Fackenheim does not resolve questions of the death of God or divine providence (though he does touch on them) but his short text is well worth considering.
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