The Autobiography of an Idea

I wondered, even then, if the Nazis really were irrational. Perhaps they employed a bizarre logic. If Jews were the ultimate cancer, a germ infecting the species, then destroying them might trump such short-term goals as military victory. If it looked likely that they’d lose the war, as it did once the US entered, there might even be a ghastly selflessness in trying to destroy the viral race — even as one perished. It all followed only, of course, if you granted the inane premises: that race exists in a meaningful way; that it is the chief determiner of global history; that there is such a thing as global history; that individual lives matter little compared with grand patterns; and that Jews are a vile race. None of this shook my sense of the Holocaust as a unique horror. But it made me think; it set me up to ask other questions in coming years. The trick, I now feel, lies in figuring out the questions that were on your mind, which led you to accept or reject certain answers or attitudes. What is bugging you. What was bugging me?

During the 1960s, Emil attended yearly gatherings in the Laurentians of like-minded Jewish thinkers. There, he said, he met the high priest of Auschwitz. It was Elie Wiesel. Wiesel’s readiness to confront the Holocaust stunned Emil. I went one year, as part of a small “youth” contingent. On a long walk, Emil told me he realized that for twenty years he had been trying to clear a place for faith after Auschwitz, yet all along he’d failed to tackle faith’s main stumbling block: the Holocaust.

It was a turning point. He finished a book on Hegel and began writing about faith — not so much after Auschwitz as in its harsh shadow. He also declared that there was now a 614th commandment (the traditional number of laws in the Torah is 613) — Emil later sometimes called it the eleventh commandment — for Jews after Auschwitz: thou shalt not allow Hitler posthumous victories. Emil said that had been his purpose in all he had written on faith: denying Hitler another triumph. His life and thought were permanently recast. I suppose that happens in life. But for most intellectuals, the existential fulcrum tends to become obscured until only the abstract conclusions are visible. The biographical elements get hived off from the conceptual results. Emil took the opposite route. From then on, he wrote everything based on who he was and what he had lived through.

In June 1967, Emil despairingly watched the outburst of war between Israel and the Arab states. He feared Hitler was about to win another victory. Then Israel suddenly and totally triumphed. In our conversations at the time, it seemed clear to me that Emil felt that was in some sophisticated sense a miracle, that God had intervened. The presence of God in history was part of his theology. He did not affirm literal revelation of scripture, but he believed in an existential encounter between the “Eternal Thou” and the Jewish people. It was a bold way to introduce a transcendent quality into worldly reality. Applied to the Middle East in 1967, though, it was risky. For to claim that Israel owed victory to divine intervention, one had to accept the version of events provided by Israeli officials and the Western media — and that was questionable. Perhaps Israel had not been so exposed. What if its resources were in fact superior, and its leaders knew that but for strategic reasons claimed the situation was dire? In that case, Emil’s anxiety and that of others, including me, was due to propaganda, and there was no need for intercession from above. He had begun moving down a dangerous path, placing his faith at the mercy of diplomatic and journalistic exercises.

We stayed close. When I left to study in the US and Israel, he handed me on to others, who handed me on to others. In 1964, he officiated at my wedding. He gave an exquisite Midrash, a rabbinic sermon, on marriage. It was one reason I stayed in an ill-starred marriage as long as I did — the sad thought of him preaching in vain.

In 1965, while I was at both a rabbinical seminary and grad school at Columbia, I sat in a coffee shop on a grey, rainy afternoon. I was in a gloomy state over my marriage, my unease at seminary, and, maybe, the state of the world. The Vietnam War was poisoning discourse in the US. I was no leftist; I still saw the world in religious terms. To me, politics seemed superficial. If anything, I leaned to the right. I finished a grey cup of coffee and watched a column of police officers march briskly onto the campus. I paid and followed. By the time I got there, a melee was in full flow. Bodies were being flung down the wide steps of Low Library — not a real library but the main admin building. I headed up to see what was going on.

At the top of the steps before the domed building, police had disrupted a protest against campus military recruitment. What I saw was not just protesters being hauled from a line. It was excitement in the faces of the officers and animation in their bodies. Many protesters were long-haired women with something provocative in their dress and hair, and the police violence felt like a response. That’s what hit me: the engagement of the armed agents of the state. They were not just doing a job or maintaining order. They were into it, as one said. And I thought, this is how it was in Nazi Germany. The entire conceptual structure I’d imbibed, including the uniqueness of the Holocaust, crumpled. People are capable of this, I thought. They just are.

Put these cops in Nazi Germany, and some would do what the SS or camp guards did. The uniqueness of the Holocaust and any ideas built on it melted away. So this is what the force of the state is about, I thought — and human nature, too. That experience led me to leftist politics. When someone had to risk his academic career by speaking out, I would volunteer cheerily, as if I’d already written off the future of my past. I wrote my comps but didn’t advance to a thesis. I spent a summer on an island in Temagami reading through a small mountain of Marxist economics. My relationship with Emil did not weather these changes well.

When I returned to Toronto in 1970, I went to see him. He said, “I don’t like what I’ve heard about you and Israel.” I found it abrupt, but it was true, I had changed. I’d been in Quebec City, where I’d gone to rent a garret and become a writer. It’s odd that we never discussed my fall from faith; it didn’t seem to interest him, nor me either. We had both been absorbed in some way by politics.

After that, our contact waned. In 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon, I wrote a piece for Maclean’s called “Hitler’s Haunting Last Laugh,” in which I mentioned Emil’s new commandment. I wrote that supporting the invasion amounted to ceding Hitler a belated victory. Emil wrote in, angrily dissociating himself from my use of his words. We had sporadic, indirect, always bitter contact. He retired and moved to Jerusalem. Years passed before we met again.