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.
In the late 1980s, Dow Marmur, rabbi at Holy Blossom, told me Emil would be in Toronto again. Dow asked me to come. When I winced, he said, “I’ll stand between you.” After speaking, Emil signed books. I got in line. He looked up, and I said, “It’s Rick.” He pushed his glasses onto his brow (another lovable trait) and rose, then we embraced. We met the next day, and I brought up our disputes. He said, “We can talk about that. Or we can say, It’s in the past.” I suggested we talk a little. We got nowhere, but it didn’t matter. We were back in touch. On his eightieth birthday, Holy Blossom held a dinner, to which I went.
It all came apart again after September 11, 2001. Someone told me, “Emil Fackenheim mourns for you.” I got a tart email from Jerusalem. Emil said he had followed my recent writing, and “of course” I was wrong. Then he veered off. He said when I was sixteen, he had judged a sermonette contest I had won, but that I had quoted a verse from Exodus without mentioning the next, which contradicted my point — as though he would revoke the prize now if he could. I pondered for months how to reply.
A copy of his email was still sitting on my desk when I heard he’d died. Then I realized I could have said something about his famous phrase, my use of which incensed him. It was open ended, that eleventh commandment; it said how to approach your obligations as a Jew but not what to actually do. It left that to each of us in our situations, much as the categorical imperative of Kant (whom Emil revered) said only in the broadest terms what to do. Kant and Emil both left the living of life to free choice. He had respectfully cleared that space, in spite of how vehemently he might have disagreed with the decision in my case.
After 9/11, evil was in the air again, as though it were the true source of the attacks. There was also a sense that 9/11 was, like the Holocaust, unique. It changed the world forever, people said; nothing would be the same. They sometimes mentioned, for contrast, Hannah Arendt’s phrase, the banality of evil, deployed to describe the Eichmann trial forty years before. But 9/11 didn’t seem banal. It was spectacular: huge towers collapsing as if swallowed by the earth. I found the question confusing. The drama and symbolism of 9/11 were surely unique, but they were hard to square with the grimly ordinary result: some 3,000 innocent lives extinguished in the name of cause and grievance, hardly a rarity in our time. It didn’t change everything, except for those to whom it felt that way. But that is true of all catastrophe: a single death in traffic changes everything for those involved.
I studied with Arendt at the New School after drifting out of the seminary/religion stream. At first, I didn’t know she was Jewish, or that she spent almost a decade after she fled Nazi Germany working for Youth Aliyah in Paris, helping Jewish kids reach Palestine (as Israel then was). She was a great teacher. She had a direct quality. “Look,” she said when some of us informed her during a class on violence that capitalism is inherently violent, “violence is when he hits you.” I became not a disciple, exactly, but I still take a regular dose of her writing and always come away improved. Post-9/11, a book of her essays jumped off the shelf into my hand one day. Then a few pages from a 1950 piece called “Social Science Techniques and the Study of Concentration Camps” leapt out. Near the end of World War II, she wrote, the gas chambers were counterproductive. Himmler knew it. Yet he ordered that “no economic or military considerations were to interfere with the extermination program.” This “for all immediate practical purposes [was] self-defeating.” It was the same argument I had learned from Emil.
I don’t find this kind of thing repetitive. I find it to be an opportunity to grow and learn. We revisit scenes of significance because we have not yet solved the conundrums of our lives. I returned to Toronto, I now think, not just because I ran out of money and terminally alienated my department with my fevered leftism. I came back because I wanted to deal with dilemmas I hadn’t solved when I left (and which were why I left). You can’t choose what perplexes you, but you can sometimes decide to confront or evade it. Long after I first heard Emil’s argument, Arendt’s essay gave me a chance to fixate on it again.
“Normal men do not know that everything is possible,” she wrote, quoting a Buchenwald survivor. But it seemed to me that many “normal” people know everything is possible. They may shake their heads but are not surprised. Arendt feared her colleagues would be stymied by Nazi conduct, since they would not comprehend how “objective necessities . . . adjustment to which seems a mere question of elementary sanity, could be neglected.” She meant such necessities as using trains to get troops to the front. But I don’t find that hard to grasp, and I don’t think I’m abnormal. People routinely fail to do what seems practical, because what matters in their eyes often has little to do with rationally calculated benefits. Irrationality — in the sense of impractical, short-term, or counterproductive — is chokingly common.
During the 1837 rebellion in Upper Canada, the beaten rebels retreated to Navy Island, near US territory below Niagara Falls, and exchanged cannon shots with imperial troops on the Canadian side. According to one of the accounts I read, a Loyalist volunteer named Miller — an “old Navy man” — had his leg ripped off by a cannonball. “After the mangled member was cut off, he desired to see it, gave three cheers for the Queen” — i.e., Victoria, crowned in London that very year — “and in a few hours was dead.” He made sense of his life by giving it away gladly, even giddily, for the sake of a young queen who would never know his name.
I have been thinking about Miller for thirty years. If I can understand him, I thought, I’ll understand what there is to know about human behaviour.
So who are the “normal men” who do not know everything is possible? I ask since I find the varieties of common sense to be more diverse and mysterious than Arendt and Emil thought, and any calculations made by Miller and others (like my dad, who I’ll get to) are usually far from utilitarian. What seems to me abnormal would be a world in which people lived rational, utilitarian lives and act commonsensibly. That sounds more utopian than the lives we see in history or on our streets. But that may say as much about me and how I have come to view the world as Arendt’s views do about her. Hmmm. Why did she see things just that way?
