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.
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?
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