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The Religion Question Answered - Emil Fackenheim
In May 1996, the University of Oregon in Eugene sponsored a four-day seminar entitled "Ethics after the Holocaust"; it was so widely attended that some had to be turned away. In September 1997, Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University will sponsor an international Jewish-Christian dialogue, "Good and Evil after Auschwitz". And 1996 saw Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, a bestseller in America and Germany, publicizing the fact that the Holocaust murderers had not been just SS fanatics but also "ordinary" men who had never killed before, were free to refuse with impunity but, shockingly, got used to doing and even enjoying it. (Some of the facts had been discovered by Christopher R. Browning, in Ordinary Men (Harper Perennial, 1992).) Winston Churchill had wished "to rid the earth of Hitler and his shadow" but while succeeding with Hitler, he seems to have failed with his shadow.

Religion in the next century? If any, it will be feeble if it ignores that shadow. We need go no further than to the "humanistic" part of our Biblical heritage: "Man created in the divine image", "Thou shalt not kill" (except in war, as long as there still is war), "Love thy neighbour." We have managed, after a fashion, in the past, by keeping, in our theories, the sadists of the species in a separate category, away from the rest of us; and in practice-more importantly still-by keeping them away from power. But "ordinary" men made to enjoy brutality, especially to the weak, above all to the helpless? The speed with which Hitlerism accomplished this goal stunned us at the time, but it didn't sink in, and even fifty years later, after a Hitler-incited war that cost fifty million lives, it seems to sink in only now. These conferences are not for nothing, neither is the popularity of Goldhagen's book.

To be sure, there is comfort in the fact that there was only one Hitler, and it seems unlikely that there will ever be another. But the genocides after 1945? Would they have happened without him? Perhaps even his shadow is enough.

"Thou shalt not kill," "Love thy neighbour"? There is need, even for those disbelieving in God, to act as if humanity were created in His image. Many Jews in North America have lost relatives in the Holocaust. But it is false to say that they were "lost": they were murdered, each of them a person, each an individual. We do say "lost", of course, because it is hard to face the truth, yet retain the Jewish belief that "he who saves one human life is considered as though he had saved all humanity." It is hard but it is necessary; possible, however, only if the belief assumes a new, post-Holocaust strength.

The necessity is also Christian. Traditionally, Christians can take bad Jews so long as there are also good ones, in extremis at least one, Jesus himself. But if-as happened in the Holocaust for the first time-the enemy wants to murder Jews, not for beliefs and actions, but for birth, and if he aims at murdering all of them-make the world judenrein-the carpenter of Nazareth is included.

It will be hard to get rid of Hitler's shadow, and Jews and Christians had better stick together. It is mostly a shared task, requiring shared strength...

Rabbi Emil Fackenheim is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Toronto.

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