What do you think?
Rate this book
To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought
"This subtle and nuanced study is clearly Fackenheim's most important book." ―Paul Mendes-Flohr
" . . . magnificent in sweep and in execution of detail." ―Franklin H. Littell
In To Mend the World Emil L. Fackenheim points the way to Judaism's renewal in a world and an age in which all of our notions―about God, humanity, and revelation―have been severely challenged. He tests the resources within Judaism for healing the breach between secularism and revelation after the Holocaust. Spinoza, Rosenzweig, Hegel, Heidegger, and Buber figure prominently in his account.
" . . . magnificent in sweep and in execution of detail." ―Franklin H. Littell
In To Mend the World Emil L. Fackenheim points the way to Judaism's renewal in a world and an age in which all of our notions―about God, humanity, and revelation―have been severely challenged. He tests the resources within Judaism for healing the breach between secularism and revelation after the Holocaust. Spinoza, Rosenzweig, Hegel, Heidegger, and Buber figure prominently in his account.
408 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1982
5 people are currently reading
128 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 20, 2019
This work does a great job at showing how the Holocaust interferes with the systems of the Modern period's greatest Philosophers. In it, he responds to Spinoza, Rosenzweig, Hegel, and Heidegger (as well as Kant in bits and pieces), showing how each either fails to prevent gentiles from willing the Holocaust, or preserves the Jewish people in an ontological condition inappropriate to its new needs of survival.
With all of this said, and with great respect to the author, I believe his ultimate response to the Holocaust, what we, the Jewish people, ought to do next, has some significant flaws. He ultimately argues that Galut (exilic, diasporic) Judaism is no longer feasible, and that we must affirm the State of Israel, both so that the Jews are no longer at the mercy of potentially murderous government, and so that the gentiles no longer are exposed to the moral blemishes related to antisemitic oppression.
I will agree that diasporic existence has taken a great blow with the Holocaust, and that the Jewish people can likely never live in full trust of a secular government again, if they ever could. I also agree that some form of national sovereignty for the Jewish people is essential for our safety today in the age of mass death. However, Fackenheim's stance at the conclusion of this book ignores one crucial factor of the Jewish experience since the Shoah: through the independence of the State of Israel and the increasing acceptance that many Jews find in the United States, many among the Jewish people risk being participants or complicit bystanders in gruesome acts of political violence, those that offend the rights to life and dignity of others. This is not to say that all will be combatants in this scenario, but that we all participate in societies that can carry out global injustices. As members of a democratic West, we have allowed our countries to economically abuse developing nations, and our military interventions have taken countless civilian lives. Moreover, the State of Israel, though certainly not committing atrocities now as some of its most fervent critics might claim, still maintains problematic systems of religious and racial oppression, and has displaced thousands of Palestinian people from their homes in the process of establishing itself.
I am not in any way trying to equivocate between Jews and the Nazis who perpetrated the Shoah. What I am saying is that many of us Jews have power and privilege, and a post-Shoah approach to Jewish identity, religion, and ethics must take the risks involved in this power into account. It is not enough to ensure that we will never be victims again. We must ensure that we are never the oppressors.
In this work, Fackenheim is dismissive of Israel's critics, and does not take seriously the potential ethical pitfalls of national sovereignty and enfranchisement in a democratic society. Until the Jewish people learns to respond to these pitfalls adequately, we will not have learned the necessary lessons from the Shoah.
With all of this said, and with great respect to the author, I believe his ultimate response to the Holocaust, what we, the Jewish people, ought to do next, has some significant flaws. He ultimately argues that Galut (exilic, diasporic) Judaism is no longer feasible, and that we must affirm the State of Israel, both so that the Jews are no longer at the mercy of potentially murderous government, and so that the gentiles no longer are exposed to the moral blemishes related to antisemitic oppression.
I will agree that diasporic existence has taken a great blow with the Holocaust, and that the Jewish people can likely never live in full trust of a secular government again, if they ever could. I also agree that some form of national sovereignty for the Jewish people is essential for our safety today in the age of mass death. However, Fackenheim's stance at the conclusion of this book ignores one crucial factor of the Jewish experience since the Shoah: through the independence of the State of Israel and the increasing acceptance that many Jews find in the United States, many among the Jewish people risk being participants or complicit bystanders in gruesome acts of political violence, those that offend the rights to life and dignity of others. This is not to say that all will be combatants in this scenario, but that we all participate in societies that can carry out global injustices. As members of a democratic West, we have allowed our countries to economically abuse developing nations, and our military interventions have taken countless civilian lives. Moreover, the State of Israel, though certainly not committing atrocities now as some of its most fervent critics might claim, still maintains problematic systems of religious and racial oppression, and has displaced thousands of Palestinian people from their homes in the process of establishing itself.
I am not in any way trying to equivocate between Jews and the Nazis who perpetrated the Shoah. What I am saying is that many of us Jews have power and privilege, and a post-Shoah approach to Jewish identity, religion, and ethics must take the risks involved in this power into account. It is not enough to ensure that we will never be victims again. We must ensure that we are never the oppressors.
In this work, Fackenheim is dismissive of Israel's critics, and does not take seriously the potential ethical pitfalls of national sovereignty and enfranchisement in a democratic society. Until the Jewish people learns to respond to these pitfalls adequately, we will not have learned the necessary lessons from the Shoah.
October 18, 2007
Fackenheim is one of the most influential Jewish theologians in the post-Holocaust period. He is most famous for his "614th commandment" not to grant Hitler posthumous victories. This particular book is dedicated to finding a foundation for Jewish philosophy in the wake of the failure of modern philosophical systems to come to terms with the Holocaust.
This book is a critique of several figures in Jewish and German thought in the modern period. The major figures discussed are Spinoza, Rosenzweig, Buber, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. His new philosophic system is founded on the Jewish mystical concept of Tikkun, which he divorces from its theurgic context and turns it into a Kantian categorical imperative. (Although he would never admit that is what he has actually done.) This book ultimately has its roots firmly in liberal Judaism and owes a lot to traditional German Reform Judaism of the nineteenth century.
This book is a critique of several figures in Jewish and German thought in the modern period. The major figures discussed are Spinoza, Rosenzweig, Buber, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. His new philosophic system is founded on the Jewish mystical concept of Tikkun, which he divorces from its theurgic context and turns it into a Kantian categorical imperative. (Although he would never admit that is what he has actually done.) This book ultimately has its roots firmly in liberal Judaism and owes a lot to traditional German Reform Judaism of the nineteenth century.
December 23, 2025
A JEWISH PHILOSOPHER POSES SOME VERY ‘UNCOMFORTABLE’ AND CHALLENGING QUESTIONS
Emil Ludwig Fackenheim (1916-2003) was a German-born Jewish philosopher and Reform rabbi. Arrested by the Nazis on Kristallnacht (1938), he escaped from the Sachsenhausen camp and made it to Great Britain; considered an ‘enemy alien,’ he was interned in Canada until the war ended. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, where he became a professor of philosophy from 1948-1984.
He wrote in the Preface to the second edition (1989) of this 1982 book, “The word ‘Holocaust’ has not appeared in the title or subtitle of any of my previous books… But the time for restraint is long past. The name is being used in vain every day. Distortion, abuses, exploitations abound. Yet the meaning of the word is clear and established. It refers to… ostracism … and eventual murder of every available Jew, for no reason other than birth, by a German regime… The regime was criminal from the start. In its twelve years… it committed numerous crimes other than the Holocaust…
“Since [this book] is not a sociopolitical work but one that hovers between philosophy and theology… it is best for me to … turn at once to the ultimate cause. To murder the very last member of a well-defined group of human beings… To consider this task so supremely important as to persist in it even as a Reich… was, after a mere twelve [years], collapsing in a nightmare of fire and death of its own people?… Future historians may well conclude what is already asserted by fake historians …. that the Holocaust never happened: how could [this]… ever have actually occurred?” (Pg. xi-xii)
He explains in the first chapter, “what if the Holocaust IS unique?… in a symposium on the subject in the spring of 1967… my first response was to formulate a ‘614th commandment,’ to the effect that Jews are forbidden to give Hitler posthumous victories… the 614th commandment became the only statement of mine that ever became famous.” (Pg. 10)
He states, “only in this context can the ‘central question’ of our whole inquiry be both asked and answered---how Jewish (and also Christian and philosophical) thought can both expose itself to the Holocaust and survive.” (Pg. 24)
He points out that “Heidegger never faced German ‘guilt’… Karl Jaspers… stayed away from the Holocaust… Karl Barth … describe[d] the Holocaust as the greatest Jewish catastrophe in history; that it might also be a Christian catastrophe does not seem to have entered his mind… Paul Tillich… and Rudolf Bultmann wrote… as though nothing had happened. Nor… has this failure among the great ones in this century been remedied by philosophers or theologians coming after them. Thus… we are faced with the possibility that the Holocaust may be a radical rupture in history---and that among things ruptured may be not just this or that way of philosophical or theological thinking, but thought itself.” (Pg. 192-193)
He quotes the testimony of a Jewish concentration camp survivor, who said, “they had condemned us to die in our own filth, to drown… in our own excrement. They wished to abase us, to destroy our human dignity… to return us to the level of wild animals… But from the instant that I grasped the motivating principle… I felt under orders to live… And if I did die in Auschwitz, it would be as a human being.” He comments, “This is an historic statement… we have come… upon an unimpeachable testimony to the effect that some … confronted and grasped this whole-of-horror even while they were in it and trapped by it… This is a monumental discovery… We must therefore ask … some crucial questions. She felt under orders to live. We ask: WHOSE orders?… where did she get the strength?… the last question is unanswerable. Once again ‘will-power’ and ‘natural desire’ are both inadequate. Once again we have touched an Ultimate. [She] does not say who gave the orders. We must respect this silence.” (Pg. 217-218)
He observes, “That the Holocaust transcends comprehension is of course not immediately accepted---or acceptable. Reason rightly rebels against this assertion, until all avenues for understanding are explored. And the reason that comes on the scene, next to the psychological, is that of the historian… Yet the better a Holocaust historian succeeds in explaining the event, the closer he comes to suspecting the inevitability of ultimate failure.” (Pg. 230)
He points out, “The most extreme outcome … is the thesis that the Holocaust never happened at all. This, of course, is a … neo-Nazi thesis which is not respectable… However, quite respectable… is the thesis that while the Endlӧsung doubtless happened, nobody REALLY WANTED IT, that it was … the way out of an awkward dilemma…” He quotes Holocaust denier David Irving: “governors in ‘the east’ proved wholly unequal to the problems caused by this… The Jews were brought by the trainload to ghettos already overcrowded and underprovisioned.” Fackenheim comments, “It seems that if a bureaucrat has sleepless nights because he cannot house and feed masses of men, women, and children entrusted to his care, then the best [solution] of the problem is wholesale murder.” (Pg. 244-245)
He asks, “Where would Jesus of Nazareth have been in Nazi-occupied Europe? If he was who he is said to have been, he would have gone to Auschwitz or Treblinka voluntarily even if, as Nazi-Christian doctrine asserts, he had been an ‘Aryan.’ If not going voluntarily, he would have been dragged into a cattle car involuntarily, for he was not an ‘Aryan’ but a Jew. A Jesus that goes voluntarily reveals the scarcity of his disciples in the great time of testing---that saints, those Christian included, were few. A Jesus dragged off involuntarily reveals the still more terrible truth that, without Jew-hatred in Christianity itself, Auschwitz, in the heart of Christian Europe, would have been impossible.” (Pg. 280-281)
He argues, “However the Christian theologian seeks to understand the Good News that is his heritage, it is ruptured by the Holocaust. One ponders this awesome fact and is shaken. The one who is shaken need not himself be a Christian. He may also be a Jew… Even so, he need by no means be indifferent. And if he ever had but a single true Christian friend… indifference is impossible. This Christian was his friend. When the law made friendship with a Jew into an ‘Aryan’ crime, THIS Christian … remained his friend and risked his life. In this he felt guided by the Holy Spirit. A Jew must ask: Can this feeling have been a mere sham and a delusion?” (Pg, 288)
He observes, “A Jew today is one who, except for an historical accident---Hitler’s loss of the war---would have either been murdered or never been born. One makes this statement at a conference on Jewish identity. There is an awkward silence. And then the conference proceeds as if nothing had happened.” (Pg. 295)
He explains, “The explorations of this work may all be said to have concerned a single theme---Teshuva [repentance] for the Jewish people in our time… we were finally led to its Jewish core… just this self-immersion helped disclose also most fully the problematics of Teshuva in our time… The problematics have become radically inescapable in our time, with a rupture so complete that any Tikkun [repair] can at best be only fragmentary. Hence our climactic question remains yet to be asked: Can Teshuva after the Holocaust be the same as before? Is it possible at all?” (Pg. 317)
He concludes, “the nearly impossible has in our time become almost actual. The holy remnant has become an accidental remnant, and the question is whether this threat to the matrix of Judaism can leave its apex unaffected… For Jewish thought after the Holocaust, these questions all find their focus and concentration in a single one on which the future of Judaism depends. After the Holocaust, can the Yom Kippur be what it was before? Is it still possible at all?” (Pg. 321)
This book will be ‘must reading’ for those studying the theological and philosophical implications of the Holocaust.
Emil Ludwig Fackenheim (1916-2003) was a German-born Jewish philosopher and Reform rabbi. Arrested by the Nazis on Kristallnacht (1938), he escaped from the Sachsenhausen camp and made it to Great Britain; considered an ‘enemy alien,’ he was interned in Canada until the war ended. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, where he became a professor of philosophy from 1948-1984.
He wrote in the Preface to the second edition (1989) of this 1982 book, “The word ‘Holocaust’ has not appeared in the title or subtitle of any of my previous books… But the time for restraint is long past. The name is being used in vain every day. Distortion, abuses, exploitations abound. Yet the meaning of the word is clear and established. It refers to… ostracism … and eventual murder of every available Jew, for no reason other than birth, by a German regime… The regime was criminal from the start. In its twelve years… it committed numerous crimes other than the Holocaust…
“Since [this book] is not a sociopolitical work but one that hovers between philosophy and theology… it is best for me to … turn at once to the ultimate cause. To murder the very last member of a well-defined group of human beings… To consider this task so supremely important as to persist in it even as a Reich… was, after a mere twelve [years], collapsing in a nightmare of fire and death of its own people?… Future historians may well conclude what is already asserted by fake historians …. that the Holocaust never happened: how could [this]… ever have actually occurred?” (Pg. xi-xii)
He explains in the first chapter, “what if the Holocaust IS unique?… in a symposium on the subject in the spring of 1967… my first response was to formulate a ‘614th commandment,’ to the effect that Jews are forbidden to give Hitler posthumous victories… the 614th commandment became the only statement of mine that ever became famous.” (Pg. 10)
He states, “only in this context can the ‘central question’ of our whole inquiry be both asked and answered---how Jewish (and also Christian and philosophical) thought can both expose itself to the Holocaust and survive.” (Pg. 24)
He points out that “Heidegger never faced German ‘guilt’… Karl Jaspers… stayed away from the Holocaust… Karl Barth … describe[d] the Holocaust as the greatest Jewish catastrophe in history; that it might also be a Christian catastrophe does not seem to have entered his mind… Paul Tillich… and Rudolf Bultmann wrote… as though nothing had happened. Nor… has this failure among the great ones in this century been remedied by philosophers or theologians coming after them. Thus… we are faced with the possibility that the Holocaust may be a radical rupture in history---and that among things ruptured may be not just this or that way of philosophical or theological thinking, but thought itself.” (Pg. 192-193)
He quotes the testimony of a Jewish concentration camp survivor, who said, “they had condemned us to die in our own filth, to drown… in our own excrement. They wished to abase us, to destroy our human dignity… to return us to the level of wild animals… But from the instant that I grasped the motivating principle… I felt under orders to live… And if I did die in Auschwitz, it would be as a human being.” He comments, “This is an historic statement… we have come… upon an unimpeachable testimony to the effect that some … confronted and grasped this whole-of-horror even while they were in it and trapped by it… This is a monumental discovery… We must therefore ask … some crucial questions. She felt under orders to live. We ask: WHOSE orders?… where did she get the strength?… the last question is unanswerable. Once again ‘will-power’ and ‘natural desire’ are both inadequate. Once again we have touched an Ultimate. [She] does not say who gave the orders. We must respect this silence.” (Pg. 217-218)
He observes, “That the Holocaust transcends comprehension is of course not immediately accepted---or acceptable. Reason rightly rebels against this assertion, until all avenues for understanding are explored. And the reason that comes on the scene, next to the psychological, is that of the historian… Yet the better a Holocaust historian succeeds in explaining the event, the closer he comes to suspecting the inevitability of ultimate failure.” (Pg. 230)
He points out, “The most extreme outcome … is the thesis that the Holocaust never happened at all. This, of course, is a … neo-Nazi thesis which is not respectable… However, quite respectable… is the thesis that while the Endlӧsung doubtless happened, nobody REALLY WANTED IT, that it was … the way out of an awkward dilemma…” He quotes Holocaust denier David Irving: “governors in ‘the east’ proved wholly unequal to the problems caused by this… The Jews were brought by the trainload to ghettos already overcrowded and underprovisioned.” Fackenheim comments, “It seems that if a bureaucrat has sleepless nights because he cannot house and feed masses of men, women, and children entrusted to his care, then the best [solution] of the problem is wholesale murder.” (Pg. 244-245)
He asks, “Where would Jesus of Nazareth have been in Nazi-occupied Europe? If he was who he is said to have been, he would have gone to Auschwitz or Treblinka voluntarily even if, as Nazi-Christian doctrine asserts, he had been an ‘Aryan.’ If not going voluntarily, he would have been dragged into a cattle car involuntarily, for he was not an ‘Aryan’ but a Jew. A Jesus that goes voluntarily reveals the scarcity of his disciples in the great time of testing---that saints, those Christian included, were few. A Jesus dragged off involuntarily reveals the still more terrible truth that, without Jew-hatred in Christianity itself, Auschwitz, in the heart of Christian Europe, would have been impossible.” (Pg. 280-281)
He argues, “However the Christian theologian seeks to understand the Good News that is his heritage, it is ruptured by the Holocaust. One ponders this awesome fact and is shaken. The one who is shaken need not himself be a Christian. He may also be a Jew… Even so, he need by no means be indifferent. And if he ever had but a single true Christian friend… indifference is impossible. This Christian was his friend. When the law made friendship with a Jew into an ‘Aryan’ crime, THIS Christian … remained his friend and risked his life. In this he felt guided by the Holy Spirit. A Jew must ask: Can this feeling have been a mere sham and a delusion?” (Pg, 288)
He observes, “A Jew today is one who, except for an historical accident---Hitler’s loss of the war---would have either been murdered or never been born. One makes this statement at a conference on Jewish identity. There is an awkward silence. And then the conference proceeds as if nothing had happened.” (Pg. 295)
He explains, “The explorations of this work may all be said to have concerned a single theme---Teshuva [repentance] for the Jewish people in our time… we were finally led to its Jewish core… just this self-immersion helped disclose also most fully the problematics of Teshuva in our time… The problematics have become radically inescapable in our time, with a rupture so complete that any Tikkun [repair] can at best be only fragmentary. Hence our climactic question remains yet to be asked: Can Teshuva after the Holocaust be the same as before? Is it possible at all?” (Pg. 317)
He concludes, “the nearly impossible has in our time become almost actual. The holy remnant has become an accidental remnant, and the question is whether this threat to the matrix of Judaism can leave its apex unaffected… For Jewish thought after the Holocaust, these questions all find their focus and concentration in a single one on which the future of Judaism depends. After the Holocaust, can the Yom Kippur be what it was before? Is it still possible at all?” (Pg. 321)
This book will be ‘must reading’ for those studying the theological and philosophical implications of the Holocaust.
July 29, 2016
I think this book would be excellent for someone who has a deep knowledge of philosophy, specifically Jewish philosophy and Jewish scholars. I read this book in seminary for class and I struggled with the first half of the book which largely discusses Jewish philosophical thought - I thought this would share more stories and accounts from the Holocaust than it did. That being said, I think Fackenheim does a good job of making his point and backing up his claims. I wish he defined more of the terms he used and did a better job of explaining things he discusses so less scholarly readers can more easily follow along and spend less time Googling terms he uses. I would recommend this book to those who enjoy philosophy and have an existing knowledge of philosophers and Jewish thought.
December 2, 2020
Paused .. Excellent and found biggest, but buried in philosophy and dated pre 1990s ...
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews