Emil Fackenheim died two weeks ago, at 87, in Jerusalem. He moved there in 1984, after retiring from the University of Toronto philosophy department and also, in a way, to complete his life’s arc. He came of age in Nazi Germany, became a rabbi there, then managed to escape to Canada. He spent the first part of his philosophical career here trying to show it was not unreasonable to believe in God. Then he turned to his true vocation: the question of how a Jew may react to the Holocaust. He did not try to justify the Holocaust or explain it but, in traditional Jewish fashion — exemplified by the thought of Rabbi Leo Baeck, who ordained him in Berlin just before war broke out — focused on what one could do, as a Jew, in response. For him, Israel was an essential part of any response.

I was a teenager when I met Emil, and was overwhelmed that a man of such mighty intellect would use it to search for faith rather than dismiss it.

We lived nearby and I would ride my bike to his place after school, then wait for him to get home from the university. We’d ascend the narrow stairs to the study of his apartment and he’d describe his latest project, a book on the philosophy of religion from Kant to Kierkegaard. When I left for university, he helped guide me through my own quest, from Boston to Jerusalem to New York. When I married quite young, he stepped out of rabbinical retirement to participate in the ceremony.

During the 1970s we fell out, not surprisingly, over the politics of the Mideast. In 1982, during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, I wrote a piece for Maclean’s in which I referred to Emil’s most famous phrase. It has various versions but the one I quoted concerned “the 11th commandment for Jews after Auschwitz: Thou shalt not hand Hitler any posthumous victories.” I said those who supported Israel’s actions were doing so. He wrote Maclean’s in fury, dissociating himself from my use of his words.

In the late 1980s, Rabbi Dow Marmur of Holy Blossom Temple invited me to a lecture Emil was giving there. I must have winced. Dow, a mischievous man, said he would stand between us if necessary. When I approached Emil afterward, he looked up from his book signings, beamed, rose, sliding his glasses up his forehead, and we embraced. The next night we met and I mentioned our rift. “We can do two things,” he said generously. “We can talk about it or we can say, ‘That’s behind us.’” We talked about it a little. During the 1990s, I saw him on some of his frequent visits to Toronto and attended his splendid 80th birthday tribute at the Holy Blossom. Then, after Sept. 11, the rift reoccurred. For over a year, I’ve had an e-mail from him on my desk, vehemently disputing my views on the event. I kept pondering my answer, and now it’s moot.

I found it moving that literary critic and Palestinian advocate Edward Said died recently as well. I don’t mean to twin them in the stupid way poor Johnny Cash and John Ritter were twinned for dying on the same day.

But Edward Said was a Palestinian deeply aware of Jewish history and pain, as of his own people’s. He sought to clarify the “link” without “equating” them, or “minimizing” either. “We have to begin,” he said, “to admit the universality and integrity of each other’s experience of suffering.”

Emil wrestled, as I said, not with the meaning of the Holocaust but with how to respond to it: What can one do? More than any other thinker, he insisted on its total catastrophic uniqueness, and he wrote as a Jew for Jews. Yet his 11th commandment can serve as a guidepost for anyone to whom the Holocaust is a, or the, central event in modern history.

Like the moral categorical imperative of Kant, whom Emil revered, and the “maxims” Kant based on it (i.e., Act as if your behaviour could be a model for everyone), Emil enunciated a principle that can guide those who have been shaped and haunted by the Holocaust, through the storms of the future. But also, like Kant’s imperative, it does not provide a blueprint for what to do in specific cases. In that sense, his “law” respects everyone’s own freedom, dignity and individual responsibility within history.

So what does it mean to deny Hitler another victory? Does it mean ensuring Jewish survival? Does it mean supporting a Jewish state, or every policy it makes? Does it mean deciding that no other people ever will have done to them what was done to Europe’s Jews? People may differ with each other on the application, and even with the thinker who coined the phrase, because even he is not the ultimate arbiter of its use. Yet they all remain anchored in it as a principle. It is more like one of those great questions that open the world up, rather than a mere answer. Its imprecision is not a flaw, it is the source of its value and brilliance.

I could have written him that, for whatever it’s worth, in my reply.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.