AN ANTHOLOGY OF THOUGHT & EMOTION... Un'antologia di pensieri & emozioni
הידע של אלוהים לא יכול להיות מושגת על ידי המבקשים אותו, אבל רק אלה המבקשים יכול למצוא אותו

Wednesday 29 November 2017

TOTÒ È SEMPRE TOTÒ

TOTÒ È SEMPRE TOTÒ
Amo Totò, l'ho sempre amato, sin da piccolo: le risate che mi ha fatto fare lui, nussun altro c'è riuscito. Risate a crepapelle, risate ironiche, risate sotto i baffi, risate scoppiettanti, risate a singhiozzo, risate ghignanti, risate diaboliche, risate lacrimanti, insomma risate in tutti i modi, perfino risate tristi. Ho la collezione completa di tutti i suoi film (e sono tanti) e, quando ho voglia di rilassarmi e voglio dimenticare per un po' i problemi della vita, me ne rivedo uno e godo...
        Ecco un bell'articolo di Francesca Divella, pubblicato in luglio 2017 su

https://www.cinefiliaritrovata.it/

in occasione della proiezione di I DUE MARESCIALLI alla Cineteca di Bologna:


Fisica e naturale: la comicità di Totò
di Francesca Divella

La recitazione di Totò era molto spontanea, l'improvvisazione vi aveva una grande parte. Per dare il meglio, Totò aveva bisogno di un compagno con cui l'accordo fosse immediato, e che spesso lo seguiva di film in film. Nei Due marescialli per esempio, Totò recitava per la seconda volta con Vittorio De Sica. Al suo fianco quasi si esaltava, dimostrava il classico piacere del comico che sa di recitare capito e lo fa in modo eccezionale. Le sue doti naturali di improvvisazione, le sue straordinarie doti di comico, venivano messe in enorme risalto. Credo che questo avvenisse, in quel film, principalmente per la presenza di un partner molto importante. Totò diceva sempre: "Io posso far ridere, ma se ho vicino a me uno che fa ridere più di me, anch'io faccio ridere di più". Con De Sica ritrovava una verve nuova, e il senso di divertire un artista che oltre che essere un vecchio collega, un compagno napoletano, era nello stesso tempo un grande regista. Da parte sua c'era un certo gusto a far risaltare la sua bravura, una certa eccitazione nel recitare, far ridere, tirar fuori tutti i suoi lazzi e le sue fantastiche trovate, che rendevano difficile perfino al regista assistere alla scena senza ridere. (Sergio Corbucci)

Toto' ne I DUE MARESCIALLI
Riparliamo ora di Totò in occasione della detta proiezione di I due marescialli ...
“Macchè artista: venditore di chiacchiere. Un falegname vale più di noi artisti: almeno fabbrica un tavolino che rimane nei secoli. Ma noi, dica, che facciamo? Quanto duriamo? Al massimo se abbiamo successo, una generazione. Se chiedo al mio nipotino chi era Petrolini, chi era Zacconi, risponde boh! Lo scritto rimane, il quadro rimane, il lavandino rimane: ma di ciò che facciamo noi non rimane un bel nulla.” (tratto da Antonio De Curtis “Totò si nasce” a cura di Marco  Giusti, Mondadori, 2000). Partiamo da un’affermazione inconfutabile: Totò fu un fenomeno di cinema popolare, e come tale ha sempre riscosso un gran successo al botteghino, collezionando numeri e quantità in termini di pubblico di spettatori appassionati, da fare invidia a chiunque.
Nato e cresciuto in un tempo e tra generazioni per cui il cinema non era ancora considerato una forma d’arte necessariamente aulica, bensì una forma di intrattenimento, un passatempo da fiera o da baracconi, per comprendere la sua comicità, bisognerebbe prima di tutto ricontestualizzarla nel suo tempo. E dopo aver tirato una linea di demarcazione tra il suo tempo e il nostro, notando le differenze e le somiglianze tra le due epoche, potremo comprendere quali sono le ragioni per cui ancora oggi ci fa così gustosamente ridere Totò.
Oppure potremmo appellarci a una caterva di teorie generali del comico da quelle bergsoniane (il riso ha una sua precisa utilità sociale) a quelle pirandelliane (umorismo come forma di percezione della realtà, il senso del contrario), ma una cosa resterebbe sempre invariata, il riso che provoca Totò è un riso fragoroso e dilagante, un riso collettivo, come quello generato simultaneamente nella platea di spettatori a teatro o nelle troupe che assistevano ai suoi film.
La comicità di Totò è fisica e naturale, è come una musica, basata sul tempo: nasce da gesti, movimenti, suoni che inducono il sorriso, capitomboli, starnuti, balbettii, smorfie, occhi strabuzzati, strisciate di piedi e tutto ciò che conduce all’idea della maschera sovrapposta al corpo vivente dell’attore. La risata scaturisce dal fatto che la materialità del gesto o del suono si svincola dal senso che dovrebbe animarlo. E’ come se Totò solleticasse di continuo il carattere equivoco del comico, il piacere del ridere non è mai del tutto disinteressato ad esso si mescola, indicibilmente, l’intenzione di umiliare e quindi di correggere qualcosa che non funziona, il riso è la risposta ad una imperfezione, sottolinea la comparsa di qualcosa di inammissibile. E spesso è come se le sue battute ci facessero la morale:  “Era un uomo così antipatico che dopo la sua morte i parenti chiedevano il bis”,“Non dividerei mai una donna con un altro uomo, in amore non mi piacciono i condomini”.
il Pinocchio di "Totò a colori"
il Pinocchio di "Totò a colori"
La comicità di Totò nasce a volte dalla ripetizione, ma non da una ripetizione pura e semplice, bensì dalla ripetizione di ciò che non dovrebbe ripetersi: un uomo che simula la ripetitività della macchina, proprio come il Chaplin di Tempi Moderni, ecco il Totò di Totò cerca casa nella scena dei timbri: l’impiegato che comincia a timbrare freneticamente tutto ciò che gli capita sottomano con una smorfia diabolica sul viso, fino alla imprevedibile “caduta nella follia”, che lo porta a timbrare inconsapevolmente il deretano del sindaco di bianco vestito. Più spesso la comicità di Totò affonda in gran parte nella pantomima, ossia nel parossismo quasi surreale, di scene in cui la parola diventa superflua e Lui si esprime solo visivamente, come la scena degli spaghetti in Miseria e Nobiltà, il Pinocchio di Totò a colori o la scena esilarante della gallina che fa l’uovo in Totò cerca casa.
Eppure sulla questione di ciò che fa o non fa ridere pesano sempre indubbiamente le esperienze del soggetto e quello che ognuno di noi trova per proprio conto ridicolo. E’ per questo che il comico è un fatto che ha sicuramente tre aspetti: uno sociale, uno psicologico e soggettivo e l’ultimo di linguaggio. Ebbene la grandezza di Totò stava probabilmente nella sua capacità unica di coinvolgere contemporaneamente questi tre aspetti.
L’aspetto sociale era alla base del suo personaggio, Totò aveva conosciuto la miseria, e la fame. E, come lui stesso affermò più volte “Io so a memoria la miseria, e la miseria è il copione della vera comicità. Non si può far ridere se non si conoscono bene il dolore e la fame, il freddo, l’amore senza speranza, la disperazione della solitudine di certe squallide camerette ammobiliate alla fine di una recita in un teatrucolo di provincia; e la vergogna dei pantaloni sfondati, il desiderio di un caffellatte, la prepotenza esosa degli impresari, la cattiveria del pubblico senza educazione. Insomma, non si può essere un vero attore comico senza aver fatto la guerra con la vita”.
L’aspetto psicologico e soggettivo, invece, Totò lo chiama in causa ogni volta che mette in scena la sua (fiera) origine partenopea, un vizio condiviso (l’impiegato fannullone, l’imbroglione, il truffaldino, l’infedele), l’amore per il cibo o per le donne, la paura della morte, prestandosi in tal modo alla rappresentazione di un italiano tipico (pusillanime per lo più) che viene al contempo criticato e perciò stesso quasi assolto dai suoi peccati di bassa umanità (fame, paura, appetito sessuale): Sono un uomo della foresta, nel mangiare mi contento di poco. A me mi bastano due banane, qualche nocciolina, un’aragosta, ma piccola, un pollo lesso, un pollo alla cacciatora con qualche animella e tartufi. Dolce, vino, formaggio e caffè. Mi creda, caro Micozzi, io sono vegetariano”. (Tototarzan); “Cara, di cognome ti chiami Ranocchia? Vieni, andiamo a fare un girino” (Tototarzan) ; “Oh io nella vita ho fornicato sempre. Mi chiamavano il fornichiero.” (Totò all’inferno).
Infine, non da ultimo, Totò costruisce le sue battute giocando consapevolmente con la lingua italiana, che nelle sue collaterali attività di poeta/paroliere/compositore ha dato prova di conoscere a menadito, facendoci ridere mentre si beffa della nostra ignoranza, invertendo parole e significati, utilizzando equivoci e giochi di parole: “Parlo solo la lingua madre perché mio padre morì quando ero bambino; Sono finito sul banco degli amputati; Signora, i suoi modi sono interurbani; Io c’ho le coliche apatiche; Ho fatto una gaffe, una grossa gaffe….ho fatto un gaffone; Io c’ho l’occhio policlinico…..nulla mi sfugge”.
La lingua italiana sarà al tempo stesso matrice della sua comicità e suo limite: perchè proprio a causa del suo essere così legato alla lingua d’espressione Totò purtroppo non valicò mai le frontiere d’oltremare, ma esistette solo entro i confini del nostro Paese. Non ebbe la possibilità di imporsi anche all’estero, perchè non era facile esportare e soprattutto doppiare i suoi film. Totò raccontava ad Age di aver visto a Marsiglia Totò sceicco in francese e di come la celebre battuta “Guarda Omàr quant’è bello” tradotta in francese non facesse ridere per niente. Resta tutt’oggi questo grande rimpianto, che il genio di un così grande uomo sia rimasto all’estero quasi sconosciuto a causa di una supposta intraducibilità della sua comicità. A tal proposito Age lanciò un invito anni orsono, a provarci, a trovare la chiave di volta per esportare Totò anche al di fuori dell’Italia. Probabilmente questo invito andrebbe accolto, anche solo per la constatazione che, se Totò è capace di far ridere così tanto noi che lo conosciamo bene, chissà quante risate potrebbe regalare a chi lo scoprisse per la prima volta.
Totò e Peppino De Filippo nel film LA BANDA DEGLI ONESTI

Tuesday 28 November 2017

SHAKESPEARE FOREVER!

William Shakespeare

Why Shakespeare is for all Time


by THEODORE DALRYMPLE
Shakespeare reminds us of the line between good and evil running down the center of all human hearts. And in showing us that the line is always there, easily and disastrously crossed, Shakespeare destroys the utopian illusion that social arrangements can be made so perfect that men will no longer have to strive to be good.
A decade ago, the psychiatrist Peter Kramer published a book called Listening to Prozac, which claimed that our understanding of neurochemistry was so advanced that we would soon be able to design and no doubt to vary our personalities according to our tastes. Henceforth there would be no more angst. He based his prediction upon the case histories of people given the supposed wonder drug who not merely recovered from depression but emerged with new, improved personalities.
Yet the prescription of the drug (and others like it) to millions of people has not noticeably reduced the sum total of human misery or the perplexity of life. A golden age of felicity has not arrived: and the promise of a pill for every ill remains, as it always will, unfulfilled.
Anyone who had read his Shakespeare would not have been surprised by this disappointment. When Macbeth asks a physician:
Canst thou not minister to a
mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a
rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles
of the brain,
And with some sweet
oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuffed bosom
of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?
The physician replies laconically: "Therein the patient / Must minister to himself."
Every day, several patients ask me Macbeth's question with regard to themselves in less elevated language, to be sure and they expect a positive answer: but four centuries before neurochemistry was even thought of, and before any of the touted advances in neurosciences that allegedly gave us a new and better understanding of ourselves, Shakespeare knew something that we are increasingly loath to acknowledge. There is no technical fix for the problems of humanity.
Those problems, he knew, are ineradicably rooted in our nature; and he atomized that nature with a characteristic genius never since equaled: which is why every time we moderns consult his works, we come away with a deeper insight into the heart of our own mystery.
Take as a test case Macbeth, the shortest of his tragedies. The play is a study of ambition, the evil to which ambition leads when unrestrained by ethical inhibition, and the logic of evil once an evil course has been embarked upon. The ambition and the evil are part of man's nature. All that is necessary to understand the play, therefore, is to be human: and if we attend to it closely, we shall have a deeper appreciation of its subject matter than if we read all the philosophy, sociology, criminology, and biology of the past two centuries. Statistics will not lead us to enlightenment about ourselves, any more than the elucidation of the human genome will render Shakespeare redundant. Those who think that an understanding of the double helix is the same as an understanding of ourselves are not only prey to an illusion but are stunting themselves as human beings, condemning themselves not to an advance in self-understanding but to a positive retrogression.
Modern experience has been said to render Shakespeare irrelevant. In The Gulag Archipelago, for example, Alexander Solzhenitsyn remarks that Shakespeare's evildoers, Macbeth notably among them, stop short at a mere dozen corpses because they have no ideology. By the sanguinary standards of the twentieth century's totalitarian despots, in other words, Shakespeare's characters are but petty criminals, for (says Solzhenitsyn) it is ideology that "gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination." Since all subject matter shrinks to triviality when compared to the cataclysms of the Holocaust and the Gulag, it follows that a tragedy such as Macbeth is of limited relevance to our recent history.
Solzhenitsyn was not alone in this view: indeed, one Russian poet wrote a cycle of sonnets from the Gulag, in which he referred disparagingly to Shakespeare's tragedies as "mere trumpery" a phrase he repeated many times as a refrain to underline the unprecedented nature of Soviet evil. Just as the German philosopher and social theorist Theodor Adorno said that after Auschwitz there could be no more poetry, so the Russians said that after the Gulag there could be no more Macbeth.
They were mistaken. Massacre and genocide have not always been accompanied by an ideology: were the Mongol hordes ideological, and was the ethnic conflict in Rwanda and Burundi ideological? And I have little doubt from my medical practice that radical evil can exist on a large scale without the sanction of an official ideology. Many a man is the Macbeth of his own little world, and the measurement of evil is not the same as a body count.
The Russians' remarks suggest a reading of Macbeth that takes the raw plot and the number of deaths as the play's most significant aspects the kind of interpretation one might expect of a literal-minded person who had seen the play acted upon the stage but had not studied the text very closely. Even on the number of deaths, Solzhenitsyn one of the last century's great experts on evil, after all was not quite accurate, for there are more people killed than those whose deaths occur, or are recounted, upon the stage. When Macduff goes to sound out Malcolm, the legitimate heir to the throne who has fled to England, about leading an attempt to overthrow Macbeth, he underscores that reality:
each new morn,
New widows howl, new
orphans cry, new sorrows
Strike heaven in the face.
Shakespeare makes plain that something like totalitarian terror reigns as a direct result of Macbeth's thirst for power: an atmosphere one might have expected Solzhenitsyn to recognize instantly. Comparatively early in Macbeth's reign, before his evil is clear to everyone, Lennox says:
And the right-valiant Banquo
walked too late,
Whom you may say, if't
please you, Fleance killed,
For Fleance fled. Men
must not walk too late.
Dictatorships traditionally ascribe political murders to people who have fled the scene to escape being murdered too. If they weren't guilty, goes the charge, why did they run away? Lennox's words exactly capture the bitter irony of those impotently caught up in such a dictatorship.
Macbeth boasts that he has spies in the households of potential enemies: an ever-expanding class, of course, with each passing murder: "There's not a one of them but in his house I keep a servant fee'd." Neither spying nor fear were the inventions of Solzhenitsyn's accursed twentieth century, and tyranny is no new invention. It proceeds from the human soul itself.
Shakespeare no less than Solzhenitsyn understood the role of agents provocateur and entrapment in tyrannies. When Macduff first seeks Malcolm's assistance, Malcolm denies that he is a suitable figurehead for opposition to Macbeth because he has so many vices himself. Where evil reigns, it is best to pretend to be evil oneself. When finally he is convinced that Macduff is sincere, however, he retracts his self-denigration and explains why he has lied in this peculiar fashion:
Devilish Macbeth
By many of these trains hath
sought to win me
Into his power, and modest
wisdom plucks me
From over-credulous
aste.
When Macduff asks the Thane of Ross, "Stands Scotland where it did?" he replies:
Alas, poor country,
Almost afraid to know itself.
It cannot
Be called our mother, but our
grave, where nothing,
But who knows nothing, is
seen once to smile;
Where sighs, and groans, and
shrieks that rend the air
Are made, not marked . . . .
Did this really ring no bells during the Soviet era?
Again, when Malcolm addresses the commanders who are about to do decisive battle with Macbeth's forces, he says:
Cousins, I hope the days are
near at hand
That chambers will be safe.
He doesn't say "our chambers," the chambers of a small clique of aristocratic malcontents, disgruntled at Macbeth's rule: he says "chambers" in general. And was it not characteristic of the totalitarian regimes, imbued with an ideology, to which Solzhenitsyn refers, that citizens were not safe, even in the privacy of their own homes and bedrooms, to speak their own minds: in other words, that chambers were not safe? As Shakespeare knew, rule without consent entails terror, ideology or not.
Solzhenitsyn was quite right that Macbeth has no ideology. Macbeth is motivated in equal measure by ambition and by the fear of appearing weak and small in the eyes of his wife. By stripping him of any philosophical or political justification (real or imagined) for his acts for example, by not having him assert that the king whom he supplants is a bad one deserving of overthrow; by not letting him pretend even for a moment that he acts for the good of his country and people Shakespeare goes straight to the heart of human evil considered sub specie aeternitatis. Shakespeare is interested in the essentials of human nature, not the accidentals of human history, though, of course, he knows that every man must live at a particular time and place. Indeed, the play refers obliquely to the current historical situation: for example, Banquo was believed to have been an ancestor of James I, and therefore the scene in which the witches tell Banquo that he will be the progenitor of many kings, though no king himself, was a form of flattery of the reigning monarch. But such topical significance is of interest mainly to pedants. If Macbeth were but an elaborate attempt to legitimize Jacobean rule, it is hardly credible that it should have been translated into Zulu (in which language I once saw it performed) and that it should have meant a great deal to a Zulu audience. Macbeth stands witness to the universality of great literature.
It is characteristic of Shakespeare's genius that he should have emptied Macbeth not only of ideological reasons for his actions, but also of psychological ones, apart from those that spring solely from universal human nature. Macbeth is no stage villain, if I may put it thus: he is no Richard III, "Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time/ Into this breathing world scarce half made up," whose physical deformity parallels, indeed plausibly explains, his moral deformity. On the contrary, Macbeth is a hero, a valiant soldier in a good cause, bravely and loyally saving the realm of good king Duncan ("O valiant cousin, worthy gentleman," exclaims the King, when he hears of Macbeth's exploits on the battlefield against the forces of his enemies). He is no psychopath or sociopath. He is a normal man, endowed with a nature no worse than ours: which is why, of course, he stands as a chilling example to us all.
Nor is he the victim of injustice or ingratitude that might extenuate, though not excuse, his later crimes. He has nothing to complain of: quite the reverse, for he is fortunate in his aristocratic birth, and he is more than generously rewarded by the king for his military services. Greeting Macbeth for the first time after his victories, Duncan says:
The sin of my ingratitude
even now
Was heavy on me. Thou art
so far before,
That swiftest wing of
recompense is slow
To overtake thee. Would thou
hadst less deserved,
That the proportion both of
thanks and payment
Might have been mine. Only I
have left to say,
More is thy due than more
than all can pay.
Macbeth can hardly claim to be undervalued by Duncan but he kills him nonetheless.
He cannot complain of his domestic or economic circumstances, either. When Duncan later arrives at Macbeth's castle, he remarks upon its beauty and tranquillity:
This castle hath a pleasant
seat; the air
Nimbly and sweetly
recommends itself
Unto our gentle senses.
What more than Macbeth already has when he starts on his road to ruin could a man want?
Macbeth says as much. He specifically recognizes that he has no motive for his future crimes but a lust for power that comes entirely from within:
I have no spur
To prick the side of my
intent, but only
Vaulting ambition which
o'erleaps itself.
This motivation is in specific contrast with the two murderers whom he employs to kill Banquo. By the time they appear on stage, Macbeth has already poured poison in their ears, informing them (falsely, of course) that Banquo is the author of all their woes:
This I made good to you in our last conference; passed in probation with you how you were borne in hand, how crossed, the instruments, who wrought with them, and all things else that might to half a soul and to a notion crazed say, "Thus did Banquo."
The two murderers are only too eager to hear that they have an enemy responsible for all their disappointments. They are resentment personified, archetypes of men with grudges against the world, who unlike Macbeth are thereby predisposed to evil. The Second Murderer says:
I am one, my liege,
Whom the vile blows and
buffets of the world
Hath so incensed that I am
reckless what I do
To spite the world.
The First Murderer then adds:
And I another
So weary with disasters,
tugged with fortune,
That I would set my life on
any chance
To mend it or be rid on't.
Superficially, then, they have a reason, if not a justification, for their heinous deeds. We do not know, of course, whether their disappointments and setbacks are real or imaginary, self-inflicted or undeserved, and it doesn't matter: Shakespeare gives us to understand that their self-pity and by extension all self-pity, including our own is dangerous, permitting evil in the name of restitution.
Macbeth, however, is not a resentful man; he never complains of ill-treatment. So while resentment is a cause of man's evil, it is not the sole or fundamental cause. Macbeth is led to evil by his ambition: and because we all live in society, in which jockeying for position and power is inevitable, we all understand him from within. Macbeth is us without the moral scruples.
By depriving Macbeth of any particular predilection for evil that is not common to all men, and by denying him every possible circumstance that might justify or occasion his actions, Shakespeare excavates down to the line between good and evil that runs through every human heart, to use a phrase from The Gulag Archipelago that contradicts Solzhenitsyn's faintly dismissive estimate of Shakepeare's evil characters. He writes: "Gradually it was disclosed to me [in the Gulag] that the line separating good from evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either but right through every human heart and through all human hearts." And it is Shakespeare who shows us this line.
But he does more. He shows us not only how easily that line is crossed, even by someone without an excuse or a special propensity to do so, but what the consequences are of crossing it. And in showing us that the line is always there, easily and disastrously crossed, Shakespeare destroys the utopian illusion that social arrangements can be made so perfect that men will no longer have to strive to be good. Original sin that is to say, the sin of having been born with human nature that contains within it the temptation to evil will always make a mockery of attempts at perfection based upon manipulation of the environment. The prevention of evil will always require more than desirable social arrangements: it will forever require personal self-control and the conscious limitation of appetites.
Macbeth is ambitious before the opening of the play. That is why he is startled when the three witches greet him as Thane of Cawdor and future king of Scotland: they echo his secret thoughts. But he has so far kept his ambition under ethical control (as Lady Macbeth puts it, "Thou wouldst be great / Art not without ambition, but without / The illness [malevolence] should attend it"), and even after his meeting with the witches he ponders, like a Marxist wondering whether or not the historical inevitability of the triumph of the revolution requires his participation:
If chance will have me king,
why chance may crown me
Without my stir.
As Russian Marxists needed their Lenin, so Macbeth needs his Lady Macbeth. Decisive during the simplicities of battle, without her he would forever be a waverer in the complexities of peace: more Hamlet, indeed, than Macbeth.
The tool that Lady Macbeth uses to galvanize her husband into action is humiliation. She humiliates him into doing what he knows to be wrong, just as many of my patients who take heroin started to take it because they were afraid to seem weak in the eyes of their associates. Macbeth loves and respects his wife ("my dearest partner in greatness," he calls her), but Lady Macbeth perverts his love and his essential, ineradicable, and often laudable human desire to be respected and loved by the person one respects and loves to the purposes of evil. The lesson is that any powerful emotion or desire, however virtuous in many circumstances, can be turned to evil purposes if it escapes ethical control.
For Shakespeare, human nature has the potential for both good and evil, depending upon the decisions we make. Macbeth is ambitious, true: but not only is ambition, in the sense of a desire for the just approbation of one's fellow men a good quality, but Macbeth is not so ambitious that nothing else matters. His ambition for approbation sets bounds and limits to his ambition, so to speak. Lady Macbeth recognizes her husband's reflexive scrupulousness:
Yet I do fear thy nature,
It is too full o'th'milk of
human kindness
To catch the nearest way.
She must curdle the milk, make Macbeth abjure his good qualities, if he is to act as she wishes.
But paradoxically she, who is usually taken to represent the acme of evil, is not by nature altogether evil herself, but only evil potentially in other words, evil by choice. She recognizes the need to suppress the potential for good in her own nature if she is to obey the promptings of ambition:
Come, you spirits 
That tend on mortal thoughts,
unsex me here
And fill me from the crown
to the toe topfull
Of direst cruelty; make thick
my blood,
Stop up th'access and passage
to remorse
That no compunctious
visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose.
No more chilling evocation of the willing choice of evil exists in all literature than Lady Macbeth's famous renunciation of maternal feeling for the sake of power:
I have given suck and know
How tender 'tis to love
the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling
in my face,
Have plucked the nipple from
his boneless gums
And dashed the brains out,
had I so sworn
As you have done to this.
And yet the point remains: the true psychopath has not in the first place the compunctious visitings whose passage needs to be stopped up. Most men and women must suppress the good within them to be evil; just as, to be good, they must suppress the evil. There is no final victory of one or the other.
Indeed, Lady Macbeth's tragedy is that she so gravely underestimates the strength of the good within her. Eventually it takes its revenge upon her, for she "by self and violent hands / Took off her life."
Her psychological error is to imagine that the good within her could simply be ignored without consequences. After she and Macbeth have covered themselves in blood by the murder of Duncan and the two chamberlains, she says: "Retire we to our chamber; / A little water clears us of this deed." How many of my patients think that they can behave unscrupulously without a penalty to be paid!
The shallowness of Lady Macbeth's idea of exculpation stands revealed completely and piercingly in the sleepwalking scene, in which she acknowledges that "all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand." A little water will wash away the blood but not the sin and the guilt.
Macbeth succumbs to Lady Macbeth's taunting. One is reminded of the famous experiments that Stanley Milgram, the social psychologist, described in his book Obedience to Authority. In these experiments, researchers, using mere words, induced ordinary people like Macbeth, without any special propensity to evil to administer what they believed to be dangerous electric shocks to complete strangers.
But Shakespeare is not so crude as to believe that social pressure is always bad. On the contrary, our desire to see ourselves favorably reflected in the esteem of others is the source of honor and other worthy qualities. For example, when Macduff replies to Malcolm's suggestion that they simply bemoan their fate as victims of Macbeth, he says:
Let us rather
Hold fast the mortal sword
and like good men
Bestride our down-fall'n
birthdom.
Good men, he suggests, are engaged upon a common enterprise, strengthened by values they hold in common. When Siward hears that his son has been killed in the final battle to overthrow Macbeth, he says:
Why then, God's soldier
be he;
Had I as many sons as I
have hairs
I would not wish them a
fairer death.
Without the social virtues of honor and obedience to duty, Young Siward might have fled and saved his skin: as, indeed, would everyone else, leaving Macbeth still in power. And it is the fact of his death having been a worthwhile sacrifice that gives it meaning, and that meaning places a limit to the father's grief.
Macbeth is aware throughout the play that what he does is morally wrong: he never claims (as do so many modern relativists) that fair is foul and foul is fair. He thus single-handedly refutes the Platonic theory of evil as ignorance of the good. Unlike his wife, he never deceives himself that a little water can clear them of their deeds. On the contrary, as soon as he has murdered Duncan, he knows that he is irredeemably compromised:
Will all great Neptune's ocean
wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No: this
my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas
incarnadine,
Making the green one red.
And so he at once regrets what he has done: as he says when he hears knocking at the outer gate after the murder: "Wake Duncan with thy knocking: I would thou couldst."
He knows that Macbeth shall sleep no more. He has committed himself to such a treadmill by his initial act of evil that he comes to envy his own victims:
Better be with the dead
Whom we, to gain our peace,
have sent to peace,
Than on the torture of the
mind to lie
In restless ecstasy.
Time's arrow flies in one direction only. On several occasions, Macbeth makes reference to the unchangeability of what has already been done: a disconcerting thought when incontinent public confession is all the rage, as if mere words automatically undid harm and made bad good. Evil, once committed, has an inescapable logic of its own, as Macbeth famously discovers:
I am in blood
Stepped in so far that should I
wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as
to go o'er.
Macbeth utters the key line in the play, when his wife is taunting him into killing Duncan:
Wouldst thou have that
Which thou esteem'st the
ornament of life,
And live a coward in thine
own esteem,
Letting I dare not wait upon I
would?
And he replies:
Prithee, peace.
I dare do all that may become
a man;
Who dares do more is none.
In other words, there is a boundary that, once crossed, deprives a man of his full humanity. Boundaries are what keep us human, and they are not lightly to be crossed. That is why the admiration of the transgressive in art is so deeply frivolous. And it is why Britain's most notorious murderess, Myra Hindley, who has just died, properly stayed in prison until the end. She and her associate, Ian Brady, tortured and murdered several children on a whim in the first half of the 1960s, and she devoted much of her life in prison to campaigning for her own release. She had changed, she insisted; she had paid her debt to society long ago.
But life is not a matter of double-entry bookkeeping. No number of years in prison can be equivalent to the torture and killing of children: if it were, the term could be served in advance and the person who served it would be entitled to commit his crimes on his release. Hindley's victims were dead and could not be resurrected; she could not undo what she had done.
Macbeth warns us to preserve our humanity by accepting limitations to our actions. As Macduff says to Malcolm, when the latter presents himself as a heartless libertine:
Boundless intemperance
In nature is a tyranny.
Only if we obey rules, the rules that count, can we be free.



Anthony Malcolm Daniels, a.k.a Theodore Dalrymple
Anthony Malcolm Daniels (born 11 October 1949), who generally uses the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, is an English writer and retired prison doctor and psychiatrist. He worked in a number of Sub-Saharan African countries as well as in the east end of London. Before his retirement in 2005, he worked in City Hospital, Birmingham and Winson Green Prison in inner-city Birmingham, England.
Daniels is a contributing editor to City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, where he is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow. In addition to City Journal, his work has appeared in The British Medical Journal, The Times, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Salisbury Review, National Review, and Axess magasin. He is the author of a number of books, including Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass, Our Culture, What's Left of It, and Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality.
In his writing, Daniels frequently argues that the socially liberal and progressive views prevalent within Western intellectual circles minimise the responsibility of individuals for their own actions and undermine traditional mores, contributing to the formation within prosperous countries of an underclass afflicted by endemic violence, criminality, sexually transmitted diseases, welfare dependency, and drug abuse. Much of Dalrymple's writing is based on his experience of working with criminals and the mentally ill.
Daniels has been described as a pessimist. In 2010, Daniel Hannan wrote that Dalrymple's work "takes pessimism about human nature to a new level. Yet its tone is never patronising, shrill or hectoring. Once you get past the initial shock of reading about battered wives, petty crooks and junkies from a non-Left perspective, you find humanity and pathos".
In 2011, Dalrymple received the 2011 Freedom Prize from the Flemish think tank Libera!
Daniels was born in Kensington, London. His father was a Communist businessman of Russian ancestry, while his Jewish mother was born in Germany. She came to England as a refugee from the Nazi regime.
His work as a doctor took him to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Tanzania, South Africa, and the Gilbert Islands (now Kiribati). He returned to the United Kingdom in 1990, where he worked in London and Birmingham. In 1991, he made an extended appearance on British television under the name Theodore Dalrymple. On 23 February, he took part in an After Dark discussion called "Prisons: No Way Out" alongside former gangster Tony Lambrianou, Taki Theodoracopolous, and others. In 2005 he retired early as a consultant psychiatrist. He has a house in Bridgnorth, Shropshire, and also a house in France.
Regarding his pseudonym "Theodore Dalrymple", he wrote that he "chose a name that sounded suitably dyspeptic, that of a gouty old man looking out of the window of his London club, port in hand, lamenting the degenerating state of the world". He is an atheist, but has criticised anti-theism and says that "to regret religion [...] is to regret our civilisation and its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy". Raised in a non-religious Jewish home, he began doubting the existence of a God at age nine. He became an atheist in response to a moment in a school assembly.
For his writings and themes specifically, check the corresponding sections in the respective Wikipedia article.

Monday 27 November 2017

TO MEND THE WORLD





In memory of Franz Rosenzweig z”l






and 







Emil Fackenheim z”l,









two great Jewish thinkers I deeply admire...

~ * ~

Here, however, I wish to concentrate first on Fackenheim, as he comes closer to my spiritual aspirations. He researched the relationship of the Jews with God, believing that the Holocaust must be understood as an imperative requiring Jews to carry on Jewish existence and the survival of the State of Israel. He emigrated to Israel in 1984. 
Fackenheim was always saying that "continuing Jewish life and denying Hitler a posthumous victory was the 614th law," referring to the 613 mitzvot given to the Jews in the Torah.
Judaism According to Emil Fackenheim
by Robert M. Seltzer
(Commentary, Sept. 1988)

In the course of overlapping careers as rabbi, professor of philosophy, and theologian, Emil Fackenheim has produced a shelf of books that must be considered among the most important works of serious Jewish religious thought in the second half of this century.

Some of those books are technical in nature, devoted to specific issues in Jewish theology. Others, however, are addressed to a wide general audience. Such is Fackenheim’s most recent book, which is also his most personal, accessible, and comprehensive, What is Judaism? An Interpretation for the Present Age.1 And we are also fortunate to have just now a large anthology, The Jewish Thought of Emil Fackenheim, (edited by Michael L. Morgan)2 containing a judicious selection ranging from unpublished student pieces from the late 30’s to extracts from Fackenheim’s latest work of technical theology, To Mend the World: Foundations of Future Jewish Thought (1982). Together, these two books offer a good occasion for a look at Fackenheim’s lifelong bid to sustain Jewish faith against the onslaught of modern philosophical thought, and to define an “authentic” Jewish existence in the post-Holocaust age.
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In 1977, the late Gershom Scholem, the great historian of Jewish mysticism, brought out a small book of personal reminiscence with the title From Berlin to Jerusalem. Emil Fackenheim’s memoirs, were he ever to write them, would also describe a journey from Berlin to Jerusalem, but by a different route.

Emil Fackenheim in the 1980s
Born in Germany in 1916, Fackenheim experienced the rise to power of the Nazis when still in high school in Halle. Whereas Scholem became a Zionist in his youth, and went to Palestine directly from Germany in the mid-1920’s, Fackenheim, who abandoned the anti-Zionist stance of his family for “non-Zionism,” entered the Reform rabbinic seminary (the illustrious Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums) in 1935. In the aftermath of Kristallnacht in 1938 he was seized and sent to the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen. Among the fortunate few who were subsequently released, Fackenheim found refuge in England and then in Canada where he served as rabbi in Hamilton, Ontario, and then as a longtime member of the philosophy department of the University of Toronto. In 1984 he settled in Israel with his family.*

Gershom Scholem’s spiritual road to Zion ran through the “cultural Zionism” of the essayist Ahad Ha-Am and by way of Jewish historiography, especially the philological and literary study of the Kabbalah. Emil Fackenheim’s ran by way of Sören Kierkegaard and dialectical theology, Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber, medieval Arabic philosophical texts and modern German philosophers from Immanuel Kant to Martin Heidegger. The results, in Fackenheim’s case, have been quite as revisionist of the Jewish intellectual mainstream as Scholem’s work. Scholem used to insist that he was only a disinterested historian and not a theologian, but his regard for the continued vitality of Jewish religiosity is evident in a subterranean way in any number of his scholarly writings and overtly in his Reflections on Jewish Theology (1974), one of the most perceptive articles on the subject in recent decades. Conversely, Fackenheim, a philosopher and a theologian, has found himself forced to wrestle openly and continually with the problems posed by a modern understanding of history and modern historical methodologies for what has been called (occasionally by Fackenheim himself) “postmodern” Judaism.

The term “postmodern” has been applied—in a vague, polemical, and sometimes pejorative sense—to a variety of cultural tendencies. In the arts, the postmodern style is marked by the deliberate employment of traditional elements discarded by the avant-garde: tonality in music, for example, or pictorial representation in painting, or classical columns and Romanesque arches in architecture. Not infrequently these elements are “quoted” in an eclectic, whimsical, stylized manner within works whose methods and structures are themselves modern in the larger sense. Likewise, postmodern theology does not so much repudiate modernity as aim at a self-conscious synthesis of the modern mentality with reappropriated classical values, sacred texts, and traditional ways of interpreting those texts. In Fackenheim’s thought, the stress has fallen on the interplay between a living present and the immediacy of what he calls the “root experiences” of Judaism in the Exodus from Egypt and the covenant at Mount Sinai.

Postmodern theology does take decided issue with certain aspects of modernity, however. In his earlier writings, Fackenheim sought to expose the tendency of Jewish religious modernists to make man, in effect, the arbiter of the divine and to be excessively optimistic about human progress. In contrast to the medievals, he wrote, modern Jewish philosophy presupposed rather than proved that “human reason could dissect without remainder texts that claimed to be divinely inspired” and restricted the realm of the divine commandments to the categorical imperative of the “moral law.” He, by contrast, unabashedly took his stand on a personal and transcendent God (rather than on a God-idea immanent in history); on an appreciation of authentic Jewish styles of worship and direct encounter with Jewish texts (rather than relying on scientific-historical criticism); and on a commitment to the irreducible particularity of the Jewish people (rather than an emphasis on the universal essence of Judaism).

Fackenheim has written that Kierkegaard was an early inspiration (and we would probably have to add such figures of crisis or dialectical theology as Karl Barth), but equally influential was the Jewish religious existentialism pioneered by Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber. Fackenheim’s belief that truth is acquired in and through personal commitment follows Rosenzweig’s “new thinking,” itself a bridge between the older philosophical idealism that had dominated modern Jewish thought up to World War I and the more tradition-oriented mode of Jewishness that came to be increasingly prevalent thereafter. And Fackenheim similarly provides a crucial connecting link between the Jewish thought of pre-Holocaust Europe and the first post-Holocaust generation of American Jewry, whose attitudes toward the Jewish religion, knowingly or not, have been more influenced by Rosenzweig than perhaps by any other figure.

Michael L. Morgan’s anthology contains an early essay illustrating the influence on Fackenheim, while still a rabbinic student, of Rosenzweig’s distinction between mitzvah—that which has come to have for one the force of a divine commandment—and Halakhah, mere law which has not yet been internalized as religiously binding. Thus we find the young Fackenheim declaring that “the task of the present generation is to be ready for faith, i.e., ready to let the Other as Demanding enter into its very midst.” Admitting the riskiness of faith, the young Fackenheim nevertheless effectively calls the bluff of the atheist, the agnostic, and the radical empiricist who, by their existential decision to remain spectators, cut themselves off from the very possibility of discovering God and thus of transcending their essentially tragic, unredeemed view of the human situation.
_____________

The influence of Martin Buber is quite as evident as that of Rosenzweig in Fackenheim’s early writing. For Fackenheim, Buber’s conception of the I-Thou relationship provided the key to revelation as the primordial experience of ancient Jews recorded in the Bible and as an eternal potentiality in the present. Revelation for Fackenheim is God’s “incursion” into the present, an incursion which of course presupposes the willingness of human beings to open themselves up to the distinct and separate ontological realm in which such revelatory events happen. There is no “It” at all in the moment of revelation, when every It becomes either the partner to whom God speaks or a symbol through which God speaks. Although the moment of encounter cannot be adequately captured in writing, it can be remembered and has been recorded by human beings as their personal response to having been divinely addressed.

Such a concept of revelation leads to the question of the religious significance of history. In 1961 Fackenheim delivered the Aquinas Lecture at Marquette University on the theme “Metaphysics and Historicity.” Here he contended that all philosophizing, ancient, medieval, and modern, is tied to its historical situation. The “predicament of history” is that “timeless truth” is somehow always a reflection of the age in which it is articulated. Yet although man “constitutes himself” in time, beyond such self-constituting action there is another reality, “other than man,” that has a share in the shaping of human existence. In a brief epilogue Fackenheim remarks that he holds this other-than-human reality to be God.

These and other themes in Fackenheim’s writing were developed mainly in the period between 1945 and 1967. They are prologue to the original turn his thought took in the latter year.

Fackenheim was not alone in requiring the passage of two decades after the end of World War II to gain sufficient perspective on the Holocaust to be able to confront it theologically. Only in the middle 1960’s was the Nazi Final Solution given a Jewish name and widely perceived as a historical event of such singularity that it could not easily be assimilated into the conventional historical or Jewish categories—that it could not, in Fackenheim’s view, be assimilated into them at all. And only after Israel’s miraculous victory in June 1967—a victory preceded by weeks and days in which it seemed, incredibly, that the Holocaust was about to be reenacted on Middle Eastern soil—were the energies released to inquire deeply into the meaning of the Holocaust for Jewish survival.

Since 1967, Fackenheim has repeatedly insisted, using powerful and telling illustrations, that the Holocaust was a “novum,” something drastically new, an instance of “radical, unprecedented evil.” In the merciless light of Nazi bestiality, with its determination to murder the whole Jewish people, the issue for the theologian became one of saving Jewish religious faith. That issue was compounded by the agonizing question of why a survivor of the Holocaust—and all contemporary Jews are in some sense its survivors—should have children and raise those children as Jews.
_____________

The project upon which Fackenheim embarked, and in which he is still engaged, brought together the earlier themes of his work—Jewish particularity, the ever-present accessibility of revelation, the spiritual meaning of history—while leading him in new directions. Martin Buber had coined the phrase the “eclipse of God” to describe the apparent negation of God’s presence in the face of a historical abyss like Auschwitz. To Fackenheim, such a way of putting it ignored the evidence that, in the midst of the Holocaust and thereafter, God’s will had been grasped by some—indeed, that God’s voice was and is heard by amkha, the ordinary Jewish people.

The celebrated principle in which Fackenheim formulated the response of amkha to the divine voice was “the 614th commandment.” (According to traditional teaching there are a total of 613 commandments incumbent upon every Jew to perform.) As he wrote in an essay first published in COMMENTARY (“Jewish Faith and the Holocaust,” August 1968) and has elaborated many times over, a “commanding voice” issued from Auschwitz. According to that voice,

Jews are forbidden to hand Hitler posthumous victories. They are commanded to survive as Jews, lest the Jewish people perish. They are commanded to remember the victims of Auschwitz, lest their memory perish. They are forbidden to despair of man and his world, and to escape into either cynicism or otherworldliness, lest they cooperate in delivering the world over to the forces of Auschwitz. Finally, they are forbidden to despair of the God of Israel, lest Judaism perish.

The Buberian idea of revelation as an ineffable encounter between an “I” and a “Thou” gives way here to an instruction for action. For Fackenheim, mere intellectual vision is inevitably blurred, shot through with unresolvable tension. But in the biblical tradition, vision is secondary, hearing God’s word is central. If, after the war, Jewish theologians were unable to formulate a coherent theodicy reconciling God’s goodness and power with the naked fact of Auschwitz, in retrospect it appears that amkha had already responded to the divine command. First, there were the acts of resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe, acts more varied, more intense, and more widespread than had at first been believed. Second, there was the visceral, ongoing determination of ordinary Jews to rebuild Jewish life in and through the state of Israel. To Fackenheim, all this suggested that the vital core of the Jewish people had reaffirmed its continuing witness to Judaism’s place in history—and this “stubborn fidelity” of the Jews in turn reaffirmed, “as it were,” God’s place in history as well.

In his notion of amkha as the (unconsciously) willing recipient of revelation after the Holocaust, Fackenheim accomplished a major revision of the theology of Franz Rosenzweig. A religiously liberal Jew, Rosenzweig had nevertheless placed at the heart of Judaism the traditional Jewish way of accepting the Bible as “Torah,” not just ancient literature but the Word of God. He had also come to accept some, if not all, Jewish laws as commandments personally addressed to him. But Rosenzweig was not captivated by Zionism, and he conceived of the Jewish people as living “outside” of the stream of history.

Fackenheim, by contrast, came to speak of a Jewish return to history, the title of a book he published in 1978, and of Zionism and the state of Israel as the main vehicles of that return. The Holocaust had demonstrated that Jewish “servitude” to the powers-that-be must be resolved now, in history, and not in messianic times. “What made [the Holocaust]—thus far—unbearable,” he wrote, “is an unprecedented togetherness of helplessness in the victims with wickedness in their persecutors. It is necessary to make an end to this togetherness, and since the victims cannot make an end to the wickedness they must make an end to the helplessness.”

Into Rosenzweig’s doctrine of revelation, in other words, Fackenheim brought the survivalism that had been at the heart of a number of secular nationalist ideologies since the late 19th century. Ahad Ha-Am and Simon Dubnow, the fathers of Jewish cultural survivalism, had found the ultimate explanation for Jewish history in the active will of the Jewish people to persevere in its individuality. For these secularists, God and the Torah were but the mutable stratagems employed historically by the Jewish elemental life force, which in the present age could and would take on different forms not necessarily tied to the categories of ethical monotheism or the supernatural authority of any of the laws of Torah.

Fackenheim, however, now saw secular Zionism as itself rooted in something more than nationalism. “If at its best Western Jewish fideism,” as in the writings of Franz Rosenzweig, “showed fidelity to the God of Israel but abandoned the Jewish people, Eastern Jewish secularism at its best showed fidelity to the Jewish people but abandoned the God of Israel.” In Fackenheim’s attempt to heal the breach, the concept of amkha served as nexus.
_____________

Emil Fackenheim, 1956
Fackenheim’s preoccupation with amkha has remained an integral part of his thought to this day. In What Is Judaism?, indeed, he begins by citing the simple fidelity of present-day Jews to Jewish survival, a commitment that has turned Ahad Ha-Am and Dubnow into veritable prophets of a dominant Jewish stance. From there he proceeds to a reading of the Bible as a Jewish book, then to the question of how a contemporary Jew can have access to the Bible as the Book, as Torah. After observations on what Judaism specifically means and will continue to mean (what is “living by Torah,” “learning Torah,” Jewish ethics, prayer, the cycles of worship), he takes up the relation of the Jewish people to the perplexities of its history (anti-Semitism, Judaism and Christianity, Jewish messianism).

Though he insists that “God is the ultimate theme of Judaism . . . the theme of themes,” only in the last pages of What Is Judaism? does Fackenheim venture to discuss “God in the age of Auschwitz and the rebuilt Jerusalem.” Here he invokes the midrashic rhetorical device of kivyakhol (“as it were”), which means that any statement so qualified is at once true, “that it falls short of the ultimate form of truth, and that the ultimate form is beyond our finite understanding and in the keeping of God alone.” He applies this midrashic mode of apprehension to God’s independent yet paradoxically reciprocal relation to the Jews, His “witnesses.” “So involved with His witnesses is God in His intimacy as to make Him, as it were, ‘not God’ if He is abandoned by His witnesses. And so independent is He in His infinity of all human praise as to be, if not praised by them, as it were, ‘lovely in Himself.’” If such paradoxes seem to border on the mystical, for Fackenheim that may be, finally, a realm in which the “ultimate theme” of Judaism can best be understood; in a brief epilogue to this book he appeals (in spite of his general discomfort with the Kabbalah) to Jewish mysticism as he reaches for language to capture the relation between God and the Jews in history:

If the house has an owner, why does He not put the fire out? Perhaps He can and yet will. Perhaps He cannot or will not. But if He cannot or will not, a Jew today must do what he can to put the fire out himself. A kabbalistic saying is to the effect that the effort from below calls forth a response from above.
_____________

Over the years, Fackenheim’s thought has been subjected to a fair amount of comment, much of it focusing on his views of the Holocaust. Even among his admirers he has been taken to task for exaggerating the significance that the Holocaust poses for Jewish theology, for overemphasizing its historical uniqueness, or for seeming to ground all prospect of future Jewish salvation in the Holocaust itself. Thus in a 1971 review of God’s Presence in History, Michael Wyschogrod contended in response to Fackenheim that “If there is hope after the Holocaust, it is because, to those who believe, the voices of the Prophets speak more loudly than did Hitler, and because the divine promise sweeps over the crematoria and silences the voice of Auschwitz.” Likewise David Singer, reviewing The Jewish Return to History, asked, “Can a religion which places the Exodus at the center of its faith grant equal status to a totally destructive event like the Holocaust?” And in an essay on Fackenheim as “theologian of the Holocaust” Hyam Maccoby averred: “To see the Holocaust, as Emil Fackenheim does, as a revelatory event, exposing the basic situation of humanity, is to give it far too much centrality.”

Fackenheim’s almost sensationalist conception of a 614th commandment forbidding Jews to grant posthumous victories to Hitler has also provoked strong demurrals—on the ground that it seems to give pride of place to Hitler as a reason for Jews to bear children and to rear them as Jews. David Singer has paraphrased the objections of the Orthodox and the agnostic alike: “Why should the traditional Jew, who lives by the 613 commandments, need an additional one to ensure Jewish survival? In what sense can the secular Jew be commanded, when he does not believe in a Commander?” In a fine and careful essay on Fackenheim’s religious thought, Michael A. Meyer agrees that there is a commandment issuing forth from the Holocaust—“to survive as Jews, continuing to hope and to act in an unredeemed world”—but takes issue with Fackenheim’s existentialism by proposing that this duty is “the command of a God who is the source of the distant but urgent moral ideal glimpsed by Israel’s prophets and sages,” rather than Fackenheim’s God of history, about whom “it seems no longer possible to say anything meaningful.”

Perhaps the problem here is that the language of divine commandment is too narrow to accommodate the revelatory interchange to which Fackenheim points. Certainly the Holocaust gives rise to a twofold Jewish nightmare: the overwhelming potency of human evil to degrade and destroy, and a vision of a world without the Jewish people. Attesting to God’s presence in history means, for Fackenheim, reaffirming the human capacity to resist evil both physically and spiritually, and it means detecting signs of a reconfirmation of the convenant which is the essential theological rationale for there being a people of Israel at all. Formulating this attestation as a command, which is what Fackenheim does, recalls the role of the talmudic sages who amplified the list of benedictions and obligations incumbent on Israel by establishing that Jews are “commanded,” for example, to light Hanukkah lamps even though no such command is found in the written Torah. (Actually, Fackenheim might be viewed less as a rabbinic interpreter of Torah than as a thinker in the tradition of Deutero-Isaiah, the otherwise anonymous prophet of the Babylonian exile who unforgettably endowed historical catastrophe with religious meaning, offered consolation for the devastating burden of sin and defeat, and found hope of redemption in a return to Zion.)
_____________

Fackenheim does not conceive of Auschwitz, or the establishment of Israel, as revelatory in the sense that Sinai was: they are “epoch-making,” but not root experiences. The Babylonian exile, the destruction of the Temple, the expulsion from Spain, and the modern emancipation of the Jews were similar “epoch-making” events, in Fackenheim’s terminology, drastically rupturing the orderly flow of Jewish history. True, the Holocaust was a “novum” in human evil, and in Jewish history. True, the establishment of the state of Israel was a historical surprise, the creative response of a people who could very well instead have been overwhelmed by mortal despair. But for all the novelty of these events, Jewish history contains other excruciating catastrophes and redemptive surprises, after which Jewish life has gone on. In a sense it may therefore be misleading to speak, as Fackenheim does, of a Jewish return to history; Jews and Judaism never left history, even though they may now be facing history with fewer illusions.

Yet in any case Fackenheim hardly intends to celebrate the irrevocable rupture in the events of the 1930’s and 1940’s; indeed, carefully threading his way between two unacceptable alternatives, he provides the basis for reasserting Jewish continuity dialectically.

There is, at one extreme, the response perhaps most memorably formulated by Richard Rubenstein, who argued in After Auschwitz that the millennial Jewish belief in a caring, omnipotent God was demolished by the Holocaust and that an entirely different rationale had to be erected for post-Holocaust Jewishness. For Fackenheim this way out is certainly not permissible; the permanent loss of a personal God who attends to history and answers prayer would foreshadow the end of Judaism itself. At the other extreme is recourse to one of the venerable formulas according to which the repeated persecution of the Jews is understood as punishment for their sins, or as evidence of divine testing, “the chastisements of love.” This too Fackenheim can hardly accept. Rather, by rooting philosophical and religious meaning in the physical and spiritual resistance of Holocaust victims, and in the fidelity of post-Holocaust Jews to Jewish survival, he at once wrestles with the brute, inarguable facts and prepares for the eventual absorption of them into the Jewish history of salvation.

The experience of near-annihilation can act as a dybbuk on a people’s soul, driving it to self-defeating acts of violence and/or immolation. By providing a subtle, eloquent, even rational response to an event which is close to being religiously inexplicable, Fackenheim has helped exorcise this dybbuk for modern Jews, reestablishing a ground for religious faith, however problematically “postmodern,” however full of strains and kivyakhols ("as it were"). And by associating the full force of the memory of the Holocaust with the anxieties and elations of June 1967, Fackenheim has given powerful philosophical meaning to sentiments felt by vast numbers of his fellow Jews. In his project of turning these feelings into theory he has contributed to repairing what is perhaps the most serious of all ruptures in modern Jewish thought: that between a secular, scientific conception of Jewish experience and the primary insights, values, and beliefs of Judaism.
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1 Summit Books, 320 pp.
2 Edited by Michael L. Morgan, Wayne State University Press, 394 pp.
* Obituary in The Guardian.
Franz Rosenzweig in  three different periods of his short life
And now let's talk about Rosenzweig...

Representation of the Star of Redemption by Franz RosenzweigFranz Rosenzweig's major work is The Star of Redemption (first published in 1921). It is a description of the relationships between God, humanity, and the world, as they are connected by creation, revelation and redemption. If one makes a diagram with God at the top, and the World and the Self below, the inter-relationships generate a Star of David map. He is critical of any attempt to replace actual human existence with an ideal. In Rosenzweig's scheme, revelation arises not in metaphysics but in the here and now. We are called to love God, and to do so is to return to the world, and that is redemption.


Then read this article by Professor Jay Michaelson, published on Forward.com (2005)

A THEORY OF EVERYTHING
Franz Rosenzweig is one of the most mentioned and least read of the Jewish philosophers. Everyone with an interest in modern Jewish philosophy includes him in its highest circle, along with Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Emanuel Levinas and, if religious philosophers are included, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Rav Kook and Joseph Soloveitchik. But while even laypeople know a little Buber (something about “I” and “Thou”), hardly anyone can understand Rosenzweig’s masterpiece, The Star of Redemption. Few people have even tried to read it, preferring instead to dwell on Rosenzweig’s remarkable life story: The Star was partly written in the trenches of World War I and right after it was published, Rosenzweig was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). He died seven years later, at 42.

For a long time now, Rosenzweig’s unusual reputation — he’s very important, but I don’t know what he says — has been blamed on the appallingly difficult language of The Star. Not only is the book, published in 1922, written in the heavy prose of German philosophy — somewhere between the opacity of Hegel and the oracular tone of Heidegger — but its standard translation, the 1971 effort by William Hallo, is clouded in needlessly arcane language. Hallo, whose primary field was neither philosophy nor German but Assyriology, struggled to maintain the character of Rosenzweig’s language, which often includes neologisms and wordplay. But as anyone familiar with the German language knows, it’s much easier to create words in German for complicated states of mind or matter than it is to create them in English. Hallo had to stretch, and the result was a very, very difficult read.

Book cover of Galli's translation
The arrival of Barbara Galli’s new translation, therefore, was greeted with nothing less than elation in the small academic circles in which Rosenzweig is actually read, studied and taught. Galli, whose endeavors include editing and translating numerous works by and about Rosenzweig, has at last rendered The Star of Redemption into language that anyone can read. No more of Hallo: “Is love not rather a matter of fate and of seizure and of a bestowal which, if it is indeed free, it withal only free?” Now, at last, rendered by Galli: “Isn’t love destiny, and being deeply touched, and if it is free, isn’t it a free offering?”

Unfortunately, The Star remains an exceptionally difficult book. Its project is to be honest with all aspects of the human experience — reason, yes, but also love, embodiment, particularity and happenstance — and somehow unify all of what makes our lives worth living into a schematic understanding of humanity, the world and God. Crucially — centrally, really — this project cannot undermine what Rosenzweig saw as the essential property of human beings: We are not essential at all, but all particular, all radically different.

These days, when people speak colloquially of “difference,” it’s the end of the philosophical conversation. Postmodernism and multiculturalism have been cheapened into mere relativism: You have your opinion, and I have mine. Pluralism has been reduced to giving up on conversation entirely; no one is supposed to be convinced in a “dialogue.” We’re just there to express our feelings.

This state of affairs would horrify Rosenzweig, but so would its alternative: the fundamentalist, reactionary “values” that currently dominate our political sphere — values based not on reasoning but on authority and fideism. Does anyone believe in modernity anymore? Has liberal Enlightenment universalism really become extinct?

For Rosenzweig, as for many of us, the problem with rationalist philosophy is that it denies why it exists in the first place. “It is from the fear of death that all cognition of the All begins,” Rosenzweig writes at the very beginning of his work. And yet, philosophy “does not value death as something, but makes it into a nothing.” In other words, we start wondering about the meaning of life when we deeply realize that our lives are finite. What is the point? What matters? But then, philosophy — at least, serious philosophy — denies the importance of our motivation, speaking in terms of general absolutes and categories that seem to have little to do with why we cared in the first place.

Franz Rosenzweig
The primary alternative to such philosophy — the move to the subjective “interior” that characterized Romantic thought in the 19th century, and contemporary “spirituality” today — was, for Rosenzweig, equally unsatisfying. He really wants it all: a physical and metaphysical view of the universe with an emotionally mature account of human nature; truth but also feeling; science but also God.

So Rosenzweig proceeds from the world as we find it, rather than in terms of philosophical categories. “What is dismaying in the world is that it is not spirit. There is still something else in it, something always new, pressing, imposing.” Translation: We don’t see essences and categories; we see particularities. There’s a nice joke about the idealist philosopher sent to the market with a shopping list. He comes home empty-handed, because there was no essential milk or juice, only different brands.

We are also all different brands — defined, in Rosenzweig’s language, by our first and last names. Our last names — our histories, our families, our luck — and our first names: our individuality, our particularity. “I am here,” Adam answers to God in Eden, and there we begin — not as types, but as individuals.

This matters. “Contrary to what unbelief unceasingly maintains with empty and prideful obstinacy, the name is not sound and smoke, but word and fire.” It is not meaningless. (Hallo’s translation is much better here: “For name is in truth word and fire, not sound and fury,” evoking Shakespeare’s “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”) Rather, it is the key to understanding what creation, revelation and redemption actually mean.

About God we know nothing, Rosenzweig avers. But the fundamental reality is not a “no” — no-self in the Buddhist conception, or no-world in the Hasidic one — but a “yes.” We don’t really end in negative theology or atheism, because, after all, there is the world. Whatever God may be, we can see from the world that God is creative, world affirming, world generating. This is the meaning of creation: not its unknowable source, not theology, and not the world’s fundamental laws of thermodynamics or religion, but its fullness and becoming.

Revelation, then, can only be a revelation of particularity. If God speaks, God speaks only to the individual, because there is no “general” that actually exists. This is the secret of love. Think about it: Are you ever in love with a category? With an essence? We speak the language of particularity all the time — in helping our children cross the street, in going to work every day. And it is love that, for Rosenzweig (quoting the “Song of Songs”), is as strong as death. Love — but love understood, not merely rhapsodized — is the answer that true philosophy provides, because love touches the irreducible selfhood of the other, and offers the possibility of a bridge.

Franz Rosenzweig
And redemption? When the love of lovers becomes the love of sisters and brothers; when love of God really turns into love of God’s creatures. This may sound like precisely the neo-Romantic claptrap that Rosenzweig railed against, but remember, this is just a summary. What Rosenzweig does, in the last part of The Star of Redemption, is prove it. Or at least systematize it. That includes the concept of God (The Star of Redemption is essential reading for intellectual agnostics), the relationship of Judaism and Christianity, and what it would mean for universal love to exist when there is no such thing as a universal. Importantly, Rosenzweig is not basing his philosophy on an exciting peak experience, or on the hormonal sensations of love. Rather, the attempt is to understand what philosophy and religion are really talking about, and to include everything — time, history, war, revolution — in a system of “new thinking” that does justice to each component of our experience.

The integrative project — begun in Greek thought, reaching perhaps its apogee in Hegel but resurfacing today in the integral efforts to create “theory of everything,” associated with philosopher Ken Wilber — is, invariably, either overly simplistic or very difficult. In the case of Rosenzweig, it’s the latter. And that is why no one reads his work, even though they acknowledge that, according to the experts, it’s important. Galli’s new translation may help somewhat. Certainly, the language is more straightforward, although sometimes, inevitably, the majesty of certain phrases is lost (not unlike the New International Version of the Bible as compared with the King James). And even if Rosenzweig still does not gain a space on every Jewish bookshelf, maybe he’ll get his due in the academy as — earlier and more reliably than Heidegger — the true progenitor of postmodern ethics and metaphysics.

The Star of Redemption is difficult, but as Rosenzweig himself writes, this is how it must be — not only because of his grand project but also because the work is related to the reward. In an all-too- prescient passage on the difference between supposed piety and true religion, Rosenzweig speaks to all of us who love truth but live in a time of simplistic faith and political fideism.

A rabbinic legend tells the tale of a river in a faraway land that is so pious that it stops flowing on the Sabbath. If, instead of the Main, it was this river that flowed through Frankfurt — there is no doubt that the whole Jewish community there would strictly observe the Sabbath. But God does not give such signs. Obviously, He shudders at the inevitable result: that then precisely the least free, the most fearful and the weakest would be the “most pious.” And God obviously wants only those who are free for his own.

(Jay Michaelson is an adjunct professor of Jewish Studies at The City College of New York, and the creator of learnkabbalah.com)
Ludwig Meidner, APOKALYPTISCHE LANDSCHAFT