that seems to have been buried in the mass graves produced
TRANSCRIPT
My problem with Adolf Grün- baum's "In Defense of Secular
Humanism" (Fall 1992) is his highly selective presentation of the available evidence, as, for example, the range of Jewish theological responses to the Holocaust, and his statements about Martin Buber's response that are in the realm of fantasy. In such matters we should heed the advice of the ancient Stagirite: "The fact is the starting point." I would put it less elegantly: "Is is, ain't ain't." Moreover, professional ethics requires us to state the negative data that might invalidate our generalizations. I hazard that the reason for Grünbaum's incomplete presentation is that he is not speaking here as a professional scholar, but rather as the passionately indignant spokesman for a cause.
Let me state where I am coming from. I am a secular non-observant Jew with a personal allegiance to Judaism. I speak as a veteran historian and phenomenol- ogist of world religions, with a concen- tration on religious experience. My philosophical preference is the dialogical approach, with a stress on concrete experience. Hence, I find Grünbaum's stipulated definition of religion simplis- tically inadequate, even if confined to the Western tradition. This applies also to his notion of theism, which he confines to the so-called classical variety with all the "omnis," far closer to the theism of
Seymour Cain, author of Gabriel Mar- cel, is a Visiting Scholar in History at the University of California, San Diego.
the Greek philosophers and to that of later theologians influenced by them than to that of the Hebrew Bible. Charles Hartshorne, for one, spent a philosophi- cal lifetime alerting us to this theological solecism and to developing a nonclassical logic of theism. I should add that I have long been concerned with the Holocaust, have published many papers on the subject, and have served as an editor of an anthology of theological responses to the Holocaust.
Let us turn now to Professor Grünbaum's impassioned apologia. He deals with an important question in the philosophy of religion, the relation, if any, between ethics and religion. He cites a number of apologists of the opposite persuasion, theocentric rather than anthropocentric, who assert that the cause of all our moral and social ills lies in the abandonment of traditional (Western) religion and triumph of secular humanism.
Grünbaum argues in response that neither traditional religion nor secular humanism generates an ethics that elicits actualization by its respective adherents. He points out correctly some egregious horrors connected with traditional Western religions. He might also have cited the far greater horrors committed by the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, seats of the two great secular movements in our lifetime. I grant that it would be going too far to attribute the term humanism to Hitlerism and Stalinism; however, there was much talk in the 1930s of "Soviet humanism," the crea- tion of a new, unalienated human being.
That seems to have been buried in the mass graves produced by the Stalinist regime. Certainly both movements were anthropocentric without any transcend- ent norm, unless we take racial purity or the materialist dialectic to be such.
It would require a much broader and detailed historical and social-scientfic survey than Grünbaum has provided to establish that there is no essential connection between religion and ethics or secularism and ethics. Like a lawyer's brief, Grünbaum's argument is much too selective and one-sided. Certainly there are ethical precepts essential to Bud- dhism, originally a nontheistic religion, and to Judaism, a theistic religion. It may be that, for some reason, ethics is more central to the Judeo-Christian religions than to those of Southeast Asia. Recall that Rudolf Otto in his searching comparisons of Shankara (medieval Hindu monist) and Meister Eckhardt (medieval German mystic) found them to be strikingly similar, except for the central importance Eckhardt placed on the ethical aspect. And my master, Joachim Wach, noted the anomalous stress on the ethical by the ancient Israelites compared with contemporary peoples on the same primitive cultural level. So apparently some do and some don't.
Grünbaum is bothered by the fact that revelations and life-rules are not all the same. There is no reason why they should be, unless you demand something analogous to the universal table of elements. Let's put it this way: If there were an ultimate reality with which human beings might have an encounter, then the results would vary according to the particular era, area, and culture, as well as the individual personality. Revelation need not be conceived as itemized recipes or propositions dropped into people's passive minds like beans in a bowl. There would always be a variety of modulations in this, the human condition. We're dealing hypothetically with concrete human experience, not with an accountant's spreadsheet.
It is very difficult to separate the "religious" from the "secular" when it comes to deciding the source of ethical norms and acts. Take the so-called righteous Gentiles who helped Jews to
Point/ Counterpoint
In Response to Grünbaum's Defense Adolf Grtinbaum's "In Defense of Secular Humanism" appeared in the Fall 1992 FREE INQUIRY. Below Seymour Cain offers a critique. Adolf Grünbaum's reply follows.
Seymour Cain
Winter 1993/94 55
escape the Nazi murder machine, risking deadly danger for themselves and their families. Some of them may have been acting from a self-sacrificing devotion to values engendered by centuries of Western secular humanism. Others, like the French Huguenots who saved a remarkable number of Jews, were moved by religious motives and identification with the People of the Book. And there may have been French humanistic values mixed in. I heard one of them say in a moving, unforgettable moment, "No, we were not heroes. We could not do anything else!" This catches the essential ethical note of unconditional command. Of course, on a descriptive physical level, they could have collaborated with the German persecutors, just as Socrates could have taken it on the lam and passed up the hemlock. But on a normative level that was impossible.
Right in the seat of Nazi tyranny, in Germany/ Austria, there was again a mixed bag, both secular and religious resisters, people who had the amazing courage to say no to cruel, total power. With Niemoeller and Bonhoeffer it was clearly religious, claiming a higher authority than the secular state. With others, such as Willy Brandt, it was clearly secular, based on a democratic socialist humanism, but again claiming a higher authority than one's own government. As a member of the Norwegian resistance movement, he became, formally speaking, a traitor to his country, thus challenging the idolatry of the national state so pervasive in modern times. There were many other Germans who resisted Nazi tyranny for purely secular reasons, so far as anything is pure in human existence. Lay religious resisters sometimes found themselves abandoned and disavowed by their church leaders, like the simple Austrian carpenter who inveighed against the Nazi invasion of other countries only to be told by his bishop that he had no business opposing the governing authorities; hence, the church did nothing to prevent his execution. A similar case was that of a young Mormon workingman who engaged in anti-Nazi activities in Ger- many, only to be excommunicated by his church leaders and executed. Like secular leaders, religious leaders often
put the practical welfare of their insti- tutions above that of higher ethical values.
It is salutary to note that not everyone who is an attested member of a religious community is such in ethical and spiritual reality. Their actions speak louder than the words they intone in church or synagogue. These are persons called "practical atheists" by some religionists. I realize that the appelation can't be pleasing to Professor Grün- baum. However, I assure him that I wholly agree that authentic theoretical atheists can be just as good citizens as theoretical theists. There are various motivations involved in so-called good citizenship, including prudential ones. Let's go on now to Grünbaum's dis- course on the response of Jewish theologians to the Holocaust, to which he gives so much space.
What we get from him here are citations limited to those who
view the Holocaust as divine punishment for the backsliding of modern Jews. This is like shooting fish in a barrel, lamen- table easy targets. Again I wonder if he is being highly selective in order to add weight to his adversarial argument. I recently read through over fifty brilliant theological papers contributed to a symposium on the Holocaust. There were a wide variety of views, but only one of them viewed the Holocaust as divine punishment for backsliding. It seemed anomalous and obsolete. It obviously was not representative of present-day responses, any more than Grünbaum's horrible examples.
I acknowledge that the citations he provides are a correct reflection of a certain school of thought, but it is by no means the only one, even among echt- Orthodox theologians. One only has to recall Eliezer Berkovits's Faith After the Holocaust, which puts the onus for the Holocaust not on backsliding Jews, but on Western civilization and its religion, Christianity. It might be of interest to Grünbaum and other devout secularists that Berkovits correctly insists that in Judaism there is no antinomy between the secular and the sacred, as in tradi- tional Christianity, that Judaism is very much a this-worldly religion. I assume
that this Orthodox theologian was not mentioned either because Grünbaum was ignorant of his work or because it did not suit the needs of the adversarial argument.
Or why not mention Richard Ruben- stein, who proclaimed the death of the God who was traditionally believed to be the protector of his chosen people? Rubenstein went acutely to the root of the matter, not merely the general problem of theodicy, but the specific problem of a covenantal God who let his chosen people endure abysmal humiliation, torture, and death—a now absolutely unbelievable God. He even blamed the Chosen People claim for leading ultimately to the Holocaust. Here again Grünbaum makes no men- tion of an eminent Holocaust theologian who does not blame Jewish backsliding for the cataclysm, again a skewed omission. The same could be said of the neglect of Emil Fackenheim and Irving Greenberg. We are led to believe that Jakobovitz, Schneerson, and Teitel- baum, who interpret the Holocaust as divine punishment for the modern Jews' abandonment of Torah belief and observance, are the representative voices of contemporary Jewish theology. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many Jewish theologians have voiced exactly the same rejection of the idea of the killer-God of Auschwitz in practically the same words as Grünbaum (p. 32), e.g., Eugene Borowitz. Any mention of them would not serve the purpose of Grünbaum's adversarial argument.
mally, I want to take account of 11 Professor Grünbaum's presentation of Martin Buber's reponse to the Holocaust. This constitutes the most flagrant case I've ever witnessed of setting up a straw man and then knocking it down. Nothing Grünbaum says has anything to do with the words and thoughts of the real-life Buber. He cites no texts: there are none to support his statements. Grünbaum is completely confused on the meaning and application of the term eclipse of God. It appeared originally as the title and subject of a book based primarily on Buber's Amer- ican lectures in Fall 1951, along with
56
FREE INQUIRY
much earlier writings. It contains no "eclipse theodicy," for Buber had none. What Buber is attempting to do in this book is to deal with the shift in modern times from a believed experiential relation with transcendent reality to a merely mental entertainment of repres- entations, images, and ideas. What Grünbaum fantasizes as a matter of God himself going into eclipse is on the contrary, for Buber, something that occurs between man and transcendent reality due to a change in man's basic stance toward things. The light, meta- phorically speaking, is still there, but man can no longer experience it. In such a time, to change the metaphor, there can no longer be a dialogue, an I-Thou relation, between man and God. (If Buber has an ontology, it is that of "the between," the inter, the zwischen, relationality). To sum up, Buber sees a centuries-long cultural development, not the Holocaust, as leading to this situation, in which a living reality and relation is reduced to abstract ideas, an intra-psychic phenomenon. Whether or not what Buber claims is believable or whether or not such an eclipse occurred in modern times may be questioned. But this is actually what he says. This is what we must deal with, positively or negatively, when we try to interpret the meaning of Buber's "eclipse of God."
Also it is incorrect to label Buber a "Jewish theologian." He is rather a religious philosopher who has contrib- uted in his own way to many areas of philosophy, as recognized by eminent scholars in the volume in the Living Philosophers series devoted to Buber. To lump Buber, Jakobovits, and Teitel- baum together amounts to a shameful slander, explainable only by a complete ignorance of Buber's place in the spectrum of modern Jewish religious thought. His stance is at the opposite pole from that of the other two men. Can it be possible that Grünbaum does not know that Buber has long been regarded as a heretic in Orthodox Jewish circles? It's as if Grünbaum has pro- ceeded on the principle, "Any stick to beat a dog with."
The odd thing is that a cottage industry has been growing among some
Jewish academic commentators on the Holocaust, accusing Buber of no interest at all in the Holocaust. This has been taken as evidence that his dialogical approach to human affairs is without merit, since it has to do with a timeless realm with no possible application to concrete actuality, including the practi- cal demands of power-relations for a powerless people. Hence academics of this school dismiss him as a naïve utopian thinker. This might have pro- vided Grünbaum with some real meat on which to feed an adversarial argu- ment, had he been aware of it, but it would have had to be a quite different argument.
There is in Buber's later writings on Judaism a statement that might seem to support Grünbaum's reading of "the eclipse of God" as referring to the Holocaust. In "The Dialogue Between Heaven and Earth" in On Judaism (New York: Schocken, 1967) Buber speaks of the apparent withdrawal or hidden- ness of God, a seeming absence and silence that has occurred frequently in human history and is often la- mented in the Hebrew Bible. Then he asks the specific relevant question: "How is life with God still possible after Auschwitz?" that is, a living dia- logical relation, not mere belief. He sees this question as especially trau- matic for the Jews, who were left completely at the mercy of their destroy- ers during the Holocaust. He offers no easy answer, but calls on us to rely on hope for a theophany and a renewal of dialogue, as in the conclusion of the biblical story of Job. "Nothing is explained, nothing adjusted; wrong has not become right, nor cruelty kindness" (Ibid., 224f.) The evil remains un- changed, unexplained, unjustified. Thus, contrary to Grünbaum, there is no "eclipse theodicy" and no viewing of the Holocaust as punishment for the sins of the Jews.
Iwould counsel secular humanists to spend much less of their time accum-
ulating proof texts on the failings and horrors of religion and much more on what, humanly speaking, must be the great concern for us late twentieth- century survivors of the horrors perpe-
trated in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia in the 1930s and 1940s: the face of man after Auschwitz. This should be of far more concern to secular humanists than that of "the face of God after Auschwitz" (title of a book by Ignatz Meybaum), since for them the question of theodicy cannot arise except as a historical curiosity. Obviously secular- ism and the advance of science have been no unmixed blessing. The great horrors of our time have been the work of secular anthropocentric societies. The eminent secular thinkers who inspired us in our youth never prepared us for what happened, not because they lacked the gift of prophecy, but because their view of human nature and the boon of technical reason was naïvely incomplete. They lacked the compelling insight that human beings, the most educated and scientifically advanced, are capable of abysmal evil, a potential that was actualized in the assumedly paradisal age of scientific and social progress. Perhaps the laboratory experiment is not the ethical paradigm that John Dewey thought it was. The Nazi researchers engaged in some notorious laboratory experiments, with methodical proce- dures and carefully tabulated results. The scientific method does not necessarily make for virtuous human beings or a good society. It may indeed contribute to the opposite. And secular humanists should stop finding all the good in their own camp and all the evil in that of their adversaries. Bigotry, fanaticism, and the refusal of dialogue are common human failings, affecting secularists as well as religionists. Let's look for the mote in our own eyes.
References
Berkovits, E. Faith After the Holocaust. New York: Ktav, 1973.
Buber, M. Eclipse of God. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1952.
Cain, S. "The Question and the Answers After Auschwitz," in Faith and Reason: Essays in Judaism. Eds. R. Gordis and R. B. Waxman. New York: Ktav, 1973.
Rubenstein, R. "Buber and the Holocaust: Some Reconsiderations on the 100th Anniversary of His Birth," Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. XVIII, no. 3 (Summer 1979).
Schraeder, G. The Hebrew Humanism of Martin Buber. Trans. by N. J. Jacobs. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973. Esp. Eclipse of God, 449-470. •
Winter 1993/ 94 57
Humanism" (Fall 1992) is his highly selective presentation of the available evidence, as, for example, the range of Jewish theological responses to the Holocaust, and his statements about Martin Buber's response that are in the realm of fantasy. In such matters we should heed the advice of the ancient Stagirite: "The fact is the starting point." I would put it less elegantly: "Is is, ain't ain't." Moreover, professional ethics requires us to state the negative data that might invalidate our generalizations. I hazard that the reason for Grünbaum's incomplete presentation is that he is not speaking here as a professional scholar, but rather as the passionately indignant spokesman for a cause.
Let me state where I am coming from. I am a secular non-observant Jew with a personal allegiance to Judaism. I speak as a veteran historian and phenomenol- ogist of world religions, with a concen- tration on religious experience. My philosophical preference is the dialogical approach, with a stress on concrete experience. Hence, I find Grünbaum's stipulated definition of religion simplis- tically inadequate, even if confined to the Western tradition. This applies also to his notion of theism, which he confines to the so-called classical variety with all the "omnis," far closer to the theism of
Seymour Cain, author of Gabriel Mar- cel, is a Visiting Scholar in History at the University of California, San Diego.
the Greek philosophers and to that of later theologians influenced by them than to that of the Hebrew Bible. Charles Hartshorne, for one, spent a philosophi- cal lifetime alerting us to this theological solecism and to developing a nonclassical logic of theism. I should add that I have long been concerned with the Holocaust, have published many papers on the subject, and have served as an editor of an anthology of theological responses to the Holocaust.
Let us turn now to Professor Grünbaum's impassioned apologia. He deals with an important question in the philosophy of religion, the relation, if any, between ethics and religion. He cites a number of apologists of the opposite persuasion, theocentric rather than anthropocentric, who assert that the cause of all our moral and social ills lies in the abandonment of traditional (Western) religion and triumph of secular humanism.
Grünbaum argues in response that neither traditional religion nor secular humanism generates an ethics that elicits actualization by its respective adherents. He points out correctly some egregious horrors connected with traditional Western religions. He might also have cited the far greater horrors committed by the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, seats of the two great secular movements in our lifetime. I grant that it would be going too far to attribute the term humanism to Hitlerism and Stalinism; however, there was much talk in the 1930s of "Soviet humanism," the crea- tion of a new, unalienated human being.
That seems to have been buried in the mass graves produced by the Stalinist regime. Certainly both movements were anthropocentric without any transcend- ent norm, unless we take racial purity or the materialist dialectic to be such.
It would require a much broader and detailed historical and social-scientfic survey than Grünbaum has provided to establish that there is no essential connection between religion and ethics or secularism and ethics. Like a lawyer's brief, Grünbaum's argument is much too selective and one-sided. Certainly there are ethical precepts essential to Bud- dhism, originally a nontheistic religion, and to Judaism, a theistic religion. It may be that, for some reason, ethics is more central to the Judeo-Christian religions than to those of Southeast Asia. Recall that Rudolf Otto in his searching comparisons of Shankara (medieval Hindu monist) and Meister Eckhardt (medieval German mystic) found them to be strikingly similar, except for the central importance Eckhardt placed on the ethical aspect. And my master, Joachim Wach, noted the anomalous stress on the ethical by the ancient Israelites compared with contemporary peoples on the same primitive cultural level. So apparently some do and some don't.
Grünbaum is bothered by the fact that revelations and life-rules are not all the same. There is no reason why they should be, unless you demand something analogous to the universal table of elements. Let's put it this way: If there were an ultimate reality with which human beings might have an encounter, then the results would vary according to the particular era, area, and culture, as well as the individual personality. Revelation need not be conceived as itemized recipes or propositions dropped into people's passive minds like beans in a bowl. There would always be a variety of modulations in this, the human condition. We're dealing hypothetically with concrete human experience, not with an accountant's spreadsheet.
It is very difficult to separate the "religious" from the "secular" when it comes to deciding the source of ethical norms and acts. Take the so-called righteous Gentiles who helped Jews to
Point/ Counterpoint
In Response to Grünbaum's Defense Adolf Grtinbaum's "In Defense of Secular Humanism" appeared in the Fall 1992 FREE INQUIRY. Below Seymour Cain offers a critique. Adolf Grünbaum's reply follows.
Seymour Cain
Winter 1993/94 55
escape the Nazi murder machine, risking deadly danger for themselves and their families. Some of them may have been acting from a self-sacrificing devotion to values engendered by centuries of Western secular humanism. Others, like the French Huguenots who saved a remarkable number of Jews, were moved by religious motives and identification with the People of the Book. And there may have been French humanistic values mixed in. I heard one of them say in a moving, unforgettable moment, "No, we were not heroes. We could not do anything else!" This catches the essential ethical note of unconditional command. Of course, on a descriptive physical level, they could have collaborated with the German persecutors, just as Socrates could have taken it on the lam and passed up the hemlock. But on a normative level that was impossible.
Right in the seat of Nazi tyranny, in Germany/ Austria, there was again a mixed bag, both secular and religious resisters, people who had the amazing courage to say no to cruel, total power. With Niemoeller and Bonhoeffer it was clearly religious, claiming a higher authority than the secular state. With others, such as Willy Brandt, it was clearly secular, based on a democratic socialist humanism, but again claiming a higher authority than one's own government. As a member of the Norwegian resistance movement, he became, formally speaking, a traitor to his country, thus challenging the idolatry of the national state so pervasive in modern times. There were many other Germans who resisted Nazi tyranny for purely secular reasons, so far as anything is pure in human existence. Lay religious resisters sometimes found themselves abandoned and disavowed by their church leaders, like the simple Austrian carpenter who inveighed against the Nazi invasion of other countries only to be told by his bishop that he had no business opposing the governing authorities; hence, the church did nothing to prevent his execution. A similar case was that of a young Mormon workingman who engaged in anti-Nazi activities in Ger- many, only to be excommunicated by his church leaders and executed. Like secular leaders, religious leaders often
put the practical welfare of their insti- tutions above that of higher ethical values.
It is salutary to note that not everyone who is an attested member of a religious community is such in ethical and spiritual reality. Their actions speak louder than the words they intone in church or synagogue. These are persons called "practical atheists" by some religionists. I realize that the appelation can't be pleasing to Professor Grün- baum. However, I assure him that I wholly agree that authentic theoretical atheists can be just as good citizens as theoretical theists. There are various motivations involved in so-called good citizenship, including prudential ones. Let's go on now to Grünbaum's dis- course on the response of Jewish theologians to the Holocaust, to which he gives so much space.
What we get from him here are citations limited to those who
view the Holocaust as divine punishment for the backsliding of modern Jews. This is like shooting fish in a barrel, lamen- table easy targets. Again I wonder if he is being highly selective in order to add weight to his adversarial argument. I recently read through over fifty brilliant theological papers contributed to a symposium on the Holocaust. There were a wide variety of views, but only one of them viewed the Holocaust as divine punishment for backsliding. It seemed anomalous and obsolete. It obviously was not representative of present-day responses, any more than Grünbaum's horrible examples.
I acknowledge that the citations he provides are a correct reflection of a certain school of thought, but it is by no means the only one, even among echt- Orthodox theologians. One only has to recall Eliezer Berkovits's Faith After the Holocaust, which puts the onus for the Holocaust not on backsliding Jews, but on Western civilization and its religion, Christianity. It might be of interest to Grünbaum and other devout secularists that Berkovits correctly insists that in Judaism there is no antinomy between the secular and the sacred, as in tradi- tional Christianity, that Judaism is very much a this-worldly religion. I assume
that this Orthodox theologian was not mentioned either because Grünbaum was ignorant of his work or because it did not suit the needs of the adversarial argument.
Or why not mention Richard Ruben- stein, who proclaimed the death of the God who was traditionally believed to be the protector of his chosen people? Rubenstein went acutely to the root of the matter, not merely the general problem of theodicy, but the specific problem of a covenantal God who let his chosen people endure abysmal humiliation, torture, and death—a now absolutely unbelievable God. He even blamed the Chosen People claim for leading ultimately to the Holocaust. Here again Grünbaum makes no men- tion of an eminent Holocaust theologian who does not blame Jewish backsliding for the cataclysm, again a skewed omission. The same could be said of the neglect of Emil Fackenheim and Irving Greenberg. We are led to believe that Jakobovitz, Schneerson, and Teitel- baum, who interpret the Holocaust as divine punishment for the modern Jews' abandonment of Torah belief and observance, are the representative voices of contemporary Jewish theology. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many Jewish theologians have voiced exactly the same rejection of the idea of the killer-God of Auschwitz in practically the same words as Grünbaum (p. 32), e.g., Eugene Borowitz. Any mention of them would not serve the purpose of Grünbaum's adversarial argument.
mally, I want to take account of 11 Professor Grünbaum's presentation of Martin Buber's reponse to the Holocaust. This constitutes the most flagrant case I've ever witnessed of setting up a straw man and then knocking it down. Nothing Grünbaum says has anything to do with the words and thoughts of the real-life Buber. He cites no texts: there are none to support his statements. Grünbaum is completely confused on the meaning and application of the term eclipse of God. It appeared originally as the title and subject of a book based primarily on Buber's Amer- ican lectures in Fall 1951, along with
56
FREE INQUIRY
much earlier writings. It contains no "eclipse theodicy," for Buber had none. What Buber is attempting to do in this book is to deal with the shift in modern times from a believed experiential relation with transcendent reality to a merely mental entertainment of repres- entations, images, and ideas. What Grünbaum fantasizes as a matter of God himself going into eclipse is on the contrary, for Buber, something that occurs between man and transcendent reality due to a change in man's basic stance toward things. The light, meta- phorically speaking, is still there, but man can no longer experience it. In such a time, to change the metaphor, there can no longer be a dialogue, an I-Thou relation, between man and God. (If Buber has an ontology, it is that of "the between," the inter, the zwischen, relationality). To sum up, Buber sees a centuries-long cultural development, not the Holocaust, as leading to this situation, in which a living reality and relation is reduced to abstract ideas, an intra-psychic phenomenon. Whether or not what Buber claims is believable or whether or not such an eclipse occurred in modern times may be questioned. But this is actually what he says. This is what we must deal with, positively or negatively, when we try to interpret the meaning of Buber's "eclipse of God."
Also it is incorrect to label Buber a "Jewish theologian." He is rather a religious philosopher who has contrib- uted in his own way to many areas of philosophy, as recognized by eminent scholars in the volume in the Living Philosophers series devoted to Buber. To lump Buber, Jakobovits, and Teitel- baum together amounts to a shameful slander, explainable only by a complete ignorance of Buber's place in the spectrum of modern Jewish religious thought. His stance is at the opposite pole from that of the other two men. Can it be possible that Grünbaum does not know that Buber has long been regarded as a heretic in Orthodox Jewish circles? It's as if Grünbaum has pro- ceeded on the principle, "Any stick to beat a dog with."
The odd thing is that a cottage industry has been growing among some
Jewish academic commentators on the Holocaust, accusing Buber of no interest at all in the Holocaust. This has been taken as evidence that his dialogical approach to human affairs is without merit, since it has to do with a timeless realm with no possible application to concrete actuality, including the practi- cal demands of power-relations for a powerless people. Hence academics of this school dismiss him as a naïve utopian thinker. This might have pro- vided Grünbaum with some real meat on which to feed an adversarial argu- ment, had he been aware of it, but it would have had to be a quite different argument.
There is in Buber's later writings on Judaism a statement that might seem to support Grünbaum's reading of "the eclipse of God" as referring to the Holocaust. In "The Dialogue Between Heaven and Earth" in On Judaism (New York: Schocken, 1967) Buber speaks of the apparent withdrawal or hidden- ness of God, a seeming absence and silence that has occurred frequently in human history and is often la- mented in the Hebrew Bible. Then he asks the specific relevant question: "How is life with God still possible after Auschwitz?" that is, a living dia- logical relation, not mere belief. He sees this question as especially trau- matic for the Jews, who were left completely at the mercy of their destroy- ers during the Holocaust. He offers no easy answer, but calls on us to rely on hope for a theophany and a renewal of dialogue, as in the conclusion of the biblical story of Job. "Nothing is explained, nothing adjusted; wrong has not become right, nor cruelty kindness" (Ibid., 224f.) The evil remains un- changed, unexplained, unjustified. Thus, contrary to Grünbaum, there is no "eclipse theodicy" and no viewing of the Holocaust as punishment for the sins of the Jews.
Iwould counsel secular humanists to spend much less of their time accum-
ulating proof texts on the failings and horrors of religion and much more on what, humanly speaking, must be the great concern for us late twentieth- century survivors of the horrors perpe-
trated in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia in the 1930s and 1940s: the face of man after Auschwitz. This should be of far more concern to secular humanists than that of "the face of God after Auschwitz" (title of a book by Ignatz Meybaum), since for them the question of theodicy cannot arise except as a historical curiosity. Obviously secular- ism and the advance of science have been no unmixed blessing. The great horrors of our time have been the work of secular anthropocentric societies. The eminent secular thinkers who inspired us in our youth never prepared us for what happened, not because they lacked the gift of prophecy, but because their view of human nature and the boon of technical reason was naïvely incomplete. They lacked the compelling insight that human beings, the most educated and scientifically advanced, are capable of abysmal evil, a potential that was actualized in the assumedly paradisal age of scientific and social progress. Perhaps the laboratory experiment is not the ethical paradigm that John Dewey thought it was. The Nazi researchers engaged in some notorious laboratory experiments, with methodical proce- dures and carefully tabulated results. The scientific method does not necessarily make for virtuous human beings or a good society. It may indeed contribute to the opposite. And secular humanists should stop finding all the good in their own camp and all the evil in that of their adversaries. Bigotry, fanaticism, and the refusal of dialogue are common human failings, affecting secularists as well as religionists. Let's look for the mote in our own eyes.
References
Berkovits, E. Faith After the Holocaust. New York: Ktav, 1973.
Buber, M. Eclipse of God. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1952.
Cain, S. "The Question and the Answers After Auschwitz," in Faith and Reason: Essays in Judaism. Eds. R. Gordis and R. B. Waxman. New York: Ktav, 1973.
Rubenstein, R. "Buber and the Holocaust: Some Reconsiderations on the 100th Anniversary of His Birth," Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. XVIII, no. 3 (Summer 1979).
Schraeder, G. The Hebrew Humanism of Martin Buber. Trans. by N. J. Jacobs. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973. Esp. Eclipse of God, 449-470. •
Winter 1993/ 94 57