Emil Fackenheim Thinking through radical evil
Sometimes life goes to school with philosophy, sometimes philosophy goes to school with life.
The first thing one noticed about him was his accent. It, like him, was one of a kind. It was a mix of guttural German and the brogueish, Scottish English he picked up in Aberdeen. His speech was punctuated by Yiddishisms, Hebrew, Greek and Arabic. Since he learned most of his English reading P.G. Woodhouse, who wrote about aristocrats, he would often unconsciously insert a posh phrase such as Right-O, which sounded funny coming from such a man of the people.
In God's Presence in History, he proposed his 614th commandment, for Jews to follow: Never grant Hitler a posthumous victory. The Holocaust may be incomprehensible, but Jews could refuse to collude with the Hitlerian goal of ending their 4,000-year history.
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