Why Do They Hate Us?

Perhaps we will never really understand. Perhaps Emil Fackenheim was right when he sought an explanation for the Holocaust: “There will never be an adequate explanation. The closer one gets to explicability, the more one realizes nothing can make Hitler explicable.” Perhaps to offer reason for the unreasonable is a step down the path of Spinoza’s famous maxim that “to understand all is to forgive all.” But there is one explanation that just may be the most valid because it came from Hitler himself. It is the confession of the prime prototype of the antisemite used to justify its application to six million victims. Indeed, it is the very debt of the world to Judaism’s discovery of ethics and morality that for some necessitate its destruction.