Leibowitz and Levinas: Between Judaism and Universalism 9781644698549

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Leibowitz and Levinas Between Judaism and Universalism

Leibowitz and Levinas

Between Judaism and Universalism Rabbi Dr. Tal S essler

Tr ansl a te d by Ey l o n L e v y

B o st o n 2022

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022932976

ISBN 9781644698532 (hardback) ISBN 9781644698549 (ebook PDF) ISBN 9781644698556 (ePub)

Copyright © 2022, Academic Studies Press, English translation All rights reserved.

Book design by Tatiana Vernikov Cover design by Ivan Grave On the cover: Yeshayahu Leibowitz's photo is reproduced by permission (https:// www.flickr.com/photos/bracha-ettinger/125104636/in/photostream/). Emmanuel Levinas's photo: public domain.

Published by Academic Studies Press 1577 Beacon Street Brookline, MA 02446, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

To Honey Amado and the Maurice Amado Foundation for generously allowing the publication of this book

To Eliana and Noa, with love and joy

Contents Introduction

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1 A Portrait of the Philosopher as a Young Man

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2 The 1930s—Early Writings

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3 The Case against Political Messianism and the Philosophy of History

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4 Leibowitz, Levinas, and Zionism

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5 Mysticism Under the Guise of Musar

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Afterword

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Index

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For two and a half years, Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel disagreed. These say: It would have been preferable had man not been created than to have been created. And those said: It is preferable for man to have been created than had he not been created. Ultimately, they were counted and concluded: It would have been preferable had man not been created than to have been created. However, now that he has been created, he should examine his actions that he has performed and seek to correct them. And some say: He should scrutinize his planned actions and evaluate whether or not and in what manner those actions should be performed, so that he will not sin. —Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Eruvin 13b

La vie est un souvenir et un devenir. —Claude Bernard

Good men must not obey the laws too well. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Introduction

Yeshayahu Leibowitz and Emmanuel Levinas were lone voices during their lifetimes. In an age of growing nationalism and unbridled religious fundamentalism, they displayed philosophical and theological heroism in their insistence on shifting between different worlds, even when these worlds appeared diametrically opposed and mutually antagonistic. Leibowitz and Levinas sought to instigate a textual revolution, one that would overhaul how Jews approached the seminal texts of their civilization. Levinas’s commentaries on the Talmud, and Leibowitz’s on the weekly Torah portion, were radically contemporary interpretations of the Written and Oral Torahs. One might say that they “emancipated” the traditional texts by reading them in a way that reflected the Zeitgeist, honestly confronting the tension between science and faith, politics and religion, the radical individualism of the modern age and the communal and universal responsibility expected of every Jew. Leibowitz and Levinas courageously embrace the intellectual and existential tension between universal European culture and the spiritual and religious treasures of the Jewish people. This book is not just an analysis of their works, but a thoughtful paean to two of the twentieth century’s greatest Orthodox Jewish thinkers. Leibowitz and Levinas salvaged some of Orthodox Judaism’s honor in terms of intellectual honesty, social and political justice, human dignity and respect, and its ability to resist the onslaught of rampant nationalism from within and murderous totalitarianism from without. All this was in the context of the existential challenge of remaining faithful to the spiritual and confessional heritage of the Jewish people amid the challenges of modern Western thought, humanism, and hopes of finding an intellectual space for political liberalism and religious faith to coexist peacefully This book is my way of repaying a spiritual and personal debt to two unique and original thinkers. On the face of it, a comparative study of the philosophies of Leibowitz and Levinas might seem perplexing, because what could Leibowitz’s political radicalism and strict separation of religion and morality have to do with Levinas’s religious “humanism of the other”? This book proposes some surprising affinities between Leibowitz and Levinas. The first is their similar biographies, having both grown up in Baltic

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strongholds of opposition to Hasidism, in Lithuania and Latvia respectively. Both moved to Western Europe as young men to obtain a university education. Both began their philosophical journeys in the 1930s with a series of avant-garde essays on Jewish identity, which remain critical to understanding the quandaries of Jewish and human existence in the modern age. They also allow us to trace Leibowitz and Levinas’s spiritual and philosophical voyages as two exceptional thinkers who mounted profound and groundbreaking challenges to the dominant spirit and hegemonic philosophies of their times. Leibowitz was a prophet of rebuke. On the one hand, he mercilessly excoriated Israel’s secular society for neglecting the Jewish people’s spiritual and intellectual heritage and turning its back on particularistic Jewish culture; on the other, he savaged Israel’s religious society for consecrating the historical and the political, shunning universal human values, and celebrating the Gordian knot between religion and state. Levinas was similarly remorseless in attacking political movements that purported to mythologize politics. He was a prophet of compassion, who dedicated himself to the monumental mission of rehabilitating French Jewry after the Second World War. But both Levinas and Leibowitz were more than just “Jewish thinkers” and produced writings of universal significance. For Leibowitz, this element found expression in his scientific work as well as in his personal example as a universal role model for religious individuals with a Renaissance education who believed in the values of the Enlightenment. For Levinas, this found expression in his critical contributions to twentieth-century philosophy, especially in the field of ethics and the intersubjectivity of human existence. After presenting the biographies of Leibowitz and Levinas’s early lives, Chapter II will explore and compare their writings from the 1930s. As we shall see, the young Leibowitz spent the early 1930s grappling with the colossal challenges of modern Orthodox Jewish life in the Diaspora, in a world without political sovereignty for the Jewish people. He focused on crises of identity and halakha within the Jewish world, while Levinas focused on external existential dangers to the Jewish people, specifically the Nazis’ rise to power in Germany. The young Leibowitz devoted his early essays to an internal debate about religious Jewish identity and the dangers of assimilation and spiritual extinction. Levinas, meanwhile, turned his attention to the threat of physical annihilation facing the Jews in the 1930s. These were also the years in which Leibowitz and Levinas were choosing how and where to live. Leibowitz left Europe for Palestine in 1935, the year of the infamous Nuremberg Race Laws, and gave up on Europe as a realistic geographic and political option for modern Jews,

Introduction

despite having spent the first three decades of his life in Riga, Berlin, and Basel and having freely reveled in the treasures of European culture and science. This was in contrast to Levinas, who supported the Zionist enterprise but saw a special virtue in Diaspora life, adhering to an enigmatic, evasive, existential wish to reconcile Athens and Jerusalem. Levinas remained, in this sense, a Jew of the Enlightenment and Emancipation eras, refusing to relinquish the option of a pan-European Judaism even after the terrible breaking point of the Holocaust. In Chapter III, we shall conduct a more rigorous and comprehensive inquiry into Leibowitz and Levinas’s most incisive political analyses about the upheavals of the twentieth century. This chapter, which touches on the core themes in their thinking, will focus on Leibowitz and Levinas’s sweeping rejection of political messianism and philosophies of history. Levinas criticized both right-wing (Nazi) and left-wing (Stalinist) brands of European totalitarianism, denouncing the mythologization of politics and the pagan-idolatrous worldview that he believed underpinned the National Socialist regime. In an essay on the Soviet Union in the 1950s, he condemned the socialists’ Machiavellian abuse of Marx and Hegel’s thinking, revealing himself to be finely attuned to the Zeitgeist and committed to the issues of the day. As such, we shall explore Levinas’s phenomenological and philosophical critique of the concept of totality in Western thought and its political implications. We shall also see how Leibowitz criticized philosophies of history, whether in their Hegelian-Marxist forms or in Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook’s students’ interpretation of his theosophical dialectic, especially after the Six-Day War. We shall see how Leibowitz shared Levinas’s revulsion at the mythologization of politics. We shall also consider both thinkers’ opposition to ideologies that seek to interweave politics with morality, or politics with theology. Moreover, we shall explore their misgivings about such thinkers as Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt and their common cause with such thinkers as Ernst Cassirer. In this context, we shall try to present Leibowitz and Levinas as multifaceted thinkers inhabiting the seam zone between Judaism and universalism; as thinkers who were profoundly religious and no less devout in their commitment to universal values of justice. This chapter forms the thrust of the book, highlighting Leibowitz and Levinas’s fierce spiritual and intellectual opposition to political and ideological totalitarianism on the one hand and unbridled religious fundamentalism on the other. This book therefore includes a normative element inasmuch as we shall present Leibowitz and Levinas as paradigmatic models of modern and enlightened religiosity, remaining loyal to such modern political values as liberalism and universal human rights.

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Finally, Chapter IV deals with the question of Zionism. Levinas seems to have seen Jewish nationalism as a kind of universal experiment related to the Jewish people’s cosmic destiny: tikkun olam—repairing the world. We shall explore the differences on this point between him and Leibowitz, who as a young man prayed for a Zionist state that would revolutionize the world of halakha but abandoned this position in the 1950s. We shall also consider the religious, Jewish, and universal implications of the Holocaust of European Jewry in the writings of both men. The appendix addresses Leibowitz and Levinas’s thoughts on Kabbalah and Hasidism, as well as their surprisingly positive attitudes to two particular books in the Jewish bookcase. In Levinas’s case, we shall point to some affinities between his philosophy and historiosophical aspects of Rabbi Isaac Luria’s Kabbalistic thought, and we shall explore his particular approach to Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin’s Nefesh Hachaim (“Living Soul”). In Leibowitz’s case, we shall unpack the theological rationale that led him to comprehensively abjure mysticism and the reasons that led him nevertheless to embrace the Mesillat Yesharim (“Path of the Just”) of the eighteenth-century kabbalist Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, who was suspected of strong Sabbatean sympathies. This book, which was first published in Hebrew, mainly compares Levinas’s earlier writings to Leibowitz’s philosophy, based on the assumption that Israeli readers are likely to be better acquainted with Leibowitz’s works, which are accessible to them in their original language, whereas some of Levinas’s philosophical works have yet to be translated into Hebrew. This book specifically considers several of Levinas’s political essays from the 1950s about the Cold War, which shed light on the Nietzschean affinities between abstract metaphysics and concrete politics in Levinasian thought; between his philosophical diagnosis of the metaphysical totality that he believed had characterized Western metaphysics throughout the ages and twentieth-century political totalitarianism. Our philosophical voyage into Leibowitzian and Levinasian ideas will reveal some surprising points of confluence between them. It will also propose fresh observations about some of the major problems facing modern Jews who possess a sense of history and culture, such as questions of faith and the connection between the State of Israel and the Holocaust, between Israel and world Jewry, between religion and morality, between tradition and progress, between continuity and change, and between Judaism and universalism.

1 A Portrait of the Philosopher as a Young Man Yeshayahu Leibowitz was one of the most prominent public figures in Israel from the moment he arrived in 1935 until his death in 1994, aged ninety-one. Leibowitz was a public intellectual, intimately engaged in all the most pressing issues of the day—a Renaissance man of science and spirit, eternally familiar with the foreign. Leibowitz gained a public reputation mainly because of his unorthodox and controversial opinions about politics, ethics, and faith. In some of his political prophecies, specifically about the disputed territories, Leibowitz was generations ahead of the Israeli public and leadership. On other questions, such as religion and state, Leibowitz changed his mind from one extreme to another over the course of fifty years. Some of his political predictions, such as that Israel’s acquisition of nuclear capabilities would spark a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, or his fears in the 1950s of an American attack on Israel’s nuclear facilities, did not come true. Leibowitz did not believe that the Arabs would reconcile themselves to the existence of a non-Muslim state in the heart of the Arab world, and his call for Israel to withdraw from the territories was not based in a naïve faith in Israel’s ability to integrate into the region but a realistic appraisal of the demographic and political reality and deep concern for the morality and spiritual wellbeing of Israeli society. He was a whistleblower-prophet and a man of extremes, who had the courage to use controversial rhetoric to shake people out of their complacency and alert the Jewish conscience to the cost of oppressing another nation. Some smeared Leibowitz as a “Torah-observant heretic” for supporting the Jewish ritual observance while disputing Orthodox Judaism’s articles of faith, such as the belief in the resurrection of the dead and God’s active involvement in history. In this respect, some understood Leibowitz’s brand of Judaism

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as “Orthopraxis,” rather than Orthodoxy in the conventional sense. I am not sure that this is the case; this is a line of criticism that might have helped his ideological foes contend with his daring and innovative theology. Leibowitz describes a fascinating exchange on the matter with Gershom Scholem: In one of our conversations, Gershom Scholem told me, “You believe in the Torah and you do not believe in God.” I replied, “You do not believe in the Torah and you do not believe in God, but in something wondrous latent in the People of Israel—and I possess none of this faith.”1

Leibowitz was in a majority of one. A prophet of rebuke characterized by a deep religiosity that emphasized a Maimonidean negative theology, pinning its hopes on a solidly empiricist conception of Judaism as a heteronomous life of “accepting the yoke of heaven” and the commandments on the one hand, and a fierce commitment to universal values of justice on the other hand. Leibowitz used to fume against those who saw him as a humanist, because he held a radical and somewhat grotesque conception of humanism, whereby the humanist was fated to be an eternal stranger in the world—cosmopolitan, anarchistic, pacifistic, and even atheistic. In practice, Leibowitz’s positions reflected the existential mindset that Levinas called “the humanism of the other.” Leibowitz wished to completely divorce religion from morality but used to pepper his political and moral exhortations with quotations from the Jewish scriptures, specifically the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud. Yeshayahu Leibowitz was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1903 to observant Zionist parents. In 1919 he moved to Berlin, following the political unrest in Russia, and studied chemistry and philosophy at the University of Berlin. In 1924 he was awarded a doctorate in philosophy; in 1934 he completed a second doctorate, this time in medicine, at the University of Basel. In 1935 he immigrated to Palestine out of clear Zionist motives. The young Leibowitz naively believed that religious Zionism would instigate a halakhic revolution, rising to the great challenge of creating a political entity governed by the laws of the Torah. He served as the editor of the Encyclopedia Hebraica and sat on the faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he continued teaching even after his retirement in 1970. Leibowitz died in Jerusalem in 1994. Levinas was born in Lithuania in 1906 and experienced the turmoil and upheaval of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and, prior to that, the outbreak of the 1

Yeshayahu Leibowitz, I Wanted to Ask You, Professor Leibowitz: Letters to and from Yeshayahu Leibowitz (Tel Aviv: Keter, 1999), 483 [Hebrew].

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First World War. Like the Leibowitz family, the Levinas family was also uprooted during the First World War. Following the occupation of Kovno (Kaunas) by German forces in 1915, the family relocated to Kharkov, Ukraine, where Levinas studied at the local Russian gymnasium. Russian culture, particularly its intellectual and literary giants, constituted one of the four primary, important prisms through which Levinas sought to understand the vicissitudes of modernity and the West’s attitudes toward the Other. Levinas regarded the great Russian novelists as existential philosophers who employed a distinctly epic methodology. He admired the majesty of their prose and the metaphysical turmoil of their attempts to unveil the foundations of human existence and the meaning of life. To some extent, it was the young Levinas’s rencontre littéraire with the Russian intellectuals of the nineteenth century that first enticed him to grapple with metaphysics as a lifelong vocation. Levinas was famously enamored with the written word and detected a flickering spark of sanctity even in the literature of the secular world.2 Judaism was another decisive cultural lens for Levinas. He could read Hebrew from his childhood, a fact that helped him to play the pivotal role in rehabilitating the Jewish education system in France after the Holocaust. The Hebrew Bible and the Talmud also came to underpin his philosophy in some profound ways. Indeed, when his family returned to Kovno in 1920, as the political turmoil somewhat subsided, Levinas resumed his studies at the Hebrew gymnasium. 2

Levinas expresses it thus in his book Ethics and Infinity: “I think that across all literature the human face speaks—or stammers, or gives itself a countenance, or struggles with its caricature. Despite the end of Europocentrism, disqualified by so many horrors, I believe in the eminence of the human face expressed in Greek Letters and in our own, which owe the Greeks everything. . . . There is a participation in Holy Scripture in the national literatures, in Homer and Plato, in Racine and Victor Hugo, as in Pushkin, Dostoyevsky or Goethe, as of course in Tolstoy or in Agnon. . . . What one calls written in souls is at first written in books. . . . [Thinking] probably begins through traumatisms or gropings to which one does not even know how to give a verbal form. . . . It is from the reading of books—not necessarily philosophical—that these initial shocks become questions and problems, giving one to think. The role of national literatures is here perhaps very important. Not just that one learns words from it, but in it one lives ‘the true life which is absent.’ . . . I think that in the great fear of bookishness, one underestimates the ‘ontological’ reference of the human to the book that one takes for a source of information, or for a ‘tool’ of learning, a textbook, even though it is a modality of our being. Indeed, to read is to keep oneself above the realism—or the politics— of our care for ourselves. . . . The religious sentiment such as I had received it consisted much more in respect for books.” Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 116–117, 21–23.

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Three years later, Levinas decided to pursue his academic studies in Strasbourg, France. During this period, Levinas’s rather utopian conception of the French Republic was characterized by a potent messianic pathos. Levinas exalted France as a country where the Eastern European Jew’s dreams of emancipation were coming true. He saw French republicanism as a worthy successor of universal prophetic morality, in terms of its powerful impulse of universal justice and uncompromising zeal for equality and fraternity. Levinas was naturalized as a French citizen in 1930, describing France as “a nation that one can attach oneself to by way of spirit and heart, as much as by roots.” While the young Leibowitz pinned his hopes on Zionism and Jewish nationalism as the solution to the existential dilemmas of the modern Jew, Levinas favored a pan-European Jewish existence and regarded France as a humanistic promised land, a fertile soil for a synthesis between tradition and change and progress. Levinas studied philosophy in Strasbourg, particularly Bergson and Husserl, and was exhilarated when one of his teachers, Maurice Pradines, presented the Dreyfus Affair as an example of the triumph of the ethical over the political. As his own œuvre evolved, Levinas himself would overtly call for the precedence of the ethical, the “face-to-face,” over the political, which comes into being under the watchful eye of le tiers, a third party. In 1928–1929 Levinas studied a semester in Freiburg, Germany, and attended Martin Heidegger’s seminar. Heidegger was an antisemitic philosopher who hoped to rescue modern thought from the epistemological fixations of Cartesian thought, which placed its faith in a mentally tortured subject trapped in his or her atomistic solipsistic consciousness. Heidegger strove to restore philosophy to fundamental questions about existence and experience, death and the pursuit of autonomy. Levinas came to Freiburg in order to expand and further explore Husserlian phenomenology yet rapidly found himself immersed in Heidegger’s innovative, audacious, and enigmatic ontology. Levinas would later say, “I had gone to Freiburg to study Husserl, and I found Heidegger.” But Levinas’s admiration for Heidegger was short-lived. He attended the famous debate between Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer in Davos in the late 1920s. Like the German-Jewish poet Paul Celan, Levinas was similarly haunted by the grim specter of Heidegger’s Nazism for the rest of his life. Heidegger never expressed remorse for his support for Nazism during the regime’s early years. As a Nazi mouthpiece, he was appointed the rector of the University of Freiburg by the regime. He did not object to the expulsion of the university’s Jewish students and he regularly embellished his lectures with cries of “Heil Hitler!”

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Along with Carl Schmitt, Heidegger was the most high-profile German intellectual who sided with Hitler in the early 1930s. In light of this record, the moral significance of which some still try to downplay, Levinas declared at a conference of French-speaking Jewish intellectuals in 1963, “One can forgive many Germans, but there are some Germans it is difficult to forgive. It is difficult to forgive Heidegger.”3 Levinas favored a normalization of relations with Germany after the Second World War but he personally swore never to set foot on German soil again. When he was awarded a prestigious prize by Heidelberg University in the 1980s, Levinas chose to send his son Michael to accept the prize and deliver some remarks on his behalf. Heidegger’s support for Nazism was a seminal event in modern intellectual history and in Levinas’s private and spiritual life. In some respects, Levinasian philosophy can be read as an ethical-phenomenological revision of the Heideggerian enterprise, especially Heidegger’s solipsistic and immanent mysticism, presenting a fairly gloomy picture of the interpersonal dimension of being, focusing on the lone individual’s journey to autonomy and being, that is, on his own mortality rather than the latent danger of death facing those around him. Levinas continued to regard Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) as one of the monumental works of the modern age and Western philosophy in general but never stopped challenging some of its underlying principles and paradigms, especially concerning interactions with the Other. Leibowitz, in contrast, experienced the formative crisis of his religious and political thought after realizing that the State of Israel was going to be a secular statist project and would bear at most a tenuous link with the great halakhic revolution that he had prayed for. Seeing a vast gulf between religious and secular Israeli Jews, he excoriated the latter as “Sabbath desecrators, treif-eaters, and menstrual-fornicators” and accused them of abandoning the spiritual and in-tellectual treasures of Jewish civilization, particularly the core text uniquely venerated by the People of Israel: the Babylonian Talmud. Another even more consequential high-water mark came when Leibowitz watched helplessly as the need for political independence became a sacred and supreme value for the lion’s share of Orthodox Jewish society in Israel, making him practically the sole religious opponent of this folly. From this point on, especially after the Six-Day War, Leibowitz renounced his halakhic vision for the Zionist enterprise and assumed the role of the gatekeeper of no-nonsense reli3

Idem, Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Aronowitz (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 25.

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gion, criticizing both the secular government and religious Zionism’s fetishization of territorial sovereignty. It was in this context that he said, in his contemporary interpretation of Parashat Vayechi and the corresponding reading from Prophets (the death of King David): Sovereignty is a lofty and precious value for Israel, for it means that the Jewish people will not be subject to other nations. But elevating the power contained within statehood to a supreme value is a very major source of harm.4

Whereas the high-water mark for Levinas was the rise of Nazism and the enthusiastic support of leading thinkers for this totalitarian escapade, for Leibowitz it was his disillusionment with the secular character of the Zionist enterprise, the stunning non-appearance of his longed-for halakhic revolution, and especially the elevation of the state itself into a supreme value, an emotional and anti-spiritual tendency that Leibowitz regarded as fascism incarnate. This element of Leibowitz’s thought was bound up with what he understood as a dichotomy between needs and values. Values, for Leibowitz, are derivative from one’s autonomous decisions and cannot be rationalized; needs, however, pertain not just to individuals but collectives. There are national needs, for example, such as sovereignty and self-defense: Values cannot be identified with the gratification of human needs. Values are things that man does not need: what man needs is not a matter of his decision or discretion, and man has no choice about it, whereas the concept of value cannot be dissociated from the potential for choice and decision. Every human being, qua living being, needs to eat and needs to drink. Eating and drinking, therefore, are not values. But no man needs to be fair. . . . Values are not facts of the objective reality but are determined by man as objectives and goals, which he accepts as his mission. Values are not compelled by reality, which is indifferent in terms of values. Values are things that ought to be found; they are what man strives for, from within his reality, to beyond his reality.5

What is true of individuals and their autonomous lifestyles, Leibowitz maintained, applies similarly at the collective level, for the common good. Leibowitz 4

Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Accepting the Yoke of Heaven: Commentary on the Weekly Torah Portion, trans. Samuel Himelstein (New York: Urim, 2002), 52–53.

5

Idem, Conversations about Pirkei Avot and Maimonides (Schocken: Tel Aviv, 1979), 148–149 [Hebrew].

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illustrated this element of his thinking through the example of the ideological confrontation between the rival sides in the Second World War: During the Second World War, the warring parties supplied different explanations for the purpose and significance of the war. Eleanor Roosevelt declared it to be a war for supreme universal values and the higher good of all humanity: a world in which every child was guaranteed a cup of milk a day, without distinction as to race, nationality, religion, or class. Hitler declared it to be a war for supreme universal values and the higher good of all humanity: the worldwide rule of the Aryan race. Japan’s General Tojo declared it to be a war for supreme universal values and the higher good of all humanity: death in the service of the emperor and his honor. Some 3,000 years before them, Asaph defined the good as “nearness to God” (Psalm 73). D. H. Lawrence considered the sexual gratification of love between a man and a woman as the supreme, if not only, good. What standard can we use to evaluate these different conceptions of the good, to which we can add more and more? Each of these figures had their own standard, the moral principle for which they were prepared to fight, even kill and be killed, which was not even up for debate.6

It is clear, therefore, that Leibowitz championed the individual’s right to define his or her own normative existence independently, in the sense of an autonomous legislator, because he regarded values as scientifically and empirically unverifiable or even rationalizable. According to Uri Ram, Leibowitz arguably anticipated the postmodernist approach in observing that super-stories (metanarratives), as political, cultural, spiritual, or moral prisms for understanding human existence, are inherently subjective.7 In this sense, Leibowitz can be regarded as an existentialist, recognizing the freedom of the modern person to choose his or her own way. His existentialism is succinctly expressed in his basic outlook on human existence: This is the whole problem of man: there is an unavoidable conflict between values. For every day of his life, man faces a dilemma: this is good and this is good, but if I want this thing, I must forfeit something else, and if I want that something else, then I must forfeit this. Harmony does not exist in the human reality. It contravenes the very essence “being

6

Idem, I Wanted to Ask You, Professor Leibowitz, 32.

7

Uri Ram, Israeli Nationalism: Social Conflicts and the Politics of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 2014).

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human.” Because human life exists in contradictions between different things. And then comes the matter of voluntary decisions: which of these two contradictory things do I choose? And this is not a rational choice.8

Nevertheless, both Leibowitz and Levinas can equally be regarded as postexistentialists because they ultimately favored a specific form of religious existence, which they believed would redeem the modern individual from his atomistic and solipsistic existence, circumscribed by private or personal desires. Finally, both figures can also be associated with religious existentialism, taking a “leap of faith” in the spirit of Kierkegaard or Pascal. Levinas used to call Judaism “difficult freedom,” an expression that coheres with Leibowitz’s view, in a manner reminiscent of Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Lonely Man of Faith, that “for a believing Jew, religious experience itself is a crisis. This crisis is not caused by a particular event or situation—the crisis is the essence of faith.”9 Leibowitz utterly repudiated the simplistic conception, held by certain secular philosophers, that voluntary submission to the dogmatic regulations of halakha was a kind of escapism, a flight from the complexity of modern existence. He answered such schools of thought thus: I hope you understand that faith, in the religious sense, is expressed through the asking of questions, the most difficult ones. It is much easier for one who lacks religious faith. There are many difficult questions that he does not even ask. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the Shulchan Arukh begins with the word yitgaber: “one should strengthen oneself.” There are many life principles by which one can live a very good life indeed, without needing to “strengthen oneself ” for anything. But a life of faith demands strength.10

Leibowitz’s conception of heroism, therefore, was bound up with the phrase “strengthen oneself ” at the start of the Shulchan Arukh, whereas for Levinas, the phrase “strengthen oneself ” was intimately linked to Abraham’s hineni—“here I am”—on the eve of the binding of Isaac, the heroism of an attentive subject 8

Chemi Ben-Noon and Joseph Agassi, Limitations of the Mind: Thought in Science and Faith— Conversations with Yeshayahu Leibowitz and Joseph Agassi (Tel Aviv: Keter, 1997), 142 [Hebrew].

9

Ibid., 19.

10 Avraham Sagi, ed., Yeshayahu Leibowitz: His World and Thought (Tel Aviv: Keter, 1995), 351 [Hebrew].

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heeding the call of a fellow human being. All this stands in contrast to the model of the Nietzschean Übermensch—the heroism of a sovereign and spontaneous individual, uninhibited and unchained. Leibowitz’s metamorphosis on matters of religion and politics can be encapsulated as follows. In his younger years, Leibowitz believed that the religious Zionists who participated in the foundation and defense of the new Jewish state were carrying out the mightiest religious revolution in the history of the Jewish people; but later, Leibowitz pivoted to denouncing the whole idea of religious nationalism as a contemptible corruption or oxymoron, a vulgar conflation of the sacred and the profane, which exuded the putrid scent of idolatry and was therefore tantamount to a modern-day abomination.

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2 The 1930s—Early Writings In the early 1930s, the young Leibowitz dedicated his writings to an honest reckoning with the monumental challenge of Orthodox Jewish life in the Diaspora, in the glaring absence of Jewish political sovereignty. He focused on the crises of Jewish identity and halakha from within, at a time when Levinas was grappling with existential dangers facing the Jews from without. The young Leibowitz’s early essays explored internal quandaries about Jewish religious identity, and the main dangers he identified were those of assimilation and spiritual extinction. Levinas, meanwhile, turned his attention to the threat of physical annihilation facing the Jews in the 1930s. In his polemical writings in the 1930s, Leibowitz focused on the main dilemma of the age of the Enlightenment: how to bridge the Jewish and the human, the particular and the universal. On the one hand, Leibowitz rejected the ultra-Orthodox option of cutting Judaism off from the rest of the world and the modern Zeitgeist. On the other hand, he believed that any attempt to combine a Jewish life with “the way of the land” in exile, in the spirit of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, would lead to assimilation and the erosion of Jewish identity. Leibowitz’s proposed solution was inescapably Zionist: the establishment of a solidary Jewish national community in the Land of Israel. In Leibowitz’s vision, this society would lay the foundations for a halakhic revolution, which would answer the urgent need for religious legislation relevant to a modern Jewish collective, encompassing matters of economics, security, and other public affairs. Indeed, the young Leibowitz pinned his hopes on Zionism in the belief that a Jewish national revival would create suitable foundations for a fully modern Jewish existence, capable of bridging the universal and the particular. In later years, having despaired of the State of Israel’s secular character, Leibowitz’s approach to religion became much more narrowly personal. In his religious life, he became a stalwart opponent of both secular atheism and political messianism.

The 1930s —Early Wr it ings

Leibowitz left Europe in 1935, the year of the infamous Nuremberg Race Laws, despite having spent the first three decades of his life in Riga, Berlin, and Basel, where he freely reveled in the treasures European culture and science. This was in total contrast to Levinas, who supported the Zionist enterprise but saw a special virtue in Diaspora life as a form of “being” that fused Athens with Jerusalem, in the sense of “Jerusalem above.” Levinas remained, in this sense, the consummate Jew of the Enlightenment and Emancipation, who refused to turn his back on the option of a pan-European Judaism even after the terrible breaking point of the Holocaust. Until 1933, Levinas devoted most of his intellectual energies to Husserlian and Heideggerian philosophy in France. In 1930, he published his doctoral dissertation, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology. German phenomenology in particular, and Western thought in general—from the preSocratics until the pre-twentieth century—comprised the fourth element in the overall shape of Levinas’s emotional and cultural world. The year 1933, the year of Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, constitutes a milestone in the history of modern times and a watershed moment in the evolution of Emmanuel Levinas’s thought. After it, Levinas came to devote the thrust of his writings for the rest of the 1930s to an attempt to grapple with political paganism and the mythologization of politics in Europe. Levinas understood the rise of Nazism as a seminal metaphysical event. In his pioneering article “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism” (1934), Levinas contributed one of the world’s earliest, most profound and original analyses of the “spiritual” essence of National Socialism as a political ontology. Levinas regarded the emergence of Nazism as a civilizational rift, an attempt to overthrow and annul the accumulated philosophical, spiritual, moral, and political achievements of centuries of Judeo-Christian hegemony. He believed that this hegemony had paved the way to democratic liberalism, universal human rights, and the modern ethos behind the French Revolution of 1789. Levinas was one of the earliest thinkers to realize how utterly distinct the National Socialist endeavor was from analogous political models at the time, such as Soviet communism and Italian and Spanish fascism. Nazism, argued Levinas half a decade prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, was an ontologically revolutionary approach to the human condition in its entirety, and in that respect its all-pervasive ramifications extended well beyond the realm of the political. Hence his quasi-prophetic analysis of the essence of the Third Reich in terms of philosophical anthropology, at a time when the Western powers regarded the German threat as secondary to that of

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Stalinist Russia. Levinas reasoned that National Socialism was not only opposed to particular details of liberal culture but contested the “very humanity of man.” Levinas strove to demonstrate that monotheism anticipated and laid the metaphysical foundations of the Enlightenment. In his view, the Judeo-Christian conception of temporality—a theological notion of redemptive time—revolutionized the human experience of life. In paganism, Levinas argued, one is enslaved to the tragedy of the unmovable, ineffaceable time, which is inescapably arbitrary and does not permit respite or meaning, whereas religious remorse and repentance rectify time. Echoes of this can be found in Maimonides’s Laws of Repentance and Rabbi Chaim Vital’s Gates of Holiness. Religion breathes cosmic significance into the human experience and ends the tyranny of the corroding cogs of time, stripping time of its quasi-anarchical, ever-changing streak, typified by the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus’s simile of the forever-changing river. According to Levinas, one finds in monotheism “an infinite liberty with respect to all attachments” in addition to “the equal dignity of all souls, without regard to a person’s material or social condition.” One finds here already two of the three metaphysical ingredients of the French Revolution, namely liberty and equality. Together with an implied notion of universal fraternity in light of the infinite demand for responsibility, which would become an integral part of his subsequent work in the post-1945 era, Levinas built the case for an internal and continuous linkage between monotheism and modern liberal republicanism. Yet, in order to redeem oneself from enslavement to irreparable time, one must struggle, for this would involve a strenuous effort and difficult choices. Levinas would draw on this notion to define his Jewish philosophy after the Second World War. Political liberalism, he argued, crowned the ethos of reason and thus perpetrated and guaranteed the essence of monotheism, which also implied a rational demystification of the world, expunging it of the pagan myths. Similarly, Leibowitz, an advocate of negative theology in the vein of Kantian epistemology, which disavows metaphysical speculation about the essence of God as a deity existing beyond human cognitive horizons, saw in Judaism a theology of radical opposition to the mythological, the pagan, and the human tendency to sanctify the immanent and material. This underpinned Leibowitz’s spiritual contempt for religious groups that tended to see the climax of religious existence as the consecration of historical sites and ancient graves. Like Levinas, Leibowitz saw religious existence as a form of “being” that liberated man from his subordination to space and the soil. The essence of monotheism, Levinas believes, includes the axiomatic belief in a higher essence beyond the empirical and sensory world. In much the same

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way, he maintains that liberalism tended “to place the human mind on a plane higher than the real,” creating a metaphysical abyss between man and the world. Liberalism replaces “liberation by grace” with autonomy, based on the rationalist ethos of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and Haskalah, with a longing for freedom as its defining leitmotiv. Equality in the eyes of God gives way to equality in the eyes of republican universalism. In a sense, the monotheistic spirit culminates in the monumental and formative Promethean escapade of the modern age: the Enlightenment. The optimism of Voltaire, Derrida, d’Alembert, and other members of the philosophical movement that anticipated representative democracy shares its sweeping rejection of radical materialism with the monotheistic ethos. Abstract reason is the moral and metaphysical successor of the Judeo-Christian notion of infinity, which holds that the ultimate essence is not substance but rather something much more ineffable and indescribable. Levinas, like the Nietzsche in On Genealogy of Morals, points to a Gordian knot between the prophetic morality of the Hebrew Bible and the political upheavals of his era, specifically the formative event of the modern age: the French Revolution. For Nietzsche and Levinas, paganism and tyranny are “communicating vessels,” while democracy, with all its normative baggage and axiomatic faith in universal human rights, is a historical, ideational, and normative derivative of Judeo-Christian heritage. Leibowitz, however, does not consider the values of democracy and liberalism to have their roots in religion, but to be political values derivative from the modern adventure and the Enlightenment revolution. Starting in the 1950s, he vigorously opposed any correlation between religion and politics. Nietzsche and Levinas do not see eye-to-eye about the implications of this Gordian knot. In contrast to Levinas, the Nietzsche of On the Genealogy of Morals is inclined to lament the moral and cultural ramifications of the affinity between the spirit of Judea (manifested in priestly Judaism and early Christianity) and his cultural-moral diagnosis of nineteenth-century Europe. The fact that the spirit of Judea has the upper hand in modern times (in lieu of the pagan legacy of Rome) is a detriment to Western civilization. For Nietzsche, these two contradictory and dichotomous values have been engaged in a “fearful struggle” for metaphysical hegemony over the past two thousand years of Western thought: “good and bad” (aesthetic categories rooted in Ancient Greece) as opposed to “good and evil” (ethical-moral categories originating in priestly Judaism’s “slave morality”). The ultimate symbol of this struggle, emblazoned throughout history, is “Rome against Judea, Judea against

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Rome.” For Nietzsche, there has never been a more bitter battle than this quandary, this puzzle, this paradox. “Which of them has won for the present?” he asks rhetorically. There was no doubt. The French Revolution heralded the profound and decisive triumph of the Jewish spirit. As such, both Levinas and Nietzsche conceive of the history of Western civilization as a titanic, monumental struggle, a battle of ideas between two metanarratives in the history of thought: the spirit of paganism versus the spirit of monotheism. Nietzsche depicts the Levinasian normative dichotomy of Judeo-Christianity contra paganism as Judea contra Rome, in conjunction with the all-pervasive analogies in terms of political regimes. While Nietzsche resorts to this dichotomy in order to deplore both the ascent of ultra-nationalism and democratic liberalism—the “new idol” and the modern state as “the coldest of monsters”—Levinas draws on these dichotomies in offering his analysis of both Hitlerism and liberal democracy in terms of philosophical anthropology. Leibowitz, for his part, sees the intermixture of monotheism and politics as a form of idolatry and any correlation between religion and politics as anathema. He repudiates both renaissance and modern humanism, regarding it as a particularly contemptible form of idolatry: the cult of narcissism. For Leibowitz, the history of the modern age, from the Robespierrean French Revolution to the Stalinist Soviet Union, is a kind of macabre political, moral, and theological allegory for man’s auto-apotheosis. He considers European humanism to be a Promethean adventure by modern man, directly connected to Auschwitz, the Cambodian killing fields, and the Soviet gulags. Nevertheless, Leibowitz regards the religious choice to accept the yoke of religious commandments as a personal matter. This finds expression in his conception of Judaism’s messianic idea. Leibowitz was fond of citing Abarbanel’s interpretation of the biblical verse “early next morning, Abraham saddled his ass” (Genesis 22:3) as meaning that he overcame his materiality (in Hebrew, the words for “ass” and “matter” share the same root: ch-m-r). In other words, it is a metaphor for the triumph of man over human nature. Leibowitz adds that according to Abarbanel, this was the “ass” on which the long-awaited Messiah would ride. He infers from this an alternative interpretation of the messianic idea as the triumph of faith over human nature, as opposed to a tangible political event in Jewish and world history.1

1

Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Five Books of Faith ( Jerusalem: Keter, 1995), 25 [Hebrew].

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Unlike Leibowitz, Levinas does not see the journey to Mount Moriah as the pinnacle of the binding of Isaac; for him, the story reaches its climactic moment when Abraham looks Isaac in the face, heeds the angel’s call, and chooses not to slaughter his son. While Levinas perceives the mythological saga of the exodus from Egypt as a formative metaphysical event, saturated with universal meaning and relevant for the whole of humanity, he regards Nazism as a politically and spiritually reactionary movement, a biologically materialistic Darwinization of politics, which gives a clear ontological preference to the physical and physiological over abstract principles, unlike the Enlightenment and monotheism, which pin their hopes on abstract entities, namely reason and the idea of infinity. Hitlerism, Levinas argues, is a new, daring, terrifying, and revolutionary ontological approach to the general human condition in modern times. The metaphysics underpinning its central features are biological-Darwinist. In the metaphysics of National Socialism, the defining feature of the human condition is neither a transcendental longing for the infinite, nor a persistent and unquenchable metaphysical thirst, nor even life at the Archimedean point of the Cartesian pyramid, which places its faith in the natural right of reason and the truthfulness of God, but a deterministic, dogmatic, and a priori submission to ethnic and racial criteria, which denigrate the Kantian conception of autonomous human will. According to Levinas, in Nazism, as a philosophical anthropology, the cult of the body is the basis of a new perception of man. The biological becomes the defining feature of spiritual and cultural life and is rendered the core of existence, the ultimate determinant of fate. Man’s fate is settled, for better or worse, at the moment of his birth or even earlier, in a stunning juxtaposition with the liberty defining the Enlightenment and monotheism. The primal and primordial echoes of blood and race, the “call of heredity”— this is the essence of existence itself. The essence of man lies not in his boundless liberty but in a kind of a priori, deterministic enslavement. Being truly and sincerely loyal to oneself does not mean rising above circumstantial constraints and contingencies but becoming aware of one’s ineluctable enslavement to one’s body. Above all, Nazism is a call to accept this enslavement. “Chained to his body,” Levinas writes, “man is denied the power to escape from himself ”—to embark on an ontological exodus, breaking out of the limitations of the present.” We can find another expression of Levinas’s worldview in a multifaceted and enigmatic article he wrote on phenomenology in 1935, the year of the Nuremberg Race Laws, which laid the legal foundations for the dehumanization of European Jewry. In De l’évasion (On Escape), Levinas writes of the sense of nausea

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that accompanies the desperate inability to breach the constraints of experience. At a first glance, this appears to be an abstract-philosophical essay, but a deeper look reveals the Gordian knot between the nausea suffered by a man trapped in his condition in a phenomenological-existential sense, and by the persecuted Other trapped in his ethno-political condition. Levinas would later write a brief segment titled “Signature” (published in his collection Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism), a kind of laconic autobiographical inventory in which he outlines the events and ideas that shaped the course of his life. In this brief work, Levinas argues that the direction of his life and thought was set by the Nazi atrocities and the quasi-prophetic “presentiment” that he had experienced from the early 1930s. Levinas speaks of the economic and legal dehumanization that anticipated the open season on European Jewry, including in his Talmudic essay “Toward the Other”: The crime of extermination begins before murders take place . . . oppression and economic uprooting already indicate its beginnings . . . the laws of Nuremberg already contain the seeds of the horrors of the camps and the “final solution” . . . Here you have the ubiquity and omnitemporality of the violence which exterminates: there is no radical difference between peace and war, between war and holocaust. Extermination has already begun during peacetime.2

In his “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” Levinas also grapples with Nietzsche’s fundamental antagonism to the political foundations of the Enlightenment, namely representative democracy, universal human rights, and universal suffrage. Nietzsche feared the implications of democratic popular culture for Hochkultur—high culture—and so rejected it. Nietzsche was not a political thinker in the constructivist sense. He did not strive to articulate a coherent political philosophy, which would have sat ill at ease with the thrust of his thought: engineering the ideational-metaphysical infrastructure for the capable and interested few to rise, break out of the political, historical, cultural, and existential exigencies of the Zeitgeist, and establish themselves as sovereign, autonomous, self-determining individuals. Levinas wisely understands this to be the Achilles’s heel of the Nietzschean dogma, which opened a dark window for the Nazis to twist his anti-nationalist thought and make him their “house philosopher,” with the fervent assistance

2

Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, 27, 192.

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of his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Levinas hint at a direct intrinsic link between Nietzsche’s metaphysical vandalism, his “philosophizing with a hammer,” and the intolerable ease with which his thought was vulgarized in 1930s Germany. In this context, Levinas wrote in his “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism” that ideas, once disseminated, become essentially separated from their Archimedean starting point, whatever unique expression the individuals who devise them intend to give them. The idea comes under common ownership and develops an autonomous life of its own; those who embrace it claim mastery over it. At this point, the corrupted version of the idea creates a community of “masters.” Under Nazism, Levinas reasons, Nietzsche’s radical individualism loses its universal dimension, giving way to the militant idea of collective expansion, war, and conquest. The Nietzschean Wille zur Macht, will to power, is replaced with submission and subjugation to the will of the führer. Thus, in his 1935 article “The Actuality of Maimonides,” Levinas writes of National Socialism, the “arrogant barbarism installed in the heart of Europe,” as a challenge to Judeo-Christian civilization. Paganism has reared its ugly head again, Levinas writes, and is subverting the foundational principles of civilization. Nazism’s barbarism, he believes, attests to its intellectual and moral impotence, its inability to transgress the limits of the world, inasmuch as this political paganism is imprisoned in the world, incapable of transcending it. Similarly to Levinas, Leibowitz also sees Maimonides’s theology as a worthy and sublime religious paradigm, which is both anti-anthropocentric and quintessentially nonmystical: Maimonides made methodological use of philosophy in his faith-based thought. In philosophy, he found the most suitable tool for purifying the faith from superstitions, which are [by definition] beliefs in something other than God. Through philosophy, he proved that superstitions contradict faith. For Maimonides, the meaning of philosophy was faith in God, and God alone.3

In his 1955 essay “Maimonides—The Abrahamic Man,” Leibowitz argues that Maimonidean theology is beyond philosophy, a position consistent with Levinas’s notion of infinity as “beyond essence.” Leibowitz devotes a large part of his political writings to excoriating political paganism at home: the messian-

3

Leibowitz, Five Books of Faith, 69.

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ism of the Gush Emunim settlement movement, which he regards as a territorial Sabbateanism, imprisoned in the constraints of this world, helpless to transcend its bounds and remain loyal to the theosophic conception of a God beyond the world and history. Much as Leibowitz abhors the tendency to see the nation as sacred in the spirit of Korah, in the sense of “all the community are holy,” he recoils from the sanctification of the land. Leibowitz wishes to cleanse the theological Augean stables in order to sever the Gordian knot between the theological and the political, hence his deep emotional identification with the position of Rabbi Meir Simcha of Dvinsk, that only God is holy, and anything else can only be said to be holy in virtue of his commandments.4 This is the quintessence of Leibowitz’s radical transcendentalism, which has clear political implications: any attempt to attach religious value to material reality and to banal, anthropocentric human needs, such as a national flag, sovereignty, and military defense, is tantamount to a desecration of the sacred and sanctification of the profane: Life molded on the halakhic model demarcates a domain of things and deeds that pertain to holiness. Holiness, in the religious sense of the word as against its figurative secular meanings, is nothing but halakhic observance; the specific intentional acts dedicated to the service of God. Any other deed—whether regarded as good or bad, whether material or spiritual—that a man may perform in his own interest or for the satisfaction of a human need is profane. Sacred and profane are fundamental religious categories. . . . Conversely, the idea of holiness as an immanent property of certain things—persons, locations, objects, institutions, objects, or events—is a magical-mystical concept which smacks of idolatry.5

According to Leibowitz, the Land of Israel is not intrinsically holy because such a notion hints at a paganistic a priori sanctification of land. The Land of Israel is holy only in virtue of the commandments that can only be performed on its soil, such as shemitah, the agricultural sabbatical year. In another essay from 1935, “To Fraternize without Conversion,” Levinas called for a common theological front against Nazism. He argued that the Judeo-Christian concept of historical-theological sovereignty was being eroded by the combined Hitlerian threat. In a fascinating article from 1938, “The Spiritual

4

Meir Simcha of Dvinsk, Meshekh Chokhma (Exodus 32:19).

5

Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, trans. Eliezer Goldman et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 24.

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Essence of Anti-Semitism,” Levinas writes of a Judeo-Christian “shared vocation,” since both Judaism and the church are at once completely in the world and yet strangers in the world. The same underlying message of interfaith solidarity appears on the eve of the Second World War, in Levinas’s obituary for Pius XI in 1939, in which he describes the Jewish hope of finding shelter under the cross from the threat of the swastika. Levinas also rearticulates his somewhat mystical interpretation of the quandary of National Socialism. He regards the ascent of Nazism as first and foremost a metaphysical occurrence and a grave spiritual challenge, and thus reasons that in spite of all the analysis of the political and socioeconomic causes of the rise of the Third Reich, in light of which the persecution of the Jews is considered but a side event in the broader upheavals of the twentieth century, the Jews possess the obscure sentiment that Hitlerism is a call to realize the Jewish fate and destiny: to confront Nazism as a morally and metaphysically bankrupt mode of paganism with a steadfast adherence to the transcendent. Leibowitz could not join Levinas’s call for a common theological front with Christianity, believing that “the whole essence of Christianity and the European civilization that emerged out of Christianity is the negation of the Torah and its commandments, i.e. the negation of Judaism.”6 Leibowitz regards Christianity as a religion of charity and Judaism as a religion of exigency. In Christianity, he reasons, God sacrifices himself for mankind (on the cross), while in Judaism, man is called upon to steel himself, make sacrifices, and dedicate himself to worshiping the divine. For Leibowitz, the word emunah, “faith,” is derived from the word ne’eman, “faithful,” that is, faithful to the path of Torah observance; Christianity, however, had emerged to abolish the heart of Judaism, namely the view that religious life finds its most profound expression in fixed daily rituals, in the sense of Pirkei Avot 1:17: “Study is not the most important thing, but actions.” Levinas utterly repudiates the historian Arnold Toynbee’s explanation for the miracle of Jewish survival on the stage of history, namely that the Jews are a “fossil relic.” Nor does he fully accept Sartre’s view that antisemitism is primarily a manifestation of inauthenticity in empty people struggling to fill the vacuum of their existence with positive-operative content and therefore prizing a negative identity based on the negation of the Other. This brilliant analysis encapsulates only half of the truth, Levinas argues. He fills in the missing half of Judaism’s substantive metaphysics in an important essay on Sartre.

6

Idem, I Wanted to Ask You, Professor Leibowitz, 205.

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The Jerusalem saga goes beyond a sense of existential siege and possesses an autonomous-imperative aspect of its own, he adds. If Hegel saw the survival of the Jews throughout history as an inscrutable enigma, then according to Levinas the Jew, Jewish survival is the most sweeping refutation of Hegelian history. Sartre himself reached a similar conclusion in his later life, as is clear from his collection of conversations with Benny Lévy, Hope, Now. In his Talmudic reading Judaism and Revolution, Levinas writes: “German Jews in 1933, foreigners to the course of history and to the world, Jews, in other words, point to that which is most fragile and most persecuted in the world.”7 Levinas totally rejects the theological temptation of theodicy (the “vindication” of God’s existence in spite of the existence of radical evil). Nevertheless, he does not see the dark night of Auschwitz as a crisis of faith but as a resounding echo of the failure of modern Promethean man to honor his obligations and responsibility toward the Other, to oppress him in the name of murderous secular-atheistic doctrines in the spirit of National Socialism. This is a case of the dehumanization of political structures and moral existence, which both derive from the radical individualism of the modern age. This reality is characterized by the metaphysical symptoms of the Nietzschean “death of God” and the formative theological experience of the modern age, what the Jewish tradition calls the “concealed face of God”: The diabolical inscribes itself within the possibilities of the man called to vigilance. That is the only way it is possible. It is man who closes himself to God, if only when he blinks his eyes, thus interrupting with moments of black the continuous light of his vigilant gaze.8

In the same breath, Levinas alludes to the dangers of philological and epistemological nihilism, the postmodernist bankruptcy of the Kafkaesque archcharlatanism of language and perhaps even the “death of the subject”: That is what sorcery is: the modern world; nothing is identical to itself; no one is identical to himself; nothing gets said for no word has its own meaning; all speech is a magical whisper; no one listens to what you say; everyone suspects behind your words a not-said, a conditioning, an ideology.9 7

Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, 113.

8

Ibid., 148.

9

Ibid., 152.

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In the same Talmudic reading, “Judaism and Revolution,” Levinas emphasizes his Archimedean starting point concerning the rights of the Other and the Same’s infinite responsibility toward him. Contrary to the norm among social contract theorists and Hobbesian realists, who speak of a “war of all against all,” Levinas wishes to begin from a somewhat paradoxical starting point, whereby the social contract pertains more to limiting the Same’s responsibility toward the Other than guaranteeing individual rights and privileges, such that politics must always be subject to, and under the guidance of, ethics: It is extremely important to know if society in the current sense of the term is the result of a limitation of the principle that men are predators of one another, or if to the contrary it results from the limitation of the principle that men are for one another. Does the social, with its institutions, universal forms and laws, result from limiting the consequences of the war between men, or from limiting the infinity which opens in the ethical relationship of man to man?10

Levinas insists, therefore, that it is impossible to reduce the personal to the statist and universal dimensions of the state, setting his sights on a loftier, more transcendent vision. In the same Talmudic reading, Levinas reasons that man will not find his highest, ultimate, essential-spiritual fulfillment in the political framework of the modern state. He opposes giving precedence to the state as a spiritual substance in its own right, in a manner consistent with Leibowitz’s dichotomy between needs and values, a distinction that holds the valorization of the state to be inherently fascistic. Levinas expresses it thus in his Talmudic reading “Judaism and Revolution”: Everything begins with the right of the other man and with my infinite obligation toward him. . . . Society according to man’s strength is merely the limitation of this right and this obligation toward him. This contract does not put an end to the violence of the other. It does not abolish an order—or disorder—in which man is a wolf toward man. In the wolves’ forest, no law can be introduced. But it is possible, when the other man is in principle infinite for me, to limit the extent of my duties to a degree, but only to a degree. The contract is more concerned with limiting my duties than with defending my rights.11

10 Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 80. 11 Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, 100.

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Unlike Levinas, Leibowitz holds a solidly Hobbesian conception of human society. He tends to highlight the political realism of Pirkei Avot 3:2 and Rabbi Hanina’s maxim: “pray for the welfare of the government, for were it not for the fear it inspires, every man would swallow his neighbor alive.” He reads this as a precursor of Thomas Hobbes’s political philosophy, writing that Rabbi Hanina, the deputy high priest, understood the necessity of coercive power as rooted in the very nature of the human condition. Rabbi Hanina’s perspective was astonishingly similar to that of the pioneering political theorist who lived some 1,600 years after him: Thomas Hobbes.

3 The Case against Political Messianism and the Philosophy of History Neither Leibowitz nor Levinas denied the need for political structures, nor did they recoil from armed struggle when they deemed it legitimate and unavoidable. Levinas served as an officer in the French Armed Forces and fell into Wehrmacht captivity, a fact that saved his life by sparing him deportation to the concentration camps. Leibowitz served in the Haganah and the IDF and never stopped emphasizing that the state was not a value but an essential human necessity in order to prevent a collapse into the state of nature that Hobbes called a “war of all against all,” a state of political Darwinism and social anarchy. At the same time, both men were appalled by the political messianism of their age and devoted their energies to an uncompromising struggle against extreme nationalism and tyranny. As a pan-European Jew, Levinas explored both right-wing and left-wing European totalitarianism in his books and essays, while Leibowitz grappled with what he deemed the unholy alliance between nationalism and religiosity. He considered the term “national-religious” (or “religious nationalist”) an abomination and was horrified by the application of the religious category of holiness to values and matters of politics and state. For Levinas, the Other faces me and obliges me as a heteronomous imperative, and I must immediately accede, just as the heroes and founding fathers of the Hebrew nation answered and followed the ultimate, indecipherable, infinite voice of the Other when they said hineni: “Here I am!” One’s acceptance of the face of the Other appears on one’s own face. The face is the scene of the ultimate ethical event. The epiphany that appears on one’s face “reveals” infinity. The face in which the absolute Other presents himself does not negate the Same. This is the “miracle of exteriority,” redeeming the

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individual from an absolutely solipsistic mode of being, which pins its hopes on man as a closed Cartesian creature who perceives himself a purely spiritual being. Levinas’s rejection of solipsism is encapsulated in the statement, in his Nine Talmudic Readings, that evil is the absence of a connection; when man closes in on himself, till he cannot even see himself. In contrast, for Leibowitz, individual redemption is not bound up in the interpersonal dimension of existence, but only in the autonomous decision to accept the yoke of Torah observance. This does not offer permanent redemption but difficult freedom, a quasi-Sisyphean, quasi-heroic daily grind to observe the full gamut of commandments. This liberty is alluded to in the rabbinic dictum “there is no free man but one that occupies himself with the study of the Torah” (Pirkei Avot 2:6). For Leibowitz, the essence of faith is a halakhic existence, not rhetorical gestures at various kinds of spirituality. The halakhic existence is a case of difficult freedom because the essence of Judaism, in Leibowitz’s view, can be distilled in the Hebrew word yitgaber, “strengthen oneself.”1 In other words, Judaism demands that man strengthen himself and transcend his nature, while idolatry makes no such demand, and on the contrary, is perfectly consistent with the instinct to surrender to one’s urges and impulses: “Faith is expressed in the acts which man does due to his awareness of his obligation to do them, and not because of an internal urge—even when his intention is to worship God, but derives satisfaction for himself through this worship.”2 For Leibowitz, the worship of the golden calf requires no self-overcoming, whereas the worship of God does. This is the Leibowitzian “miracle of exteriority,” which maintains that there is no knowing the essence of the divine, the absolute Other, just as Levinas reasons that there is no knowing the ultimate and profound essence of the human Other, the concrete Other, and that the only way to heed and devote oneself to the Other is through concrete actions in this world as it is (the commandments for Leibowitz, ethical behavior for Levinas), with all its imperfections. Existence in relation to the Other liberates one from enslavement to the natural-personal caprices, or what Levinas called “ego-logy.” For Levinas, the heteronomous call demanded by and reflected in the face of the Other is non-violence, which anticipates and underpins the liberty of the 1

Leibowitz also discussed the psychological significance of the word yitgaber at the start of the Shulchan Arukh: he drew on Rabbi Moses Isserles’s interpretation of this term and argued that one should not be deterred on account of those who mock one for worshiping God.

2

Leibowitz, Accepting the Yoke of Heaven, 105.

The Case against Political Messiani sm and the Phi losophy of Hi stor y

self. It maintains the plurality of the Same and the Other and heralds peace. To approach the Other is to put into question one’s spontaneity as a living being, to limit the age-old impetuosity of the Western subject, to deduce the Other’s spiritual-epistemological and political essence at once, to delineate or terminate the unrestrained spiritual-ethical hunger of the modern man, governed by a Promethean lust to achieve unfettered control over the totality of beings and things. In this sense, Levinas can be seen as a kind of “Montesquieu of ethics,” wishing to apply spiritual-ethical checks and balances to Western man and traditional nature of his epistemology, a nature that reached its zenith with Hegel and Nietzsche, whose thought has been interpreted as implying that historical progress, or alternatively the sovereign individual, is the omnipotent driving power for whose sake everything is permitted, even murder. The face, Levinas argued, is a concrete manifestation of the eternal heteronomous injunction “thou shalt not kill”: Access to the face is straightaway ethical. You turn yourself toward the Other as toward an object when you see a nose, eyes, a forehead, a chin. . . . The best way of encountering the Other is not even to notice the color of his eyes. When one observes the color of the eyes one is not in social relationship with the other. The relation with the face can surely be dominated by perception, but what is specifically the face is what cannot be reduced to that. . . . The skin of the face is that which stays most naked, most destitute. . . . There is an essential poverty in the face; the proof of this is that one tries to mask this poverty by putting on poses, by taking on a countenance. The face is exposed, menaced, as if inviting us to an act of violence. At the same time, the face is what forbids us to kill. . . . The face is what one cannot kill, or at least it is that whose meaning consists in saying: “thou shalt not kill.”3

The imperative of the face, for Levinas, is heteronomous and is externally imposed, a kind of inversion of Kant’s moral philosophy, which is based on the autonomy of the individual. In his book Ethics and Infinity, Levinas explicitly framed his ethics as the opposite of Kant’s.4 Kant saw Judaism as a religion of laws rather than reason; Leibowitz indirectly responded to him in holding that Judaism’s power is, paradoxically, inherent in its heteronomous essence. 3

Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 85–87.

4

For a rigorous and comparative study of Kantian and Levinasian ethics, see Catherine Chalier, What Ought I Do?: Morality in Kant and Levinas (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).

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Levinas and Leibowitz both reject the solipsistic mysticism implied in après moi, le déluge. Similarly, they are vigorously opposed to philosophies of history in all their forms, from transcendental philosophies that locate real life in an ecstatic “other” place to which man flees in order to escape the daily “here and now” of human existence, which is to be attained in moments of gloriously mystical transcendence, and all the way to immanent philosophies in which man conquers “being” while other parties to his conflicts dissolve into the recesses of history. Levinas proposes a way of approaching the Other that does not culminate in divine or human totality, nor in the totalization of history, but in the idea of infinity. This is an implied criticism of the ecstatic mysticism of both Hasidism and Hegel’s philosophy of history. As for Hasidism, Levinas warns against the danger of entering the Temple, the Holy of Holies of contact with the divine, in the ecstatic condition and temporary blindness of untempered spiritual transcendence. This thinking is implied in Levinas’s book Difficult Freedom and in his Talmudic reading “The Youth of Israel.” Rabbi Daniel Epstein wisely elaborates on this motif in Levinas’s thought in his afterword in the Hebrew edition of Levinas’s Nine Talmudic Readings: Levinas frequently returns to this danger of “spiritual drunkenness,” which he detected not just within the Jewish people, but in what he calls “mysticism,” “enthusiasm,” “connection, “immediate communion with being.” At the start of his book Difficult Freedom, under the heading “Beyond Pathos,” appears a quote from Rashi on Leviticus 10:2: “Let them not enter the Sanctuary drunk.” Lithuanian “rationalism,” which continues the rationalist tradition of the Jewish sages known as Pharisees, is expressed not just in the love of logical inquiry but in emotional restraint and in the avoidance of any attempt to storm being, difference, or the Other out of a wish to “connect” with it. In this drunkenness, Levinas discerns hints of an attempt to conquer the Other instead of trying, with patience and humility, the meaning of one’s existence.5

In his breathtaking interpretation of the myth of the Tower of Babel, Leibowitz offers a terrifying depiction of the annihilatory spirit of political totalitarianism. The biblical text, he reasons, seems to intuitively grasp the potential for atrocities when political fanatics use murderous means to try to enforce social homogeneity:

5

Daniel Epstein, “Afterword,” in Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Daniel Epstein ( Jerusalem: Schocken, 2001) [Hebrew].

The Case against Political Messiani sm and the Phi losophy of Hi stor y

It appears to me that the root of the error, or sin, of the generation of the separation was not the building of a city and tower, but the aim to use these artificial means to ensure a situation of “one language and one speech”—of centralization, which, in modern parlance, would be known as totalitarianism. . . . All of humanity a single bloc, without differentiation, and, as a result, without conflicts. But one who truly understands will know that there is nothing which is more threatening than this artificial conformism. . . . One cannot imagine greater tyranny than that, one cannot imagine a greater mental and moral sterility than that.6

Just as Levinas invokes the Talmud’s aggadic fables to grapple with the challenges of modernity, Leibowitz weaves sociocultural, historical, and political readings into his readings of the weekly Torah portion. Leibowitz support negative liberty, in the spirit of Isaiah Berlin, as a guiding principle of the proper political order, and in this sense he concurs with liberal thought. He considers the urge to artificially impose ideological, spiritual, and intellectual unity as the poisonous political root of totalitarianism on the Left and Right: The notion of the state as a framework for unity is a clearly fascist idea: ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer—the essence of totalitarianism. The democratic state is the scene of power struggles between people who believe in rival values and wish to pursue their values. The advantage of the democratic state is that it allows people to fight for these rival values, and this is what the totalitarian state does not permit. . . . We, who are not fascists, ask only one thing of the state: that it not interfere in people’s pursuit of what is, for them, values. In this respect, the strength of a system is expressed in the weakness of its governing institutions: the less capable the government to impose its will on its subjects, the better.7

Levinas dedicated several essays in the 1950s to the latent danger of leftwing totalitarianism. In his 1956 article “The Spirit of Geneva,” Levinas describes what he identified as the murderous thrust of Soviet communism. Here, Levinas offers a different account of “the third,” le tiers, from his other works: that is, not as the party who limits my infinite responsibility to the Other when he faces me and demands my attention, but as the faceless power of weapons of mass destruction, which cast a long shadow on the fate of humanity in the age

6

Leibowitz, Accepting the Yoke of Heaven, 17–18.

7

Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Faith, History, and Values ( Jerusalem: Akdamon, 1982), 201 [Hebrew].

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of the Cold War. He describes the geopolitics of the nuclear era as characterized by transatlantic dependence at a time when the fate of mankind hangs in the balance as a consequence of the apocalyptic weaponry in the hands of great powers, hence his recurrent use of the neologism “cosmopolitics” to refer to the politics of atomic weapons, which holds the whole of humanity hostage to the caprice and hubris of superpower leaders. In an essay from 1960, Principes et Visages (“Principles and Faces”), one finds an early version of the Levinasian critique of Hegelianism and the Marxism of Soviet totalitarianism: an excoriation of how these metaphysical tautologies were harnessed, warped, and twisted to legitimize a policy of mass murder at home and oppressive imperialism abroad. Along with Albert Camus and Hannah Arendt, Levinas was one of the most avant-garde critics of Stalin’s bloodthirsty regime, at a time when the majority of the Parisian intelligentsia was still enamored with the Soviet experiment against American hegemony in the West. Such was the case with Sartre, for example, who only disavowed Soviet Machiavellianism in 1956 following the invasion of Hungary. Against these philo-tyrannical intellectuals who whitewashed evil and lent their philosophical approval and aura to political oppression and brutality, Levinas protests that “the wit of ‘cultivated minds,’ the paradoxes of intellectuals searching for new ideas”—this was the cause of violence.8 And thus, in his essay Principes et Visages, one finds the foundations of the critique that would find more eloquent and rigorous expression in Levinas’s thinking in his book Totality and Infinity. Three years after Stalin’s death, Levinas articulated a forceful critique of the Soviet regime in Principes et Visages. He addressed the Secretary-General of the Communist Party not as “Khrushchev” but only by his initial, namely as “Mr. K.” This might have been an ironic allusion to Franz Kafka’s seminal The Trial, a novel that many regard as having prophesied the Moscow show trials and the Soviet regime’s purges. In this essay, Levinas attacks Khrushchev’s contention that the absence of alternative political parties in the Soviet Union was justified given the non-existence of meaningful social cleavages. Afterwards, Levinas pivots to addressing Khrushchev’s rationale that his subjects were “free” because they were led (perhaps against their volition) by reason and the spirit of historical progress. This mode of argumentation, Levinas says, is symptomatic of dominant themes in the whole of Western thought, reaching their modern zenith with Hegel and Marx. He describes the deindividuating streak inherent

8

Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, 186.

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in the foolish Soviet attempt to cleave to Left Hegelianism. From the perspective of the proponents of this system, Levinas argues, a state without contradictions or parties accomplishes the humanity of man. This, the Left Hegelians believe, is reason incarnate: just the emergence of such a state, even before its historicalpolitical mission is realized. Reason is slowly revealed in the historical process of dialectical materialism in the Soviet Union; the individual finds his supreme satisfaction in the state. Man’s other needs and desires are his subjective illusions, no more, argue regime leaders and cheerleaders, who set their sights on the universal alone and dismiss with derision and disgust those who place their faith in the agony of their human and political conscience, as regards the enemies of the revolution, both real and imagined. To them, Levinas replied: I do not think that revolutionary action is to be recognized by the massiveness of victorious street demonstrations. The fascists knew more successful ones. Revolutionary action is first of all the action of the isolated man who plans revolution not only in danger but also in the agony of his conscience—in the double clandestinity of the catacombs and of conscience. In the agony of conscience that risks making revolution impossible: for it is not only a question of seizing the evil-doer but also of not making the innocent suffer.9

For Mr. K. and his cabal, Levinas argues in The Spirit of Geneva, liberty, equality, and fraternity were a matter of abstract moralism. Levinas mounts a pioneering and searing challenge to the defining anti-liberalism of the Soviet experience, whereby liberty goes with the “deindividuation of the individual,” with the will to the universal that, for man, means disappearing into this coherent discourse, like an artist who would enter into his canvas fully alive and live, as a mute, amid the shades and shapes he traces there to envelop him. If this were so, Levinas asks rhetorically, then why should we fear a one-party system in the style of the Soviet Union? For unlike the racist, particularist, and chauvinistic agenda inherent in fascism and right-wing totalitarianism, the form of totalitarianism that purports to liberate the proletariat is sufficiently broad and tolerant to accommodate the whole of humanity. Given these universalistic guidelines, why should anyone resist Mr. K.’s proposed political structures and the Soviet mode of communism as the pure and most refined accomplishment of universality and global fraternity?

9

Ibid., 110.

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Nevertheless, Levinas warns, those led astray by the political Fata Morgana of left-wing totalitarianism given its supposed moral superiority in virtue of its universal orientation need a fundamental rethink. For in contrast to the quasi-Hegelian rationale of the Soviet praxis, in which reason, universalism, and liberty are united in the framework of the state, Levinas asks provocatively: “Is there no universality other than that of the state, no liberty other than objective?” Levinas describes his critique as “difficult reflections,” which “go further than one would think. . . . Well beyond Marx and Hegel.” Thus, Levinas’s rejection of Soviet Marxism is closely intertwined with his critique of Hegelian philosophy of history. Both are depicted here as impersonal abstractions, in light of which (or in darkness of which) the individual is effaced, as he is rendered in the service of the all-encompassing dialectical vision in which the individual is at most an intermediary agent or tool in the hands of a secularizing theology of progress. Progress, as the secularization of the religious concept of redemption, marginalizes the individual into a subsidiary position in which he is at most a tool in the hands of the “guile of history.” Hence Levinas’s position that individuality cannot find satisfaction in the state and in the political development of humanity. The politics of conceptual dialectics is a politics that turns its back upon the human face, its focal point being an excessive intellectualism that fails to rise to the humanistic standpoint transcending beyond the reductivist categorization of the collective-national-politicalcultural perspective. Leibowitz also utterly repudiates Hegelianism and philosophies of history, seeing them as dangerous forms of political messianism and even as desecrations of God’s name, particularly in the case of Jewish political messianism in the vein of Gush Emunim. Leibowitz expresses his resolute rejection of all philosophies of history as follows: Who am I to judge what history should be, or empowered me to decide what it shall be? I do not at all understand the contention that history . . . has a certain trajectory, for the idea of a trajectory is necessarily geared toward the future—which is unknown. That which is in mere potential form I can only discuss after it transforms itself from potentiality to actuality. In general, the term “course of history” is meaningless ex ante and only gains meaning in hindsight (who was it who said, “History is just one damn thing after another?”). Historical determinism is not metaphysics, but mythology.10 10 Leibowitz, I Wanted To Ask You, Professor Leibowitz, 357.

The Case against Political Messiani sm and the Phi losophy of Hi stor y

In Leibowitz’s view, history is entirely contingent: I am inclined to agree with the thinkers who reason that there are no laws of history. Human history is the complete opposite of nature, in which the present necessarily follows the past, and the future follows necessarily from the present. I concur with the thinkers for whom Herbert Fischer spoke in saying: “History is a play of the contingent and the unforeseen.”11

Leibowitz does not see God as an active participant in history, and the only rule that world history obeys is that the world keeps turning. In the context of religion, he reasons that history is irrelevant to the question of acknowledging God and observing his laws: The God one experiences through nature and history is a miserable god indeed. . . . Religious faith is an expression of man’s decision and determination to cleave to God and worship a God who did not reveal himself through nature or history, but rather through religion in the Torah.12 The worship of God through the mitzvot is not a remembrance of ancient times. . . . The worship of God is not folklore, not even in the most profound sense. It is not a remembrance of that which was, of what happened to the Jewish people and of what happened to our forefathers. The worship of God means fulfilling the commands which were given to us.13

Indeed, for Leibowitz, as with Levinas, the essence of Judaism is to be found in its heteronomous character. Additionally, further to his dismissal of any correlation or affinity between the historical and the theological, Leibowitz utterly rejects any appeal to ostensibly extra-historical events, such as “miracles,” as a threshold criterion for the acceptance of faith: It is of tremendous importance for comprehending the essence of faith to grasp the fact that miracles and supernatural factors are of no significance religiously, and are, at the least, ineffective as foundations for faith. The generation which saw the miracles and wonders [the splitting of the Red Sea] did not believe [hence the episode with the Golden Calf]. . . . As opposed to this, we know from history that many generations after this failure, there were many generations in which the masses, not only

11 Yeshayahu Leibowitz, The Limits of Reason ( Jerusalem: Keter, 1997), 107 [Hebrew]. 12 Idem, I Wanted to Ask You, Professor Leibowitz, 103. 13 Idem, Accepting the Yoke, 109.

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unique individuals, clung to God and His Torah to the extent of laying down their lives for it [such as during the Crusades]. . . . Thus we see that there is no connection between the natural reality in which a person lives and his decision to accept upon himself the Yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven and the Yoke of Torah and the Mitzvot. This decision can only come from the person himself, and if it does not come from him, if he proves that he is a member of a stiff-necked nation, even Divine intervention cannot bring him to accept the Yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven.14

For Levinas, the decisive precedence of the ethical sphere is the a priori starting point, in the sense of an inviolable internal-heteronomous imperative, in contrast to political and metaphysical abstractions such as spirit (Geist), status, and progress. This daring, subversive, and revolutionary position finds expression inter alia in his book Totality and Infinity, where he argues that the face that presents itself during war is rooted in the concept of totality, a dominant concept in Western thought. In the concept of totality, individuals are reduced to questions of power as stand-ins for socio-political categories. The meaning of the human subject is derived from the same totality, and the uniqueness of each moment is constantly sacrificed for an obscure future that may provide him objective meaning. If history wishes to engineer the integration of the Same with the Other in the spirit of impersonality, this alleged integration is cruelty and injustice, that is, it ignores the Other. History as a relationship between individuals ignores the position of the I before the Other, in which the Other remains transcendent. “When man truly approaches the Other,” Levinas writes, “he is uprooted from history.” He explains: In the measure that the face of the Other relates us with the third party, the metaphysical relation of the I with the Other moves into the form of the We, aspires to a state, institutions, laws, which are the source of universality.15

Levinas expresses this principle in Ethics and Infinity thus: If I am alone with the Other, I owe him everything; but there is someone else. Do I know what my neighbor is in relation to someone else? Do I know if someone else has an understanding with him or his victim?

14 Ibid., 70–71. 15 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 300.

The Case against Political Messiani sm and the Phi losophy of Hi stor y

Who is my neighbor? It is consequently necessary to weigh, to think, to judge, in comparing the incomparable. The interpersonal relation I establish with the Other, I must also establish with other men; there is thus a necessity to moderate this privilege of the Other; from whence comes justice. Justice, exercised throughout institutions, which are inevitable, must always be held in check by the initial interpersonal relation.16

But politics, neglected by the intersubjective dimension, offers an invitation to tyranny and hurts the Same and the Other who found it, because politics subordinates and enslaves them to universal laws while ignoring them. While the Same beholds the face of the Other, he exalts the very person for whose sake his liberty is constrained. This limitation finds expression in all of Levinas’s ethical endeavors: his attentiveness to the Other, his uniqueness, his oneness, and his face. It is thus that subjectivity is rehabilitated, and not as egoism. Levinas insisted here that it is impossible to subordinate the individual to the universality of the state. He looked to the transcendental perspective that was as true as the political horizon, if not more so. The essence of the intersubjective discourse and experience is an ethical essence. In this thesis, the idealization of the philosophical is upended. Full idealization reduces the ethical to the political; then, the Other and I function as elements in an idealized calculation, derive our identity from this calculation, and approach each other under the control of necessity. Individuals play the role of fleeting moments in a system, not as the a priori point of departure. In the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Other is not a concrete and autonomous being in his own right but an agent/emissary of an abstract entity, such as “the owners of the means of production,” “the bourgeoisie,” and so forth. This is the politics of deindividuation, while for Levinas, the interpersonal sphere receives total primacy and preference; the ethical is not reduced to the political but strives to be a kind of metaphysical yet concrete buffer zone in order to complete the political and repair it when needed, a kind of moral insurance policy against the totalitarian adventures of the twentieth century. It is in this critical spirit, decrying Soviet Marxism, that Levinas concludes his essay Principes et Visages. He argues that a system in which impersonal reason is the guiding force obviates the necessity of personal goodwill and moral intentions, in the sense of a non-systemic coexistence. For Levinas, this proves the importance, beyond universal structures, of interpersonal relations; man must

16 Idem, Ethics and Infinity, 89–90.

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take the leap beyond anonymous principles, toward the face of the Other as it presents itself. Levinas does not deny the critical importance of official institutions in the establishment of a moral and just society but vigorously emphasizes the vital necessity of reconciling official justice with interpersonal commitments. He expresses it thus in his Talmudic reading “Toward the Other”: And what remains as well, after this somber vision of the human condition and of Justice itself, what rises above the cruelty inherent in rational order . . . is individual sacrifice, which, amidst the dialectical rebounds of justice and all its contradictory about-faces, without any hesitation, finds a straight and sure way. . . . [It is against] this virile, overly virile, proposition, in which we can anachronistically perceive a few echoes of Hegel; it is against this proposition, which puts the universal order above the interindividual order, that the text of the Gemara rises. . . . No, the offended individual must always be appeased, approached, and consoled individually. God’s forgiveness . . . cannot be given if the individual has not been honored.17

In his 1960 essay The Sino-Soviet Conflict and Dialectics, Levinas criticizes the Soviet Union’s Machiavellian policies in the Third World and its support for post-colonial tyrannical regimes. He rejects the Soviet teleological rationale, which holds it reasonable to support non-Marxist forces if they represent a stage in a historical movement toward socialism, and to support even temporarily dark regimes that persecute communists. Levinas argues at the end of the article that Soviet tyranny shares a certain ethical core with the Third Reich. He describes the revulsion that he feels in view of these internal contradictions (between the lofty values of Marxism, which the Soviet Union purported to act for, and its political murderousness): we must recognize the shadow of National Socialism in anti-capitalist forms of nationalism. Echoes of the Levinasian critique of Hegel’s philosophy of history appear throughout Totality and Infinity. In this book, Levinas develops the conceptual seeds sown in his essay “The Spirit of Geneva,” according to which non-totalitarian politics can only be envisaged as a rejection of the political consequences of the metaphysical principles of Western philosophy, chiefly the concept of totality. Hegel argues that philosophy offers a Zeitdiagnose, a critical analysis of historical times. Indeed, this idea characterizes Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, which

17 Idem, Nine Talmudic Readings, 29.

The Case against Political Messiani sm and the Phi losophy of Hi stor y

seeks to sketch a philosophical genealogy capable of illuminating the ideational seeds that led to the defining political experiments of the twentieth century, chiefly totalitarianism. This book was written during the Cold War, fifteen years after the defeat of Nazism. Levinas himself alludes to the anti-totalitarian driving force behind his critique of the notion of totality, noting that it follows from a political experience whose terrifying results are still etched in our memories: the horrors of fascism, and chiefly the Holocaust. In Totality and Infinity, we find a rejection of a philosophy of immanence in which we would truly come into possession of being, when every cause of war vanishes at the end of history. Instead, Levinas offers a description of a relationship with the Other that does not result in a human totality: a totalization of history. Here we can describe Levinas’s critique of metaphysical totality that leads to totalitarian politics as “the demystification of demystification,” as a philosophical inversion of Friedrich Engels’s celebrated “negation of negation.” Levinas sees the following dynamic in the history of Western civilization: philosophical and metaphysical demystification of the Other leads to dehumanization and consequently to political messianic teleologies typified by political murderousness. Thus, in lieu of the alarming formula “demystification of the other—dehumanization of the other—political murderousness,” Levinas offers the following formula: “remystification of the other—rehumanization/reindividuation of the other—a metaphysical buffer zone vis-à-vis political murderousness.” According to Levinas, the totalitarian experience draws its spiritual and metaphysical legitimacy from ideologies based on abstract principles divorced from the irreducible individualism of every person, estranged from the fact that each individual’s spiritual and human essence will forever rise above the banal and vulgar categorization of humanity into socio-ethnic identity groups. This element in Levinas’s thought demands explication: Levinas claims that Western thought has been culpable of metaphysical tyranny for some twenty-five centuries, from the pre-Socratic Parmenides to Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. By this he alludes to the tendency of Western epistemology to annex the human Other and reduce her to a third term, a conceptual reference point that seeks to erase the Other’s individuality. In order to negate this hegemonic philosophical climate, Levinas enlists the Cartesian notion of infinity to foster another approach, one of metaphysical humility, recognizing the limits of human knowledge in the face of the absolute infinity of the Other. Similarly, he presents a quasi-Romantic picture of approaching infinity, typified by fervor and passion, not absolute knowledge:

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Absolute knowledge, such as it has been sought, promised or recommended by philosophy, is a thought of the Equal. Being is embraced in the truth. Even if the truth is considered as never definitive, there is a promise of a more complete and adequate truth. Without doubt, the finite being that we are cannot in the final account complete the task of knowledge; but in the limit where this task is accomplished, it consists in making the other become the Same. On the other hand, the idea of the Infinite implies a thought of the Unequal. I start from the Cartesian idea of the Infinite, where the ideatum of this idea, that is, what this idea aims at, is infinitely greater than the very act through which one thinks it. . . . For my part, I think that the relation to the Infinite is not a knowledge, but a Desire. I have tried to describe the difference between Desire and need by the fact that Desire cannot be satisfied; that Desire in some way nourishes itself on its own hungers and is augmented by its satisfaction; that Desire is like a thought which thinks more than it thinks, or more than what it thinks. It is a paradoxical structure, without doubt, but one which is no more so than this presence of the Infinite in a finite act.18

Levinas argues that the history of Western philosophy is characterized by autonomous and totalistic thought. Autonomous thought demands a way of thinking from a detached perspective, beholding the world from its particular point of reference; the ego goes out into the world but is unaffected by its travels. In a famous Talmudic reading, Levinas seeks to shed plentiful light on this existential dilemma, which gnaws away at the soul of any modern Jew possessing a sense of history, which keeps him constantly on his toes. Levinas calls the theme of this Talmudic reading “the temptation of temptation,” which he uses to try to trace the foundation of the halakhic experience and how it withstands the modern temptation of the “open life.” Levinas propose a sublime historicalepic simile, which frames this dilemma as between an “Abrahamic” life and an existence in the spirit of Homer’s Odysseus, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of the celebrated literary critic Erich Auerbach’s book Mimesis. According to Levinas, to heed the Abrahamic calling is one to follow the “absolute-ultimate Other,” whose traces (the Shekhinah, the Divine Presence) cover the face of the Other, in the sense of an asymmetric ethical-heteronomous imperative that compels the Same to proclaim, “Hineni—here I am!” and submit. My encounter with the Other is an encounter that releases the chains of pure Solipsism, the self-centered and apathetic existence that Levinas calls

18 Idem, Ethics and Infinity, 91–92.

The Case against Political Messiani sm and the Phi losophy of Hi stor y

“ego-logy.” Ego-logy is an ontological state, a primal and essential characteristic of the Homeric ethos of open life in the West. The Homeric hero is an ambitious adventurer who crosses vast seas and continents but ultimately returns to himself, to his defining essence as the king of Ithaca, as expressed in The Odyssey. In the final analysis, the Homeric epic is the saga of a man who yearns to return to himself, to his initial state as the king of Ithaca, while the Abrahamic hero is the hero of self-abnegation and transcendence toward the Other, in virtue of the immortal imperative inherent in the Eternity of Israel, rooted in the depths of the Other: the most mysterious and inscrutable Other, concealed and invisible, namely the divine infinity. Abraham departs for another land, following the will of the cosmic Other, God Almighty, while Odysseus returns to his own land, to his private will, to his caprices and aspirations as the king of Ithaca. Levinas expresses it thus in his “Temptation of Temptation”: The temptation of temptation may well describe the condition of Western man. In the first place it describes his moral attitudes. He is for an open life, eager to try everything, to experience everything. . . . Ulysses’ life, despite its misfortunes, seems to us marvelous. . . . This European is certain at least of his retreat as subject into his extraterritorial subjectivity, certain of his separation with respect to any other, and thus assured of a kind of irresponsibility toward the All. . . . For our question, that of the temptation of temptation, the idea of a fruit preceding leaves (and flowers) is obviously essential. The Torah received outside any exploratory foray, outside any gradual development. . . . To hear a voice speaking to you is ipso facto to accept obligation toward the one speaking. Intelligibility is fidelity to the true; it is incorruptible and prior to any human enterprise; it protects this enterprise like the cloud which, according to the Talmud, covered the Israelites in the desert. Consciousness is the urgency of a destination leading to the other person and not an eternal return to self.19

For all of Western philosophy, Levinas reasons, the autonomous ego has understood the world through appropriation/comprehension. Every entity is reduced into neutral categories. These categories are anchored in a single concept of totality, which purports to capture the whole of human essence, be it Spinoza’s Conatus or Nietzsche’s “Will to Power.” But Levinas emphasizes that this metaphysical hubris is to their fatal detriment, because totalistic philosophies

19 Idem, Nine Talmudic Readings, 32, 36, 46, 48.

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full of enthusiasm, gusto, and Promethean passion, which purport to develop metaphysical means of unveiling the total essence of humanity and the cosmos, are precluded from doing justice to individual beings, or persons. Instead, humans are understood in light of neutral concepts (for Marx, “the proletariat,” the “petty-bourgeoisie,” the “owners of the means of production,” and so forth). The concept of alienation in its Levinasian guise has a different meaning from its Marxist version, because for Levinas personal alienation means “not to have a place of one’s own, not to have an interior . . . not truly to communicate with another, and thus to be a stranger to oneself and to the other.”20 Levinas urges us to do away with the tendency to look at the people in front of us only through the lenses of neutral and impersonal concepts: “Seeing the other is already an obligation toward him. A direct optics—without the mediation of any idea—can only be accomplished as ethics.”21 Another element of Levinasian thought is tied up with what he calls “the Humanism of the Other” (the title of one of his œuvres): the person whose rights must be defended most, he writes, is the Other, not the Self. The “human” at the root of “humanity” is the Other. Moreover, the hegemonic philosophies in modern Western thought do not pin their hopes on a bid for pure transcendence, or on any possibility of ethics based on “beyond being.” Levinas emphasizes that the pursuit of autonomy and totality leads to anti-humanism and tyrannical political regimes; Western philosophy needs the Other, to be challenged from the outside in the most transcendental sense, because in the absence of limitations, for lack of a heteronomous metaphysical buffer, philosophy can easily come to serve or provide a Machiavellian rationale legitimizing dark political experiments, as happened with Heidegger in the early 1930s and Sartre in the early 1950s. Thus, for Levinas, Western metaphysics is virtually synonymous with an approach that causes the Other’s “alterity” to vanish, hence his provocative contention that “this European is certain at least of his retreat as subject into his extraterritorial subjectivity, certain of his separation with respect to any other, and thus assured of a kind of irresponsibility toward the All.”22 Having been held as a prisoner of war by the Nazis during the Second World War, and having lost his family in the war, Levinas borrows concepts from his personal life story to emphasize responsibility for the human Other: escape, be20 Ibid., 107. 21 Ibid., 47. 22 Ibid., 36.

The Case against Political Messiani sm and the Phi losophy of Hi stor y

ing held hostage, insomnia, trauma, and obsession. Thus, for example, he writes that “in the world, we are not free in the presence of others . . . we are their hostages.”23 His attitude to the human Other elicits far-reaching commitment, hence his use of the strong metaphor of infinite responsibility, which causes side effects such as insomnia. The ability to heed the call of the Other is given “for free,” with reverence, in a manner devoid of personal or Machiavellian considerations. According to Levinas, the “I” affirms itself and expresses itself, not by way of theoretical contemplation or intellectual activity, but through proximity to the Other. For Levinas, the Other passes by the face in sanctity. It begins with the face, without reciprocity. It is a pathway to sanctity. The relationship with the Other is therefore sacred.24 In lieu of the ontological hostility to daily life that in Heideggerian thought, Levinas demands attention and daily attentiveness to the intrusive Other. This was all in the wake of the Second World War, the era that introduced the term “genocide” to the international lexicon (during the war, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill used another, chilling expression: “a crime that has no name”). Levinas demands constant attentiveness to the imperative reflected in the face of the human Other, shrouded in radiant light by traces of infinity after a period in which daily politics included the daily transport of human cargo to industrialized extermination camps, which were rendered possible by the maximal exploitation of the technical, bureaucratic, and technological achievements of scientific progress. In these camps, innocent human beings were dehumanized and depoliticized, in the sense that they were deprived of their fundamental right to citizenship. The fate-stricken inmates who were left exposed, naked, and helpless received a “new identity” in the form of a serial number tattooed on their forearms, instead of a name, instead of a face. Levinas’s philosophical journey “beyond being” is also an ontological and political step beyond the moral implications of Heideggerian immanent mysticism, which emphasizes being and thus abandons the individual’s destiny of proceeding in the light of the face of the human Other. As Rabbi Daniel Epstein writes: “The ‘great proximity of being’ typifies Heideggerian thought, presenting itself as a lonely nomad on the mountain path. Just like the man who [to quote Levinas] ‘behind the synagogue . . . [who] bears no burden,’ he absolves himself

23 Ibid., 87. 24 Idem, Ethics and Infinity.

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of the yoke of responsibility toward his fellow man.”25 But in Levinas we find a comprehensive rejection of the mysticism of the eremitic religious figure, a transcendental-theological form of mysticism: “No escape into isolation! Watch out for the peace of private worship! Beware of dreams in an empty synagogue!”26 For Levinas, unlike Heidegger, the call of conscience stems not from the Same’s focus on being, but from the “miracle of exteriority” phenomenologically exemplified in the nakedness, the political and humanistic vulnerability of the concrete human Other. As such, for Levinas (pace Heidegger), existential salvation is obtained not via the cessation of the escape from one’s mortality, the inherent temporality of life, the “being-toward-death” as the fundamental predicament of the human condition, but rather from adhering to the plight of the human Other, out of enthusiastic obedience to the immortal spirit encapsulated in the cry “Hineni—here I am!” By emphasizing not the “being-toward-death” of the Same, but this condition among the weak, the persecuted, and the helpless. Levinas expresses it thus, speaking in conversation with Philippe Nemo in Ethics and Infinity: I think that in responsibility for the Other, one is, in the final analysis, responsible for the death of the other. Is not the rectitude of the other’s look an exposure par excellence, an exposure unto death? The face in its uprightness is what is aimed at “point blank” by death. What is expressed as demand in it certainly signifies a call to giving and serving—or the commandment to giving and serving—but above this, and while including it, the order is to not let the Other alone. . . . This is probably the foundation of sociality and of love without eros.27

The ethics of the face presents a good way of thinking about the politics of difference; all this, in lieu of the theoretician and jurist Carl Schmitt’s deviant distinction between enemy and friend, in the sense of distinguo ergo sum (“I am different, therefore I am”), instead of the hegemonic politics of judenrein and Lebensraum. Levinas borrows from the terminology of monotheism in order to construct the ethical infrastructure of a precisely antithetical political theory, one that ensures the primacy of human rights and human dignity and enables 25 Epstein, “Afterword,” 222. 26 Ibid., 193. 27 Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 118–119.

The Case against Political Messiani sm and the Phi losophy of Hi stor y

us to safeguard those rights, and consequently to transcend a mode of ethnic politics that fails to see above the label categories of gender, ethnicity, religious affiliation, and national identity. If so, we can say that the political significance of Levinasian philosophy lies in his creation of an infrastructure for anti-Schmittian politics. In terms of political theory, this is a conceptual revolution, as the phenomenological meditations about ethical thought on the face augment and complement the traditional defenses of human rights, typically involving constitutional, electoral and institutional remedies. The key to an anti-totalitarian politics, argues Levinas, the ultimate anti-totalitarian vaccine, is to see in the face of the human Other a symbolic, spiritual, and atemporal challenge to the moral blindness of the hegemonic political dogmas of the twentieth century, an unprecedented era in terms of the plenitude of its political experiments. For Levinas, the face of the Other is a universal appeal to human rights and human dignity, and this ethical stance fills an inevitable void in societies that focus mainly on erecting legal barriers to racism and Procrustean political extremism. In fact, in times when the legal system is hijacked to erase the face of the Other, to erase the humanity of the Other as a first step to legitimizing his murder, as happened with the Nuremberg Race Laws and other Schmittian jurisprudence in 1930s Germany, the heteronomous and immortal imperative of the face seeks to circumvent and overcome the depravity of the legal system and the pervasive political phantasmagoria. In such dark times, with the institutionalized voice of the public conscience silenced, heeding the call to the face constitutes the last humanistic frontier, in the absence of any binding formalistic and constitutional mechanisms against comprehensive dehumanization. Levinas hints at this in Talmudic reading “Toward the Other,” exalting the magnanimity of the “righteous Gentiles” who saved Jewish lives during the Nazi Holocaust: There are people whose hearts do not open before their neighbor runs a mortal risk, just as there are people whose generosity turns away from men fallen to the level of hunted animals. Under the Occupation we learned these distinctions, just as we also knew souls full of humility, pity, and generosity—souls of Israel beyond Israel.28

28 Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, 28.

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Rabbi Daniel Epstein also draws attention to the fact that Levinasian ethics is the last humanistic obstacle to the institutionalized dehumanization of entire collectivities. He notes that in the final chapter of Levinas’s book Proper Names, “Nameless” (originally published as “Honneur sans Drapeau”), Levinas speaks of “the fate of the Jews in the Holocaust, unable to depend on judicial institutions and finding refuge only in their own interiority. Levinas writes there about Jewry as humanity, about a language of morality without institutions.”29 Nevertheless, it is important to emphasize in this context that Levinas is expressing here a universal statement about the human evil that was forcefully exposed by the great political experiments of the twentieth century. As Richard Bernstein writes, it is essential to understand that Levinas is not speaking specifically about the tragedy of European Jewry. Auschwitz is a paradigm for a much more pervasive radical evil. This universal and humanistic element in Levinas’s philosophy also finds expression in his choice to dedicate his magnum opus, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, to all the victims of the Nazis, Jews and non-Jews alike, whom he calls “victims of the same hatred of the other man, the same anti-Semitism.” Levinas continues this train of thought in his essay “Useless Suffering,” on left-wing and right-wing totalitarianism, Hiroshima, Stalinism, the Soviet gulags, and the genocides of Auschwitz and Cambodia. He speaks of what Eric Hobsbawm calls the short twentieth century (1914–1989) as a dark and anti-humanistic period that unfolded in the tyrannical shadow and haunting memory of everything signified by these barbaric names. Even when Levinas speaks of the extermination of European Jewry and the existential dangers hanging over the State of Israel like a sword of Damocles, he chooses to emphasize the universal dimension of this existential condition: It is the abyss of Auschwitz or the world at war. A world which has lost its “very worldliness.” It is the twentieth century. One must go back inside, even if there is terror inside. Is the fact of Israel unique? Does it not have its full meaning because it applies to all humanity? All human beings are on the verge of being in the situation of the State of Israel. The State of Israel is a category. . . . The no-exit of Israel is probably the human no-exit. All human beings are of Israel. In my way, I would say: “We are all Israeli Jews.” [Echoing the slogan “We are all German Jews,” adopted by French students during the unrest of 1968.] We, that is, all human beings. The interiority is the suffering of Israel as universal suffering.30 29 Epstein, “Afterword,” 104. 30 Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, 191.

The Case against Political Messiani sm and the Phi losophy of Hi stor y

If the celebrated Freudian dictum encapsulating his call for to remain alert against primal and primeval energies subliminally driving one’s urges is “where id is, ego shall be,” for Levinas the maxim is “where politics is, ethics shall be (preceding it).” In other words, ethics must stand constant guard over politics, and even to precede it. Consequently, Levinas does not see man’s ultimate essence in his being an Aristotelian “political creature” but as first and foremost a moral subject: “The man who is integrally human is not to concern himself with politics. He must concern himself with morality.”31 This is the gist of the Levinasian metaphysical buffer against political totalitarianism. It is, in the final analysis, a mode of spiritual and existential resistance anchored in an appeal to the same infinity that triumphs over the urge to kill and murder, which uses the face to philosophically illuminate the primordial expression of “you shall not commit murder,” from the depth of the defenseless eyes that look down in their helplessness and destitution. The surprising political implications of such an audacious and esoteric philosophical tract as Totality and Infinity are overshadowed by Levinas’s statement that peace cannot be identified with the defeat of some and the total victory of others; that is, peace built over mass graves and universal empires that impose their will on their subjects. Peace, says Levinas, must be “my peace, in a relation that starts from an I and goes to the other,” creating a brave Gordian knot of mental fortitude, heartfelt pathos, solidarity, and genuine goodwill. Philippe Nemo, in his book of conversations with Levinas, touches on this important element in the political philosophy woven into Totality and Infinity: A society respectful of freedoms would thus not simply have “liberalism” for its foundation, an objective theory of society. . . . Such a liberalism would make freedom depend on an objective principle and not on the essential secrecy of lives. Freedom would then be but entirely relative: it would suffice that one objectively prove the greater efficiency, from a political or economic point of view, of a given type of organization, for freedom to remain speechless.32

Levinas, for his part, responds to Nemo’s observation by emphasizing that he has no desire to belittle the constitutional and formal achievements of liberal democracy, only to complement them with the interpersonal dimension:

31 Ibid., 113. 32 Idem, Ethics and Infinity, 79.

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It is not necessary, from what I have just said, to deduce any underestimation of reason and reason’s aspiration to universality. I only try to deduce the necessity for a social rationale of the very exigencies of the intersubjective such as I describe it.33

Like Levinas, Leibowitz is similarly appalled by attempts to sanctify the profane, such as the state, what Nietzsche called the “New Idol.” Levinas criticizes the murderous and atheistic false messianism of right-wing and left-wing totalitarianism, as both a French patriot and a pan-European Jew in his lived experience and philosophical and cultural temperament; but Leibowitz, as a Zionist and an Israeli citizen, gives greater consideration to the danger of political messianism at home, the mystical and theosophical Hegelianization of the Zionist enterprise by Rav Kook’s disciples, who see the establishment of the State of Israel as a kind of prelude to the advent of the Messiah, as the atchalta de’geula—the beginning of the Redemption. For Leibowitz, the sanctification of land is anathema, the evil spirit of wayward paganism and a theological insanity that would cause a moral rift and religious-spiritual degeneration. Leibowitz regarded the messianism of Gush Emunim as a monumental danger and commonly compared it to the fiasco of Sabbatai Zevi, the seventeenth-century false messiah. He even foresaw the crisis of faith that would afflict Israel’s religious right when the geopolitical and demographic reality came to bear and the Israeli public supported the evacuation of settlements. While Levinas, therefore, focuses on the dangers of political messianism in Europe, the sanctification of the concept of historical progress, and historiosophical metanarratives that efface the individual in favor of worldly and immanent visions of redemption, Leibowitz devotes his energies to quashing mystical political messianism in Israel, which sanctifies the territorial and political, regards the state and the military as vessels of God’s work, and even attaches a degree of sanctity to them. Leibowitz, then, is deeply concerned by the mystical theurgy in Rav Kook’s thought, sanctifying immanent-historical events in an ideationally dubious process of theopolitical dialectics. Levinas correctly notes the theologization of politics in Europe and the pagan spirit animating the Third Reich, while Leibowitz points to the dangers of the theologization of politics in Israel. But both Leibowitz and Levinas share with each other, and with Nietzsche, a revulsion against the apotheosis of the

33 Ibid., 80.

The Case against Political Messiani sm and the Phi losophy of Hi stor y

state as a value in its own right, as an independent member of the Pantheon; but unlike Nietzsche, they do support the democratic order and associated political values, such as civil rights and universal human rights. A comprehensive study of the political aspects of Leibowitz’s thought would show that like Levinas, he too was a fervent opponent of political theology in the vein of Carl Schmitt. In Schmitt’s neo-Hobbesian Weltanschauung, regime stability is the decisive normative and political objective in the public sphere; that is, Schmitt gives precedence to dictatorships or states of emergency (proclaimed by the sovereign) over liberalism, which he comes to see in the 1930s as a weak and inefficient system. Schmittian thought is the unambiguous antithesis of Leibowitzian philosophy, because pace Leibowitz, who abhors any compound of the sacred with the profane (the worldly and political), for Schmitt the political crises that defined the early twentieth century are inevitable consequences of the French Revolution’s strict separation of religion and state. Leibowitz, as we know, fought with all his might to dissolve the Gordian knot between religion and state in the Israeli context, evincing his sweeping rejection of this Schmittian axiom. Fear of the mythologization of politics, therefore, typifies the political writings of both Levinas and Leibowitz. Levinas is horrified by the paganization of politics by Hitler and Stalin, while Leibowitz recoils from the hegemonic mentality of Religious Zionism in Israel, an especially explosive cocktail of unbridled nationalism that takes no notice of the universal values of equality and justice. Just as Levinas identifies the murderous potential of the distortion and corruption of the Left Hegelian philosophy of history in the Soviet Union, Leibowitz expresses his disgust with the philosophy of history trumpeted by Rav Kook’s self-proclaimed successors. In sum, Leibowitz and Levinas, straddling the line between the religious and the political, are democrats par excellence in their political-normative orientation, declaring all-out war against those who would tie the pagan, the mythological, the theological, and the political together in a Gordian knot. Levinas attended the famous disputation between Martin Heidegger and the neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer in Davos in the late 1920s. Professor David Ohana has astutely noted the connection between Leibowitz’s open revolt against the theologization and fascisization of politics in Israel after the Six-Day War and Cassirer’s tenacious battle against mythical conceptions of politics, which disregard empirical reality. Ohana’s proposed parallels between Leibowitz’s philo-political critique and Cassirer’s also hint at Leibowitz’s common cause with Levinas concerning the nexus between the religious and the political:

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In certain respects, Leibowitz’s outlook is similar to the German-Jewish philosopher Ernst Cassirer’s. Both were neo-Kantians who translated their thought into social criticism: Leibowitz warned of the fascisization of Israeli society; Cassirer abhorred the political paganization of the twentieth century. The common source of their respective fears was the mythologization of reality: how symbols turned on their makers, became myths, and turned into reality. . . . The early Cassirer failed to distinguish between a philosophical and anthropological examination of a myth and the mythologization of the Volk. Believing in German liberalism, he was cautious in the early 1920s not to step outside the academic ivory tower, even when he appeared at political rallies. But slowly but surely, Cassirer sensed the approaching storm, which threatened to topple the house of cards of Germany’s nascent democracy. In his famous debate with Martin Heidegger, he saw how the symbol had ceased to be a metaphor and had taken on a life of its own. It was only a matter of time until pagan idolatry became a political reality. Like Cassirer, Leibowitz was also fearful of any attempt to condition empirical reality and transform it into an alternative, mythical reality. He too believed that myth does not create ritual and religion. Hence his repeated emphasis on separating the sacred and profane.34

34 David Ohana, “Leibowitz—The Radical Intellectual and the Critique of the Canaanite Messianism,” in Yeshayahu Leibowitz: Between Conservatism and Radicalism, ed. Aviezer Ravitzky ( Jerusalem: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2007), 174–175 [Hebrew].

4 Leibowitz, Levinas, and Zionism In order to properly understand Levinas’s approach to Zionism, we must highlight one of the pillars of his philosophy of religious humanism. To a large extent, Levinas considered it his life’s work to facilitate and contribute toward the cultivation of religious humanism as an alternative to both secular nihilism and religious fundamentalism. One of the more illuminating essays in his book Difficult Freedom is titled “For a Jewish Humanism.” In it, Levinas performs a kind of ironic inversion of Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” writing that “monotheism is a humanism.” He implores his humanist readers to glean the hints of the inexhaustible humanism between the lines of the Book of Books. Levinas strove to read the canonical texts of monotheism through a pluralistic lens, and to neutralize or invert the meaning of verses that, at first glance, seem quintessentially anti-humanist. His methodology always had an element of universal humanism, inasmuch as he saw religious experience first of all as moral experience; the divine is revealed not through theological speculations or theurgic magic but from the perspective of the dayto-day, the face-to-face encounter, at moments of interpersonal engagement. Leibowitz, in this context, makes an interesting point: the Torah devotes only around thirty verses to the creation of the universe, compared to around 400 verses to the construction of the Tabernacle. Leibowitz’s conclusion is clear: the Torah is not a book of physics or biochemistry, which might purport to offer scientific truths. On the contrary, any attempt to harmonize the Torah and science would be ungrounded at best, imbecilic at worst, and evidence of a lack of intellectual integrity. The Torah does not deal with science, which is essentially theoretical, but with the question, or indeed instructions, about how Jews who accept the principles of their faith should live. According to Leibowitz, any

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attempt to subordinate the Torah to modern scientific discoveries devalues and reduces it: The meaning of the book of Genesis is to present man facing God. The book of Genesis offers neither chronology nor history and is certainly not a book of information about nature and the world; it is, rather, as we said, a depiction of man facing God. This presentation is made, in Genesis and the whole Torah, in various ways: in the form of stories, in the form of poetry, and through symbols. Consider one such symbol. The Torah devotes thirty-one verses to the whole creation of the world. . . . In contrast, the Torah devotes more than 250 verses to the construction of the Tabernacle and around another 100 verses to its dedication. That is, the creation of the Tabernacle takes up as much space in the Torah as ten creations of the heavens and the earth, and all their array, including man. And what does this ratio teach us? It teaches us what, from the Torah’s perspective, constitutes value: the mere construction of the Tabernacle has no meaning, and no value, other than by giving expression to the worship of God by man. The proportional relationship—thirty-four verses for the universe, versus some 400 verses for the Tabernacle— teach us that the Torah attaches value not to the world and everything in it, but to man’s worship of God inside this world. And the whole wide world, including our existence, only carries importance as the framework in which man worships God.1

Leibowitz invokes a Midrashic interpretation of a verse in Genesis, “This is the story of heaven and earth when they were created” (Genesis 2:4), to bolster his reading. He reads hibaram (“were created”) as be’Avraham, an anagram, to produce: “This is the story of heaven and earth for the sake of Abraham.” Leibowitz reads the story of Creation as a frame story, providing the narrative context for the appearance of Abraham, the first monotheist. Indeed, Leibowitz reasons that Abraham’s defining feature is not his biographical background but his new path into a trailblazing faith. The role of the Oral Torah is to distill the Written Torah into a daily praxis of halakhic existence. In this context, in Difficult Freedom, Levinas recalls an argument in the Talmud between several sages about the essence of the Torah. One rabbi argues that the whole Torah is encapsulated in the verse “Love your fellow as yourself.” Another holds it to be “Hear, O Israel! Adonai is our God, Adonai is One.” Along comes another rabbi and proposes “You shall offer one lamb in

1

Leibowitz, Five Books of Faith, 18–19.

Leibowitz, Levinas, and Zionism

the morning, and the other lamb you shall offer at twilight.” Rabbi Judah HaNasi embraces the last proposal, and according to Levinas, this shows that Judaism places its emphasis on the regulation of day-to-day life, a stance that overlaps with Leibowitz’s.2 Unlike Leibowitz, who draws a dichotomous distinction between halakha and morality, Levinas describes a Gordian knot between these two elements. For example, he links the commandment to recite a blessing over food to modern man’s responsibility to pursue social and global justice; and he connects the act of benediction, as an intensional-phenomenological wonder of spiritual gratitude and longing to commune with existence to the fact of Third World famine and the decadence of the sated Western man.3 Levinas is thus one of the leading advocates of Enlightenment Judaism, seeing individual faith as an essence in its own right and as the path to greater, morally upright, and spiritually mature form of humanity, capable of demystifying and demythologizing the pagan conceptual world. In virtue of this moral rectitude, Levinas exalts Rabbi Akiva as moral pioneer who anticipated the Enlightenment’s abhorrence for capital punishment (“the gentle Rabbi Akiba, who, in the Sanhedrin, never condemned anyone to death!”);4 and in virtue of this 2

Emmanuel Levinas, “A Religion for Adults” in his Difficult Freedom, trans. Sean Hand (London: Athlone Press, 1990).

3

“Saying Grace . . . would be an act of the greatest importance. To be able to eat and drink is a possibility as extraordinary, as miraculous, as the crossing of the Red Sea. We do not recognize the miracle this represents because we live in a Europe which, for the moment, has plenty of everything, and not in a Third World country, and because our memory is short. There they understand that to be able to satisfy one’s hunger is the marvel of marvels. To return to a stage of indigence in Europe, despite all the progress of civilization, is a most natural possibility for us, as the war years and the concentration camps have shown. In fact, the route which takes bread from the earth in which it grows to the mouth which eats it is one of the most perilous. It is to cross the Red Sea. . . . Nothing is as difficult as being able to feed oneself. So that the verse ‘You will eat and be full and you will bless’ (Deuteronomy 8:10) is not pious verbiage but the recognition of a daily miracle and of the gratitude it must produce in our souls. But the obligation of gratitude goes further. . . . The problem of a hungry world can be resolved only if the food of the owners and those who are provided for ceases to appear to them as their inalienable property, but is recognized as a gift they have received for which thanks must be given and to which others have a right. Scarcity is a social and moral problem and not exclusively an economic one. . . . To feed those who are hungry assumes a spiritual elevation . . . so that the Third World, so-called underdeveloped mankind, can eat its fill; so that the West, despite its abundance, does not revert to the level of an underdeveloped mankind. And, inversely, to feed the world is a spiritual activity.” Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, 132–133.

4

Ibid., 144.

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spiritual maturity, Levinas expresses his disgust for superstitions and magical beliefs, so alien to the rationalist climate of his Lithuanian Jewish upbringing: “Sorcery, then, would be a phenomenon of perversion, absolutely foreign to Judaism itself. It is the sacred of others!”5 Levinas’s Talmudic readings seek to breathe contemporary significance into this ancient text, the ultimate book of hermeneutics. Levinas reads the Talmud, a text unique to the Jewish people, to elucidate its audaciously humanist and surprisingly modern sentiments. He seeks to discourage modern readers from treating the Talmud as a dogmatic and antiquated tome, jam-packed with arcane riddles about anachronistic, passé ritualism. Levinas makes supremely Nietzschean use of the Talmud’s fables to illuminate the profound relevance of its spiritual and literary genius, specifically its pure worldly wisdom. In his book On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life and elsewhere, Nietzsche postulates that to be relevant, a text must speak to the cultural and existentialist challenges of the generation, be suffused with joie de vivre, and uplift the soul; that is, it must be “life-enhancing.” Hence Levinas’s quip, playing on the title of Nietzsche’s seminal work The Gay Science, that “the Talmud is a subtle and lofty and gay science.”6 Like his anti-totalitarian interpretation of the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, Leibowitz’s other brazen and contemporary commentaries on the weekly Torah portion provide a subversive and modern reading of the monotheistic canon. Aviezer Ravitzky, one of Leibowitz’s most famous students, illustrates this by way of anecdote, recalling a conversation with Leibowitz in synagogue one Sabbath. That morning, the Haftarah reading was about King David’s order to execute a man he feared would endanger his dynasty. Ravitzky expressed his discomfort to Leibowitz and told him that he always prayed that he would not be called up to read this portion because he found it repugnant and morally nauseating. Au contraire, replied Leibowitz. For latent in this episode was a profound insight about the human condition: power corrupts, even for historical figures of King David’s stature. This anecdote illustrates the creativity with which Leibowitz, like Levinas, proposed audacious and unorthodox readings of Jewish literature in order to exemplify its trenchant salience—morally, politically, and existentially—in approaching the questions and quandaries that agitate modern man.

5

Ibid., 144.

6

Ibid., 194.

Leibowitz, Levinas, and Zionism

Leibowitz, as we have seen, tried to create an artificial separation between religion and morality, purposely ignoring the fact that halakha presents a desirable model for interpersonal relations; yet his own positions on military affairs, politics, and social justice are unambiguously progressive and liberal. For his own part, he deviated from his putative separation between religion and morality. For example, wishing to salute Israeli conscientious objectors during the First Lebanon War (1982) and the First Intifada (1987), he spoke of their personal “bravery,” a term that he generally reserved to describe religious martyrdom, such as during the Crusades. For his own part, Levinas did not adhere to a separation of morality and religion—on the contrary. He prized the Gordian knot between the two but introduced a dogmatic distinction of his own: he published his “academic” philosophical writings through one publishing house and his “confessional” Jewish writings through another. While Leibowitz used to fume at being called a humanist, Levinas expressed chagrin at being called a Jewish thinker. He tried to separate his two vocations despite peppering his “universal” works with quotations from Jewish texts. In this respect, Levinas’s methodological choice to interweave Talmudic quotations into his philosophical writings mirrors Heidegger’s appeal to the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin. Levinas held a metahistorical conception of Judaism, despite being extremely knowledgeable about and familiar with Judaism’s nature as a dynamic metaphysical system (“category/comprehension of being,” in his words), which developed its primary and formative literature over the course of centuries and millennia. In this sense, one can discern tension, even a paradox, in Levinas’s Zionism. On the one hand, he was a pan-European Jew in his cultural orientation and was loyal to his country, France. On the other hand, he was a pragmatic Zionist who recognized the imperative of national sovereignty for the Jewish people in light of the Hobbesian political reality that had reared its ugly head during the Second World War. It was Levinas’s fervent aspiration not to eulogize the tragic yet sublime drama of Jewish life on the European continent. The key roles that he played in French Jewry’s postwar education system serve as biographical proof of Levinas’s resolute loyalty to European culture, despite everything. As a traditionalist Jew, Levinas could not have accepted the paltry vision that typified certain strands of secular Zionism, namely the aspiration to “normalize the Jewish condition” in the spiritual and ethical sense. He strives to identify the hallmarks of universal humanism in the Zionist enterprise, as find expression in the unique social experiment of the kibbutzim:

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A society in which man is not exploited, a society in which men are equal, a society such as the first founders of the kibbutzes wanted—because they too built ladders to ascend to heaven despite the repugnance most of them felt for heaven—is the very contestation of moral relativism. What we call the Torah provides norms for human justice. And it is in the name of this universal justice and not in the name of some national justice or other that the Israelites lay claim to the land of Israel.7

In contrast to Levinas, the Leibowitz of the 1950s onwards completely rejected any attempt to impute to Zionism a grandiose, cosmic dimension of tikkun olam—repairing the world. Leibowitz’s minimalistic Zionism reduces the Zionist adventure to the level of real-world politics, dismissing any efforts to attach religious pathos, or a religious aura, to the State of Israel. His is a Zionism rooted in the private will of the People of Israel for sovereign self-determination, stripped of any spiritual pretense of being a universal spiritual center, a light unto the nations. “I am a Zionist,” Leibowitz writes, “which is to say that I do not wish to live a Jewish life within the framework of the Gentile world, subjected to its rule.”8 This is the gist of Leibowitz’s later Zionism, and in this respect, it is a “heretical” Zionism: one that has forsworn any religious significance as a movement to restore the Jewish people to their ancient land, invoking the fact of Hobbesian political landscape as the only rationale for the existence of the Zionist enterprise. Levinas was a political pragmatist who urged dialogue with the Palestinians (“We must talk to them,” he implores in an interview in the appendix to the Hebrew edition of Ethics and Infinity) and an ardent critic of religious fundamentalism (including in its Jewish guise), which he took to be necessarily blind to the religious and political Other. In his book Emmanuel Levinas: His Life and Legacy, the journalist and author Salomon Malka writes that Levinas was sensitive to colonialist undertones in Zionism, and on one visit to Israel even refused to step off the bus during a tour of the Negev because he saw the forced urbanization of the Bedouins as a particularly vulgar form of colonialism.9 In his famous Talmudic reading “Judaism and Revolution,” Levinas completes the universal-humanistic interpretation of his mysterious and enigmatic teacher,

7

Ibid., 66.

8

Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, 211.

9

Salomon Malka, Emmanuel Levinas: His Life and Legacy, trans. Michael Kigel and Sonia M. Embree (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2006).

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Monsieur Chouchani. He strives to counterbalance the moral particularism that the Mishnah might imply, the xenophobic ontology that typified certain strands of Judaism in antiquity and the Middle Ages: I have it from an eminent master [Monsieur Chouchani]: each time Israel is mentioned in the Talmud one is certainly free to understand by it a particular ethnic group which is probably fulfilling an incomparable destiny. But to interpret in this manner would be to reduce the general principle in the idea enunciated in the talmudic passage, would be to forget that Israel means a people who has received the Law and, as a result, a human nature which has reached the fullness of its responsibilities and of its self-consciousness. . . . The descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are human beings who are no longer childlike. Before a selfconscious humanity, no longer in need of being educated, our duties are limitless.10

Leibowitz hints at a similar principle in his commentary on the weekly Torah portion, addressing Chayyei Sarah’s roots in ancient legend: I would like to convey here an aggadic thought of great significance, which deals with the three wives of Abraham: Sarah was of the daughters of Shem, Hagar (the Egyptian) was of Cham, whereas Ketura (which this Midrash does not identify with Hagar) was of Yafet. This indicates (or gives us a hint) that from Abraham there emanated—or there will yet emanate—enlightenment for all the races of mankind.11

Levinas emphasizes repeatedly that “to accept the Torah is to accept the norms of a universal justice”12 and pours scorn on advocates of the selfish and lazy view that the idea of Jewish chosenness is a priori and implies special privileges, as opposed to a difficult freedom laden with infinite responsibility: “‘The people of our God’ is capable of all crimes then! No doubt the Talmud wants to remind us of this to put an end to so much mystifying and facile rhetoric!”13 He even adds that “the righteous subject to punishment may also be the Jewish people when it closes itself off in its community life and contents itself with its

10 Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, 98. 11 Leibowitz, Accepting the Yoke of Heaven, 29. 12 Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, 66. 13 Ibid., 117.

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synagogues.”14 Here we behold the comprehensive scope of Levinasian thought, geared toward a cosmic and universal destiny of tikkun olam, inasmuch as “the role of Judaism . . . is a universal one, a deaconry in the service of the totality of being.”15 Leibowitz holds to a reductivist reading of the idea of the Jewish people’s chosenness, encapsulated in the blessing “for He chose us and gave us His Torah,” that is, in the acceptance of the yoke of the commandments. Leibowitz passionately decries the “daft and primitive” notion that the belief that we were chosen by God means that we are the beneficiaries of positive discrimination in terms of the special “favors” that God will do to our people, our success in life, our history, etc., out of all other nations. The truth is the opposite. The meaning of “You chose us out of all the nations” is that the People of Israel were given more difficult tasks than other nations, and more is demanded of them than other peoples, and thus they even bear weightier responsibility.16

Levinas uses the Jewish tradition to create the infrastructure for an ethicalmoral revolution capable of contending with the dehumanization of the individual in tyrannical regimes, and Leibowitz strives to defuse the explosive potential of the messianic idea in the political sphere. Levinas’s conception of messianism is of cosmic personal responsibility, a bulwark against political theology. For Levinas, the messianic idea is divorced from its historic potential and becomes an existential-utopian, almost Romantic ideal of man treading the quasi-heroic, quasi-Sisyphean Via Dolorosa of his attempt to observe the full gamut of the commandments and reinforce his faith. The expectation of the Messiah, therefore, becomes an eternal quest for perfection, an expectation that will never be met, expressed only as a longing for a redemption that will never come but forever lies around the corner: The redemption is regarded as a reality that always transcends any existing state, which one never reaches but toward which one must always strive. . . . The Messiah who comes, the Messiah of the present, is invariably the false Messiah.17 14 Ibid., 118. 15 Ibid., 78. 16 Leibowitz, I Wanted To Ask You, Professor Leibowitz, 191. 17 Idem, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, 126, 72.

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*** Let us now address the dualism in Levinas’s thought as it relates to the concept and essence of “Israel.” On the one hand, for Levinas, Israel is the translation of the biblical-ethical promise into Greek (the language of logos and the philosophical discourse), a metaphysical space of sanctity, that is, a space of unconditional stepping out toward the Other, an ethical and supra-political existence. Hence his assertion that Jewish tradition must be translated into the language of political discourse. By this, Levinas does not seek to reduce Greek thought to mere politics. For Levinas, Greek thought also incorporates the sciences, which do not speak of an “I-thou” relationship.18 On the other hand, however, Levinas is not blind to the political necessity of Jewish sovereignty as a means of safeguarding the physical survival of the Jewish people. From this, “Israel” comes to signify the monumental historical event of the return of the Jewish people to their land, that is, a concrete political entity fated, as a matter of its historic and spiritual destiny, to demonstrate spiritual leadership and moral responsibility. This aspect of Levinas’s thought is correlated to his conception of Judaism as a “religion for adults,” a system of duties and imperatives. Levinas does not conceive of the State of Israel as a state among states, just as he does not conceive of the ration d’être of the Jewish people as a people among peoples. In this sense, Levinas assigns the State of Israel with the somewhat utopian, prophetic mission of instigating a metamorphosis in the meaning of the modern nation-state, stripping it of its nationalist, ethnocentric, chauvinistic, and exclusionary character. In this, he wishes to divest the state of its modern idolatry: the fascistic ethos that holds sovereignty itself—rather than spiritual and cultural wealth—to be the nation’s loftiest and most sublime ideal. In this respect, Levinas prays that the Jewish state will serve as a port for a cosmopolitan nation, in the spirit of Ahad Ha’am’s cultural Zionism. Levinas was subjected to fierce criticism for failing to publicly rebuke the State of Israel’s Realpolitik. But this accusation, as if Levinas minced his words about the darkest moments of the Zionist enterprise, was unfair. After the massacre of Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatila in 1982—by Lebanese Phalangist militias, as the Israeli army stood by—besides his ambivalent remarks (a consequence of his sensitive status as a Diaspora Jew), Levinas proclaimed his unambiguous shock at the “human possibility” of this atrocity and what it signified “for our entire history as Jews and as human beings.” Levinas also decried

18 Levinas, Ethics and Infinity.

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the Zionist fetishization of land as a sacred, supreme value, warning against such mystification of the material. Unlike Levinas, Leibowitz was unencumbered by the constraints of Jewish life in the Diaspora, having to contend with dubious episodes in Israel’s military and moral history while in “exile,” and so his criticism was more full-throated. Leibowitz railed against the Kafr Qassim massacre, when Israeli soldiers mowed down fifty-one Palestinian civilians in October 1956 (the courts handed down only very weak sentences against the responsible actors in the military). Leibowitz’s response to the IDF’s reprisal operation in Kafr Qibya in the 1950s, in which dozens of innocent civilians were killed, similarly reflected his abhorrence for war crimes and the moral laxity that prevails whenever banal and material human needs, such as nationalism and defensive power, are mystified. Leibowitz wrote in the context of the 1953 Qibya operation: We must ask ourselves: what produced this generation of youth, which felt no inhibition or inner compunction in performing the atrocity when given the inner urge and external occasion for the retaliation? After all, these young people were not a wild mob but youth raised and nurtured on the values of a Zionist education, upon concepts of the dignity of man and human society. The answer is that the events at Kibiyeh were a consequence of applying the religious category of holiness to social, national, and political values and interests. . . . For the sake of that which is holy—and perhaps only for its sake—man is capable of acting without any restraint. In our discourse and practice we have uprooted the category of holiness from its authentic location and transferred it to inappropriate objects, thus incurring all the dangers involved in such a distorted use of the concept. . . . From a religious standpoint only God is holy, and only His imperative is absolute. All human values and all obligations and undertakings derived from them are profane and have no absolute validity. Country, state, and nation impose pressing obligations and tasks which are sometimes very difficult. They do not, on that account, acquire sanctity.19

Levinas hints at the dangers of treating land as more sacred than life, insisting that human life will always be more sacred than land, even holy land, because when human dignity is trampled, sacred land is exposed in its destitution as supporting just trees and rocks. Here Levinas draws a vital distinction between the strange fire of political fanaticism and religious fundamentalism, and the

19 Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, 189–190.

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eternal spiritual-prophetic fire of the embers still glowing beneath the ashes, as Rabbi Eleazar called the words of the prophets. Leibowitz, for his part, demystifies the essence of prophecy; contrary to the slightly naїve view of the Hebrew prophecies as eschatological visions of what must transpire in our empirical reality, Leibowitz notes that historically and factually, virtually all the prophets failed in their efforts to get the people to repent. In this context, Leibowitz sees the prophets of Israel as exemplars of intense commitment to a life of faith and social justice, although it was never inevitable that their national and universal visions would come true if the people failed to follow them. Leibowitz cites the Tosafists’ observation that “no prophet foretells but what ought to occur, if there is no sin” (Yevamot 50a), that is, that the fulfillment of the prophetic potential in Israel and the world is in the hands of ordinary people, through their personal deeds and decisions, rather than the hands of God: We are told in Tosafot: “No prophet foretells but what ought to occur, if there is no sin.” The false prophets throughout the generations preach the importance of faith in the certainty of a redemption which is not conditional on anything; of redemption—even if man does not redeem himself from sin.20

When Levinas speaks of the strange fire of fanaticism, he draws on the etymological similarity between the Hebrew words lat (“magic tricks”) and lahat (“fervor”), recalling Pharaoh’s necromancers, who tried to replicate the wonders performed by Moses and Aaron. For his own part, he prefers the eternal fiery glow of the Hebrew prophets, the torch of universal justice, the prophet Isaiah’s longing for a world without bloodletting, the prophet Amos’s social sensitivity, and the prophet Micah’s succinct maxim: “He has told you, O man, what is good, And what the LORD requires of you: Only to do justice And to love goodness, And to walk modestly with your God” (Micah 6:8). He elaborates on the universal dimension of these biblical imperatives, drawing on Isaiah 57:19, and of course he can find plentiful supporting evidence in the Torah itself (in the spirit of Leviticus 19:34), where the Torah commands Jews to love the strangers in their midst as if they were their own flesh and blood because the Jewish people have intimate experience with persecution and oppression: “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall

20 Idem, Accepting the Yoke of Heaven, 50.

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love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I the Lord am your God.” Yet, Levinas’s political moderation involves a stern rebuke not just of the nationalist right but also of the seeds of post-Zionism and the “New Left” in Europe and the United States, which call into question Israel’s legitimacy. Faced with the antizionist sentiments of the New Left, Levinas laments: Why [was it that] these young men felt they had to make such a choice, why they operated on thoughtlessness, on the usage of empty concepts (imperialism, colonization) and also on the feeling that it is the Palestinians who are the weakest, and one must be on the side of the weak (as if Israel were not extremely, dreadfully vulnerable).21

The Western radical Left’s fervent and grotesque emotional identification with nationalists and fundamentalists in the Arab world has given rise, according to Levinas, to a new strand of Kafkaesque politics, an unholy alliance between unadulterated antisemitism and antizionism: “Antisemitism will now have as allies those who are as if deprived of antisemitism. Isn’t this a strange reversal, which proves that the absence of antisemitism is not enough?”22 In November 1965, at the apex of Nasserite pan-Arabism, Levinas poured scorn on international actors who tried to downplay, minimize, and obscure the threat of annihilation facing the state of the Jews. In a passage that remains vividly resonantly over half a century later, as the Iranian nuclear project picks up steam, Levinas emphasized the dehumanization of Israel by hostile forces and the risible efforts in some parts of the West to turn a blind eye: Didn’t someone say recently: “We are one hundred million strong to crush you.” When Israel arms itself against its neighbors, pacifists asks: How do you know that your neighbors do not want to make peace with you? Did they say so? Yes, they did say so; they told us we were like grasshoppers. It is a remarkably contemporary passage. That way of taking human faces for grasshoppers! Or that way of taking the historical act of Return for a movement of grasshoppers.23

21 Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, 115. 22 Ibid., 116. 23 Ibid., 68.

Leibowitz, Levinas, and Zionism

In response to the Israeli-Jewish radical Left’s loss of faith in the justness of the Zionist cause, Levinas proposes a curious parallel in his Talmudic reading about the sin of the Israelite spies sent to explore Canaan, who returned in a slough of despond. He hints at the ruinous self-doubt responsible for estrangement of the collective self, a pathological denial of their collective rights, which begets an excessive emotional identification with the political Other, which in turn begets self-hatred: Did the crime of the explorers consist of being too pure and of having thought that they did not even have rights to this land? Or did these people back off from a project which seemed to them Utopian, unrealizable? Did they think their right lacked might or that they had no rights, that the Promised Land was not permitted to them? In both cases, the explorers were wrong. . . . These were then useless scruples They cried for no reason. The tears of beautiful souls are dangerous when they are without cause. They provoke real misfortunes which resemble the imaginary ones.24

Levinas’s metahistorical conception of Zionism finds expression in his statement that Zionism represents the survival of Judaism rather than a plain form of nationalism. Consequently, given the question facing him—Does he see the Land of Israel as founded more on Jewish texts than geography?—Levinas answers that he did not attach supreme value to land, because the origins of Jewish identity are textual rather than territorial.25 This idea in Levinas’s thought is also implied in what considers the dialectical relationship between Judaism, territory, and technology. In his essay “Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us,” published in his book Difficult Freedom, he calls into question Heidegger’s praise for the hegemonic conception of history in the West, according to which the interpersonal and international are inextricably tied to nations residing on their own soil.26 Levinas opens this essay with an 24 Ibid., 68–69. 25 Idem, Ethics and Infinity. 26 Levinas also addresses the historical anomaly of the Jewish people, compared to other nations who remained settled in their own land, in his short essay “Politique Après,” first published in 1979 in the French journal Les Temps Modernes. In this essay, Levinas sees the Diaspora Jewish existence as “an extreme form of human potential. This potential disturbs and irritates the awareness of sovereignty that nations which are well established among nations have of themselves. These nations are firmly settled on their land, and their self-affirmation is supported by . . . this original experience of the unshakeable.” Emmanuel Levinas, Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, trans. Gary D. Mole (Bloomington, IN: Indiana

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account of the spiritual, social, and ecological dangers of the technological revolution but proceeds to utterly excoriate the Heideggerian conception of linkage to a physical locality, which he associates with the eternal temptation of paganism. In marked contrast to Heidegger’s antipathy for urban life, Levinas believes that Judaism is a party to the Socratic conception of the polis as the center of human activity. This Socratic existence is bound up with man’s involvement in topical affairs, in the intellectual’s compliance with the Sartrian imperative to be an “engaged intellectual” who throws himself into the public sphere for the sake of truth and justice, for the good of the society in which he lives. The book I Wanted to Ask You, Professor Leibowitz, published posthumously, contains hundreds of the thousands of letters written to Yeshayahu Leibowitz over the years, reflecting the esteem with which he was held across Israeli society, from secular and religious, young and old, the educated and uneducated alike. Leibowitz answered every single letter and often invited his correspondents to his home for a tête-à-tête. There was a gulf between Leibowitz’s gentleness in private conversations and his inflexibly hardline demeanor in the public sphere. This collection of letters attests to his intense humanity and attentiveness to other people, without distinction as to class, gender, or educational attainment. He gladly assumed the role of national Socrates, seeing the individuals in front of him as individuals. In the same essay (“Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us”), Levinas recalls the pioneering space mission of the Soviet astronaut Yuri Gagarin and argues that Judaism and technology are alike in posing the same eternal challenge to the pagan tendency to submit to a fixed geographical location, and thus hold the keys to the emancipation of man from the limits of physical space. In this sense, Levinas argues, Judaism, like technology, demystifies the world from its pagan tendencies in virtue of its abstract universalism; Judaism rediscovers the concrete Other in the bareness of the human face. Leibowitz concurs with Levinas, of course, in his view of Judaism as a demystification of the world, but he does not associate this with science and technology. True to his epistemological separation between scientific quesUniversity Press, 1994), 90. Here Levinas sees eye-to-eye with Leibowitz, who writes in Accepting the Yoke of Heaven that the historical fate of all nations is determined by the Lord of History. The only difference with the People of Israel is what they have been commanded to perform.

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tions based on empirical observation (categories of “truth and lies”) and moralexistential questions (categories of “good and bad”), Leibowitz sees no affinities between the scientific revolution and its monotheistic analogue. On the contrary, in his commentary on the book of Job, Leibowitz writes the following: “The central chapter in the book of Job, I submit, is chapter 28. It offers a wonderful description of man’s technological achievements. But for all of man’s greatness, accomplishments, and abilities, in the same world where man has such power, his fate is unintelligible to him.”27 Tradition states that the Torah was given to the People of Israel at Mount Sinai, which according to the Midrash is the smallest mountain in the Sinai Desert, symbolizing the humility expected of Jews. This desert, of course, was not in the Land of Israel but outside it; a wilderness that is at once also heavenly. The Torah was given in this ex-territorial enclave, this terra nullius, in order to forcefully highlight its cosmic relevance for all humanity. “Sinai,” according to tradition, is derived from the Hebrew nisi, “miraculous”—an allusion to the miracle of the giving of the Ten Commandments—a revolutionary document in the history of human morality, which anticipates the miracle of the nation that sustained itself not by “chariots and horses,” but by God. A nation that defied the rules of historical gravity, survived through apolitical, spiritual, and textual sovereignty, and created cultural, scientific, and intellectual wealth for the whole of humanity precisely out of the paradoxical power latent in the geopolitical and military impotence that characterized it for some two millennia, despite the heavy price that it had to “pay” for this spiritual odyssey, which has no parallel in human history. Leibowitz called the opening words of the Israeli Declaration of Independence—“The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people”—a brazen lie, insisting that the formative event in biblical history took place at Mount Sinai. The Torah, he writes in Accepting the Yoke of Heaven, is not tied to a specific place. It is universal, and that is why God does not give it to Moses in the Land of Israel, but in the no-man’s land of the wilderness. For the same reason, he opposed the insertion of the ambiguous term “Rock of Israel” in the Declaration of Independence, because it was obvious to him that the overwhelming majority of Israeli secular Zionists understood it as an allusion to the People of Israel, rather than the Sovereign of the Universe:

27 Leibowitz, Five Books of Faith, 32.

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The tzur Yisrael—Rock of Israel—of the blessing after the recitation of the Shema, who is the same Rock of Israel of King David and the prophet Isaiah, exists beyond Israel, beyond human values and any human categories. The “Rock of Israel” of the Declaration of Independence is within Israel, it is Israel itself, it is the national genius of the People of Israel. The insertion of “Rock of Israel” into the secular consciousness of our Declaration of Independence was but a scam: a baksheesh that the secular public gave religious society, which did not refrain from accepting this bribe.28

Similarly, as part of his campaign to extricate the Jewish religion from the bear hug of the Zionist stage, Leibowitz fervently opposed the recitation of Hallel on Israeli Independence Day and the Prayer for the State of Israel. In this sense, he was much closer to the ultra-Orthodox, despite his Zionism: Only a war for the sake of the heavens can be divinely mandated: a war explicitly commanded by the Torah (such as Joshua’s war) or a war waged by Jews for the sake of the Torah (such as the Hasmonean war). Our War of Independence was not a war for the sake of the heavens. It was not a war for the sake of the Torah. . . . It was a war for the sake of the national-political independence of the Jewish people in their land. The desire for national-political independence is natural and proper for any nation, but it is not sacred and bears no significance for religion or faith.29

This case exemplifies the profound complexity of Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the man who in his original thinking and intellectual independence placed himself outside any discernible social framework. True to his Socratic ideals, Leibowitz saw fit to challenge secular society, which was often dismissive of the spiritualexistential ideal of ultra-Orthodox society. In an article in the Haaretz newspaper, Leibowitz blasted the characteristic ignorance, nationalism, and militarism of certain quarters of Israel’s secular society and their loathing for ultra-Orthodox society. Here is what he wrote to the editor: In your editorial against institutions for baalei teshuva [secular Jews who return to religious Judaism] supported by the state budget (Haaretz, June 04, 1984), you spoke of “the principles on which the Zionist state

28 Yeshayahu Leibowitz, “Problems of the World and Problems of the Nation,” Hazut 4 (1967): 74 [Hebrew]. 29 Idem, I Wanted To Ask You, Professor Leibowitz, 40.

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was founded: that a Jew in the Land of Israel must support himself by his own labor and be ready to defend himself and his people”—hence your dismissal of yeshiva students, who are “Jews to whom the state affords a parasitic existence” and who “are searching for satisfaction of their desires outside a national framework.” In contrast, let it be known: 1. The State of Israel is not a “Zionist state” but a Jewish state, and Torah-studying and Torah-observant Jews have at least as much of a share in it as heretics, Sabbath-desecrators, treif-eaters, and menstrualfornicators; 2. The whole “Zionist state” is based on the fact that its nation does not support itself by its labor, and it is sustained in its “parasitic existence” by grants worth billions of dollars from gentiles. In exchange, its army acts as a garrison to protect the interests of its benefactors, and it sends its sons to kill and be killed for their sake—and this is its “nationalism.” 3. There is no clearer Jewish “national framework” than the yeshiva world, which draws entirely on texts that are particular to the Jewish people, their history, and their creative endeavors, from their best to worst, from all their glorious achievements to their failures—all these together comprise the “national.” It is doubtful whether one might find any national Jewish content in the world of the writer of the aforementioned editorial—unless the concept of the nation is identified with the cult of colored fabric tied to a pole, the uniform of the Jewish army, and the Jewish fighting power armored with American steel. A certain nineteenth-century thinker must have had such “nationalism” in mind when he warned of “the progression from humanity to bestiality.”30

Leibowitz emphasizes in this context: “A gap has been created between those Jews who observe the mitzvot and those who do not, a gap which is not only ideological, but is—even against their will—existential.”31 Here is a letter that Leibowitz wrote to Nathan Rotenstreich: Secular society’s ingrained emotional aversion to the content and form of traditional Judaism [that is, Orthodox Judaism] . . . these remarks are actually aimed at intellectual society, including many of our best friends. This emotional attitude is something completely different from personal hostility to observant Jews—an antipathy that does not exist in our university society. The fury, and rage, and anger of the Jews who have thrown off the yoke of the Torah and the commandments, as the Judaism

30 Ibid., 320–321. 31 Idem, Accepting the Yoke of Heaven, 66.

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of Torah and the commandments endured—all this is understandable both intellectually and psychologically, and necessitate such an intellectual and psychological reality.32

For Levinas, it was his critical encounter with his mysterious teacher Monsieur Chouchani in the late 1940s that settled the question of his attitude to ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) Judaism. Levinas saw himself as a devotee of “emancipatory Talmudism,” that is, as one who did not adhere to a halakhic and existential praxis typified by antagonism to the Zeitgeist, but to a Judaism that suited the universalism and humanism of the modern Enlightenment. Nor did he have any qualms about using concepts lifted from Christian theology to speak of the Jewish people’s mission, referring to the Holocaust as “the Passion of Auschwitz.” Leibowitz, of course, was mortified by the use of quintessentially Christian imagery and terminology to describe the genocide of European Jewry for two main reasons: first, his intense spiritual aversion to Christianity, which he perceived as a religion that satisfied its followers’ needs rather than making demands of them, what Levinas called “a religion for adults”; second, because for Leibowitz, the use of theological and mystical terminology to refer to immanent-historical events was a theological temptation that true believers must resist. Leibowitz called for divine worship in the world as it is—that is, in a cruel, alienating, unjust, unforgiving world. He did not see the Holocaust, therefore, as a religious or transhistorical event, but as another indication of the chilling reality of a world that kept on turning, of a human and worldly tragedy, because such is the fate of the powerless in the hands of the wicked. Leibowitz also fervently criticized what he called the “cult of the Holocaust,” the construction of the cultural, spiritual, moral, and national substance of Israeli society atop the tragedy of European Jewry. He fervently opposed “pilgrimages” by youth movements to the extermination camps in Poland, arguing that they were symptomatic of a society shorn of positive-operative spiritual and cultural assets; instead of contending with its own identity problems, it reified a negative-reactionary identity, defining itself via negation as a victim’s counterreaction to European antisemitism. Leibowitz scorned the “cult of the Holocaust” as a form of political, spiritual, and cultural escapism. In so doing, he performed a kind of implicit inversion of Sartre’s critique of antisemitism in his Anti-Semite and Jew: for Leibowitz, it is not the antisemite who bases his

32 Idem, I Wanted To Ask You, Professor Leibowitz, 355–356.

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existence on his own lack of authenticity by negating the Other/Jew, but the Israeli Jew who has discarded his national patrimony and based his political existence on the Other’s hatred toward him, on the terrifyingly effacing gaze of the Other: The prevailing cult of the Holocaust has the malicious habit of distracting us from existing problems in the present moment. For none of the problems that exist at any given moment are the problems of the past, but the problems of the future. . . . I ask whether such a thing exists in our social, cultural, and educational reality, or whether we have something else entirely, when an awareness of the past is artificially perpetuated in order to let us off the hook, to permit us to release ourselves psychologically from our forward-looking present duties. . . . The real cult of the Holocaust is educational content. Nowadays, trips are arranged to Auschwitz to distract the youth from the real problems. The life-and-death problems we face. So they breathe substance into imaginary problems: what the gentiles have done to us. As if this has the slightest connection to the life-and-death problems we face today.33

Leibowitz was intolerant of those who believed that the apocalypse of the Holocaust had provoked their crises of faith or had brought them to abandon religious observance. He decried this tendency, reasoning that anyone who did not believe in God after Auschwitz had not believed in God before Auschwitz, either. This hardline and uncompromising element of Leibowitz’s theology was bound up in his radical conception of worship “for its own sake,” of faith bereft of any expectation of reward, as opposed to the faith “not for its own sake,” a kind of insurance against whatever misfortunes are itching to enter the world: Here I cannot resist telling of a certain person in our midst, of a very high intellectual and moral caliber, who is also immersed in Judaism, who said that after Auschwitz he lost his faith in God. My response is this: you never believed in God but in God’s help and that faith was disillusioned—God did not help. One who believes in God, however, does not relate this belief in God’s help; nor does he expect that God will help him. He believes in God in terms of His Godhead, not in terms of the functions that attribute to him concerning His dealings with man.34

33 Idem, The Limits of Reason, 96, 115. 34 Idem, Accepting the Yoke of Heaven, 20.

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To Leibowitz’s credit as a spiritual leader, we can say that he practiced what he preached. Leibowitz had suffered the most terrible tragedy of all, losing two children, but he never cast an accusatory finger at the heavens or reached a crisis of faith. He hints at this in the coda of his Five Books of Faith, sharing the following autobiographical anecdote with the reader: A while ago, a very intelligent woman told me how she had become religious. Her youngest son was seriously ill and the doctors despaired of saving his life. She prayed for his recovery, and the boy recovered. “I reached faith when my son, with God’s help, became healthy,” she said. I told her that I knew a woman whose son had been ill, and with God’s help, had died. The woman thought about what I said and replied: “Thank you for opening my eyes to see the true meaning of faith.”

The woman whose son fell ill and died was Leibowitz’s wife, and the boy who never recovered was Leibowitz’s own son. Leibowitz chose to end his book with this anecdote, hinting that his faith was not even shaken by the loss of his son, to whom he dedicated the book: “In memory of my son Elhanan, a man of faith and Torah and science, who passed away in the prime of his life.” We have also seen that Levinas chose to dedicate Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence to family members murdered in Lithuania during the Holocaust and to all other victims of hatred and violence. Personal tragedy and grief did not rock these men’s profound religiosity; on the contrary, they transformed the cruel loss of their loved ones into hidden wellsprings of an even deeper faith. For Leibowitz, this meant an even loftier faith, favoring the fulfillment of religious commandments irrespective of any worldly reward, faith “for its own sake,” which does not see the religious lifestyle as a kind of existential insurance certificate. Levinas, meanwhile, channeled the loss that he experienced during the Holocaust into a noble stance of universal humanism. He viewed his own loss as inextricably linked to all victims of hatred and racism, the victims of the same antisemitism, of hatred of the human Other. Leibowitz also despised any attempt to impute a theological cause-and-effect relationship to the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel three years later: The Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel are monumental events—the most monumental events—in the history of the Jewish people, and they have monumental importance—perhaps decisive importance for the existence and future of the Jewish people. But these two events, like the overwhelming majority of events in human history, carry no religious or faith-based significance. In the Holocaust,

Leibowitz, Levinas, and Zionism

there was no martyrdom in God’s name; it was the result of the helpless falling into the hands of the wicked of the earth; while the establishment of the state [of Israel] was the fruit of a battle for human-national interests, not of a battle for the sake of the heavens. Nothing in either of these monumental events related to man’s standing before God, nor even to his awareness of this standing—for this awareness is the substance and essence of religious faith. And if for Gush Emunim, the state is a religious value, this is absolute idolatry.35

Despite his fierce criticism, Leibowitz remained devoted to the Zionist enterprise and very much hoped that it would enjoy sustainable success. In a conversation with Joseph Agassi in the last year of his life, Leibowitz confused that “for me, the Jewish Question is my life’s main content.”36

35 Idem, I Wanted To Ask You, Professor Leibowitz, 21. 36 Idem, The Limits of Reason, 137.

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5 Mysticism Under the Guise of Musar Professor Joseph Dan draws a direct line between the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 and the mass forced conversions of the era, and Rabbi Isaac Luria’s monumental enterprise of kabbalistic thought in sixteenth-century Safed. The Spanish-Jewish refugees who reached the Land of Israel after the historic catastrophe of the Alhambra Decree, he argues, were the driving force behind the establishment of Safed’s great spiritual center. The expulsion from Spain was a traumatic event in Jewish national life for two reasons: first, the liquidation of the world’s largest Jewish community, and second, beyond the political and economic ramifications, the fact that many Jews preferred to embrace Christ than leave Spain, such that the exile induced a protracted theological crisis. According to Joseph Dan’s historiosophical narrative (including in his chapter on Lurianic Kabbalah in his book Jewish Mysticism and Jewish Ethics), many Sephardic Jews blamed the rationalist orientation of contemporary Jewish thought for allegedly giving rise to a spiritual feebleness, at a time when much of Sephardic Jewry faced and excruciating dilemma. I would submit that Levinasian philosophy also contains clear mystical motifs, and just as Lurianic Kabbalah in Safed was influenced by the tragedy of 1492, Levinas undoubtedly bases his later thinking on the apocalyptic events that began with Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. We have already seen that Levinas proposes a characteristically mystical interpretation of the rise of Nazism, reasoning that whatever geopolitical constellations might shed light on the quandary of Nazism as the dark heart of the twentieth century, the Jews possess the vague sense that this eruption of pagan barbarism on the stage of history is connected to their historic destiny of offering a metaphysical resistance to such pagan barbarism by appealing to the transcendental.

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Levinas’s language is intensely mystical and theological. The words “miracle” and “revelation,” for example, are among the most commonly used in his philosophical lexicon. In order to imbue his thought with a universal dimension and secure his admission to phenomenological philosophical circles, Levinas ignores the kabbalistic symbolism of one of his favorite books in the Jewish bookcase, Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin’s Nefesh Hachaim, and opts to draw on a Cartesian methodology to obtain philosophical legitimacy for his frequent use of the term “infinity.” Similarly, for the exact same reason, he prefers to rely on a philosophical tradition with an ancient pedigree, namely Platonic thought, to argue that “the good is beyond being,” instead of using the traditional term in Hebrew literature that hints at a similar metaphysical principle (infinity is hatov ve’hametiv—“who is good and does good to all”). If so, if what greatly influenced the cultivation of the monumental metaphysical doctrines of sixteenth-century Safed was to a large extent the historical and ideational fallout of 1492, then for Levinas, the historical equivalent is 1933 as the harbinger of a civilizational rift. We have already seen that the failure of rationalist theology to prevent the forced conversions of the Spanish Inquisition paved the way for the creation of the new and daring theology of Lurianic Kabbalah in Safed. If the impetus for Lurianic Kabbalah, therefore, came from the spiritual infirmity and tyranny of 1492, catastrophes that rationalist theology failed to forestall as a metaphysical buffer, then what propelled Levinas (in the footsteps of Franz Rosenzweig) was the resounding failure of philosophical idealism, especially in its Hegelian incarnation, to serve as a metaphysical buffer against the political oppression and moral deficit exposed by the creation of a political structure unique to the twentieth century: the totalitarian regime. That is, if the Lurianic ethics that flourished in sixteenth-century Safed is also understood as a bold and creative theosophical response to the impotence of theological rationalism amid the chilling reality of the collapse of Sephardic Jewry and the associated wave of forced conversions, then Levinas, taking his cue from Rosenzweig, strives to contend with the Achilles’s heel of Hegelianism. In this respect, he is most distinguished as an ethical thinker by his sober realization that Hegelianism, as a philosophical method, ignores the interpersonal dimension of the human experience (or at least paints a frighteningly Hobbesian picture of it, as expressed in the master-slave dialectic) while nevertheless purporting, with Promethean passion, to have identified the dialectical raison d’être of human history. I wish to demonstrate here how Levinasian thought can be read through the terminology of Lurianic cosmology and seen to contain anachronistic echoes

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of Rabbi Isaac Luria’s cosmology and cosmogony, the mythical elements having been subjected to a kind of inversion. For Levinas, the kabbalistic concept of tzimtzum—contraction—is repurposed for the interpersonal dimension of existence. Echoing Gershom Scholem,1 Yoram Jacobson demonstrates that Hasidic thought can be understood as a kind of psychologization of Lurianic mysticism.2 By analogy, Levinasian “contraction” does indeed evince an “ethicization” of Lurianic symbolism, heralding not the wonder of the creation ex nihilo (Lurianic cosmogony) but the birth of the responsible subject, locating the Archimedean point of his existence in attentiveness and responsiveness to the Other. Levinasian “contraction” highlights the glaring asymmetry between the Self-Same and the human Other; and the formative act of kindness replaces the chesed (kindness) of the ein sof, the “infinite light” that contracts its light, as a spiritual metaphor, to vacate conceptual space for the creation of the cosmos. Lurianic contraction is an act of metaphysical withdrawal that clears space for the autonomous existence of the universe, while for Levinas, this anthropomorphic depiction undergoes a kind of inversion, as the subject assumed the ontological and existential tendency that Levinas calls “ego-logy” (solipsism), constricts his unbridled spontaneity, and turns to face the same hidden and indecipherable exteriority reflected as a trace of infinity in the face of the Other. As for the Lurianic concept of shevirah (“shattering,” the formative metaphysical event of the shevirat hakelim, the “shattering of the vessels”), for Levinas this does not relate to an absolute and infinite Other, but a concrete Other that shatters the typically peaceful and atomistic nature of the solipsistic subject’s “being” and makes a heteronomous demand for the Abraham response of hineni—“Here I am!” Moreover, the shattering of the ego-logical in Levinas’s thought is not just a traumatic metaphysical event but a brilliant and constitutive harbinger of the redemption (antithetically to Lurianism, where the shattering constitutes a catastrophic occurrence), in the sense that it anticipates and heralds the Levinasian “miracle of exteriority,” which facilitates a post-existentialist existence, in which man finds his meaning in being an attentive and responsive subject. In Lurianic mythology, the core concept of reshimu, the residual traces of the infinite light that remain in the vacant space after the act of contraction,

1

See the chapter on the Lurianization of the messianic idea in Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism (New York: Schocken Books, 1969).

2

Yoram Jacobson, Hasidic Thought (Tel Aviv: MOD Press, 1998).

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plays an important role. For his part, Levinas employs a similar mystical rationale, employing a core concept that he calls “trace.” Indeed, whereas in Lurianic Kabbalah, the reshimu is the flickers of the divine light that once encompassed all of reality before the contraction, for Levinas the face of the human Other is covered in the same latent “trace” of infinity, a kind of reshimu that radiates from the human face and similarly constitutes a kind of spiritual residue and immanent manifestation of the transcendental. In this sense, one can argue that the enigmatic Levinasian concept of the “trace” is a phenomenological vessel for introducing the patently mystical concept of the Shekhinah, the Divine Presence, into his ethics. Levinas hints at this when he writes in Totality and Infinity that the idea of infinity is typified by lovingkindness and radiance. Levinas, as we have seen, defines Judaism as a “religion for adults.” Similarly, Lurianic ethics emphasizes the acute responsibility of each and every individual in the sublime and complex chain that will complete the process of cosmic tikkun (rectification) and redeem Israel and the whole cosmos from their chaotic metaphysical Pandemonium, as the nitzutzot, the divine sparks, remain exiled in the bowels of the keliphot (the gross, dark side). In so doing, Lurianic Kabbalah makes intense demands of anyone who subscribes to its worldview, its notion of tikkun implying onerous ethical obligations. Living in the light of Lurianic metaphysics means submitting to infinite demands and perpetual pressure. For Levinas, the connection with the Other is only a matter of responsibility, whether or not we heed the call reflected in the face, know how to actualize this responsibility, or are capable of acting for the Other’s sake, of proclaiming, “Hineni!,” of giving, of being human spirit. Similarly for Rabbi Isaac Luria, man cannot choose to care exclusively for his own needs—to excuse himself from the mystical odyssey of tikkun olam and the liberation of the trapped sparks of divine light—on the grounds that he is an autonomous being, a free man. On this point, both Levinasian and Lurianic ethics question the liberal conception of the autonomous subject, for how are we to preserve ourselves from evil? Levinas answers: How to preserve oneself from evil? By each taking upon himself the responsibility of the others. Men are not only and in their ultimate essence “for self ” but “for others,” and this “for others” must be probed deeply. . . . Israel would teach that the greatest intimacy or me to myself consists in being at every moment responsible for the others, the hostage of others. I can be responsible for that which I did not do and take upon myself a distress which is not mine. . . . For the human world to be possible. . . . at each moment there must be someone who can be responsible for the others. . . .

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Even if you are free, you are not the absolute beginning. You come after many things and many people. You are not just free; you are also bound to others beyond your freedom. You are responsible for all. Your liberty is also fraternity. Responsibility for the sins you did not commit, responsibility for the others.3

For Rabbi Isaac Luria, this is a demand to participate in the grandiose cosmic saga of restoration and redemption vis-à-vis the infinite light, the absolute Other, characterized by radical transcendence and absolute alterity, while for Levinas, the emphasis is on the concrete Other, whose face is awash in the radiant light of enigma, a trace, a mystical manifestation that reflects the absolute Other of infinity. Hence the sense of urgency in Levinasian ethics: Its urgency is not a limit imposed on freedom but attests, more than freedom, more than the isolated subject that freedom establishes, to an undeniable responsibility, beyond commitments made, for in them the absolutely separated self can put itself into question, claiming to hold the ultimate secret of subjectivity.4

Interestingly, both Rabbi Isaac Luria and Emmanuel Levinas conceive the idea of “chosenness” as a spiritual imperative. In Lurianic Kabbalah, the notion of chosenness implies that a Jew’s cosmic destiny is his symbolic endeavor and the battle to subdue the sitra achra (the dark “other side”), eliminate evil, and liberate the divine sparks. It also means that the Torah was given at Mount Sinai in order to herald that the Jews possessed this destiny, that is, that they were participants in this cosmic and mythological struggle. Analogously, addressing the giving of the Torah, Levinas writes that: God, therefore, did not create without concerning himself with the meaning of creation. Being has a meaning. The meaning of being, the meaning of creation is to realize the Torah. The world is here so that the ethical order has the possibility of being fulfilled. The act by which the Israelites accept the Torah is the act which gives meaning to reality.5

Similarly, the concept of chosenness for Levinas is not connected to spiritual privileges but to a vast system of intense responsibility. The Levinasian subject 3

Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, 85.

4

Ibid., 46.

5

Ibid., 41.

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is expected to demonstrate spiritual and ethical leadership, to demand more of himself than from others, in the spirit of the Talmudic saying “The Holy Blessed One, desired to make Israel worthy, therefore He gave them much Torah.” Levinas emphasizes that the idea of chosenness can easily degenerate into unbridled national chauvinism, but in its authentic core, it expresses a cosmic awareness of the unshakable destiny that is the font of ethics and moral living, the entry point to the universal objective of tikkun olam, implied in the glorious isolation of a “subject that dwells apart.” Levinas liked to frequently quote Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov to stress the Same’s responsibility for the human Other: “We are all guilty of all and for all men before all, and I more than the others.” Levinas sheds light on this ethical rationale in explaining that my responsibility . . . is not owing to such or such a guilt which is really mine, or to offenses that I would have committed; but because I am responsible for a total responsibility, which answers for all the others and for all in the others, even for their responsibility. The I always has one responsibility more than all the others. . . . I understand responsibility as responsibility for the Other, thus as responsibility for what is not my deed, or for what does not even matter to me. . . . I am responsible for him without even having taken on responsibilities in his regard; his responsibility is incumbent on me. It is a responsibility that goes beyond what I do. Usually, one is responsible for what one does oneself. I say, in Otherwise than Being, that responsibility is initially a for the Other. This means that I am responsible for his very responsibility. . . . The proximity of the Other is presented as the fact that the Other is not simply close to me in space, or close like a parent, but he approaches me essentially insofar as I feel myself—insofar as I am—responsible for him. . . . The tie with the Other is knotted only as responsibility.6

Lurianic Kabbalah is also characterized by a conception of collective and communal responsibility, in virtue of which individuals are required to atone for the sins of others, and the individual’s obligation to advance the Redemption knows no bounds. Lurianism, like Levinasianism, provides an illustration of the constructivist role of Jewish ethics, which allows for the assimilation of daring, and revolutionary metaphysical conceptions, which bolster Orthodox Judaism in light of a new rationale for halakhic existence.

6

Idem, Ethics and Infinity, 95–99.

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Finally, it would be remiss to ignore the elitist aspects of Lurianic Kabbalah and Levinasian ethics. Rabbi Isaac Luria personally surrounded himself with a select coterie of confidants, while Levinas writes in an esoteric philosophical jargon that is largely unintelligible without the requisite philosophical tools. He acknowledges as much in his book Ethics and Infinity, telling Philippe Nemo that his ethics address philosophical society. One of the moral treatises that most closely resembles Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s thinking is Mesillat Yesharim by Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, an eighteenth-century Italian kabbalist suspected of Sabbatean sympathies. On the face of it, this presents something of a puzzle, because Leibowitz was even more radically opposed to Kabbalah and mysticism than Levinas. Leibowitz regarded theories of reincarnation with contempt and considered the ten sephirot (divine emanations) and other kabbalistic myths as a particularly crude form of idolatry. He regarded the mere act of metaphysical speculation about the essence of God, who is incorporeal and cannot be grasped in corporeal terms, to be heresy against the core principles of monotheism.7 In response to questions about the widespread popularity of Kabbalah in the present day, Leibowitz used to say bluntly that he was not surprised, because idolatry has always been more popular than monotheism: “The Zohar had such a tremendous impact because in every generation, idolatry has been more influential than the true faith.”8 This element of Leibowitz’s thinking is bound up in one of the central tenets of his Jewish philosophy, namely the duty to try to transcend to a higher spiritual level of faith “for its own sake,” as opposed to faith that is “not for its own sake,” of adherence to the existential framework of accepting the yoke of heaven in order to win spiritual and material dividends. Leibowitz illustrates this article of his faith by elaborating on the proclamation of the Shema: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one!”:

7

“The mere question [the identity of the divine] is the sort of thing an idolater asks about his deities. A believer in God knows these three words in the Torah: ehyeh asher ehyeh, ‘I shall be what I shall be,’ and the three final words recited on Yom Kippur: adonai hu ha-elohim, ‘Adonai is our Lord.’ He knows that God, Blessed Be He, is incorporeal and cannot be grasped in corporeal terms (that is to say, cannot be grasped in the categories of thought) and has no image at all. Belief in God is not a matter of knowing something about God, but accepting the duty of worshipping God—that is, to observe the laws of the Torah and the commandments.” Leibowitz, I Wanted To Ask You, Professor Leibowitz, 17.

8

Ibid., 60.

Mysticism Under the Guise of Musar

When we speak of the Shema, we do not refer to the first verse, known as the greatest declaration of the Jewish faith. We mean the following verse, which is the operative clause. Philosophically, we might say that this is a categorical imperative. . . . When we proceed from “hear, O Israel” to “if, then, you obey,” it is as if we switch to a totally different world. . . . The two worlds represented by these two Torah readings differ in their conception of faith: “for its sake” and “not for its sake.” The Torah portion with the Shema is one of faith for its own sake: faith that is for the sake of faith in God, and divine worship for the sake of divine worship—both of them are ends, not means. In contrast, in the portion that includes the words “if, then, you obey” presents the love of God and worship of God as means to an end. Since these two portions are connected, we learn that they are both legitimate. The first portion is addressed to whoever is capable of divine worship for its own sake. But it seems that not everyone has this competence, so others are also given a way to worship God and to be fully kosher Jews despite being unable to reach the pinnacle, doing whatever it is they do because they believe in what is called “reward and punishment.”9

As we have said, Leibowitz answered people who asked him about the essence of God in Judaism by slamming the question as intrinsically idolatrous, saying that God’s answer to Moses at the burning bush—“I shall be what I shall be”—neatly encapsulates Judaism’s negative theology. Judaism is an empirical heteronomy of ritual observance, and the vast existential paradox at its core comes down to the fact that submission to a lifestyle of religious observance is what ultimately redeems man from his natural caprice and enslavement to his ego, from the apathetic and solipsistic existence that Levinas calls “ego-logy.” For Levinas, the “miracle of exteriority” relates to man’s responsiveness to the human Other, to the concrete Other, while for Leibowitz it seems to apply only to the absolute Other, to man’s voluntary and autonomous submission to the heteronomous call of the yoke of heaven, in the sense of “one from another and acquiesce one to another, to sanctify their Creator, with calmness of spirit.” Leibowitz used to invoke the theological allegory of the binding of Isaac as a supreme exemplar of faith for its own sake, as well as the Neilah prayer on Yom Kippur (“man has no superiority over beast [but] you have set man apart from the beginning and recognized him to stand before you”), and the anti-nihilistic conclusions of the book of Ecclesiastes (“the sum of the matter, when all is said

9

Idem, Five Books of Faith, 93–94.

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and done: Revere God and observe His commandments! For this applies to all mankind”) in order to emphasize that in his view, Judaism is not based on theological and mystical speculations but on the praxis of daily life, such as eating, drinking, intimacy, and work. That is, the relationship between impulse and the impulsive is such that the former is conquered by loyalty to the latter. Leibowitz, in a manner that proves once again his failure to heed his own call to separate religion from morality, used to cite Pirkei Avot—“who is mighty? He who subdues his inclinations”—to rebuke militaristic indulgence and the virus of the worship of military strength and the cult of the generals, which swept Israel like a foul wind after the SixDay War. He correctly understood the price of the Occupation, the inevitable dominance of the Shin Bet in the new geopolitical reality, the moral deficit and demographic suicide that this venture entailed. Another example of how he tied together religion and morality despite his pretenses of separating them is his statement that he would prefer the heroism of the victims of the Crusades to the warrior-heroism of Ariel Sharon and his merry men. Moreover, his condemnation of the Qibya operation cited biblical verses, from the story of how Jacob’s sons massacred the men of Shechem. Levinas used to say that his philosophy could be summarized in the seemingly banal phrase après vous, and that he regarded his philosophy as a philosophy of the day-to-day. From here, it is clear that for Leibowitz and Levinas, redemption was a daily praxis. For Leibowitz, this was to be achieved through the commandments and a halakhic existence alone, obedience to the absolute Other; for Levinas, meanwhile, the divine is revealed both through the commandments and face-to-face encounters. For both thinkers, this is a case of heteronomy, of difficult, daily, anti-messianic freedom; hence their antagonism for kabbalistic myths, both out of an ontological rejection of their radical and audacious anthropomorphisms and the immanent and worldly imagery of God in Kabbalah (such as in the theory of sephirot, or divine emanations), and because of their intellectual fears that mystical and ecstatic experiences might sweep them away with the masses, and even lead to apostasy and false messianism. Leibowitz, unlike Levinas, who openly trumpets religious humanism, performs an avant-garde inversion of the classical conception of the biblical expression “in the image of God,” reasoning that this does not make man a carbon copy or cosmic derivative of God, but that tzelem, “image,” comes from the word tzelalim, “shadows,” in a manner reminiscent of Plato’s cave. Both Levinas and Leibowitz were immune, therefore, to the “theurgic temptation” (“fixing divinity” by controlling higher worlds) and averred that

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the proper theological relationship was bottom-up, from man to God,10 and also asymmetrically between man and man (for Levinas). What they offered, therefore, was a forceful negation of sixteenth-century kabbalistic theosophy with everything it entailed, and especially the theosophic dialectic of Chabad, characterized by kabbalistic psychologism, cosmological-theological implications for the intimate sphere of the human soul, the unity of opposites, the dialectical tension between the immanent domain of God and the transcendental, between existence and absence, between the covering up and exposure of the divine light.11 In light of these profound reservations, Leibowitz’s spiritual affinity with Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto’s Mesillat Yesharim might come across as inexplicably paradoxical. But Leibowitz boldly separates Luzzatto’s biography and mystical writings from his Mesillat Yesharim, a core text of Musar literature, which is devoid of kabbalistic terminology. He distinguishes between Luzzatto’s many writings, just as he does with Rabbi Judah HaLevi. Leibowitz praises him for his piyyutim (liturgical poetry) while utterly repudiating the Judah HaLevi of the Book of the Kuzari, because like Levinas, he conceives of chosenness as a “difficult freedom,” as an infinite journey and burden of personal improvement through faith rather than as an unconditional privilege. Leibowitz liked to say that Jews must decide whether to choose the Judaism of Korah, the Judaism of “all the community are holy,” or to transcend to a higher stratum of religious existence, in the spirit of Moses (“to observe all My commandments and to be holy to your God,” Numbers 15:40). As Haviva Pedaya has shown—as the first to explore Leibowitz’s complex relationship with Luzzatto in general and Mesillat Yesharim in particular—Leibowitz strongly embraced the Mesillat Yesharim because it matched his stance that the path to a faith-based existence runs not through the mystical and the ecstatic (such as with the ascetics) but through the daily construction of a proper religious lifestyle, that is, adopting life habits that inspire certain reactions in

10 Leibowitz said: “The meaning of divine providence is that the connection between man and God does not descend from God to man, but rises from man to God, meaning a recognition of the duty of divine worship.” Leibowitz, Five Books of Faith, 75. 11 For a comprehensive study of this matter, see the excellent Rachel Elior, Paradoxical Ascent to God: The Kabbalistic Theosophy of Habad Hasidism, trans. Jeffrey M. Green (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 2014).

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one’s soul, in how one lives one’s life.12 He paraphrases the dialectic of Mesillat Yesharim thus, offering what is superficially a solipsistic mysticism but in practice represents daily grind: Here we encounter a paradox: Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, whose entire philosophy was supposedly immersed in the mystical significance of the messianic idea of redemption, the hallmarks of which are the Divine Spirit and the resurrection of the dead, was able to avoid a discussion of these “steps” as he mapped the path for the one who worships God by way of his own merit and worldly effort, and what one can achieve through it is down here, without any explicit reference to the plenitude above. “Holiness,” the end-point of Mesillat Yesharim, is the pinnacle of human achievement and the point of confluence between the human and the divine, but man must approach this encounter with divinity by himself, or else it will never take place.13

The path of faith outlined in Mesillat Yesharim is based on a baraita by Rabbi Pinehas ben Ya’ir, quoted in the Babylonian Talmud: From here Rabbi Pineḥas ben Ya’ir would say: Torah study leads to care in the performance of mitzvot. Care in the performance of mitzvot leads to diligence in their observance. Diligence leads to cleanliness of the soul. Cleanliness of the soul leads to abstention from all evil. Abstention from evil leads to purity and the elimination of all base desires. Purity leads to piety. Piety leads to humility. Humility leads to fear of sin. Fear of sin leads to holiness. Holiness leads to the Divine Spirit. The Divine Spirit leads to the resurrection of the dead.14

In this context, Haviva Pedaya wonders how Leibowitz could have drawn on a book written by a pseudo-Sabbatean kabbalist. She explains that the fact that Rabbi Luzzatto’s choice not to embrace the two final stages of this sequence (concerning the Divine Spirit and the resurrection of the dead) allowed Leibowitz to put stock in his œuvre as an ethical-religious paradigm, because Leibowitz’s Maimonidean negative theology has no tolerance for such

12 Haviva Pedaya, “Leibowitz and Luzzatto” in in Yeshayahu Leibowitz: Between Conservatism and Radicalism, ed. Aviezer Ravitzky ( Jerusalem: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2007), 174–175 [Hebrew]. 13 Leibowitz, Five Books of Faith, 86. 14 Babylonian Talmud, Avodah Zarah 20b.

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metaphysical adventurism. In this sense, Leibowitz is obviously much more radical than Maimonides himself, for whom the resurrection of the dead is a fundamental element of his thirteen articles of faith. Levinas, of course, concurs with this heteronomous Leibowitzian approach: in his book Difficult Freedom, his descriptions of God are not indicative but imperative. Leibowitz warns against such mystical-kabbalistic anthropocentrism as follows: Man tends to attach various functions or descriptions to God. But any function that man could impute to God is taken from what man knows and understands in his reality, and truth be told, reflects what he expects to receive from God . . . The worship of God alone, the worship of God for the sake of the worship of God (“for its own sake”), forces one to question conceptions of God using categories rooted in human consciousness. In philosophy, such an approach is called via negativa, and it forms the central chapter in Maimonides’ theology.15

Leibowitz’s Kantianism also finds expression in his dismissal of attempts to interpret immanent-worldly-historical matters in terms of the supposed will of God. Leibowitz, as we have seen, fervently opposes any hint of divine involvement in the world and in history. He despises the naïve and fascistic religiosity that treats God as responsible for ensuring order. To the self-proclaimed augurs of divine intent in historical omens, Leibowitz used to retort: “I do not know what lies behind the curtain.” In other words, Leibowitz totally resists the temptation of dogmatic metaphysics. In sum, in this appendix we have compared the historical background that led to the metaphysical innovations of Emmanuel Levinas and Rabbi Isaac Luria (surrounding the traumas of 1933 and 1492 respectively). We have considered their dissatisfaction with traditional philosophical and theological approaches, which disappointed at the critical moment of historical truth (Hegelian idealism and theological rationalism respectively). We have shown how the Levinasian enterprise can be read as an “ethicization” of Lurianic Kabbalah, implicitly inverting the kabbalistic concept of contraction from a primordial-cosmic act to a classic ethical activity in the interpersonal domain. Moreover, we have proposed reading the Lurianic concept of “shattering” into Levinasian philosophy, not as a historical catastrophe but as an act that announces the intrusive Other, the shattering of the pure Solipsism of the atomistic autonomous subject, as an

15 Leibowitz, Five Books of Faith, 69–70.

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event that anticipates redemption and the “miracle of exteriority.” We have also compared the Lurianic concept of tikkun, rectification, with Levinas’s infinite responsibility, and the fascinating Lurianic concept of reshimu with the Levinasian concept of the enigmatic and Romantic trace. Finally, we have compared how both thinkers understood the notion of chosenness, highlighted the metahistorical and supra-political aspects of their thought, and considered the elitist character of their philosophy. We have also pointed to the parallels between Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s emotional and religious attitudes to Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto’s Mesillat Yesharim and Levinas’s special approach to Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin’s Nefesh Hachaim. Leibowitz and Levinas, both typified by a rationalist LithuanianJewish temperament and the spiritual outlook of the Misnagdim, warmly embraced these respective works. Levinas even wrote the introduction of the French edition of the Nefesh Hachaim, perhaps his favorite book in the Jewish bookcase. In both cases, there was an element of mysticism in the garb of Musar—or more accurately, of religious ethics using the quintessentially mystical terminology and conceptual world of kabbalistic symbolism, in the case of the Nefesh Hachaim, and in the case of Luzzatto, a work written by one of the greatest kabbalists of modern times.

Afterword There is no heart without reason and no reason without a heart. —Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings

In the book featuring Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s conversation with Michael Shashar, Leibowitz is asked: “Which contemporary Jewish philosopher do you consider important?” He answers as follows: In the world of contemporary general philosophy, Emmanuel Levinas is a man whose Judaism colors his work. His four essays on the Talmud are among the most outstanding writings of our generation. But I refer not only to his writings about Judaism, but also to his general philosophy, nourished by the world of Judaism, even if it is not religious philosophy. It is hard to think of any other Jewish philosopher in our generation whose thought sprouted from the world of Judaism.1

It is clear from Leibowitz’s remarks that he held Levinas’s thought in great esteem and admired his contribution to modern Jewish and human philosophy, despite disagreeing with several fundamental elements, such as the link between religion and morality. Levinas, for his part, addresses Leibowitz laconically on two occasions: in his essay “The State of Israel and the Religion of Israel” (in Difficult Freedom) and again in his book Entre Nous.2

1

Yeshayahu Leibowitz and Michael Shashar, Yeshayahu Leibowitz: On the Whole World—Conversations with Michael Shashar (Tel Aviv: Keter, 1987), 54 [Hebrew].

2

Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (London: Continuum, 1991). See the essay “Dialogue on Thinking-of-the-Other,” 173–178. See also David Banon, “E. Levinas et Y. Leibovitz,” in Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophie et Judaïsme, ed. Danielle Cohen-Levinas and Shmuel Trigano (Paris: In Press Editions, 2002), 57–86 [French]. In this essay, Banon notes that Levinas depicts Leibowitz as a passive and almost antizionist thinker. According to Banon, Leibowitz thought of writing to Levinas to point out his mistake on this matter but changed his mind.

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In “The State of Israel and the Religion of Israel,” Levinas addresses the question of the State of Israel’s destiny. He argues that Israel’s ultimate genius is spiritual, not political. From this, he deduces that Israeli society must be commit itself to the imperative of “justice, justice you shall pursue,” and he therefore proposes a daring criterion for religiosity: to be religious means to see political sovereignty as a means to realizing the goals of social justice and tikkun olam; irreligiosity, meanwhile, finds expression in a conception of political sovereignty and independence as the pinnacle of Jewish and human existence. The dichotomy that Levinas proposes, therefore, is not between observant and non-observant Jews, but between those who want a Jewish state for the sake of a state and those who wish to use it as a vehicle for justice and the construction of an exemplary society. In this context, as we saw earlier, Levinas sees the kibbutzim as a religious enterprise, in the broadest sense of the term, in virtue of their members’ zeal to produce a model society. Nevertheless, he disputes the need for religious political parties. The State of Israel, Levinas argues, shall be religious in virtue of the genius of its national literature. It shall be religious in this sense, or not at all. But how must we read Jewish literature nowadays, Levinas asks. To answer this question, he cites Leibowitz’s essay “Religion and State,” reaffirming Leibowitz’s contention that there is no need to restore the halakhic institutions of antiquity or to ignore modernity in order to live in the light of halakha. In this context, Levinas invokes Leibowitz’s argument that the sociopolitical constellation described in the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud is an example of a situation that becomes human through law. Emmanuel Levinas died on the eighth night of Chanukah, which coincided with Christmas Day, December 25, 1995. The date of his death carries considerable symbolism, because he was “of the disciples of Aaron, loving peace and pursuing peace,” as Pirkei Avot puts it, and maintained a relationship of friendship and spiritual dialogue with leading Christian theologians. Levinasian philosophy is a bridge between cultures, committed to a universal ethics that knows no bounds. Yeshayahu Leibowitz passed away in August 1994. In the last few years of his life, Leibowitz used to say that he knew his time was coming. He was not looking for “metaphysical consolation” in the form of an afterlife, and his remarks about man’s transience were prescient echoes of the tannaic sage Akiva ben Mehalalel’s words in Pirkei Avot: Know from where you come, and where you are going, and before whom you are destined to give an account and reckoning. From where

Afterword

do you come? From a putrid drop. Where are you going? To a place of dust, of worm and of maggot. Before whom you are destined to give an account and reckoning? Before the King of the kings of kings, the Holy One, blessed be he.

In a conversation about death, Leibowitz said that he had no thoughts to share about death, since death can only be defined as the absence of life. It is impossible to speak of an absence. The entire content of human consciousness, whether we are speaking of intentions or desires, refers to living humans. Beyond this, I am unfamiliar with any content in human consciousness. During Neilah on Yom Kippur, the supreme consolidation of the Jewish faith, there is only one question: How will you, in the sixty, seventy, or eighty years given to you, stand before God?3

Levinasian and Leibowitzian philosophy continue to enthrall people from diverse backgrounds. Religious and secular, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. In modern times, few religious Jewish thinkers have so fascinated secular Israeli Jews or compelled them to reexamine the meaning of their Judaism. Levinas and Leibowitz proposed new and audacious ways of approaching the Jewish bookcase and, through it, of understanding the wonder of Jewish and human existence. The secret of their charm and popularity is connected to their nature as cultural mediators between worlds that might at first glance seem diametrically opposed and irreconcilable. Levinasian and Leibowitz thought is especially important in the context of the free world’s ongoing fight against religious and nationalist fundamentalism. The battle against intellectual and political tyranny, to which Leibowitz and Levinas dedicated much of their intellectual energy, is not as unidimensional as certain political actors would present it, a straightforward confrontation between religion and secularism, tradition versus change and progress. In the twentieth century, it was a battle against secular and atheistic doctrines in the form of fascism, Nazism, and Chinese and Soviet communism. Nowadays, this totalitarian spirit presents itself in a religious garb. The ongoing battle over man’s humanity, as Levinas defined it, is not between the faithful and those who see religion as an anachronistic holdover of a bygone era, but be-

3

Leibowitz and Shashar, Yeshayahu Leibowitz: On the Whole World, 371.

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tween those who employ their spiritual-national identity groups as a means to an end, to promote an ethnocentric, militant, and chauvinistic political agenda, and those who always see clearly the face of the human Other and refuse to hijack and warp any particular spiritual doctrine for the sake of their irredeemably political objectives. Nowadays, in the twenty-first century, in the current geopolitical constellation, there is an acute need for religious intellectuals suffused with lofty idealism, in the vein of Leibowitz and Levinas, living paragons of unalloyed spirituality, attentive to the distress of both the individual and collective Other. These thinkers cared deeply about the humanization of the political and sociocultural order and were prepared to devote their best energies not to their own theologies, but to the promotion of a universal moral agenda.

Index A Abarbanel, Isaac, 26 Agassi, Joseph, 79 Agnon, Shmuel Yosef, 15n2 Akiva, Rabbi, 61 Ancient Greece, 25 Arendt, Hannah, 40 Athens, 11, 23 Auerbach, Erich, 48 Auschwitz, 26, 32, 54, 76-77 B Basel, 11, 14, 23 Bergson, Henri, 16 Berlin, 11, 14, 23 Berlin, Isaiah, 39 Bernstein, Richard, 54 C Cambodia, 54 Camus, Albert, 40 Cassirer, Ernst, 11, 16, 57-58 Celan, Paul, 16 Chaim of Volozhin, Rabbi, 12, 81, 92 Chouchani, Monsieur, 65, 76 Christianity, 25, 31, 76 Churchill, Winston, 51 Cold War, 12, 40, 47 D d’Alembert, Jean le Rond, 25 Dan, Joseph, 80 Davos, 16, 57 Derrida, Jacques, 25 Diaspora, 10-11, 22-23, 67-68, 71n26 Dostoyevsky, Fedor, 15n2, 85 Dreyfus Affair, 16 E Eleazar, Rabbi, 69 Engels, Friedrich, 47 Enlightenment, 10-11, 22-25, 27-28, 61, 65, 76 Epstein, Daniel, Rabbi, 38, 51, 54 Europe, 10, 23, 25, 29, 56, 61n3, 70

F First Intifada, 63 First Lebanon War, 63 First World War, 15 Förster-Nietzsche, Elisabeth, 29 France, 15-16, 23, 63 Freiburg, 16 French Republic, 16 French Revolution, 23-26, 57 G Gagarin, Yuri, 72 Germany, 10, 16-17, 23, 29, 53, 58 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 15n2 Gush Emunim, 30, 42, 56, 79 H HaLevi, Judah, Rabbi, 89 Hanina, Rabbi, 34 Hasidism, 10, 12, 38 Hebrew Bible, 14-15, 25, 94 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 11, 32, 3738, 40, 42, 46 Heidegger, Martin, 11, 16-17, 47, 50-51, 5758, 63, 71-72 Heraclitus, 24 Hiroshima, 54 Hirsch, Samson Raphael, Rabbi, 22 Hitler, Adolf, 16, 19, 23, 57, 80 Hitlerism, 26-29, 31 Hobbes, Thomas, 34-35 Hobsbawm, Eric, 54 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 63 Holocaust, 11-12, 15, 23, 28, 47, 53-54, 76-78 Homer, 15n2, 48 Hugo, Victor, 15n2 Hungary, 40 Husserl, Edmund, 16 J Jacobson, Yoram, 82 Jerusalem, 11, 14, 23, 32 Jewish people, 9-10, 12, 18, 21, 38, 43, 62-67, 69, 71n26, 73-76, 78

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Index

Judea, 25-26 Judeo-Christianity, 26 K Kafka, Franz, 40 Kafr Qassim, 68 Kafr Qibya, 68, 88 Kharkov, 15 Khrushchev, Nikita, 40 Kierkegaard, Søren, 20 Kook, Abraham Isaac, Rabbi, 11 Kook, Rav, 56-57 Kovno (Kaunas), 15 L Latvia, 10, 14 Lawrence, D. H., 19 Leibowitz, Yeshayahu Accepting the Yoke of Heaven, 72n26, 73 Five Books of Faith, 78 I Wanted to Ask You, Professor Leibowitz, 72 “Maimonides—The Abrahamic Man,” 30 Levinas, Emmanuel “Actuality of Maimonides, The,” 29 De l’évasion, 27 Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, 28, 38, 59-60, 71, 91, 93 Ethics and Infinity, 15n2, 37, 44, 52, 64, 86 “For a Jewish Humanism,” 60 “Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us,” 71-72 Judaism and Revolution, 32-33, 64 Nine Talmudic Readings,36, 38 Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, 54, 78, 85 Principes et Visages, 40, 45 Proper Names, 54 “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” 23, 28-29 Sino-Soviet Conflict and Dialectics, The, 46 “ Spirit of Geneva, The,” 39-40, 46 “Spiritual Essence of Anti-Semitism, The,” 30 “Temptation of Temptation”, 49 Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, The, 23 “To Fraternize without Conversion,” 30 Totality and Infinity, 40, 44, 46-47, 55, 83 “Toward the Other,” 28, 46, 53 “Useless Suffering,” 54 “Youth of Israel, The,” 38

Lithuania, 10, 14, 78 Luria, Isaac, Rabbi, 12, 80, 82-84, 86, 91 Lurianic Kabbalah, 80-81, 83-86, 91 Luzzatto, Moshe Chaim, Rabbi, 12, 86, 89-90, 92 M Maimonides, 24, 29, 91 Malka, Salomon, 64 Marx, Karl, 11, 40, 42, 50 Meir Simcha of Dvinsk, Rabbi, 30 Middle East, 13 N National Socialism, 23, 29, 31-32, 46 National Socialist regime, 11 Nazism, 16-18, 23-24, 27, 29-31, 47, 80, 95 Nemo, Philippe, 52, 55, 86 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 25-26, 28-29, 37, 49, 56-57, 62 Nuremberg Race Laws, 10-11, 23, 27, 53 O Ohana, David, 57 P Palestine, 10, 14 Pascal, Blaise, 20 Pedaya, Haviva, 89-90 Pirkei Avot, 31, 34, 36, 88, 94 Pius XI, 31 Plato, 15n2, 88 Pradines, Maurice, 16 Pushkin, Alexander, 15n2 R Racine, Jean, 15n2 Ram, Uri, 19 Ravitzky, Aviezer, 62 Renaissance, 10, 13, 26 Riga, 11, 14, 23 Rome, 25-26 Rosenzweig, Franz, 81 Rotenstreich, Nathan, 75 Russian Revolution, 15 S Sabra, 67 and Shatila, 67 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 31-33, 40, 50, 59, 76 Schmitt, Carl, 11, 17, 57 Scholem, Gershom, 14, 82 Second World War, 10, 17, 19, 23-24, 31, 50-51, 63

Index

Sharon, Ariel, 88 Shashar, Michael, 93 Shatila, 67 Six-Day War, 11, 17, 57, 88 Soloveitchik, Joseph B., 20 Soviet Union, 11, 26, 40-41, 46, 57 Stalin, Joseph, 40, 57 Stalinism, 54 Strasbourg, 16

U Ukraine, 15

T Talmud, 9, 14-15, 17, 49, 60, 62, 65, 90, 93-94 Third Reich, the, 23,31, 46, 56 Third World, 46, 61 Tolstoy, Leo, 15n2 Torah, 9, 13-14, 31, 36, 43-44, 49, 59-60, 62, 64-66, 69, 73-76, 78, 84-85, 86n7, 87, 90

Z Zevi, Sabbatai, 56 Zionism, 12, 14, 16, 18, 22, 57, 59, 63-64, 67, 70-71, 74

V Vital, Chaim, Rabbi, 24 Voltaire, 25 W Western Europe, 10

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