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Review Essay: That Law which Calls us Away from Mystifying Rapture to Religious Responsibility*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2015

Steven Copeland
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Type
Review Essays and Book Reviews
Information
Journal of Law and Religion , Volume 17 , 2002 , pp. 111 - 119
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University 2002

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Footnotes

*

A head-note in regard to the footnotes: While footnotes are generally not a part of book reviews—or even book review essays—I request the reader's indulging consideration that they are not only appropriate, but almost necessary, here. The Law and the Talmud—so central to Professor Levinas' project—are all about breaking up the page with interruptions and expansions, reservations and associations from outside.

References

1. Levinas, Emmanuel, To Love the Torah More than God, 28 Judaism 216, 219 (1979) (emphasis added)Google Scholar. I have combined their sensitive translation with a few elements from Seàn Hand's translation; as well as my own—in brackets. Seàn Hand's translation is in Levinas, Emmanuel, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism (John Hopkins U. Press 1990)Google Scholar.

2. See Sylvia Plath's translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's poem The Prophet—appears at <www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/1619/poems/miscpo.html>.

Concerning the prophetic character of Levinas' work, Jacques Derrida has written:

[T]he thought of Levinas can make us tremble. At the heart of the desert, in the growing wasteland, this thought, which fundamentally no longer seeks to be a [contemplative] thought of Being [as an ontology] …makes us dream of an inconceivable process of dismantling and dispossession … [thus] liberating [thought that involves being, as a verb] from the … [comfortably mystifying] domination of the Same and the One [which is] the origin or alibi of all oppression in the world. Derrida, Jacques, Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas in Writing and Difference 82–83 (Bass, Alan trans., U. Chi. Press 1978)Google Scholar.

The sense from Levinas' work that we are being prophetically appealed to notwithstanding, paradoxically there is also something gentle, reassuring, even charming in his manner—there is a face of smiling love in Professor Levinas' style of writing and speaking; even as it is subversively demanding of affronting justice. See the wonderful photo of him on the cover of Entre.Nous; here is a Talmudic laughter not entirely unlike that of the Dalai Lama's. Indeed, in her very valuable introduction to her translation of Levinas' Nine Talmudic Readings, Annette Aronowicz considers the humor that regularly appears both in the Talmudic passages Levinas explores as well as in his own manner of engaging those passages. On the laughter of Rabbi Akiva as told in the Talmud, Makkot 24a-b & in Midrash Eychah Rabbah 5:19—as well as on the comic in the face of catastrophe in our own terrible times—see Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven, After Such Knowledge, What Laughter?, 14 The Yale J. of Criticism, 287 (2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. See Celan, Paul, “Deathfugue,” in Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (Felstiner, John trans., W.W. Norton 2001)Google Scholar. The first part of Levinas' dedication for his Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (Lingis, Alphonso trans., Kluwer Academic Publishers 1991)Google Scholar reads: “To the memory of those who were closest among the six million assassinated by the National Socialists, and of the millions on millions of all confessions and all nations, victims of the same hatred of the other man, the same anti-semitism.”

4. Talmud, Yoma 54a.

5. The gender difference between the two cherubim facing opposite one another as it is developed in this Talmudic passage—by itself, but especially when read in the metaphoric way that Levinas takes up the masculine and the feminine—can very plausibly be understood not necessarily in a literal way; that it is only through the two genders entering into erotic relationship with each other's heterosexual difference that the trace of the Transcendent Difference can be engaged. See Levinas' ideas of “Metaphor and Metaphysics of Gender” as described in Cohen, Richard, Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Levinas ch. 9 (U. Chi. Press 1994)Google Scholar.

6. And in the first of his Nine Talmudic Readings, Professor Levinas argues a key element of Talmudic discourse:

The reference to a biblical verse does not aim at appealing to authority—as some thinkers drawn to rapid conclusions might imagine. Rather, the aim is to refer to a context which allows the level of the discussion to be raised and to make one notice the true import of the data from which the discussion derives its meaning. The transfer of an idea to another climate—which is its original climate—wrests new possibilities from it. Ideas do not become fixed by a process of conceptualization which would extinguish many of the sparks dancing beneath the gaze riveted upon the Real …. Ideas are never separated from the example which both suggests and delimits them.

(Nine Talmudic Readings, 21)

7. There are a number of passages in Entre Nous that engage this theme of lovingly dispassionate disinterestedness, but I am especially taken by the pursuit of this in the collection of Professor Levinas' lectures entitled God, Death, and Time—specifically the lecture from Friday, May 21, 1976, A God ‘Transcendent to the Point of Absence’ in God, Death, and Time 219–224 (Hamacher, Werner & Wellbery, David E. eds., Bergo, Bettina trans., Stanford U. Press 2000)Google Scholar.

8. See Walzer, Michael, Interpretation and Social Criticism ch. 1 (Harv. U. Press 1987)Google Scholar. Indeed, the author does identify the Talmud with the ongoing conversation that interpretation involves—according to him, a phenomenon somewhere between discovery and invention.

9. Derrick:

Are we Jews? Are we Greeks? We live in the difference between the Jew and the Greek …. We live in and of difference … about which Levinas so profoundly says that it [involves] … ‘the underlying rending of a world attached to both the philosophers and the prophets.”

Derrida, Jacques, Violence and metaphysics, in Writing and Difference 79, 152 (Bass, Alan trans., Chi. U. Press 1978)Google Scholar.

10. See Hermann Cohen—one of Levinas' intellectual influences, Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism, ch. 1 (Scholars Press 1995)Google Scholar.

11. See The Sermon in Melville, Herman, Moby Dick or the Whale ch. 9, at 60 (The Modern Library 1982)Google Scholar.

As with all sinners among men, the sin of this [Jonah] son of Amittai was in his willful disobedience of the command of God—never mind now what that command was, or how conveyed—which he found a hard command. But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do—remember that—and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.

60 (The Modern Library 1982). My favorite edition of Moby Dick is The Modern Library one, illustrated by Rockwell Kent, 1982. See Rosenzweig, Franz, The Star of Redemption 174–176 (Hallo, William trans., Notre Dame Press 1970) (another of Levinas' major intellectual influences)Google Scholar.

12. See e.g. his discussion of Rabbi Joseph bar Helbe's view concerning forgiveness between a person and his fellow—and how such forgiveness between people is related to the Divinity's forgiveness of us—in Nine Talmudic Readings 18-20. See Harold Bloom's marvelous idea that when it comes to interpretations—which any “strong” writing involves—“only a difference that makes a difference matters.” He continues: “Poems matter only if we. matter, and so there is no true criticism that is not experiential criticism.….” It seems to me that this is true for any kind of writing—including our laws. Bloom, Harold, The Breaking of the Vessels 34 (U. Chi. Press 1982)Google Scholar.

13. See Lionel Trilling's discussion of the Greek roots of the word “authenticity”—as carrying connotations of violence perpetrated against others, as well as against self, thereby arguing that authenticity involves an alienated opposition to the habitual ways of the world and of the self. Trilling, Lionel, Sincerity and Authenticity (Harv. U. Press 1971)Google Scholar.

14. This is really what might be the most original and stirring movement in Rosenzweig's configuration of the two overlapping triangles forming the Jewish star: that the Divinity's love or relationship or act of transcending Itself toward the Human Being that is called Revelation (which forms one of the triangle's vertical-diagonal lines from God's top point down to the Human) cannot be returned directly toward the Divine. Rather, the reciprocating relational act of response from the Human Being must move horizontally across to the World—to society and nature, our fellow creatures; and this response to Revelation is called Redemption.

15. See e.g. Bloom, Harold, Kabbalah and Criticism (The Continuum Publg. Co. 1975)Google Scholar.

16. Celan, Paul, The Meridian, in Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan 401 (Felstiner, John trans., W.W. Norton 2001)Google Scholar.

17. Kafka, Franz, My Destination in Parables and Paradoxes 189 (Schocken Books 1946)Google Scholar.