It should be clear from the start that this book challenges the common understanding of the Talmudic readings as “religious” texts, or as texts (re)introducing religion into Western thought.20 This understanding pertains to both the phenomenological and the Jewish scholarly camps, as well as to those who have called for reading the two bodies of work together: all agree that the “Jewish texts” are Jewish and that Levinas’s intention in writing and publishing them was to honor and follow the Jewish tradition. As a result, most studies of the Talmudic readings focus on the Talmud, wondering whether or not Levinas’s interpretations were faithful to Judaism in terms of method as well as of content and trying to understand his claim that he was translating Hebrew into Greek.21
Of course, it is not wrong to say that Levinas’s interpretations of the Talmud are Jewish. However, this should not be considered the only or even the main reason for their importance. Levinas repeatedly refused to be called a “Jewish thinker,” acknowledging his Jewishness but firmly rejecting a formula by which “one understands something that dares to establish between concepts relations which are based uniquely in religious traditions and texts, without bothering to pass through the philosophical critique.”22 For him, the readings were a philosophical product. Moreover, while it has been rightly argued that Levinas popularized the Talmud by offering his readings to a public of intellectuals often ignorant of Jewish sources, it is also quite clear that the readings do not make the rabbinic method less opaque to the untrained reader. In fact, Levinas neither uses nor explains the rabbinic method, despite occasional comments on the context and method throughout the Talmudic readings and their prefaces. A student hoping to learn what the Talmud is all about would be well advised not to begin with Levinas. To put it differently, Levinas’s project is not to make rabbinic literature accessible to a wide audience but to use this literature to say what he wants to say, using his own (i.e., not Talmudic) style: “We strive to speak otherwise” (DSS 9; NTR 92).23 As Samuel Moyn claims, “For the dominant interpretation of Levinas’s relationship to the Jewish past and the Jewish religion, the conventional wisdom presents it as linear and continuous. But it works only on the basis of mistaken assumptions, one about Judaism itself and the other about the nature of Levinas’s biographical and philosophical relationship to it.”24 Indeed, Levinas’s Lithuanian Judaism is, “if we may say, a ‘metaphor’ which is not a given but a retrospective ‘construct.’”25 Levinas himself emphasized again and again that he studied Talmud only very late, after World War II, in Paris, with the mysterious itinerant teacher Chouchani.26 He did not grow up in an atmosphere of Lithuanian rabbinic studies. One of the goals of this book is to determine what Levinas took from the Talmudic tradition and how he applied it to formulate his own ideas.
Commentary and Political Philosophy
In both Otherwise than Being and “Peace and Proximity,” the appearance of the “third party” is accompanied by a similar phrase: “Birth of the question.” The “first question,” says Levinas, is the “question of justice,” meaning the distribution and sharing of responsibility. Hence, the situation presented by Levinas is double: an ethical call of responsibility that exists without question; and a question that stems from the co-presence of a multiplicity of people to whom one is ethically responsible. This model of an absolute command (i.e., a command that brooks no question) met by a body of questions about that very command is the model of the written Torah (the Bible) versus the oral Torah (the Talmud): the Talmud is a collection of interpretations of the divine apodictic law.
I believe that Levinas had this model in mind when he drew the distinction between his two sets of works, the phenomenological books and the interpretive Talmudic readings. The ethical philosophy published in the phenomenological books expresses an unconditional and immemorial call that can be considered “prophetic.”27 One hears the call and accepts it as it is. The readings are commentaries that question, discuss, and catalogue the possible meanings of the call. As Levinas wrote, “Bible and Talmud, prophecy and critical spirit” (ADV 76; BTV 58). The irony, of course, is that the Talmudic readings are commentaries on the Talmud, namely, commentaries on commentaries, as well as commentaries on Levinas’s own ethical works.
It has been argued that Levinas’s hermeneutics is “ethical,” namely, that his commentary is a way to face the other, meaning the innumerable other meanings of a given text.28 As Levinas wrote in his 1974 reading “The Will of God and the Power of Humanity,” “the adventure of the Midrash [Talmudic commentary], the very possibility of hermeneutics, in its rigorously formal advance, do they not already belong to the very way in which another voice is heard among us—the very way of transcendence?” (NLT 32; NewTR 68). At the same time, however, the formulations “birth of the question” and “critical spirit” add complexity to the ethics of hermeneutics. Indeed, for Levinas everything that has to do with questioning, with critique, and, accordingly, with “comparison, coexistence, contemporaneousness, assembling, order, thematization, the visibility of faces, and thus intentionality and the intellect, and in intentionality and the intellect, the intelligibility of a system” (AE 245; OB 157) is related not to ethics but to ontology. Interpretation is therefore an ontological means to defy the infinite and the transcendent. The recourse to the Talmud as a framework for a set of commentaries is recourse to a set of questions as a framework for a new set of questions; hence, it is redundantly concerned with ontology. In contrast to Robert Bernasconi, who argues that in the philosophical writings “the ethical is always associated with a certain questioning that extends even to morality itself, but, even though that dimension is not absent from the confessional writings, it is less pronounced there,”29 I show in this book that the Talmudic readings are permeated with endless questioning in which ontology and politics are no less central than ethics.
Is this to say that, for Levinas, any corpus of questioning, any hermeneutic system, would be political, at least in part? The answer is yes, by definition. Moreover, the two questioning systems with which Levinas worked—the Talmud and the philosophical tradition that issued from the Platonic dialogues—were political, or more exactly, they were the only “politics” left to two elites that had lost concrete sovereignty: Plato founded the Academy after giving up all hope of reforming the polis, and the rabbis wrote down the oral law after losing all hope of reestablishing political power in the Land of Israel. One could here object that given these conditions both the Talmud and philosophy are eminently non-political, or even anti-political.30 Even a superficial reading of Levinas’s work, however, makes clear that he puts philosophy and politics in the same ontological category. Similarly, his insistence on the political character of basic questioning, at least from a certain point of view, puts the Talmud—by contrast with prophetic ethics—in the same category as politics. This explains Levinas’s choice of the Talmudic commentaries to convey his political thinking, but only partly, because traditional philosophy is also a questioning system. Thus, we need to inquire into other possible explanations.
The Talmud, as Whitehead might put it, is a commentary on the Torah somewhat in the way that European philosophy is a commentary on Plato. The Talmud, however, does something that philosophy often neglects: it examines the law in the light of particular cases. The Talmud confronts the apodictic law with concrete situations. As Levinas writes, “The Talmud, according to the great masters of this science, can be understood only from the basis of life itself” (QLT 20; NTR 8). As such, Talmudic commentary does not merely explain the Law but deconstructs it, tests it, strengthens it, and sometimes overturns it. Likewise, Levinas’s Talmudic commentaries reinforce and confront the ethical call with particular situations.31 Levinas calls this method “paradigmatic modality”: “Without fading before their concepts, things denoted in a concrete fashion are yet enriched with meanings by the multiplicity of their concrete aspects” (ADV 127; BTV 103).32 The readings ask the question: What does ethics mean in situations that involve more than the ego and the other? What does ethics mean, therefore, in concrete situations that are, by definition, non-ethical? Levinas chose not to take his examples from contemporary everyday life but borrowed cases