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Who would have believed that Emmanuel Levinas would become an Israeli cultural hero?

By Yair Sheleg

For the past four months, an unusual book has become a fixture on the non-fiction best-seller list. The book is "Tesha Keriyot Talmudiyot" ("Nine Talmudic Readings" - Schocken Press) - a collection of nine lectures given by the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas between 1957 and 1975. In these lectures, Levinas addressed a series of deep philosophical and intellectual issues that occupied all of Europe at the time - topics like the ability to forgive the Germans, the "student revolution" and youth rebellion in general, modern war, the "new economy" and the status of women. It was all done via an in-depth look at Talmudic discussions centering on subjects that ostensibly have nothing to do with these matters -like the significance of Yom Kippur, an employer's obligations to his workers, the Jewish attitude toward witchcraft, and more.

Raheli Idelman, the book's publisher, declines to say how many copies have been sold since it came out about six months ago ("I don't divulge information like that before reaching 10,000 copies"). But she does say that the book has already had three printings and a fourth is due soon - "And that's definitely extraordinary for a book of this type." She also says that she was sure the book would be a success "and that's why I fought with wholesalers who only wanted to purchase small quantities, because of the failure of the only other book by Levinas that was previously translated into Hebrew. I was confident that, with the right timing, this book would catch on, and the demand shows that I was right."

Idelman attributes the book's success to the cultural blend that it expresses: "In recent years, there has been a wave of secular interest in Judaism, but the Talmud isn't usually comprehensible to a secular reader. Levinas' book enables this reader to see the Talmud from a general Western orientation. And, at the same time, this combination naturally interests the enlightened religious public, too."

The commercial success of "Nine Readings" is only one of many indications that Levinas, in just the past few years, has become a hero of Israeli culture. Upon its publication, the book generated a lively intellectual debate, at least in the pages of the Ha'aretz literature and culture supplement. Not only did the book stir a number of intellectuals to write articles concerning Levinas, it also aroused a debate regarding the degree of Levinas' understanding of the Talmudic texts he interprets.

In Israeli academia - particularly at Hebrew University, Bar-Ilan University and Haifa University, where several Levinas experts like Shalom Rosenberg, Efraim Meir and Ze'ev Levy teach - the number of courses dedicated to Levinas' work has been steadily growing in the past few years. Rosenberg says that he was excited to discover, just a few days ago, that singer Barry Sakharof's new disc is called "Ha'aher" ("The Other"), a central philosophical concept in Levinas' thinking. Moreover, the disc was dedicated to Levinas. Rosenberg published a book called "The Other" several months ago, a collection of articles dealing with the relationship to the Other. Levinas is mentioned in it many times, and one article is devoted to discussing his ideas.

About two years ago, one of Levinas' students, the former French-Jewish revolutionary Benny Levy, opened Makhon Levinas (The Levinas Institute) in Jerusalem, which is devoted to the study of Levinas' works. And next week will bring more evidence of the "Levinas trend," with the opening of an international conference on Levinas, sponsored by Hebrew University's Department of Jewish Philosophy.

So what has made Levinas, the man and his philosophy, so fashionable in Israel in 2002? Is it just the return to the "Jewish bookshelf" that Idelman points to?

Spiritual search

Levinas was born in Kovno, Lithuania in 1906, to an enlightened Orthodox family. Later in life, he would say that his early years in Lithuania had a very formative influence on his personality and left their mark in his rationalistic, anti-mystical way of thinking, which emulates that of some of the great Lithuanian sages (such as Rabbi Chaim of Brisk, the founder of the analytic learning method still popular in today's yeshivas, and the Vilna Gaon). Still, he did not spend that many years in Lithuania and did not study in yeshiva there. When Lithuania was occupied by the German army during World War I, the Levinas family moved to Kharkov in the Ukraine. In both Lithuania and the Ukraine, Levinas was exposed to the second cultural factor that he says shaped his world: Russian literature. He saw the questions about the "meaning of life" posed in the classics by Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin and others as the foundation that determined the objectives of his own spiritual search, while Lithuanian rationalism determined its nature and style.

At 17, Levinas left his family and moved to France, where he studied philosophy, French and Latin at the University of Strasbourg. Five years later, he moved again, this time to the University of Freiburg in Germany, where he had the opportunity to study with two of the great philosophers of the 20th century: Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Levinas would later ponder the question of Heidegger's character, after the philosopher eventually collaborated with the Nazis. But at this stage, he "made do" with internalizing the phenomenological theory that characterized both; a philosophy that said big, predetermined doctrines and theories must not be projected onto reality, but rather the opposite: Experience should be described by observing reality without recourse to theory, deduction or assumptions from other disciplines.

When World War II began, Levinas was back in France, married and the father of a daughter. He was drafted into the French army, and fell prisoner to the Germans a few months later. His status as a French prisoner of war saved him from extermination as a Jew, while almost all of his Lithuanian family was killed. His wife Raissa and daughter Simone were hidden during the war in a French monastery, with the help of Levinas' friend, the French writer Maurice Blanchot.

It was when he returned from captivity after the war and learned of his family's bitter fate that Levinas began to develop his philosophical method. In 1947, he published his first two books: "De l'existence a l'existant" (later published in English as "Existence and Existents") and "Le temps et l'autre" ("Time and the Other"). In them, he continued on the phenomenological path of "learning from reality" that he got from his teachers, but, in the wake of the Holocaust, this outlook put a special emphasis on moral ethics, and on the relationship to the Other in particular.

Rabbi Daniel Epstein, who teaches Levinas at the Matan women's seminary in Jerusalem and also translated "Nine Readings" from the French, describes it this way: "For Levinas, the obligation to the Other is absolute, and much greater than the obligation to the self. Basically, his criticism of classical Western humanism comes down to the fact that, in his view, Western humanism sees everything, including the Other, through the prism of the self, and thus makes the Other no more than another reflection of the self. Levinas demands that a person turn away from himself and toward the Other."

Still, at that point, Levinas' Jewish roots were not yet evident in his philosophical writings. Two years later, in 1949, he published, "En decouverant l'existence avec Husserl et Heidegger" ("Discovering Existence with Husserl and Heidegger") which gave French readers a first taste of the phenomenological method that Levinas learned from his two mentors.

The great Shoshani

Not long after that came the event that would tie Levinas to his Jewish roots. At the time, he was serving as principal of the Alliance teacher training school. One of his friends, Dr. Henri Nerson, introduced him to a mysterious figure known only as "Mr. Shoshani." To most of his students, Mr. Shoshani's origins, and even his first name, have remained a mystery to this day (it was not solved in a biography about him published in France, though Prof. Rosenberg, who knew Shoshani in his last years in South America, says that his first name was Hillel, which is why he gave his son that name).

Apparently, Shoshani was born in Eastern Europe, grew up in a religious home and, as a child, was considered a genius. Some say that he was put on display at fairs in Eastern European towns, where he demonstrated his astounding knowledge of the Talmud to curious passersby. Various legends also surround the question of how Shoshani survived the Holocaust. It appears that he escaped from France to Switzerland, where he lived as a refugee. After the war, he returned to France. Lonely and dressed like a beggar, he made a living from giving religious lessons in various places. This is how Levinas heard of him; he essentially absorbed all of his Jewish education from Shoshani.

In his Talmudic lectures, Levinas often quoted the principles of exegesis that he learned from Shoshani, though he referred to him as "the superb teacher," and not by name. One of these principles was the idea that the verses quoted by Talmud scholars in order to prove a point are not chosen randomly. The original context in which such verses appear must be studied in order to understand what the sages were trying to say by using a particular quote.

Using this and other exegetical methods, Levinas found fascinating implications for the modern issues that preoccupied him and his contemporaries. For example, he tells the Talmudic story of Rav, who would repeat the lesson he was giving again and again each time one of the other amorayim (the sages of the Talmud) came into the room. Until his teacher, Rabbi Hanina Bar Hama entered, by which point Rav had grown tired of repeating himself and decided not to go over the lesson again.

Rabbi Hanina was offended. Rav tried to reconcile with him every Yom Kippur eve for the next 13 years, but was unsuccessful. The Gemara explains that the reason for Rabbi Hanina's stubbornness was a dream he had, in which he saw Rav hanging from a palm tree - a dream he interpreted as signifying that Rav was due for greatness. Rabbi Hanina worried that Rav might replace him as head of the yeshiva, and so he insisted on not forgiving him, so that Rav would be hurt and leave Eretz Israel for Babylonia and attain his expected greatness there - as indeed happened. The lesson Levinas derives from this story is that someone who is unaware of his actions or words and sins unintentionally may be forgiven, but not someone who sins intentionally, or one who has a personal interest in the sin he has committed. Hence, his conclusion that "It is possible to forgive many Germans, but there are Germans whom it is hard to forgive. It is hard to forgive Heidegger" (who succeeded his mentor Husserl at Marburg University during the Nazi period).

What so enchanted Levinas in the Talmud, and Judaism in general, was the similarity he found there to his own philosophical outlook: a perception of reality based not on abstract theories, but on the most ordinary acts of everyday life, as manifested in the world of halakha (Jewish law). In the halakhic perspective, he saw that same absolute obligation - in practical and not theoretical terms - to the Other. In a Talmudic lecture that he gave in 1969, close to the time that the "student revolution" was sweeping France and Western youth in general, Levinas sought to express his aversion to the violence inherent in the revolution - in any revolution - by means of another Talmudic story. (His opposition to the revolution was a natural development of the outlook that saw one's obligation to the actual person beside you as the main point, and abhorred big revolutionary ideologies, lofty as they might be, that ended up trampling on the individual.)

He quoted a story about Rabbi Elazar, the son of Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yohai, who became a catcher of thieves in the service of the Roman empire. Another amora, Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Korha, railed against Rabbi Elazar's "collaboration" with the authorities, and then Rabbi Elazar explained to him: "I am removing thorns from the vine." Rabbi Yehoshua's biting response: "Let the vineyard owner (i.e., God) come and get rid of his own thorns!" Levinas sees Rabbi Elazar's words as expressing the outlook of the young revolutionaries: "The harmful thorns must be removed from the vine. I'm violent only because violence is necessary to neutralize this other violence," while Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Korha expresses, in Levinas' opinion, the Jewish perspective that says "Only the vineyard owner is entitled to get rid of the thorns."

Crisis of the revolution

Until the mid-1970s, Levinas was not a central figure in French intellectual life, outside Jewish circles. True, philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre first became acquainted with the phenomenological thought of Husserl and Heidegger through Levinas. But his own work was not very well known. The turning point occurred about the time of the crisis among the leaders of the student revolution and their violent anarchic outlook. The one who fomented the change was Benny Levy - a Jewish immigrant from Egypt who became one of the leaders of the student revolution in 1968 when he led the Marxist "proletarian left" movement. At one point, Levy even became Sartre's personal secretary.

Sartre, who had been captivated by the communist ideology in the Soviet Union and China in the 1940s and `50s, became enchanted with the student revolution in the late `60s. But as the years went on and the revolution did not succeed, Levy himself began to have some regrets, about legitimizing the use of violence, for example. He started to search for an alternative philosophical anchor and found it in Levinas. Through Levinas, Levy also returned to his Jewish roots, and today, as an observant Jew (with a predilection for ultra-Orthodoxy), he divides his time between the Levinas Institute he founded in Jerusalem and studies at a Jerusalem kollel.

Levy: "After the failure of the leftist revolution, I wanted to study the reasons for the necessary failure of the revolution with Sartre. As I was doing so, I recalled that before the period of the revolution, I had read an interview with Levinas about the relation to the Other. And then I began to really study his books. I studied Levinas very seriously for two years. He was the third person who changed my thought - after Socrates and Sartre - and thanks to him, I also came back to studying and teaching in the holy tongue. I also introduced Sartre to Levinas. Before that, Sartre didn't know Levinas' books at all. I remember that in his final years, Sartre had me read him excerpts from Levinas' great book "Totalite et infini" ("Totality and Infinity"). He was jealous of how important Levinas was to me."

Incidentally, a series of interviews that Levy had with Sartre in his later years, which were published in the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, sparked an uproar in France, when Sartre appeared to retract many of the main ideas that had guided his philosophy and adopted "Levinasian" theories instead. Some, including Sartre's companion, Simone de Beauvoir, claimed that young Levy simply "took over" the soul of the elderly philosopher.

Levy also introduced Levinas to his friends from the New Left in France, people like the philosophers Bernard Henri-Levy and Alain Finkielkraut (who helped Levy open the Levinas Institute about two years ago), making Levinas, who by then was almost 70, into a key figure in the intellectual discourse of the young, post-revolution generation in France. A similar thing happened with young post-modernist philosophers, including Jacques Derrida (also a Jew, an immigrant from Algeria). French-Jewish journalist Laurent Cohen, who currently lives in Israel and has covered Levinas and the French-Jewish intellectual discourse in general, explains: "Post-modernism expresses the disappointment in the big ideologies that characterized modernism. Levinas' thought, which talks about the obligation to the real, individual person standing opposite you, allows post-modernism to develop an ethics and a theory of moral responsibility." Derrida, by the way, delivered one of the eulogies at Levinas' funeral in 1995.

The riddle of Levinas' late success therefore seems to be related to the ethical and moral answers that he supplies to a post-modernist age devoid of big ideologies - in both France and Israel (though, as noted, it took Israelis a bit longer to discover him). Benny Levy adds that, in Israel, Levinas also speaks to the post-Zionist era:

"Zionism was a type of merger of Judaism and modernism. As soon as the power of this merger diminished, another was needed, and Levinas is the thinker who is able to rebuild this bridge, because he is nurtured by the deepest sources of modernism and, at the same time, connected to an entirely different horizon, to Mount Sinai."

Moreover: Levinas' thought also deals critically with the other fashionable outgrowth of post-modernism - the "New Age" spirit and the escape into a spiritual quest that is unmoored from the surrounding reality. Though Levinas did not address New Age thinking directly, in his books, he defines Judaism as "an adult religion," meaning a religion that demands of its believers a commitment of responsibility for the Other, and for society in general, unlike religions that offer childish self-indulgence through spiritual amusements that are devoid of responsibility.

Yet, it must be noted that Levinas was also criticized in French-Jewish intellectual circles, by some who said that the absolute commitment to the Other that he expresses reflects Christian outlooks ("Turn the other cheek") more than Jewish ones. Just a year and a half ago, one of the most prominent participants in this discourse, psychoanalyst Daniel Sibony, published a book called "Don de foi ou partage de foi? - le drame Levinas" ("Giving of the Self or Division of the Self? - The Drama of Levinas") which comprises a sharp attack on Levinas' ideas.

In the book, Sibony argues that Levinas is actually expressing a Christian perspective that he puts in the mouth of Judaism. According to Sibony, Levinas' Jewish identity is not authentic Judaism, but rather what the Christian environment would like to identify as Judaism. He even maintains that Levinas actually remained a clandestine disciple of Heidegger. Sibony also attacks Levinas' young adherents - and, by inference, Levinas himself - like Derrida and Finkielkraut, saying that they reflect the same intellectual sin that Levinas finds in Western humanism; that, to them, the figure of "the Other" is no more than an intellectual-academic plaything and does not signify a genuine commitment to the Other standing at the street corner.

Prof. Rosenberg, who is one of the organizers of next week's Levinas conference, is outraged: "The contention that Levinas reflects Christian thinking is an ignorant one. Yes, Christianity claimed to represent love and kindness, and Judaism claimed to represent the law, but who said that this claim is correct? When an IDF soldier risks his life in order to save another soldier, that certainly is a reflection of Jewish ethics and an IDF norm, and in no way a Christian ethic. Moreover, Levinas also acknowledges that love and kindness as a basis for human relations are relevant only in the theoretical sense, if there were only two people in the world. When we're talking about an entire society, which is the situation in reality, he also includes the question of justice and not just the obligation to the Other."

Levinas certainly lived a very Jewish lifestyle, in any case. He followed halakha, the same halakha that had such importance in his philosophy. He observed the laws of Shabbat and kashrut, and for many years also used to give a lesson on the Torah portion of the week at his synagogue. Laurent Cohen says that, in his final years, when Levinas was also very ill with Alzheimer's Disease, he still insisted on keeping all the commandments. "His family knew he was lost the first day he forgot to put on tefillin."