Lévinas: A Mentor for the 21st Century

Will Lévinas serve as a mentor for the 21^st century? It would be excellent if he did. If Lévinas is right, it’s not possible to read the Bible without reading our lives and the times against the anguish and promise the Bible speaks of. According to the Bible, the promise of renewal belongs to the one who weeps over things as they are – and to no one else:

כֹּה אָמַר יהוה

 

קוֹל בְּרָמָה נִשְׁמָע

נְהִי בְּכִי תַמְרוּרִים

 

רָחֵל מְבַכָּה עַל־בָּנֶיהָ

מֵאֲנָה לְהִנָּחֵם עַל־בָּנֶיהָ

כִּי אֵינֶנּוּ

 

כֹּה אָמַר יהוה

 

מִנְעִי קוֹלֵךְ מִבֶּכִי

וְעֵינַיִךְ מִדִּמְעָה

 

כִּי יֵשׁ שָׂכָר לִפְעֻלָּתֵךְ

נְאֻם־יהוה

וְשָׁבוּ מֵאֶרֶץ אוֹיֵב

 

וְיֵשׁ־תִּקְוָה לְאַחֲרִיתֵךְ

נְאֻם־יהוה

וְשָׁבוּ בָנִים לִגְבוּלָם

The Lord said this:

 A voice is heard in Ramah,

lamentation and bitter weeping -

Rachel weeping for her children;

she’s refused comfort for her children:

they are no more.

The Lord said this:

 Restrain your voice from weeping,

your eyes from tears:

there’s a reward for your labor

- word of the Lord –

they will return from enemy land.

 There is hope for your descendants,

- word of the Lord –

children will return to their own borders.

Jeremiah 31:15-17

 Is it possible to read this text without connecting it with the Shoah and the Return? I don’t think so. To be sure, everything depends on how and in what sense the connection is made, but an exegesis of Jer 31:15-17 which takes no account of the historical context in which we live would be irresponsible.

Is it possible to read the messianic texts of the Bible and beyond in isolation from what Lévinas called “the march towards universality of a political order”[1] and what Francis Fukuyama called “the end of history”? Probably not. What passes for interpretation of prophecy among Jews and Christians today is paltry, mechanical fare. The texts deserve better readers than they have. Lévinas shows us the way.

Emil Fackenheim cites a midrash on the text of Jeremiah cited above:

ג' משמרות הוי הלילה

ועל כל משמר ומשמר

יושב הקב"ה ושואג כארי ואומר

אוי לי* שבעונותיהם החרבתי את ביתי

ושרפתי את היכלי

והגליתים לבין אומות העולם

 

*לי would be the text presupposed by Fackenheim’s translation which I adapt below: the edition of Talmud Bavli available via www.mechon-mamre.org reads לבנים instead (tikkun sopherim?).

The watches of the night are three,

and during each watch

the Holy One sits and roars like a lion and says:

Woe is me because on account of their iniquities I devastated my house,

and burned my temple,

and exiled them among the nations of the world.

Bab. Talmud, Berakhot 3a

Fackenheim comments:

 God Himself, as it were, weeps for His children. He weeps not for symbolic children in a symbolic exile but rather for actual children in an actual exile. He weeps as would a flesh-and-blood father or mother. He weeps as Rachel does.

. . . If God wakes up at midnight, shall we not wake with Him? And if He weeps for us and for our children, shall we too not weep, not so much with Him as for Him? And shall this divine-human community of waking and weeping not be the turning point of redemption?

Tikkun Hatzot – the liturgical “midnight watch” – was thus divided into two parts. To be sure, the second part – Tikkun Leah – consists of prayers expressing the hope of redemption. These prayers, however, would be fleshless, bloodless and vapid unless they were preceded by Tikkun Rachel – the mourning for the flesh-and-blood children in exile, suffering and unredeemed.[2]

There are many ways to be vigilant and pray. There are those who do so with every breath they take. Four women who kept watch and prayed, each in her own way, are: Simone Weil, Edith Stein, Etty Hillesum, and Anne Frank. In a future post, I will introduce a book dedicated to them. The photos of the four women reproduced in the book are a most excellent illustration of the Lévinasian theory of   intersubjective relationships. As stated in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

For Levinas, intersubjective experience, as it comes to light, proves ‘ethical’ in the simple sense that an ‘I’ discovers its own particularity when it is singled out by the gaze of the other. This gaze is interrogative and imperative. It says “do not kill me.” It also implores the ‘I’, who eludes it only with difficulty, although this request may have actually no discursive content.

Here are the photos (click for enlargements):

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[1] Emmauel Lévinas, “Messianic Texts,” in Difficult Freedom: Essay on Judaism (tr. Seán Hand; Johns Hopkins Jewish Studies; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990 [1963]) 59-96; 94.

[2] Emil Fackenheim, “New Hearts and the Old Covenant: On Some Possibilities of a Fraternal Jewish-Christian Reading of the Jewish Bible Today,” in The Jewish Thought of Emil Fackenheim (ed. and introd. Michael L. Morgan; Wayne State University Press, 1987) 223-234; 225.