Emmanuel Levinas: Judaism and the Primacy of the Ethical

How understand the ethical metaphysics of Emmanuel Levinas in relation to monotheism in general and to the ethical monotheism of Judaism in particular? How understand it in relation to the spiritual shift that has moved us from a classical mentality oriented primarily by the standards of intellect, the rule of permanence and eternity, to a contemporary mentality oriented primarily by the imperatives of will, the rule of change and time? These are the questions that guide this essay. If the world in all its variety is not simply an illusory antechamber, then what is it? The biblical God calls His creation good. His creation of the human He calls very good. While classical philosophy reduces the world to the truth of its rational intelligibility, and classical theology reduces it to the predetermined providence of Gods omniscience, contemporary thought, in contrast, is the effort to take the world in its finitude seriously. Contemporary thought, Levinas will say, insists on the possibility of atheism. Nature, as science calls the real, or creation, as monotheism understands the same reality, are in some sense there. The multiplicity and temporality of the world are not so simply conjured away as provisional games, vanishing acts, dreams within dreams, or a snake swallowing its own tail. Nature can have no beginning, and creation can have no immanent origin. For a monotheist outlook these ruptures do not indicate failure but surplus, not less but more: the positivity rather than the negativity of the infinite. It asks and attempts to articulate the irreducible sense of this surplus, this more, this infinite in the finite. A complex typology is required to approach the thought of Levinas in relation to Jewish monotheism and the new vision of modernity. Continuing a long holistic Jewish tradition that unites life and thought, the work of Levinas is at once rigorously philosophical and profoundly Jewish. And Judaism is a monotheist religion: the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob the God of the Jewish people is a monotheistic God. Nevertheless, to comprehend monotheism is impossible in principle because monotheism exceeds human understanding. What is important, however, is not simply the bald statement that incomprehensibility lies at the root of monotheism, or some blank astonishment in the face of an irresolvable mystery. Rather it is to grasp as clearly

and specifically as possible the precise manner in which monotheism and Jewish monotheism - exceeds human understanding. There are many mysteries and monotheism is only one of them, even if it is the deepest. One must begin, then, with as exact an understanding as is possible of the essential paradox that specifically determines monotheism. The monotheist paradox is made up of three elements. All three together determine every religious or institutional form that monotheism has taken, whether Jewish, Christian or Islamic. First, God is perfect by definition. No attributes, qualities or adjectives can be applied to Gods perfection insofar as all attributes, qualities and adjectives are taken from our finite world and can only be applied to God by analogy or negation. Gods absolute perfection, what Levinas, citing Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhyn, refers to as God on his own side,1 is perfection without duality, contrast or multiplicity. It is the unalloyed pure oneness of God. Here the oneness (echud) of God is not the numerical oneness of a unit, as mathematics understands oneness, but the oneness of the unique: the one and only, the singular and alone, that which has no other, no outside. Levinas invokes the declaration of Deuteronomy 4:39 that there is nothing outside him.2 Here is God prior to or without creation, as it were. It is what kabbalists have called ayin, nothingness or pure spirituality, in contrast to yesh, existence or palpable reality. The singular oneness of God unto Himself is beyond anything humanly comprehensible, beyond absolutely. Second, the perfect God of monotheism in contrast to the Godhead of monism3 - is a Creator God. He creates an imperfect universe, a universe somehow less than the original unalloyed perfection of God-in-Himself. God diminishes Himself in creating the world. It is all too evident that the created universe is imperfect because it includes, in some sense, ignorance as well as knowledge, evil as well as good, ignoble feelings as well as noble feelings, the profane as well as the holy.4 All the evidence of the Bible and all the evidence of our lives support this interpretation. At once One and Many, as the philosophers would say, it is of such a God that Isaiah 45:7 speaks: I am the Lord, and there is none else, I form the light and create darkness: I make peace and create evil: I, the Lord do all these things. Here, then, instead of a unique One, with no other, there is hierarchy, the above and the below, the better and the worse. In contrast to the absolute

perfection of God-in-Himself, here one must speak of God on our side, to again invoke the language Levinas takes from Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhyn. Indeed, in Judaism the term holy (kadosh), according to the classic interpretation given by Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac (known by the acronym Rashi), means separation: separation of the holy from the profane, the pure from the impure, the noble from the vulgar. Separation refers both to the fundamental difference between creation and Creator, and to the differences within creation that serve as concrete evidence of its diminution from the Creator. Here is the God who is named and who acts through history and human exodus. Before you could feast your eyes directly on God, the rabbis teach, you fell to earth.5 Determining in the specific sense in which creation is a diminution of Gods original perfection, and hence delineating the appropriate countermeasures (wisdom, faith, prayer, charity, repentance, righteousness, etc.) of which creatures are capable, is the central bone of contention whose various answers individuate the monotheistic religions, both within each and between themselves. Third, however, because God is perfect, everything that follows from God including the created universe is also perfect, completely perfect like its source. Only the perfect follows from perfection, otherwise perfection would not be perfection. Because all is perfect nothing is required of creatures and no countermeasures are needful. Even gratitude is essentially ungrateful in a perfect world. Here, then, latent in this third element, taken by itself, lies the possibility of a holy nihilism, the temptation of excess rather than surplus. The spiritualism beyond all difference that would come from the creature, Levinas has written of this excess originating in creation, means, for man, the indifference of nihilism. All is equal in the omnipresence of God. All is divine. All is permitted.6 The world is already perfect, therefore there is nothing or everything to be done. The genuine paradox of monotheism, however, lies in the affirmation of all three elements simultaneously: God is perfect, and creation is at once both imperfect and completely perfect.7 It is precisely the surplus of this paradox that necessarily lies at the root of all monotheism. It is upon this paradox and because of this paradox that actual monotheist religions not religion in general but Judaism, Christianity and Islam - are built, and which they reflect in all their concrete singularities from daily life to liturgy to

theology. It is precisely this paradox, too, that cannot be understood, comprehended, grasped or known, for it surpasses human understanding. In its loyalty to this surplus monotheism is forever distinct from a purely rational philosophy. But for better or worse, that is the question. Like all paradoxes, affirmation of the paradox of monotheism is fundamentally non-rational. It oversteps the two constitutional principles of rational logic, namely, the principles of non-contradiction and excluded middle. According to the strictures of rational logic, nothing can be, and no coherent statement can affirm, both A and not-A at the same time. Everything, in order to be, and in order to be coherently stated, must be either A or not-A. In the case of monotheism, however, as we have just seen, these constitutive principles of logic must be broken. Hence monotheism is beyond the logic of being and the being of logic. The sense it makes, if it makes sense at all, is the sense it makes of this beyond. Clearly, the language of being as understood by the philosophers is inadequate to the paradox of monotheism. Being adheres to itself, subsists in itself, develops out of itself, while the God of monotheism both is and is not, at once otherwise than being or beyond essence is Levinass formula. One cannot think, feel or obey the God of monotheism without invoking an absolute transcendence whose content overflows its containers, whether the latter are constituted by thought, emotion or action, or some combination of the three, or something else entirely. It is not by accident, then, but by necessity that paradox, and hence surplus, is the ground zero of monotheism and the monotheist religions. At the same time this does not mean, however, and this point must be underlined, that monotheism is irrational. Indeed, the key to the sense of monotheism whether in thought, feeling or action - depends on seeing as precisely as possible how the monotheist religions concretely express the paradox of an extra-logical relation between God and creation. While it may well be, as a genuinely atheism would have it, that if there is no God, everything is permitted, the obverse is nevertheless not the case, that if there is a God, everything is permitted. Mind boggling as it may appear, everything is not permitted precisely because there is God. The entire effort of the monotheistic religions Judaism, Christianity and Islam is to reveal, contain, make sense of and emphasize indeed to exalt - without reducing away that which ruptures manifestation. The heart of

monotheism is glory rather than truth, or it is the truth peculiar to glory. Revelation is thus never only a content, the specific texts, rituals, declarations, services, saints and sages revered and exalted by the monotheist religions, which as a matter of fact differ in all their particularity from religion to religion and from sect to sect. It is also a more in the less the surplus of the paradox. To determine, specify and make concrete the explosive sense of this surplus, whether primarily as love, compassion, intellection, command, grace, or something else - this is the task of religion, of the concrete religions, in contrast to philosophy. There have been two broad and fundamentally opposed responses to the paradox of monotheism. For those persons like Spinoza and Western philosophers generally who adhere consistently to the logic of rationality, the paradox indicates that the monotheist mentality is beneath rationality, less than rational, sub-rational. From this point of view, in the self-fulfillment of its constitutional principles, sense is either rational or irrational. The real, as Parmenides first affirmed and as Hegel later elaborated, conforms to the rational: The real is rational and the rational is real. The actuality of Jewish, Christian and Muslim monotheistic beliefs and practices would be explained away as the psychologicalsociological products of ignorance, primitivism, pathology, herd instinct, grand politics, mass delusion, class consciousness and the like. The litany of radical rationalist critiques of religion is a long and varied one, even if in the end they all reduce to the simple and reductive claim that whatever is not rational is illusory, superstitious, mere appearance. For some rationalists, perhaps the most obdurate, religion would be entirely negative, an obstacle to genuine human enlightenment. It must be eradicated. For others, more temperate or condescending perhaps, monotheism would be a way station, however inadequate ultimately, on the long road to human enlightenment. It must be superceded. While for still others, more cynical or prudential perhaps, it would be an ideology, useful politically and socially to placate and subdue the masses driven inevitably by their passions and incapable of enlightenment. It must be administered. Whatever critical route be taken, and no doubt there are others, for all forms of rationalism the non-rationality of monotheism is merely sub-rational. Religion would be a long lie for the mentally incompetent.

For those persons who adhere to monotheism, in contrast, the non-rationality of the paradox indicates that religious mentality is above rationality, more than rational, suprarational. All that is not rational is not therefore illusory, superstitious, mere appearance. Unlike the either/or dualism of the rationalist, the monotheist makes a tri-part distinction: irrationality, which he opposes; rationality, which he exceeds; and religion, to which he adheres. Religion makes sense of paradox. The monotheistic religions account for their superior significance neither by the standards of rationality nor as the dumb affirmation of irrationality, but as the gifts of divine revelation, spiritual vision, prophetic inspiration, celestial grace and the like. The critical objections of the rationalists are explained away by characterizing rationality, despite its own self-serving claims, as narrow, confining, limited, blind to the transcendence of the divine. The basic effort of monotheist religion is to point towards and approach a dimension (what is the proper way to speak of this? - that is the question) of the holy unknown to and unattainable by rationality alone. Pascal perceptively recognized this triadic distinction when he noted that the interests of scientists, who aim for knowledge, are unknown to businesspersons, who aim at worldly goods, and that the interests of the pious, who aim at holiness, are unknown to the scientists! Religion negotiates the non-negotiable - the surplus of the paradox and it does so concretely, attached to both God and creation. A few illustrations must suffice at this point to make clear, with a broad stroke, the manner in which the monotheistic religions express their constitutional paradox. In Judaism the most celebrated instance is the Sabbath, which joins time and eternity. With creation eternity comes to pass through days. From a purely worldly point of view, a view under the sun, to use Solomons apt expression, days and months and years are a function of sun, moon, heat and light (or wet and dry), and no more. They are natural rhythms used by humans as conventions for dividing time. Judaism, however, under the command of God, sets the time of days into a six to one alternating ratio of work (melachah), when the world must be changed and improved, and rest (minouka), when the world is appreciated in its perfection. In this way the time of the world is taken seriously, sanctified, neither reduced away for the sake of an escapist eternity, as if there were no days and nights really, nor denigrated to a meaningless repetition, as if the patterns of nature were the ultimate structure of the real.

In Christianity the most celebrated instance of the paradox is the Incarnation, the New Testament figure of Jesus who is at once God and man, perfect and imperfect, Jesus and Christ - the deepest most unfathomable mystery and at the same time the very presence of God on earth. Early theological efforts to interpret Jesus as entirely creature (Arianism) or entirely divine (Manicheism) failed and were rejected as the heresies they were because mainstream Christianity perforce remained grounded in the paradox. At the center of Christianity lies the paradoxical surplus of perfection and imperfection united in the figure of Jesus the Christ. So too in Islam, in its oft-repeated confession of faith (Shahadah) - There is no God but Allah; Mohammed is the messenger of Allah. the absolute perfection of God is conjoined with the earthbound prophecy of Mohammed. Jihad, then, the holy war, is the religious human response, the paradoxical movement from imperfection to perfection, from evil to good, from infidelity to fidelity. The same can be said of the Jewish declaration of faith (Shema) Hear of Israel, the Lord our God the Lord is One. - which joins our God, God for us, the God of Israel who acts in history, with the One God, God in His perfect unadulterated uniqueness. Not only can examples be easily multiplied, they in fact permeate the entire gambit of actual monotheism: every single thought, action, feeling, text, narrative, institution or what have you, that is sanctioned by the monotheist religions, is - through exegetical interpretation an expression of the paradox.8 And exegesis itself, as Levinas elucidates in several articles devoted to this topic,9 is itself a reflection of the paradox, joining spirit to letter and letter to spirit. Indeed, every aspect, every detail of religious thought and practice reflects and concretizes the monotheist paradox. It has often been said that between science and religion there can be no common ground because they are mutually exclusive. One side exalts the paradox at the expense of rationality, while the other exalts rationality at the expense of the paradox.10 Leo Strauss has shown that when posed as an opposition neither side can convince the other of its errors or limitations because each is based on different grounds entirely.11 Science and religion are not mirror images of one another; neither accepts the others basic position for science rejects the transcendent God and religion rejects a totalitarian rationalism. Strauss, for his part, while regally defending the rights of each, nevertheless presents only a dyad:

rationality or religion, reason or revelation, Athens or Jerusalem. Yet dyadic thought is itself a function of rationalism. Monotheism, for its part, distinguishes the religious from the rational, to be sure, but it also distinguishes the religious from the irrational. As we have seen, it sees in its own paradox a surplus of signification rather than a deficiency. This human impossibility of conceiving the Infinite, Levinas writes, is also a new possibility of signifying.12 We know how rationality rejects religion, as sub-rational. Any specifically religious intelligibility would be rejected for being merely stupid, stubborn, infantile, duped, deluded and the like. But our question is neither how rationality rejects religion nor how religion rejects rationality. Rather, our question is how monotheism admits its fundamental paradox without producing the chaos of irrationality. The real may not be entirely rational, but for all that it is not entirely irrational either. The answer given by monotheism is that the sense of the paradox indeed finds expression in the symbol. Here the symbol is conceived neither as a corruption of thought, an inadequate or stammering thought, nor as a mystification of matter, an unfortunate but humanly necessary concession to the opacity of the world. Rather for monotheism the symbol preserves the unstable unity, the singularity of the proximate and distant, the hither and beyond, being and the otherwise than being, the visible and the invisible. In its very instability the symbol retains and represents the pointing, disruption and challenge the transcendence - that lie at the heart of monotheism. Of course, the symbolic, even if granted autonomy, can be interpreted in many ways. The great originality of Levinass thought in this regard is to argue that the symbol that retains the sense of monotheism as a surplus is at bottom to be understood neither an ontological-epistemological structure nor an aesthetic structure but as an ethical structure. Hence the primacy of the ethical. In his first major philosophical work, Totality and Infinity, Levinas had already written: God rises to his supreme and ultimate presence as correlative to the justice rendered unto men.13 And: Everything that cannot be reduced to an [ethical] inter-human relation represents not the superior form but the forever primitive form of religion.14 In giving primacy to the ethical Levinas remains true to Judaism and at the same time proposes a fundamental reorientation to philosophy and its quest for the real. In other words, a religion permeated by ethics is for Levinas not simply a matter of blind faith or opinion, but opens up the reality of the real.

The issue, then, is one of establishing a level of sense independent of the rationalists dyadic worldview and yet generative of it. The issue of the generation of sense is one that has determined most of modern philosophy, from Hegels historical dialectic, Schellings philosophy of myth, Schopenhauers and Nietzsches cosmic will, Bergsons elan vital, to Heideggers ontological difference, Cassirers philosophy of symbolic forms, Merleau-Pontys flesh of the world and Ricoeurs symbol that gives rise to thought. Indeed, it is an issue sense as the invisible in the visible that has haunted philosophy from its Socratic transformation to the Renaissance humanism that is still so influential today. In general, however, all the answers that have understood the significance of meaning beyond a reductive scientific rationality have relied on an aesthetic ontology attentiveness to the manifestation of manifestation in its own right taken as a new form of epistemology. In contrast, for Levinas the very production of the real upon which both aesthetics and epistemology, each in their own way, must be grounded is an ethical event. Levinas thinks ethics ethically, subordinating ethics neither to an epistemological nor to an aesthetic ontology. Here the paradox of monotheism, the unstable unity of the perfect and the imperfect, is conceived as the non-coincidence diachrony - of each persons obligations to and for each and every other. Responsibility, then, rather than the selfpositing of consciousness or of the world, would constitute the ultimate and irreducible sense of transcendence in immanence. How can this claim so apparently wild - be made good? Levinas advanced philosophical training was in phenomenology, and he was instrumental in introducing phenomenology to France. Phenomenology began as a meticulous study of the most primitive meanings (sign, unit, part, whole, etc.) and their formation in the meaning-bestowing acts of consciousness. Levinas own careful analyses of signification led him to discover a dimension of meaning whose true significance was overlooked within the intentional or noetic-noematic framework considered fundamental by the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, under whom Levinas studied. Husserls great discovery was a turn to consciousness as the source of meaning, as the source of meaning for science, the hard objective sciences, to be sure, but also for all realms of meaning, for instance affective, social and evaluative meanings as well. Hitherto, natural science, in contrast to philosophical idealism, had wrested truth out

of meaning by correlating quantifiable signs to referents out there in the world. This was its form of realism, that of a calculus: scientific formulae conform to or draw out the quantifiable contours of the real. What Husserl saw was that a complete understanding of the meaningful would also require an elucidation of the production of signs, including mathematical signs, by consciousness. A complete account of meaning would require a turn to the meaning-bestowing or constitutive acts of consciousness. Thus Husserl supplemented the realist sign-referent structure of science with its origin in the signifying acts of consciousness. The sign-referent structure of the natural sciences would be supplemented with and expanded by the even more scientific signifying-sign-referent structure of phenomenology. Phenomenology would be science the search for the truth of the real - carried all the way through, rigorous science, including both the subjective and the objective constituents of signification. What Levinas saw, however, was that in his legitimate concern to provide a broader ground for signification by turning to consciousness, Husserl still favored a representational model of meaning that he had taken unwittingly from the objective sciences he aimed to supplement. What struck Levinass attention, beyond the broader signifying-sign-signified or intentional structure authorized and elaborated by phenomenology, was a further communicative dimension of meaning. Not only are meanings intended by acts of consciousness, they are also communicated by someone to someone. Meaning, in other words, has an irreducible accusative dimension. Sociality and not merely verification lay at the root of signification. What Levinas saw was that the accusative dimension of meaning could not be recuperated within the signifying-sign-signified structure of intentionality. A more basic non-intentional dimension of meaning broke with and yet undergirded the intentional framework of meaning. However, unlike the later structuralists, for whom this excess of meaning would be interpreted as the influence of a larger web of historical-cultural signs, that is, of language and cultural history, and unlike the later deconstructionists, for whom this excess would be interpreted as the impact of a semiotic slippage, that is, of a basic and material grammar, signs deferring to signs, for Levinas the accusative dimension of meaning meant that beyond the inter-relations of signs in their grammatical and cultural context, which Levinas calls the said (dit), one must also account for the even greater impact the transcendence - of an inter-subjective or inter-human dimension which he

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calls saying (dire). The impact of society, more specifically the impact of the communicative proximity of one person with another across discourse therefore must be accounted for as the source from which signification derives. From this point of view, discourse, language, speaking, expression would not indicate some failure of signifying to be sufficiently precise or transparent, nor would they merely indicate the intrusion of larger cultural or semiotic determinations that would undermine the subjects autonomy relative to the sign. Rather the impingement of language would point to an irreducible priority a dimension of emphasis, a performative or imperative dimension - deriving from the intersubjective relation itself, a priority that would overcharge the entire signifying-signsignified structure without undermining its validity. And this social priority, because it is a social priority, can only be accounted for, so Levinas argues, in ethical rather than epistemological terms. The alterity of the other person to whom one speaks and, even more importantly, the alterity of the other person who speaks and to whom one responds has the moral significance of an obligation. Responsibility, then, the responsibility to respond to the other person as another person, would be the non-intentional root of the intentional construction of signification. This is Levinas great insight. The entirety of his intellectual labor is the effort to lay out the precise character of this over-riding social and moral surplus of meaning and its consequences and ramifications for all the dimensions of human life. How is this related to monotheism and Judaism? The connection is not difficult to see. Monotheism the paradox of monotheism - is based on the irruption of transcendence within immanence without that transcendence either absorbing immanence into itself or being absorbed by immanence. Furthermore, the transcendence of monotheism, the perfection of God, is not merely an abstract transcendence. It is the transcendence pointed to not only by such philosophical superlatives as omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence, but no less by the transcendence of the biblical God, the transcendence of divine benevolence, of mercy and justice. The personal God of monotheism is a compassionate God. Considered from this point of view, the paradox manifests the very same structure as that of the saying-said that for Levinas is the root structure of ethics. Monotheism holds together the transcendence of divine perfection and the immanence of created imperfection or separation without divorcing or identifying the two. So, too, are the

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self and other bound to one another across an absolute but ethical separation. What Levinas understood is that the ethical relation, like the paradox of monotheism, is at bottom neither an epistemological nor an aesthetic structure. Neither epistemology nor aesthetics are capable of sustaining the extra-ordinary relation without relation,15 the posteriority of the anterior16 transcendence in immanence that is characteristic of ethics and monotheism. For their part, epistemology and aesthetics inevitably reduce the alterity of transcendence to a relative rather than an absolute structure, whether to the intentionality of consciousness and knowledge or to the ex-stases of existence in the world. What Levinas understood, then, is that monotheism is an ethical structure. While Gods omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence can be known only by negation (taking analogy to be a form of negation), and hence are not known at all, Gods benevolence enigmatically appears is traced - when and where human benevolence occurs. The real in its relation to God, in its paradoxical conjunction of imperfection and perfection, is constituted as and by the ongoing work of sanctification as moral responsibility and redemption as the struggle for justice.17 One can cite many supporting and elucidating texts by Levinas. I invite readers to examine the whole of the subsection entitled The Metaphysical and the Human from section one of Totality and Infinity, from which the following philosophically oriented citations are taken. The proximity of the Other, the proximity of the neighbor, is in being an ineluctable moment of the revelation of an absolute presence (that is, disengaged from every relation), which expresses itself. God rises to his supreme and ultimate presence as correlative to the justice rendered unto men. The work of justice the uprightness of the face to face is necessary in order that the breach that leads to God be produced. The establishing of this primacy of the ethical, that is, of the relationship of man to man signification, teaching and justice a primacy of an irreducible structure upon which all the other structures rest (and in particular all those which, in an

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original way, seem to put us in contact with an impersonal sublime, aesthetic or ontological), is one of the objectives of the present work.18 I cite from this philosophical work to show that for Levinas religion is not a matter of private confession or personal indulgence, which would somehow remain separate from philosophy proper. Rather, doing good is the act of belief itself.19 This is how Levinas understands religion in his philosophical texts, and it is how he understands Judaism in his Jewish writings. Within the most particular particularity of Judaism, in its traditions, texts and rituals, lies the universal message of morality and justice. At the core of Judaism Levinas finds the same biblical humanism, with its own peculiar expressions, to be sure, as lies at the core of philosophy. There is nothing exclusionary about the biblical humanism of Judaism except the evil and injustice that it excludes from the path of righteousness. It is in this sense that Levinas is able to say, provocatively to a Christian interlocutor whose membership in the Christian religion Levinas certainly does not challenge: The authentically human is the being-Jewish in all men.20 While most Jewish laws as one sees in the Ten Commandments - are straightforwardly moral laws and laws of justice for all humankind, even in the laws of holiness which apply only between Jews and God, such as the dietary codes and the family purity rites, there is always, as Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch had said a century earlier, a moral dimension. On Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, Levinas is fond of pointing out, the penitent Jew must ask from his or her neighbor the forgiveness that not even God can bestow. There is nothing extra-ethical or supra-ethical, nothing beyond or above good and evil in the manner of the Kierkegaards knight of faith, in Levinass conception of Judaism in particular or religion more generally. For Levinas, the highest moment of the story of Abrahams near sacrifice of Isaac, to take the apparently most difficult biblical counter-instance, lies not in an alleged breach of morality - a breach that in fact never occurs ( God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering, Abraham tells his son Isaac (Genesis 22:8)) - but rather in the imperative of the Angel of God who does not permit murder (Lay not thy hand upon the lad, Genesis 22:12) even of a willing victim.21 Fear of God, spiritual awe - in which, according to the rabbis, lies the paradoxical gift human freedom - is to fear for ones moral rectitude, to fear for the other before

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oneself, to love the neighbor as oneself. This is the sense of loving the Torah more than God, about which Levinas has written two articles.22 And this includes, let us not forget yet another biblical highpoint, Abrahams fear articulated in his trenchant defense of the righteous of Sodom (Genesis 18:23-33) - for Gods own moral rectitude! While it is true that Levinas focuses with great acumen on the ethical height of the other as it is traced in language in his philosophical writings, providing deep analyses, as we have seen, of the non-intentional that underlies intentional consciousness,23 in his most Jewish or confessional writings, too - without in the least reverting to the abstract universality of the Enlightenment and thus remaining faithful to the normative Talmudic tradition - Levinas will no less articulate the surplus of the absolute in the relative, the disruption of the said by saying, in terms of morality and justice. The primacy of ethics is defended throughout Levinass writings, both philosophical and Jewish,24 for this, after all, is the central work of all of Levinass work. Insofar as the aim of philosophy is wisdom rather than knowledge, reason rather than rationality, there is no need and there can be no justification for separating philosophical from confessional writings. The most explicitly monotheist articulation of this same primacy is found, as one would expect, in Levinass Jewish writings. Most particularly I refer readers to the concluding pages of two essays published in 1977 (six years after the publication Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, hence in the fullest maturity of thought): Revelation in the Jewish Tradition and In the Image of God, according to Rabbi Hayyim Volozhiner.25 In The Image of God, according to Rabbi Hayyim Volozhiner, for instance, as article I have already cited above, Levinas recognizes that when Rabbi Hayyim finds the paradox of monotheism in the very syntax of Jewish blessings Blessed are you Lord, Lord, who where a shift from the second to the third person brings into coordination God on our side, the immanent God who acts in history, and God on his own side, the transcendent God in his pure perfection, it is also and no less a reference to the moral imperative placed upon the I facing a You and to the demand for a dis-interested-ness that, striving for perfection, aims at justice for all.26 The perfection of God is not just any perfection, but translates into the specific perfection the perfecting - of moral goodness and justice for all. In this radical contradiction [between God on our side and God on his own side], neither of the two notions could efface itself before the other. And yet this

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modality of the divine is also the perfection of the moral intention that animates religious life as it is lived from the world and its differences, from the top and the bottom, from the pure and the impure.27 The imperfection-hierarchy of creation is precisely a moral imperative, from and to perfection. When, continuing, Levinas writes of this as [a] spiritualization that dismisses the forms whose elevation it perfects, but which it transcends as being incompatible with the Absolute, he means precisely religious life as ethical selfovercoming. The trace of God on earth, to say it again, is precisely the moral elevation of humanity. Not to know God, per impossible, but to become Godlike, such is the presence of God on earth. Religion, in this holy ethical sense, would no longer be a miraculous or predetermined escape from nothingness, from the utter worthlessness of creation vis--vis the Creator, but the perfecting of a creation whose highest sense would be precisely this movement not necessary or impossible, but best - toward perfection. Ethics as the ground of the real, Levinas writes, is a new possibility: the possibility of thinking of the Infinite and the Law together, the very possibility of their conjunction. Man would not simply be the admission of an antinomy of reason. Beyond the antinomy, he would signify a new image of the Absolute.28 Man in the image and likeness of God would be ethical man. His compassion, says the Psalmist, is upon all His creations.29 God is found on earth not by escaping the earthly, but by sanctifying it through morality and justice. The just law halachah, properly the way is then no obstacle to contact with God but His very presence, his Will, as it were, on earth. The freedom of doing in obedience to just law All that the Lord has said will we do and obey (Exodus 24:7) is the very structure of moral freedom for creatures bound to God. To put the neighbor before oneself, to be forthe-other before oneself, is to be for God. On the concluding pages of Revelation in the Jewish Tradition Levinas is even more explicit regarding the height of ethics as the ultimate and irreducible sense of the paradox of monotheism. Levinas writes: The path I would be inclined to take in order to solve the paradox of the Revelation is one which claims that this relation, at first glance a paradoxical one, may find a model in the non-indifference toward the other, in a responsibility toward him, and

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that it is precisely within this relation that man becomes his self: designated without any possibility of escape, chosen, unique, non-interchangeable and, in this sense, free. Ethics is the model worthy of transcendence, and it is as an ethical kerygma that the Bible is Revelation.30 In this way the hollowing out of selfhood, the humanity of the human, as sacrifice, as circumcision of the heart, as infinite obligation to the other, as hostage the opposite of repose anxiety, questioning, seeking, Desire31 - upon which, and for the sake of which, are built the rectifying structures of justice, would be the concrete sense that the paradox at the heart of monotheism takes on. Such would be a selfhood more awake than the psyche of intentionality and the knowledge adequate to its object a relation with an Other which would be better than self-possession where the ethical relation with the other is a modality of the relation with God.32 Continuing: Rather than being seen in terms of received knowledge, should not the Revelation be thought of as this awakening?33 Levinas is not merely glossing an ontological or aesthetic structure: the real is itself determined by the ideality not merely self-assertion but obedience - of morality and justice. It is in following this trace, in rising to its proper height, that humanity as monotheist understands better than philosophy. The sense of Judaism as of all monotheist humanism is to rise to the surplus of the more in the less, the perfect in the imperfect, via the demands of an imperative voice from beyond: the voice of the other person, the obligating imperatives deriving from the others suffering and mortality, commanding the self beyond its own needs to its unfulfillable obligation34 to each one and to all. The perfection of a personal God is traced in the perfecting of the earth. And the perfecting of the earth would be to care for the other before oneself, for the orphan, the widow, the stranger. This would not be mere feeling or sentimentality but an imperative morality, morality requiring justice. And with justice, judge in your gates. (Zechariah 8:16) - upon which Rabbi Simeon ben Gamaliel comments: where justice is wrought, peace and truth are wrought also.35

16

17

Emmanuel Levinas, In the Image of God According to Rabbi Hayyim Volozhiner, in Emmanuel

Levinas, Beyond the Verse, trans. Gary D. Mole (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 162 et passim.
2 3

Levinas, Beyond the Verse, p. 164. Monism, expressed by both Hinduism and Buddhism, is a spirituality fundamentally distinct from

monotheism. Rather than the paradoxical transcendence of a creator God, for monism the divine is the real in its totality, properly speaking a Godhead rather than a personal God. The aim of the monist, then, is integration into the whole, requiring the disintegration of all distinctions including that of the distinct self. While for Hinduism the ultimately real is Brahman and for Buddhism it is the absolute Void, structurally these two spiritual paths are the same: extinction of all dualities, identification with the whole. For monotheism, in contrast, one must distinguish God from His creation.
4

See, e.g., Isaiah 45:7: I am the Lord, and there is none else, I form the light, and create darkness: I Sifre Deuteronomy, Berachah, no. 355, 17. Levinas, Beyond the Verse, p. 166. I am deliberately using the dyad perfect/imperfect, rather than such alternatives as infinite/finite,

make peace, and create evil: I, the Lord do all these things.
5 6 7

unconditioned/conditioned, or absolute/relative, because the former begins with God while the latter begin with creation.
8

The subtle analyses found in the marvelous book by Marc-Alain Ouaknin, The Burnt Book, trans.

Llewellyn Brown (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), especially those directly indebted to Levinas, such as Ouaknins extended commentary to Yoma 54a (pp. 187-255), show to what extent an attentive exegesis can discover the paradox of monotheism embedded in every detail of monotheistic religion.
9

Most notably: On the Jewish Reading of Scriptures and Revelation in the Jewish Tradition, in

Beyond the Verse; Contempt for the Torah as Idolatry and From Ethics to Exegesis, in In the Time of the Nations; and The Strings and the Wood: On the Jewish Reading of the Bible, in Outside the Subject; among the many other articles that could be mentioned in this regard. See, also, chapter seven, Humanism and the Rights of Exegesis, in my book, Ethics, Exegesis and Philosophy: Interpretation After Levinas (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2001), pp. 216-265.
10

Nonetheless, there is a third alternative: to affirm a non-religious irrationality, a sub-rationality that

denies rationality, but at the same time also denies the perfection, that is to say, the existence of God. This is the position of sophism, skepticism or what Levinas calls a pure humanism (in contrast to biblical humanism) that deny truth in the name of extra-rational power relations such as habit, good

manners, force, equanimity, will, libido, the nomadic and the like. Influential and destructive though this third posture has been, and continues to be, it is essentially pagan and except for a few allusions to Heidegger - is not the concern of the present paper on monotheism.
11

See, e.g., Leo Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Levinas, Beyond the Verse, p. 165. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquense University Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 79. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 80. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 54. In a chapter entitled Monotheism and Ethics (pp. 74-119), from his book Monotheism: A Philosophic

Jewish Thought, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997).
12 13

Press, 1969), p. 78.

14 15

16

17

Inquiry into the Foundations of Theology and Ethics (Totawa, New Jersey: Allanheld, Osmun & Co., 1981), Professsor Lenn Goodman writes (p. 86): The emulation called for by the very contemplation of the concept of divine perfection expressed Biblically as the human pursuit of holiness (Leviticus 19) and in Plato as the striving to become as like to God as lies in human capacity (Theaetetus 176) means simply the pursuit of the highest conceivable moral standards. See also a later revised version of this chapter in Lenn Goodman, God of Abraham (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 79-114.
18 19

Levinas, Totality and Infinity, pp. 78-79 (with some minor revisions of the Lingis translation). Levinas, In the Time of the Nations, p. 164. Levinas is interpreting an anecdote told by Hannah Arendt

on French radio: When she was a child in her native Konigsberg, one day she said to the rabbi who was teaching her religion: You know, I have lost my faith. And the rabbi responded: Whos asking you for it? The response was typical. What matters is not faith, but doing. Doing which means moral behavior of course, but also the performance of ritual. Moreover, are belief and doing different things? What does believing mean? What is faith made of? Words, ideas? Convictions? What do we believe with? With the whole body! With all my bones (Psalms 35:10)! What the rabbi meant was: Doing good is the act of belief itself. That is my conclusion.
20

Levinas, In the Time of the Nations, p. 164. Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, See, Emmanuel Levinas, Loving the Torah more than God, in Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom,

21

1996), p. 74.
22

trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), pp. 142-145; and Levinas,

Contempt for the Torah as Idolatry, in Levinas, In the Time of the Nations, pp. 55-75.
23

See, e.g., his close analyses of Husserlian phenomenology in Emmanuel Levinas, Discovering

Existence with Husserl, ed. and trans. Richard A. Cohen and Michael B. Smith (Evanston: Indiana University Press, 1998).
24

The unity of Levinass philosophical and confessional writings can hardly be better recognized than on

the pages of his extraordinary essay of 1973, God and Philosophy (trans. Richard A. Cohen), found in Collected Philosophical Papers, ed. and trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), pp. 153-186; as well as in a second English translation in Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 55-78.
25 26 27 28

These two essays were both reprinted in the 1982 collection entitled Beyond the Verse. Levinas, Beyond the Verse, p. 163. Levinas, Beyond the Verse, p. 165. Levinas, Beyond the Verse, p. 166-167. For a more extended discussion of Levinass appropriation of

Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhyn, see chapter eleven, The Face of Truth and Jewish Mysticism, in my book, Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 241-273 (especially pp. 261-273).
29

Psalm 145. Levinas, Beyond the Verse, p. 148. Levinas, Beyond the Verse, p. 149. Levinas, Beyond the Verse, p. 149. Levinas, Beyond the Verse, p. 150. Levinas, Beyond the Verse, p. 150. Pesikta Kahana, 140a.

30 31 32 33 34 35