Encountering the Stranger: A Jewish-Christian-Muslim Trialogue

6. The Jewish Roots of Emmanuel Levinas’s Metaphysics of Welcome

76 6 The Jewish Roots of Emmanuel Levinas’s Metaphysics of Welcome Leonard Grob Any human face is a claim on you . . . —Marilynne Robinson, Gilead In his essay titled “Religion and Tolerance,” the twentieth-century French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas speaks of Judaism as a “religion of tolerance ” at its core. Such tolerance, for Levinas, is not to be understood in its customary sense as open-mindedness before the doctrines of those who are strangers to Judaism: “Before appearing to the Jews as a fellow creature with convictions to be recognized or opposed, the Stranger is one towards whom one is obligated.”1 I, as a Jew, am thus not merely to be broad-minded with regard to the religious views of the stranger. Before any intellectual exchange of religious views—before dialogue—the stranger-as-Other is one who demands of me as a Jew nothing short of radical hospitality.2 Responding to the command to welcome the Other invests a Jewish life with ethical import. In his philosophical writings, Levinas takes these claims about the stranger yet further, making explicit that which he believes is implicit within Judaism. Indeed, “to be obligated” to the stranger is not a demand placed before Jews alone. To be obligated is the very definition of what it means to be human! For René Descartes’s Cogito, ergo sum (I think, there- 77 Jewish Roots of Levinas’s Metaphysics fore I am), Levinas substitutes Obligo, ergo sum (I am obligated, therefore I am). Levinas goes so far as to depict the nature of this obligation as the need to give the stranger “the bread out of one’s own mouth and the coat from one’s shoulders.”3 He thus gives metaphysical import to the act of hospitality, an import that distinguishes the welcome of the stranger from any conventional understanding of hospitality as the product of some moral calculus. Levinas contends that it is not merely “a good choice” that I host the stranger: the act of welcome is constitutive of my very humanityas -ethical. Drawing on Jewish sources, Levinas thus formulates a “metaphysics of welcome.” Indeed, in his view Judaism remains a particular tradition that aspires to universality: it announces to all of humankind the fundamental role that an ethics of welcome plays in constituting us as genuinely human. Such chosenness-of-mission, however, is not to be misconstrued as sectarian spiritual arrogance: Judaism’s teaching—its injunction to offer hospitality to the stranger—“does not turn into an imperialist expansion. . . . It burns inwards, as an infinite demand made on oneself, an infinite responsibility .”4 The Hebrew Bible speaks of Judaism’s occupying a “position outside nations,” but this position “is a moral category rather than a historical fact to do with Israel and its particularism. It is a particularism that conditions universalism.”5 It is the purpose of this chapter to elucidate this “metaphysics of welcome”; in it I endeavor to articulate a vision of primordial hospitality, which, according to Levinas, has its origins within Judaism . Such a vision of hospitality extended to the stranger/Other is not altogether new in the history of religious thought. Adumbrations of the command that the stranger be shown hospitality are found in many religious writings throughout the ages. Yet Levinas argues that religio-philosophical thought in the West has most often remained impervious to a notion of the other-as-truly-Other. Within a universe of discourse in which selfinterest is the supreme law, someone other than me cannot, on principle, present me with a genuine moral challenge. Others cannot challenge me to proffer true hospitality, since these others exist solely within my individual ego’s sphere of meaning-giving powers. Indeed, the very nature of their being is understood as determined by the interests of my egoist existence. Within these traditional systems, I habitually objectify others: others are “for me.” I classify others, give them a role, a set of attributes. And it is not only human others who are subject to my categorizing ego. “Everything is 78 Leonard Grob at my disposal,” Levinas proclaims, “even the stars, if I but reckon them.”6 Most religio-philosophical teachings in the history of Western thought have thus been little other than “egologies.” If others in these teachings have challenged me at all, Levinas argues, the challenge has been directed at the extent of my ego’s powers, rather than the right I...