The Fence and the Neighbor: Emmanuel Levinas, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, and Israel among the Nations

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER 2 Mishurat HaDin: Leibowitz, Nationhood, and the Fence of Halakhah Two neighbors were blessed with daughters at the same time. One man was a shoemaker by profession and extremely poor. The other was a thief, and strange as it may seem, despite his profession he was equally povertystricken . They would often lament their fate and discuss ways to help their daughters when they were to reach marriageable age. A friend advised them to save money, and the shoemaker took his advice. He bore a hole in a crate, locked it up, and would daily place a penny inside this safe. In those days, a long period of such savings would reap a goodly sum. At the wedding of the shoemaker's daughter, the father of the bride and his neighbor the thiefagain discussed money matters. "How did you manage it?" inquired the thief. "I locked up a safe and placed pennies in it day after day," responded the shoemaker. "And why did you not do the same?" "I, who have no fear of other people's locks-why should I fear a lock of my own?" replied the thief. -R. Yaakov Krantz, Maggid of Dubno One of the fundamental problems of language is that while it recognizes the question mark and the exclamation point, it does not recognize other necessary signs such as signs of amazement or irony. -Jorge Luis Borges' :iTTD Ii; iTt~ Ii" Ci'~I:JiT ';1!liD~::J " lli:';Q i~!l'1 :::JiDnn' li:'; Ci'1J::J1 PiD' ii::J'; Ci!l-jiT 1:11iVli: n1!l::J;m 1:li:1li: Ci'I:> uli:I~-'= •.• The angel of the Lord stood in the path of the vineyards, a fence on this side and a fence on that side. ... For from its origins, I see it rock-like and from hills I see it. Behold! It is a nation that will dwell in solitude and not be reckoned among the nations. -Numbers 22:24 101 102 THE FENCE AND THE NEIGHBOR .'m~iD~'; m~iDr- liD!' ii l~P i!'lrSet a fence (guard) about my Fence (Guard). -Tractate Moed Katan Sa Mishurat HaDin 103 1. JUDAISMS Altered slightly, the parable by the Dubner Maggid's in the first epigraph to this chapter suggests that thief and shoemaker are in identical positions when considered humanly, the latter's stroke of good luck notwithstanding. One man breaks into other people's safes; the other man breaks into his own safe: in both cases, the safes always hold out the possibility of their being cracked, the locks invite being broken into in the first place. That is because safes and locks, like shoes and promises made to oneself, are the stuff of human fabrication, and the human hand that grasps and aggrandizes is also the human hand that loses or finds itself emptied. The Halakhah, by contrast, is a set of safes and locksor fences-instituted by Divine command, that entirely transcend a selfinterested human calculus of gain and loss. It is minimally an anthropology because it concerns man. But it has no truck with characterology: as men, thief and shoemaker are equal before God. I chose the Maggid's parable as an epigraph to this chapter not only because of the way it subtly implies an axial tenet of Leibowitz's philosophy -man's standing before God-but also because of implications in it that can be heard to speak over Leibowitz's head. That is, although the parable points in the same direction as Leibowitz's contumacious theocentrism, it is not the sort of discourse he would very likely use himself , for it is the stuff of storytelling-aggadic or biblical humanismand thus ill-suits the lapidary formulations of his philosophizing. On Leibowitz's understanding of the Halakhah, a distinction between ~~mn or f:Jn (object) and ~i:D (person), is merely, or entirely, halakhic. So dogged is his antihumanism where ethics is concerned that from within its ambit and metaphysically considered, safes and shoemakers, locks and thieves, objects and persons, sometimes seem members of the same class of entity. It is only the fact that humans are made in the image of God that they have an opportunity thus to turn to God in worship and serve Him through the Torah and the mitzvot. But this, as one of the Sages says, is merely "because you were created for this purpose" (Pirke...