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

Table Of Contents

CONTENTS Preface: Fences and Neighbors lX Acknowledgments XVt1 Abbreviations X1X Introduction: Signing the World 1 Chapter 1 Aggadic Man: Levinas and the Neighbor as (Br)Otherhood 23 Chapter 2 Mishurat haDin: Leibowitz, Nationhood, and the Fence of Halakhah 101 Epilogue: The Present of "Future Jewish Thought" 169 Notes 187 Works Consulted 241 General Index 253 Scriptual Index 259 v For Lisa The caress oflove, always the same, in the last accounting ... is always different and overflows with exorbitance the songs, poems, and admissions in which it is said in so many different ways. La sagesse de l'amour aIe service de ['amour. -Emmanuel Levinas Au repoussoir Time and again, at the end of a working day, I marveled to see that Ferber, with the few lines and shadows that had escaped annihilation, had created a portrait of great vividness. And all the more did I maruel when, the following morning, the moment the model had sat down and he had taken a look at him or her, he would erase the portrait again, and once more set about excavating the features of his model, who by now was distinctly wearied by this manner of working, from a surface already badly damaged by the continual destruction. The facial features and eyes, said Ferber, remained ultimately unknowable for him. He might reject as many as forty variants, or smudge them back into the paper and overdraw new attempts upon them; and if he then decided that the portrait was done, not so much because he was convinced that it was finished as through sheer exhaustion, an onlooker might well feel that it had evolved from a long lineage of gray, ancestral faces, rendered unto ash but still there, as ghostly presence, on the harried paper. -w. G. Sebald ...