Addressing Levinas

Strange Fire

Difficult Freedom, a collection of essays on Jewish topics that Emmanuel Levinas published in 1963 and in a second, expanded edition in 1976, is the first of Levinas’s “nonphilosophical” or “confessional” works. He keeps these works separate from his philosophical works, as the difference between an exegetical adherence to a tradition on the one hand, and a phenomenological inquiry aware of its own presuppositions on the other. While arguably this distinction between the two kinds of writing is not absolute (it breaks down, in any case, after 1975 with the publication of essays eventually collected in Of God Who Comes to Mind), it is important to understand why Levinas takes the distinction seriously. As he would later formulate it in a 1986 interview with François Poirié: A philosophical truth cannot be based on the authority of a verse. The verse must be phenomenologically justified. But the verse can allow for the search for a reason.1 This assertion of the distinction between the philosophical and the nonphilosophical does not go without acknowledging the possibility of a certain interplay between them. The search or “midrash” (a term which the French biblical scholar Renée Bloch translates as recherche), the starting point of which is the scriptural verse, may—indirectly, of course—“motivate ” the ethical thought which, in turn, “must” receive phenomenological description. More generally, this might be a way in which Levinas’s philosophical works can be said to be inflected by Judaism. The fortyseven essays collected in Difficult Freedom—which date from the late 1940’s through the early 1960’s, namely, from a time when Levinas was developing his mature ethical philosophy, represented by the 1961 Totality and Infinity—were originally published in French Jewish periodicals such as Strange Fire Jill Robbins 3 Evidences, Arche, Les nouveaux cahiers, and Information juive. In these postwar essays, which register the impact of the Nazi genocide of the Jews, Levinas addresses questions of Jewish education, assimilation, and identity. Suffice it to say that in this context, Levinas feels free to let the Jewish exegetical tradition engage him. The epigraph to part 1 of Difficult Freedom is from the medieval French Jewish commentator Rashi. The opening moment of a book cannot be inconsequential . At the opening of his book, at the very opening of the opening , Levinas offers his reader an inscription, Rashi’s comment on Leviticus 10:2: “Let them not enter the sanctuary drunk.” This is a telling motto for an ethical philosopher who always tries to keep intoxication and the ludic at arm’s length. I have evaluated the consequences of this for Levinas’s philosophical work, especially as it concerns the relation between ethics and aesthetics, elsewhere.2 In this essay, I am concerned with the meaning of the epigraph for Difficult Freedom. There are no further direct references in that work to Rashi’s comment, and although it would appear that Levinas endorses the interpretation of the scriptural text that it implicitly advances , he never does come right out and say so.3 What is irrefutable is this: the inscription with which Levinas opens his work calls upon us to ask, and gives us to think, what it means to read and interpret. To read the inscription is necessarily to read Levinas reading Rashi reading previous rabbinic commentators reading scripture, i.e., to read reading. This inscription also suggests something about the modality of interpretation, as a relation to a “word always already past,” as Levinas put it in an interview, “in which transmission and renewal go hand in hand” (IR 275). The Leviticus passage which provoked the interpretive comment belongs to one of the few extended narrative portions in the book of Leviticus , which is primarily comprised of legal material. According to Jacob Milgrom, while Exodus presents us with a static picture of the people receiving instructions for the building of the tabernacle, Leviticus gives us its living context.4 The focus of Leviticus is on the priests. Chapters 1–7 contain the laws about sacrifice and the distinctions between different kinds of offerings. The narrative portions, chapters 8–10, recount how Moses’s brother Aaron, along with four of Aaron’s sons, undergo consecration as priests, the inaugural service of the tabernacle, and what Milgrom calls “the tragic aftermath of the Inaugural Service,” in which two of the sons, Nadab and Abihu, are killed. Chapters 11–16 detail the impurity system. The authorship of Leviticus is generally attributed to the P (Priestly) writer, who...