Levinas and Buber: Dialogue and Difference

10. Reading Torah: The Discontinuity of Tradition

ReadingTorah 179 179 TEN ReadingTorah The Discontinuity ofTradition RobertGibbs One of the most basic agreements between Levinas and Buber is a shared insight that what happens in the action of language, in the performance of signification or in the facing of another, is the origin of meaning. The pragmatic dimension of our relations to others, the way a sign relates to the ones who signify, who “use” the sign, governs the interpretation not only of discourse and of language, but more of thought and, beyond that, of ethics and of social relations. Buber’s distinction between the I-It and the I-Thou articulates the way that the address to another differs from any description of the world. Levinas interprets the face as my exposure to the other as my teacher, as the shattering of images in the moment of being addressed. These are central insights into the pragmatic claims of others, claims that engender language, thought and action. Still more interesting, for both Buber and Levinas this claim about the act of signifying centers on the experience of reading, on the interpretation of texts, and ultimately, on reading the Bible. This biblical orientation is manifest in Buber’s works, and is central to the appeal and wide reception of Buber’s works. Those works were welcomed not only for their cadence or style, but much more for their ability to call us back to the Bible. For Levinas, the matter is more implicit. His major work, Totality and Infinity, had only a smattering of explicit references to the Bible, although the refrain about justice for the 180 RobertGibbs stranger, the widow, the orphan, the poor, resounds in the work. In later work, including his various volumes of Jewish writings, Levinas has been much more forthcoming on the role of the Bible in his thought, and more importantly, on the biblical orientation of his views of language and ethics. While the thinking of both men finds its origin in and orientation from the Bible, how to read the Bible opens a significant space between the two. Indeed, that gap provides a kind of scale for thinking through the way that words work, and the ways that meaning arises. I will focus on one key difference: Buber requires a direct reading of the Bible and Levinas requires a reading through the Talmud and Midrash. That there is a contrast is relatively obvious: both in literary form (Buber’s many works on biblical texts and figures, Levinas’s many readings of talmudic texts and diverse writings about the rabbinic reading of the Bible), and in their explicit account of what is required in reading the Bible. There is even a polemic from Levinas against Buber’s choice.1 The historical influences that lead to this contrast is in itself interesting and worthy of pursuit: Levinas’s Lithuanian enlightenment (Haskalah) background and commitment to the rationalist schools of interpretation (Mitnaggidic), and Buber’s commitment to his sympathetic and even existentialist interpretation of pietistic practices (Hasidic). But this essay focuses on philosophical rather than historical differences; modes of reasoning, the temporality of texts and their reading, and the role of discontinuity in a tradition. These are themes I wish to explore. Both Buber and Levinas seem to require a face-to-face interaction for the orienting moment of ethics and of human existence. Many have accepted Derrida’s critical questioning of Levinas’s privilege of speaking over writing, and Buber’s I-Thou seemed, in principle, to exclude the written text as an ossified moment, firmly located in the IIt . However, several scholars have radically contested and transformed these readings of both thinkers, and showing that both philosophers are, in fact, textual reasoners, who hold that the orienting relations of ethics occur in reading as well as in listening. The work of Steve Kepnes, Dan Avnon, Jill Robbins and Richard Cohen, as well as my own writ- ReadingTorah 181 ings on Levinas, transforms our understanding of the place of reading and of texts in the philosophies of Buber and Levinas.2 Buber focuses our attention on the work of art and the latency of I-thou relations within it; Levinas, on the excess of meaning in the written word, meaning , for Levinas, as more than an author intends the definition of the infinite as a thought that contains more than a thinker can think. In...