Levinasian Meditations: Ethics, Philosophy, and Religion

THIRTEEN: Singularity

255 THIRTEEN Singularity The Universality of Jewish Particularism—Benamozegh and Levinas INTRODUCTION A flame needs a candle as much as a candle needs a flame. Judaism finds the universal, the holy—the “image and likeness” of God—not in another world, a heaven hovering above or a “soul” or “spirit” detached from matter here below. Rather holiness is found here and now in the unending divine-human partnership of sanctification. The world’s ascent is God descent, or rather his ascent too. To sanctify is to make the profane holy. Passion becomes compassion. “The socalled profane,” Martin Buber has said, “is only the not yet holy.” The Hebrew term usually translated as “law” (halakhah) in fact means “walk,” “path,” or “way.” The Jewish path creates, nurtures, enhances, and preserves the holy on earth. Thus Judaism is a religion of incarnation, holiness on earth, the sanctification of life and all of creation. While Jews know the heights of personal salvation, they prefer the collective endeavor of universal redemption. Holiness is separation—the pure from the impure, the sacred from the profane, the clean from the unclean, the refined from the vulgar—but it is not exclusion. Everything—from birth to death to mourning, from morning to night, from work to rest, from the bathroom, kitchen, dining room, bedroom, office, farm, factory, dance, song, government, and army, to school, science, synagogue, and Temple—is to be transfigured and made holy. Transcendence 256 Religion for Adults and immanence meet in the refinement of a covenant exclusive of nothing. Judaism is thus one—not the only one, but unique—expression of the religious paradox of humanity cocreating God’s created universe. Judaism is not a religion, however, if by religion one means a compartment of life dedicated to God in contrast to other compartments of life with other devotions. Rather, like being a Hindu, or being Chinese, to be a Jew is to participate in a vast and ancient civilization. It is a civilization as old as civilization itself, and for much of its history , it has been as dispersed as the globe itself. Like any civilization, then, it is far more than a rational “system” or a consistent “worldview .” It cannot without distortion be reduced to a simple formula, a principle, a thesis, or even a set of basic concepts. Its coherence is less the unity of a philosophical or theological system, than the integrity of a history, a narrative, or a life. Judaism, like any civilization , cannot without distortion be summed up or boiled down. Knowing Judaism—whether for the first time or after a long time, whether from inside its vast precincts or outside—is always a matter of highlighting, emphasizing, choosing an angle or perspective, and selecting from a multiplicity of foci that flow from and feed into one another. Neither an artificial unity nor a set of unrelated fragments, the coherence of the Jew and of Judaism is the variform integrity of life itself: unique individuals joined together as a unique people growing organically—in complexes of actions, with reactions at once internal and external—across historical time. JEWISH UNIVERSALISM IN ELIJAH BENAMOZEGH AND EMMANUEL LEVINAS With this overview in mind, the thesis of this chapter is that Judaism is a universal religion. This thesis strongly contrasts with and contests the perennial Christian misrepresentations of Judaism as a merely carnal, tribal, or nationalist cult. Even more profoundly, it strongly contrasts with and contests certain modern, and often Jewish , misrepresentations of Judaism that would relegate most of historical Judaism to the same small teapot of parochialism. The thesis of this chapter, in other words, is that old-fashioned, unregenerate, as it were, traditional, rabbinic, or talmudic Judaism—label it “orthodox Judaism,” if you will—is a universal religion. Singularity: The Universality of Jewish Particularism 257 This claim could be justified on the basis of many Jewish thinkers , past and present. One could go all the way back to the Hebrew prophets, and farther still. Here, however, this claim will be approached through the works of two outstanding modern Jewish thinkers: Rabbi Elijah Benamozegh (1823–1900), of Livorno, Italy, and Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995), born in Kavnas, Lithuania, a Parisian by choice. It may seem odd to juxtapose two thinkers who, although both Jewish and philosophically minded, flourished in different centuries, hailed from very different parts of Europe (and even more so from “Jewish Europe”), and lived in quite...