The Exorbitant: Emmanuel Levinas Between Jews and Christians

Should Jews and Christians Fear the Gifts of the Greeks?

Should Jews and Christians Fear the Gifts of the Greeks? Reflections on Levinas, Translation, and Atheistic Theology PA U L F R A N K S I What in Levinas’s thinking is Jewish, and what is Christian? There is no good reason to think that these questions will be easier to answer than the question What is Jewish, and what is Christian? Here is a familiar dialectic. You are tempted to say of some idea or doctrine: that is essentially Jewish and not at all Christian, or that is essentially Christian and not at all Jewish. Perhaps you succumb to the temptation . Then you find—depending on your predilections, either to your despair or to your delight—that something excruciatingly hard to distinguish from that very idea or doctrine is found in the other religion after all. You may stand your ground, of course, by expelling the uncooperative idea or doctrine from authentic Judaism or Christianity. But then you had better be prepared to show your basis for what is now clearly a prescriptive claim. Nor is this the only alternative. Surely—to enter the dialectic—nothing could be more Christian and less Jewish than the idea of divine incarnation. So Levinas is thinking in Jewish terms when he says, in a passage expounded by Robert Gibbs: ‘‘The other person is not the incarnation of God, but precisely by his face, in which he is disincarnate, the manifestation of the height in which God is revealed.’’1 Yet, as Elliot Wolfson points out, an idea of divine incarnation —or something excruciatingly close to it—in the Torah is central to kabbalah, including the Lithuanian, antiecstatic tradition that Levinas valorizes .2 To be sure, poetic incarnation is not personal incarnation. But 211 both seem to involve what Levinas would regard as an illicit ontologizing of what is properly ethical. Is Levinas endorsing—perhaps constructing —a particular brand of Judaism? Or is his philosophy just as non-Jewish as it is non-Christian? Again: surely the affirmation of a creed and its articulation in theology are quintessentially Christian, as Richard Cohen argues, while the practice and consideration of law and ethics are Jewish, as Leo Strauss says in a passage quoted by Leora Batnitzky.3 But could any version of Christianity really be exhausted by the affirmation of dogma? Moreover, even if the history of Judaism involves nothing exactly like patristic controversies over creedal formulations, attended by denunciations of heresy, it does involve an early controversy over belief in resurrection, said to be central to the disputes between Pharisees and Sadducees, while disagreements over practice have often turned on more or less explicit differences in doctrine. Could any version of Judaism be exhausted by law-based ritual, ethics, and study, without any beliefs or presuppositions about being? If Levinas is prescribing an exclusively ethical Judaism, what is the basis of his proposal , and what is the cost of its acceptance? Could the peculiar intimacy of Judaism and Christianity consist in a dance in which they repeatedly trade positions, without ever ceasing to insist on their differences? II Levinas himself is not immune to the temptation to announce the exclusive essences of Christianity and Judaism. Yet something in his thinking can help us to resist the temptation. In his reading of TB Sotah 37a-b, Levinas says, ‘‘We have still not finished translating the Bible. The Septuagint is incomplete.’’4 On one reading —hardly supported by scholarly study of the formation of the Hebrew and Greek Bibles, but sometimes suggested by Levinas—Judaism is the unchanging Urtext from which proceed many translations, including the New Testament and, more generally, the various Christianities. On another reading—more sensitive to the practice of translation and to the history of religions—there is no Urtext. Just as much as Christianity, the various Judaisms—Hellenistic, Rabbinic, Geonic, Neo-Platonic, Aristotelian , kabbalistic, hasidic, mitnaggedic, etc.—are moments in an ongoing process of translation, a process within which the aforementioned dialectical dance takes place. 212 Paul Franks What divides dancing from fighting? Sometimes no more than the edge of a knife. So we should thank Levinas for his contributions to peace between Judaism and Christianity. In particular, he has given Christians a conception of Judaism, and he has given Jews a conception of Christianity , that each can not only tolerate but also acknowledge. Levinas’s gift to Christians is more evident. There are...