The Meaning of Religious Practice by Emmanuel Levinas: An Introduction and Translation

Translators' Introduction

Published for the first time in 1937, Emmanuel Levinas's short article "The Meaning of Religious Practiceî is perhaps best characterized as "pre-Talmudic." At this time, Levinas had not yet met the "prestigious master" M. Chouchani, under whom he would undertake a serious study of the Talmud. Although he cites the mitzvot in an example, Levinas's reflection on religious practice in Judaism is not applied to the categories of the Halakha but rests instead on a phenomenological description of the execution of the ritual. In contrast to the "reformers of Judaism," Levinas does not conceive of the ritual in purely utilitarian terms, that is, as good for personal hygiene, moral discipline, religious symbolism, and mental and emotional arousal. Nor does he understand it as the expression of a purely subjective or private religious life, situated on the margins of the universal order of reason and nature. For Levinas, this modern interpretation gets its plausibility only from the nonessential features of ritual. The true meaning of Jewish religious practice lies elsewhere.

Levinas argues that the execution of a ritual constitutes an interruption of "the natural attitude" that we habitually adopt in our everyday dealings with things. The ritual suspends our natural tendency, for example, to eat indiscriminately, giving us moment for pause and benediction. In so doing, it makes the world and everything in it exotic, altogether strange, and miraculous. What the Greeks experienced at the very heart of philosophy, namely, "wonder" (to thaumaston ["Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder" (Plato, Theatetus 155d)]), Levinas finds in the world revealed by Jewish ritual: "For the Jew, by contrast, nothing is entirely familiar, entirely profane. To him, the existence of things is something infinitely surprising. It strikes him as a miracle. He experiences wonder at every instant at the fact—so simple and yet so extraordinary—that the world is there." In the final analysis, then, the meaning (signification) or essence of Jewish religious practice is to be found in the event that it accomplishes, whereby human beings are brought into contact with the mystery of the natural world lying at the heart of creation itself.

The reader familiar with Levinas's mature philosophy, who is thus aware of his enormous distrust of magic, the numinous, and the sacred, will no doubt be surprised to hear him speak in this article, in an entirely positive way, of the "mystery," "the mystical resonance of things," and the "sacred face of things"—that is, of Mysteries. Knowing the reservations that he expressed so often in regard to the Kabbala, one is astonished to find the consideration that is given to the supernatural character of Jewish rituals.

To be sure, we find Levinas here clearing a path that he will later abandon. But, at the same time, we all see him adumbrate a number of themes that will later be given central place in his overtly ethically oriented writings. The criticism of a purely interior and subjective characterization of religious life foreshadows the denunciation of the very egoism and natural complacency of the self that he criticizes in Totality and Infinity (1961). The relationship with the otherness construed as a break with knowledge and comprehension anticipates Levinas's characterization of the face-to-face relation with the Other human being. And the importance that Levinas confers on the idea of creation will be confirmed by the analysis of Same's indebtedness to and dependency on the Other.

There is a sense, then, in which this early article by Levinas is a sign of things to come. It offers a vision of religious practice that is a direct forbear of the very ethics of the Other to which Levinas's name is now indelibly linked. But let us not anticipate too much—for there is much here that it is worthy of consideration in its own right for the reader interested in modern Judaism.

Translation: The Meaning of Religious Practice

The Jewish intellectual elite, educated in the scientific and moral ideas of...