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Secrecy, Modesty, and the Feminine Kabbalistic Traces in the Thought of Levinas E L L I O T R . W O L F S O N Various scholars have discussed the possible affinities between Levinas and kabbalistic tradition,1 despite his unambiguous critique of mysticism on the grounds that the experience of union it presumes effaces the transcendence beyond ontology2 that grounds the radical difference between human and divine, the basis for the alterity that serves as the foundation for the ethical responsibility that one must bear for the other.3 The focus of the scholarly discussion has been on certain key terms and ideas, largely drawn from the teachings transmitted in the name of the sixteenth-century master Isaac Luria, to wit, the notion of withdrawal of the infinite (s .ims .um) and the trace (reshimu) of light left behind in the primordial space (t .ehiru) as a consequence of that withdrawal, the task of rectification (tiqqun) that ensues from the diminution of the contracted light, the emphasis on secrecy, and the utilization of gender to account for the metaphysical principles of being. To date, the most extensive and affirmative treatment of Levinas and kabbalah has been proffered by Oona Ajzenstat. I am doubtful of many of Ajzenstat’s claims due to her questionable views about both the prophetic kabbalah of Abraham Abulafia and the theosophic kabbalah of Isaac Luria—she is hampered, unfortunately, by her dependence on secondary sources—but I am nevertheless persuaded by her surmise that Levinas was guided by the esoteric nature of kabbalah ‘‘to occult the kabbalistic images in his own text and to protect them under a layer of antimystical argument .’’4 In my judgment, this is a keen insight, and my own engagement 52 with Levinas has led me to a similar conclusion regarding the need to posit an esoteric use of Jewish esotericism on his part, even though I will nuance the argument in a different way. As I will propose in this study, the antitheosophic interpretation of kabbalah proffered by Levinas accords with his polemical depiction of Christianity as a form of idolatry. The influence of kabbalah on Levinas, it may be presumed, can be explained primarily, if not exclusively, by his study of and admiration for the compilation of eighteenth-century ritual piety, Nefesh ha-H . ayyim, written by H . ayyim of Volozhyn, the disciple of Elijah ben Solomon, the imposing Lithuanian rabbinic authority better known as the Gaon of Vilna.5 Levinas maintained, dubiously in my opinion, that in this treatise H . ayyim of Volozhyn rejected mysticism or at least the mystical impulse ‘‘in its Hasidic excesses.’’6 Predictably, therefore, the focus of scholarly attention, following the assessment of Levinas himself, has been on the ethical implications of R. H . ayyim’s treatise, the ‘‘spiritual meaning’’ as opposed to the ‘‘outdated cosmology,’’7 that is, the demand imposed on the human to strive to be divine—indeed to be united with the divine— not through theosophic gnosis but through action that is for the sake of the other, on the way to drawing near God, drawing near by turning toward as opposed to becoming one with the transcendent—for the spiritual ideal of devequt embraced by R. H . ayyim, based on earlier sources, especially zoharic literature, entails that the human agent is conjoined with and hence juxtaposed to the divine person.8 Levinas’s attempt to adduce a universal ethical principle on the basis of the pietism enunciated in Nefesh ha-H . ayyim should be seen as part of his larger project to demonstrate (perhaps in response to the dichotomy proposed by Lev Shestov9 ) that Athens and Jerusalem are not to be set in binary opposition, that philosophical concepts are implicit in rabbinic texts, and that talmudic discourse betrays a speculative mode of argumentation .10 As Levinas puts it in one context, ‘‘If the Talmud is not philosophy , its tractates are an eminent source of those experiences from which philosophies derive their nourishment.’’11 The paradigm, therefore, is that of the ‘‘Western Jew,’’ the Jewgreek or Greekjew,12 prophetic and contemplative , midrashic and speculative, equally adept in textual exegesis and deductive reasoning. Predictably, Levinas relates the ‘‘synthesis of the Jewish revelation and Greek thought’’ that he embraces to the religious philosophy of Maimonides.13 It seems to me, however, that Levinas articulates something fundamentally different from his medieval predecessor. According to Maimonides, philosophic truths have been scattered in rabbinic dicta, and it...

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