Encountering the Jewish Future: with Wiesel, Buber, Heschel, Arendt, Levinas

Introduction

1 In 1963 the great Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas published a collection of his essays on Jewish life. In his fascinating and provocative essays, Levinas sought to counter the drift in Jewish life toward an uncritical assimilation to the culture and violence of the modern world. After the Holocaust and the birth of the state of Israel, Levinas felt that a new chapter of Jewish history was opening. Levinas was born in Lithuania and became a French citizen in 1930; he was one of the few Jews to survive the Holocaust and continue to live in postHolocaust Europe. As such, Levinas was an eyewitness to both the Holocaust and the birth of the state of Israel. In those dark times, Levinas wondered if the surviving Jewish world was ready—and able—to persevere. Age-old questions confronted Jews anew, but, once again, these questions presented profound challenges. Jews were deeply wounded and scarred. Now they had reemerged on the world scene. If Jews were to take control of their destiny, Levinas thought they had to return to the traditions of Judaism and the essence of what it means to be Jewish. But were Judaism and Jewishness the same as they had always been, without change and eternal? Though Levinas thought this to be the case in general, he also realized that different contexts present challenges for ancient principles and understandings. Through the confluence of the ancient and the modern, Introduction Levinas sought to articulate a way for Jews to return and renew their identity in a changing world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Levinas held out the Jewish ethical tradition as the medium for modern Jews to re-embrace their vocation in the world. Levinas hoped that the formative challenges would not suppress this ethical tradition. The contemporary challenges for Jews revolved around the systematic murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust and the Jewish assumption of power in the state of Israel. In light of this trauma and hope, Levinas believed ethics were even more defining of Jewish identity and a renewed Jewish commitment. Levinas was ambivalent about this prospect, as were the other Jewish thinkers I explore in these pages: Elie Wiesel, Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Hannah Arendt. Each articulated their ambivalence with differing points of view. Their strength is that they dealt with the two formative events in Jewish history. The Holocaust exposed the intense vulnerability of European Jewry. The state of Israel proposed the physical and military empowerment of the survivors of the Holocaust and Jews around the world. In exploring these Jewish thinkers, the scope of their interest and expertise is so wide as to defy categorization. Their thought moves within and beyond what we know today as academic disciplines. They are philosophers and theologians , biblical exegetes and interpreters, political scientists and sociologists, mystics and realists. They are Jewish “thinkers” who are also “committed.” First and foremost, Wiesel, Buber, Heschel, Arendt, and Levinas explored the difficult, almost impossible questions facing the Jewish people after the Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel. Their first priority was their Jewishness and how that Jewishness interacted with the broader world: they were committed Jewish thinkers. Though we might group them together, emphasizing their many similarities , each also displayed a variegated self. Although some aspects of each of these thinkers are well known, because of their complexities there are aspects that neither the thinker nor the world recognize and aspects that it would be difficult for each to affirm. A variegated self is insistent and yet open to interpretation . Profound thinkers, Jewish or otherwise, should be mined for what they thought in their time, as well as unearthed for another time. These twentiethcentury Jewish thinkers spoke to their time. They also speak to ours. Personalities are complex and thinkers no less so in the persona that emerges within and from their work. When the stakes are high, thought takes on an urgency that may lack the self-reflection we presume as normative in ourselves and in others. Although Jewish thinkers are known for their precision and incisiveness, like all thinkers they are limited. Sometimes limitations come from the urgency of the moment or from a thinker’s context. Jewish thought provides an incredibly vibrant and open 2฀฀฀•฀฀฀Encountering฀the฀Jewish฀Future Introduction฀฀฀•฀฀฀3 window onto the world, but sometimes this can block other windows that provide other important vistas. The depth of Jewish thought comes...