Nine Talmudic Readings

233 Pages·1990·15.877 MB·English

by  Emmanuel Levinas

Nine
Talmudic Readings
by Emmanuel Levinas
TRANSLATED
AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY
Annette Aronowicz
Indiana University Press
BLOOMINGTON & INDIANAPOLIS
First Midland Book Edition 1994
©1990 by Indiana University Press
The readings included in this work were originally published in French as
Quatre lectures talmudiques, © 1968 by Les Editions de Minuit, and Du sacré
au saint: cing nouvelles lectures talmudiques, © 1977 by Les Editions de
Minuit.
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by
any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and
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permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American
University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only
exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Levinas, Emmanuel.
[Quatre lectures talmudiques. English]
Nine Talmudic readings / by Emmanuel Levinas ; translated with an
introduction by Annette Aronowicz.
. cm.
Translations of: Quatre lectures talmudiques; Du sacré au saint.
ISBN 0-253-33379-2 (alk. paper|
1. Talmud—Criticism, interpretation, etc. 1. Levinas, Emmanuel.
Du sacré au saint. English. 1990. 1II. Title.
BMs504.2.L4413 1990
2096.1'206—dc20 89-46329
ISBN 0-253-20876-9 (pbk.)
4 5 98
CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
Vil
Translator's Introduction, by Annette Aronowicz
Four Talmudic Readings
Introduction
Toward the Other
The Temptation of Temptation
Promised Land or Permitted Land
“As Old as the World?”
From the Sacred to the Holy: Five New Talmudic Readings
Preface
Judaism and Revolution
The Youth of Israel
120
Desacralization and Disenchantment
And God Created Woman 161
Damages Due to Fire

Acknowledgments
I want to thank Franklin and Marshall College for the two grants that have
enabled me to complete this project. The first, in the summer of 1986, al-
lowed me to meet with Emmanuel Levinas and to research some of his earli-
est writings on matters Jewish in the Bibliothéque Nationale. The second,
awarded for the academic year 1987-1988, made it possible for me to hire an
assistant to prepare this manuscript for publication. I am very grateful for
the college’s support.
Secondly, I want to thank my assistant, Scott Feifer, who typed many
drafts with great care. Without his attention to detail and great loyalty to
the cause, the manuscript might never have seen the light of day.
Then, there are a number of people who have helped me think through
certain matters, concerning the translation as well as my own interpretive
essay. Foremost among them is Jacques Rolland, who directed me to some
of Levinas’s early essays in the Bibliothéque Nationale. Our many conversa-
tions were also of great assistance with regard both to details and to general
principles. I want, too, to thank Susan Handelman, whose generous spirit
and very good questions were a much-appreciated stimulus to my own
thoughts. Lastly, I want to thank the many friends who read parts of my
manuscript attentively and offered helpful suggestions, most especially Kees
Bolle, Michael Kerze, Eric Lane, and Leon Galis.

Translator’s Introduction
The true goal of the mind is
translating: only when a thing has
been translated does it become truly
vocal, no longer to be done away
with. Only in the Septuagint has
revelation come to be at home in
the world, and so long as Homer
did not speak Latin he was not a
fact. The same holds good for
translating from man to man.
—Franz Rosenzweig'
Translating into ‘‘Greek"
These Talmudic commentaries are, as Emmanuel Levinas tells us himself,
an attempt at translating Jewish thought into the language of modern
times. That is, they are simultaneously an attempt at letting the Jewish texts
shed light on the problems facing us today and an attempt at letting modern
problems shed light on the texts. Levinas sometimes refers to this approach
as translating the Jewish sources into “Greek,” Greek being his metaphor
for the language Jews have in common with other inhabitants of the West-
ern world.” .
These Talmudic commentaries, then, can be viewed as a mark of the
secularization of the Jewish tradition, for today the majority of Jews live
not in a world apart but in the world at large. They too need to worry about
the State and nuclear war, revolutions and the relation between the sexes,
all the burning issues of the times; and, what is more, they are used to
expressing these issues in a language derived from sources other than the
traditional Jewish ones. As a result, the Jewish texts’ way of posing
problems—in particular, the Talmud’s way of posing problems—is no
longer intelligible or meaningful to a large majority of Jewish readers. The
very polemic Levinas wages in every one of his commentaries against people
for whom the Talmud is but a disjointed folkloric remnant or a dated dis-
cussion is a sign of its lack of transparency, its inability to communicate to
most contemporary Jews.’
The impenetrability of these texts is due not so much to a different his-
torical context as to the Talmud’s allusive, elliptical, seemingly incoherent
style, so ditferent from the expository logic that Western, university-
educated readers expect. Translating the Talmud into a modern idiom,
translating it into the problems of the times, means, then, for Levinas, pre-
senting its teaching in an expository, conceptual language that would be
X Translator’'s Introduction
accessible to any educated, even if uninitiated, listener. This attempt at ut-
ter intelligibility, at clarity, at an exposition that aims at every human being
regardless of background or prior assumptions, in ““un langage non-
prévenu’’ is also what Levinas means by translating into ‘Greek.”*
But if the fact of translation can be read as a sign of modern Jews’ dis-
tance from the language of their own tradition and from their own spiritual
resources, as a sign of secularization, it is also for Levinas the sign of a secu-
larization in a very different sense, for he claims that the texts always need
to be translated into secular language, into the language of contemporary
issues, into the language that strives to be understood by all, into the lan-
guage of prose and demystification. The very distance we might feel with
respect to these traditional sources is, in a sense, a gain for these very
sources, for it allows their universal import to manifest itself in yet another
of its aspects. For Levinas, the capacity of these texts to signify is infinite,
and only successive ‘‘secularizations,’” translations into the language of the
times, can bring these infinite meanings to light.® Translation, and thus sec-
ularization, is here not a sign of regret for a lost past but the very life of a
tradition. It is, no doubt, in this context that we should understand his
comment that ‘“the translation of the Septuagint is not yet complete, [and]
that the translation of biblical wisdom into the Greek language remains
unfinished.”’s
But why should modern Jews, at home in Western (“/Greek’’) intelligibil-
ity and Western (“Greek’’) wisdom, go back and attempt to translate these
obscure Jewish sources? Levinas addresses this question often in his Talmu-
dic commentaries; but beyond the answers he suggests explicitly, the very
richness of meanings his readings bring to light has its own eloquence. But
what made him decide to undertake the task of translation, when there
were no commentaries such as his available to persuade him? Here, a brief
sketch of his life, with special attention to the tension of “Greek’’ and Jew
within it, might provide us with a clue.
The “Greek’” and the Jew
Emmanuel Levinas was born in Kovno, Lithuania, in 1906, into a Jewish
community in which, as he put it, “‘to be Jewish was as natural as having
eyes and ears.””” The first language he learned to read was Hebrew, at home,
with a teacher, but it was also part of his formal education at the Hebrew
Gymnasium he attended after the family’s return to Kovno in 1920. During
World War I they had moved to Kharkov, in the Ukraine, and while there
Levinas was one of a small number of Jews admitted to the Russian
Gymnasium.
While the Jewish influences in his childhood and early youth were very
much present, so much so that one can hardly speak of ““mere influences,”
we can also see that other cultures were already exercising their strong pull.
Translator's Introduction Xi
His parents knew Yiddish, yet Russian was spoken at home. In the Jewish
Gymnasium, he developed an abiding love for the great Russian classics,
which he credits with the awakening of his philosophical interests. And
there he learned of Goethe and yearned, as he put it, to know the cathedral
of Cologne.®
In 1923, at the age of seventeen, Levinas went to France to study at the
University of Strasbourg, and for the next decades it would seem that it was
the non-Jewish cultural influences that aroused his passion and com-
manded his time. He became particularly engrossed in the thought of Hus-
serl and Heidegger, both of whom he studied with in 1928-1929 at the
University of Freiburg. His was the first complete work on Husserl in
France, and it was Levinas who introduced Heidegger into the French intel-
lectual world.” As he once put it humorously: /It was Sartre who guaran-
teed my place in eternity by stating in his famous obituary essay on
Merleau-Ponty that he, Sartre, ‘was introduced to phenomenology by
Levinas.” ’'° Levinas’s career in the French intellectual world culminated
with his appointment as professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1973, an
appointment preceded by two other university positions (Poitiers and
Nanterre) and by many and frequent contacts with the great figures of
French intellectual life.
It would seem that during these years—a good part of his adult life—
“‘the square letters,” as Levinas calls Hebrew and the Jewish sources with
which he had become acquainted in his childhood and early youth, had
receded completely. Indeed, there is little evidence of a living encounter
with Jewish texts in the 1920s and 1930s. It should not be forgotten, how-
ever, that soon after his arrival in France, Levinas joined an organization of
considerable importance in the world of modern Western Jewry, the Alli-
ance Israélite Universelle.
The Alliance was established in France in 1860 by a group of Jews prom-
inent in French life. Inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment, they
wished to promote the integration of Jews everywhere as full citizens
within their states, with equal rights and freedom from persecution.! While
the eagerness of the Western Jews in the nineteenth century to enter into
their host cultures has subsequently been criticized as an abandonment of
the vital core of the Jewish tradition and as self-serving, Levinas under-
scores the religious nature of this move toward emancipation.'? For nine-
teenth-century Jews it was not a mere desire to shirk their Jewish identity in
order to make life more comfortable. They were also spurred by a vision of
the unity of humankind, a sense of coincidence between Jewish and mod-
ern European values, and an ardent desire to participate in movements pro-
moting this unity.
One of the many goals of the Alliance Israélite Universelle was to estab-
lish schools in areas where Jews were not receiving the kind of education
that, members of the Alliance believed, would make them fit to enter the
Xii Translator's Introduction
modern world as productive citizens. The Alliance thus saw itself as having
a ‘civilizing mission,”’ the regeneration of its brethren in the Mediterranean
Basin who were not educated in the Western tradition.'* This “civilizing
mission’’ expressed itself in the creation of a curriculum that would train
the Jewish youth of North Africa and the Middle East in modern languages,
French taking a chief place, and in secular disciplines such as mathematics,
(European) history, and science. These schools also taught Hebrew and
some Jewish subjects.'* However, the status of these latter subjects was
lower than that of the “‘secular” curriculum. They were taught by local
teachers who were not trained by the Alliance and who were very poorly
paid, and the number of hours devoted to these subjects was small in com-
parison to the hours devoted to the others. Much tension often arose be-
tween the Alliance teachers and the local community over how, what, and
by whom these subjects should be taught."
The history of these Alliance schools reveals what nineteenth- and
twentieth-century Western Jews (the Alliance had members outside the
French community, as the word ‘“‘universelle’” in its title indicates) per-
ceived to be the relation between European culture and the Jewish heritage.
It seems clear that the Alliance took it for granted that there was a coinci-
dence of ideals between the two traditions. As a result, anything in the Jew-
ish sources or way of life encountered in the communities of North Africa
or the Middle East that pointed in a direction other than that of modern
French culture was not deemed worth transmitting.'e
Levinas’s membership in this organization soon after his arrival in
France would seem to imply that he too saw the relation of Jewish and
Western traditions as primarily one of a coincidence of ideals. But if this
were so, events of the 1930s punctured this assurance. With the advent of
fascism and all it brought in its train, Levinas, in a number of essays written
for, among others, the journal of the Alliance, began to reflect upon the
necessity of discovering the specificity of Judaism." If we are being forced
to admit our difference, what does this difference really amount to? In one
of these essays he wrote:
Modern Jewish consciousness has become troubled. It does not doubt its des-
tiny but cannot calmly be witness to the outrages overwhelming it. It has an
almost instinctive nostalgia for the first, limpid sources of its inspiration. It
must once again draw its courage from it and again rediscover in it the certitude
of its worth, its dignity, its mission."
There is a groping in these essays for a return to one’s own inner resources,
reminiscent of the Talmudic injunction (which Levinas discusses in ““Dam-
ages Due to Fire”’) to withdraw into one’s home, “‘rentrer chez soi,”’ in a
time of epidemic.
It was the failure of emancipation, then, the refusal of admittance to