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 recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without 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 Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. TM Manufactured in the United States of America 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