Association of Jewish Studies Conference - December 20, 1998
Ira F. Stone
I will observe the 20th anniversary of my pulpit rabbinate this spring.
Yet this is the first time I've ever been allowed to respond to my critics. I
want to thank you for giving me this exhilarating opportunity.
I am pleased to say that, for those of you who may have been off-line in the
week since the critiques of my book began to appear, the discussion that has
ensued, entirely tangential to my book, justifies its selection for all this
attention regardless of its merits or lack thereof. I am relieved and
especially grateful to Kris Lindbeck for providing sufficient tinder to
nourish a fire in which I was not consumed.
On the other hand, Kris's comment regarding my assumption #7 on page
36 of Reading Levinas/Reading Talmud is as good a place as any for me to
begin my response to the gracious respondents to my book. One final preliminary
remark,
however. That is to convey my sincere appreciation to all of the respondents.
Each had some kind words to say about my work and that was heartening. By
definition my response will not address those kindnesses other than by way of
this word of gratitude.
I want to begin by reading a poem of Paul Celan in translation by Michael
Hamburger.
With A Variable Key
With a variable key
you unlock the house in which
drifts the snow of that left unspoken.
Always what key you choose
depends on the blood that spurts
from your eye or your mouth or your ear.
You vary the key, you vary the word
that is free to drift with the flakes.
What snowball will form round the word
depends on the wind that rebuffs you.
It is interesting that the one assumption of Talmudic interpretation that I
did not need to deduce from Levinas is the one Kris questioned and which gave
rise to the subsequent cyber-debate. The first assumptions can be located with
varying degrees of difficulty. However, that the mention of "Israel" means
"human being" Levinas asserts relatively frequently and most often as an
example of what he learned explicitly from his teacher Monsieur Chuchani. So
my response to Kris is twofold. First, you are astute in having identified
this crucial Levenasian move and correct in criticizing it. As much of the
subsequent discussion on-line has shown, Levinas' assertion is a patent
violation of the ^--facts' of Talmudic/rabbinic history. You could have gone on
to criticize me for uncritically passing along this violation. However, I
would suggest that Levinas was quite aware of the impossibility of his claim
and I assure you that I was. So the question is not whether he/I was correct,
but why we would assert what appears through historical and academic text
study to be incorrect as an axiom of interpretation.
To what extent therabbinic culture considered different kinds of non-Jews lesser than Jews is
not the point. That they obviously did consider all non-Jews to be to some
degree lesser seems unarguable. Yet Levinas asserts that everywhere the Talmud
says Israel it means human and he states this in the name of his teacher
Monsieur Chouchani. And I report it in the name of my teacher Emmanuel Levinas
and his teacher Monsieur Chouchani; and I teach it to my students who will
teach it in my name -- And around the word a bloodied snowball forms. For
Levinas and for me what the tradition does or doesn't say about ACUM is not
the tradition. What we say the tradition says about ACUM with the blood
flowing from our eyes, our mouths and our ears is the tradition and my concern
as a rabbi is what we do with that tradition. My reading of Levinas posits his
re-creation of a mythic oral tradition which is the unspoken warrant for a
radical departure from the accepted meaning of certain terms on the basis of
a quasi-revelation carried on the commanding face of the other.
Which brings me to the responses of Jacob Meskin and Oona Ajzenstat, both of
whom raise important questions. Ajzenstat accuses both Levinas and me of
unfairly treating Western tradition as a totality -- and points out correctly
that Levinas does not criticize everything that came before him. She argues
that I do not present the more generous Levinas. On the other hand, she
acknowledges that those aspects of the Western tradition that Levinas does
criticize, "the deformations," as she calls them, all tend to make life more
comfortable and that I don't present the discomfort of Levinas uncomfortably
enough. This second critique is Meskin's also, that I have created a
palatable Levinas -- that I have made him too digestible -- too easily
assimilable by contemporary Americans whose assumptions he is in fact
attacking.
Regarding Ajzenstat's first point, it is well taken. I believe it derives
from an unclarity in Levinas which I carry forward between philosophy and
ontology. Levinas' attack on philosophy from Parmenides to Jena should more
accurately be read as an attack on ontology -- keeping in mind that in some
important sense Levinas presents his project as a commentary on the ontology
of Heiddeger. When philosophy is not ontology -- especially not
phenomenological ontology which limits the very constitution of consciousness
to the inscription of mind on Being -- then it falls outside Levinas's
critique. Plato, Descartes, the New Testament, Kant, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky,
Bergson and yes, perhaps, even Heiddeger do break out to different degrees of
the totality of ontology which he characterizes as otherwise than Being.
However, Levinas does contend that these occasional glimpses beyond ontology
were roads not taken and therefore, sometimes paints the entire Western
tradition, especially philosophy, with the brush that might better be
reserved for ontology.
And yet. I cannot but believe that he was aware of this and may well have
felt justified by the urgency as a post-holocaust writer. Whatever better
urges the West may have had were buried in the ruble of Europe. And the
totalizing goes on despite the work of Levinas. I am not certain why Robert
Bersconi is correct in pointing out that "Levinas is at his weakest when he
sets himself up against...philosophy in general [and] at his most penetrating
when he finds the otherwise than being within philosophy." Is it because it
gets philosophy off the genocidal hook? Hmmm! I offer another selection from
Paul Celan:
Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening
we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink
we shovel a grave in the air there you won't lie cramped
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Magareta
From Deathfugue , translated by John Felstiner
Both Ajzenstat and Meskin fear that I present a too soft Levinas, a popular
Levinas. To this point I want to both protest and plead guilty. First the
protest. I would maintain that precisely the level of self interestedness
which is the daily norm of my average congregant (not to mention almost
everyone else I know) makes the Levinas I present to them a dire threat. While
I may moderate that threat I do not hide it. Meskin writes: "On page 8 and
again on page 12, Stone describes Levinas' view that the self is "constituted"
by the other with the term "love." This is not what Levinas is talking about,
though it was what the incurable young romantic Franz Rosensweig thought about
how Revelation opens up the lone human being." Rather than appealing to
Levinas' statement in the introduction to Totality and Infinity that
Rosenzweig cannot be cited in the notes because the Star infuses every page of
Totality and Infinity, I want merely to suggest that Meskin read passages of
my book rather selectively. On the same page 8 I wrote: "We come into being
because of another who, unbidden and inscrutable, tends to us. We are
fundamentally beholden to this other person; regardless of our own will we are
chosen by this indebtedness, "elected," as it were.
We are created by another's love and create ourselves by accepting the burden of this love and
its obligations...Before philosophy, there is responsibility." "Fundamentally
beholden." "Regardless of our will," "burden of love," "chosen by
indebtedness," love's obligations -- In my community these are not easy words,
in my view this does not sound like romanticism. As for page 12, Meskin later
grants that I am accurately presenting the Levinas of Time and the Other which
is what I intended to do at that point, so I will pass by it. But I would like
to direct Jacob's attention to pages 10-13. In the chapter Time, Love and
Fecundity I emphasize the centrality of suffering as presentiment of death
that interrupts our solitude. I suggest that this is not an affirmation of
contemporary feel-good philosophies. That then is, in brief, my protest. Now
for my pleading guilty. In his opening remarks Meskin writes: "It is first of
all one of the best (or perhaps the best) attempts to introduce Levinas and
his ways of reading the Talmud to the general public, both Jewish and non-
Jewish." Jacob is sensitive to the fact that this material and this book had
to be carefully crafted to include people who had previously had no experience
with either of the book's subjects. He compliments the caginess of the teacher
who could do this at a number of points in his paper. I plead guilty.
However, I hope that what I have presented does not distort the very project I am
trying to present; frankly I think it doesn't.
To Marty Jaffee I just want to say: drat, why didn't I think of that! His
presentation of the sugiya works perfectly into what I am doing and I promise
to use his ideas next time around.
I also appreciated Ed Feld's analysis of the Talmud as the arena in which the
tension between philosophy and what he calls "dialectical debate" is posed and
poised and how the work of Levinas, and by extension my book, fit into that
analysis.
Finally, I turn to Aryeh Cohen's response. Aryeh articulates what others
alluded to: the problematic place of the law -- is that the plain meaning of
the text? In passing I also want to respond to Aryeh's preference for seeing
the Talmud "as being written in the space which is the absence of God, the
exile of God. In my chapter Toward God, I try to make Levinas' and my stance
that God is precisely experienced as a palpable absence as a trace on the face
of the other. Thus identifying my position as that of hearing the voice of God
in the Talmud is not quite accurate. Rather, one encounters the command of God
as a trace left by God's having passed by the face of the other. Similarly, my
favorite among the Talmud Readings is "The Problem of the Absent God" where I
explore this theme in detail. So I think we don't disagree.
More important is the place of the law. Ed Feld, perhaps, is also alluding to
this problem when he calls some of the readings overeadings. Perhaps Jacob
Meskin's additional critique of my eschewing sacrifice is also germane here. I
admit to not being as clear as I might have been on this subject. In the
chapter "In The beginning" I do write the following: "A final consideration
vis-a-vis the environment is the most difficult to address. Much of the Talmud
consists of legal argumentation. Although the text will often not take a final
position on what the law is, it will always assume that its legal rulings are
important to you, the readers, as a law abiding, or as we say, an observant
Jew. That is, the Talmud is addressed to Jews for whom the yoke of the
commandments is real, and while your stance toward the law should not
logically affect your reading of the text, reading the Talmud is not merely a
matter of logic. Knowing that the outcome of a particular discussion might
very well determine how you act in the world has an effect on the reader. The
text demands that level of seriousness, real-life seriousness. Although it is
not always possible to read the text at this level of practical seriousness,
it is preferable."
I meant this to gently remind the reader and the
practitioner that a commitment to halacha is an expectation of the text qua
text. That the text functions in a phenomenological matrix that allows for
disagreement on legal details but require assent to the concept of legal
commitment. Unlike, say, a book of philosophy, not living as an halachic Jew
impacts one's understanding of the Talmud. Non-observance doesn't render it
meaningless, only that much more difficult to translate. This is a real
problem and is worth raising within the community of academic scholarship of
Talmud also. What does happen to the text we study when it is removed from
practice? I should have made this more clear in the introduction and included
it in the types of discussions that generally ensue in the Second reading of
the methodology section. I am grateful to Aryeh for causing me to do so now.
I am very grateful to all the respondents and to all of you.
I end as I began with a poem. This one my own:
A Psalm of Resurrection
Flowering open
mouths reaching
for songwords
for scourednotesdropping from a
pastcloud as it
breaks up over
the painmountain
As it soothes itself
in snow -- opens
to a blank page
ice hard
And they sing hard
flowering back
into the nature
of time
Returning to the very word
flower
lips
passion
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