Response to Ira Stone's Reading Levinas/Reading Talmud

Jacob Meskin

Princeton University

Ira Stone's Reading Levinas/Reading Talmud is two radically different, perhaps irreconciliable, things at once.

It is first of all one of the best (or perhaps even the best) attempts to introduce Levinas, and his ways of reading the Talmud to the general public, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Stone writes clearly and helpfully about very challenging, and often downright obscure matters, delivering to his readers a great deal of both Levinas' message and his method. He also offers forceful and insightful examples of his own "Levinas-inspired" talmudic commentary; some of these may be more convincing than others, but all of them help to illustrate and to communicate Stone's understanding of Levinas' approach to the talmud. These several features, then, make Stone's book quite important.

And yet Stone's book is also something else: it is a highly problematic interpretation of Levinas, and, to a certain extent, of what one might call the world of the talmud. It is not merely that Levinas scholars, or philosophers, will have their pedantic bones to pick, here and there, with Stone; if such were the case, then Stone could well respond with the hope that sinew and flesh might suddenly sprout on these dry bones, endowing narrow academic concerns with the breath--and the breadth--of life. The problem is much deeper than that. Whether by design, or by the need to shape his words and ideas to the contours of his audience's expectations, Stone ends up presenting us with a Levinas who has lost a good deal of his intellectual and spiritual toughness, a Levinas who has lost his resolute refusal to treat deep matters with the mostly superficial tools of our popular culture, a Levinas who has lost his humorous and yet vaguely Jeremiah-like critique of the thoughtless faddishness and inhumanity that marks much of modern western culture.[1]

I do not mean in saying this simply to allude to the powerful influence of the holocaust on Levinas, though of course there is no denying such influence in everything Levinas wrote and thought after 1945. I mean rather that Stone has worked very hard to make Levinas, and his view of the talmud, compatible with the generally unquestioned intellectual and spiritual worldview of most of the modern American Jews for whom Stone intends this volume. The problem is that this worldview arises in good measure from sources outside Judaism, which quite often conflict with Judaism--at least with the Judaism Emmanuel Levinas wrote about, studied, and championed. This point has nothing to do with tensions between the various denominations or movements of American Judaism. Nor does it reflect the necessary compromises involved in explaining Levinas to the general public, a truly daunting task, undertaken by Stone with bravery and executed with panache. It has to do, rather, with contemporary American individualism, and its widespread manifestation in a post-60's apotheosis of spontaneity and untrammeled self-expression. This is quite at odds with Levinas' rigor in matters of ethics, religious discipline, tradition, and study--in short, it clashes with Levinas' insistence that the individual per se is not the apogee of reality. In saying this I am by no means making some sort of vague, general observation: this issue comes up many, many times in Stone's presentation of Levinas. Or rather, it does not come up, and that is exactly the problem.

At the very beginning of the book, 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 that incurable young romantic Franz Rosenzweig thought about how Revelation opens up the lone human being. For Levinas, of course, it is true that I owe an unrepayable, and infinitely growing debt to the other. But this is not for the other's love, since I am brought into being (as it were) not by love, but by the challenge of the other (as in Totality and Infinity), or by the "internal" summons of the other around which I "congeal" or "coagulate" into a coherent being (as in Otherwise Than Being). Love--both the state and the emotion--come later, only after the face of the other calls for me. Here, to borrow a famous line of Abraham Joshua Heschel's, worthiness precedes happiness, that is, the worthiness of answering the call of the other precedes the happiness of love.

No doubt, this idea--that of an obligation which is even more basic than my individuality and which, in fact, founds that individuality--will not play well in contemporary America. This idea may not exactly denigrate personal feelings, but it certainly moves them down the list of priorities, and implicitly suggests that I may need to learn how to reshape my feelings in conformity with a higher reality. It also hints at ways I may be involved in networks and structures of meaning that I--the typical American individual--did not make, and on which I did not even get a chance to vote.

We find the same problem on page 14, where Stone writes:

"The other person's face obligates me. Remarkably, this obligation coincides with my own desire to serve another, which grows stronger the more it serves. For Levinas, this is the meaning of consciousness itself."

I am afraid this is not Levinas either--but it might well be what Levinas sounds like when an ingenious and resourceful teacher, such as Stone, struggles to find ways of talking about him to which his contemporary American audience might readily assent--without, that is, sensing that a good portion of Levinas' ideas in fact conflict with some of their assumptions. So in the passage cited, Stone makes it sound like I enjoy the obligation the face of the other imposes on me. But Levinas is clear that the face of the other actually contests my spontaneous feelings, he or she begins the process of educating me away from my own likes and dislikes. After all, it is hardly likely that my first response to the other's interrupting my own private enjoyment will be to welcome him or her with open arms! I may well hate the other, which is why Levinas repeatedly says that the first commandment is "thou shall not murder". Indeed, the face of the other is the beginning of my ability to transcend my own individual wants and feelings. So, unsurprisingly, when he discusses the "desire" of which Stone speaks above, Levinas makes clear that this desire takes place as a movement beyond "my own" desires--they are "my" desires allright, but "I" have become gradually transformed by the interruption of the face of the other. I have become capable of taking up distance from my own self, a capacity which makes me a person, and which I owe to the other. (Incidentally, this is why the last line of the passage cited above should probably read "For Levinas, this is the meaning of self-consciousness itself", rather than "consciousness". "Consciousness" is about concepts for Levinas, while "self-consciousness" arises from the other.)

Let me reiterate: Stone's presentation of Levinas cannot fail to impress and edify, and this is especially so for those of us who have struggled to try to communicate Levinas' ideas to students. Nonetheless, that being said, I find myself wishing that Stone had tackled the problem I am addressing here head on. This would have required Stone to make it explicit to his readers that Levinas' ways of thinking are not necessarily congruent with all of the "feel-good" asumptions of our contemporary culture--or, to put this in a more pedagogically felicitous way, that Levinas agrees with Reinhold Niebuhr that "the self does not realize itself most fully when self-realization is its conscious aim". Given the largely self-obsessed and hedonistic situation in which we find ourselves today, Stone might well have tried to introduce Levinas by arguing that he is, at bottom, offering us the deepest kind of self-gratification, namely the kind that comes from working hard to live in harmony with something far greater than our individual selves. Indeed despite cultural blinders, one still meets many, many people whose day to day lives feature dedication, loyalty, altruism, fidelity, patience, and so on. Perhaps Stone needed to tap into this still surviving source of sacrifice for things beyond self in order to show his audience concrete examples of what Levinas' philosophy wants to explain, and to preserve.[2]

Lest I be misunderstood here, let me point out that Levinas was hardly some sort of latter-day Litvische ascetic, humorlessly mumbling things about "duty and obligation" as he went about his colorless life of self-denial! Anyone who had the privilege of meeting Levinas could not but be impressed with his humor, his verve, his personal joie de vivre. And, to look at a different side of things, I still remember my own embarassment, as a very young assistant professor, when I found myself for the first time trying to read the sections of Totality and Infinity on "the voluptuosity of the caress" with a bright group of undergradutes. It was not exactly Levinas' language that made me all too acutely aware of myself: it was rather that his words so powerfully captured the sense of passion sweping one away into delirium, the intoxication of simply feeling the other's skin, the wild urgency stoked by erotic touch. Levinas clearly had a vivid and personal appreciation of the goodness of God's creation in eros, as well as in food, ideas, friendship, and so on. Yet Totality and Infinity is quite clear that all of these human feelings of jouissance have their place in an order of meaning far larger than that of my little self and my--perhaps insufficiently--little ego.[3]

Yet it is not only with respect to Levinas' philosophy that Stone has, perhaps understandably, chosen to avoid the disparity between Levinas and Stone's intended audience. Similar problems arise with Stone's treatment of Levinas' approach to Judaism, and with his appropriation of Levinas' "method" of reading talmud.

One reason for this is that Stone, perhaps as a sensitive teacher worrying about his students' ability to hear such things, has minimized the theme of sacrifice in Levinas' thought. This central theme shapes not only Levinas' understanding of the self, but also his view of Judaism. The concept of sacrifice is already at work to a certain degree in Levinas' early philosophical works, but it becomes paramount in Otherwise than Being, with its famous discussion of "substitution", my "being a hostage" for other. Similarly, the concept of sacrifice--one central to Jewish tradition--plays a prominent role in Levinas' approach to Judaism. We see this, for example, in Levinas' frequent talk about the discipline of the mitzvot "elevating us" above our nature, or about the way that the discipline of talmud torah can gradually free us of our personal inertia and egocentric limitations, leading us to ever deeper levels of spiritual development. These ideas about Judaism, however, make very few appearances in Stone's readings of the talmud.[4]

The reader is likely to find some of Stone's talmudic readings brilliant, and others somewhat forced. Stone works hard to capture the beneficial, dialectical openness of these texts, the way they prevent easy closure, and invite us to ever more questioning. I would like, in conclusion, to draw attention to just one line of one of Stone's more brilliant readings, that of Berakhot 8a, "Prayer and the End of Metaphysics". On page 57 Stone brings this little essay to an elegant and powerful conclusion; I will cite just the last line: "Prayer humbles philosophy, teaching it to laugh at its own obsession with consistency, or to keep silent and stay out of the way." A wonderful line! Yet, isn't Levinas--who was, after all, a consummate philosopher--better read as searching for a way to philosophize that could recognize the significance of prayer? Stone seems to read Levinas as "leaving philosophy behind", but it is not that simple. Levinas wants to change philosophy, not try to do without it. We need philosophy, albeit one that has learned from the talmud and Socrates, to challenge us, to help us strive. In this regard, we need all the help we can get, and can ill-afford to reject a potentially valuable teacher.

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