Levinas and the Crisis of Humanism

2013.07.24

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As she accurately puts it, Levinas is not. This is to say, he is not concerned with a self that is concerned with itself. Interestingly, in the first chapter Katz engages not with Levinas, but with contemporary controversies about education. What is at stake is not the crisis of humanism, but rather that of the humanities in Western curricula. She presents different models of education exemplified in the works of Arendt, Dewey, and Nussbaum.

For Arendt, whom Katz defines as "conservative," education has no direct political function. Politics is the realm of free and spontaneous innovation, while education is meant to establish a bond between a child and his or her history, culture, and tradition, and, in general, the world as it is. Politics means creating and therefore transforming the present and the future; education is about the past. Yet for Arendt, education -- though not in itself political -- is necessary to politics, which cannot flourish in a society whose members lack an understanding of history and tradition.

In contrast to Arendt, Dewey's "progressive education" emphasizes the process or mode of teaching rather than the material taught. Dewey's point -- as Katz argues -- is that the learning process and the acquisition of skills are central to a moral education. For Dewey, while education must not neglect the transmission of knowledge, education is in itself a democratic practice, rather than being simply a prerequisite for democracy, as for Arendt. Nussbaum, attempting to synthesize Dewey and Socratic pedagogy, argues that greater emphasis on teaching the humanities is critical to ensuring the preservation of democracy.

However, claims Katz, Nussbaum's intellectual elitism undermines her democratic intentions. According to Katz, this discussion about the humanities and the normative essence of education leaves open several fundamental questions: Therefore, in her second chapter Katz turns to Rousseau and Nietzsche, leaving the humanities to discuss modern humanism and its accent on self-sufficiency. In a subtle and sophisticated way, Katz shows that Rousseau, who "inaugurate[d] two major trends in contemporary education -- the Montessori movement and Deweyan pragmatism" 41 -- and who influenced the theory of rights and French Republicanism, developed, in Emile , a philosophy of self-sufficiency largely founded on gender.

Rousseau champions an autonomy that is largely a male characteristic. Pursuing that line of thought, Nietzsche, in Zarathustra, also depicts an education that promotes individual independence. Both Rousseau and Nietzsche de-valorize the teaching role of the community and advocate educational processes that are cut off from the affairs of the city -- i. How then, should we expect citizens to be involved in moral and political challenges? In the chapter "The Crisis of Humanism," Katz reviews the main themes of Levinas's critique of humanism. Analyzing his early and later assessments of Christianity, liberalism, and Marxism, she shows how Levinas's analysis of self-sufficiency and emancipation led him to the philosophical question of the relationship between immanence and transcendence, which he conceptualized as ethical: However, if this responsibility for the other is to have any meaning, it must be cultivated , as is described in the fourth chapter of the book, "Before Phenomenology.

As Katz rightly emphasizes, Levinas contends that the cultivation of an ethical subjectivity constitutes the core of Judaism. However, I am not sure he unambiguously believed that subjectivity to be "unique to Judaism" p. It is true that often in Levinas's work, "'being Jewish' is set in opposition, or at least in contrast to, 'being Western'" p. However, despite his numerous attacks on Western philosophy, Levinas also declared on many occasions that ethics can be found in philosophy.

Just as his harsh critique of politics must be seen in light of his repeated assertion that politics is the only way to implement ethics, his harsh critique of Western culture must be regarded in light of his absolute admiration for and need of Western philosophy: In other words, the project is to disclose Judaism's universal meaning.

But it is the case that the education, the learning of Spanish, has become tied to an ethical dimension and that is what I wish to stress. First, I am opposed to character education as it is traditionally taught—as neat and clean and not messy or difficult.

But even if I were to agree with a particular approach to teaching ethics, they would most likely not be tethered to intellectual development. It is this dynamic that distinguishes Talmudic education and that could distinguish something like the dual-language program. The question I have is could there be other ways to replicate this structure.

Levinas and the Crisis of Humanism by Claire Elise Katz is, among other things, an argument that Emmanuel Levinas does in fact engage the political in his work, but does so by describing the type of education that will enable us to become ethical. Her answer is that, since Levinas does not think one becomes ethical by reading writings on ethics, something else is required for the achievement of that goal; that Levinas thinks Jewish education, as he conceives it, is that something else, at least for Jews; and, that some other education similar to Jewish education as he describes and understands it might fulfill the same function for non-Jews.

As Katz points out, her approach therefore conceives Levinas to be like Aristotle. For Aristotle, though the goal of ethics is to become good, we become good not by learning about ethics but through habituation which he understands as the doing of acts like the acts one wishes to acquire a settled disposition to do.

In each case, there is something a person does that tends to result in an internal change called a change in disposition for Aristotle and a change in subjectivity for Katz and Levinas. Ethics is a part of politics according to Aristotle, and, it appears, according to Katz as well. I read Levinas somewhat differently than Katz does, perhaps because of different starting points and different emphasized texts. For example, I think the de-emphasis of the glory of the infinite in Otherwise Than Being is similar to the de-emphasis of glory and immanence in general in Jewish thought and practice: Another way to think of what Katz is doing—or, here, really, it is what Levinas is doing—is that it is a kind of apology or defense of the Talmud, that much-maligned book or set of books that was almost completely physically destroyed by non-Jews in Europe not so long ago.

The defense is that Talmudic and Midrashic reading practices are not a type of nitpicking legalism but instead practices that accomplish ethical subjectivity since Talmudic and Midrashic texts are plurivocal and, in addition, always signify more than they say Add to that the fact that the voices in the text come from various persons and periods, and the text teaches community as well. Plus, if you add the fact that Talmud study itself is social—done in pairs or groups—then we get a teaching of human dependency, too. I cannot read the text nearly as well by myself as together with others. Finally, add to that the fact that the texts are themselves about ethical matters and feature flawed human characters, and you get a unique text-and-textual-practices set designed to teach and cultivate ethical subjectivity.

Katz emphasizes also that the fact that the ethical aspects of Talmud and Talmud study are the universal components of it belies the idea that such study is fundamentally particularistic because it is Jewish. At the same time, she points out that there is a particularist exhortation by Levinas to Jews not simply to echo their Western surroundings but to take the lead. Western culture and philosophy is veiled Christianity, she takes Levinas to say, and not Judaism. I am broadly sympathetic to what Katz and Levinas are doing as I have described it so far and want to continue in what follows briefly to raise some issues—primarily issues for Levinas or those influenced by what he is doing—just to see how Katz might respond to them, on the assumption that the issues I raise, and others similar to them, are ones Katz likely has already considered.

One could argue that halakha or Jewish law is just as central to such development—and here I mean halakhic practice not halakhic study. Levinas emphasizes Talmud and Midrash in part because without the study of them we end up with Judaism without Jews, that is, a Jewish life so underinformed that the practice becomes shallow and cannot inform subjectivity. This may lead Levinas or Katz? Yeshayahu Leibowitz argues for it on those grounds. Second, Talmud rarely mentions a woman teacher, and therefore is rather sexist.

I do not need to say much about this, as I am sure Katz can fill it in if she wishes. I think that Totality and Infinity does not center as much on responsibility as it does on desire. Indeed, Katz even spells fecundity out in terms of responsibility. But fecundity is one of the two ways desire is accomplished according to Levinas. It is accomplished in two ways, he says, through the face-to-face and through fecundity.

I wish scholars would bring desire into their discussions of applications of Levinas more and not focus so exclusively on responsibility. I worry that too much emphasis on responsibility betrays a certain self-ignorance or smugness.

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What kind of regime ought to accompany a Levinasian ethics in our time, for example? Also, what kind of economy? Sixth, so much of this book is about knowledge that I think the Levinas of Totality and Infinity , who argues for a form of relationship to an other that is not a type of knowledge, consciousness, or intentionality in the ordinary sense, is left out. Of course, it is clearly a book about education. At the same time, though, it is a book about developing ethical subjectivity.

Seventh, the critique of Western thought for its emphasis on freedom and the self is, in my view, more a critique of modern Western thought than of certain strains in ancient Western thought. I discuss this in my book on Plato and Levinas. Overall, I found Levinas and the Crisis of Humanism to be a stimulating and enjoyable book that is very strong on how Levinas responds to the perceived crisis of the modern west. The book pushes us to read Levinas as a whole, not bit by bit, and to expand our ideas of how he is political.

Moreover, it gives us a lot to think about for the present on how to produce ethical subjectivity today, in our own fraught times, as Levinas thought about that question in his own difficult times. To conclude, I want to quote a sentence from the book: When I read that sentence, expressing what Katz finds compelling about Levinas on education, namely, his effort to conceive an education in which the ethical component of what is learned is responsibility rather than hoarding, I think of ways to change my approach to my own courses.

Perhaps because of a certain giving quality in her writing, not to mention in her general approach to philosophy and to others, I find myself as a result of the book reconceiving numerous matters. I experience the book, in other words, as both a calling into question and as a gift, that is, as itself containing the two central components of ethical experience as outlined and described by philosopher Emmanuel Levinas.

Indiana University Press, All references will be provided parenthetically in the text. Harvard University Press, , Leibowitz argues for the primacy of halakhic practice understood by him to be motivated not by understanding but by commitment. Deborah Achtenberg, Essential Vulnerabilities: Northwestern University Press, I am grateful for these insights.

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Deborah writes her responses in a series of questions or comments that make it relatively easy to respond back—and so rather than reproduce the points she made, it will be easier for me to respond to each one in turn. If it did, he could just as easily return to the classical humanities education. Rather, it is about practice, but practice in a particular kind of way—the way that the partnership is formed for example, hence my example of the dual-language education, the performance of the midrash simply reinforces rather than running contrary to the kind of practice we want from our students—or children, as it were.

Yes, but then it lacks the potential universal appeal—rightly or wrongly, Levinas sees midrash and Talmud as emphasizing something similar: That is not what he is after. Yes, no question that gender, and in particular, sexism is an issue if we replicate Talmudic study as such. I use Talmudic study as an example—not to say that we should return to the Talmud and the original iteration that leaves women in a secondary status. It could be a chauvinism; it could also be that he places a particular responsibility on Judaism—if no one else is going to do this, we better do it.

This is not to say that no other community could. There were no lights unto the nations. I emphasize TI mostly because that is the primary philosophical text that has any sustained or frequent discussion of teaching. I think this is the bonus round question—the million dollar question. There is no question in my mind that we are talking about reconceived political—a radically different political and in particular a radically different economic system that would distribute goods and services more justly than it does currently.

What are the ways that we practice education that send different messages—messages that many of us oppose? I think Levinas sees in a robust Jewish education the simultaneous development of responsibility that does not come at the expense of the development of a sophisticated mind—both of which I think he would argue are necessary for creating a just community. I think I might not have been so clear in that early chapter—my discussion of Socrates and Plato is not about how to read them correctly but rather how they have been received.

Having taught in schools of education, I can speak fairly confidently, that a certain view of Plato and Socrates is brought forward and it is not the one that Deborah emphasizes. Turning now to the generous comments offered by both Dennis Beach and Oona Eisenstadt, I realize that I have known both them, as I have Martin and Deborah, for nearly fifteen years.

Dennis indicated that he hoped he was invited to participate in this symposium because he thinks with Christianity—not in spite of it. I was delighted that both Oona and Dennis were invited—mostly because I know them to be honest and smart. I expected them to push back on the book.

The Silent Footsteps of Rebecca Bloomington: A voice comes from the other shore. A voice interrupts the saying of the already said. I sat once in a graduate writing workshop on relationships to the land. The students all demonstrated a deep respect and affection for nature. They said that nature was the place where they experienced the greatest sense of belonging and well-being.

They professed without reservation that they loved the earth. It was as if I had brought a two-headed porcupine into the classroom. Over the last three decades can it be that long? This has been particularly so in regard to following out how Jewish traditions of thought might find their way into practices of philosophical discourse emerging in the wake of the Shoah and the many other moments of colonial mania—both ecocidal and genocidal—that have characterized the worst side of the project of a perhaps all-too-Greek Enlightenment.

I find this mode of activism at work in Levinas and the Crisis of Humanism. This disappearance, Claire argues, has intensified the current crisis characterizing American education, in which the humanities are attacked not because they are too provocative and unsettling but because they are irrelevant and of no use.

This attack, I would add from personal experience, emerges from within the academy, as well as from without. In doing so, teachers of the humanities have failed to consider how an ethically responsible subject who is oriented toward another from the ground up might emerge in the first place.

But the largest and to my mind most innovative aspect of her project involves a positive contribution to how one might move beyond critique of the solitary man to a pedagogy of ethical subjectivity. And here emerges the promise of a Jewish education. Through it is prescribed an interpretive practice of reading that finds itself already indebted to the multiplicity of other voices, both those that emerge and those that are suppressed, both those that are contemporary and those that arise from the past or the future!

Could it ever have been otherwise? And so here, yet another provocateur in discursive activism deserves mentioning. Her name is Nimachia Howe, a scholar in anthropology, education and social linguistics, whose work focuses on ways of knowing among the Niitsitapi, the Peoples of the Blackfoot Confederacy. And somewhere amidst that welter of voices and their increasingly noisy commentary was the steadying tones of Levinas, as well as the polyphonic background of the rabbis, particularly Rabbi Ishmael and Rabi Akiba. And these latter two particularly as they had been offered to me through the thought of Abraham Heschel.

And so it is as well with myself and all other readers of her book.

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It is a tribute to Katz as teacher and student, indeed, as a teacher who is always eager first to be a student, that the very writing of Levinas and the Crisis of Humanism is an interweaving, performed sensitively and with openness, of a plurality of voices already engaged in commentary upon one another. And so, engaging in the practice of biblical midrash, I have a question to pose. And the question, as is necessarily the case in Midrash, begins in a pretext.

In the small village in Lithuania, where Levinas underwent the first stages of his Jewish education, he reports,. That was the essential aspect of the way of reading. There was also a demythologizing of what was already demythologized, a quest for meaning to be renewed. For the sake of these voices I am moved to ask the following question: In what manner might the stories of the other claim me, intervene in my storying and destorying of them? And in this mode of culture and commentary we would not only discern but also conscientiously attend to a threefold division among philosophical, literary and biblical ways of speaking, of being engaged in discourse, in which each is not reducible to the other and each calls for its own manner of pedagogical intervention.

One pedagogical practice in this regard both explored and recommended by Katz particularly impressed me: No less than this model was recently recommended to me, in rather forceful terms by Pueblo poet Simon Ortiz and here I am going to be putting words in his mouth, since they were spoken for the most part to me in Acoma, and I did not understand them at first hearing: For in at least some of these indigenous languages, one finds that more-than-human others also are engaged in teaching, though not in a manner a Talmudic scholar might feel comfortable with.

Robin Kimmerer, both a scientifically-trained botanist and also a citizen of the Potawatomi Nation, puts it this way:. What if you had no language at all and yet there was something you needed to say? In time you would become so eloquent that just to gaze upon you would reveal it all. And so it is with these silent green lives.

For Kimmerer, a plant, say sweetgrass, Heirochloe odorata , orients us to living from the ground up in a posture of reciprocity and gratitude. If we are inattentive to the gift giving of sweetgrass, indeed, to sweetgrass precisely as a gift-giver, we already have failed to be instructed in how to be responsible and so to be human. Put otherwise, others are already teaching us, altering our very sense of and hold upon the world, precisely because they are offering us gifts without which we would fail to be ourselves. Several questions accrue in regard to thinking through the implications of this approach in the context of the Americas: First, would not place as well as text be crucial in an education that would sensitize citizens to the discourse of indigenous American cultures?

As a corollary to this question: Indigenous notions of responsibility put into question the notion of an open realm of conversation between citizens that are only human. The more-than-human—which is to say not only The Most High but also all other sentient creatures—have their say. Second, how best might one understand the destorying of the story and then the destorying of the destorying of the story recommended by Levinas in his own story about his Jewish education? Is commentary like an acid etching away at story? Should we be forever impatient with and perpetually vigilant against the emergence of story in the midst of commentary?

And one would need to elaborate more clearly how crucial the telling of stories remains in a culture of commentary. Third, how to pursue a pedagogy of commentary in a situation of uneven numbers with deep currents of dehumanization still at play in regard to the non-majority other? In it Jewish practices of education have found a renewed hearing in the philosophical tradition that deserves attention. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, , Anne Waters New York: Wiley-Blackwell, , 3.

Milkweed, , Indiana University Press, , 3. Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas , ed. Mesorah, , 2. Levinas, Otherwise than Being , See Nimachia Howe Hernandez , Mokakssini: A Blackfoot Theory of Knowledge , — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass , An Annual Review , vol. He never treated me as anything but his equal—as a friend and colleague.

But I did not read anything Levinas wrote until Jim led a discussion of a section on Totality and Infinity. Admittedly, not much stuck. But I felt like I learned Levinas more through interacting with Jim, listening to how he read and interpreted, than I did by reading Levinas directly. And so once again, I am learning from Jim again. I think many of his questions are best left to a future discussion. I do not think I can address all of them, maybe even any of them, well in a few remarks. So, I think I might respond by making a few general comments that touch on all of the questions Jim has raised.

Let me start with regard to languages. As I groped to find some kind of secular educational model that filled the two main requirements of Talmudic education—the development of the intellect alongside of the development of ethical responsibility, where one was actually tied to the other, not two separate processes, the kind of dual-language program that is specifically offered in Texas seemed to be the closest match. So when Jim asks about the non-Western, non-European, I would ask in return, is he asking to have another pedagogical model considered alongside or instead of what I am proposing?

That is, is it not just as strange, just as presumptuous to think that we can engage in a non-Western pedagogy—like that funny yoga video where Gandhi is eventually kicked out of the yoga class—as it is to presume that a Western, or European, or Talmudic model should be utilized by others? I have often thought of education as reproducing the world, so of course the question to be raised is whose world? That is not even mine? I am a solemnly professed Benedictine monk and I have been for thirty-four years.

But there it is: I am a monk. My being professionally Christian is pertinent here because the crisis of humanism about which Levinas and Katz speak is in large part a crisis of Christian humanism, a point upon which Katz, following Levinas, insists. Of course, part of the crisis that Levinas was addressing in the mid-twentieth century was also a crisis of Jewish humanism, but it was this only because Jews had, through active assimilation or passive reluctance to insist upon their Jewish particularity, more or less ceded the space of humanism to what the Christian-spawned Enlightenment said it was.

And this turned out, in Europe at mid-century, to have been an ethically catastrophic mistake. Of course, Katz and others already know the secret of my monkishness and I have to believe I was asked to respond not in spite of but because of my commitment to religion, to an other religion. I say that with gratitude, since I have to believe also that Katz sees me as not only a sympathetic reader of Levinas, but as a reader who will ask hard questions if they need to be asked. This is after all what Levinas understood philosophy to be. Let me pause here for a brief confession. Almost all I know of the Talmud comes from reading Levinas and a few other Jewish thinkers who have broached this topic in the secular intellectual world.

But is this book symposium simply an exercise in hagiography? I have a charge, from Levinas himself, to allow no one a lapse of attention or a lack of rigor. What are we to make of the claim that this Jewish particularity which ek-sists paradigmatically in the study of the Talmud, is at the same time universal? Can this purgation of particularism mean that the truth these Hebrew texts teach is not really particular, but is, instead, accessible to all? But what does such a universality signify? Katz tackles exactly this question both early and late.

According to Levinas, it is not that Jewish education has as its business to cultivate and to maintain the particular and uniquely Jewish cultural expressions of a truth that is in itself or essentially universal—a universal that would have other, equivalent cultural expressions in other religious traditions, perhaps even in purely secular ethical traditions. As much as such a schema might fit a normal philosophical understanding of the relationship between universal and particular, it seems clear that this is not what Levinas thought about anything!

She goes on to claim that this ethical subjectivity is glimpsed already, fleetingly, in two pre-war writings, the essay on Hitlerism and On Escape , and then more systematically and explicitly in the s essays and addresses on Jewish education as well in studies that culminate in Totality and Infinity , which then functions as the first comprehensive and synthetic philosophical formulation of this ethical subjectivity.

The idea is then developed further through the s essays collected in Humanism of the Other and culminates, I think most would agree, in the discussions of subjectivity as substitution in Otherwise than Being. Furthermore, she maintains, Levinas believed this is a task that education in and formation by the Jewish tradition is uniquely able to accomplish. Levinas often represents this Western humanism as a secular version of Christianity, a relation that, he implies, disqualifies Christianity from being part of the solution to the crisis of humanism.

This is a familiar Platonism-as-Christianity interpretation—in other words, it is pure Nietzsche—and not without some justification. I have some reservations about this characterization of Christianity. To explore them, I would like to quote the full passage from the Hitlerism essay Claire also quotes:. The whole philosophical and political thought of modern times tends to place the human spirit on a plane that is superior to reality, and so creates a gulf between man and the world. It makes it impossible to apply the categories of the physical world to the spirituality of reason, and so locates the ultimate foundation of the spirit outside the brutal world and the implacable history of concrete existence.

It replaces the blind world of common sense with the world rebuilt by idealist philosophy, one that is steeped in reason and subject to reason. In place of liberation through grace there is autonomy, but the Judeo-Christian leitmotif of freedom pervades this autonomy.

When Levinas writes about Judaism, he is sharp and concrete and rather hard in challenging sentimental piety. But he depicts Christianity using a stereotyped and ineffectual image—stereotyped because it seems to be derived from the worst excesses of a pseudo -Hegelian mythology. My point in mentioning this is not to contest or excuse such appalling and un-Christian complicity on the part of churches, church organizations or individual Christians.

Still, it seems to me like an ad hominem argument writ large. What Levinas writes in his Hitlerism essay comes across as a claim that Christianity is essentially incapable of ethics, essentially incapable of forming proper ethical subjects. A monk of my monastery, Fr. The prejudice or the silence and the complicity of myriad European Christians cannot be denied. Why is Jewish education uniquely suited to the cultivation and formation of the ethical subject that Levinas comes to see as the first task of philosophy?

This I do not dispute. As Katz is careful to emphasize, Levinas is largely offering these talks to secularized Jews. At least not immediately. Assent to what Levinas urges of his Jewish audience would have required many of them to repudiate the intentional or at least acquiescent stance they had taken to their Jewish traditions through assimilation.

These were dire straits. And these are dire straits. What I take Katz to be claiming for Levinas and for Rosenzweig, and, by extension, for the tradition of Jewish education, is more radical yet: But she also turns to it, I think, because the other, more sectarian solution—that everyone must undergo a Jewish education, that everyone must become Jewish, just seems untenable.

Still, the question remains, how is it figurative? How can it be figurative when Jewish particularity is so insisted upon? But if there are acceptable philosophical formulations for this demand, Katz realizes, they often lack the urgency that compels assent: Rather, the ethical relationship is learned through education that is first and foremost a practice and a discipline, not simply the acquisition of concepts to which the subject gives free intellectual consent.

Everywhere that religion tries to become philosophy in Levinas, it seems to turn back into religion again! Katz is certainly sympathetic to the difficulties this raises for non-religious, non-Jewish thinkers.

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But I think she is right in insisting that something religious is at the heart of what Levinas is advocating. Not sectarian, despite the insistence on Jewish particularity, but religious. The emphasis on Jewish education comes to focus on the reading and study of particular texts—and reading and study done in a concrete and particular way:. We must, therefore, return to rabbinic exegesis, which made the text speak DF , In this return, the text becomes a teacher, or at the very least, a source of teaching rather than a mere object of study.

Katz returns to describe these particular practices later, in chapter 6. On the one hand, it is clear that this approach is distinctively Jewish. I mentioned earlier how jealous I am of the Talmud as both text and tradition. Such as imitation does not repudiate the uniqueness of the Talmud, but recognizes it and testifies to it. Maybe this reversal names the dynamic of shaping the ethical subject that Levinas finds paradigmatic in the Talmud, that is, in Jewish education. Such texts, such voices, call on me to respond, to subject myself to their saying. I do this not to challenge the claim of the uniqueness of the Jewish tradition Levinas finds paradigmatic for ethics, but to gesture toward the kind of universalism about which that very tradition testifies.

The Lives and Sayings were oral traditions later written down and anthologized. This story is about Abba Moses, a fourth-century Egyptian monk-hermit.

A brother at Scetis committed a fault. A council was called to which Abba Moses was invited, but he refused to go to it. He took a leaking jug, filled it with water and carried it with him. While interpretation of this story seems fairly straightforward, the text and tradition also clearly have a vocative urgency that demands both attention and response from the reader. They call one to self-examination and to a kind of renunciation of the self-assertive subjectivity that Katz makes clear Levinas criticizes.

Is not the universal dimension Levinas insists that Jewish education embodies in its particularity precisely this vocative urgency? The Other teaches me, forms me as an ethical subject—that is, a subject capable of ethical relation—not only from a height, but as height, as a demand that is precisely ethical: Is this height and the ethical responsibility to which it calls us what Levinas means by the ethical uniqueness and universality of Jewish education?

Is there something religious but not dogmatic or doctrinal about it? It speaks truth to power and calls me to recognize, convicts me of this truth.

The height from which it teaches and convicts is also its destitution and its vulnerability. Is it possible to miss this conviction, not to perceive or apperceive it? That some individuals do not experience beauty is no argument that beauty is false. Ethics is a vocation and not a fact. Once again, she is spot on. But this seems to lead us again from philosophy back to religion. Or might it lead us to recognize in the prophetic a sort of nonsectarian religion as our best love of wisdom, our best longing for wisdom? Katz is right that Levinas often invokes Isaiah, Ezekiel, and other prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures.

True justice must not forget the uniqueness of the other:. Justice] awaits the voices that will recall, to the judgments of the judges and statesmen, the human face dissimulated beneath the identities of citizens. An anachronism that may bring a smile to the lips!

But prophetic voices probably mean the possibility of unforeseen acts of kindness of which the I is still capable in its uniqueness preceding all genus or freed from all genera. In other words, those who have ears to hear recognize those prophetic voices, voices not confined to any particular religion or culture. But such ears do not develop spontaneously, Levinas reminds us. Ears need to be attuned if they are to be able to hear and to heed such voices, to be subject to their urgent call. Levinas argues that Jewish education teaches precisely such attunement, such ethical subjectivity.

If other experiences teach it too, we can and must welcome that lesson. Columbia University Press, [French original, ] , 77—90; here, 89— Essays on Judaism , trans. John Hopkins University Press, Sean Hand, Critical Inquiry Talmudic Readings and Lectures , trans.

Indiana University Press, , xi. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection , trans. Benedicta Ward, SLG, rev. Cistercian, , — So I will focus on that. First, I concede that on the one hand, Levinas is not always a charitable reader. On the other, I think Levinas is genuinely perplexed by Christianity. It was a convent that saved his family; it was an ecumenical but nonetheless Catholic journal that published the Hitlerism essay, but it was also Christianity that led the Crusades, the Inquisition, and collaborated with the Nazis.

The writings on Judaism take up significant topics—but in particular, he is concerned with a false sense of secularism enjoyed by both Jews and Christians. My kids asked me just the other day why we are not off of school for the Jewish holidays—they have to make a choice: This is generally not a choice that Christians have to make. My point is not to say that schools should shut down for every holiday of every non-Christian religion.

Levinas was keenly aware of this dilemma in France. He loved the universalism promised by the French Republic at the same time that he also realized this universalism came with a price for living life Jewishly—or more simply, for being Jewish. His essays warning his audience about the dangers and the mythology associated with assimilation prepare them for his claims that Jewish education can address these dangers.

If they did not really get much from assimilation, and if assimilation required them to give up too much, and especially those characteristics that made Judaism unique, then why continue? I think Levinas in these moments is trying to do two things. Contra Hegel, Levinas is simultaneously trying to reclaim the significance of Judaism as particular at the same time that he is trying to persuade readers that there is a universal dimension to Judaism. Part of me wants to agree with Dennis at the same time that I know part of the contention in Christian theology is what it means to be Christian—is it works and deeds?

What would it mean to accept Christ as the messiah and still be a jerk? Would this fall under the Socratic dictum—to know the good is to do the good such that we would say about such a person that they could not really be Christian and also be a Nazi? In the same way that I worry about discussions over who is a real Jew, I also worry when these discussions include other religions. Religions include a wide variety of people and interpretations. Let me preface this with rightly or wrongly.

However, the one non-negotiable that he believes is found in these sacred texts is a responsibility for the Other. That is, he sees this as the one common thread that runs throughout the texts. This approach allows him on the one hand to hold responsibility for the other as fundamental to the Jewish sacred texts while also allowing for the plethora of readings that a honor the spirit of talmudic reading and b do not require him to deliver or condone a decision procedure or moral theory for his ethics.

On Faith and Value in Education On a regular basis I meet with prospective students and their parents in the attempt to recruit them to come to the institution where I teach, Furman University. Add your voice and join the discussion Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. Second—the idea of the Talmud as sexist: Fourth—the focus on responsibility rather than desire in Totality and Infinity: Fifth—the specifics of a Levinasian political economy: Sixth—the seeming focus on knowledge: Seventh—not enough distinction between modernity and the ancient: Robin Kimmerer, both a scientifically-trained botanist and also a citizen of the Potawatomi Nation, puts it this way: To explore them, I would like to quote the full passage from the Hitlerism essay Claire also quotes: The emphasis on Jewish education comes to focus on the reading and study of particular texts—and reading and study done in a concrete and particular way: True justice must not forget the uniqueness of the other: EN , In other words, those who have ears to hear recognize those prophetic voices, voices not confined to any particular religion or culture.

Commentaries Oona Eisenstadt Pedagogical Utopias.

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