Michael Fagenblat's A Covenant of Creatures Footnote ¹ is a bold and powerful book. Given the nuanced nature of its arguments, no sooner did I think I captured his thought than I discovered that Fagenblat might also have made the opposite point. Nonetheless, a central line of argument does run through the book. My task will be to present it and also to challenge it. The best tribute to this fine work is to engage in vigorous debate about its claims.

In reading Levinas's work, Fagenblat places himself between two critical approaches, both of which he seeks to oppose. The first approach denies that Levinas's philosophy is Jewish. Samuel Moyn, for example, argues that Levinas's thought was formed by the Protestant theology dominating European discourse in the interwar years. Levinas's claims about Jewish tradition are thus merely superimposed upon that substratum. The second critique does read Levinas's thought as Jewish, but this is precisely the problem for the critics in this camp. Accordingly, to them Levinas's works should no longer be considered philosophy but rather a veiled theological particularism, claiming an authority beyond reason and an exceptional status for Jews as a people.

In his debate with both of these camps, Fagenblat reaffirms that Levinas is indeed a Jewish philosopher, provided that both Judaism and philosophy are understood in the right key. His first answer to those like Moyn who deny the Jewish element of Levinas's thought is to show that his major philosophical works, Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, are interpretations of specific biblical and rabbinic texts. “Levinas's philosophical works are midrashically determined from beginning to end” (preface, 23). More than that, his works “present a coherent philosophy of Judaism” (22). To note just one example among several of Fagenblat's, he claims that Levinas's early postwar writings (1947–1961), culminating with Totality and Infinity, are philosophical elaborations of Genesis 1. Engaging not only with Levinas's works and biblical and rabbinic texts, but also with contemporary biblical and philosophical scholarship, he argues for the presence of a cosmogonic myth within Levinas's early works. In Genesis 1, the world arises only when the tohu-va bohu is contained, and particular beings come into existence as a result of God's act of speech. In Levinas's thought this is reproduced as the containment of il y a, achieved when human beings respond to the particularity of the Other. Just as the world, in Levinas's thought, is created not out of nothing, but out of the containment of anonymous, homogenized existence, so does it emerge in the biblical account. “My suggestion is that il y a is a phenomenological interpretation of Genesis 1:2” (6). It follows from this that “the account of chaos preceding creation, for Levinas, as for Genesis 1, provides a moral rather than a naturalistic description of the origins of the world” (6). The world comes into being as resistance against evil, and creation is maintained when the human being, in the image of God, responds to particularity and protects it, always against the background of the collapse of the world into mere existence. “Creation takes place within existence; it is the emergence of a particular point of view that enables meaning to arise from the indeterminacy of mere existence” (6, 21). Thus the task of the human being is to keep the world from sinking back into evil, through his ethical response.

But Fagenblat's argument against Samuel Moyn does not end by establishing that Levinas was interpreting Jewish texts. After all, Moyn does not deny this. Moyn's objection, rather, is that in doing so he inserted ideas foreign to Jewish tradition. Against this, Fagenblat not only shows that there is a Jewish tradition of interpreting texts along the lines that Levinas himself does, but also, more centrally, he wants to point to the nature of the act of interpreting itself. Jewish texts are never ahistorically static but fluid, and their many potential meanings are uncovered by means of ongoing interpretive acts. That is what rabbinic midrash has always been. Further, biblical and rabbinic texts invite not just midrash but philosophical midrash, that is, elucidation of their meaning in a philosophical language, because to begin with, they have a virtual philosophical core. In every kind of midrash, the historical situation of the interpreter is not an obstacle but an occasion to discover new meaning. Interpreting is a complex movement between a fluid content and a fluid interpretative grid. The text is neither dogma, fixed forever, nor empty. “Philosophical midrash interprets Judaism in the best philosophical light and therefore depends on the philosophical milieu of the exegete” (8).

If Levinas's interpretation of Jewish texts follows a Jewish tradition, it also nonetheless remains philosophy, claims Fagenblat. To establish this, he turns to Heidegger, one of whose major contributions to subsequent understandings of philosophy was that philosophical reflection is always historically situated and thus always operates within a certain horizon of thought. That horizon of thought is by definition textually dependent. With the help of the French philosopher Marlène Zarader, Fagenblat points out that Heidegger himself relied not only on Greek texts but also on Hebraic ones. Philosophy can no longer see itself as a timeless discussion of concepts, divorced from texts and history, operating with nothing external to the reasoning process. Thus the fact that Levinas built his philosophy on the basis of his interpretation of Jewish texts does not in the least invalidate his thought as philosophy. It works on two levels at once, as an interpretation of Judaism and as a description of what appears in human relations. As such, it operates outside of any dogmatic authority. Levinas is not saying that his analyses should convince us because of the origin of his thought in some sort of revealed knowledge. He is claiming that his descriptions of our relationship to the Other are true because they cohere with our experience. We evaluate them using the normal tools with which we evaluate truth claims. Precisely because Levinas brackets any authority outside human reason, his interpretation is a secularization of the Jewish tradition. It is also what makes his work philosophy.

Having demonstrated that Levinas's interpretation of Jewish texts remains Jewish, despite its philosophical importations, Fagenblat next turns to the other side—those, like Alain Badiou and Judith Butler, who see in Levinas's Jewish side a contradiction to philosophy. One of their assertions, we recall, is that there is a hidden theological claim in Levinas's work. It advocates the bending of reason to a command—the responsibility to the other—that it neither establishes nor can criticize. Is this not what dogma is? In response to this, Fagenblat returns to discussing the nature of interpretation. Levinas's philosophy is not dogmatic, because interpretation by its very nature constructs and deconstructs. “Midrash,” he writes,” is a process of continuously reconstructing and thus simultaneously deconstructing the idea of its [tradition's] pure givenness and transmission” (23). Perhaps the critics' perception of Levinas's thought as dictating dogma stems from the fact that he did not sufficiently make clear the interpretative dimension of his thought, always claiming that he was merely resorting to human experience and reason, and not to Jewish texts. Thus his understanding of the command in the face of the Other appears as an absolute truth detached from context and subjective alteration, when, in fact, it is itself the product of a particular, context-bound reading of a textual tradition. But, insists Fagenblat, “the Other is not absolutely, dogmatically revealed . . . the Other is experienced exegetically” (23). There is no naked experience that hasn't already been formed by a textual tradition. “Ethics in no way refers to the Other directly, without passing through the text, as if there were some immediate access to the moral meaning presented in the face.” Fagenblat's argument is that this makes Levinas antidogmatic, rather than dogmatic, since the responsibility to the Other, there before reason, is the result of the use of reason to explicate texts.

The second charge made by these same critics is that Levinas, by drawing his philosophy from Jewish sources, privileges the Jewish tradition in a way not justifiable in terms of reason. Fagenblat denies that Levinas privileges the Jewish tradition. On the contrary, he says, Levinas opens up Jewish teachings to the whole world, making Jewish difference ethically insignificant. For if the truth of Judaism is the responsibility to the other, then every time someone enacts that responsibility, every ethnic, religious, national difference melts away, leaving only naked humanity. “It goes without saying that Jewishness for Levinas is a matter of ethical indifference—pure adiophora, as Paul rightly calls it” (31–32). Whoever enacts it is of Israel, which no longer refers to a specific people in Levinas's thought but takes on the universal meaning of whoever follows the teaching. On the basis of this reading of Levinas, Fagenblat compares him to St. Paul. Both translated Jewish teachings for the Gentiles: “Levinas's philosophical work, like Paul's letters, is primarily addressed to the Gentiles” (28). Fagenblat addresses the concerns this might raise. For twenty centuries, Paul has been interpreted as dismissing the Law as a path to salvation, effectively erasing Judaism as a living religious tradition. To compare Levinas to Paul is to suggest that his work will lead to the same result, especially given that “not since Paul has such a radical interpretation of Judaism for the Gentiles met with any significant success” (28). Fagenblat denies that supercessionism is a fair reading of Paul, relying on recent reevaluations of the apostle's thought. Paul wished to preserve Jewish law for Jews while at the same time opening up the message of Judaism to Gentiles. Levinas is doing the same thing: “The same structure of preserving the Law for the Jews while applying its promise to the Gentiles can also be found in Levinas” (27). It is not a matter, he claims, of imposing a singular message from above but of addressing whoever has ears to hear, regardless of origin. This is why Fagenblat considers Levinas to be such a radical philosopher, quite different from other Jewish philosophers, who, he claims, used the language of philosophy to address not the world but the Jews.

To further illustrate how far Levinas's thought is from a Jewish particularism that would privilege a strictly Jewish truth, Fagenblat claims that his philosophy needs to be seen not merely as Jewish but as converging “with the plain reading of many of the ethical teachings of the New Testament”: “Indeed, although he generally avoids citing the New Testament explicitly, who could doubt the most profound proximity between ‘ethics’ and a certain ‘Christian experience?’ Do we not find in the New Testament everything Levinas says about the coming to pass of God through the ethical relation to the other?” (ch. 5, 8). Fagenblat resorts to the hyphenated term Judaeo-Christian to indicate this common origin. Making fluid the boundaries between traditions is, for him, necessary both for the world as a whole and for Jews in particular, making possible a stronger sense of the oneness of humankind. “Only a Judaism that goes beyond the identity politics of being Jewish is able to make a Judaic contribution to thinking about ethics and politics in our world today” (preface, 24).

In evaluating Fagenblat's claims, I must first of all declare that his many beautiful interpretations, of Genesis, of Maimonides, and of rabbinic midrash do convincingly show the affinity of Levinas's thought to these texts. But isn't the affinity he establishes more the result of his own reading of these texts through Levinas's philosophy rather than from a direct influence of these texts on Levinas himself? The philosopher's exposure to Jewish texts was broad and diffuse. Can we really ascertain that he was attempting a reading of these very sources? In any case, perhaps it is more important to establish affinity than it is to claim that these particular texts were the origin of Levinas's acts of interpretations. In Levinas's own estimation, what makes thought Jewish is not only its content but also its insertion within the Oral Law, the long line of preceding commentators. Fagenblat inserts Levinas within Oral Law in two ways. In the first place, he shows him to be an important reference point for interpreting Jewish texts today. In the second place, he gives a pedigree to Levinas's own interpretations by showing how some previous commentators follow an analogous line of thought. This is a valuable service. The act alone of using Levinas's insights as an interpretative tool in reading Jewish texts, while at the same time showing a possible line of rabbinic interpretation with which he resonates, makes him part of Jewish tradition. No other argument really works.

But this is a mere qualification. My discomfort with the way Fagenblat asserts Levinas's indebtedness to Jewish texts goes much deeper. I think it is dangerous for the following reason. We recall that for Fagenblat, Levinas's claim about the responsibility to the other is always mediated through texts. That a textual tradition jars one into awareness of responsibility makes perfect sense and does echo what Levinas says. But I am not at all sure that this is the limit of Fagenblat's own point. He insists that no face-to-face relation can have moral meaning unless the parties involved have already been shaped by a set of teachings about this meaning: “The Saying is strictly speaking not an immediate experience of another person as a speaking subject but the idea of the singularity of the other is deduced from the interlocutory situation—a deduction that I wager takes place by way of Scripture and tradition” (35, my emphasis). In other words, in Fagenblat's reading, I respond not to the Face but to the idea of the face, given to me through my tradition.

This is simply the opposite of what Levinas is saying. The responsibility evoked by the presence of the other person is there before any intercession of reason or culture. It is outside all cultures and all times. That is why, in fact, one can speak of transcendence and the trace of divinity. It cannot be reduced to a historical context. In a talmudic reading such as “Temptation of Temptation,” even the revelation of the Torah merely makes one aware of a responsibility one already has. Accepting the Torah, before accepting a content, is accepting that something precedes this content. That is what the biblical expression of na'aseh ve-nishma means—“we will do and we will hear.” We do before we hear. “To hear a voice speaking to you is ipso facto to accept obligation toward the one speaking.”Footnote ² Levinas translates this as the very structure of subjectivity:

Fagenblat acknowledges that in making the relation to the other dependent on a textual tradition he is departing from what Levinas states, but he is convinced that this is how Levinas derived his insights, rather than through phenomenological descriptions alone, and that Levinas hid the textual sources of his thought because any reference to religious tradition would have disqualified his philosophy in the French academy of the time. “Denying the Jewish element of this thought was quite simply the price of admission into the arena of French philosophy” (preface, 12). We will come back to dispute this point. But for now, I think that Fagenblat is himself paying too high a price in trying to convince the contemporary philosophical world that Levinas was not making an absolute claim and therefore was not dogmatic. Levinas is making an absolute claim. To those who object to this claim because it posits a truth that can neither be established nor dislodged by reason, one cannot deny this. It is precisely what he is doing. If those philosophers choose to see this as dogmatic, perhaps it can be argued that Levinas is within a tradition of philosophy in which reason discovers something beyond itself. Levinas traces this tradition back to Plato's good beyond being. But more powerfully, is not the reaction of this group of philosophers precisely a confirmation of the problem Levinas indicated at the heart of Western philosophy? Everything has to be established by reason and has to become knowledge. This is a metaphysical position, just as much as his own. The whole point of Levinas's work was to redirect reason to an acknowledgment of a responsibility that precedes it. If these philosophers feel constrained by this, it just means, from a Levinassian point of view, that they remain Western philosophers.

Similarly, I have a strong objection to the way Fagenblat understands Levinas's universalizing of the Jewish tradition. I agree that Levinas is translating a Jewish insight into a universal language, making it available to everyone. But it would be a mistake to compare his project to that of St. Paul, as read by Fagenblat. For Levinas, Jewish particularism is not just one particularism among many, compatible with universalism but not privileged. It is privileged, even ethically privileged, since it has an ethical task in excess of other peoples'. In many of the Jewish writings, we find passages such as this, distinguishing Jewish particularism from other national differences:

Not only is Jewish particularity of a different sort from all other particularities. It is also essential for the defense of the persecuted human being against the homogenizing impulse of the modern State and the reason it incarnates. It is necessary for the world:

Even in the passage that Fagenblat quotes from “Judaism and Revolution,” in which “the heirs of Abraham are of all nations” if they follow in the tradition of receiving and feeding others,Footnote ⁷ and in which Israel is assimilated, as Fagenblat quotes, to a humanity who has received the law,Footnote ⁸ Levinas adds that it is the suffering of the particular people Israel that makes it more representative of suffering humanity than of the proletariat, a theme he repeats later.Footnote ⁹

I am not in the least denying that for Levinas Israel means not only the Jewish people but also a certain kind of behavior that can be found outside the Jewish people itself—anytime, in fact, that the act of responsibility is carried out. But in order for this universal meaning to exist, he maintains that a concrete Jewish people, with its long history and traditions, of necessity also has to exist. Otherwise, the universal would have no place to start:

All of these quotations are from the Jewish writings, and not from the philosophical writings, in which this privileging of the Jews does not appear. Is this because “to the Jews, Levinas will have come as a Jew, to those outside the law he would have come as one outside the law … ”? (chap. 2, 8). Does this mean that to Jews he emphasizes a privileged position and to Christians he makes the Jews as Jews ethically indifferent? But since in the philosophical works he never mentions Jews at all, it would seem that it is only in the Jewish writings that we have access to what he thinks about them. Fagenblat quotes from Jewish writings, both to demonstrate how Levinas makes Israel stand for the universal and, in a later chapter, how he thinks the political. If only for accuracy's sake, then, he must convey the emphasis on a privileged particularism all over the Jewish writings. One might conclude, as a result, that Levinas's originality as a philosopher lies not so much in addressing the Jewish message to Gentiles, as it does in arguing for the centrality of the particular to Gentiles for the very purpose of making room for the Jews as a people. In the same essay in which Levinas speaks of the difference between Jewish particularity and that of all others, he also states: “since our emancipation we have never formulated this beyond [Western universalism] in Western language.”Footnote ¹¹ He ends by saying that “Jewish peculiarity awaits its philosophy.”Footnote ¹²

I would like to hazard the thought that if Levinas did not wish to be called a Jewish philosopher, it is because his defense of particularism in his philosophical works does not amount to a philosophy of Judaism. For that, peoplehood and the law are necessary. But that is what stands outside the general categories that philosophy inevitably works with. The concrete life of the Jewish people cannot be universalized; the most that philosophy can do is point to the breakup of homogeneity in the confrontation with the particular. There is a gap between this and the defense of the Jewish people as such, and it is precisely this gap that exposes Jews to persecution.

Whatever the merit of this explanation, I do not think that those critics who argue that Levinas is privileging the Jewish tradition can be dismissed. He does do so, always in tension with a universal dimension. If this is enough to dismiss his writings as theology, one may well want to ask whether someone like Alain Badiou, who objects to Jewish particularism, does not do so from a secularized Christian theological position.

Finally, as to Fagenblat's claim that the source of Levinas's thought is not merely Jewish but Judeo-Christian, that “ethics is the dispersal of the Judeo-Christian God in modern social life,” this too seems very dubious to me. Of course, Levinas engaged with many Christian thinkers and Christian texts. He even occasionally uses the locution Judeo-Christian. But in reading the bulk of his essays, one is struck by the opposite movement in his thought—the effort to remove the hyphen and to claim Judaism's completely independent position vis-à-vis Christianity. “Our feeling for Christianity is wholehearted, but it remains one of friendship and fraternity. It cannot be paternal. We cannot recognize a child that is not ours.”Footnote ¹³ Levinas insists that the relation of friendship cannot be translated into the language of a common inheritance. “Judeo-Christian friendship: there is a phrase that embodies an absolutely proper use of this synthetic adjective. But on the level of doctrine, as regards the finality of the human, major divergences remain.”Footnote ¹⁴

This in no way contradicts Levinas's finding in Matthew 25 a teaching comparable to that of the Jewish tradition. In his talmudic reading “As Old as the World,” he states: “Let us be on our guard against facile and rhetorical antitheses. We are justice, they are charity; we love God, they love the world. From authentic spiritualities, no spiritual adventures are withheld.”Footnote ¹⁵ This means neither that all traditions are the same nor that all traditions are different, but merely that one can find echoes of similar teachings, but with nuances of meaning that open up abysses between the messages.Footnote ¹⁶ In the same interview in which he speaks about Matthew 25, Levinas also goes on to argue about the great difference in emphasis that the ethical teaching has received in Christianity than in the Jewish sources.

From Levinas's own perspective, Judaism is not in a privileged relationship with any other tradition in matters of content: “Israel is not defined by opposition to Christianity, any more than it is defined as anti-Buddhism, anti-Islam, or anti-Brahmanism. Instead, it consists in promoting understanding between all men who are tied to morality.”Footnote ¹⁷ He goes on to say that because Jews have been neighbors of both Muslims and Christians, the first effort at reaching this understanding is with them. The basis of this understanding is in resorting to the language of philosophy, which they all share. That is to say, Judaism seeks to express its particular concerns in the categories that others also use, thus creating a means for conversing, which in no way combines the traditions.

Fagenblat might argue that despite Levinas's own understanding of what he was doing, his philosophy is nonetheless Judeo-Christian. He does propose that “the partitioning of Judeo-Christianity is a partitioning that is today less stable than it has been since the congealment of Christian and Jewish identity in Late Antiquity” (conclusion, 33 n. 14), which might suggest that Levinas's own view still harks back to an older dispensation, which is increasingly disappearing. I must say the new consensus-in-the-making alarms me, and this not only for what it does for my reading of Levinas's philosophy. In today's political climate, is this not a way of making Jews and Judaism part of the West against the rest? I know this is far from Fagenblat's intention, but what else could it mean, if it refuses to hyphenate Judeo-Islam or even Judeo-Hinduism or Judeo-Lakota? Is reclaiming a hyphenated tradition really, as he claims, a way of demonstrating that the world is bigger than the walls groups build around their identity? Or is it simply a way of creating another set of walls? I don't think any tradition should be hyphenated with another, but if commonalities are to be found, why not indeed find the insistence on a separate peoplehood in Lakota religion or the centrality of law in Islam at least as compatible with Judaism as some Christian teachings? Does the new climate Fagenblat talks about, in which a common Judeo-Christian tradition is proclaimed, amount to more than the old supercessionism in a new disguise? Certainly Christian Zionism would lead us to conclude this.

Finally, I think that arguing for the Judeo-Christian basis of Levinas's thought also reduces the Jewish tradition to the Christian notion of religion, a set of ideational propositions—which Fagenblat himself argues against in one of his chapters. It becomes a teaching divorced from mitzvoth and from peoplehood, a kind of twenty-first-century version of the attempt to reconcile Jewish ideas with the ideas of the contemporary West.

In conclusion, I cannot help noticing an irony in Fagenblat's approach. His bold claims end up taming Levinas's thought. The latter's insistence that the responsibility to the Other precedes reason and thus cannot enter into a philosophical discourse, Fagenblat makes dependent on a reasoned discourse, that is textual interpretation, and thus subordinates to philosophy. Levinas's claim that Jewish particularity will always remain outside any kind of synthesis, Fagenblat hyphenates with Christianity, which at the very least invites such a synthesis. Yet, having said all this, I am still as seduced by Fagenblat's textual interpretations of Jewish texts, through a Levinassian lens as before. As with any good work, one eats the fruit and throws away the peel.