The Universal Mission of the Jewish People in the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas

Abstract

Emmanuel Levinas’s definition of ethics does not differentiate between Jews and non- Jews. However, in his Jewish writings, the Jewish people keep their particularity and do not disappear within ethnic universality. This paradoxical position has already been discussed. I would like to add the following points to the discussion:

a. Levinas’s Talmudic readings are not research, but interpretation; it is a reading geared towards linking the text to reality. The article interprets one of his Talmudic readings (‘Vieux comme le monde?’) dealing with this topic. Levinas’s reading, while discussing whether Judaism is necessary to the world and to the universal values contained in the Torah, also leads to the importance of the Halacha in keeping those values, in connection with actual behavior and with Jewish destiny, as a special heritage. Thus the complexity of Levinas’s approach to the question is uncovered.

b. In Levinas’s later writings, the self ‘substitutes’ for the other, although it remains separate and chosen, chosen for this substitution. There is a structural similarity between this point and the way Levinas envisions the relationship between the Jewish people and other peoples.

c. Levinas’s attitude towards the State of Israel and his expectation that in it a new balance between ethics and politics would be invented constitutes the second part of this article. Although his vision is utopian, it is connected to a specific reality and represents another aspect of the particularity of the Jewish people nowadays.

d. Levinas’s approach sets a challenge for the State of Israel and its self-definition as a Jewish State.