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ADDRESSING LEVINAS
Northwestern University Press
Copyright © 2005 Northwestern University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8101-2048-8
Chapter One Strange Fire Jill Robbins
Difficult Freedom, a collection of essays on Jewish topics that Emmanuel Levinas published in 1963 and in a second, expanded edition in 1976, is the first of Levinas's "nonphilosophical" or "confessional" works. He keeps these works separate from his philosophical works, as the difference between an exegetical adherence to a tradition on the one hand, and a phenomenological inquiry aware of its own presuppositions on the other. While arguably this distinction between the two kinds of writing is not absolute (it breaks down, in any case, after 1975 with the publication of essays eventually collected in Of God Who Comes to Mind), it is important to understand why Levinas takes the distinction seriously. As he would later formulate it in a 1986 interview with François Poirié:
A philosophical truth cannot be based on the authority of a verse. The verse must be phenomenologically justified. But the verse can allow for the search for a reason.
This assertion of the distinction between the philosophical and the non-philosophical does not go without acknowledging the possibility of a certain interplay between them. The search or "midrash" (a term which the French biblical scholar Renée Bloch translates as recherche), the starting point of which is the scriptural verse, may-indirectly, of course-"motivate" the ethical thought which, in turn, "must" receive phenomenological description. More generally, this might be a way in which Levinas's philosophical works can be said to be inflected by Judaism. The forty-seven essays collected in Difficult Freedom-which date from the late 1940's through the early 1960's, namely, from a time when Levinas was developing his mature ethical philosophy, represented by the 1961 Totality and Infinity-were originally published in French Jewish periodicals such as Evidences, Arche, Les nouveaux cahiers, and Information juive. In these post-war essays, which register the impact of the Nazi genocide of the Jews, Levinas addresses questions of Jewish education, assimilation, and identity. Suffice it to say that in this context, Levinas feels free to let the Jewish exegetical tradition engage him.
The epigraph to part 1 of Difficult Freedom is from the medieval French Jewish commentator Rashi. The opening moment of a book cannot be inconsequential. At the opening of his book, at the very opening of the opening, Levinas offers his reader an inscription, Rashi's comment on Leviticus 10:2: "Let them not enter the sanctuary drunk." This is a telling motto for an ethical philosopher who always tries to keep intoxication and the ludic at arm's length. I have evaluated the consequences of this for Levinas's philosophical work, especially as it concerns the relation between ethics and aesthetics, elsewhere. In this essay, I am concerned with the meaning of the epigraph for Difficult Freedom. There are no further direct references in that work to Rashi's comment, and although it would appear that Levinas endorses the interpretation of the scriptural text that it implicitly advances, he never does come right out and say so. What is irrefutable is this: the inscription with which Levinas opens his work calls upon us to ask, and gives us to think, what it means to read and interpret. To read the inscription is necessarily to read Levinas reading Rashi reading previous rabbinic commentators reading scripture, i.e., to read reading. This inscription also suggests something about the modality of interpretation, as a relation to a "word always already past," as Levinas put it in an interview, "in which transmission and renewal go hand in hand" (IR 275).
The Leviticus passage which provoked the interpretive comment belongs to one of the few extended narrative portions in the book of Leviticus, which is primarily comprised of legal material. According to Jacob Milgrom, while Exodus presents us with a static picture of the people receiving instructions for the building of the tabernacle, Leviticus gives us its living context. The focus of Leviticus is on the priests. Chapters 1-7 contain the laws about sacrifice and the distinctions between different kinds of offerings. The narrative portions, chapters 8-10, recount how Moses's brother Aaron, along with four of Aaron's sons, undergo consecration as priests, the inaugural service of the tabernacle, and what Milgrom calls "the tragic aftermath of the Inaugural Service," in which two of the sons, Nadab and Abihu, are killed. Chapters 11-16 detail the impurity system. The authorship of Leviticus is generally attributed to the P (Priestly) writer, who, in Genesis, favors genealogies and has a statistical bent. The author of the first, rather than the second, creation account in Genesis, P has a heaven-centered view. Within a hierarchy of biblical authors and styles, P is something of a bookkeeper.
The major theological effort of Leviticus, according to Milgrom, is a negation of paganism. "Impurity is eviscerated of its magic power" and "devitalized" (ABL 261). It is still dynamic-as in regard to sancta encroachment-but no longer demonic. Leviticus "severs impurity from the demonic and reinterprets it as a symbolic system" (ABL 47). The world of demons is abolished, leaving only one being with demonic powers, the human being. This demonization of man is a central contribution of the Priestly theology (ABL 43).
The context of the verse commented upon is especially important because of the ironic juxtapositions it contains. The last few verses of chapter 9, verses 22-24, recount a blessing and theophany-appearance of God-at the conclusion of the inaugural service of the tabernacle:
Then Aaron lifted his hands toward the people and blessed them; and he came down after sacrificing the purification offering, the burnt offering and the well-being offering. Moses and Aaron then entered the Tent of Meeting. When they came out, they blessed the people; and the Glory of the Lord appeared to all of the people. Fire came forth from before the Lord and consumed the burnt offering and the suet pieces on the altar. And the people saw, and shouted for joy, and fell on their faces. (Milgrom translation)
The appearance here of the divine glory (kabod) necessarily recalls the cloud-encased fire (by day only the cloud is visible; at night the fire can be seen) which guided the Israelites in the wilderness (ABL 588-89). It recalls a similar theophany on Mount Sinai: "Now Mount Sinai was completely enveloped in smoke, for the Lord had come down upon it in fire. Its smoke rose like the smoke from a kiln, and the whole mountain trembled violently" (Ex. 19:18). God is not a fire but like a fire (Num. 9:15; Ex. 24:17), and it is precisely not God who is visible but his fire (ABL 574-75). In Exodus 24:15-18, we read:
Then Moses went up the mountain and the cloud covered the mountain. The glory (kabod) of the Lord settled on Mount Sinai and the cloud covered it six days. On the seventh day he called to Moses from the midst of the cloud. Now the appearance of the glory (kabod) of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the people of Israel.
Here the kabod is expressly identified with the fire, and its destructive power is emphasized. A few verses earlier, Exodus 24:9-11, an even more direct theophany is described:
Then Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel went up and they saw the God of Israel, and under his feet as it were a pavement of sapphire stone, like the very heaven in purity. Yet he did not lay a hand on the leaders of the Israelites, but they beheld God, and they ate and drank.
This passage is not without its difficulties. Astonishing for its anthropomorphism and for what Brevard Childs calls "its bluntness" (e.g., "And they saw the God of Israel"), the text seems to acknowledge the unique and extraordinary nature of this meeting by observing that God "did not lay a hand on the leaders of the Israelites," "as might have been expected." In Exodus 24:11, Moses, Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and the elders even share a covenant meal, "a communion which," for Childs, "is in stark contrast to the burning terror of the theophany in Ch. 19." According to Milgrom, Exodus 24:9-11e comes from a tradition which suggests that Moses penetrated into the divine cloud to receive the Decalogue, which encounter made Moses's face radiant (ABL 136). It must be harmonized with the other places in scripture (even later in the same passage, Ex. 24:17) that assert that Moses saw only the kabod (fire-cloud) that envelops God (Num. 9:15) or that Moses hid in the cleft of the rock while the presence of the Lord passed him by (Ex. 33:22-23).
The analogy between the theophany at Sinai and that in the tabernacle is significant for several reasons. First, it establishes a certain equivalence: the tabernacle, suggests Milgrom, may be understood as a portable Sinai. As at Sinai, at the tabernacle theophany, the kabod and the fire are associated ("And the Glory of the Lord appeared to all the people. Fire came forth from before the Lord and consumed the burnt offering and the suet pieces on the altar," Lev. 9:23-24). As at Sinai, where God speaks to Moses who speaks to Aaron who, in turn, speaks to the people, revelation proceeds by way of a chain of communicators, sometimes with unpredictable results. In Leviticus 6:1, the typical structure is in place: "The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 'Command Aaron and his sons thus.'" When the kabod, as Milgrom details, separates itself from its nebulous encasement and consumes the sacrifices in the sight of all the people (ABL 575), this is a sign-depicted in drastic and miraculous terms-of divine approbation. No wonder the people "saw, shouted for joy, and fell on their faces," in the words of verse 24. Hence the kabod theophany in Leviticus 9:24 signifies a legitimation of Aaronic priesthood.
At this point we are ready to appreciate the ironic juxtaposition of 9:22-24 (blessing and theophany) and 10:1ff. (the tragic aftermath of the inaugural service). No sooner has the ritual order been inaugurated, than "systems failure"-as Everett Fox puts it-occurs. Divine approbation becomes wrath, joy becomes grief. Chapter 10 (verses 1-3) of Leviticus begins:
Now Aaron's sons, Nadab and Abihu, each took his pan, put coals in it, and laid incense on it; and they offered before the Lord unauthorized coals (es zerah), which he had not commanded them. And fire came forth from the Lord and consumed them; thus they died before the Lord. Then Moses said to Aaron, "This is what the Lord meant when he said: 'Through those near to me I shall sanctify myself and before all of the people I shall glorify myself.'" And Aaron was silent. (Milgrom translation)
The sin or error committed by Aaron's sons is unspecified, but its consequences are violent and irreversible. The question-what did Nadab and Abihu do?-has received a range of exegetical answers, to which I will return. However, one should note that the very fact that the biblical account does not specify the priestly error serves to direct attention to the inherent asymmetry in divine/human relations, what Kierkegaard called "the edification implied in the fact that man is always in the wrong before God." (Indeed, the ironic juxtaposition of Leviticus 9:22-24 and 10:1ff. recalls a previous ironic juxtaposition back at the Sinaitic theophany. While Exodus 31:18 recounts the giving of the tablets, the subsequent verse, Exodus 32:1ff. recounts the fashioning of the golden calf. One midrashic commentator finds that the two events were simultaneous: "While Israel were standing below engraving idols to provoke their Creator ... God sat on High engraving for them tablets which would give them life." Suffice it to say that perhaps this simultaneity of donation and betrayal is constitutive.) Milgrom argues that "against the backdrop of the wilderness narratives, the story of Nadab and Abihu is the Priestly counterpart to the episode of the golden calf" (ABL 632); that is, this story, too, points to man's inherent inability to be righteous.
But let not these edifying reflections distract us from what is disturbing and recalcitrant in the episode. David Damrosch notes that it is shocking not only in its timing but in the stature of the victims. God's sudden wrath, the violence of the episode, the family tragedy unfolding-these are the elements that make a reading encounter with the Hebrew Bible deeply strange and unfamiliar, rendering it less of a complacent and customary possession, as Franz Rosenzweig noted in a letter written to Gertrud Oppenheim in June 1922:
The people who wrote the Bible apparently thought about God in a similar manner as did Kafka. I have never read a book that so much reminded me of the Bible as his novel The Castle. Reading it also can certainly not be called a pleasure.
Is it Kafka who reminds us of the Bible or the Bible which reminds us of Kafka? The irreducible similarity between the Bible and Kafka imposes itself upon Rosenzweig when he is confronted with the biblical authors' style in the full radicality of the original Hebrew-with its distinctive syntax and sound-patterning. Arguably, this similarity between the Bible and Kafka imposes itself on all modern readers. Harold Bloom refers to J, the uncanny Yahwistic writer (in distinction from P, the Priestly author), as the legitimate ancestor of Kafka's K., and argues that a Kafkan facticity governs our awareness of the biblical tradition. In the case of the Nadab and Abihu episode, what seems Kafkan is not simply the fact that we begin with a punishment in search of a crime, which may lead, as will be seen, to an infinite proliferation of deadlocked interpretations. It is the uneasy sense that, as in Kafka, guilt is never to be doubted; "guilt," as Henry Sussman puts it, "is an ineluctable family legacy."
The matter-of-fact way in which commentators countenance the interpretive possibility (attributed to Rashbam and Hazzequni [quoted in ABL 599]) "that the same divine fire that consumed the sacrifices also struck down Nadab and Abihu in its path" may be disconcerting. Everett Fox calls the fire that destroys Nadab and Abihu "an ironic echo of the positive divine fire that came down and completed the sanctifying of the priesthood." Searching out the scriptural cross-references for divine fire does little to allay this essential ambiguity. In The Legends of the Jews, Louis Ginzberg reports:
Upon twelve occasions did God send a Divine fire upon earth, six times as a token of honor and distinction, but as many times as a punishment. To the first class belong the fire at the consecration of the tabernacle, at the offering of Gideon as at that of Manoah and of David; at the dedication of Solomon's Temple, and at the offering of Elijah upon Mount Carmel. The six fatal fires are the following: the fire that consumed Nadab and Abihu; that which wrought havoc among the murmuring and complaining multitude; the fire that consumed the company of Korah; the fire that destroyed Job's sheep, and the two fires that burned the first and the second troops which Ahaziah sent against Elijah.
Following out any of these local references in which, comparably, God's fire is a token of honor or punishment, may well be of interest. Yet there is something folkloristic about the "six and six" patterning, as if the actual number is less important than the fact that they cancel each other out. This "six of one, half a dozen of the other" quality discourages interpretive assurance. Another rabbinic discussion, from Leviticus Rabbah 11.7, no doubt has the impending tragedy in mind when it comments on scripture's account of the beginning of the day of the inaugural service, Leviticus 9:1, "And it came to pass on the eighth day that Moses called Aaron and his sons and the elders of Israel and he said unto Aaron, etc.":
R. Tanhuma in the name of R. Hiyya said, as also R. Berekiah in the name of R. Eleazar of Modin: The following homiletical interpretation was brought back with us from the Exile. Wherever the words wayyehi ["and it came to pass"] are used [in scripture], there is misfortune [related].
(Continues...)
Excerpted from ADDRESSING LEVINAS
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