The mental disorders that seize travelers or pilgrims upon contact with the Holy City are sometimes designated by the name “Jerusalem syndrome.” It might be useful to extend the notion to those whom the encounter with the Jewish question drives to delirium. The intellectual life of recent years has not been sparing of them.
There are works that are symptoms. Works that interest us less for their intrinsic quality than for the reactions they provoke or the aura that surrounds them, for what they reveal of contemporary passions. J.-C. Milner’s book on Les Penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique (The Criminal Inclinations of Democratic Europe) says more about contemporary Jewish anxieties than many a reasoned treatise; Alain Badiou’s incendiary tract Portées du mot “juif” (Uses of the Word “Jew”) exuded a suspect fixation on Zionism, become the “bad object” of the radical intelligentsia1; celebrated by the liberal establishment and brandished as a bible by the anti-Zionist battalions, Shlomo Sand’s Comment le peuple juif fut inventé (The Invention of the Jewish People) is of interest less for its contribution to history than as a barometer of an obsessive zeal.
Benny Lévy’s last texts2 fall into this category of symptom-books. In a few years the author passed from Maoism to Jewish fundamentalism. One might think he hoped to find meaning and enjoyment only in the atmosphere of the absolute: first in the frenzied race toward the Great Day, then in the “thought of Return.” His spectacular trajectory has enjoyed, in certain Jewish circles, an indulgence that neither his talent nor the friendship he inspired suffices to account for. The prodigal son, returned from his revolutionary intoxications, was going back to the faith of his Fathers: an edifying and gratifying happy end in which eternal truth triumphed over the impostures of the age. And what if it were too simple?
Having no scores to settle with a man prematurely deceased and whom I never knew, I have no other ambition than to follow and to discuss an argument that continues to exert, including on secular intellectuals, a certain force of intimidation. No disrespect here, but the will to set out, in so many words, the reasons for a grievance.
Democratic melancholy and divine right
Benny Lévy’s discourse is a discourse of rupture, less with the revolutionary epiphenomenon than with Western culture in general. The “thought of Return” is the itinerary from Athens to Jerusalem. The antithesis of Athens and Jerusalem underlies two regimes of speech: “Philosophy begins when one negotiates arguments, […] without there being a moment of pure obedience to a word, to the authority of the origin”; conversely, “the word of the origin in Israel is called prophetic speech, […] words of fire that were spoken through the greatest of prophets, Moses, then by all the prophets until prophecy ceases; and it ceases precisely at the moment when Greece seizes hold of the world” (Lli, 39). Secularism is supposedly invented in this “new speech cut off from the origin,” unlike the speech of Israel which, “knotted to its origin” (ibid., 40), would be constitutively foreign to it.
It is not on the definition — classical, moreover — of these paradigms that one will quibble with Benny Lévy. To anyone who might object that Judaism too developed as “negotiation,” as arbitration between the letter of the Law and the “demands of the hour,” one will reply that it rests nonetheless, as a “revealed” religion, on a non-negotiable bedrock — non-negotiable, if not as to its extent — against which no rational objection has any hold, because it is identified with the divine will.
The most interesting thing is the turn the discussion takes with Alain Finkielkraut. Starting from this antithesis, Benny Lévy infers from it the irremediable incompatibility between Athens and Jerusalem. On the one hand, because in his eyes it is impossible to define a Jewish genealogy of secularism: “In the basic definition of the son of Abraham that the Jew is, there can be no question of integrating anything of what played out in Europe, and most particularly in France, under the term secularism.” (Lli, 84). On the other hand, because, for its part, Greek thought is said to have broken, since Aristotle, with the only one of its intuitions that might have been able to dialogue with Jewish thought. Plato is said to have “tried to retain something of the word of the origin while entering into the logos, but when one arrives at Aristotle, […] it’s over, the logos can seize hold of the world” (ibid., 39). It is this failure to say the One, to remain anchored to an originary word, that consecrates the superiority of the Jewish experience. Let us pass quickly over the convergence of the sworn enemies Lévy and Badiou, who play Plato against Aristotle: beyond their antagonism, the two doctrinaires have never finished with the heaven of Ideas. We shall retain above all that what the fundamentalist prizes in Platonism is not the pathways of the logos but the anchorings in the muthos, not reason but myth, and the remnants of an originary narrative whose revelatory energy is said to exhaust itself, rather than fulfill itself, in the adventures of the dialectic.
In seeming to deplore the disaffection of the originary word in Greek philosophy, does Benny Lévy contradict himself? A consistent absolutist cannot recognize the absolutism of others, for truth does not divide: when it is Greek, an originary voice can only be a misleading one. By an eloquent paradox, Benny Lévy seems to consider that the word of the “false” god whose interpreter Socrates wished to be is still worth more than the deliberative thought that succeeded it, insofar as it disposes the human mind to obey. His entire terminal work confirms, alas, that his cardinal value is not truth but order, not the search for the true but allegiance to a master.
What follows in his analyses is a compendium of conservative thought. The “political destiny of the logos” (Lli, 21) leads, after the “murder of the Shepherd,” to the reign of the individual-king and to the omnipotence of “Law” (in the juridical sense). Which is nothing other than the product of a “decline” (ibid., 42), insofar as all (civil) “Law” prospers on the corpse of the (religious) “Law.” Democratic modernity is said to complete this defeat of the Law, since “opinion” and good pleasure are substituted in it for the thought of the just: whereby we find again what Plato, in The Republic, described through the allegory of the “Great Beast.”
At times the argument remains vague. When Benny Lévy asserts that the “problem the Westerner has not resolved [is] to maintain the religious dimension without which there is no rule of law,” what is one to understand by “the religious dimension”? If it is a matter of the sacredness of certain values, one scarcely sees any Western society — even the most overtly de-Christianized — that would be devoid of it. If it is a matter of the effective inscription of a “law of God” within political institutions, how can one forget that all existing rule-of-law States had, on the contrary, to wrest “human rights” through hard struggle from the grip of the churches? As for the regimes, mostly Islamic, that have not consummated their independence from the “religious dimension,” their contribution to the history of the rule of law is not established. Applied to the Israeli situation, these theses leave one perplexed: can one imagine what would become of civic rights if the halakhic norms were applied? How can one refuse to see that, in Israel, human right is far better defended by the Supreme Court than by the “men in black”?
It is, moreover, very difficult to determine Benny Lévy’s exact relation to politics. Chastened by his past errancies, he refrains from any too marked political commitment. But his contradictions in his relation to the State of Israel are the very ones of the religious tendency to which he is closest (that of the haredim). On the one hand, a reservation about the Zionist enterprise, a badly born work because secular in essence: settled in Jerusalem to live his Judaism there in the most favorable conditions, Benny Lévy never claimed Israeli nationality; persuaded that a Zionism without the Torah makes little sense, he claims to “wrest the proper name of Israel from all the little ideological figures that have brought us to the present impasse. Enough of the false solutions, political, military, semi-political, semi-military” (Lli 107). A disciple in this of Rosenzweig, he defends the vocation of a “people of priests” that inscribes itself neither “in the natural order” (Lli 107) nor in the historical order. The contradiction comes from the impossibility in which he finds himself of endorsing the separation of the religious and the political, a “gesture that is integrally christological” (Lli 40). Thus it is that, invited to explain why he cannot, despite everything, take a complete lack of interest in the State, he explains: “we are engaged in a responsibility with respect to the name of Israel, borrowed by the State […]. In a State that has a hold on the signifier of Israel, everything that can be done to avoid the profanation of this name must be done — I am thinking of course of Shabbat” (ibid., 45, emphasis ours, id. 74).
In the eyes of a secular person, inconsequence vies here with frivolity. As a good Orthodox Jew, Benny Lévy considers that the whole Torah rests on Shabbat, which is his right. But if it is a question of the relations between politics and religion, one cannot but note the destitution of the political vision — is Israel not confronted with more pressing challenges? — as of the religious conception: is the “name of Israel” not profaned today by something other than the circulation of buses? Do the human-rights advocacy associations not do more for the ethical honor of the “signifier of Israel” than certain “guardians of Shabbat” who stoke hatred? It is true that, apolitical though he is, Benny Lévy prefers to reserve his arrows for those who demonstrate “in a completely incongruous manner” for a negotiation with the Palestinians, still clinging to “secular solutions” (Lli, p. 74).
As for the rest of the world… By the admission of his own friend Bernard-Henri Lévy, the former internationalist militant had every difficulty understanding that a Jew should commit himself to foreign causes, scour the world in search of justice, when it sufficed to bend over the pages of the Talmud to attain the Universal3.
At this point of deafness, autarky verges on autism.
One generally emerges from ambiguity only to one’s detriment. As soon as he becomes more precise, Benny Lévy recovers his black-and-white thinking, fond of thunderous and peremptory alternatives; the foundation of democracy is necessarily theological, because “one must make a pact with God […] or in any case with some non-human authority, in order to fulfill the promises of democracy, which imply the all. If it is not God, it will be ‘Nothing’” (Lli, 44). Is the space of the political not precisely the refusal of this senseless alternative between the reign of God and the empire of “nothing,” to which Benny Lévy (along with the Maharal of Prague) reduces the heritage “of Edom” (Lli, 42) — that is to say “Rome,” or Europe? What is there still to discuss with one who understands nothing of the possibility of a human order not pledged to an absolute? Are we bound to think that all European thought of the political has gone bankrupt on the pretext that the utopias met the bloody fate we know? Must one consider as vain all shared search for a habitable world from the moment it no longer carries the promise of a collective ecstasy? Is it of politics in general, or of its messianic and/or totalitarian derivations, that one must mourn?
At this stage an unease is about to arise upon reading his dialogue with A. Finkielkraut. The latter, in his defense of a demanding and, to put it plainly, slightly Calvinist conception of secularism, involuntarily enters onto his interlocutor’s terrain. For the antithesis between “law” and “right,” he substitutes that of “right” and “human rights” (Lli, 52), in order to worry about their consumerist and subjectivist perversion. Benny Lévy perceives that A. Finkielkraut’s plea stems more from nostalgia for an old world than from adherence to the slope of a modernity that ceaselessly draws away from it — so much so that A. Finkielkraut’s democratic disenchantment chimes more than once with Benny Lévy’s theological re-enchantment4. Critical though he is, Finkielkraut nonetheless intends to stay within the perimeter of democratic questioning; in the fundamentalist logic, by contrast, there can be no “human rights” in the strict sense, and humanism designates the Babelian temptation to “rival in sovereignty with the Master of the world” (Lli, 83). So much so that, when A. Finkielkraut, conciliatory, ventures: “we have the same adversary, Benny and I — he, the man of return; I, and my pious idea of secularism” (ibid., 49), the misunderstanding rests on a confusion between the internal critique of democracy and contempt for democracy as such, as the immanent foundation of human legislation.
The cause of the Chosen People
“I do not feel essentially accountable for the future of Western societies, I feel accountable for the future of the Jew as such, of Israel as such!” (Lli, 138) Benny Lévy’s optic seems constantly skewed by an outrageously ethnocentric approach. This is palpable when, apropos of the law on the veil, to which he is opposed, he notes that its most deplorable consequence is to have complicated the lives of Jewish pupils who wear the kippa. But this Judeocentrism above all guides his unappealable condemnation of emancipation. Its only virtue, he assures us, ought to have been to ensure for the Jews the freedom and security necessary “to study in peace”; but here, barely out of the ghetto, the new Frenchmen are said to have flung themselves upon “foreign” women, as in the time of Ezra (Lli, 35)! Exit Franco-Judaism, which has against it the near-unanimity of Orthodox Judaism, accusing it of having sold off the religious heritage. One must reread, in this regard, the damning satire of “the Israelite,” born with the idea that “the world was ending and the prophetic lessons were being fulfilled” (EJ, 22) — crowned by this umpteenth and odious attack on Crémieux in the guise of the “Sartrean swine” (EJ 22).
This Judeocentrism is certainly not stupidly tribal — but does one gain by the exchange in giving it a metaphysical depth? The case against assimilation starts, to be sure, from a defensible position, which consists in refusing the European confiscation of universality; but the author of Être juif (Being Jewish) merely inverts the “Catholic” proposition, claiming for Judaism alone the privilege of a full humanity: “It is Israel that is not humanity in extension but the intensive form, the concentrate of what this form […] of Adam is. It is therefore ridiculous to say: ‘I am becoming a French Jew,’ ‘I am opening myself to the universal.’ This ridiculousness killed us for two centuries. […] The universal is the Jew.” (Lli, 85) To invoke the shade of Lévi-Strauss, that “Jew of the Century,” would assuredly be to no effect. And one finds oneself rejoicing that this theological exclusivism, unlike that of the madmen of Allah, is devoid of practical consequence and confined within the walls of a Talmudic school. There remain formulas, distressing in their sectarianism, some of which — “there is no man, but a Jew and a pagan” (EJ, 48) — ring like something out of Joseph de Maistre.
This, moreover, is the whole stake of the critique of Levinas’s humanism: it is a matter, for Benny Lévy, of returning to the schism that the Election of Israel instituted at the heart of humanity, an “incredible fracture” (Lli, 155) that the over-polished author of Totalité et infini (Totality and Infinity) is said to have tended to attenuate. Already constrained to bend Judaism to the philosophical idiom and to an “acephalous” language, “exceptionally rebellious” to the thought of Return (Lli, 148), Levinas is said to have sometimes sacrificed the specific meaning of Election on the altar of a consensual universalization. He is thus said to have debased the meaning of the “Noachide laws” by reducing them to the expression of a natural right (Lli, 42-43) that does not imply recognition of the God of Israel (EJ, 53). As for the distinction between Israel and the Nations, it is said to have been spirited away by the conversion of the “Jew” into an allegory of the human. Levinas, “effacing from his philosophical works the properly Sinaitic references” (EJ, 41), maintaining the confusion between a phenomenology of man “riveted to existence” and that of the Jew “riveted to Judaism” (ibid., 42), is said to have lost “the positive of Jewish facticity: election” (ibid., 43).
What is happening in this reckoning with Levinas, and what, in the eyes of a critical mind, does not pass muster?
Let us grant that Benny Lévy has the merit — no doubt because he no longer feels bound by the obligations of the “politically correct” — of putting his finger on a real question by pointing out, in his former master, the signs of an embarrassment in the articulation between the singular of Israel and the summons of the universal, a difficulty often evaded by his readers, as if the identification between “Jew” and “man” and the convergence between the teachings of the halakha and the lessons of ethics went without saying.
From this observation, however, several positions were possible. The first would have consisted in paying tribute to Levinas for having striven, after the example of great masters of the past (Hillel, the Meiri, Maimonides, E. Benamozegh, H. Cohen, A. Heschel), to reduce the fracture between Jewish commandments and universal morality. The second would have consisted in drawing on this difficulty to support, if not an aggiornamento, at least a documented critique of an Orthodox corpus long occupied in distinguishing between “others” at the risk of widening the fracture between Israel and humanity: the Levinasian version of “election for the other” runs up against very exclusivist interpretations, some of which continue to rage. Benny Lévy, for his part, merely corrects Levinas in the name of an ultra-Orthodox understanding of the Election of Israel, assumed without the shadow of a reservation.
It will be said, to be sure, that it is not for unbelievers to settle theological quarrels, and one will be right. But since theological propositions are by definition removed from rational examination, the preference for one or the other always proceeds from an axiological decision or an ideological structure. Levinas’s choice was that of dialogue, at all costs; Benny Lévy’s choice is that of secession, under the banner of a proud autarky.
Tora! Tora! Tora! or the Pearl Harbor of culture
Intellectual autarky first of all. Jewish being being decreed simple, Judaism will be written, if possible, in a single language. Levinas was polyglot; Benny Lévy claims to be incapable of “having two languages at the same time” (Lli 116). This monolingualism says it all. The man of a single language is also — whatever Alain Finkielkraut may say, out of friendship perhaps — “the man of a single book.”
The objection is familiar: Benny Lévy had read a great deal and continued to teach philosophy. Does his entire work not bear witness to a dialogue with the great thinkers of the West? An objection in trompe-l’œil. His philosophical formation corresponds to the first part of his life, that before the “Return,” and which he himself says was a “waste of time” (what the religious designate by the term bitul Torah)5. Nor is he afraid to assert that he would be the last to encourage a Jew to pass through the stage of secular culture: the Torah dispenses with external references, as the example of great masters attests (Lli, 58). The only problem for him was to put this “Greek” thought he had acquired in the service of his new convictions; it fell to him to use the weapons of philosophical thought in order to turn them against itself for apologetic ends, to push this thought to its last entrenchments, to show at what moment one is obliged to leave it. Definitively. “I am sometimes asked the question: why do you continue to go through these texts now that you have the Jewish texts? Well, because these texts still have something to say […] Political philosophy, if you like, is the statement […], it is the statement of an aporia: the political, to be great […] must be the shepherd of men. […] and cannot be” (Lli, 131). To show that what Western thought has that is best leads to an impasse from which only religious Revelation can extricate it: an old refrain that, moreover, transposes what, for centuries, Christianity taught about Judaism and about the relation between the Law and Faith… Philosophy could therefore, at best, only bear witness to its own deficiency.
As for literature, even the highest, it is not worth two minutes’ attention, to the great chagrin of Alain Finkielkraut. “The Good Lord created a Jew to bear witness to the true, that is to say to study” (Lli, 78), not to read or write novels. So much for secular culture — and no exception for “Jewish culture,” a notion devoid of meaning or justification in Benny Lévy’s eyes. One is free, obviously, to call this exclusively prosecutorial instruction an “extraordinary open-mindedness”…
The “waste of time” is not the only thing at issue. Benny Lévy sees in books the “danger” of an “idolatrous arrest” (ibid., 163): they “must inscribe themselves in the wake of the Book so as not to be an idolatrous diversion” (ibid.); books are said to be a trap of images, unlike the Book which “enjoins; these are words of fire. A necessity of existence is revealed at Sinai. Intelligible necessities are not enough. […] This is the difference between culture and truth, the revealing of Sinai. Culture can be an obstacle to understanding, to the sight of the voices.” (ibid., 70)
These questions about the value of literature, the relations between the speculative and the prescriptive, aesthetic enjoyment and ethical commitment, are not without interest; the irony is that they have haunted literature from the very beginning. What are books if they are only books, only signs, if they do not commit one’s whole life? This was the founding interrogation of the first great modern novel, Don Quixote. But Benny Lévy, in the name of the “words of fire” of the Bible, draws nearer not to the knight-errant than to the priest burning his library to save him from perdition. This biblioclasm6, symbolic though it remains, gives one pause; what would be said if a Muslim intellectual held more or less this language? The unease keeps growing before this oppressing (for want of being able to be oppressive) Judaism, which relegates to idolatry nearly the totality of human culture. As for the very possibility that the “Law” might in its turn become the object of an “idolatrous arrest,” it does not even seem to have crossed Benny Lévy’s mind.
Let us add that it does not suffice to say that the Book “enjoins” in order to demonstrate its prevalence over literary lures. For a mind that is even slightly critical, the question is to know what it enjoins me to do, by what legitimacy and at what price. “Truth” does not proceed from its prescriptive character — in which case all sacred books would be true; on the contrary, it is by virtue of its injunctive character that I am entitled to submit its truth to a historical and scientific inquiry. Now the man of Return, the baal teshuva, in the name of a literal understanding of “We will do and we will hear” (Ex., XXIV, 7), forbids himself this spirit of examination that enjoins us (for once!) to “dare to know” (sapere aude). Biblical criticism is a heresy whose deplorable inventor was Spinoza, who must be “forgotten” (Lli, 16) (and whose name had best not be uttered!).
“Torat Emeth”: “Torah of truth” is to be understood in the most literal sense of the term:
“Jewish ‘identity,’ if one wants that word […], was given once and for all at the foot of a little mountain called Sinai, where six hundred thousand Hebrews, physically present with their bodies, and all the Jews of all generations to come, were present! That is all. There is no need for a Jewish solution to a question that does not exist. […]” (Lli, 161) Such is the refrain: “Everything was given at Sinai. At Sinai, we saw voices7 — words, made explicit by a master, Moses. Fundamentally, there is no solution to be sought, because there is no question” (ibid., 67; our emphasis)8.
Let any Orthodox rabbi be free to profess this version of Revelation for the very young — after all, credo quia absurdum passes for a possible definition of faith, and there would be no merit in believing what reason can prove. But the question here is to know whether the man who subscribes to such a catechism can still be described as an intellectual. Whether one can discuss with one who posits that fundamentally there is neither question (“The Jewish question is fine for Herzl,” Lli, 26) nor problem (“to return, without problem, ‘to the faith of our fathers,’” ibid., 17), brushes aside with a disdainful wave of the hand all university research, and is content to express, in barely re-elaborated concepts, a charcoal-burner’s blind faith.
This motion of distrust toward secular, even scientific, culture is neither new nor isolated in Orthodox Judaism, and has not prevented the latter from bearing fine fruit. Benny Lévy’s case remains different. Educated far from any religious tradition, a latecomer to piety, he offers the devastating example of an intellectual who, gnawed by bad conscience, settles his scores with a thought from which he expected too much, and which he burns only for having adored it too much.
The “real of the Jew,” or the search for the J-spot
To recover the “simplicity” of Jewish being. Is this a program? Judaism according to Benny Lévy is an effort to free oneself from all that is not Jewish within oneself; “the Jew always subtracts himself, withdraws: struggling with the world that is ending, he must set aside from himself what is non-Jewish in order to produce precisely the remainder, the Jewish one” (EJ, 29). Can one say how spiritually disastrous and philosophically scabrous this project of expelling the foreigner within is? It makes the “thought of Return” a deadly experience, by which the Jewish subject finds himself anxiously tracking down what comes to him from elsewhere, ceaselessly decontaminating himself. All in the name of the myth of an “authentic” and pure Judaism, transmitted intact by the masters from generation to generation, before the Reform, emancipation, and the so-called “science of Judaism” took it upon themselves to corrupt it. Historically, this vision does not hold up, but who cares here about history? History is a school of complexity; it teaches the twists and detours of an idea that enriches or debases itself in contact with the real, that transforms itself or recants over the course of human experience; it compels one to shatter the essentialist illusion in order to learn to relativize, if not one’s beliefs, then at least the present form of their expression.
Since Judaism was given once and for all, Jewish being will be “immobile” (EJ, 15): “Never does any movement, any intellectual peripeteia in the age, affect the Jew’s relation to ‘Revelation.’” (ibid.) Of which “Jew” is it here a question? The Jew as he is, or the Jew as he ought to be? The confusion is cleverly maintained: insofar as “the irremissibility of Jewish being” is postulated, the empirical variants change nothing in the status of Israel sub specie aeternitatis.
One term expresses this equivocation. Benny Lévy speaks constantly of the “real of the Jew”: “What is the real of the Jew? The letter, the knowledge of the Torah. How is the annulment of the real expressed? The letters fly off, the Tablets shatter. Nothing more. The miracle of the Jew lies in this simplicity.” (Lli, 24) Benny Lévy has the right to define the essence of Judaism as he understands it; but to designate it as the “real of the Jew” is to engage in a conceptual show of force by confounding the “real” and the normative, the descriptive and the prescriptive: at the close of this capture of the “real,” the secular Jew feels not only judged but annihilated. All the non-Orthodox forms of Jewish life or consciousness, instead of being seen as the ramifications of a centuries-old history, are nothing but narratives of alienation9.
A return to simplicity, or a regression toward simplism?
What is one to understand in this synonymy of the Torah and Science (EJ, 28, ff.), and in the postulate that “Sinai has […] clearly imposed itself as the only paradigm possible for all modern political thought […] Such should be the very simplicity of Jewish independence: why have Sinai stolen from us in the form of a symbolic social pact — of the general will — why not stick to the fact of Sinai itself?” (ibid., 43) Benny Lévy’s self-evidences are stated with an aplomb that chills the blood. Are we bound to take him at his word, to subscribe to this series of apodictic propositions — in the manner in which, forty years earlier, one was expected to prostrate oneself before the Little Red Book?
Fundamentalism in a Mao collar
Troubling, in Benny Lévy, is this alliance of acuity and infantilism, of depth and immaturity; from Revolution to Revelation, the former leader of the Gauche Prolétarienne (Proletarian Left) will never have found the right measure in his relation to the other nor in his relation to truth.
“From Mao to Moses”: although BHL described as a “platitude”10 the formula by which his trajectory is summarized, one cannot but observe that the party concerned does not himself reject it, contenting himself with correcting it: “‘From Mao to Moses,’ people exclaim, forgetting that to be exact one must say from Moses to Mao, from Mao to Moses, that is to say from Moses to Moses by way of Mao.” (EJ, 14).
Let us be more precise: it is not a matter of claiming that Benny Lévy remained a Maoist — which would be absurd — but that the structure of thought that made possible his role in the Gauche Prolétarienne was maintained, beyond the ideological about-face, in his vision of Judaism. Benny Lévy does not even take the trouble to mask this continuity between the two cultural revolutions: “I have always regarded culture as my most intimate enemy. I wanted to be a normalien and I was, but it was in order to relaunch immediately the great program of cultural revolution, that is to say in order to uproot culture. Why was I a Maoist? Because in Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s sixteen-point decision, he proposed to uproot the concept of culture. Nihilism, to be sure. But when I wanted to tear myself away from this nihilism, I could no longer do anything but return to the Book.” (Lli, 58)
One never chooses one’s elective myths by chance. In the abundant lode of Tradition, those that have Benny Lévy’s favor betray the persistence of a mental structure in which one finds the fundamentals of revolutionary radicalism: violence and clean slate, discipline and submission, the passion for the One.
So it is with that figure of Abraham as “breaker of idols” who haunts his discourse like an ego ideal. It is here from Mao to Abraham that one ought to speak, by his own admission: “this way of breaking the surrounding culture in order to try to bring forth ‘the deepest part of man’ — Mao Tse-tung’s expression — […], this radicalism must have, intellectually […], helped me approach the true figure of the breaker of idols, I mean Abraham.” (Lli, 114). And he returns to the charge: “to seek the true is to break the idol! There is no other way to seek the true than Abraham [sic]” (Lli, 164).
This image, inherited moreover not from the Bible but from midrashic traditions11, corresponds to an age of the sublime that it is delicate to assume today without precaution or nuance — or should one hail the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban in 2001? An unfair trial? One would search in vain, in any case, for the slightest antidote to fanaticism in the work of Benny Lévy, who, with the ardor of Racine’s Eliacin declaring to Athaliah, “He alone is God, Madame, and yours is nothing,” hurls at A. Finkielkraut:
“The thought of Israel, the one that began with Abraham’s act of breaking idols, is wholly made of this iconoclastic activity through culture. One must know what Abraham is! Abraham had the whole world on the other shore, and the whole world was the highest culture there could be! He had to break, to break the idols one after another.” (Lli, 166. Our emphasis.)
The Abraham who fascinates Benny Lévy — to the point of giving his evocation exalted accents — is not the one who opens his house to the stranger or negotiates with God the rescue of the righteous of Sodom, but the one who brings forth truth through violence. One might think Benny Lévy will only ever have asked himself one and the same question: how to destroy? How to find oneself at last alone, face-to-face with “the True”? Far from being that “passer-on” with whom he has sometimes been flatteringly identified, Benny Lévy dreamed of himself as a breaker.
This violence betrays itself at times in a slip of the tongue: “The Nefesh ha-Hayim12 gives the example of an excrement-covered baby, who does not know that he is excrement-covered; his mother removes the diapers and puts him into boiling water; he begins to scream, he does not know why he is being hurt. We are exactly that child.” (ibid., 90). We knew that God hated the lukewarm, but perhaps not to the point of plunging a baby into “boiling” water! If one adds that the slip occurs in the course of a (highly dubious) reflection on the theological meaning of the Genocide, aiming — against Fackenheim — to lend renewed credence to the hypothesis of a link between “fault” and “suffering,” this penitential vision of a God who scalds children in order to purify them has something properly chilling about it, if I may put it that way. “Levinas was respectful and I was violent” (Lli, p. 115), Benny Lévy confides, with honesty. It is fortunate for the world that this violence ended up finding a purely intellectual outlet within the walls of a yeshiva.
But there is in Benny Lévy a passion stronger still than the iconoclastic passion: that of obedience. Throughout his discourse, a leitmotif: he was crooked, he had to straighten himself out. Bad conscience is everywhere: the guilt of having been that “Pierre Victor” who remained silent before the antisemitic outburst of an Arab worker13; the “burning shame” of having been the West’s “performing monkey,” an “ignoramus” handed over to bad masters (EJ, 10). This is why “it is time to pay; measure for measure” (EJ, 10). What exactly is to be “paid”? Not so much having lent his authority to Mao’s criminal undertakings as having been “a Jew of the Century” (EJ, 1014). The clerisy of the Jew of the Century is expiated through the unconditioned obedience of the Jew of the rule: “A young person who is beginning to study the Torah — I will certainly not propose my trajectory […] because my trajectory is completely crooked. Why would you want me to make a straight fellow into a crooked one? I, for my part, try to straighten myself out, but because I was crooked” (Lli, 70). Benny Lévy transposes into the religious domain the imaginary of a reform school. The divine rod in place of discipline?
Exaggeration? An imputing of motives? “I committed myself to politics as one commits oneself to the absolute […] The only thing that interested me, fundamentally, was omnipotence, the omnipotence of the absolute!” (Lli, 128). This fascination with the absolute is maintained in his return to Judaism, in the unconditioned obedience to the one Benny Lévy likes to call “the master of the Worlds.” If the founding myth of monotheism was the midrash of the destruction of idols, the founding myth of the Election is the well-known one that recounts that God, raising Mount Sinai above the Hebrews, threatened to annihilate them if they refused the yoke of the Torah (Gemara Shabbat 88). The fable, which might for example serve as an antidote to national pride (after all, what merit is there in accepting the Covenant under pain of death?), becomes, in Benny Lévy, taking up the lesson of the Maharal of Prague, the testimony of the “constraint of the pre-originary” (EJ, 112). Difficult freedom, decidedly.
*
“No political vision of the world! No history! No dialectic! Everything is there from the beginning. The gemara adds: today, all the ends are exhausted!
The Return alone suffices.” (EJ, 115)
Such are Benny Lévy’s last words.
The “return alone suffices,” because it is a return to “simplicity.” Benny Lévy’s simplified world is the one that divides into Jews and non-Jews, between Israel and the Nations, between the Torah and all secular knowledge. It is the one that, within Israel itself, distinguishes between the “real” Jew and his simulacra: a single way of being Jewish — and that is to be religious; a single way of being religious, and that is to be ultra-Orthodox. Benny Lévy’s world of Return is the one in which doubt has no more place than pluralism, in which Israel, a people of priests outside nature and time, preserves itself from the deleterious contaminations of the Age and looks with distrust upon all that cannot claim Sinaitic credentials. A cloistered Judaism. A shrinking, peau-de-chagrin Judaism. “The Return alone suffices”: a sad testament, this theology of self-sufficiency.
Notes
On the books by Milner and Badiou, allow us to refer the reader to the reviews published, respectively, in numbers 11 and 13 of Plurielles.↩︎
It will be a question here of Être juif, Verdier, 2003 (abbrev. EJ), and of Le Livre et les livres. Entretiens sur la laïcité (with A. Finkielkraut), Verdier, 2006 (abbrev. Lli).↩︎
Pièces d’identité, p. 155, 157.↩︎
Let us add that A. Finkielkraut only rarely pushes B. Lévy to his last entrenchments, held back perhaps by that well-known complex of secular Jews toward their strictly observant coreligionists, who are a bit their “bad conscience.”↩︎
Benny Lévy: […] I wasted time, these are not idle words: I lost precious years, between, let us say, 25 and 35. Ten years which, however, were years of investigation, of research, that began with Plato. Ah, if only I had begun with Rabbi Akiva! […]” (interview in L’Évènement, May 6 to 12, 1999).↩︎
The reader of Nausea and of The Words may find a possible origin of it in Sartre’s work.↩︎
We shall spare ourselves comments in poor taste on these “voices” (B. Lévy here cites chapter XX of Exodus: “and all the people saw the voices […]”);↩︎
Which does not prevent B.-H. Lévy from asserting: “Benny was not a fundamentalist. He was not even an Orthodox Jew.” (op. cit., p. 162). What would it have been had he been one!↩︎
(His description of the “modern Jew” who “plays the most nefarious role there is” [Lli, 57] seems borrowed from the prose of the far right.)↩︎
Bernard-Henri Lévy, Pièces d’identité, Grasset, p. 128, 146, 165 and passim.↩︎
Midrash Rabbah Genesis XXVIII↩︎
A mystical work by Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin (1749-1821). I do not know whether the slip is attributable to Benny Lévy or to his source, but it does not change much.↩︎
Interview in L’Évènement, May 6 to 12, 1999. Available on the Verdier publishing house’s website.↩︎
The entire opening of the essay talentedly pastiches La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (The Confession of a Child of the Century), and Benny Lévy plays, like Musset, on the double meaning of siècle (“the (secular) world” and “the age”).↩︎