The juxtaposition of the two words Jewish and secular does not resonate self-evidently in common representations. For some, the pairing of these two terms most likely constitutes a paradox, not to say a contradiction in terms, one that can strictly be sustained only in the name of a humor of which Jewish thought is so fond. We may as well warn at the outset those readers who share this assessment that our defense of secular Judaism will not necessarily proceed in that register — although we shall not balk at illustrating the idea that Jewish humor draws heavily on what we shall for the moment call secular thought. For lack of a precise definition, let us be content to illustrate our opening remark with a Jewish story: “To the woman who comes to see the Rebbe and tells him ‘Rabbi, I have lost my faith!’, the Rebbe replies with great serenity: ‘But who’s asking you for it?’”
Being a Jew without faith certainly does not suffice to define the secular Jew. How, then, are we to define “Jewish being” without referring to the religious fact, or even to the religious festivals that punctuate the Mosaic calendar? Le Robert tells us that Mosaic qualifies whatever has to do with Moses, that is, with the transmitter of the book, the Torah, which is the common inheritance of secular and non-secular Jews alike. But a transmitter implies an original author, you will say! That is indeed the very question that constitutes a challenge for the secular Jew!
The secular Jew inherits the book and takes an interest in its transmission, without for all that keeping eyes and mind fixed upon the “creator.” In a sense, and to use a contemporary expression, the secular Jew may use and abuse the work with no regard for copyright! Here already is the outline of a program! The book and its commentaries are a common inheritance that can nourish the reflection and the memory of secular Jews in a way far more meaningful than for believers. A history of men, then, written by anonymous authors — among them priests, prophets, and kings — who knew how to work the imaginary so as to transform it into a treatise on how to live together, one that is neither theocratic in essence, nor, still less, political in essence.
In his remarkable essay Zakhor, Histoire juive et mémoire juive (Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory), Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi gives us a first lead toward answering our question: “In seeking to understand how a people could survive when its history was lived out, for the most part, in exile, I should like, truth to tell, to suggest that the history of its memory, largely neglected and still to be written, is a subject of importance.”1 But of what, then, should secular Jews remember? That is the whole question.
First and foremost, if history is preponderant in the Bible, it is not so much for its eventful dimension as for its symbolic power. The history recounted to us in the Bible owes its persistence, in time and in space, not to its historicity but to the fact that it is a construction in language in which the relations of men among themselves occupy center stage. So much so that they call forth a multiplicity of meanings, and that the questioning of meaning is the very essence of Jewish being. The divine is never the arbiter of the clashes among the commentators of the Talmud, as the Midrash itself reminds us — for otherwise, how would one explain the diversity of the commentaries and the vigor of the debates? To be a secular Jew is therefore first of all to rediscover, in another mode, this passion for interpreting without thereby being an exegete. It matters little whether the Exodus from Egypt took place or not, if history allows us to grasp its symbolic meaning and to think contemporary events in the light of the intelligibility of the commentary that is given to us of that event.
It is also to seek to prolong the questioning of the history of the Jewish destiny — a difficult destiny, most often tragic, but sometimes glorious in the sense that it has also produced a few works of the spirit that bind us forever to universal history.
Psychoanalysts, like linguists, know it well: it is language that fashions the subject, and not the reverse. It would thus be the whole bath of language, internalized since childhood, that constitutes, one might say, the latency of our being. Thus, if the signifier Jewish is part of the language in which the subject is steeped, that signifier will then inscribe itself indelibly as a signifier of the subject — and this, whatever the references on which it has been nourished according to its environment.
So, being a secular Jew is not only being unfaithful to the religious norm and to the sacralized ritual of worship; it is also and above all remaining faithful to the memory of meaning, that is, the living memory that runs through the symbolic corpus of Jewishness. The practice of questioning is an infinitely more living way of seeking to perpetuate the meaning of what Judaism sought to raise to the rank of the sacred than is cultic practice, which is often not far from being merely ritual. In a certain way, the secular Jew is the one who knows the question and has still not found the answer, but who, paradoxically, does not despair of finding it, since he keeps on seeking it — and, in any case, he knows that he cannot do without it…
But why remain faithful, some will say, if faith is not present at the rendezvous? A few avenues of response may be proposed. First, because on the plane of identity, memory cannot be effaced. Next, because responsibility is that from which the secular Jewish being cannot shirk.
Responsibility is to be understood in several senses: responsibility first of all, with respect to the Jewish destiny, as we have said, such as history shaped it and overdetermined us… A debt, too, with respect to the effort of past generations who perpetuated this identity under the most precarious conditions. Responsibility, finally, with respect to filiation, so that our children do not forget that question of difference which every Jewish identity carries, as Edmond Jabès tells us2:
“I have the impression of having no existence except outside all belonging. This non-belonging is my very substance. This non-belonging, through the availability it leaves me, is also what brings me closer to the very essence of Judaism and, in a general way, to the Jewish destiny. Judaism, in a certain sense, is nothing but questions put to History. In asking himself ‘who am I?’, every Jew also puts the question to the surrounding culture. To question, for the Jew, is always to keep open the question of Difference.”
Now, this Difference, if it is to maintain itself against all the desires for its effacement, even for its radical abolition, must also render itself intelligible and perceptible to the Other. For it is with the Other that we must tirelessly take up again the question of difference, in the dimension of the discovery of what the Jews have brought to the world.
A psychoanalyst said recently to one of his patients that her suffering would truly subside only when the world became capable of recognizing what Judaism had brought it. In another form, this is what Jabès tells us once more: “We must not forget that Auschwitz took place within our culture. Auschwitz changed our vision of the world. Auschwitz is also the near-total indifference of the German populations; it is the failure of the Human.”
Auschwitz leads us to an insurmountable paradox. How can one still expect anything at all from others after Auschwitz, and also how can one not still expect something from others after Auschwitz? Such is the paradox of Auschwitz. Today, culture in general, like Jewish culture in particular, must be thought from out of this wound that is ceaselessly reopened.
That the Jew be recognized in his Difference would be a victory over the tyranny of everyone’s narcissism. This objective could be one of the missions of secular Judaism. And yet, who does not know that at the heart of identitarian affirmation lies buried a refusal of otherness. “Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are,” Samuel Huntington tells us3.
It is not possible that religion, which means to do civilizing work, should arrive at this point, at its inverted message. This reflection, set in relief by Samuel Huntington, leads us to a severe look at the modalities of the religious — yet not insofar as the religious is specific to what religion produces, but insofar as the religious can be produced in every form of intellectual adherence. The danger of the religious thus seems to us to consist in a twofold drift: the obscurantist drift, on the one hand, and the excluding drift, on the other.
Obscurantism appears when the meaning of symbols grows obscure — at the register of their polysemy but above all at the register of their power as language, that is, as to their capacity to communicate meaning to the Other. It occurs when the Jewish symbolic corpus has become the instrument of a power. The symbols, the rituals are then reduced to the functioning of mere passwords. It is in this prevalence of form over meaning that the processes of certainty mobilize and congeal, giving rise to modes of conviction-instilling that correspond to a will to political instrumentalization. It is then a perverted principle of obedience that finds itself manipulated, and the turn toward fanaticism, or at least toward excluding certainty, often occurs in the end.
The excluding drift, for its part, brings into play a perverted principle of intransigence whereby the instituted will find itself overinvested at the expense of the instituting. I would first like to say that I owe to Myriam Revault d’Allonnes the very precious illumination of these two concepts, which she brings to light from her reading of Merleau-Ponty. Indeed, if Authority censors, one must not forget that, in the same movement, it contains an effect of authorization. Thus, when we refer to an Authority, we are obligated by it, on the one hand, but also authorized by it, on the other. To my mind, it is the fact that the instituting function becomes completely absent that leads to the unleashing of the phenomena of exclusion. What is then completely set aside is the function that sustains the authorizing face of Authority, that is, the function of the Passeur (the Conveyor, the one who carries across).
If to transmit is to make pass what one holds in one’s interiority into the interiority of an Other, then it is not the function of the instituted Master that is called upon, but that of the Passeur.
At the extreme, these perverse phenomena are such that it becomes absolutely impossible to defuse them, once they have been set off. Conscious of these dangers, secular Jews wish to sustain a Jewish presence in the world that takes account of the lessons of the past. And thus, to make themselves the conveyors of Jewish culture to whoever presents himself as a passer-by.
So let us return to the central question put by Izio Rosenman to secular Judaism: namely, whether it will be capable of giving a content to the transformation of Judaism into culture.
Georges Steiner, in his book De la Bible à Kafka (From the Bible to Kafka), reminds us that “the supreme commandment of Judaism, supreme precisely in that it comprehends and inspires all the others, is given in Joshua 1:8: ‘This book of the Law shall not depart from thy mouth; but thou shalt murmur it day and night.’”4 The destiny and the history of Judaism are bookish, in a sense that sets the Jews practically apart. “Like a snail, its antennae turned toward the threat, the Jew has carried the house of the text on his back. What other dwelling has been permitted him?” Georges Steiner tells us again5.
We have already evoked what a profane practice of the text might be; we shall now give two examples of commentaries that are each, in a very different style, ways of doing the work of creating meaning. The two commentaries refer to Genesis and to the so-called transgression of Eve, which institutes the relation to the forbidden.
Let us first recall this passage from Genesis (ch. 3): “They heard the voice of Adonai Elohim walking in the garden on the side whence the day comes. The man and his companion hid themselves from the face of Adonai Elohim among the trees of the garden. Adonai Elohim called the man and said to him: — Where art thou? He said to Him: — I heard Thy voice in the garden, I was afraid because I am naked, and I hid myself. — Who told thee that thou art naked? This tree of which I had forbidden thee to eat, hast thou eaten of it? The man replied: — This woman whom thou hast put beside me, it is she who gave me of this fruit, and I ate. Adonai Elohim asks the woman: — Why hast thou done this? The woman replies: ‘The serpent led me on, and I ate.’ And Adonai Elohim condemns the serpent to crawl upon its belly, to feed on the dust of the earth. He condemns the woman to bring forth in pain: ‘Thou shalt languish with passion for thy man, and he, he shall dominate thee.’ To the man, He says: ‘Because thou hast yielded to the voice of thy woman and eaten of the tree of which I had forbidden thee to eat, the earth shall be cursed, through thy fault; in pain thou shalt feed upon it all the days of thy life. By the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat thy bread, until thou return to the earth. For it is from it that thou wast drawn; thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.’ Immediately after receiving this curse, Adam names his woman. He named her Hava — she gives life — for she was the mother of every living being.”
In a commentary, Liliane Atlan6 first expresses her dismay before the text: “The more I read this text, the more I find it incomprehensible. Is it credible that a fruit, even a forbidden one, should make us discover, if we eat it, that we are naked? To have disobeyed — is that such a crime that we must be cursed forever, and the earth with us? You are dust, and you must give life. Are ‘Mother’ and ‘Dust’ then twin maladies? And this serpent that speaks, this Master God who created chaos, the Light, the Heavens, the Earths, the Birds, the Beasts, the Plants, who fashioned man from a little dust — why does he fly into such a murderous rage? Because someone ate a fruit from his garden? Is he so weak that he cannot bear to be disobeyed? Suddenly, these words strike me: ‘the woman shall languish with passion for her spouse, and he, he shall dominate her.’ There they are, hidden among the enigmas of the text, diverting our attention. What if they were the key to it? What if we were faced with a text written by men? Written in a manner of genius, but by men? For the good of men? To dominate women?”
But after this first, somewhat feminist outcry, Liliane Atlan proposes to reread the text through a linguistic metaphor around the polysemy evoked by nakedness (aroum in Hebrew):
“The serpent was naked, more naked than the other animals of the fields that Adonai Elohim had made. In what was it naked? It saw things as they are, without coating them in myths. For it, there is no master in the garden. There are only mute, impersonal forces. There is no forbidding. There is what there is. Nothing else. It is vital to become cunning. To get by. To have fun. The woman takes the fruit, she tastes it, she does not die of it, she gives some to her companion, he eats it, he does not die of it. They observe that this fruit is banal, it is a fruit like the other fruits, it reveals nothing, except this essential thing: the prohibition came from the Master, so that it would be respected, so that he would be the Master. And perhaps the man and the woman needed to respect the prohibition, to give themselves a Master, to live in a Garden governed by a Master, so as not to be naked, so as not to be free, so as not to be what they are — a little animated dust for a brief life. When the eyes are opened, each instant of the day can become a Curse. It takes much cunning, much guile, for living to remain a pleasure. The different significations of the word ‘aroum’ — ‘naked,’ ‘cunning,’ ‘to lay bare,’ ‘guile’ — become one and the same.”
On the plane of method, this commentary, as we see, touches several levels of approach to meaning. The first is a questioning issuing from a literal translation of the text. It often leads to an irritation. The second results from a free association so as to arrive at denser, tighter links, while keeping something of the initial poetry7. A tone of freedom dominates the whole; there is a rupture with eroded meanings, thanks to an audacity that one would not hesitate to call literary. There is perhaps an underlying element of revolt that allows the author to risk an effect of surprise and to render her commentary living, not to say subversive.
From this same passage of Genesis, José Seknadjé-Askénazi invites us to a more learned and no less profane reading, founded on a philosophy of grammar. We find ourselves at once before a method and before a wager: that a “thought as apparently iconoclastic as that of Spinoza makes it possible to illuminate the biblical text.” We can only invite the reader to refer to it8, for the method that flows from it privileges a line of meaning in a properly demonstrative dimension. In this construction of meaning, there is a necessary support upon an illuminating intertextuality that implies a solid knowledge of the corpus. There is above all, in fidelity to Spinoza’s thought, the deployment, within the practice of biblical commentary, of a reversal of perspective.
To conclude these all-too-cursory reflections, I would venture to say that secular Judaism invites a reversal of perspective with respect to religious Judaism — a reversal of a nature similar to the reversal of perspective opened by the Spinozist reading. Judaism is a secular religion. This secular register of commentary is accomplished when it nourishes itself on Spinoza’s linguistic inquiry, which translates into the language of thought the philosophical implications of linguistic data, thereby carrying itself, in the same movement, to the heart of the signification of human language.
This text is the fruit of a discussion with David Encaoua at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in August 2005.
Notes
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor, Histoire juive et mémoire juive, Éditions La Découverte, Paris, 1984, page 21.↩︎
Edmond Jabès, Du désert au Livre, Entretiens avec Marcel Cohen, Belfond, Paris, 1980, pp. 52-53.↩︎
Samuel Huntington, Le choc des civilisations, Odile Jacob, Paris, 1997.↩︎
Georges Steiner, De la bible à Kafka, Bayard, 2002, p. 170.↩︎
Ibidem, p. 175.↩︎
Liliane Atlan, Adam et Ève : Il l’appela vivante, Les Nouveaux Cahiers, Autumn 1997, no. 129, p. 47.↩︎
After the manner of the “pshat” and the “drash,” which, as we know, are possible readings of the Book. The initials of the four possible levels of reading (Pshat, Remez, Drash, and Sod) also make up the letters of the word “Pardes,” paradise in Hebrew. Thus everything coincides!↩︎
José Seknadjé-Askénazi, La philosophie de la grammaire, Les Nouveaux Cahiers, Spring 1996, no. 124, pp. 22-32.↩︎