Edmond Jabès, through his singular books, cuts the figure of an outcast in the manner of Elisha ben Abuyah, the renegade banished from the Pardes for having laid waste to the plantings of the hermeneutic garden. By this gesture, Elisha ben Abuyah marks the alteration of Talmudic thought, for he destroys in his wake the foundations of an established theology. And yet, although classed among the heretics for having knowingly placed himself outside the community of the sages, he remains at the origin of the drash, of the meaning to be solicited within the infinity of waiting. He embodies the paradigm of the Midrash, that method of rabbinic exegesis that resists all definition since it is above all a particular mode of thought and reasoning. This incomparable “hermeneutics of solicitation1,” opening onto the field of the text’s inexhaustible possibilities, authorizes the unwonted encounter of tradition and innovation within Judaism2. Ben Abuyah leaves the Pardes altered by his reading3. The text has worked upon him to the point where he is no longer able to return to himself. He becomes “Aher,” the other transformed in a twofold way: by his unfaithfulness toward a dogmatic thought and by his otherness, claiming the possibility of inventing himself within creation. And it is through his subversion that he embodies the other thought, building itself in the interval of the in-between of the sacred text; in the margins, Jabès would comment; beyond the verse, Levinas would add.
A great enemy of predetermination, Edmond Jabès proposes an unconventional poetics, drawn out of ordinary frames and yet answering to the true method of the Midrash. And the opening offered by the exegesis of the drash is what leads him onto the path of Ben Abuyah. For he never ceases, throughout his work, to underscore the analogy between Judaism and writing. Nevertheless, the very openness of the holy text raises the question of midrashic, Talmudic, or zoharic interpretation, and of the relations they maintain with dissidence. Where is the border between the displacement authorized by tradition and heretical subversion? Where is the limit between what is held to be an infidelity to the authoritative religious dogmas to which the faithful of the Torah must adhere, and the freedom of the Jewish exegete; a fortiori between poetic writing and the subversion of Judaism? The poetics of Jabès, in its very openness and through the interpretive freedom it grants itself, subverts traditional Judaism. But since there is no coincidence between the sacred book and its meaning to be decoded, are the divine traces not destined to multiply? Heresy would not, then, necessarily imply a negative and contestatory judgment; quite the contrary, it belongs to the very process of reinterpreting the text in light of socio-historical contexts. If the sacred heresy of the Jewish Kabbalah answers to the historical factors of its era, all the more reason that, in the circumstances of post-Shoah writing, the dissident reading of Jabès should be justified. It then calls into question the very notion of heresy in relation to the foundations of conventional Judaism.
Now in Jabès, for whom the art of subversion is the generative principle of the poetics, the unfaithful one is not necessarily he whom one expects. In the work, everything begins with the dream of an unwonted encounter, then the brutal reality of a nightmare that wakes Jabès’s dreamer: a vision of the originary scene in which God falls asleep, forgetting his own creatures; a betrayal of his faith in man, on whom he nonetheless imposed the remembrance at the origin of Israel’s historicity.
The Sleep of God
In the beginning, a mystery. A mystery is born of…
…this dream that was a frightful suffocation of the soul, then a lofty idea of death, then a vulgar notepad in which the days butted up against the night.4
This epigraph, preceding the book’s Avant dire (Foreword) and extending the dedication of Yaël, designates the incipit of the text and its stakes. Of this dream, Jabès tells us nothing, since its stakes are the truth of the night, the one that must be forgotten at the coming of day. The violent content of the dream inaugurates the gesture of the writing of Yaël, and is therefore not revealed. Only the trace remains; the trace of a stifled cry inscribed on the “vulgar notepad” of the book, where the writer tries in vain to reread, by the light of day, the darkness of the nocturnal dream. Through the frightful vision of a nightmare, “a frightful suffocation of the soul” has seized Jabès’s dreamer. Did he take himself for Jacob at the ford of the Jabbok, who in the night of Penuel encounters the Unknown One and comes up against his power5? Did he court death in the night of his dream? The dreamer drew near to the divine being of Yaël-Shekhinah6 in order to “receive her word; for Yaël is word of the universe: signs, colors, earthly and celestial sounds7.” But whoever sees the Face of God, Shekhinah, is liable to the death penalty. Only the elect chosen by the hand of God had the privilege of contemplating his beauty (Ex. 24:9-11), like Moses, who admired his face and came back down from Mount Sinai with his skin radiating the divine presence he carried within him (Ex. 34:29-35).
The falling-asleep of the narrator in the garden thus brings me back to Jacob, to the biblical event preceding the episode of the struggle with the Unknown One of the night. This enigmatic hand-to-hand combat with the Stranger, an encounter at the origin of the Jew’s collective memory that defines him as such, proves essential to understanding Jabès’s work and his relation to the divine. The trial Jacob undergoes, and which disposes him to receive the word of divine blessing, becomes the destiny of the Hebrew people, renamed after Jacob with the name of Yisrael, “Mighty Wrestler,” because he has fought “with Elohim as with men.” Jacob falls asleep one fine day under the open sky, his head resting upon stones. He then has a dream in which he sees the apparition of divine messengers ascending and descending a ladder set upon the earth, at whose summit the Eternal is enthroned; the Voice of God renews his promises. And Jacob wakes, exclaiming: “Surely the Eternal is present in this place, and I knew it not” (Gen. 28:10-17). Emerged from the limbo of sleep, he trembles at the dawning awareness of the divine presence wrenching him from his prior torpor. Awakening to Jewish consciousness, awakening of Israel in Jacob, awakening of Jabès’s dreamer to the remembrance of God. In the rabbinic tradition, the word “maqom,” meaning “place,” designates one of the divine namings. “The Eternal is present in this place” amounts to affirming the universal divine Self implied in the Tetragrammaton: “I Am that I Am.”
Likewise Jabès’s dreamer, faced with the strangeness arising before him, wages a merciless combat with the Unknown One of the twilight in order to wrest from him his word, until it touches him with its gift, granted and welcomed in its plenitude. At the same time, this encounter that takes place in the work, and specifically in Yaël, throws the writer off course, compelled to mourn a God who guarantees meaning by the light of day. Jabès’s work voices this relentless conflict with the Stranger that it carries on in writing, questioning the vocables extirpated from sacred speech: “Man set against God is neither victim nor executioner. He is grappling with death, in those regions where to live and to die are synonymous8.” In the night of his dream, he undergoes the “mortal violence” of a shock, the mute call of a presence that holds itself in reserve in absentia. Grappling with the impossible, on the threshold of the dream where life rejoins death, the sleeping narrator does not submit to the obscure invincibility of the divine force. In order to resist the hold this silent God exercises over him, haunting the word with his very withdrawal, he tries to wrest from him Yaël, “word emancipated from God9,” “word of the universe10.”
And it is in the course of falling asleep that the memory of Yaël’s passing awakens. The dreamer sees Yaël as he sees God. From this memory of an invisible presence arises an apparition that comes crashing, shattered, into the book. At each prophetic vocation of Hebrew history, the essence of the elect one, initiator of an innovative undertaking, is transformed by a new naming signed by the hand of God. The renewal of the divine covenant changes the named destiny: the name of Jacob becomes Israel, Abram becomes Abraham, Sarai becomes Sarah, and the name of Yaël becomes Shekhinah, Yisrael herself:
Was my truth the anchor of my life? I find myself again where I fell asleep. Yaël, the waking has your name. And your body is a long shudder of amorous fugues.11
Dream of the wanderer crossing paths with Yaël in the garden; the dream ends when the book begins, but the waking has preserved the dazzling dehiscence of Yaël-Shekhinah. The dream’s scene takes place in earthly time and space, in the middle of the garden where “the wanderer crossed paths with Yaël12.”
Now God is the place of the non-place toward which the dreamer makes his way, accompanied by the memory of Jacob. “When God says: ‘I am He who is,’ must we not hear: ‘I am He who was13?’” he asks himself; he then comes to Yaël-Shekhinah in the originary place of the Garden, touched by the sole certainty of the lost affective violence. The dream unfolds in the book, where the narrator is always on the verge of waking. He never finishes waking to the enigmatic presence coming to pass, an incision at the heart of word and body. But the song of the misery of man without God, or the cry of Yukel and Sarah14 disfiguring the remains of a God unfaithful through his absence in the first trilogy of the books of questions, breaks upon the affected name of Yaël-Shekhinah. The dreamer remembers God. This remembrance braces itself against the dereliction to which the work is called. The memory of affect does not exist, but only the forgetting of the primordial forgetting is not forgotten. He then endures the experience of the dream’s aftermath, in the light of that frightful darkness experienced through a parousia already vanishing, and emerges from his lethargy to accomplish, through writing, the exercise of deferred waking: to write the book devoted to Yaël. The demand to wake the creature out of forgetting seizes him.
The poetic invention of Jabès then bends to the biblical injunction to remember, to bear witness to the forgotten originary scene: the sacred Garden where divine harmony reigned before the fall, before the “pulverized mirrors. The earthly paradise slept in the mirrors15.” The slumbering wanderer emerges from the night, touched by the invisible and mute presence of Yaël-Shekhinah, prior to all presence. She enters his memory afterward; only the writing “I” works through the image of the affect experienced in the past. A past that allows itself to be inscribed under dictation, in unison with individual and collective memory. The book writes itself out of the immemorial time of God:
Our memory survives destruction within universal memory, so that the future is nothing other than a regrouping of memories of God that man takes upon himself.16
At the heart of poetic creation, the memory of all times slumbers in wait for the event capable of waking it. A name: “Yaël, the waking has your name.”
And yet, is it really the memory of Jacob, the voice behind the narrator’s voice, that has dozed off in the sacred garden? An inversion worthy of Jabès’s subversion: with him we experience “…this time before time; this singular time of the sleep of God17.” The dreamer falls asleep from not being heard by Yaël-Shekhinah, sleeping beauty in her lair; God has fallen asleep in his silence, forgetting himself, forgetting the insomnia of being: “God’s cunning was to forget, at each stage, God18.” Is it, then, to the memorable deafness of God that Jabès awakens, against the injunction of listening, shma19, and of remembrance, zekher20, imposed upon the Jew by the Law of the Torah? The pages of the book Le Parcours (The Journey), a kind of intimate diary, point me along:
To his people, God commands listening: “Hear, O Israel…,” but hear what? Hear the words of your God; but God is absent and His words voiceless; cut off from their sounds by distance. Hear the silence; for it is in this silence that God speaks to his creature; for it is with a word nourished by this silence that the Jew answers his God.21
The givens of Jewish thought are overturned in the poetics of Jabès, or at the very least inverted. The dreamer comes to God against his absence from the world, against his muteness. And the intimacy of God in man, or of man in God, is exercised there where it is no longer expected. It answers, beyond itself, the silent call of the mute presence. Listening and “Remember”—the prerogative of God, erected into an imperative at the origin of the Jewish vocation—are placed under suspicion by the poet’s inescapable subversion. But a subversion toward God authorized by the Covenant itself, since God the unfaithful is reprimanded on several occasions when he forgets his own creatures:
“Awake, why do you sleep, Adonai? Rouse yourself, cast us not off forever! Why do you hide your face and forget our misery and our oppression? (…) Arise! Come to our help! Deliver us, by virtue of your grace!”
— Psalm 44
In the name of his past faithfulness, his people implore him to come out of his sleep. It is no longer a matter of hearing the inaudible Voice of God, but of going, from word to word, all the way to his silence. For it is all the more present for being mute, and writing seeks to capture the presence, to render it visible and legible. There lies the voice of man, among others that of Jabès. It reads aloud the silence of God through its own muteness, in the recollection of the psalmodied prayer. “One day, Yaël, shall I speak within your silence?”22 asks the narrator who wakes to the remembrance of the God lulled to sleep by his forgetting, heedless of ignoring the presence of man.
The relation of mutual understanding, shma, that constitutes Israel’s historicity is called into question. God the unfaithful, the most renegade of common mortals, commits the sacrilege of forgetting and of deafness, paradoxically reproved by himself in his law sealed between him and his people: “I like God to be blind and deaf so that I may forgive Him those two terrible senses that are hearing and sight. Thus we alone would see, alone would hear for God23.” God has allowed himself to transgress his own precepts, as if he had expelled himself from creation, imposing upon his creature the torment of insomnia that endlessly brings him back to his abandonment. But the forsakenness of Jabès’s dreamer is perpetuated in the work, and is, in fact, nothing but the repetition, over historical time, of a succession of forgettings by God whose origin goes back to Cain.
The Forgotten One of God
In the Jewish perspective, human history begins on the seventh day of creation, after the meeting of Adam and Eve, the seduction by the serpent, the sin and the pardon granted by God, the sanction and the departure from Paradise. It is the Sabbath that brings them consolation outside the paradisiacal place, and when it ends, the first human day then begins. Human time thus follows divine time, and this time of our humanity begins outside Paradise. But the threat of death weighs upon humanity, a virtual threat in the time of Adam and Eve that ends up being fulfilled in the following generation, when Cain, the forgotten one of God, launches himself into history. With Cain, the violence of fratricide inaugurates the drama of humanity: Cain invents death24. Now for Jabès, God is implicated in the drama for which he bears responsibility.
Cain, son of Eve and the serpent, is not the man of evil by choice, but he is the bearer of an evil always already there, a radical evil that pre-exists him. The very foundation of the human revolt in which Jabès takes part, by rewriting Genesis, is rooted in this evil that condemns humanity forever: the genealogy of humans is unjustly anathematized, victim of an atavism from which it cannot escape. Cain is “the revolt of man before his moral conscience,” says Levinas25, for he does not grasp the arbitrary measure of a God who abandons him to his supposedly free destiny, and then comes to demand justice of him after the fratricide:
Words of Cain to God: “am I responsible for my brother?” (…) God cast the anathema upon Cain, for having dared, in his name, to strike his brother mortally. And Cain understood that the All and the Nothing are but the two poles of human indigence and divine injustice. Terrified, Cain has sought, ever since, to flee Cain26.
What do these words mean that Jabès places in the mouth of Cain, “am I responsible for my brother?”—a questioning that takes up that of Genesis when God interrogates him after the murder: “where is Abel your brother?”, and to which Cain answers with the question: “am I my brother’s keeper?” God’s inadvertence, his refusal to intervene even as he himself takes part in the conflict, and to withdraw the hand of Cain on the verge of striking his brother, as he later does with Abraham, remain inexplicable. God’s blindness is such that it comes after the crime, but to inquire into the situation as though he had seen nothing. He abandons Cain to his sorry fate as an outcast. But at the moment of the drama, does he take refuge in sleep, putting the freedom of man to the test? Or does he simply forget his own creature? So many questions that fascinate Jabès concerning human and divine responsibility. After the fratricide, Cain answers God with a subversive question: “am I responsible for my brother?”, thereby deflecting his guilt onto God.
In his reading of this chapter IV of Genesis, André Néher cites a Midrash whose interpretation bears on responsibility, on man’s confrontation with God, and on evil:
“The Midrash says: here is what Cain said: am I my brother’s keeper? No, there is someone who is my brother’s keeper, it is you, God, the only person who can designate himself by the I—anokhi—the first person in the absolute. The one who was to watch that nothing iniquitous should happen, the one who was to watch that man should not be killed, it was you, the keeper of men, so it is not I. My responsibility is perhaps engaged to a certain measure, but yours is engaged in an infinite measure. (…) It is you who are my brother’s keeper. In creating me, you placed in me the instinct of evil. You have not only the responsibility for my crime and for my brother’s death, but for the whole of human destiny, more or less doomed to evil27.”
But God knows not how to answer these accusations laden with veracity, for he dozed off at the very instant of the murder. This Midrash then raises the question of responsibility and the problem of evil that haunts Jabès’s work. “The instinct of evil” already occupies man, victim of “divine injustice.” It is therefore no accident that Adam, Eve, and Cain are, for Jabès, favored characters. The unwonted character of the displacement of guilt makes of Cain the insolent being toward God, the rebel who dares, through subversion, to displace the question of God: “Am I responsible for my brother?” And this subversion seduces Jabès, who, in commenting many times in his work on the narrative of Genesis, by no means hides his resentment toward this God judged ungrateful. If Judaism consists, for Levinas, “in ridding oneself of this God who plays cat and mouse with his creature28,” for Jabès it marks the incessant necessity of freeing oneself, through forsakenness, from divine unfaithfulness. God has betrayed Cain by making him guilty of an inevitable murder, victim of the jealousy he breathed into him.
In Jabès’s narrative there is therefore a rupture with God without Evil being knowingly chosen. Where does God hide during the human tragedy of the first two generations? Certainly his guilt, invoked after the fragment on Cain, finds itself revoked by what characterizes the Jewish traditions, and specifically the mysticism for which God supposedly manifested himself by withdrawing from creation:
“It is time to evoke the responsibility of God toward Creation—said a sage to his disciples. He cannot be the only one to escape His justice.” “He is the only one—they answered him—to be unaware of it. Is He not, since His withdrawal from the universe, infinite Forgetting?29”
But if God is the “infinite Forgetting,” he is judged guilty of having forgotten himself in his withdrawal, omitting, in the same movement, his creatures. He is the “infinite Forgetting” in himself and for man, which does not for all that exonerate him; despite his solitude, he does not escape “His justice” imposed upon men. On the other hand, even if he withdraws from the world during the process of creation, he nonetheless intervenes afterward with Cain by instituting the dialogue. God knew that man would fail at his task of passer-on of the Absolute. Jabès then transposes the responsibility onto God, the sole renegade in his eyes: “When God’s eyelids lowered for the first time, the shadow was in the universe along with evil, said Reb Avav (…)30.” God closes his eyes upon his creature, deciding to absent himself during the crisis: “God introduced into them suffering, ill-being. God was mistaken, God sinned31.” His aberrant fault is, for Jabès, inscribed from the very origin. Thus Cain launches himself into existence under the closed eye of God, and the myth of this second generation inaugurates human dereliction. The choice of good and of evil was not made with full knowledge, and Cain, abandoned by God, abandons him in turn. Humanity then remains in the state of a consciousness barely awakened at the beginning of time. Rejected by his first creatures, God spreads mortality at the genesis of the world.
In light of the decisive episode of Cain, although it does not stand at the origin of the Jewish people, Jabès’s Jewish consciousness takes shape in relation to the Law. That he should have granted a place of choice to this drama of Genesis is striking, not only because this event founds the invention of murder, but above all because it stands before the revelation of the Law at Sinai, hence before the history of Israel; a Law omnipresent in the work through its reference to Jewishness. The narrative of Cain then constitutes a warning charged with hope against human failure and the abandonment of God, since it is ante-Hebraic, ante-Israelite, and ante-Jewish. One must await Abraham and Moses for the reparation of this first rupture to take place. A human sickness of Evil at the heart of the Word that the election of the patriarchs begins to heal, without, however, finding the universal remedy. Jewish history confirms it, from the Genesis of the world to “Auschwitz”; a journey across the centuries that Jabès accomplishes in his fragments.
Invoking, however, this God enigmatic and damaged by the act of creation, Jabès thereby renders him powerless to forestall the face of modern Evil. In fact, this God to whom the work bears witness absented himself from the world even before the accomplishment of the Western nihilism responsible for the Shoah. And for him, this power that nihilism extols by offering it to man plunges him into a tragic freedom without God: “(…) Is He not, since His withdrawal from the universe, infinite Forgetting?”—this already-cited fragment is preceded by another making direct reference to Auschwitz, itself preceded by the questioning about Cain. One cannot therefore neglect this juxtaposition of fragments on responsibility toward the other, passing from the first murderer of humanity, Cain, to the tragedy of the Jewish genocide, for it says much about the history of human tragedy. God, the innocent of human evil, is then washed of all suspicion, discharged of his responsibilities and restored to his transcendence in the “infinite Forgetting” of his retreat from the world. But there remains the wandering question of the books.
The Subversion of God
Jabès, who does not hide his rebellious stance toward Jewish orthodoxy, confronts God in a poetics of contestation. And his books are situated between the continuity of a Jewish transmission and the freedom of an invention. Now if innovation performs an act of revelation, it deliberately leads to a displacement of meaning that, in its extension, reaches subversion, the ideal weapon for Jabès against the dogmatic ideology of religion. In the creativity of Judaism hovers the risk of heresy; a fortiori the relation to God, which resists all hold since it appears in the upheaval of its manifestation, belongs inevitably to subversion.
God the unfaithful, because he breaks his Law, proves to be at the origin of the subversion of man made in his image:
“The relation to God, he said, is an indirect relation to subversion” (…) Subversive, how could God have thought that man would not be so toward Him? God created man in the image of His subversion32.”
The relation to God, subject and object of subversion, excluding all direct relation since mediated by a holy word infinitely distant, is necessarily subversive. Faithful to himself through his strangeness, God would be doubly subversive: on the one hand in his identity in itself, and on the other in his relation to the Jew. In himself, he gathers, through the work of Jabès, the dualistic, conflictual, and inconstant aspects of the zoharic God embodied by Yaël, “cunning and lie of God33.” In his covenant with man, he stands with and against him, then rises up while granting him freedom of speech and the right to defiance. Moreover, he transgresses his own Law, as has been said, for while the terms of the Covenant require that God and Israel remember the constitution of their History, this ordinance finds itself flouted by its legislator, who falls asleep, forgetting his own creatures. So the first divine subversion goes back, for Jabès, to the origin of the world: after the fall of Adam and the murder committed by Cain, God is said to have exiled himself, letting his creature drop into a corrupted world. Then he is said to have altered the legibility of the Letter by destroying the tablets of the Law offered to Moses. He proves to be responsible, therefore, for the primordial alteration of the Torah, origin of the gaping void that separates the initial text from its secondary illegibility: “the second Tablets could not be like the first; for they are born of the breaking of the latter. Between them bleeds the abyss of the wound34.” An act of divine subversion toward the Hebrews, for the illegibility of the Mosaic Law designates the rebellion of God.
Now the breaking of the tablets of the Law, itself fomented by the Jewish sedition in the episode of the worship of the golden calf in the desert, marks the beginning of another Covenant between the Jew and his God. How, from then on, not to maintain a relation of rebellion toward this God? A rebellion necessary to sacred understanding. So man, conceived in his likeness, holds himself in a subversive bond toward him by answering with the doubt that leads him to a “faithfulness without faith,” a form of his own resistance. Manifesting his resentment at the effacement of God, Jabès nonetheless acknowledges the flourishing that such a withdrawal grants man. God willed himself absent from the world so as to allow him not only to accomplish his word, but to engender it in full freedom, equal to his demand. The voluntary forgetting of God leads to the faithfulness of man: “Sleep is not, always, loss of consciousness. God put the world to sleep in order to create it and fell asleep within Creation so as to be, Himself, created by it35.” He thus exhorts man to imitate him in his creation and lets himself be wakened from his slumber by the invocation of being, just as Jabès’s dreamer wakes to the presence of God.
The Faithfulness of Man
What Jabès calls his “Judaism after God36” comes from his envisaging the absence or the death of God. And from this formula flows another assertion proper to his personalized conception of Judaism: “The salvation of the Jewish people is in rupture, in solidarity within rupture37.” The history of Judaism is made, paradoxically, of a continuity within rupture, beginning with that in God, going back before creation at his withdrawal from the world, then the distance provoked by the breaking of the Tablets of the Law that forever separates man from God, and the rupture of the successive exiles the Jews underwent, exiled from their land of origin or from Western history, and above all the one by which is inscribed the violence ever and always near of the genocide at the heart of the catastrophe. “God willed himself absent, fell silent,” but “to recover the divine word is to pass through this rupture38,” Jabès confides to Marcel Cohen. Now the salvation of the Jewish people is also in “solidarity within rupture,” a Jewish solidarity exercised in spite of its solitude, against the unfaithfulness of God.
To believe in the faithfulness of man, responsible for his mission, is perhaps the most beautiful lesson that Jabès draws from Judaism, a form of acquiescence and respect toward the ethical law that is “first of all respect for man in the diverse confrontations of an individuality39” placed before its responsibilities: “Faithfulness to God is faithfulness to man in his quest for truth. Traces in the saddled Trace. Our differences stimulate us. God is the totality of our differences40.” But if his faithfulness dooms him to men, a profession of faith in the human, the one toward God remains a “faithfulness without faith,” to borrow Levinas’s expression:
Hard faithfulness across the irrefutable excellence of the teachings to be rediscovered, proclaimed, and confirmed—despite an unspeakable and unforgettable ordeal that compromises them and that demands them. A faith that contains non-faith, but also a faithfulness to the Bible and to a past in which God came to mind for us and from which God is inseparable. A faith that is also a faithfulness without faith41.
For Levinas as much as for Jabès, Judaism is more a religion of law than a religion of faith. With the law pass the ins and outs of an ethics that maintains the Jew in respect for the past “in which God came to mind for us.” What a duty to live, that which commands the Jew to continue life in hope, despite “the unspeakable and unforgettable ordeal” of the Shoah! And Levinas goes so far as to assert that the absence of God “forever unjustifiable” at Auschwitz nonetheless decrees, to the Jewish people, “the obligation to survive42,” taking on a “faithfulness without faith” against God himself. An obligation to which Jabès subscribes when he announces: “I write from two limits. Beyond, there is the void. On this side, the horror of Auschwitz. (…) Read only the heartrending and clumsy determination to survive43.” A new faithfulness perpetuated by the secular Jew despite the absence of God:
It is the ethical excellence of the Torah that imposes upon us the choice of life and the building of a world (and even the world) on the basis of its teachings. An excellence that could not, to be sure, serve as a pretext for a new theodicy! The silence of God at Auschwitz remains forever unjustifiable44.
After Auschwitz, the arguments of theodicy refuting the existence of Evil prove forever void. And the silence of God before the magnitude of the dissemination of evil since the beginning of time constitutes the unappeasable revolt of Jabès. From there, one approaches the secular vision of Judaism that Jabès shares with Levinas: a “faithfulness without faith,” a faithfulness in spite of God.
Notes
An expression attributed by Banon to the work of Levinas; see D. BANON, La Lecture infinie, les voies de l’interprétation midrachique (Infinite Reading: The Ways of Midrashic Interpretation), Paris, Seuil, 1987, pp. 18-28.↩︎
See E. LEVINAS, Au delà du verset, lectures et discours talmudiques (Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures), Paris, Minuit, 1982. See also M. A. OUAKNIN, Le Livre brûlé : la philosophie du Talmud (The Burnt Book: Reading the Talmud), Paris, Lieu commun, 1986, pp. 108-114.↩︎
Babylonian Talmud: Hagigah, 2:1.↩︎
Yaël, Paris, Gallimard, 1967, p. 13.↩︎
Gen. 32:23-30: Penuel means the “divine Face,” and according to certain Talmudic interpretations the “Face of God” designates the Shekhinah seen by the prophets.↩︎
To my mind, the character of Yaël, eponym of the fourth book of questions, is identified with the Shekhinah, which means the “presence of God”; a term deriving from the Hebrew verb “sh-kh-n”: “to dwell,” “to rest.” In the Zohar, she signifies the point of entry into the realm of the sefirot, the feminine aspect of God, the sefirah separated from the others because her face is turned toward the human world; she is the contact between God and men.↩︎
Yaël, p. 35.↩︎
Yaël, p. 51.↩︎
Elya, Paris, Gallimard, 1969, p. 35.↩︎
Yaël, p. 35.↩︎
Ibid., p. 78.↩︎
Ibid., p. 80.↩︎
Ibid., p. 33.↩︎
Characters of the first trilogy of the books of questions.↩︎
Yaël, p. 32.↩︎
Le Livre de Yukel (The Book of Yukel), Paris, Gallimard, 1964, p. 140.↩︎
Yaël, p. 32.↩︎
Ibid., p. 31.↩︎
“Shema Israel” is the prayer and profession of faith recited twice a day: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One” (Deut. 6:4).↩︎
See Y. H. YERUSHALMI, Zakhor, trans. Eric Vigne, Paris, La Découverte, 1984.↩︎
Le Parcours (The Journey), Paris, Gallimard, 1985, p. 83.↩︎
Yaël, p. 58.↩︎
Aely, Paris, Gallimard, 1972, p. 117.↩︎
La Conscience juive, Données et débats (Jewish Consciousness: Data and Debates), Colloquium of French-Language Jewish Intellectuals (1st-3rd: 1957-60), Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1964, p. 41.↩︎
Ibid., p. 45.↩︎
Un Etranger avec, sous le bras, un livre de petit format (A Foreigner Carrying, Under His Arm, a Book of Small Format), Paris, Gallimard, 1989, pp. 60-61.↩︎
La Conscience juive, pp. 41 and 46.↩︎
Ibid., p. 45.↩︎
Un étranger avec, sous le bras, un livre de petit format, pp. 62-63.↩︎
Le Livre de Yukel, p. 106.↩︎
Le Livre du partage (The Book of Shares), Paris, Gallimard, 1985, p. 40.↩︎
Le Petit livre de la subversion hors de soupçon (The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion), Paris, Gallimard, 1982, p. 31.↩︎
Elya, p. 31 and Yaël, p. 116.↩︎
Le Livre des ressemblances (The Book of Resemblances), p. 87.↩︎
Le Parcours, p. 92.↩︎
Du désert au livre, Entretiens avec Marcel Cohen (From the Desert to the Book: Dialogues with Marcel Cohen), Paris, Belfond, 1981, pp. 88-89.↩︎
Le Livre des questions (The Book of Questions), Paris, Gallimard, 1963, p. 108.↩︎
Du désert au livre, p. 89.↩︎
Aely, Paris, Gallimard, 1972, p. 123.↩︎
Ibid.↩︎
E. LEVINAS, “Le 614ème commandement” (“The 614th Commandment”), L’Arche, June 1981, p. 57.↩︎
Ibid., p. 56.↩︎
Le Parcours, Paris, Gallimard, 1985, p. 95.↩︎
E. LEVINAS, “Le 614e commandement” (“The 614th Commandment”), L’Arche, June 1981, p. 57.↩︎