Plurielles — When one thinks about the question of ressentiment, certain biblical figures come immediately to mind…
Rivon Krygier — There are several things at work in ressentiment. The narcissistic wound, first of all: that of someone who would have been touched in the image he holds of himself and who would like to settle scores, with all the risks of his committing the very worst of what ressentiment contains — returning evil for evil, which corresponds to “bad vengeance.” In biblical Hebrew, and for the masters of the Talmud, the word vengeance as such does not carry all the negative connotations one may hear in it in Western language. There is, in fact, in the act of responding to violence, another dimension, which is present in ressentiment, and which is the will to restore justice. The problem is: what do I do with the evil that has been done to me, with the frustration I have suffered? Do I concede, “let it pass,” even renounce my dignity and forgive? Do I react? The question studied in the Talmud is that of knowing when one must not react, and when, on the contrary, it is fitting to “take revenge.” In other words, depending on the situation, when it is a commandment, a mitzvah, or when, on the contrary, it is immoral to take revenge.
Well before the Talmud, one can also see this problematic very clearly deployed in the Bible around a very central character in the Genesis narrative, that of Joseph. Joseph experiences his brothers’ betrayal. At first they want to kill him; on reflection, they throw him into a cistern, and finally, out of opportunism, and also to “discharge” their guilt, they unload him onto a passing caravan that goes off to sell Joseph in Egypt. And not content to have sold their brother as a slave, they pass him off as dead to their father! It is an action that could not be more cruel, not only for the person dispossessed of himself and betrayed by his own, but also for the father, Jacob, who finds himself in mourning and without a body — which leaves the wound gaping all the more. And so one day, because there is famine in Canaan, they come to Egypt to seek food there; Joseph, in the meantime, has become viceroy in Egypt, let us say a sort of vizier. His brothers do not recognize him; but he recognizes them. And what does he do? He has the dreamed-of opportunity to take revenge for all the evil they did him. Instead of which, he sets up a strategy so that his brothers find themselves in a situation identical to the one in which they had sinned against him: there they are, finally placed before the dilemma of dissociating themselves from their brother Benjamin (another son of Jacob by the same mother as Joseph’s, Rachel), even if it means plunging their father once again into mortal grief, or, in exchange for Benjamin’s freedom, of making themselves slaves in Egypt! And it is the second option that Judah and the other brothers adopt. In sum, Joseph created out of whole cloth a situation of “reparation” of the highest degree, as Maimonides would later conceptualize it: “In what does perfect repentance consist? It is when someone finds himself in a situation of temptation identical to the one in which he had failed, but this time no longer succumbs to it — not out of mere fear (of the consequences) or physical incapacity, but by reason of his repentance itself…” (Hilkhot teshuvah 2:1).
Here is a very interesting lesson in living: faced with frustration, the healthiest and holiest idea is reparation. Ideally, reparation by the very one who committed the evil. If one obtains that, one obtains far better than vengeance in the elementary sense of the term, which still lies at the level of ressentiment (when one violence answers another, when a stronger wrong comes to counter another wrong). The whole trick — or better, the wisdom — consists in reacting, not by placing oneself, for moral reasons (…), as a sacrificial victim, or, conversely, as a “settler of scores,” but in reacting from a perspective of reparation, of moving beyond the vicious circle. There, I believe, this perspective is at the heart and at the summit of Talmudic ethics and dialectic.
PL. — You say of vengeance that it is not wholly negative. Can one not say, precisely, that there is, even in the purest justice, something that still partakes a little of vengeance? And, in another sense, is vengeance not already a first step against ressentiment? At bottom, is ressentiment not also that powerlessness of the one who cannot manage to obtain reparation for the wound that has been done him?
R.K. — Quite right. One of the baleful expressions of ressentiment is sadistic vengeance. But a situation that is no less unhealthy and intolerable from the standpoint of Judaism is ressentiment that remains ressentiment and finds no expiatory path and no outlet; when something is not declared, remains in suspense, inevitably gnaws at the person, undermines human relations, and ends up expressing itself through a violence that dares not speak its name, an unassumed or dissimulated violence. Violence that advances masked is often worse than the other forms of violence. It is perverse. It can also be a violence turned against oneself; as Jews, we are well placed to know how capable we are of self-destruction.
PL. — Is not Joseph’s antithesis in this regard Cain? The one who does not understand why, in the end, God turns away from him, in favor of Abel. And who finally, stewing in jealousy, ends up committing the irreparable?
R.K. — It is clear, according to the narrative, that the two brothers did not manage to speak to each other, to have things out. The text nonetheless reads: “Cain said to his brother…” (Genesis 4:8). But in place of a spoken word, there is a kind of blank. Nor, for that matter, does Cain attempt to have things out with God over the reasons for the refusal of his sacrifice. He “introjects” his frustration; his “face is downcast.” It is God who takes the initiative of reasoning with him, but Cain hears nothing of it, for at bottom he fixes obsessively on his frustration, and does not imagine for a single instant that the problem might reside in his own attitude. As often, the Midrash leans on the ellipsis, the missing part of the text, to show that the exchange of words does not take place between the brothers, by giving us to hear what the content of their dialogue was — but which turns out, precisely, to be a non-dialogue or, if you prefer, a dialogue of the deaf. In fact they cannot manage to resolve what Léon Ashkenazi called — and I am very fond of this formulation — “the equation of fraternity.” To be in a true dialogue, one must find the adjustment, the point of articulation. Cain does not get there. He does not even try. He feels a real frustration before what appears to him as an injustice. And since he reckons himself a victim, he believes himself absolved of any corrective step. The frustration is legitimate in a certain sense; one must even take note of a frustration and not repress it. But afterward, everything depends on how one manages it: one can live it in an infantile, immature way, or, on the contrary, work it through and make something positive of it. The calamitous episode of Cain and Abel is there to teach us that.
PL. — Between Joseph and his brothers there is, all the same, a certain mechanism, a sort of cycle, since at bottom everything began with Joseph and not with his brothers: for it is Joseph’s dream that is at the source of this ressentiment, of this frustration. So it is Joseph who is responsible for this ressentiment.
R.K. — I would go back further, as I think the biblical text does: Jacob, the father, senses affectively, intuitively, that Joseph is an exceptional character, and expresses it through the “many-colored” tunic he gives him — a simple tunic, but one symbolically very heavily charged. It shows the preference he enjoys, the particular affection he benefits from, the ascendancy he is called to exercise… which puts the brothers in a situation of rage and anger. Instead of becoming aware that he irritates his brothers by his presumptuous attitude, of keeping a low profile, his privileges go to his head. He makes a great display of them. His “premonitory” dreams are, beyond his intuitions, the expression of his narcissism, of his pride. Naturally, he does nothing but envenom the relationship. The most irritating thing is not his crude arrogance but, on the contrary, the fact that he presents himself as a dispenser of justice. The Midrash says he would go to his father to “tell tales” about how his brothers were fooling around with the servant-women. He is the man of “practical reason” who addresses scatterbrained spirits from the height of his pulpit. He comes to preach morality and to inform. He is the “smart-aleck with glasses”! He is a bearer of great ideals, but also a blunderer with big clumsy feet! Incapable of empathy, of understanding what he provokes, he drives his brothers down instead of encouraging them to mend their ways. He is an anti-pedagogue.
PL. — Since we are going back from Joseph to Jacob, why not go back to God? In the story of Cain, is not God the source of everything, since He accepts one and not the other? Both of them, after all, had good intentions. In the story of Jacob and Joseph, as in the case of Cain and Abel, there was no dialogue…
R.K. — I am going, very modestly, to play God’s advocate. Yes, God provokes jealousy through a procedure that reveals itself in the affair of Cain and Abel, but that will reveal itself on many occasions throughout the biblical narrative, and which is that of election. From the moment one “chooses” someone — that is, one desires to forge a privileged relationship with him — one provokes the jealousy of others, rivalry, competition. If I play God’s advocate, it is because one is entitled to suppose that He “knows” souls and deep intentions, that He knows who is in the right and who is more apt to fulfill a role. At a certain point, He takes the risk of expressing it. God takes that risk because He counts on building upon the privileged relationship, on making of it a channel of blessing. But it is very perilous, because it provokes a number of deleterious effects. But we, the readers of the narrative, do not know the behind-the-scenes and the nature of the Gordian choices. The biblical text is deliberately elliptical; it does not state the reasons for the choices. Why did God prefer Abel’s sacrifice to Cain’s? We know nothing of it. At bottom, the whole drama lies there. Is this not what happens to us human beings ceaselessly? In all sorts of situations, one does not understand why one is chosen and not the other. Why, then, is this woman in love with another — so mediocre — and not with me, who suits her so well? There are sometimes good reasons and bad ones, but also intimate resonances between souls, and we have no objective knowledge of them, and there appears the feeling of injustice. But this obliges us to dig in order to understand what is happening.
PL. — Supposing that God has good reasons to choose Abel, or Jacob to choose Joseph, is there not, from the standpoint of Creation, something unjust in the distribution of grace, since some are better endowed with it than others? Joseph, for example, is endowed with more talents…
R.K. — With talents perhaps, but not with grace in the sense of gratuitousness. Because that talent implies a certain duty, a certain maturity, a capacity to make those qualities bear fruit. And if he does not succeed in it, his lot is in no way guaranteed; on the contrary, election very often places you in a position of vulnerability, for you unwittingly trigger animosity. Abel gets himself murdered, Joseph gets himself sold, even if he ends up landing on his feet. Election here is not a sort of protectionism that will guarantee anything whatever. Once again, we are also speaking of our human condition. We are not equal in talents and in “graces”; there are all sorts of men “richly” unequal. On the other hand, one may hold that the duty of justice falls upon all unanimously, even if each, with his own personality, will have to construct his own manner of instituting relations of justice. But it is a fact that a human being is not a blank sheet… There is something very mysterious in what we designate as identity, the soul. The fact is that children, from their earliest age, reveal personality traits that will accompany them all their life long. Obviously, this question leads us to evoke antisemitism. It is very clear in the midrashic sources: the posture of the elect induces, or risks inducing, a pride, an intoxication, blunders, but also qualities that are bound up with this feeling of being invested with responsibility, of being animated by a vocation. And the identity of Israel inherits all of this, and plays its part in antisemitism. One must be very prudent in the formulation. I would not want to give the antisemites too easy a victory, and make it believed that the Jews, by their attitude, are those who give rise to antisemitism and would therefore bear responsibility for it. That is really not what I mean. But for all that, we are not as powerless as we want to claim, nor as passive as we imagine, in what we provoke around us — including when we have the best intentions, including when we are in the posture of the protected or the victim. There are blunders, attitudes that arouse unease, even revulsion. And that, I think, the Midrash, the texts, show. And Joseph is a typical example of it.
PL. — Is there a relation between election and modesty? One has the impression that they are incompatible, both on the individual scale (one thinks of Joseph when he says to his brothers about his dream: “your sheaf bowed down before mine”) and on the collective scale, among the Jews.
R.K. — Once again, the feeling of power, the conviction of being invested, brings the temptation of pride. And the question is how the one who feels himself invested takes charge of this responsibility so as not to overwhelm those around him. To find means of communicating while taking into account personalities, sensibilities. Indeed, it is a major problem. I shall again quote Manitou, whose disciple I was (even if I did not follow him on a number of points). I liked to hear him say, in substance: how can we be sure that we Jews are really the heirs of the Jewish people, such as it is described in the Torah and in the Bible? We know that Christians long claimed that they had become the people of Israel, the verus Israel, and that we Jews were on a siding. What can make us say that we are really Israel? Well, it is simple: one need only see how the people of Israel coming out of Egypt so often despised the authority of Moses, revolted against God, constantly created dissensions, tore themselves apart at will… Is this not a faithful mirror of what we are? We have the same “maladies” as the Jews of that time. It is in this that we recognize ourselves. For we are the heirs of those who have the defects of their qualities and the qualities of their defects. And I think this is still the case in the secular version, in secular messianism, including contemporary secular Zionism. Even those who have distanced themselves from the theological categories of the tradition retranslate them into a secularized language; they have inherited this missionary feeling, this desire to be a “light unto the Nations,” and when two of them argue, there are still, always, at least three opinions.
PL. — Still on the question of election: I recall that one of the etymologies, no doubt fanciful, of the word Sinai linked this word to “hatred” (sin’ah), as though there were a consubstantial link between the Revelation, the Election, and the hostility felt toward Israel. When one looks at the evolution of religious anti-Judaism, there is indeed this competition for election, to which you alluded in evoking the verus Israel. At bottom it is a question of who will take the place of the elect, in a sort of “mimetic rivalry.”
R.K. — Yes, one thinks of the writings of René Girard built around this problematic. I obviously do not follow him when he says that Christianity is the ideal solution to all vengeful feeling toward the father and the brother; but he clearly explains the mechanisms of fundamental rivalry between peoples, between civilizations, to be in the position of the dominant one. In particular, one ends up understanding that the notion of chosen people is a very universal notion. Take France, which gave itself for a motto “liberty, equality, fraternity.” When a president of the republic speaks of France as the “homeland of human rights” and presents himself as a great giver of lessons, it can leave one dumbfounded as to the just representation of oneself, if one thinks of the appalling massacres committed by France well after the Declaration of the Rights of Man, as during the convulsions of colonization, in Madagascar, in Algeria, and elsewhere… And yet there is something true in this “illusion,” for identity is also built on dream and on ideals. But when one keeps telling us Jews, “stop thinking yourselves the chosen people,” one cannot but feel an unease. First, because one is never truly elected, but in a “run-off,” to borrow Tristan Bernard’s witticism. But also because this accusation is very often a mechanism of projection on the part of the one who believes himself elected! One does not easily escape one’s “founding myth,” for better or for worse.
PL. — One can also say that there is another possible interpretation, according to which every people is called to feel itself elected for something. Election would be the formulation of a nation’s spiritual program.
R.K. — I would go further: it is part of psychic health to have, in addition to the ego, a “self,” an ideal vision of the ego. A sort of projection of what one would like to be. It is because France wants to believe itself the homeland of human rights that it will develop energies and discourses that will tend toward that ideal, and when it falls short of that ideal, it will have to render accounts. I therefore think that for a people — provided it does not fall into excess, does not develop a pride of bad alloy — it is not bad to feel oneself borne by a vocation.
PL. — Even so, this pride seems inevitable. Think of Deutschland Deutschland über Alles… And Rauschning recounted how Hitler saw things: for him it was either the Jews or Germany that would dominate the world!
R.K. — That was arrogance and vanity bordering on megalomaniacal delirium.
PL. — Can one imagine accepting an election without there being arrogance? Because the usual justification (“election equals responsibility”) is perhaps too quick, too easy an answer…
R.K. — It is an easy answer that turns out to be pernicious when it is of variable geometry, when it becomes selective memory — as when it conceals certain unsavory texts of the Tradition or feigns ignorance of certain not very laudable historical facts. This drifts into a pathetic and pathological self-glorification that unfailingly leads to contempt for the other. So one must be very careful, including and above all in the angelic image one wants to give of oneself…
PL. — As the representative of a Masorti Judaism, of a Judaism faithful to the tradition but which also intends to renew it, what view do you take of the perception of the non-Jew that traditional Judaism has developed? This non-Jew who will sometimes be designated as an “idolater,” an “infidel.” We know that in traditional Judaism there are offensive formulas, execrations, maledictions… What view do you take of those texts? Do you contextualize them historically? Or do you still grant them a form of validity, because they are validated by the tradition?
R.K. — I am going to extend what I was saying earlier. We have the duty not to conceal the fact that our tradition could convey a vision of execration sometimes very negative. One must acknowledge it, observe it, take its measure, and contextualize it. Because it is from the moment one contextualizes it that one is able to understand (and not necessarily justify) why, at a given period, it was expressed in a certain way, and then to take some distance from it. People who do not like the idea that certain negative aspects of the tradition could exist decide that they do not exist, or minimize their import, and when they cannot manage that, slip them under the rug. Contextualizing most often makes it possible not to disavow oneself to the point of shaking confidence in oneself and in one’s ideal ego. For example, to admit that one cannot go faster than the music — that is, that what is possible in a new era was not necessarily possible earlier: one cannot say, for instance, that Aristotle is a vulgar imbecile because he said there had to be slaves for society to be able to function. He lives in a society where it was impossible to imagine that there might be no slaves. It is perhaps regrettable, but it is too easy to take someone to task at centuries’ remove and to lecture him.
PL. — It is perhaps easier to take one’s distance from Aristotle, who is a philosopher, than from a word of the tradition considered to be inspired.
R.K. — Granted. But it becomes possible if one parts with a static, absolutist, fundamentalist vision of Judaism, which decontextualizes everything. For me, Judaism did not come down from the sky like a meteorite, an outlandish and immaculate object. Even when it is God who speaks, it is always man who receives His word. Revelation, Torah, and all that follows is not metahistorical; it is infra- or transhistorical; it traverses history like a river that carries with it all sorts of alluvium. The history of Revelation is the history of the reception of the divine word by men: to a transmitter, there is always a receiver. Human mentalities that scrutinize the values of the absolute translate them into their context. A civilization evolves, consciously or not, just as a child matures, and it is normal and necessary that ideas and convictions change. It is the divine will to associate man with this process, this work of declining the absolute. Not to admit it, not to understand it, is infantilism.
PL. — If I linked the question of the perception of the other and of ressentiment, it is also because I wondered whether one has entirely freed oneself from a “ressentimental” conception of God. A God who would have but one idea in His head: to punish those who turn away from Him. Is this not an infantile vision of divine justice, which one can of course understand as the expression of an era, but which continues to wreak havoc today?
R.K. — One must keep things in proportion. A God for whom there would exist only one category of men — the Jews, the pious or religious — while the others would be extras or perverts, as some represent Him, that God would be appalling. These others are people who count, who have a soul, who have a heart, feelings, values, and virtues that make them full-fledged beings. It would be of an unheard-of cruelty, not to say of a terrifying mediocrity, to imagine that God behaves like an obsessed creditor, endowed with a repressive system. I cannot share that kind of view. Nor can I fall into the other extreme, the image of a God who would be nothing but tenderness and love, who would have no discernment, no demand from the standpoint of humanity, and who would not require accounts of it. No, unfortunately the world is not perfect, and one must know how to say stop; one must sometimes know how to show oneself demanding and intransigent. One must sometimes kill in order to live, to survive. Not simply selfishly, but in order to institute the order of justice. The whole problem is to know what rules one gives oneself. How does one go about transcending all these cycles of violence in order to obtain one of the highest values of Judaism, shalom — that is, the completeness of diverse identities, serenity, harmony with the environment? This is built over the long term. I believe that the God of Israel is a God of peace, and many sources, including the most ancient, constantly mark this aspiration. And it is perhaps subjective, but I dare to believe that He is a mature God, a God who places the values of peace and harmony and coexistence well above the cycles of violence and retribution. The violence of God may have its reasons for being, but the aspiration is to transcend it. Very ancient texts say this. But others say that God takes vengeance and must take vengeance. Just as there are no “good and wicked,” divine action is nuanced and obeys nuanced considerations that obviously escape us, for we cannot have visibility of the global plan of justice in a world shot through with injustice.
PL. — It is often more subtle: one finds, for example, enlightened Orthodox rabbis who will say that there is nonetheless an abyssal difference between the monotheists and the others… But are the “human brothers” not also sometimes the polytheists? Does the line pass between monotheism, atheism, polytheism?
R.K. — That there are degrees of maturation among civilizations, with regard to the conception of ethical elevation, I do think so. But that the dividing line passes between those who believe in a single God and the others — may those who believe it forgive me — is idiocy. It is simply inheriting passively the old categories without any discernment. Because, from both the biblical and the Talmudic standpoint, what is above all problematic in idolatry is its character as an assault on the humanity of man. That is what is judged. When rabbis in the Middle Ages, like the Meiri who lived in Narbonne — an exceptional personality — says that the goyim of his time, the Muslims and the Christians, no longer correspond to the depraved beings the Talmud describes, since they obey an ethic and give it to themselves as law, he chooses no longer to reduce them to the category of idolater. When one sees that, in the name of monotheism, on the contrary, people have indiscriminately pillaged, murdered, and stolen, one understands well that theological doctrine does not suffice to discern the one who is at the highest level of spirituality from the one who is not. That is not the criterion. And still less the little scholastic distinctions according to which Muslim monotheism would be far purer than that of the Christians. Would Christians such as those of Chambon-sur-Lignon — that little village that mobilized to save Jews during the Second World War — be less monotheist than the Islamists who accomplish the worst in the name of the purity of monotheism? True monotheism is the one that says there is a single God for all men, which implies first and foremost a universal fraternity. The Jews in no way escape the rule, with regard to monotheism, and even while being “very believing” or “very observant,” one can commit acts of barbarism that illustrate what it is to be truly an idolater; and conversely, one can conduct oneself as a just man while being a perfect “unbeliever.”
PL. — One has only to read the Bible…
R.K. — One has only to open the Bible to realize that things are problematic, and that in no way is the expression of faith the yardstick by which it is fitting to measure the degree of authenticity of piety. The leitmotif of the prophets is that God does not want all those expressions of faith that have cut themselves off from humanity and from morality. This deviance has therefore existed in all times. There are still today people who are stuck in reductive equations, and for whom the word goy makes the word idolater, the word inhuman, resonate… They cling to texts from which they are incapable of taking distance. But following the Meiri, and on the basis of other criteria, we fortunately have the means for another approach. One can speak today of the goyim in a manner entirely different from that of the Bible and the Talmud, and even of Maimonides, because we are in another time and another century. And if one does not do this work, we — and the others — are headed for ruin.
PL. — That means that one must put everything back into its context: a whole part of the violence one sees in the Bible, for example the extermination of the seven peoples, or again the behavior of the prophet Elijah who kills a hundred priests for the purity of the faith…?
R.K. — One is not always able to do so. As regards the prophet Elijah, I take note of what he did — or, more exactly, of what a text of the Bible says of it. I am not going to subscribe to it automatically because he is the prophet Elijah! I cannot completely “digest” this text, and so I leave it as it is. But I know with certainty that I am not in his context, and that in no way can I draw from it a vengeful rule of conduct, all the more so as it runs counter to the great avenues of biblical ethics. The same goes for the seven peoples of Canaan. Already the Sages of the Talmud applied themselves to contextualizing things, and to inscribing the event within an exceptional situation. I take the liberty of referring you to my recent study on the work of the commentators on this episode.1
PL. — On the plane of traditional Jewish ethics, where is one to situate ressentiment in relation to sin? On the one hand, there is sin only in an act, but on the other hand, God is the one who “probes the kidneys and the hearts” of each. Ressentiment is not precisely something that is put into action (otherwise it is vengeance, it is no longer ressentiment). So what is the status of ressentiment in relation to fault?
R.K. — It is acknowledged that there is real guilt only from the moment when violence passes into act. As long as it merely crosses the mind, it is not yet a question of genuine violence, or in any case of a choice that commits us. Nonetheless, one must in no way neglect the moral work in the depths of this interiority; what the masters call the work of purifying intentions, inner thoughts. It is the apprenticeship of wisdom sustained by that of sanctification, self-mastery. But one also needs a good dose of indulgence and humility before the ressentiment that sometimes inhabits us. We are all poor humans, shot through with unsavory fantasies and sometimes appalling feelings. One is not fundamentally bad because this visits us. It is even natural! But it is up to us to manage the thing and to adopt the right posture. The Torah tells us: “lo tisnah et ahikha bilvavekha” (“You shall not hate your brother in your heart”), and it is alongside this injunction that it prescribes for us: “veahavta lereakha kamokha” (“you shall love your neighbor as yourself”). It is there too that it is said hokheah tokhiah et amitekha (“you must express remonstrance to your neighbor”). In other words, so as not to let hatred — ressentiment — settle in the heart, one must be able to express one’s grievances, to open one’s heart. What swells ressentiment is fermentation, maceration, inner brooding. There is therefore a capital importance, in the ethical relation, in there being a word that takes charge of the frustration and the ressentiment. But beware: the word expressed can easily turn into vengeance, into an assault on one’s neighbor: since one is wounded, one takes revenge through slander or insult. It is then the vicious circle of maceration in tandem. The whole subtlety consists in knowing how to express a reproach without destroying the other, without shaking his dignity but, on the contrary, saving it by helping to rebuild confidence, and not letting oneself be drawn into the spiral of ressentiment.
PL. — To come back to another biblical character, where is one to situate Job? It is said that “Job did not curse God.” He seems to have completely accepted all the frustrations, all that befell him. Now, is not God here the provocateur?
R.K. — I understand the text in the following way: Job has ressentiment, and he even expresses it abundantly. But he places himself as in a laboratory of thought, as in psychotherapy, where all that he feels comes out, but while postponing any definitive judgment. He does not want, in a precipitous manner, to pronounce the most radical verdict, which would be the malediction of God. He is a subtle man. So he searches before judging, and he says what is wrong. He is not called into question for this. On the contrary, those who are called into question are those who hold to him an overblown theological discourse, those who accuse him of pride and cover him with all sorts of moral lessons and catechesis. Thus, even on a religious plane, frustrations, incomprehensions, questionings must be expressed. But to grant a right of expression is not a blank check to say anything at all with disrespect and violence. The feeling of being in the right and the duty to speak of it do not grant every right. One must know how to master one’s word, on pain of transforming the demand for justice into destructive violence.
PL. — Generally speaking, can one hold a grudge against God? Is there a space for that? One thinks of course of Job, but we know that the question arose after Auschwitz or other atrocities. Is not all that has been said about the “powerlessness” of God (one thinks of Hans Jonas, or of Levinas) a way of combating the temptation to put God on trial?
R.K. — On an affective plane, I perfectly understand that one might hold a grudge against God. Misfortune, frustration, can be such that there is reason to question oneself, to revolt. To reflect on God’s role in history with audacity — precisely because one feels anger — is fundamental, including by daring to pose the question of the limits of divine power. Because if one gives oneself an infantile vision of an all-powerful god who everywhere imposes the good and punishes the wicked, or who closely manages all that occurs, after a moment of lucidity, as one grows up, one abandons Him or denies His existence, for it would become unbearable! So to forge a dialogue with God — or, if you prefer, to try to reflect on how an order of justice can be thought in a dynamic perspective, that of a world still in becoming — seems to me a necessary stake. A lack of imagination or of intellectual audacity can make one say frightening things, even insulting or blasphemous ones. Such as saying, for example, that the victims of the Shoah got only what they deserved, since many Jews had abandoned religious practice or had reformed it (alas, dixit…). All this discourse is simplistic and cynically opportunistic, playing on the chord of intimidation. For in the end, one cannot naively say that all that happens in the world is the fruit of the divine will without exposing oneself to attributing to God assent to the worst exactions. And what most people are unaware of, while cultivating a strong ressentiment toward religion, is that in reality Jewish theology has been able to show itself far more nuanced. There are texts in the Jewish tradition that lay heavily upon God the responsibility for having plunged humanity into an unredeemed world, a world where cruelty so often reigns. I think of a Talmudic text that says explicitly that God asked that a sacrifice be brought each month to expiate one of His faults! God asks to be atoned for a decision He took against His will, for reasons of priority, but while accepting that it would provoke collateral damage… I find this approach very subtle. There are others in which it is shown that God pays a heavy tribute for having created an unfinished world in which man is called to the work of completion. The Jewish theologians of the Middle Ages worked on the necessary limitations of divine power, or on divine powerlessness considered as consented to by reason of the freedom given. One speaks, for example, of a divine withdrawal, through the notion of tzimtzum (retraction). Even for philosophers who did not know the notion of tzimtzum, such as Gersonides, there are necessary limits to divine power, to Providence. I have personally worked a great deal on this theme, notably in my doctorate, since it bore on the famous contradiction between divine omniscience and free will.2 If God knows everything in advance, can man act otherwise than according to what God has determined? I tried to demonstrate that there is here a true antinomy. And that there have been in history many false solutions to this problem. There is no truly rational solution that would save, all the way to the end, both free will and omniscience. And that the most coherent position on the theological plane gives one to think that God does not know everything in advance! To conclude, I would say that one manages to moderate, even to annihilate, one’s theological ressentiment when one ends up realizing that it is not possible to have one’s cake and eat it too. In this instance, if we admit the importance of full responsibility being given to man, and therefore the full freedom to choose between good and evil and to act accordingly, one cannot expect God to repair every injustice even before it occurs. And the famous question “Where is God?” should never substitute itself for the one that concerns us directly: “Where is man?”