In these extraordinary moments, the lucid work of the science of Judaism — which reduces the miracle of Revelation or of national genius to a multiplicity of influences undergone — loses its spiritual signification. In place of the miracle of the single source, there shines the marvel of confluence. They are heard as a voice that calls from the depths of converging texts and that reverberates within a sensibility and a thought that await it. What does the voice of Israel say, and how is it to be translated into a few propositions?
Perhaps it enunciates nothing other than the monotheism that the Jewish Bible has brought to humanity. One may, at first sight, recoil before this truth too old, or this claim too dubious. But the word denotes a set of significations from which the shadow of the Divine is cast, beyond all theology and all dogmatism, over the deserts of Barbarism: to follow the Most High; to have fidelity only to the Unique; to mistrust the myth through which the accomplished fact, the constraints of custom and soil, and the Machiavellian State with its reasons of State, impose themselves; to follow the Most High, nothing being higher than the approach of one’s neighbor, than concern for the lot “of the widow, the orphan, the stranger and the poor,” and no approach “with empty hands” being an approach at all; it is on the earth, among men, that the adventure of the spirit thus unfolds; the trauma that was my enslavement in the land of Egypt constitutes my very humanity — that which draws me at once close to all the proletarians, all the wretched, all the persecuted of the earth; in responsibility for the other man resides my uniqueness: I cannot discharge it onto anyone else, just as I cannot have myself replaced in my death; hence the conception of a creature who has the chance to save himself without falling into the egoism of salvation; man is thus indispensable to the design of God or, more exactly, is nothing other than the divine designs within being; hence too the idea of election, which can degrade into pride, but which originally expresses the consciousness of an irrecusable assignation by which ethics lives, and through which the universality of the end pursued implies the solitude, the setting apart, of the one responsible; man is called into question in the judgment and the justice that recognizes this responsibility — mercy attenuates the rigors of the law without suspending it; man can do what he ought; he will be able to master the hostile forces of history by bringing about a messianic reign, a reign of justice announced by the prophets; the awaiting of the Messiah is the very duration of time.
Extreme humanism of a God who asks much of man. By many an account, He asks too much of him! It is perhaps in a ritualism regulating every gesture of the life of the integral Jew, in the famous yoke of the law — felt by pious souls as joy — that resides the most characteristic aspect of Jewish existence. It has preserved that existence across the centuries. It holds that existence within its being, yet, most natural though it is, at a distance from nature. But perhaps, in this way, as present to the Most High.
Excerpt from Difficile Liberté (Difficult Freedom), “Judaïsme” (“Judaism”), Albin Michel, 1963 and 1976, pp. 45–46.