Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [63]
On the other hand, the second point requires a bit more explanation. What most people seem to find hard to understand is that Judaism is not a religion. The word religion does not exist in Hebrew. The only vague equivalent, dath, is a word made up by jurists who, very recently, upon the foundation of Israel, wanted to make the new state like other states, to bring it into line with older regimes and therefore to insert something reminiscent of the division between theology and politics found everywhere else. If the word religion, as used by William of Ockham or Pascal, does not exist—and you won’t find it in any book of the Talmud or in the mouths of the sages or masters who made the great oral law—it’s because the thing itself doesn’t exist either. Do you know, for example, that the term for synagogue, beit knesset, means a meetinghouse, not a house of prayer? Do you know that the Torah refers less to some sort of bible or missal or book of prayers than to a constitution (really a constitution in the strict sense, almost political or at least civil, of the word constitution) given by Moses to his people after the receipt of the tablets? Do you know that there is a whole current of European Judaism (the one that flourished at the end of the eighteenth century in Lithuania around the Vilna Gaon* as a reaction to the mystical explosion of Hassidism and then to the great messianic movements that swept through the shtetls at that time and almost swept away their reason) that rates study above prayer? Or, to be more precise, that if it had to choose between blind, ignorant faith on the one hand and Talmudic science, full of detours, scruples, and doubts, it would, without hesitation, opt for the second? Do you know that, once again in the nineteenth century, in the middle of what you might call a world of belief and faith, there were eminent masters (I’m thinking of Rav Kook)† who believed that atheism did not pose any problem for Judaism? They even saw it as a perfectly serious and admissible hypothesis, and in any case preferred an honest and logical atheist, a serious disciple of Nietzsche, someone who had reflected on the possibility of God’s death and even its consequences, to some simpleton who merely believes in the “existence” of the unique One? And what can one say about those texts by Levinas that also flirt with atheism and tell us that Judaism is not a way of seeing but a way of living, that what’s at stake is transmission rather than revelation and that its great, its real concern is man’s relationship not with God but with his fellowman?
So naturally there are Jews who are believers. But there are others, no less Jewish, who would not even understand what you meant if you asked them whether or not they believed in God. I know something about these “returns” to Judaism. And I can tell you that for every Franz Rosenzweig* who has returned to the law of the fathers after one mystical night, you have a thousand cases for whom it’s an ethical adventure, an experience of life, language, thought, or even art that dictated this teshuva. Arnold Schoenberg, for example, who had converted to Protestantism and who on July 24, 1933, went to tell Rabbi Louis-German Lévy of rue Copernic that out of hatred for Wagner he was returning to the Covenant. Then there’s Benjamin Fondane, that pure poet and out-and-out Baudelairean, who at the door to the gas chambers recited poems from Les Fleurs du mal in order to give courage to his companions in martyrdom. Ten years earlier, he had returned to the Jewish scripture, in his case for poetic reasons, out of loyalty to Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Tzara. Or Benny Lévy, another case in point, who has always insisted that, at first at least, in the days when he was still called Pierre Victor and was emerging from his Maoist season, it was a need for thought, interrogations that grew out of his