Tag Archives: Levinas

Bettina Bergo (University of Montreal): “And God Created Woman”

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Bettina Bergo

Professor of Philosophy, University of Montreal

And God Created Woman

Tuesday, February 28, 4:30pm, Swift 201

Emmanuel Levinas wrote his « And God Created Woman » (Tractate Berakhot, 61a) between 1972 and 1973 in the shadow of “mai soixante-huit”. It follows, even stands in the shadow of his “Judaism and Revolution” (a reading of Baba Metsia 83), which appeared in 1969. The two Talmudic readings arguably share a guiding thread, although their discussions are quite different: in 1969 it is social and metaphysical alienation; in 1972, it concerns an enigmatic domain of justice situated between the universal and the particular. Thus Levinas’ clin d’oeil to Godard’s film with Bardot focuses on “a difference that does not compromise equity,” before it so much as touches on sexual difference. Perhaps predictably, we find running through the debate about God’s ‘second’ creature (viz., is the rib from which Eve is created a face, or rather a tail?), the question of alterity itself. But is this not one of those abstractions—flowing out of phenomenological formalism—that belies its lived origin in our experiences of or with actual people? Alterity and its “modalizations” would be the question that opens to that of justice in this reading, as in Levinas’ Otherwise than Being. To understand this approach I compare his Talmudic reading with Daniel Sibony’s discussion of the discovery, après coup, of Eve, Isha, by Adam, Ish.

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Matthew Peterson on Jewish Ethics

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Matthew Peterson (MA Student, Divinity)

“Between Halakhah and the Other: Navigating the Scope of Jewish Ethics”

Tuesday, April 14th, Noon

Swift 201

Abstract:

One recurring theme in modern Jewish thought has been the scope of its ethics. That is, upon whom can Jewish ethics make demands, whom can it address, and who may embody Jewish ethics appropriately? To address these questions, this paper puts into dialogue two figures who stand at opposite poles on the spectrum of concern. Emmanuel Levinas, a Jewish philosopher, offers an anthropocentric vision of Judaism that is about responding to the demands of the human Other and is therefore, I argue, universal. In contrast Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, a philosophically-informed authority on Jewish law, offers a fundamentally theocentric view of Judaism, where to be Jewish is to respond to the call of the God of Abraham by following the laws of halakhah, and in this sense I argue its ethics are particular.

Two different positions come out of this conversation: a broad appeal to moral authority grounded in a religiously informed anthropology, and a traditionalist, identity-defined response rooted in religious law. While both positions support moral authority over autonomy, their divergence suggest the need for a more careful distinction between ethics as teleological and concerned with aims, and morals as deontological and concerned with norms. This clarification illustrates a common vision of Jewish ethics as aiming to create a better world through service to others with God in view, yet it also makes apparent two phenomenologically distinct ideas of the Jewish moral life. For Lichtenstein, Jewish morality is only incumbent upon him who is willing to live out the minutiae of a wholly Jewish existence, while Levinas sees Judaism as offering moral resources with which anyone can productively engage. Ultimately, at stake are questions about the applicability of moral norms, their relation to ethical frameworks, and a concern with incorporating tradition into modernity without losing that which constitutes the tradition as such.