MUST READ: THE GENIUS OF JUDAISM, by Bernard-Henri Levy, Prologue

4178UuNa76L[This book was lent to me by the president of the Jewish Club in my city of residence.  I recognized the author from his photo on the inside cover flap as someone I had just recently watched being interviewed on CNN, possibly about this recent publication  dated 2017.  As we often do with MUST READ endorsements, we’re featuring here what we call the “bookends” — the Prologue and the Epilogue — to whet your appetite, dear reader.  Sometimes we add excerpts or whole chapters, although we would rather that you add this to your personal collection of worthwhile book acquisitions.—Admin1.]
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PROLOGUE
 
It was 1979.
  I was thirty years old.
  The revolutionary era had signed its last in the killing fields of Cambodia.
  A scent of dry powder hung in the air over the great capitals, mingling with an insouciant sense that it was a good time to be alive.
  We were sure that we were at the apogee of the age in which God had died.
  It had been beautiful.
  It had been huge.
  Rarely had humanity seemed so radiant as in this century of doubt and skepticism, during which we had burned all of our idols, all of our religions, in the joyful fire of atheism.
  Or, rather no.  The temples, the devourers of men and destinies, were the pyre.  From Giordano Bruno to Nietzsche, and then from the death of God to that of Divine Man, there had been intrepid liberators who faced the blaze, some burning, some wielding torches—and we felt we were their heirs.
  A moment of rejoicing.
  An unparalleled triumph of freedom.
  That triumph cost countless dead and wounded.  It had required unprecedented acts of heroism.  But God’s fire had gone out.  The ashes had been scattered.  And we found ourselves alone, finally alone, in a world more suited to our wishes because (we thought) we had disenchanted it and could now savor the pure pleasure of being ourselves without fearing the slings and arrows of the censors.
  Anything was possible.
  Everything seemed to be permitted.
  I recall that time as a long and languorous Sabbath of the spirit.

 

But doubt gripped the less credulous among us.
  What if this was a deception?
  A trap?
  What if the coin had another side?
  What if a shadow of doubt, a new kind of doubt, forced us to doubt our previous doubt?
  What if, behind the funeral pyre of subjugating religion, behind the celebration of the universal  federation in which the tree of life was to have triumphed over the vultures of the moral order, a worried eye could discern the silhouettes of other, more-ancient gods that one had given up for dead but that were creeping back into the world?
  It was during this time that I met Emmanuel Levinas.
  And then, in the United States, the Catholic philosopher Rene Girard.
  A little later, I encountered Franz Rosenzweig’s great work, which had finally been translated into French.
  This was the time when I began to wonder, with these thinkers, in their footsteps, whether humanity could do without gods, if it could topple the supreme god without risking the return of the others, all the others, all those gods of ancient Indo-European paganism the even more pernicious modern, political gods—- Thor, Wotan, Prometheus unchained, hydras and dragons, the gods of race and history, of scourging nature and of science without limits, the damming of whose bloody invasiveness had required the full strength of the One God but of which nothing now blocked the return.
  Above all it was the time when a growing number of texts and signs began to suggest that we should not rule out the possibility that yesterday’s Judeo-Christian inquisitors might once have been, and might once again become, the inventors, the liberators, the saviors of a fragile and constantly imperiled idea, an idea that was again being surrounded by the dark tide of neo-pagan bestiality: man, man alone, that Adam who new Jewish intellectuals insisted (but who was listening?) was tenable only if conceived simultaneously as adama born of the earth and its dust? and as bria, sekkhel, or yech me-ain (created anew as an emanation of an unknowable and immeasurable intelligence).
  This is the time when, seized by a part of me of which I was unaware, grasped by a force that was instantly familiar but to which I had never before been exposed in the course of my career as a speaking being, I turned to the subject of Judaism and wrote a book called Le Testament de Dieu (The Testament of God).
 

 

 

It turned my intellectual life upside down.
  Had I not discovered, with such wonder, the Torah and then the Talmud, I might not have been able to continue writing.
  It’s hard to express the shock I felt at realizing that I had before me books that my hands had never held, my eyes had never beheld, but in which my name, that most intimate of intimacies, found not the accident of an origin or an occupation (Smith the smith; Miller the miller…) but the necessity of a place that followed in turn from a long chain of meaning divided into verses,  other proper names, acts to be accomplished, arguments to make or refute: a book of life in which a place had been made for me, springing—yes—from my name.
  Another thing about which I have not said enough is the feeling of indescribable glory that coursed through me, like a ray of light from within an opaque shell, when I understood that those pages contained not only the entire mental apparatus needed by someone seeking to close the parentheses of philosophical and political atheism without yielding to the murky appeal of a return to magic, occultism, and, at bottom, religion but also the resolution of most of the impasses into which my young, self had strayed, the answer to so many questions that my theoretical work had left hanging.  They also contained provisions for the human and political adventure that I had begun in Bangladesh and that I sensed was gathering force.
  I spoke that glory in French.
  I would utter the words la gloire des juifs without provocation or vanity, steeping myself in that beautiful word gloire, one of the loveliest in the French language—that word of Bossuet’s, favored by Racine for moments of grace and by Corneille for moments of strength, that word of Bach and Vivaldi, which I was listening to in those years, that word used by Chateaubriand, whom I have never tired of reading and rereading.
  I would repeat la gloire des juifs, delighting in that red word, or orange-red, loving the feel of its guttural attack, with the hardest of our French consonants followed by the lightening the brightening of that “L”, which sparkled with so many poetic memories, then flaring through the “OI”, where French forgives itself for being nearly unaccented, and ending with the rugged “R”, as if to contain, after all, that effusion of light.
  But even though I was not yet speaking the phrase in Jewish terms, I had begun thinking it that way: awkwardly; painstakingly; putting the full resources of my soul into my first readings of Rashi and Maimonides and soon of Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin, Franz Rosenzweif, Nachman of Breslov, and many others.
  The hod of Jewish splendour.
  The karnei hod, the rays of light and glory, that flooded Moses’s face upon his descent from Mount Sinai.
  And the kavod, derived from kaved and also signifying glory, weight, and price—of a Jewish life not entirely unfulfilled.
  And the me’hail el hail, literally “from strength into strength”, that propels and accompanies the beauty, the brilliance, and (once again) the glory that emanate from destiny.
  And the blue of the sky and of the kings of Israel, with its lighter but ore volatile tint, the color of quivering air.
  And the imperceptible white of their crown.
  And the pale gold of the seraphim, or the purer, invisible gold of the cherubim on the cover of the holy ark.
  The glory of the Jews, like the light gleaming in lines of rain falling to the ground, like shafts of sun over a misty land, like the trail of sparks left by the masters whose wisdom I was absorbing.
  I knew that sense of glory would never leave me.
  I understood that I was experiencing a source of knowledge that would accompany me to the end of my days.
.    .   .
Indeed, it did  not stop.
  I remained faithful to the work of Levinas.
  I resumed my conversation with a young master, Benny Levy, a sort of Jewish imam who concealed himself for a generation.
  And then, in the company of several wise men who guided my first steps into the jungle of the text, I studied as much as I could, but not enough, never enough, with the handicap of not mastering the language, a language I still have not mastered.
  Nevertheless, the Talmud was mine.
The Bible was mine—-as jealous, demanding, and insatiable as she is for every man.
  When writing about Sartre or art, about The Iliad or The Odyssey of a novelistic hero in a race with the devil, about the decapitation of an American journalist in Karachi, about the United States, about Baudelaire, about France, or about Europe; when pursuing, from Bangladesh to Iraq and Afghanistan, from the Libyan desert to the mountains of Kurdistan, the dialogue with Islam that has been one of the most persistent themes of my life; or when embarking, in response to Frantz Fanon, in search of those wars that are forgotten only by those who have also forgotten the messianic music of the time, the Jewish thread was always there.
  And the truth is that almost nothing of what I said and did during those decades seems completely intelligible to me unless I include the inner work on Judaism that I was pursuing in parallel—-although not necessarily in secret.
 

 

 

It is the feeling of having “advanced”, as Benny Levy was saying to me in the last conversation of ours that I can recall?
  Is it the erosion of the Jewish exception, which I see wavering everywhere—not only, alas, among anti-Semites?
  Is it, in fact, the return of anti-Semitism?
  Is it the deepening of our misunderstanding with Muslims, my brothers in Adam?
  Is it fear in the face of creeping nihilism and the prospect of new waves of destruction?
  Or is it the feeling of having entered into one of those dark ages during which it becomes necessary to separate what must be separated and to reconcile what can be reconciled?
  Whatever the answer, I wanted to come back to this.
  I wanted to provoke a new encounter between my two tongues: the French of my mother and father and the Jewish language, which was theirs, as well, and which they spoke even more rarely than I.
  I decided, in other words, to return to the questions that had first taken hold of me almost forty years ago and never left.
  In these pages one will find reflections on the criminal fury of anti-Semitism that is brewing, on its new forms, and on the not in considerable fear that it inspires in me.
  As well as others on the State of Israel, on the reasons for defending it, and on why, having existed for a human lifetime, it is a litmus test for Jews and non-Jews alike.
  And, still more, I will try to untangle why I, a Jew put my head and body, not once but many times, into certain countries where no being is under greater threat than the Jew and where hostility to the Jew is like a second religion.
  But I will devote the essence of this book to the search for, and defense of, a certain idea of man and God, of history and time, of power, voice, light, sovereignty, revolt, memory, and nature—-an idea that contains what I call, in homage to one of the few really great writers to have understood some of its mystery, the genius of Judaism.   
[Here’s the text in the inside cover of the book jacket):
From world-renowned public intellectual
Bernard-Henri Levy comes an incisive and provocative look at the heart of Judaism.
For more than four decades, Bernard-Henri Levy has been a singular figure on the world stage—one of the great moral voices of our time.  Now Europe’s foremost philosopher and activist confronts his spiritual roots and the religion that has always inspired and shaped him—but that he has never fully reckoned with.
The Genius of Judaism is a breathtaking new vision and understanding of what it means to be a Jew, a vision quite different from the one we’re used to.  It is rooted in the Talmudic traditions of argument and conflict, rather than biblical commandments, borne out in struggle and study, not in blind observance.  At the very heart of the matter is an obligation to the other, to the dispossessed, and to the forgotten, an obligation that, as Levy vividly recounts, he has sought to embody over decades of championing “lost causes”, from Bosnia to Africa’s forgotten wars, from Libya to the Kurdish Peshmerga’s desperate fight against the Islamic State, a battle raging as we speak.  Levy offers a fresh, surprising critique of a new and stealthy form of anti-Semitism on the rise as well as a provocative defense of Israel from the left.  He reveals the overlooked Jewish roots of Western democratic ideals and confronts the current Islamist threat while intellectually dismantling it.  Jews are not a “chosen people”, Levy explains, but a “treasure” whose spirit must continue to inform moral thinking and courage today.
Levy’s  most passionate book, and in may ways his most personal, The Genius of Judaism is a great, profound, and hypnotic intellectual reckoning—indeed a call to arms—by one of the keenest and most insightful writers in the world. 

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