Public Enemies (19 page)

But let’s get to the bottom of this.

The reason why I’m telling you these stories is to let you know two things: first, that in relation to all that, those old times and the scenes connected with them, yes, it’s true that I’ve taken a “journey back,” which hasn’t escaped you and which I certainly don’t wish to play down. Second, this “return,” strictly speaking, has nothing to do with some sort
of mystical attraction or indeed religious conversion of the sort you imagined.

The first point is obvious to anyone who reads my work a bit. My unconditional support for Israel. My intransigence, which I hope is unwavering, whenever the old anti-Semitism rears its ugly head. (On this point, I’d like to mention in passing the decisive influence of another comrade, unjustly forgotten: Pierre Goldman, a writer and martyr, a small-time crook and a great wit who used to say that even Jewish jokes were unbearable when told by a non-Jew.) … My constant recourse, which I believe has become more insistent over the years, to the texts of the tradition (Bible, Talmud, etc.). Hebrew, which I’ve learned a little. My reading and rereading of Levinas. The institute of Levinas studies, which I set up seven years ago in Jerusalem with Benny Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut, a quite unexpected development in my life. When I put all that together, I’m forced to admit that they add up to a combination of features that make of me overall a rather “positive” Jew, the opposite of the Jew of negation Jean-Claude Milner spoke of, and whose portrait Sartre painted in his
Réflexions sur la question juive
, and which I was programmed to become by my family.

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 reading of Plato, at the same time as he encountered the dead ends of the “political conception of the world,” that led
to the storm that he called his “turning.” And then there’s myself, if you allow me to say so, who came to a reading of the Jewish text at the end of an intellectual—I almost said conceptual—journey, whose major stops were philosophical ones …

So you understand, don’t you? When I talk about
ruah
, when I contrast the narrative of Genesis with that of
De rerum natura
, when I say that I’m more a follower of Jerusalem than of Athens, I’m not juxtaposing faith with reason, spiritualism with materialism, a “legendary” revelation with your “set of rebuttable assertions”—I’m merely juxtaposing one book with another, beyond all that, in that zone that’s very vague and yet decisive and in which, for each speaking being, the philosophical and life choices we make are located.

At the end of the day, there aren’t many “fundamental” books.

There are very few “universal” books in the sense intended by Borges when he spoke about books that contained other books, indeed encompassed the whole library.

There’s Homer.

There are the Old and New Testaments.

There’s Lucretius’s poem, and I feel that I’m honoring him by placing him in this company.

There are also, depending on each person’s inclination and language, the
Divine Comedy
, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, or the
Summa
of St. Thomas Aquinas.

And I’m saying simply that for me, this is how it works. I know that there’s nothing better than the
Iliad
to see what war is really about, the extermination, the destruction of cities. I know that Greek thought, in particular that of the Epicureans, can be very useful in thinking about free will. I’m certain that there would be no human rights without the highly audacious Christian hypothesis of man as a creature in
God’s likeness and therefore inviolable. But I also believe that in order to think about what makes me a human being and connects me with other humans, to understand what, to use your own words, distinguishes people from animals and is the reason why my compassion for a rabbit caught in a trap will never be of the same order as what I feel for the inhabitants of Sarajevo under siege, to provide a foundation for that idea of human dignity on which I’ve staked my belief and so needed the philosophical resources to defend and illustrate, I’ve found nothing to match the lesson of Rabbi Akiva and Emmanuel Levinas.

It is there, at a level that goes beyond (or is perhaps more basic than) the question of whether or not we’re living in the “truth.”

It is there, in that region of the soul where positivism (or what you call that) is bound to lose its footing.

And none of this has anything to do with either “disloyalty” or “metaphysics.” It’s axiomatic, truly axiomatic: these are the first principles of thought, indemonstrable, or, as in arithmetic, irreducible and from which, for each one of us, everything else proceeds.

Your letter ends so abruptly, dear Bernard-Henri, that at first I wondered if there was not a paragraph—or indeed several paragraphs—missing, but maybe not; we are on such difficult terrain that I feel as though I’m boring a tunnel, in total darkness, and I can hear you drilling on the other side, a few feet away; but we can hope for a stray pickax to burst through the seam of flint, for a sudden dazzling light. And if we are not yet equal to the task as
intellectuals
, we have at least broached the one subject on which I believe we can shed some faint light for our contemporaries. Because, as both you and I are aware, the
return of the religious
that looms today looks about as friendly as the Incredible Hulk; but we are no less aware that it is nonetheless inevitable. Obviously, it is impossible for me to
establish
that for a society to cut itself off from the religious is tantamount to suicide; it is simply an intuition, but a persistent intuition.

We approach the subject from very different standpoints, at least as far as I understand from what you wrote about those Jews who broke with the religion of their forefathers and refused to become members of the Catholic Church in their host countries. What did they have left? Very little, apart from the communist faith. And when that too crumbled
beneath the weight of evidence? Well, it must have been difficult. Go
back to their beginnings
?

What was the point of all the effort preparing for the
École Normale
? I can understand why your father took it badly.

There are, of course, the Jewish texts; but if you’ll permit me, there is something else. I very much like the way you talk about your maternal uncles, Moïse, Hyamine … I can picture them, these Jews dressed in black, when the Sabbath was over, drinking their weekly anisette; in a few lines you manage to make them sound infinitely touching. “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob; not of the philosophers and of the learned.” It was Pascal’s “Mémorial,” too, that brought me to him; a devastating poetic thunderbolt, unlike anything in the French literature of the time.

It’s like in Dostoyevsky—“a single beautiful childhood memory, and you are saved.”
^*
But what you have to understand now is that, when it comes to childhood memories like this, I do not have a single one. You are right, France is much less secular than people claim; in certain regions (Brittany being the most obvious), you need only scratch the surface and you find yourself in profoundly Catholic territory. Other regions, like Burgundy and the Southwest, on the other hand, have long since been dechristianized; and the most important fact (it is its historic failing) is that the Church never managed to regain the confidence of the working classes. The last time I was in Paris, I was passing that little church in the
Sixth Arrondissement where Ozanam
^*
and Lacordaire
^†
once preached. They at least understood that if the Church did not break the unnatural covenant it had made with the bourgeoisie and the employers, if it could not forge ties with the working classes, it was signing its own death warrant. They tried, they preached in the wilderness, they failed, and by the time the Church finally woke up from its long sleep, it was too late.

So, in my family, no matter which way I turn, no matter how far back I look, I can see nothing akin to a religious tradition. I can, on the other hand, see a certain communist faith. I have occasionally read in a newspaper that I was “brought up by communist grandparents.” This is both absolutely true and absolutely untrue. My grandparents hadn’t read Marx or Lenin or anything like that. He hadn’t even read Maurice Thorez
^‡
and I’m not sure that they ever flicked through the Party’s election program. But they voted communist at every election, that much is true, and I don’t think they ever thought of voting anything else. It was exactly what is called a
class vote
.

Such faith, not fed by an intimate knowledge of the texts, is fragile; and my father, as soon as he got rich, as soon as he found himself
out of his class
, it disappeared in the blink of an eye. When I think about it, I never saw him show any real, genuine interest in it. When I think about it, I never saw him
take a real, a genuine interest in
any
political issue. This is slightly frightening, because it means that with me, we are dealing with second-generation
absolute atheists
—not simply religious atheists but political atheists. When you get to this point, atheism is not joyous or heroic or liberating; there is nothing anticlerical about it, nor is there anything
militant
either. It is something cold, something desperate, lived like a pure incapacity; a white, impenetrable space where one advances only with difficulty, a permanent winter.