Recollection, Zakhor, Anamnesis: On Ira Stone's Reading Levinas/Reading Talmud.

The greatest problem which currently faces modern or postmodern Jewish thought in America is its lack of relevance to the Jewish community at large. There are good historical reasons for Jews today to be suspicious of anything that falls under the banner of "thought." Looking back upon the venerable tradition of Jewish philosophy stretching from Moses Mendelssohn to Emmanuel Levinas, we see a tradition of apologetics. These German Jews and their French heirs are not simply defending Judaism to the dominant culture. Additionally,

the way in which they treat Judaism is determined by the approaches and the questions of that culture, and notably its philosophers: Wolff, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, etc. By using another culture's tools to examine Judaism, the apologists risk a complete loss of the natural particularity of the Jewish tradition. In an age in which any threat to the vitality of Judaism appears to run even a slight risk of handing Hitler a posthumous victory, [1] this will simply not do. As Arthur Green wrote in his 1994 programmatic statement for American Jewish theology: "[s]haken to our root by the experience of the Holocaust, our religious language took the predictable route of self-preservation by turning inward, setting aside this universalist agenda as non-essential to our own survival." For this reason, Green chooses to reject this entire Mendelssohn-to-Levinas tradition in favor of a neo-Hasidic stance, favoring the broad contours of the individual's prayer over and above the nitty-gritty of legal (and even non-legal) textwork, and omitting all reference to the Christians of the philosophical tradition. [2]

Despite the good reasons behind an approach such as Green's, this will to forget the dominant strand of modern Jewish thought is shocking. Judaism is, among many other things, a religion of memory, of zakhor. Memory is the fuel of the covenantal relationship between God and Israel. It is now commonplace for studies of Judaism to point out that the liturgical cycle, part of the system of mitzvot (commandments), reenacts sacred Jewish history and thus brings the past into the present. Most notably, in the Passover liturgy, the Jew of today is commanded to see him- or herself as one of the people at Mt. Sinai. Other mitzvot, such as that of fairness to strangers (Exod. 22:20), are explained through the memory of enslavement. [3] Jewish vitality is a product of binding together the moments of the past, with all their tensions, in the present moment. Secular Jewish history is thus always also sacred history. The sacred history of Israel has not ended, and will never end. Hence, to forget any moment of the past -- even the ones that are at odds with whatever our individual values or ideologies might be -- is to threaten the organic and sacred essence of Judaism. It should not be a question of choosing the Judaism of the Eastern European Hasidim over and above that of the Western European philosophers. It should be a question of retrieving this latter historical trajectory for our present situation. The so-called universalism of philosophy should speak from within the particularity of the Jewish tradition, addressing the concerns of contemporary American Jews inside and outside the ivory tower who seek to engage the tradition at an authentic level.

Ira Stone's Reading Levinas/Reading Talmud (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1998. 176pp. $34.95 [cloth]) is, in my view, the first popular book to take on this project, and its publication is thus a landmark in Judaica at the turn of the century. [4] Ignoring the question of whether Derridean deconstruction is indebted to Judaism in any way, Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) is the most recent representative of the Jewish philosophical strand apparently rejected by Green and others. Trained as a phenomenologist under Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Levinas developed a phenomenology which uncovered an ethical and precognitive stratum at the basis of experience. He considered this to be a reversal of the "Greek" philosophical tradition that tyrannizes the Other, ignores the singularity of persons, and overvalues autonomous ethics. Yet Levinas was not simply a philosopher. In a series of commentaries on Talmudic passages, he endeavored to show the parallels between his phenomenological thinking and th e Jewish worldview. Thus, in line with the Athens-Jerusalem dichotomy that has been with us since Tertullian, it is the "Jew" who appears when the "Greek" is reversed. [5] In what is now the most often cited of these commentaries, "The Temptation of Temptation," Levinas amplifies Israel's response to the covenant at Sinai -- na'aseh ve-nishma' ("we will do and [then] we will hear" [Exod. 24:7]) -- into Judaism's unconscious realization that the doing of ethics precedes and outweighs the hearing of rational reflection. [6]

Levinas uses Talmud as a confirmatory tool for his phenomenological thinking, and his philosophical prejudices at times lead him into problems. For example, in the interpretation of na'aseh ve-nishma', Levinas claims this to be a "secret of angels," and associates this with true wisdom. Yet the Talmud often portrays angels as imps who are jealous of God's special relationship with Israel. One of these portrayals occurs in B. Shabbat 88b-89a, directly following the passage which Levinas analyzes. [7]

And R. Yehoshua b. Levi said, "At the hour when Moses went up to the height [of Sinai], the ministering angels spoke before the Lord-blessed-be-He, Lord of the universe! What motive does one born of woman have with us?' He replied to them, 'He has come to accept my Torah.' They [the angels] spoke before him, 'Precious and hidden, saved by you for 974 generations preceding [the one in] which the world was created, [and] you seek to give it to flesh and blood!'"

Moses ends up calming the angels' jealousy by cheekily pointing out that the commandments of the Decalogue could not possibly be meant for them: "What is written in it? Honor your father and mother.' Do you have any?" I imagine a sly smirk on Moses' face when he stumps the angels here, saying "Aha! I thought not." It is not a question of angels being wiser than humans. It is not even a question of humans being wiser than angels. It is simply a question of God's love for Israel; no more, and certainly no less. Narratives such as these make it difficult to give any epistemological value to the Talmud in the manner that Levinas does. In short, Levinas tries too hard to correlate his beloved Talmud to his equally beloved phenomenology.

Stone's book, primarily a series of Talmudic interpretations done in a Levinasian style, is better at respecting the integrity of the Talmud than Levinas's own interpretations. (I feel that Stone's constant deference to Levinas is simply a healthy modesty.) Whereas Levinas sought to find phenomenology in the Talmud, Stone seeks to find Talmud in Levinas's phenomenology. In a twenty-five-page prefatory section entitled "Theory -- A Levinasian Dictionary," Stone does not attempt to explain why Levinas makes the claims that he does. Rather, he succinctly and successfully encapsulates Levinas's difficult arguments about the primacy of the Other revealed in his or her face, the way in which suffering contests the autonomous will, the importance of social responsibility, and the nature of love. (This section also provides an excellent introduction to Levinas for beginners. [8]) Philosophers will no doubt be dismayed at this, but proving Levinas's philosophical cogency is not Stone's goal. Rather, Stone's reading o f Levinas is one in which he elucidates the way in which he finds his own view of Judaism before him as in a mirror.

Here I want to recall the shock of recognition that occurred when I first read these ideas in Levinas's work. Was he not describing the Judaism that I always knew? Was he not translating the stories of creation and revelation into a language characterized by the use of phrases like "the interruption in pure being by the commanding other"? Wasn't this language of responsibility precisely the language of Abraham's struggle on behalf of the innocent people of Sodom and Gomorrah? Wasn't Levinas translating the most profound insights discovered through the People of Israel's ongoing encounter with the mystery of the other into a language amenable to "Greek" readers? (15)

Levinasian theory is, for Stone, predicated on Jewish experience. The "Theory" section lays out the conclusions for which the premises can be found in the final section, "The Practice of Talmud -- The Readings," which comprises the bulk of the book. This section is constituted of "imaginative" (33) readings of ten very carefully selected Talmud passages, which do nothing less than demonstrate a view of Judaism as a ritually rich ethical monotheism, from the Talmud itself. This is arguably a novum in Jewish thought. Painting in large brush strokes, one can claim that works of Jewish thought are either a focus on ethics which disparages ritual and rabbinics as myth or mere ceremony, or a focus on ritual which disparages ethical claims as the technique of assimilation, [9] Middle ways are rare -- one might cite Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption here -- but even then they are rarely accessible.

In introducing the reader to the Talmud, Stone's language is that of the individualism of contemporary spirituality (46): "[The] imaginative reading [is that] through which the reader discovers in the text its meaning in his or her own life as a participant in the discussion. Here is where practice metamorphoses into art." Stone does not stay with this language, but rather uses it as a lure in his patient and exemplary guiding of the reader into the Talmudic world.

Any worldly prejudices of the reader are swept away in an analysis of a humorous passage in B. Berkahot 8a which in Stone's view (57) claims that "prayer humbles philosophy, teaching it to laugh at its own obsession with consistency, or to keep silent and stay out of the way." Stone thus clears a space for his often surprising interpretations of what might otherwise be dry and boring selections from the Talmud. He takes his reader through analyses of the righteousness of the religious life, the divine spark within the individual (a theme usually associated with Kabbalah and not Talmud), the importance of attending to the needs of the poor, the experiences of suffering and repentance, and mourning the loss of the Temple. And each reading leads smoothly into the next. The claims of each of the chapters are senseless without the humbling of philosophy, which Stone has performed in his first Talmudic reading. The analysis of the significance of Rosh Hashanah (85-92) flows into an analysis of prophecy (93-102), w hich centers around Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, the account of which is read in the synagogue on this holiday. In turn, the analysis of prophecy leads into an analysis of what the prophet calls for, a repentance which reaffirms the Sinaitic covenant despite the absence of God (103-16). In a masterful technique, Stone is doing his readers the ultimate service of helping them construct a Jewish woridview. And the reader is almost unaware of it! Little by little, the language of popular American piety disappears, until the final chapter (on the anticipation of redemption) relishes the vocabulary of tradition. The slight appearance which Levinasian language makes here -- "God's name is missing from the megillah [the Book of Esther] because it isn't needed; the face of a human being is there instead" -- does not even seem to be a dilution of the Talmud. Stone has made it come out of the text of the Talmud itself.

This is not to say that Stone's analyses are not without some slight problems. His prose is simultaneously quick and sparing, with the result that important points can sometimes swim by the reader. (Or perhaps this is intentional, so that the reader can become accustomed to the pattern of reading and rereading which typifies Talmudic study.) In addition, Stone does not always repeat the Talmud's references to Biblical verses. This leads to an unwieldy situation in which the reader should optimally have a Bible and even a Talmud (!) by his or her side, in order to supply the complete context of the passages under consideration. Finally, Stone does not always settle the customary reading of passages before he enters into his imaginative interpretation. As a result, the reader is not always able to understand the basis of Stone's linkages, and may wish that Stone had spent more time on the inadequacies of the dominant interpretations. But these are not the problems that I imagine other reviewers will have with the book. The impropriety of the philosopher's objection has already been noted above; if this is a book for philosophers, it is only a book for philosophers to humble their craft, now inadequate in the face of these issues. No doubt, there will also be Talmudists who think that Stone's treatment of the Talmud is too free, too distant from the Jew who endeavors to live his life according to halakhah. [10] It may indeed be the case that Stone plays down the role of halakhah in order to be more accommodating to those readers who are seeking a mildly or even non-halakhic way to enter the tradition. Nevertheless, Stone addresses this objection in two places. The first occurs near the beginning of his middle section, "Method." [11]

Much of the Talmud consists of legal argumentation. Although the text will not often take a final position on what the law is, it will always assume that its legal rulings are important to you, the reader, as a law-abiding, or as we say, an observant, Jew. That is, the Talmud is addressed to Jews for whom the yoke of the commandments is real. (38)

Thus, when in the reading of B. Shabbat 21a-22a, in the chapter entitled "What Is Hanukkah?," Stone writes (139) that "when Hanukkah was observed as a ritual re-creating the sacrificial observances of the Temple, it lacked an important element...the ethical dimension," this should not be understood as an attempt on Stone's part to replace ritual with ethics. Rather, "only if the celebration of Hanukkah combined the views of Belt Shammai [ritual] and Beit Hillel [ethics] could it take its place in the sacred calendar of Judaism."

Stone's Talmudist critics have some Talmud passages on their side. At B. Berakhot 8a (adjacent to the passage which Stone analyzes in his first reading, "Prayer and the End of Metaphysics"), we read that "since the day that the Temple was destroyed, the Holy One, blessed be He, has no place in this world but the four cubits of the halakhah.... The Lord loves the gates that are distinguished through halakhah more than the houses of study." The houses of study, the battey ha-midrash, are the sites for the aggadic (narrative, non-legal) modes of interpretation which Stone appears to favor. The passage seems to be claiming that they are not as favorable to God as stricter, more literal modes of interpretations are. Yet we cannot be too hasty. For this anti-aggadic passage is itself aggadic -- it gives no laws, and it is a rather technical midrash on Psalm 87:2. [12] The irony of using aggadah to critique aggadah should make us cautious. In addition, a few pages earlier in the tractate (B. Berakhot 6b), the Talmu d seems to be telling us that ritual action for ritual's sake is insufficient, the very message that Stone is trying to communicate in his book. Here, there is a series of examples in which the rabbis claim that the true value of the commandments lie not in their observance, but in the social and spiritual results of that observance. Most notably, Raba claims that the merit of repeating a tradition, legal or nonlegal, lies in improving the understanding of it; Mar Zutra claims that the merit of a fast day lies in the charity that is given out as a result. Hence, Stone's own rather loose interpretation of various Talmud passages -- notably "Translation and the Limits of Logic" (58-71, on B. Bava Metzia 20a-21a), which amplifies a discussion of the status of lost legal documents into a argument that the purpose of the halakhot on this matter is to claim that the validity of the covenant between God and Israel depends upon the nations' perception of Jewish righteousness -- is itself authorized by the Talmud. Sto ne certainly does not need recourse to Levinas to make his claim.

Stone's goal in linking aggadic modes of interpretations to a series of largely halakhic texts is thus to give observant Jewish life an extra-legal dimension which, if not lacking, is at least not readily apparent to the majority of his readers. This point goes to the heart of Stone's hermeneutical method of recollecting these extra-legal strata of the halakhic life. In the remainder of this essay, I will elucidate this method of recollection, show how Stone uses it in one of his Talmudic readings, and then reengage the question of a universalist undercurrent to Jewish thought.

The Talmudic passage which Stone analyzes throughout the "Method" section of his book, B. Megillah 2b-3a, deals with a rabbinic claim that the prophets established the rule that certain Hebrew letters have a different form when they appear at the end of a word. Other rabbis object with two very sensible points: (1) the Torah given at Sinai is complete, and thus nothing could or should be added to it, even by the prophets; (2) the final form of one of these letters (mem) already appears on the tablets which Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai. Tradition -- for Jews, the continuing of revelation -- claims that these letters both are and are not new. Trying to reconcile the two points of view, the Talmud claims (43) "that this knowledge was known in the time of the Torah but was then forgotten. The Prophets thus only rediscovered it." The prophets believed their discovery to be new, but in reality, "nothing new really happened." Stone notes (47-48) that this passage of the Talmud itself performs this rediscovery of truth. Hence, in our reading of the Talmud by which we stretch revelation into the present by becoming participants in the discussion, we ourselves recollect truths that we had forgotten. As Stone writes (48), "the Prophet and the exegete are, thus, in the same business -- that of recovering lost knowledge."

Stone turns to this passage, and the theory of recollection contained within it, in order to explain the problem which lies at the heart of rabbinics. If the Torah is self-sufficient -- and it must be, or else it (and God) are imperfect -- than why comment on it at all? Does not the very fact that the "written" Torah needs elucidation and commentary testify to its incompleteness? Does this not threaten the very essence of the covenant? The only answer to this can be that the full dimension of the Torah has been forgotten over time, and it is up to rabbis and later interpreters -- us -- to rearticulate its original fullness. But to move from one dimension to another requires the very leaps of imagination which Stone makes throughout his book.

For Stone, recollection appears to be a path of fostering a relationship with God. This is most apparent in the best of his Talmudic readings, "The Search for Meaning and the Meaning of the Search" (72-79), which deals with B. Pesachim 7b-8a. The Talmud passage opens as follows:

Our Rabbis taught: One may not search [for chametz, leaven, before Passover] either by the light of the sun, or by the light of the moon, or by the light of a torch, save by the light of a lamp, because the light of a lamp is suitable for searching. And though there is no proof of the matter, there is a memory (zekher) of this thing, for it is said, "No leaven shall be found in your houses for seven days" (Exod. 12:19), and it is said, "He searched, beginning with the oldest [and found the goblet in Benjamin's sack]" (Gen. 44:12), and it is said, "At that time, I will search Jerusalem with lamps" (Zeph. 1:12), and it is said, "The lifebreath of man is the lamp of YHWH, revealing all his inmost parts" (Prov. 20:27).

In the standard Soncino translation of the Talmud, the word zekher is rendered as "hint," which makes no sense whatsoever. Zekher is actually a technical term meaning "mnemonic device," and the phrase "though there is no proof of it..." appears with some frequency in rabbinic literature. [13] Thus; the sequence of verses serves as a means of remembering the commandment about lamps. The original commandment to eliminate leaven "found" in the home is linked to another verse which includes both that word and "search"; the second verse is linked to a verse which includes both "search" and "lamps," and that in turn is linked to the verse from Proverbs. The Exodus-Genesis-Zephaniah-Proverbs sequence seems to have been quite popular and authoritative; it is repeated three times, one right after the other, in this section of the Talmud.

Stone's reading rests on two valid principles of Talmudic interpretation: (1) words in the Talmud, especially those referring to hermeneutical techniques, bear the weight of the full range of significations of their three-letter Hebrew root, and (2) the rabbis did not cite biblical verses idly, but within their narrative context. Thus, Stone reinterprets zekher both as "symbol" and as "remembrance" (which are other dimensions of the root z-kh-r, which seems originally to have had a connotation .of marking the importance of something). As symbol. Stone claims (73) that the zekher of the search for leaven must be "a symbol for a spiritual process." But what spiritual process? Here, Stone turns to the second verse in the mnemonic chain, and remembers its context,. the conflict between Joseph and his brothers. This choice cannot be arbitrary. There are plenty of verses which include some form of the Hebrew verb "to find"; why choose this one? What is important about the Joseph story in the context of Passover? Here, the leap of imagination must enter into the interpretive picture.

The story itself - the envy and anger between brothers, leading to slavery; the pain and punishment of the perpetrators, leading to revelation and reconciliation -- provides us with a "memory" of what we are looking for when we search for chametz. We are looking for just that pride, envy, and unconcern for our sibling (Joseph) and our parent (Jacob). (74)

The interpretation of the verse is thickened not only by the incursion of the ethical dimension, but also by the fact that the enslavement of the Israelites (part of the Passover memory) is conditioned by their migrating to Egypt. In turn, the Egyptian situation of the Israelites is conditioned by Joseph's brothers selling him to the Ishmaelites (Gen. 37:28). Stone then turns to the last two verses of the mnemonic chain. From the Zephaniah verse, he points out that the searching for chametz is an imitation of God's own searching for impurities in Israel. From the Proverbs verse, he gathers that Israel's search is part and parcel of this divine search. Hence, the close relationship between God and Israel -- especially at the time of Passover, when the clear love of God for Israel is remembered -- becomes figured as "the light of God within us." Stone thus manages to convert a pre-Passover chore ("Honey, can you get the portable lamp out of the attic?") into an experience with overtones of mysticism and social justice. Through the multiple senses of zekher, Stone develops a means for communicating to his readers a spiritually rich account of Jewish ritual (76, emphasis mine): "Bedikat chametz [the search for leaven] is intended to force us, through the power of ritual, to discover the light of God within us and to turn it on those character traits that inevitably lead to slavery."

The Jewishness of Stone's imaginative Talmud readings is thus not in doubt. Indeed, in drawing Levinasian conclusions from his own readings of the Talmud without the aid of phenomenology, Stone has cut off at the pass those critics who might (incorrectly) see a kinder, gentler form of assimilation in Levinas's phenomenological path to a view of Judaism as ethical monotheism. Nevertheless, a philosopher who sacrifices his or her craft in the face of Stone's Talmudic readings might still have the nagging feeling that the style of his hermeneutic sounds rather familiar. As Stone was shocked to recognize Judaism in the writings of Levinas, I was shocked to recognize the Platonic doctrine of recollection, anamnesis, in Stone's own approach to the Talmud. It would be imprudent to push this recognition of similarity too far. After all, it is Plato himself who writes in the Sophist (231a) that there is also a similarity "between a wolf and a dog, the wildest thing there is and the gentlest. If you're going to be saf e, you have to be especially careful about similarities." [14] Nevertheless, for a point of view such as Stone's which claims to be non-philosophical, even a slight similarity with an allegedly philosophical doctrine deserves comment. For any such similarity threatens the argument that philosophy must humble itself before God, and thereby threatens the larger project of bringing together the discourses of the universal and the particular. If Jewish recollection (zakhor) is akin to Greek recollection (anamnesis), if I can gain equal authenticity from the Platonic dialogues and from the Talmud, why would I need both? The answer to this question requires a closer look at the Platonic doctrine of recollection.

This doctrine first appears in the Meno. [15] In this dialogue, Socrates discusses the nature of virtue with Meno, a young, beautiful, impatient and lazy student of the sophist Gorgias. Specifically, they are discussing whether virtue is teachable. Socrates points out that this question cannot first be answered without knowing what virtue is. After poking holes in Meno's attempts to define virtue, the dialogue turns to epistemology. As Meno points out, if they cannot even define virtue, how can anyone be virtuous? How can one strive for what one does not know? Socrates expresses Meno's paradox in the following manner:

I know what you mean, Meno. Do you see what a disputatious argument you're bringing down on us -- how it's impossible for a person to search either for what he knows or for what he doesn't? He couldn't search for what he knows, for he knows it, and no one in that condition needs to search. On the other hand, he couldn't search for what he doesn't know, for he won't even know what to search for. (80e)

Socrates invokes the doctrine of recollection in order to resolve the paradox. The paradox makes clear that knowledge cannot come from the sensible world; if it were to be the case, there could be no way that the mind could turn raw sense-data into cognitive claims. [16] Thus, knowledge must come from within. Given the immortality of the soul (in accordance with the culture of Greek piety or "religion" [17]), Socrates claims that the individual soul has already learnt everything but has forgotten this knowledge in its embodied state. The process of learning is thus one of recollecting this knowledge, and it knows no bounds:

For seeing that the whole of nature is akin and the soul has learnt everything, there's nothing to prevent someone who recollects -- what people call learning -- just one thing, from discovering everything else, if he's courageous and doesn't give up searching. For searching and learning are just recollection. (81d)

Famously, Socrates then goes on to demonstrate to Meno that even Meno's own uneducated slave-boy can recollect knowledge of simple geometrical axioms and deductions. [18]

The similarity to Stone's account is still, at this point, slight. Here we just find a similarity in theme (the recovery of lost knowledge). Socrates makes a brief comment that every natural element in the world is imbricated in every other, from which one can make an imaginative leap to the rabbinic belief in a similar imbrication between every verse in the Hebrew Bible. Yet this leap might be too hasty; the Meno gives no evidence at this point that wisdom or virtue is divinely revealed.

Such a point does come, however, at the close of the dialogue, in a passage which has sharply divided commentators on Plato. After getting Meno to admit that virtue is neither innate nor teachable, Socrates concludes that virtuous statesmen are only virtuous because they reach the right opinion through divine dispensation (99c): "they are no different from soothsayers or seers -- for these too say many true things in their trances without knowing what they are talking about," and as such they deserve to be called divine. Here, Socrates' invocation of the divine is meant to be entirely ironic. Socrates is ridiculing the statesmen of his day who think that they are virtuous but are not. Nevertheless, Socrates repeats his conclusion (l00b) that "virtue apparently comes to people, when it does, by divine dispensation (theia moira)." There is some reason to believe that this too is ironic. [19] After all, Meno likes this definition, and Meno is not a person with whom the reader of the dialogue should identify. Ye t Socrates' next sentence casts a different light on his argument: "But we shan't have clear knowledge about it, until before searching for how virtue comes to people we first try to search out what it is in itself." Plato thus makes a connection for his reader between divine dispensation and the search for knowledge, the very search which Socrates identified with recollection earlier in the dialogue. This link marks the key difference between this use of "divine dispensation" and its earlier uses in the dialogue, which are not associated with the recollective process. Virtue is thus subtly defined as recollection, and its meaning originates with the divine. The difference between the statesman and the philosopher is that the statesman believes that s/he is in possession of fully extrapolated knowledge, while the philosopher realizes that his or her beliefs are only the beginning stages of a very long (if not infinite) path of acquiring knowledge. As Kathleen Wilkes has written, "virtue is not only the produc t, it is also the process of inquiry. This is a note that resounds through [Plato's] Apology: the chief demand made by virtue is that one must search unceasingly for it." [20]

More similarities with Stone's account of recollection show themselves. Good philosophy, "Greek" and "Jew," is humble. It may even be humbled by prayer, as one might surmise from the prayers which can be found scattered throughout the dialogues (for example, the prayer to Pan and the gods which concludes the Phaedrus). [21] At the very least, it is humbled by a recognition that the philosophical enterprise is performed in a religious context. To speak in the language of the association which funds this journal, religion is the intellectual life. Here, then, we have a little more reason to make an imaginative leap, this time from the Greek phrase "divine dispensation" to the concept of revelation. For both Plato and Stone's view of Judaism, the mere facticity of revelation is not self-sufficient. Divine dispensation must be tested through the dialectical questioning which typifies the exercise of reason, as exhibited in the conversations between Socrates and Meno and between Socrates and the slave-boy. Indeed , there is some reason to conclude that the supernatural voice within Socrates (the daimonion) is also subjected to such dialectical testing. [22] Similarly, Stone's opening example of B. Megillah 2b-3a in the "Method" section shows that revelation itself must be tested by dialectical claims, in the interest of searching for religious viewpoints which include both the original revelation and the believer's objection. Under no circumstances is either Stone or Socrates contravening the rabbinic understanding of na'aseh ve-nishma' that belief precedes rational exploration. In both scenarios, it is the depth of belief in the trustworthiness of the revealed message that occasions rational exploration. The divine spark ignites the mind.

The remarkability of Stone's analysis now comes further into relief. His patient recollection of the spiritual context of the halakhic life through his Talmudic readings has uncovered elements of the "universalist" and "assimilationist" form of Jewish thought which claims the message of Judaism is substantively the same as the message of the Greeks. Yet while the formal similarity between Judaism and Greek philosophy has been uncovered, there is not yet any similarity in content. Most obviously, the doctrine of recollection has not appeared to have any applicability to the sphere of ethics. And the backbone of Stone's recollection of halakhah is that the face of the Other serves as a substitute in the absence of God. As Raba states (B. Megillah 3b; 149), "Great is the obligation to pay due respect to human beings, since it overrides a negative precept of the Torah." Ethics forms the context of halakhah and basis of halakhic action; it is (151) "the essence of redemption." Stone, I believe, is quite sensibly arguing that ethics is the overriding context of the halakhic life not simply because it leads to a stable society or personal flourishing; divine concerns do and should override these criteria. Rather, ethics is important because the fact that certain interpersonal situations can override the Torah implies that the human creature is itself a vehicle of divine revelation. (This is what Levinasians mean when they speak of the trace of God in the Other.)

It would take a great deal of razzmatazz to show Stone's ethical Judaism in the Platonic dialogues. But it is relatively simple to show that Platonic recollection possesses a view of the human which is necessary for this kind of ethics to take place. In the Phaedrus (249c), Plato describes the act of seeing particulars in terms of the Forms which originate them as "the recollection of the things our soul saw when it was travelling with [a] god." [23] This recollection can begin in the experience of erotic yearning (249d-250a). When one sees another person as beautiful and, in this erotic mania, sees beauty-itself incarnate, the lover "stands outside human concerns and draws close to the divine; ordinary people think he [sic] is disturbed and rebuke him for this, unaware that he is possessed by [a] god." This mania is sublimely pleasurable, but it is also painful since the lover's desire for the intelligible Form of beauty cannot be granted within the sensible world. Love and suffering belong together in what Edith Wyschogrod has termed the "erotics of transcendence." [24]

Here the beauty of the other person becomes the passageway to an intimacy with God in a manner close to Stone's argument. If we are to recollect the tantalizing intimacy with the nevertheless absent God that is the halakhic life, we must almost recollect the face of the Other. The Greek account may even in some ways deepen Stone's own alternation between themes of love and suffering in his own Talmudic readings. For example, the chapter entitled "Constructing the Gateway to Heaven" focuses on suffering, while the chapter on B. Megillah 3a-3b focuses on love; the puzzling interrelationship between the two is described well by Stone in the section of his Levinasian dictionary entitled "Time, Love, and Fecundity" (10-13).

Nonetheless, in focussing upon all these similarities between these two types of recollection, zakhor and anamnesis, one difference -- perhaps an Unbridgeable one -- has come into an even sharper focus. In the Phaedrus, the lover gets to decide who is beautiful and who is not. Only near-perfect instantiations of the form of beauty draw us closer to the divine. This leads to a hornet's nest of philosophical problems. Aren't all Platonic Forms transcendent? If so, why can't a perfect instantiation of the Form of Ugliness draw us closer to the divine? Problems such as these lead directly to Aristotle's dismissal of the Theory of Forms. But in a worldview in which the divine is seen as the creator of that which is "very good," there can be no such gradation of creatures. The recollection of the divine spark -- the sanctification of the self which leads to that of the world -- depends upon seeing beauty, i.e. creatureliness, in everyone. There is no choice in this matter, no justification for splitting humans int o sub-classes (beautiful/ugly, saved/unsaved, etc.) and preferring one class to another.

With this conclusion, it once again becomes possible to rejoin Stone's argument for the superiority of Talmud to philosophy. But in this rejoining, it has become apparent that Stone has shown his readers, perhaps unwittingly, that there is no need to dismiss the apologetic Jewish tradition. In making a compelling case for zakhor as the preeminent term of Jewish philosophy, as the hermeneutic engine of Talmudic thinking, Stone has opened up a space for a renewed conversation between Judaism and philosophy. But this conversation now takes place entirely on Judaism's terms. There is no need to fear that, with the entrance of a universalist discourse, the particular will drown or assimilate. As Stone has shown, the universalism of Judaism comes from within its particular matrix and does not need to be demonstrated with the aid of non-Jewish motifs, although comparison with and testing by such motifs certainly aid in the communication and refinement of Jewish ideas. Straddling both universalism and particularism, philosophy and faith, the Judaism which Stone portrays is entirely self-sufficient. [25]

MARTIN KAVKA is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at Rice University.

Notes

(1.) The phrase is Emil Fackenheim's, and can be found in several of his writings. One example is God's Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 84.

(2.) Arthur Green, "New Directions in Jewish Theology in America," in Contemporary Jewish Theology, ed. Elliot N. Dorff and Louis E. Newman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 486-93. The quote can be found on 493.

(3.) See Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990), 28-31; Jon D. Levenson, Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), 36-42; Yosef Hayyim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982).

(4.) Future references to Stone will be parenthetically included in the main body of the text. For other reviews of the book, see the series of articles by Aryeh Cohen, Kris Lindbeck, Jacob Meskin, and Martin Jaffee in Textual Reasoning 8 (http://www.bu.edu/mzank/Textual_Reasoning/tr-archive/tr8.html). A more scholarly, and far less successful, attempt at the same project is Marc-Alain Ouaknin's The Burnt Book: Reading Talmud, trans. Llewellyn Brown (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). For an account of Ouaknin's shortcomings, see Martin Kavka, "Saying Nihilism," in God's Voice from the Void: Old and New Studies in Bratzlav Hasidism, ed. Shaul Magid (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000).

(5.) This is a highly simplistic rendering of Levinas's view of the relationship between "Jew" and "Greek," particular and universal. Most often, the relationship is inimical, but it seems that there are resources for healing this rift within one species of Greek philosophy, namely Platonism. In 1961, after he had been studying Talmud for several years, Levinas defended Totality and Infinity as the thesis for his Doctorat from the University of Paris. In the summary of the project submitted for the defense, he describes his thesis as "a return to Platonism." Whether or not Totality and Infinity is also a return to Judaism, it remains the case that Levinas's opposition to "Greek" thinking is more an opposition to Aristotle than an opposition to Greek philosophy tout court. We can reconstruct Levinas's claim as follows: when Aristotle eliminated the Platonic Forms from metaphysics, he also eliminated the dimension of transcendence from philosophy, a dimension which is dear to the Jewish heart. The thesis summa ry appears at the end of Adriaan Theodoor Peperzak, "The Platonism of Emmanuel Levinas," in his Platonic Transformations: With and after Hegel, Heidegger and Levinas (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 113-21.

(6.) Emmanuel Levinas, "The Temptation of Temptation," in Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. and ed. Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 30-50. For one of the many uses of this article as a cornerstone for postmodern Jewish interpretation, cf. Peter Ochs, "B'nei Ezra: An Introduction to Textual Reasoning," in Dorff and Newman, 502-11, esp. 504.

(7.) All translations from the Talmud are from the Soncino edition.

(8.) In my view, the best book-length introductions to Levinas's philosophical arguments are Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics, rev. ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000) and Adriaan Peperzak, To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1993).

(9.) In the former category, one could place liberals such as Moses Mendelssohn and Hermann Cohen. In the latter, one could place orthodox thinkers such as Joseph Soloveitchik. Here, I follow Zachary Braiterman's reading of Soloveitchik: "Joseph Soloveitchik, Immanuel Kant, and the Aesthetic of Mitzvah," AJS Review, vol. 25, forthcoming.

(10.) Aryeh Cohen has already commented to this effect in his review in Textual Reasoning 8.

(11.) Stone has also cited that passage in his response to his critics, which can also be found in Textual Reasoning 8.

(12.) The biblical verse reads "The Lord loves the gates of Zion (TZiYyoN)." But after the destruction of the Temple, there is no longer such a physical object for God's love, and hence the rabbis reinterpret the verse as "The Lord loves the gates [that are] distinguished (meTZu YyaNim) through halakhah."

(13.) See Marcus Jastrow, Dictionary of the Targumim, Talmud Bavli, Yerushalmi and Midrashic Literature, reprint (New York: Judaica Press, 1992), 400.

(14.) The translation is by Nicholas P. White, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 251.

(15.) Interpreting the Platonic doctrine of recollection, I have consulted the following works. Plato's Meno In Focus, ed. Jane M. Day (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), especially the reprints of Gregory Vlastos' "Anamnesis in the Meno," and Kathleen V. Wilkes's "Conclusions in the Meno," contained within (88-111, 208-20); Nicholas P. White, Plato on Knowledge and Reality (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), esp. chapter 2 (35-61); Jacob Klein, A Commentary an Plato's Meno (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965); and Dominic Scott, Recollection and Experience: Plato's Theory of Learning and its Successors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

The two standard works in English on the role of religion in the Platonic dialogues are Michael L. Morgan, Platonic Piety: Philosophy and Ritual in Fourth-Century Athens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), and Mark L. McPherran, The Religion of Socrates (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996).

All translations from the Meno will be by Jane M. Day, in the volume noted above.

(16.) See Vlastos, 98-100.

(17.) I put "religion" in scarequotes because there is no Greek equivalent for the term. However, what goes under the name of "piety" in fourth-century Athens is a worldview which, today, would be described as religious. See McPherran, 20.

(18.) For a highly technical account of this argument, cf. Julius Moravcsik, "Learning as Recollection," in Day, 112-28. Somewhat easier are Scott, 33-38, and Klein, 99-107. All three authors (as well as Vlastos, 98) stress that Socrates does not spoonfeed Meno's slaveboy geometrical axioms by rote, since Socrates on two occasions leads the slaveboy down the wrong path of thinking so that the boy can truly make his knowledge his own. In addition, the reader may be wondering how the soul first acquires knowledge before forgetting it. Vlastos (102-3) claims that the development of the Theory of Forms in the Phaedo and the Republic serves to answer precisely these problems in the Meno.

(19.) See Klein, 254-56, and Scott, 43.

(20.) Wilkes, 217.

(21.) See McPherran, 77-78, 158.

(22.) See ibid., 194-201.

(23.) The translation, with a cautious emendation on my part, is by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, in Cooper. For a fuller account of recollection in the Phaedrus, see Scott, 73-80.

(24.) Edith Wyschogrod and John D. Caputo, "Postmodernism and the Desire for God: An E-Mail Exchange," Cross Currents 48, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 293-310, esp. 299-303.

(25.) My thanks to Andrea Frolic, Stephen Hood, Don Morrison, and Randi Rashkover for conversations and comments which have improved this essay immeasurably. The responsibility for its weaknesses is mine alone.