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Peter Atterton, Matthew Calarco, and Joelle Hansel

THE MEANING OF RELIGIOUS PRACTICE

BY EMMANUEL LEVINAS: AN
INTRODUCTION AND TRANSLATION

TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION

Published for the first time in 1937, Emmanuel Levinass short article
The Meaning of Religious Practice is perhaps best characterized as
pre-Talmudic. At this time, Levinas had not yet met the prestigious
master M. Chouchani, under whom he would undertake a serious
study of the Talmud. Although he cites the mitzvot in an example,
Levinass reflection on religious practice in Judaism is not applied to
the categories of the Halakha but rests instead on a phenomenological
description of the execution of the ritual. In contrast to the reformers
of Judaism, Levinas does not conceive of the ritual in purely utilitar-
ian terms, that is, as good for personal hygiene, moral discipline, reli-
gious symbolism, and mental and emotional arousal. Nor does he
understand it as the expression of a purely subjective or private reli-
gious life, situated on the margins of the universal order of reason and
nature. For Levinas, this modern interpretation gets its plausibility
only from the nonessential features of ritual. The true meaning of
Jewish religious practice lies elsewhere.
Levinas argues that the execution of a ritual constitutes an inter-
ruption of the natural attitude that we habitually adopt in our every-
day dealings with things. The ritual suspends our natural tendency,
for example, to eat indiscriminately, giving us moment for pause and
benediction. In so doing, it makes the world and everything in it
exotic, altogether strange, and miraculous. What the Greeks experi-
enced at the very heart of philosophy, namely, wonder (to thaumas-
ton [Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in
wonder (Plato, Theatetus 155d)]), Levinas finds in the world revealed
by Jewish ritual: For the Jew, by contrast, nothing is entirely familiar,
entirely profane. To him, the existence of things is something infi-
nitely surprising. It strikes him as a miracle. He experiences wonder
at every instant at the factso simple and yet so extraordinarythat
the world is there. In the final analysis, then, the meaning (significa-
tion) or essence of Jewish religious practice is to be found in the event
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286 Peter Atterton, Matthew Calarco, and Joelle Hansel

that it accomplishes, whereby human beings are brought into contact

with the mystery of the natural world lying at the heart of creation
itself.
The reader familiar with Levinass mature philosophy, who is thus
aware of his enormous distrust of magic, the numinous, and the
sacred, will no doubt be surprised to hear him speak in this article, in
an entirely positive way, of the mystery, the mystical resonance of
things, and the sacred face of thingsthat is, of Mysteries. Know-
ing the reservations that he expressed so often in regard to the Kab-
bala, one is astonished to find the consideration that is given to the
supernatural character of Jewish rituals.
To be sure, we find Levinas here clearing a path that he will later
abandon. But, at the same time, we all see him adumbrate a number
of themes that will later be given central place in his overtly ethically
oriented writings. The criticism of a purely interior and subjective
characterization of religious life foreshadows the denunciation of the
very egoism and natural complacency of the self that he criticizes in
Totality and Infinity (1961). The relationship with the otherness con-
strued as a break with knowledge and comprehension anticipates Lev-
inass characterization of the face-to-face relation with the Other
human being. And the importance that Levinas confers on the idea of
creation will be confirmed by the analysis of Sames indebtedness to
and dependency on the Other.
There is a sense, then, in which this early article by Levinas is a
sign of things to come. It offers a vision of religious practice that is a
direct forbear of the very ethics of the Other to which Levinass name
is now indelibly linked. But let us not anticipate too muchfor there
is much here that it is worthy of consideration in its own right for the
reader interested in modern Judaism.

TRANSLATION: THE MEANING OF RELIGIOUS PRACTICE

The Jewish intellectual elite, educated in the scientific and moral ideas
of the West, encounters, in its return to the Jewish faith, a fundamen-
tal difficulty when it becomes conscious of the place practices occupy
in religious Judaism. Judaism receives its peculiar physiognomy from
rituals but seems to bear, on account of them, the mark of another
age.
The reformers of Judaism, who are attached to the liberal
movement, have tried to adapt Judaism to our incomprehension of
the ritual. They have discriminated between practices that are worth
preserving and superstition. This is a legitimate but secondary task.
First of all, there is the question of determining the religious value of
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The Meaning of Religious Practice 287

ritual, the very meaning of ritualistic action. Because we lack a theol-

ogy, we constantly admit an implicit one that is nourished by the cur-
rent ideas of the century, to which we adapt, after a fashion, our
Judaism.
The interpretation that one normally gives of the ritual shows, in
fact, the influence of ideas that have been current in the Western
world since the Renaissance. The conviction underlying this interpre-
tation above all else is that religion is a strictly private affair. Such a
thesis not only affirms the independence of social and political life
with regard to faith; it goes much further. It confines the religious life
within the limits of the human soul and situates it on the margins of
the universal order of nature. The religious life is interior, and that
means it does not weigh on the real. It is not thereby weakened, but it
is deprived of all efficacy, of every transitive action. The happiness or
equilibrium that it attains is subjectiveand this epithet is a pejora-
tive. Religious action does not have objective importance; it remains
indifferent to the actual course of things and does not engage any-
thing outside of itself.
Is not the ritual, however, always interpreted by means of notions
that are not the measure of its essence? When one sees in dietary
restrictions the rules of hygiene, when one justifies practices by the
moral discipline that they impose, when one insists on their suggestive
symbolism, on the memories and emotions that they arouse or
express, one provides explanations of them that are not altogether
lacking in truth. Following religious prescriptions certainly constitutes
a very healthy and very moral exercise, and the practices are endowed
with an emotive and incontestable evocative power. But all of this ulti-
mately amounts to a confusion of the ritual with what it can acciden-
tally become. It is to make the ritual into an exercise or a preparation.
It is to take from religion a hygiene, a discipline, a symbolism, that it is
not up to religion as such to provide and that is not to be asked of it.
It is necessary above all else to search for the original essence of
the ritual in an accurate description of its execution. It appears, from
the beginning, as an inconvenience that troubles the natural attitude
that we take in regard to things. Are not prohibited meats, in fact,
good to eat? Does not the sun cast its rays upon the work of men on
Saturday as much as on a weekday? Is prayer spontaneous in
Hebrew?
Everywhere the ritual inserts itself between reality and us. It sus-
pends the action that we adumbrate solely with a view toward objects.
Food is not merely a thing to consume; it is kosher or taref. Before
translating his religious sentiment into speech, the Jew searches for
the words in his prayer book. However naturally they come, they do
not seem to have quite the same efficacy. The seventh day does not
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288 Peter Atterton, Matthew Calarco, and Joelle Hansel

dawn like all the rest; it remains impervious to the concerns of the
week. Before accomplishing such an elementary gesture as eating, the
Jew pauses to give a blessing. Before entering into the house, he stops
to kiss the mezuzah. All this happens as though he did not step with
both feet into the world that offers itself to him, as though, in the
world where technology has cleared a way for us without resistance,
the ritual constantly marked a pause, as though it interrupted for an
instant the current that constantly connects us to things.
At bottom, the world never appears to the practicing Jew as a
natural thing. Others feel themselves immediately at home there,
immediately at ease. The environment in which they live is so habitual
to them that they no longer see it. Their responses are instinctual.
Things are always old acquaintances; they are familiar, everyday, and
profane. For the Jew, by contrast, nothing is entirely familiar, entirely
profane. To him, the existence of things is something infinitely sur-
prising. It strikes him as a miracle. He experiences wonder at every
instant at the factso simple and yet so extraordinarythat the world
is there.
The belief in creationthe basis of Judaismis nothing other
than this wonder. It is not an abstract dogma of theology. Present in
each of the surprises that the Jew daily experiences in the face of the
world, it prevents him from seeing in nature a purely natural reality.
The Jew suspects that at the basis of this reality, dazzling with light,
there is an unresolved enigma. He experiences the world as a mystery.
His most familiar gestures extend into the supernatural.
The ritual is precisely the behavior of one who, amid the racket of
our everyday action, perceives the mystical resonance of things. If it
stops us at the threshold of the natural world, it is because it intro-
duces us into the mystery of the world. It touches the sacred face of
things. From that moment on, the ritual occupies the place in the uni-
verse to which it returns. It is not an unimportant gesture to which we
give an ordinary subjective meaning. Nor is it a purely preparatory
exercise. It is efficacious and transitive, it is work, it accomplishesit is
an event.
We have become accustomed to giving the word mystery a negative
meaning. The mystery is the hidden and the incomprehensible. We
neglect the fact that it originally designates divine worship [un culte]
and, above all, that part of worship that allows the religious man to
master the very order of space and time. Do not the mysteries have
the power always to repeat over again, and in their initial inspiration
[leur originalit premire], the events of holy history? The sacrificethe
originary form of Jewish liturgyis, in the sense that we have just
indicated, a mystery. Incapable of thinking religiously, we seek out
moral or historical interpretations of it, pretexts difficult to imagine.
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The Meaning of Religious Practice 289

We forget that in the Bible sacrifice is invested with an objective effi-

cacy and that everything happens as though the suffering of the sacri-
ficial lamb within the confines of the altar purified the rhythm of the
universal order.
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO
SWEET BRIAR COLLEGE
HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM

NOTE

This essay originally appeared in French in LUnivers isralite, Vol. 37 (May

1937). The essential thought behind this article was the theme of a radio
broadcast entitled the Voix dIsral, April 9, 1937. It was reprinted in Les
Cahiers du judasme, Vol. 6 (Winter, 19992000), pp. 7475.