Excellent post. I just happened to buy the Levinas book in Hebrew and I will look it up.
Are you pining for the fjords?
Don't hold your breath.
glad to hear you arrived ok.
btw - i would rather tour the Golan then the Fjords.....
excellent post.Let's live in our ghetto here in the midbar and have God or the Israeli government take care of us.
btw - i would rather tour the Golan then the Fjords.....
If there is real peace with Syria, then you can do both!
Isn't there a ferry you could take to Greece?
I just read the Levinas speech, and didn't notice so much a reference to leftist intellectuals as three separate interpretations: They were simply perfect atheists and denied God's power over, and interaction with, this world; they foresaw what the Jewish Sabras would become and were dismayed by what they saw; and that they believed that the moral right of the indigines, immoral though they be, trumped the Israelite's, and even God's, right to establish a just kingdom.
to displace them, even for the purpose of establishing a just kingdom.
i reread the essay over shabbat and recaptured some of the nuance. he only makes reference to 'intellectuals of the left' once, but it seems to pervade some of his interpretations.
Well, it was a speech, and it seems that he was enjoying playing with ideas as he went along, not writing a tight and rigorous analysis. But I enjoyed reading it; See, that's one of the reasons I like the net; I never would have read Levinas' talmudic essays if not for your reference. It's certainly not something one would hear from, e.g., Rav Brevda. "Modern" analysis tends to turn me off, but he seems to be very sensitive to the nuances of the Gemara and Chazal's world-view.
Levinas is definitely not 'academic'. He's got some methodological principles that seem pretty solid (e.g., that when a verse is brought as a prooftext, its entire context can be brought to bear on the text at hand).
Pining for the fijords? 'es dead!
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