Levinas and the Akedah

Abstract

Today nobody will stop with faith; they all go further.1 This was Soren Kierkegaard's complaint. Today nobody will stop with ethics; they all go further. This is Emmanuel Levinas's complaint, and it is his complaint with Kierkegaard, as well.2 The following is a brief, Levinasian reading of Akedah, or binding of Yitzhak, offered as an alternative to Kierkegaard's influential interpretation in Fear and Trembling. I call it a Levinasian reading for a number of reasons. First, there is no going beyond ethics for Levinas as there is for Kierkegaard; this reading follows Levinas in this respect. Second, though there is no going beyond ethics, Levinas places tremendous importance on going-out moral certainty toward ethically immediate relations; ethics requires leaving behind in this sense and wandering toward unforeseen. This reading, as well, makes much of this going-out codified, moral relations toward immediate, ethical encounters. Third, present reading owes its most significant and controversial claims to Levinas's analysis of face, trace of absolute alterity in human visage. For Levinas, face speaks. This essay will consider how speech functions in this narrative, and most importantly, it will consider what face says, for it says something definite: Do not kill. My ultimate suggestion is that YHWH's messenger, voice that stops Avraham just before he kills Yitzhak, is no one other than Yitzhak qua face of Other. Besides referring to Levinas and several midrashic interpreters, I will support this Levinasian reading with an analysis of certain textual patterns and transformations that emerge in Genesis account. The most important of these patterns, for my purposes, are its rhythm of interruption-response and its repeating dialogue structure. Once these patterns are allowed to emerge, I believe we will see a different story than one Kierkegaard describes. Though there is an immediacy lying beyond moral certainty, as Kierkegaard suggests, we might ask those looking to go beyond immediate, face-to-face ethical relations-including Kierkegaard-where they are going. Going-Forth 22:1 Now after these events it was that God tested Avraham and said to him: Avraham! He said: Here I am. 2 He said: Pray take your son, your only-one, whom you love, Yitzhak, and to land of Moriyya / Seeing, and offer him up there as an offering-up3 upon one of mountains that I will tell you of.4 Kierkegaard is right to hold, I believe, that Avraham is commanded to leave all morality behind for an immediate relation to God. The task is not simply to substitute one morality for another; this was task of Avram's' first going-out: 12:1 YHWH said to Avram: your land, your kindred, your father's house, to land that I will let you see. Avram has already left a previous moral homeland for a new one. The Akedah poses a further challenge in a repeating yet transformative journey. As Everett Fox notes: The chapter [22] serves an important structural function in Avraham cycle, framing it in conjunction with Chap. 12. The triplet in v.2 (Pray take your son,/ your only-one, whom you love) recalls from your land/ you kindred/ your father's in 12:1; go-you-forth and the land that I will tell you of (v.2: latter, three times in story) similarly point back to Avraham's call (12:1, Go-you-forth ... to land that I will let you see). There he had been asked to give up past (his father); here, future (his son).' Before Akedah, God commands Avram to journey away his father's house toward a new homeland. Most rabbinic commentators agree that this going-out, which involves a physical change of place, is more importantly a spiritual or ethical movement. …