The eighth day of Hanukkah, 1995, saw the passing of Emmanuel Levinas. He was one of the greatest Jewish philosophers, perhaps the greatest since the medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides. Born in 1906 in Kaunas, Lithuania, Levinas settled in France in 1923 where he lived the rest of his long life. No other Jewish thinker has brought together so many cultural traditions with such deep understanding: biblical study in his youth, Russian and Western European literature, philosophical training principally centered on metaphysics, and then, after the Second World War, study of the Talmud in its haggadic part. From 1945 to 1979, in conjunction with his philosophical work, Levinas was director of the Ecole Normale Isralite Orientale, where he educated generations of teachers for the schools of the Universal Israeli Alliance. Starting in 1963, he was also a university professor. Emmanuel Levinas was originally a disciple of Husserl, but starting with his very first work, The Theory of Intuition in the Phenomenology of Husserl,1 he distanced himself from the primacy Husserlian had assigned to the theoretical and to representation. Temporarily attracted by new developments appearing in Heidegger, Levinas would soon part company with him as well. Over time, his opposition to Heidegger deepened. Though he always maintained his admiration for Heidegger's first work, Being and Time, he contested his philosophy, because Levinas did not separate in any radical way Heidegger the thinker from the Heidegger who was tarnished by National Socialism.2 The Devil can be a genius, Levinas said. It is impossible in a short essay to describe the many steps that led Levinas to the formation of his own philosophy; therefore we must be content to give a general idea of what his philosophy was at its culmination. Whereas for Heidegger ethics is but one mode of being among others and even a relatively inessential one, Levinas gives ethics the status of first philosophy. Let us be more precise. By ethics, Levinas does not mean a quest for perfection or personal accomplishment, but the responsibility to the Other from which the ego [le moi] cannot escape and which is the secret of its uniqueness: no one can replace me in the discharge of this responsibility. But a fundamental question arises: in what terms can we speak about the Other? Levinas responds tirelessly to this question and the pages he devotes to it are among the most beautiful in philosophical literature. Allow me to indicate, however awkwardly, a few points of reference. In coming to understand the term Other, we must first employ negative turns of phrase; we must avoid all denaturation. The Other is not a member of a species, not even the human species; it is not a concept nor a substance. The Other is not defined by properties, by its character, social position or its place in history. The Other is not the object of knowledge, representation or comprehension; we do not grasp the Other. Nor is the Other the object of a description; there is no phenomenology of the Other.' It is even improper to speak of the Other in terms of appearing or unveiling, terms which still belong to the register of knowing and knowledge. What can be said positively about this Other that evades all that we know, that evades Being, as the philosophers say? What can be said about this Other who comes from an elsewhere that belongs to no world? Having purified our language, what is left? The Other is the [visage], not in the sense of a face seen, a face which can be captured in a photographic image or in the memory; the is expression and discourse.4 It is immediately and all at once speech: question, supplication, commandment, teaching. And therefore the obligates me; it demands response, help, solicitude, compassion. And thus we come to the expression that is perhaps the most often employed by Levinas: responsibility to the Other. …