Parshah Commentary

This week’s parshah culminates with God’s revelation of the Torah to Moses on Mount Sinai, a momentous occasion in the biblical narrative and in the formation of Jewish religious identity. For it’s here that the people as a whole formally enters into the covenantal relationship with God. Of the initially proclaimed commandments, one in particular attracted the attention of the Lithuanian-born French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995): “You shall not kill.”

Throughout his career, Levinas meditated on this biblical injunction against murder. Inverting the conventional philosophical notion that ethical matters (How should I act?) follow from ontological ones (What am I?), Levinas argues that the I—the agential subject who is commanded not to kill—does not precede the encounter with the Other who must not be killed. Rather, the I exists because of the experience of this relation to the Other. Before I am even myself, I am my not-killing-of-the-Other, so that, technically speaking, I am never solely, or entirely, myself at all. I am constituted in my very being by this absolute responsibility for the life of the Other—the stranger, the neighbor—a responsibility which, moreover, is radically asymmetrical and nonreciprocal: It binds me regardless of the actions of the Other.

This reversal of the assumed relationship between ontology and ethics has precedent in traditional Jewish thinking about the covenant. Rabbis in the Talmud observe that, upon receiving the Torah, the Israelites state, “We will do and we will hear” the commandments, suggesting their willingness to join the covenant—to “do” what God commands—even before they have “heard” its terms. Levinas, who wrote a commentary on this Talmudic passage in 1964, echoes it in his philosophy: If I am, then before I have ever heard the explicit commandment not to kill, I must already have obeyed it.

Levinas consistently designates the human face as the locus of this primordial responsibility: “The Other is the only being that one can be tempted to kill. This temptation to murder and this impossibility of murder constitute the very vision of the face. To see a face is already to hear ‘You shall not kill,’” he writes. The face of the Other, therefore, has the effective force of a divine commandment. Unlike the Torah, issued only to the Israelites, the face commands universally.

Yet Levinas warns that the I’s “primary obedience” to the face of the Other is “upset by the third person emerging next to the other; the third person is also a neighbor, and also falls within the purview of the I’s responsibility. Here, beginning with this third person, is the proximity of a human plurality. Who, in this plurality, comes first? This is the time and place of the birth of a question: of a demand for justice!” The arrival of the “third person” inaugurates a “sociality in which responsibility is made concrete in justice,” through the operations of “institutions, courts, and thus the state.” This “third person” marks the transition, in Levinasian terms, from the ethical (the relation to the Other) to the political (the adjudication of a human plurality).

The transcendental ethics Levinas derives from the biblical commandment is diluted by its necessary translation into the concrete social realm. In practice, he suggests, I must privilege the faces of some Others over other Others—and, implicitly, I must therefore be more able to kill those other Others. Levinas’s interpretation of “You shall not kill,” which initially reads as a strong philosophical case for nonviolence, ultimately seems to risk stranding us in pragmatic pessimism, opening the door to utilitarian realpolitik and exclusionary communitarianism? (As Judith Butler has argued, his steadfast commitment to Zionism, as well as his yoking of a universal ethics to a particularly Jewish dispensation, can’t simply be brushed aside here.)

Our parshah stages this disjunction between God’s ethical demands on the Israelites and the messy “proximity of a human plurality.” Just before the revelation at Sinai, Moses explains to his father-in-law Jethro how he serves as the Israelites’ “magistrate”: “The people come to me to inquire of God. When they have a dispute, it comes before me, and I decide between one person and another, and I make known the laws and teachings of God.” Jethro objects: “The thing you are doing is not right. You will surely exhaust yourself, and these people as well. For the task is too heavy for you, you cannot do it alone.” He advises Moses to establish a juridical system to delegate his duties: “Seek out from among all the people capable men who fear God, trustworthy men who spurn ill-gotten gain. Set these over [the people] as chiefs . . . Have them bring every major dispute to you, but let them decide every minor dispute themselves.”

This story deals with what Levinas would call the political, rather than ethical, domain. Jethro’s pragmatic recommendation—complete with a built-in recognition of the law’s intrinsic vulnerability to venal exploitation—results in an expansion of the political and the proliferation of those mediating institutions Levinas mentions. Even before a case is judged, the distinction Jethro draws between “major” cases to be judged by Moses and “minor” ones left to his appointees already implies a juridical decision on the question Levinas poses: In this plurality, whose claims to justice “come first,” and are regarded as most worthy of the prophet’s attention?

I wonder, though, just what it is about the work of justice that’s “too heavy” for Moses. Is the problem only with the quantity of justice that needs doing—or is it instead (or also) a problem with justice itself? We may agree with Jethro’s assessment that what Moses is doing—justice—“is not right,” if we understand “right” here to mean absolute responsibility for the life of the Other. Perhaps justice, definitionally, cannot be absolutely right. On this view, the parshah relates a translational rupture between ethics and justice: practical justice below Mount Sinai versus the ideal commandment revealed atop it. Is this a narrative representation of the impossibility of truly obeying the commandment?

A later passage in the Torah suggests not: None of the commandments, we are told, is “too baffling for [the Israelites], nor is it beyond reach.” Instead of an impasse, we can interpret the parshah’s tension between ethics and justice as a call—a command, if you will—to find ways into configurations of living in “the proximity of a human plurality” that enable everyone, Jewish or not, to do what the face of every neighbor, every stranger, commands: “You shall not kill.” Plurality is, after all, the only mode of human existence any of us will ever know. (In the Torah, only those two humans who were eventually expelled from Paradise briefly got to enjoy—if that is the appropriate word—any other.) And it’s a good thing, too, since the task of living rightly on the earth is surely “too heavy” for each of us. As Jethro says: “You cannot do it alone.”

Samuel P. Catlin is assistant professor of religious studies at Trinity College. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.