Bernard-Henri Lévy - The Genius of Judaism

It was 1979.

I was thirty years old.

The revolutionary era had sighed its last in the killing fields of Cambodia.

A scent of dry powder hung in the air over the great capitals, mingling with an insouciant sense that it was a good time to be alive.

We were sure that we were at the apogee of the age in which God had died.

It had been beautiful.

It had been huge.

Rarely had humanity seemed so radiant as in this century of doubt and skepticism, during which we had burned all of our idols, all of our religions, in the joyful fire of atheism.

Or, rather, no. The temples, the devourers of men and destinies, were the pyre. From Giordano Bruno to Nietzsche, and then from the death of God to that of Divine Man, there had been intrepid liberators who faced the blaze, some burning, some wielding torchesand we felt we were their heirs.

A moment of rejoicing.

An unparalleled triumph of freedom.

That triumph cost countless dead and wounded. It had required unprecedented acts of heroism. But Gods fire had gone out. The ashes had been scattered. And we found ourselves alone, finally alone, in a world more suited to our wishes because (we thought) we had disenchanted it and could now savor the pure pleasure of being ourselves without fearing the slings and arrows of the censors.

Anything was possible.

Everything seemed to be permitted.

I recall that time as a long and languorous Sabbath of the spirit.

But doubt gripped the less credulous among us.

What if this was a deception?

A trap?

What if the coin had another side?

What if a shadow of doubt, a new kind of doubt, forced us to doubt our previous doubt?

What if, behind the funeral pyre of subjugating religion, behind the celebration of the universal federation in which the tree of life was to have triumphed over the vultures of the moral order, a worried eye could discern the silhouettes of other, more-ancient gods that one had given up for dead but that were creeping back into the world?

It was during this time that I met Emmanuel Levinas.

And then, in the United States, the Catholic philosopher Ren Girard.

A little later, I encountered Franz Rosenzweigs great work, which had finally been translated into French.

This was the time when I began to wonder, with these thinkers, in their footsteps, whether humanity could do without gods, if it could topple the supreme god without risking the return of the others, all the others, all those gods of ancient Indo-European paganism and the even more pernicious modern, political godsThor, Wotan, Prometheus unchained, hydras and dragons, the gods of race and history, of scourging nature and of science without limits, the damming of whose bloody invasiveness had required the full strength of the One God but of which nothing now blocked the return.

Above all it was the time when a growing number of texts and signs began to suggest that we should not rule out the possibility that yesterdays Judeo-Christian inquisitors might once have been, and might once again become, the inventors, the liberators, the saviors of a fragile and constantly imperiled idea, an idea that was again being surrounded by the dark tide of neo-pagan bestiality: man, man alone, that Adam who new Jewish intellectuals insisted (but who was listening?) was tenable only if conceived simultaneously as adama (born of the earth and its dust) and as bria, sekkhel, or yech me-an (created anew as an emanation of an unknowable and immeasurable intelligence).

This is the time when, seized by a part of me of which I was unaware, grasped by a force that was instantly familiar but to which I had never before been exposed in the course of my career as a speaking being, I turned to the subject of Judaism and wrote a book called Le Testament de Dieu (The Testament of God).

It turned my intellectual life upside down.

Had I not discovered, with such wonder, the Torah and then the Talmud, I might not have been able to continue writing.

Its hard to express the shock I felt at realizing that I had before me books that my hands had never held, my eyes had never beheld, but in which my name, that most intimate of intimacies, found not the accident of an origin or an occupation (Smith the smith; Miller the miller) but the necessity of a place that followed in turn from a long chain of meaning divided into verses, other proper names, acts to be accomplished, arguments to make or refute: a book of life in which a place had been made for me, springingyesfrom my name.

Another thing about which I have not said enough is the feeling of indescribable glory that coursed through me, like a ray of light from within an opaque shell, when I understood that those pages contained not only the entire mental apparatus needed by someone seeking to close the parentheses of philosophical and political atheism without yielding to the murky appeal of a return to magic, occultism, and, at bottom, religion but also the resolution of most of the impasses into which my young self had strayed, the answer to so many questions that my theoretical work had left hanging. They also contained provisions for the human and political adventure that I had begun in Bangladesh and that I sensed was gathering force.

I spoke that glory in French.

I would utter the words la gloire des juifs without provocation or vanity, steeping myself in that beautiful word gloire, one of the loveliest in the French languagethat word of Bossuets, favored by Racine for moments of grace and by Corneille for moments of strength, that word of Bach and Vivaldi, which I was listening to in those years, that word used by Chateaubriand, whom I have never tired of reading and rereading.