24,656
edits
Changes
no edit summary
The relationship between Judaism as a formal "spiritual" structure and Jews as its empirical bearers is difficult to conceptualize. The problem is how to avoid the deadlock of the dilemma: either Jews are privileged as an empirical group (which means their spirituality, inaccessible to others, is also ultimately of no relevance to them), or Jews are a contingent bearer of a universal structure - in this case, the dangerous conclusion is at hand that, precisely in order to isolate and assert this formal structure, the "principle" of Jewishness, one has to eliminate, erase, the "empirical" Jews. Furthermore, the problem with those who emphasize how Jews are not simple a nation, an ethnic group, like others, side by side to others, is that, in this very claim, they define Jews in contrast to other "normal" groups, as their constitutive exception.
The more standard answer to Levinas's ethic of radical responsibility would have been that one can truly love others only if one loves oneself. However, at a more radical level, is there not something inherently FALSE in such a link between the responsibility for/to the other and questioning one's own right to exist? Although Levinas asserts this asymmetry as universal (everyone of us is in the position of primordial responsibility towards others), does this asymmetry not effectively end up in privileging ONE particular group which assumes responsibility for all others, which embodies in a privileged way this responsibility, directly stands for it - in this case, of course, Jews, so that, again, one is ironically tempted to speak of the “Jewish man's (ethical) burden"?</font></p>
<blockquote>
</blockquote>
