Click on the link below "A Religion for Adults" and then read the article by Emmanuel Levinas. Blog your understanding of what Levinas means by a "religion for adults."
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A Religion for Adults
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From my understanding of "A Religion for Adults", I believe Levinas is saying that as humans we have a responsibility not only to love God but to love the "other" (my neighbor)as given to us in the Jewish Bible. The article states that, "the law is effort". However, that effort is the impetus that provides the basis for loyalty and courage to make the effort to abide by those principles. My understanding therefore of the article is that, like Moses and the prophets, the adult religion I practice should be concerned not so much with "immorality of the soul but with the poor, the widow, the orphan and the stranger." (p.20). Each of us (humankind) must accept that we are relationship with each other is to be shown by the way in which we treat each other ultimately.
ReplyDeleteSince Levinas is an Orthodox Jew, He is drawing on Jewish sources and themes, and is universalizing Judaism.
ReplyDeleteIn the passage on page (21), we see Levinas reinterpreting the doctrine of the election of Israel in terms of his own ethics/phenomenology, so that it becomes so unusual that it conditions universality. It be-comes, in fact, the asymmetry that everywhere he insists on between what I require of myself and what I am entitled to require of anyone else; and he tells us that so reinterpreted, election ‘is a universal moral category rather than a historical fact to do with Israel’. Here and elsewhere, Levinas is universalizing Judaism. To understand him, one has to understand the paradoxical claim implicit in his writing that, in essence, all human beings are Jews.
The author talks about God intention of making man His agent, and the need for man to be knowledgeable of the Divine, to support this relationship with God. A true awareness of God is to know His purpose, and mankind has fallen short. Slavery and the treatment of the Jews during WWII are evidence of our lack of understanding. The author states that the spirit of the Jewish Bible shows that "relations with the Divine crosses the relationship with man, and coincides with social justice". But man has interpreted the Bible based on their own self awareness, which lends to ones own self interested justification.Gunn and Fewell statement verifies this point when they say that distinct effect of ideology is pragmatic, to enable social subjects to feel at home and to act within the limits of a given social project(p202.
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