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On the first two pages of his essay "Revelation in the Jewish Tradition,"¹ Levinas discusses two of the most striking aspects of the Jewish religion's relationship to revelation. For one, he says revelation is the impact of an exteriority on an interiority; it is "the abrupt invasion of truths from outside,"² triggered through the opening and reading of a book or a couple of books. Moreover, this revelatory reading generates more than just new interpretations and aspects that were inherent in the text; the act of reading creates an "espace vitale" a space in which the Jewish people may live. This term is Levinas' translation of the German "Lebensraum" a term used also by the National Socialists to justify the invasion of Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc. but also to legitimize the extermination of the Jews in concentration camps. Levinas seems to be saying that reading provides a whole people with that kind of space which other nations have only been able to acquire through expansionist warfare. It would be negligent to underestimate the materiality which is designated by the term "espace vitale" in this context. The Jews are a people whose existence is synonymous with the words "exile" and "dispersion," yet Levinas claims that they have found, and always had found, a perfect plane of existence within the texts and subtexts of scripture and the long list of its traditional commentaries. He goes even further and asserts that this espace vitale would exist for the Jews even if the relationship with these books was one not of repeated reading but of continuous forgetting, or of memorizing merely some impressions and feelings. In other words, the mere chronology of events that one would normally just call sacred history has always been espace vitale for the Jews.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-011-5198-6_2

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