he interprets in “Judaism and Revolution.” The mishnah quoted in Baba Metsi’a 83a and the paragraphs from the Gemara that follow it deal with employment law; the extract that Levinas addresses in “Model of the West,” from Menahot 99b–100a, focuses on the so-called showbread, or “bread of display”—the twelve loaves or cakes of bread that, according to the Bible, were to be displayed by the priests in the desert Tabernacle and then in the Temple in Jerusalem (Exod. 25:23–30; Lev. 24:5–9). The mishnah that introduces the Talmudic text details the weekly ritual in which the priests ceremonially removed the old loaves that had been displayed for the previous seven days on a table of gold and replaced them with fresh loaves. The mishnah ends with a few words about the rules for consumption of the old loaves by the priests. The Gemara then clarifies and expands on the Mishnaic introduction to the topic.22 The digressions of the Gemara are as spectacular as in most parts of the Talmud and lead, among other things, to a reflection on Greek “wisdom” or philosophy.
It is in this context that Levinas’s reading focuses on two interrelated topics: time and politics. After a brief introduction, Levinas starts the reading proper by quoting Exodus 25:30: “And on the table, you shall set the bread of display, to be before me always.” It is this last word, “always,” that prompts the first question raised in the Gemara: on occasion, time must have elapsed between the removal of the old loaves and their replacement by the new. How, then, can the bread be said to have been before God “always”? It is also this notion of “always” that captures Levinas’s imagination.
To elucidate the meaning of “always,” Levinas defines Jewish time as “permanence” (ADV 33; BTV 17), “duration which never wears out” (ADV 36; BTV 21). This he contrasts with the “‘historical meaning’ that dominates modernity” (ADV 33; BTV 17). Levinas adopts here the framework of Rosenzweig’s critique of Hegel in The Star of Redemption. We will return to the influence of Hegel and Rosenzweig on Levinas in Chapters 7 and 8. Here, suffice it to say that Rosenzweig contests Hegel’s fusion of spiritual and political existence in the historical process, and the universalization of that fusion. For Rosenzweig, Hegel’s conception of history is relevant only for Christianity. By contrast with the Christian presence in historical time, the Torah “lifts the people out of all temporality and historical relevance of life, it also removes its power over time.” Therefore, the Jewish people “purchases its eternity at the price of temporal life.”23 The Jews have a spiritual, not temporal, life; they exist not in history but in eternity.24
Levinas echoes Rosenzweig’s answer to Hegel already in the preface of Totality and Infinity, in which he famously acknowledges that Rosenzweig is “too often present in this book to be cited” (TI 14; TI’ 28). In that preface, Levinas reflects on the opposition between war and peace, according to which war must be understood in the Hegelian context of universal History and peace as “eschatology” beyond history (TI 7–8; TI’ 22–23). It is in “Model of the West,” however, that Levinas explains the concrete implications of the ethical dimension of time, which are, unexpectedly, political. His rhetoric is hesitant, as if he were taking time to elucidate an argument that is far from clear:
Does not Israel attach itself to an “always”—in other words, to a permanence in time.… And instead of remaining a word, a purely theoretical view or doctrinal affirmation … do not this predilection and this signification of the always call for a whole structuring of concrete human reality and a whole orientation of social and intellectual life—perhaps justice itself—which would render only such a signification possible and significant? But before entering into such a serious debate, I still owe an explanation to the critical minds present in this room, who might precisely be surprised that such serious and topical problems are being treated in the context of bread and tables. (ADV 33; BTV 17; emphasis mine)
If, as Hegel and Rosenzweig agreed, history and politics come together, and if, as Rosenzweig argued, the Jewish people lives in “eternity,” can the Jewish people experience a “concrete human reality” and a “social and intellectual life”? Levinas’s response is: such a concrete life with others will come precisely from that which is apparently most foreign to it—the ritual of the bread, symbolizing permanence. The abstruse details of the Temple ceremony become, in Levinas’s reading, the key for building a well-organized society. Citing a midrash about the furnishings of the Temple, three of which had frames or “crowns,” Levinas claims that the table on which the bread was displayed symbolizes political sovereignty: “The crown of the table is thus the royal crown. The king is he who keeps open house; he who feeds men. The table on which the bread is exposed before the Lord symbolizes the permanent thought that political power … is vowed to men’s hunger.… To think of men’s hunger is the first function of politics. That political power should be thought of from the point of view of men’s hunger is rather remarkable” (ADV 34; BTV 18).
Levinas has accomplished another “reversal of the order of things” (AHN 74; ITN 61), a reversal of both Hegel’s and Rosenzweig’s arguments. Reality can be dissociated from Hegelian history, which is a history of egos fighting for preponderance, namely, a history of wars. There can be a political order outside of this history—a political order Levinas founds on the rituals that Rosenzweig conceptualized as a-political eternity. However, having rejected both Hegel and Rosenzweig, Levinas reaches a conclusion that is not far from being Hegelian: the political life of the Jews realizes their spiritual life.25 The table on which the ceremonial loaves are presented in the Temple represents both a spiritual (i.e., ethical) ideal and a political order together.
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