"I am not a particularly Jewish thinker," said Emmanuel Levinas, "I am just a thinker." This book argues against the idea, affirmed by Levinas himself, that Totality and Infinity and Otherwise Than Being separate philosophy from Judaism. By reading Levinas's philosophical works through the prism of Judaic texts and ideas, Michael Fagenblat argues that what Levinas called "ethics" is as much a hermeneutical product wrought from the Judaic heritage as a series of phenomenological observations. Decoding the Levinas's philosophy of Judaism within a Heideggerian and Pauline framework, Fagenblat uses biblical, rabbinic, and Maimonidean texts to provide sustained interpretations of the philosopher's work. Ultimately he calls for a reconsideration of the relation between tradition and philosophy, and of the meaning of faith after the death of epistemology.
"Michael Fagenblat's A Covenant of Creatures is a bold and powerful book…I am seduced by Fagenblat's textual interpretations of Jewish texts, through a Levinassian lens."
Association for Jewish Studies
"According to the famous Talmudic story in which a heathen challenges Hillel to reveal the whole of Torah while standing on one foot, the sage not only declares its essence to lie in the ethics of neighbor-love, relegating the rest to the status of mere commentary; he enjoins his interlocutor to study that very textual supplement. Michael Fagenblat has made an utterly compelling case that a simila
