The Genius of Judaism

"That was a very surprising book for me, because for many people who are a little bit familiar with the world of public intellectuals, BHL has his own image. Some admire him for his guts, for his outspokenness, for being a man of action and not only being a scholar in his study. At the same time, he’s not without some forms of vanity—‘I know Sarkozy and I know Netanyahu and dah, dah, dah.’ People envy him and consider him an extremely arrogant man. The Genius Of Judaism is an extremely honest book. It does justice to another phenomenon which is quintessential for the notion of European humanism. This again comes from Socrates, who was the great-grandfather of this whole notion of European humanism. Socrates was the first philosopher who’s not much interested in the elements and the earth and whatever, but thinks about human nature. Then he says that there are only two questions that are really important for everybody, for all time. One is the right way to live and the other is a good society. What is the kind of life I have to live? What are the choices I have to make? How can I make the distinction between the good choice and the bad choice, between what’s good and what’s evil and connected to that, what is the world I have to live in? What is the kind of society I want to live in, and what is my role in that society? Get the weekly Five Books newsletter These are the two big questions and then Socrates starts his own conversations. The dialogues are only conversations asking, what is justice? What is goodness? What is truth? What does it mean to be brave? Etc. etc. At the end of his life, in his Apology , he says that the whole secret of life is that it starts with self-examination. You have to know yourself, because without knowing yourself, there is nothing you will ever understand. Later on we have what we call the Bildungsroman —like The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, like Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship by Goethe, and in a certain sense also In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. All those novels are about the quest of these young men for what the meaning of life is. Now, this book by Bernard-Henri Lévy is an expression of a man who starts to do self-examination. He comes from the French intellectual left—the world of Sartre, of Foucault, of revolutions, of Maoism. And then, in a very honest and extremely accessible way—and accessibility, for me, is always important because I agree with Nietzsche and Schopenhauer that if you cannot write in a clear way, there is no clear thinking—he wrote this book on how he discovered the world of Judaism. It’s about how he moved beyond this world of political revolutions and started to understand what his own religious and cultural heritage had to offer to him and to the world. And what its meaning is. He doesn’t present himself as a deeply religious man, but he makes a very convincing argument that for him, Judaism is about the world of learning. It’s about the world of ongoing study. It’s about the world of constantly questioning yourself and being extremely critical. It is about the life of the mind—because without the cultivation of the life of the mind, you will never understand anything about your own life, or the world that you live in. What’s also very moving is that, apparently, his favourite book in the Bible is the small book on the prophet Jonah. Now, Jonah—and people who are not familiar with it can get their own Bible and read it, it’s a very short, beautiful story—is a prophet who has his own problems with God. He’s a grumpy guy. Then God instructs him to go to Nineveh, which is modern day Mosul in Iraq—a city of sinners and unbelievers. Jonah says, ‘Why should I go to those people? They are not Jewish. They are not religious. They are not righteous. I can spend my time in a better way.’ “Without the cultivation of the life of the mind, you will never understand anything about your own life, or the world that you live in.” At the end of the story, the prophet Jonah is in despair because of a tree that is not growing. Then God says to him, ‘You’re a pitiful man. You’re concerned about that silly tree, and yet you accuse me for the fact I am concerned about the life of 120,000 human beings.’ And so, for Bernard-Henri Lévy, this became the story of why he, as a Jew—and always afraid of new forms of anti-Semitism, because of the history—wanted to go to the people who were not his friends, who are, basically, his enemies. He sees it as a moral obligation to fight for them. So, these last years, he has spent a lot of time in Kurdistan. We know the role he played going to Libya. All of this made me put him on the list. It’s an exercise in education, in self-examination. It’s a wonderful description of what it means to live your life as an intellectual Jew. And there’s also this profound message—that people should get out of their own cave and look beyond their own tribe and try to see fellow human beings as what they are, which is fellow human beings, whatever their religion or their political position."