Law as a lieu and the Place of the Other in the Law: Between Levinas and Jewish Law

Between Totalité et Infini and Autrmeent qu`Etre the ethical obligation is indicated as the scene of the exposition - abscence of refuge - to the ordination coming from Autrui. The subject is, by him, "accused" and "persecuted". Contrary to the Hobbesian paradigm, the law presents itself as a limit to the ethical obligation, infinite in itself. In our opinion, the law reveals itself as a metaphorical shelter, a condition for being able to take root in a place and live there in society. Here the passage, with Levinas, of traduction and trahison: from ethics to law, from metaphysics to ontology.

This issue runs through the thinking of Israel. The ethical obligation resounds in the first prohibition "you will not kill" of which - indicates Chalier - every halakhic norm is a derivation. This order mirrors the transcendent character of the Name. As much this cannot be rendered in image, as Autrui must neither be killed nor resolved in definition. On pain of idolatry. As the Name points out of the Ein-Sof, so does every single Other. Yet one of G.d`s name is Makom, place. To indicate the need to build an "economy of justice" (Baharier) in a specific place, Erez Israel.

Israel is today a concrete institution; shelter from persecution but also, as a legal reality, from the persecution of Autrui. How to keep in the place of law, of rootedness, the traces of the ethical obligation - of the transcendent Makom? One answer is to restore the centrality of Jewish law. Insted, we would like to indicate how these traces could be maintained by making room, throught the law, for Autrui: from the other legal opinion - to the study of which the Tradition binds (starting from the Mishnà Eduyot 1:5-6) - up to the single individual beyond any legal category, passing hrough the relationship with the Gentiles. From this permanent tension between identity and otherness, between fefuge and exposure, it is possible to question the relationship between legal obligation and ethics.