In a 1968 essay, "Space is not One-Dimensional," Emmanuel Levinas writes about the uniqueness of Israel as a state in words which today must strike us as so naive. And yet, if the citizens and leaders of the State of Israel, and those Jews of the Diaspora who still care enough to bother, were to take up the challenge which his words express -- for not even in 1968 could these words have been read as articulating a self-evident truth -- perhaps the hope and the project could still be rekindled.
Levinas writes:
“It is not because the Holy Land takes the form of a State that it brings the Reign of the Messiah any closer, but because the men who inhabit it try to resist the temptations of politics; because this State, proclaimed in the aftermath of Auschwitz, embraces the teaching of the prophets; because it produces abnegation and self-sacrifice…. [and because] it tear[s] us out of our conformism and material comforts, dispersion and alienation, and reawaken in us a demand for the [ethical] Absolute” (Difficult Freedom, pp. 263-264)
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