This is a masterful work! The author not only enables us to understand the depths of the many works of Strauss and Levinas covering many decades, she also places us in touch with others who for more than two millennia have concerned themselves with the volatile relationships between the "truths" of philosophy and revelation, also doing the same with subsequent scholarship on the contributions and limitations of the thought of Strauss and Levinas.
Although the subtitle implies that philosophy plays a crucial role in our understanding of the dynamics of the relationship between religion and politics, from this text the reader will readily realize that history plays an even more dynamic role in this relationship. Having in mind the centrality of reason in philosophical discourse, this reader has an appreciation of a similarity between this reason and history, that while both are vitally necessary to our thought, neither is sufficient. Thus a role for a revelation that is at once historic and transcendent, a revelation that is reasonable, not susceptible to a reductive rationality.
While the author writes very clearly about the limits of historicism and for truth that is transhistorical, it seems to this reader that the notion of reason being discussed is that of an outdated faculty psychology. If we note that in the human species, evolution has become conscious of itself, and that we cultivate this consciousness, it seems reason is limited by the scant number of the varibles that impinge upon our daily lives for which we have the capacity to bring into conscious awareness, reason also limited by its temptation to rationalize our thoughts. These limitations provides space and time for revelation to play a role in our lives, leaving us with a faith that is reasonable.
The revelation that is at the center of this study is a Judaic notion of "law." Given my interest, as well as that of the author, in the larger context in which law is a text, I will utilize an often repeated phrase of her, to simply note that more is beyond the scope of this review.
I began to read this study because of my interest in Levinas and his appreciation of the otherness of others, sharing with the author an acute awareness that, while our receptivity to this otherness is a much needed corrective to a corrosive notion of rational autonomy, this receptivity is insufficiently political. Of Polish ancestry who twenty years ago led a study abroad semester contingent to Krakow, I became more acutely aware of how in 1945 the moment of liberation from Nazism became the moment of enslavement to Communism. In dealing with the aftermath of the Holocaust and the emergence of Israel as a nation state, I share with the author some apprehension at the difficulty of our seeing in the Palestinian, the otherness of the other.
It is at this point that I also share with the author her appreciation of the awesome contribution of Leo Strauss to philosophy and the politics of revelation (pages 209-10): "On the one hand, Strauss did view the human predicament as tragic in that there will never be, according to him, the 'full reconciliation among fellow citizens.' Yet Strauss was not an advocate of tragic resignation but rather of dispelling what he took to be human fantasy ... that we fool ourselves, to our own detriment, by blindly believing our own pieties..."
