Articles de presse
Pierre
Victor's search for God - and Benny Levy
Auteur : Avi KATZMAN
Sujet : Benny Lévy
Revue : Ha'aretz
Catégorie : Journal quotidien
Référence : Ha'aretz, 7 juillet 2000
Parution : 07 juillet 2000
Longueur : 2007 mots
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It took this French rebel and philosopher from the ramparts to the yeshiva. In between, he found Sartre, too.
Sitting on the podium in the Ramat Rachel convention hall last weekend, under a sign that said "Levinas Institute," flanked by colleagues Alain Finkielkraut and Bernard Henri Levy, Benny Levy looked like someone who had made an embarrassing mistake. There he sat, a short, bashful yeshiva bocher, between two elegantly-attired scholars, accustomed to cameras and spotlights. But when he opened his mouth, sparks began to fly. His words, fiery and electrifying, shot out in poetic spurts. For a moment, Benny Levy went back to being Pierre Victor, the rabble-rousing revolutionary, Sharp as a razor, brimming with charisma. Today he no longer quotes from the Little Red Book, as he did when he was a leader of the "proletarian left." The Marxist dialectic has given way to Talmud study, and Chairman Mao has been replaced by French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. The passion is the same, but national politics have been shunted aside in favor of the metaphysical awareness of the light of prophecy. Maybe it was always there.
Benny Levy's great-grandfather, Rabbi Yehuda Halevy, was the head of the Jewish community of Jaffa in the mid-19th Century. Levy himself was born in Cairo in 1945, and moved to France with his family at the age of 11, after the Sinai Campaign. A brilliant student, he completed his studies under the wing of philosophers like Louis Althusser and Jacques Derrida. While in school, he was increasingly swept up in thc winds of radicalism blowing at the time, and became a Maoist. When French university students threatened to bring down the de Gaulle government in May 1965, Benny Levy, then Pierre Victor, was the one who negotiated between them and ten million striking workers.
De Gaulle resigned and the revolution subsided, but Pierre Victor clung to the dream. As one of the editors of a leftwing newspaper, he and his colleagues were detained time after time by French policemen determined to put an end to the insurgency and restore law and order. In 1970, as the arrests became more frequent, the editors decided to appeal to the one Frenchman who was immune to police harassment. "No one touches Voltaire," De Gaulle had declared when the country's leftists joined the battle for Algerian independence. He was talking about Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre immediately agreed to add his name to the editor's list, and henceforth, the police left them alone.
But then the authorities discovered that Victor, leader of the "proletarian left," was a stateless refugee. His passport, issued by the United Nations, was confiscated, and he was forced to report to the police station every two weeks with his relatives and a lawyer. As he and Sartre grew closer, a mutual friend told Sartre about the harassment. Sartre decided to extend his aid, inviting him to become his persona1 secretary.
For six years, Victor worked closely with the ageing philosopher, whose writings he had admired from the age of 14. Their collaboration, which continued until Sartre's death in 1980, produced four books. "He was already close to the world of truth," says Benny Levy. "Far away from the vanities of life." His Hebrew is colourful, halting, sprinkled with TaImudic phrases. Sartre began to write a book about Flaubert. His eyesight was no longer good, and he asked Victor to read "Madame Bovary" aloud to him. Victor felt ridiculous. What did a radical Maoist care about the love affairs of the French bourgeois? After three sessions, the project was set aside.
Sartre generously proposed another project: Plato and the history of revolution. Victor was enthusiastic. The work, which had formerly been restricted to the morning hours, began to flow over into the afternoon. And then came the epiphany. "We read maybe 100 books about the French Revolution," says Levy. "It was a period in French history we both loved. From the revolution, we went on to Napoleon, and spent about half a year on his writings at St. Helena. All of a sudden, I began to understand what I had in me. I realized that to be a leader in France, one had to oppose it, violently. That's what Napoleon did. From there, we went back to the English revolution, and I discovered their use of biblical language. Then we went back even further, to the Gnostics and the Manicheans, to sects deemed heretics by the Christians. At that point we really started getting close to Torah.
"I, who still clung to the West and Christianity at every opportunity, became a Jew against my will, out of intellectual necessity. And I was a Jew who SO wanted to assimilate. My mission in life, being an intellectual, was to be France's greatest intellectual goy. Sartre sobered me up. 1 saw the intellectual world in all its ugliness - not Sartre, whose beauty I had the good fortune to see, but the intellectual swamp a11 around."
It was 1980. Victor published his last conversations with Sartre in a special edition of the magazine Nouvel Observateur, and then assembled them in a book "Hope Now." Sartre speaks here in Jewish-messianic language. He uses concepts associated with redemption. He expresses doubts about philosophical principles he once espoused. All because of Victor. The intellectual world and the media went into a frenzy. Sartre's admirers and close friends, among them his life companion, Simone de Beauvoir, claimed the whole thing was a fake. Victor was denounced as a charlatan and a manipulator. But Sartre was still around. Two months before his death, in a painful showdown with de Beauvoir. he confirmed that it was all true. "She shouted and cursed," recalls Levy. "It was an important moment. They wanted to grab me by the hair and throw me into a fiery furnace for taking away their god. It really was Sartre's century, as Bernard Henri Levy wrote in his recent book, which gives an excellent description of the whole affair in the last 40 pages. At that point, Sartre was only interested in the truth. He practically forced me to sign the conversations using my real name, Benny Levy. I went out of my mind when I first saw that name in print. I am indebted to Sartre for enabling me to connect to myself. Pierre Victor is the pseudonym some French writer came up with when I was an underground revolutionary. "What a horrible name," says Levy with a shudder. "The victory of Patrus. The victory of the church." Back when he was reading Plato with Sartre, Victor came across Levinas. He and Sartre began to read what this Jewish philospher, who was a friend of Sartre's, had written on interpersonal relations. "Suddenly, it was like an explosion in my brain. In that wonderful French of his, I learned how Torah and philosophy operate. Beneath Levinas's words, there was something completely different, 'sous les paves la plage' ["under the pavement, there's the beach," a revolutionary slogan used in May 1968 - A.K.]. The philosophy is what you see, and the Torah is hidden inside. I felt the hugeness of it, the strangeness. It was a shock. A revelation. I could feel how the Torah was working in his writings.
"To understand Levinas, you have to study Midrash and the Haggadah, along with Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Russell," Levy continues "The more Sartre and I discussed problematic issues in his work, the more we turned to Levinas. I was teaching a university course on Rousseau and Sartre at the time, and I consulted with Sartre while preparing my lectures. Sartre was sweet. He was incredibly jealous when he saw how much I loved Levinas.
"All the threads began to connect in this long journey from the revolutions to the early Christians and on to Levinas. I realized that there was something before Christianity. The conclusion was obvious: I had to learn lashon kodesh [the holy tongue]." Levy's teacher was the philosopher Shmuel Trigano. He learned the Hebrew alphabet together with Sartre's adopted Jewish daughter, Arlette. "Bereshit bara [In the beginning], that was what I was interested in, not 'Siah Lohamim' [soldiers' conversations from the Six-Day War], which is what they use at ulpan," says Levy. Pierre Victor's search for God intensified. He began to attend Torah classes, but as soon as they were over, he would dine at a non-kosher restaurant, Then something hit him, he says, and it was not intellectual. "It was impossible to listen to the Gaon of Vilna saying such profound things about the thigh muscle, and then go out and eat it. It made me feel uncomfortable. Me, the Existentialist. And then there was Yom Kippur. I knew when it came out, and stole into a synagogue with a little Minha prayerbook. I thought everything would be fine, but someone showed me I had the wrong book. On Yom Kippur, you're supposed to pray from a Mahzor. I got insulted and left."
Levy heard about Rabbi Leon (Manitu) Ashkenazi, and made "aliyah," as he calls it, to Strasbourg. "It took many years until I began to lay tefillin," he says. "I was stubborn. For me, it was enough to study the truth. That is why I can understand my friends, who are not into Torah and mitzvot. I did all I could to push these things away. But Torah forced itself on me. It strikes in a way that is hard to identify. It's not something cognitive. I said, 'I'll do it if I understand.' I am a thinking person. But Torah works in a place where 'cogito' ["I think" - A.K.] doesn't. It works through the mind, but not through what the phenomenologists call 'cogito.'
"It happened when my son was about to celebrate his bar-mitzvah. I was thinking a great deal about the sacrifice of Isaac, about relations between father and son. It was an issue about which I felt very deeply. The head of the yeshiva in Strasbourg came to the bar-mitzvah and bought my son tzitzit [ritual fringes] for a present. But he also brought along an extra pair and forced it over my head. 'Now that's much better,' he said. As it turned out, the timing was right. I was moving in the direction of Torah, and the rabbi saw I was 'ripe.' I am grateful to him for that. Later, I tried to do the same thing to a friend of mine, but it didn't work. You have to have an eye for these things."
Today, Levy is convinced that even a brief argument in the Talmud can shed light on unresolved philosophical problems. At the same time, his study partners at the yeshiva are forced to listen to him quoting endlessly from Sartre, Plato - and Levinas, of course. Politics is behind him. It no longer interests him. "I lost my political dreams and my political view of the world," he says. "I thought I would die. I was empty, totally empty. But Torah has come to refresh my soul like life-giving water. I have found in it all the metaphysical depth I was seeking. True freedom is studying Torah. The Torah speaks to me, directly to me."
Levy's philosophical meanderings brought him to Torah, and Torah has brought him to Zion - but not to Zionism. He is a Zionist, but this is not a matter he is willing to discuss. He is pained by the divisions in this country. Today he is a professor at University of Paris 7, conducts seminars on metaphysics in Jerusalem and is establishing the Levinas Institute. "An Abrahamic place," he calls it, for people like himself, who have undergone great swings, from one spiritual world to another. "So there will be a place where I can meet those who feel the fire and they can meet me, at the highest level of thought."
And so, biography becomes a philosophical approach. Benny Levy hurries back to the yeshiva and disappears inside, still eager to reform the world.
Ha'aretz - 07/07/2000 - Page 122- 2007 mots.
Avi Katzman
