| From the section 'Jewish Probes of the Dialogical,' Brueggemann now lists three people who made contributions to this way of seeing and reading. Today is the third person: Emmanuel Levinas. .....the general direction for Levinas, as for Buber, is dialogical. Levinas insists that face-to-faceness creates a generative openness for both parties, whereas the attempt to circumscribe in rigid ways the interaction leads to a closed totality that is authoritarian and is eventually given over to violence. While an ethical concern is surely central to Buber, Levinas is much more explicit in his judgment that the face of the other is itself a commandment that evokes an engaged response of obedience. Thus every usual understanding of "ontology" is interrupted by such engagement. It is this interruption by "saying," moreover, that is the defining issue for faith that is recast as utterance and response as command and obedience, as confession and forgiveness, as petition and attentiveness, all the interpersonal ways of Jewishness that resist reductionism. Could it be that another way to view this work is to think of the necessity to look the other person into the eye when we address them. Face-to-face interaction does demand that we each enter in with all that we are. There is no 'looking away' or 'interruption' that draws us away from the other. Rather, we are drawn into conversation - dialogue of some sort. God is the one who is always in our face so that we will enter into an ongoing dialogue with the one who creates and the one who shapes us. It is in our dialogue with God - the Other - that we gain some sense of who we are and who we are to become. I also wonder if this also enables us to be able to enter into dialogue with other all around us. When we talk face-to-face with the other person, there is opportunity for change, transformation, renewal, reversal, confession and forgiveness. This is also, you could say, what happens when we enter into a dialogue with the Word that addresses us from scripture. We are no longer separate and alone. We become connected to the God who speaks to us and to all the others who enter into the conversation. Within such conversations, we are always going to have our lives expanded. Without that wrestling we enter into a rut that often leads to our destruction and that of others. Connection: Face to face. It is not always easy. Yesterday a presenter shared his concern about how so many younger people communicate only be 'texting.' His concern: we lose the ability to really know people - to see their faces and hear their voices and face them within all of our vulnerability - to enter a real dialogue that can transform all of us. O God, whose Word lifts us into new life - inspire us to face one another in all truthfulness and hope. Amen. |
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