1 Agata Bielik-Robson Love Strong as Death: Jews against Heidegger (On the Issue of Finitude) I have set before you life and death: choose life. Deuteronomy 30:19 Finitude is not the being-finished-off of an existent […] butting up against and stumbling over its own limit (its contingency, error, imperfection, or fault). Finitude is not privation. There is perhaps no proposition it is more necessary to articulate today, to scrutinize and test in all ways. Everything at stake at the end of philosophy comes together there: in the need of having to open the thought of finitude, that is, to reopen to itself this thought, which haunts and mesmerizes our entire tradition. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Infinite Finitude” 1 In his critique of Heidegger in Entre Nous, Lévinas complains that in his death-dominated and death-oriented thought there is no place for being-with-the- other. Sein-zum-Tode, being-unto-death, is a solitary enterprise, and the only Mitsein (being-with) which Heidegger envisages in the end boils down, as Lévinas maliciously remarks, to Zusammenmarchieren, marching-with: an army of isolated Daseins exercising their authenticity in their totally mobilised Todesbereitschaft, ‘readiness for death.’ 2 Lévinas is not the first and not the only Jewish philosopher who uttered his objection to Heidegger’s overestimation of death by drawing ‘out of the sources of Judaism.’ In fact, there is a whole secret alliance of thinkers more or less explicitly inspired by this alternative tradition, which can be opposed to what Harold Bloom, himself a member of the group, called somewhat derisively ‘Heidegger and his French flock.’ 3 Despite all the differences between them, Franz Rosenzweig (provided we do not read him through the ‘Heideggerizing’ lenses of Karl Löwith), Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Lévinas, and Harold Bloom form an unofficial coalition of thinkers firmly opposed to the Heideggerian mode of doing philosophy solely under the auspices of death. There is also one further feature which they share: the importance of the intellectual heritage of the Song of Songs. Rosenzweig based the whole second part of The Star of Redemption, devoted to revelation, on the grammar of the Song of Songs; Lévinas borrowed from the Song the notion of radical assymetry between the subject and the Other; Bloom, by fusing it with Shakespeare’s sonnets, turned the Song into a dramatic canvas of his poetic love-hate relationship between the precursor and the ephebe; and it is possible that Hannah Arendt was inspired by its praise of love too. In all these approaches, Shir ha-Shirim’s famous ‘love as strong as death’ (azzah kamavet ahava) lends itself to the philosophical speculation which offers a different 1 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 29. 2 “In Heidegger, the ethical relation, the Miteinandersein, the being-with-another-person, is only one moment of our presence in the world. It does not have the central place. Mit is always being next to… it is not in the first instance the Face, it is zusammensein [being-together], perhaps zusammenmarschieren [marching-together]”: Emmanuel Levinas, “Philosophy, Justice, and Love,” in Entre Nous, Thinking of The Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, p. 116 (Entre Nous: Essays sur le penser-a-l'autre, Editions Grasset & Fasquelle 1991). 3 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence. A Theory of Poetry (With a New Preface on Shakespeare). New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1997, p. xxvii.