Buber and Levinas make me feel very Jewish. I am tempted to say that I am already Jewish, but then I catch myself. To say that my disposition toward Judaism already qualifies me as being Jewish is to succumb to the excessive theorizing tendency of Protestant Christianity. In Judaism as I understand it, the Jewish disposition leads the Jew to encounter and engage the infinite and incomprehensible and world of radical Otherness Jewishly. (Levinas sees God as the Infinite Other.) The locus is the encounter with Otherness, and the disposition (which includes the fore-understanding) that leads the engagement and the resulting disposition that follows the engagement (which includes the new understanding) is part of the engagement. For Protestant Christianity, the disposition is the locus, and the engagment matters for the sake of perfecting the disposition. My natural (or my deeply-internalized nurtured) impulse is Christian. I am oriented toward the knowledge, not its practical application in living, but my knowledge is turning itself away from living for knowledge toward living for living.

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The thrust of Protestant Christianity is radically individualistic. Groups sub-denominate themselves by their protestations, all the way down to the individual ego, who further fragments himself into conflicting inner-factions of instincts and urges and appetites. The excessive individualism of modernity is simply Protestantism having thrust itself to its extreme. The modern individual doesn’t even have his own individual religion. Each of his moods has a religion – each of his moods is a religion – a different system of moral priorities, a different sense of who and what is relevant or irrelevant – all answerable only to itself.

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Am I an immanentist, now?