“The face speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relation… the face opens the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation.”
— Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 1961.
The 20th Century Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas chose the human face as the means of indicating the essential irreducibility of the human being to an abstract concept. All too often, Levinas laments, humans forget that the individual to their right or left, personified by the human face, represents a portal to the infinite. We treat the Others as a means to an end, an obstacle in our path, or a stand-in for a group of people.
When we truly engage the face of another human and consider the depth of emotion portrayed by its every subtle move and expression, we are reminded of our innate kinship and of the infinite that resides within us all, as well as our innate responsibility to the Other. Perhaps it is with this knowledge that our sages wrote, “Whoever causes a life to be lost from Israel is deemed by Scripture as one who caused the entire world to perish (Mishnah Sanhedrin 5:4).”
Despite the boundaries that separate us — national, racial, sexual, religious, ethnic, socioeconomic, political, and, now, even physical — the face of the Other can always remind us of our shared humanity and kinship. Fortunately, we live in an era when, despite our physical distance, we can still look upon the face of the Other. With the tools at our disposal, we can invite the Other right into the palms of our hands.
Just as we make time to enjoy the presence of loved ones, so, too, must we make time to invite new Faces into our lives — Faces that span the national racial, sexual, religious, ethnic, socioeconomic, and political spectrum — to remind us of our shared humanity and our shared responsibility for one another.
— Rabbi Josh Knobel