Hineni: An expression of ethics, a demand for justice

   For the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), hineni is an expression of human ethics and a demand for justice. After the Holocaust, he developed the idea that we become who we are through our encounters with others. For Levinas, hineni — here I am — expresses the recognition that we are not alone, and acknowledges our responsibility to those others.

   It also expresses humans’ vulnerability: When responding to God’s call, Abraham didn’t respond with questions; rather, he laid himself open to whatever might come as a result of answering that call.

   The ethical response to the call of others — hineni — renders us vulnerable in the same way. Not knowing what will happen when we respond to the call, we should respond nonetheless, without reservation.

   To respond to the call of others is to abandon ourselves to the urgency of that call. As Levinas put it, when we’re called, we bear witness — we open our eyes — to the one who calls.

   Holocaust historian Saul Friedlander once recounted a story from the Warsaw ghetto. After curfew, while considering whether to eat his tiny ration of bread, a man heard a child crying out for food in the street.

   As the child slowly crawled directly underneath the man’s window, the man, anguished at the sound of the child, tossed the piece of bread out the window to within reach of the child. But the child was motionless, and the man understood that the child had died.

   After hearing the story, Friedlander’s wife, Hagith, asked, “Is it possible that the narrator still has no notion of what he should have done? Instead of throwing the bread down and calling out directions through his window, he should have gone downstairs, opened the door, and taken the child in his arms!”

   Hagith Friedlander clearly recognizes the other’s call. And she knows that to answer it — hineni — means becoming vulnerable, really seeing the one who calls, and taking that person in your arms in order to truly do justice.

   Michael Bernard-Donals is director of the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.