 Lissa concludes that Levinas intimates a meaning that, in “preceding [knowledge], founds it, orients it, and to some degree justifies it” (Lissa 2002: 227). For him, Levinas’ turn to hermeneutics largely dates from his abandonment of his phenomenology of “exteriority”, as the subtitle of Totality and Infinity indicates: An Essay on Exteriority. As we have seen, insofar as the search for meaning underlying intentional object-constitution (and other modes of intentionality) presupposes a meaning only incipiently grasped—which corresponds to Heidegger’s rethinking of hermeneutics in light of Da-sein’s basic understanding—Levinas appears to owe a debt both to Heidegger’s existential  hermeneutics[36]  as well as to a much older, polyphonic practice of reading: Talmudic thought as interpretively elaborating Jewish law (Halakhah) and recounting and parsing narratives (Aggadah). Because this hermeneutics differs from that of Christian theology by giving significantly less weight to philosophical justifications of faith, it is worth our turning briefly to it.