 A common thread runs through his philosophy and his Talmudic readings. Transcendence is one of his words for the spontaneity of responsibility for another person. Responsibility is experienced in concrete life and is variously expressed, from words like “here I am” to apologies and self-accounting. This is the case, Levinas argues, even before a de facto command is heard or reflected on. This surprising proposition hearkens to the debated meaning of Jews “receiving the Torah before knowing what was written in it” (NTR: 42–43). Levinas names this responsiveness Platonically the “Good beyond being”. We perform that good, that trace of the infinite, because instances of answering to or for another are everyday events, though they may not appear typical of natural or self-interested behaviors. Above all, we do not choose to be responsible. Responsibility arises as if elicited, before we begin to think about it, by the approach of the other person. Because this theme is found in his philosophy as well as in his interpretations of Talmudic passages, Levinas’ thought has, at times, left both Talmud scholars and philosophers dissatisfied. For some Talmudists, his thought seems secularly humanistic, with “infinity” suggesting a clandestine concept of divinity. No stranger to Mishna and Gemara (Talmud), his interpretations are less preoccupied with traditional inter- and intra-textuality, than with the ethical content of the teachings therein. To philosophers skeptical of him, Levinas’ thought reinterprets Heidegger’s hermeneutic circle of facticity in a metaphysical vein. Indeed, its anti-foundationalist approach to responsibility, as the pre-reflective structure of the embodied, intersubjective “self” (soi), appears to these critics to lie between phenomenology and religious thought, even if it lacks specific dogmatic commitments. As we have seen, in his later philosophy, the seemingly metaphysical concept of illeity expresses my emotive experience of a “power” or an affective excess greater than I can contain. In this way, it also resembles Descartes’ “light so resplendent” (Descartes 1641 [1911], Meditation V). But it is precisely in these tensions, between the Jewish religious and philosophical traditions, on the one hand, and his phenomenological-existential thinking-of-the-other, on the other hand, that Levinas’ originality lies.