Bat Kama At ?

Each face in its utter singularity

Michael Gottsegen, Ph.D.
Department of Religious Studies,
Brown University

Each face in its utter singularity, eyes meeting mine, imploring, asking, putting me into question. My comfortable world is punctured, my ease, my present, my future, are called into question by the past which becomes strangely present in each of these faces. Indeed my time is displaced by the time of the other, and though that other’s time, as measured by clocks and calendars, expired long ago, beholding, and being held fast by, the singular face which looks at me straight on, my own easy relation to time is undone, as I am undone.

students of Gymnasium Yavne, Telz Lithuania, around 1936

How does one look at these faces which look back, which look ahead untroubled by a future which would doom them all and come to trouble us profoundly? If one takes in these photos as ensembles, as period portraits, as generalized symbols of what was lost, then one might become nostalgic, respectful, elegiacal — without being especially troubled by the individual faces which in their utmost singularity implore and demand a singular answer from each of us who permits the other’s claim to register as such. Even if only regarded as a collective portrait, these pictures are still poignant historical artifacts which have much to tell us about a vanished world whose loss we feel compelled to mourn. But if we permit ourselves to be interrogated by these faces in their individual particularity, something deeper still comes into focus: a moment in which we are elected and compelled to respond with all that we are and with all that we have to the charge conveyed by the last glimpse of a life that is irreducibly unique and at the same time is shadowed by a disaster which is about to cut it short.

Levinas, in writing of the face, acknowledges that the height and uniqueness of the other, which is especially signified in the other’s face, is not only signified there. Thus he speaks of the face being sensed in the line of the other’s shoulder or neck or torso. In viewing the documents gathered together on Bat Kama At? I was reminded of this broader conception of the face when I came upon the signatures of the students of Yavne Schools of Telz which struck me as even more singular and as even more poignant than the faces in the photographs. In a different way, perhaps, each signature is even more expressive than the faces in the group photos of the intangible uniqueness of each of the girls. Each signature is different – one more firm, one less so; one more rounded, one more angular; one more graceful, one more emphatic. But just as the ethical point of the face to face relation is missed if the relation to the other becomes an exercise in prosography, so too is it missed if the relation to the other’s handwriting becomes an exercise in graphology. Rather the ethical point with respect to the other’s face and signature is not what they are as objects, which we might characterize and which in their objectification affirm us as subjects, but what they signify individually as expressions of the other’s irreducible uniqueness which demands something from each one of us as they call into question our own unreflective self-absorption and summon us as singularities ourselves to respond deeply, ethically, individually to the question posed by the singular face that challenges us. There is a shock or surprise in such an encounter which recalls Jacob’s utterance to the effect that “God was in this place but I did not know.” But having met the face of God in the faces of the others whose gaze meets our own when we look upon these photographs, or upon these signatures, we emerge changed, different from who we were before, and charged to act differently, to act better in the world of the present, to pay it forward, as it were, because we cannot give back, at least not in a direct way, to the girls of Telz whose lives are forever captured in these photos. And for having brought these photos to light, and for having brought these young women to our attention, we are greatly indebted to Isabelle Rozenbaumas, daughter of the daughters of Telz, who has retrieved these still glowing embers from the ashes.

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Michael Gottsegen, Ph.D.
Department of Religious Studies,
Brown University