One hundred and ninety-one years ago, in 1808, Johann Leonhard Hug's Introduction to the New Testament carried statements that, in part, may strike textual critics as being far ahead of their time. Hug laments the loss of all the original manuscripts of the New Testament writings “so important to the church” and wonders: “How shall we explain this singular fact?” Next, he observes that Paul and others employed secretaries, but Hug views the closing salutation, written in the author's own hand, as “sufficient to give them the value of originals.” Then, referring to the further role that scribes and correctors must have played after such a Christian writing had been dictated by its author, he says:

Let us now suppose, as it is very natural to do, that the same librarius [copyist] who was employed to make this copy, made copies likewise for opulent individuals and other churches—and there was no original at all, or there were perhaps ten or more [originals] of which none could claim superiority.

The history of what constitutes a “cure” in a given society is a history of that society's values: for the rhythm of the cure shows what is acceptable as a plausible way of giving form, and so the hope of resolution to … the nebulous and intractable fact of suffering.

On the face of it, the very title of this paper may appear puzzling. Responses to the problem of evil are by their nature theological or philosophical, whereas halakha, or Jewish law, is about behavior. In what sense, then, can there be a halakhic response to the problem of evil?

The Other resembles God.

To welcome the Other absolutely is to preserve the Other as a state of irreducible uncertainty, to suspend the desire to ascertain exactly who or what the Other is, to suppress the wish to name, and to avoid assimilating or incorporating the Other into a reassuringly familiar vocabulary. The object of this paper is a tentative comparison between Eckhartian gelâzenheit and Derridean openness. I will compare the Derridean response to the uncertainty of the infinitely Other with that of the German Dominican preacher Meister Eckhart (1260–1329) in order to examine their respective terms of “emptiness” and “openness” and to try to understand how Eckhart's idea of description or conception as doing violence upon the Other is, in part, adopted and, in part, rejected by Jacques Derrida. As some of the most interesting aspects of Derrida's understanding of otherness can be discerned in his early work on Levinas, I will first examine Derrida's initial skepticism toward the idea of a nonviolent phenomenology, in contrast to his more recent reappraisal of his relation to Levinas and the “welcome of the Other.”