Hineni

'Are you in your office?', W. emails me. Hineni, I write back. – 'So you speak Hebrew now?' Hineni, here I am: that's what Abraham said in response to God's call, W. has explained not once, but a thousand times. And Moses. Here I am, ready for my task. Here I am, and this is all I am, waiting in response. And it is what Adam refused to say, when he hid from God, and Jonah, who caught a ship to the far ends of the earth to escape the call.

What does it mean to be called?, W. has mused a thousand times. What, as Israel responded to God's call in Exodus? To do before you understand. To respond before thinking. It's the opposite of philosophy, of course, he's said. The opposite of the Greeks, for whom it is more important to know oneself than to walk in God's way, to keep the commandments.

Hineni: but perhaps there is a way philosophy is indebted to God's call, and the Greeks to Israel. For isn't philosophy, too, a matter of responding to your neighbour, hineni? Mustn't philosophy return to that space of the encounter if it is to remember that event of dialogue with which language begins?

Here I am. So Abraham to God, W. has said. So Moses, and so Noah. When God speaks to the patriarch, there is nothing elevated about the language. God does not speak from on high; he does not issue orders like a tyrant. He exhorts, it is true. He pleads. He questions. But he does so as a neighbour, and as one who speaks using everyday speech.

But if it is everyday speech that God speaks, it is only so as to reveal the hineni that is at the root of all speech, that each partner in dialogue utters in turn. That each utters not by saying the words, here I am, but by the fact of utterance, by the capacity to speak. The capacity that is the ever-renewed beginning of language in speech, the language of God and man, and the language of men insofar as God speaks between men, and perhaps is none other than a name for this beginning.

Hineni, doing before understanding: of course this must be very easy for me, W. writes back in his email, who understands so little. What is he going to make me do, his ape, his shadow? – 'Dance for me, fat boy', he emails. And a bit later: 'are you dancing now?'