Judaism is a non-coincidence with its time, within coincidence: in the radical sense of the term, it is an anachronism, the simultaneous presence of a youth that is attentive to reality and impatient to change it, and an old age that has seen it all and is returning to the origin of things. The desire to conform to one's time is not the supreme imperative for a human, but is already a characteristic expression of modernism itself; it involves renouncing interiority and truth, resigning oneself to death, and, in base souls, being satisfied with jouissance. Monotheism and its moral revelation constitute the concrete fulfillment, beyond all mythology, of the primordial anachronism of the human.

Emmanuel Levinas, "Judaism and the Present", in "The Levinas Reader", pp. 256-257