In Difficult Freedom and elsewhere, Levinas writes of the radically anachronistic nature of Judaism. He sees it as simultaneously the youthfulness that, attentive to everything, would change everything and the senescence that, having seen everything, would seek only to return to the origin of everything. Its difficult, if not impossible, relation to the present is bound up with its refusal of the 'modernist' imperative that one 'desire to conform to one's time'. Simultaneously youthful and aged, engaged (committed) and disengaged, such would be the figure of the prophet: 'the most deeply committed (engagé) man, one who can never be silent, is also the most separate, the one least capable of becoming an institution. Only the false prophet has an official function' (df 212). Levinas's religious (Talmudic) writings are always concerned with illustrating, rehearsing and reflecting upon this anachronistic wisdom, finding both in the Biblical expression of monotheism and in its endless rabbinical revisions and interpretations a wisdom that is absolutely irreplaceable. Irreplaceable, above all, by philosophy; but perhaps, above all, not just by any philosophy, or, rather, not by philosophy under just any name: