I wished I’d known it at the time, because I would have been even more of a fanboy than I already was. I had just started the second semester in my PhD program and had stumbled upon the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, to whom I’ve already introduced you. What I didn’t know at the time, however, was that Levinas had written a beautiful three-page essay on dogs.

What makes this little essay so powerful is that Levinas does something very different from in his more proper philosophical texts. He goes biographical, telling about how during World War II, he was captured by German soldiers and thrown into a prisoner-of-war camp, where torture and forced labor were the norm. Yet he survived. After the war, he wrote dense treatises on the ethics and infinite mystery of encountering the face of another person. Levinas wrote with the urgency of an Old Testament prophet, seeking God’s goodness in a world oppressed by evil, never allowing God off the hook for the blood-soaked soil he had witnessed in the camps.

In this brief essay, however, titled “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Right,” Levinas turns to dogs. The setting for his reflections is the prison camps that so systematically stripped him and others of their humanity. Not only did the guards treat prisoners as disposable objects, but the townspeople did, too. He tells of being marched back and forth from prison to work site, passing the townspeople at gunpoint. An ideology of hate had turned his captors into monsters, blind to the humanity of the prisoners, blind to their pain, intent only on forcing them to complete their backbreaking labor.

One day, however, on their march back to prison, a dog ran out from the woods and bounded up to the prisoners. His tail wagging happily, the dog jumped up to lick their faces, bringing into their gray world a blur of energy, color, and affection. Though the dog had never seen the men before, it seemed to recognize them, Levinas said. Even better, the dog seemed convinced that these broken, forlorn captives were amazing people.

For two weeks, after their long hours of dehumanization, the same dog appeared in their midst with his happy greetings. To the prisoners, Levinas recalled, the experience felt like drops of rain on a dry, dusty land. “For him,” Levinas wrote of the dog, “there was no doubt that we were men.”1 The dog’s joy was a kind of defibrillator to their souls, reawakening them to their true worth.

In his essay, Levinas points out that the dog had no such reaction to a tree, and a very different response to a squirrel. Yet when it saw a human being, the dog knew just what to do. It celebrated what the guards and townspeople refused to acknowledge: the lowly prisoners were beautiful human beings. The men responded, Levinas recalled, by giving their visitor a name: Bobby. Reflecting on the events later, Levinas saw the naming as bearing witness to the shared bond between the dog and the prisoners.

After two weeks, Bobby disappeared, never to return, but Levinas said the dog’s sacred work and witness remained, and the prisoners spoke of it often. They knew they were persons of worth and beauty now, and no misery could take that truth away.

Righteous Beasts

This experience led Levinas to conclude that not only do dogs connect with us at a spiritual level, they do so in such a way that we can call them righteous—meaning that a dog is, or can be, in right relationship with God based on its actions. I found that statement amazing. After all, the term righteous comes freighted with significance in the Jewish tradition, and Levinas wouldn’t have used it lightly.

No surprise, then, that to explain what he means by calling Bobby “righteous,” Levinas shifts from philosopher to rabbi, creating something like a midrash (rabbinical commentaries of ancient Judaism) to help reveal a hidden truth. He explores his experience in the Nazi camp in light of a biblical text, Exodus 11, which describes the last of the ten plagues that God visited on the Israelites’ captors in order to set them free.

When this last plague strikes the land, the text says, “among the Israelites not a dog will bark at any person or animal. Then you will know that the Lord makes a distinction between Egypt and Israel.”2 These dogs participated in the liberation of the Israelites, Levinas says, by standing witness in silence rather than barking to warn their masters that slaves were trying to escape. Scholar Laura Hobgood-Oster agrees; by their silence, she says, the dogs were “proving that they are acting as agents of the divine.”3

That, Levinas explains, is why they were righteous dogs.

Taking us back to a Nazi prison camp, Levinas explains that Bobby, a stray from the woods, along with those dogs of ancient times, was bearing witness that those oppressed are indeed human. Throughout human history, righteous dogs have participated in God’s act of setting people free to be fully human. Bobby couldn’t break the men out of prison, but right under the guards’ noses, he sprang them loose from lies that threatened worse.

You might have a righteous dog stretched out beside your chair or bed right now, as I did at my feet the first time I read Levinas. In our day, a dog can speak loudly against a culture that defines our worth and value by what we produce and consume, and that differentiates between people as more or less valuable based on the color of their skin, or on their education or income. Dogs don’t. To a dog, there is no difference between a person gifted enough to create a Fortune 500 company and someone whose hair is gone from chemotherapy or who is confined to a wheelchair. Human beings, these righteous dogs proclaim, are beautiful. Period.

Interestingly, Levinas believes that Jewish law rewarded the righteous dogs of Egypt for their gift. Exodus 22:31 reads, “You are to be my holy people. So do not eat the meat of an animal torn by wild beasts; throw it to the dogs.” Where you or I might read “throw it to the dogs” as a sign of disrespect or devaluing of dogs, Levinas proposes a different interpretation. He views the meat as a blessing and reward given to the dogs for their sacred partnership with God’s purposes.

Do dogs all merit being called “righteous”? I don’t think so. We read of dogs attacking small children. We see news clips of security dogs foaming at the mouth and tearing the flesh of prisoners or of students marching against oppression and injustice. Yet it seems to me these dogs are behaving the way they’ve been trained. They have been bent against their own nature for other purposes by broken human beings. Time and time again, though, dogs remind us that we are beautiful simply because we are, and this is a righteous gift.

Whether you agree with Levinas’s commentary or not, I believe this much is clear: a good dog echoes the acceptance and pleasure of God. As a theologian, I find this undeniable. Also, as a father, citizen, and dog lover in our violent and hate-filled era, I find it inspiring. Like never before, we need these descendants of the righteous dogs of Egypt to nudge us with their wet noses, reminding us that we, our children, and yes, even our enemies share an infinite, and infinitely valuable, spirit.