Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903–1994) was one of the most outspokenand controversial twentieth century Jewish thinkers and Israeli publicintellectuals. Once termed “the conscience of Israel”^[1] by his childhood contemporary from Riga, Sir Isaiah Berlin,Leibowitz’s thought is founded on a far-reaching theocentrismthat allows him to combine a commitment to Orthodox Jewish practicewith a stripped-down definition of Jewish faith that yields aradically naturalistic theology – if, indeed, what is left canbear the burden of the term “theology” at all. But theinfluence of this theocentric commitment spreads far beyond theconfines of his views on religious faith. It is the ultimate source ofhis unyielding criticism of the rabbinic establishment in Israel, andwhat – “in the face of so much pressure to be sensible, tobe realistic, not to let the side down” as Berlin (1983, 18) putit – was seen at the time as a highly controversial stanceregarding Israeli policy towards the territories occupied since theSix Day war.

• 1. Life and Works
  • 1.1 Works
  • 1.2 Methodology
• 2. God and Theology
• 3. Interpreting Scripture
• 4. Jewish Faith and Jewish Law
  • 4.1 Faith, Practice, and God
• 5. WorshipLishmah and the Meaning of Mitzvoth
• 6. Ethics and Religion
  • 6.1 Ethical Mitzvoth
  • 6.2 Meta-Halakhah and the Status of Women
• 7. Religion, State, and Israel
• Bibliography
  • Primary Literature
  • Selected Secondary Literature and Works Cited
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Life and Works

Born to an observant Jewish family in Riga in 1903, Leibowitz gainedhis education at theGymnasium, with concurrenthome-schooling for his Jewish studies, before the family fled Russiain 1919 for Berlin. At the University of Berlin, Leibowitz studiedchemistry and philosophy, receiving his doctorate in the former in1924. After studying at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute from1926–1928, Leibowitz went onto study medicine in Koln andHeidelberg, though with the Nazis gaining power he would gain hisformal medical degree in Basel. In 1935 he moved to Palestine,initially as professor of biochemistry at the Hebrew University, goingon to be appointed as head of biological and organic chemistry andprofessor of neurophysiology at the Medical School, as well aslecturing on the history and philosophy of science. Yet these formalacademic appointments formed but one side of his work, and far fromthe most public, for in addition Leibowitz taught Jewish thought,whether in an academic context, in small study groups, or ontelevision and radio, with a number of these broadcasts andstudy-group notes having since been published. But aside from theseactivities and his being editor in chief of several volumes of theEncyclopedia Hebraica, it was for his political interventionsthat Leibowitz would gain most notoriety on the Israeli public scene,whether in his criticism of the religious parties as the “keptmistress” (Judaism, 115) of the Israeli government, hisargument as early as 1968 that Israel should withdraw from thenewly-occupied West Bank and Gaza strip, or his public call forconscientious objectors from the time of the Lebanon war of 1982 andsubsequently in the Palestinian territories. Leibowitz’s abilityto stir up public controversy was in evidence as late as 1993, theyear before he died, in a speech to the Israel Council forIsraeli-Palestinian Peace, where he reiterated his call on soldiers torefuse to serve in the Territories, using, not for the first time,highly provocative language comparing special units of the Israeliarmy to the SS. The speech followed the announcement that he was toreceive the Israel prize – the country’s most prestigiouscivilian award – in recognition of his life’s work, a movethat precipitated an appeal to the Supreme Court, and a threat toboycott the ceremony by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Leibowitz,however, saved everyone further embarrassment by declining theaward.

1.1 Works

Leibowitz’s philosophy found expression in numerous essays thatfirst appeared in Hebrew periodicals and were subsequently collated,with some overlap, into a handful of volumes published at irregularintervals, most significantlyTorah u-Mitzvot ba-Zeman ha-Zeh[Torah and Commandments in Our Time] (1954);Yahadut, Am Yehudiu-Medinat Yisrael [Judaism, Jewish People, and the State ofIsrael] (1975); andEmunah, Historiah, va-Arakhim [Faith,History, and Values] (1982). 1982 also saw the publication of thetranscripts of his study-group on Maimonides’ShemonehPerakim – the section of Maimonides’Commentary tothe Mishnah that serves as an introduction to TractateAvot (generally known in English as theEthics of theFathers). A number of his contributions to Israeli television andradio also appeared in print – including series on the philosophyof Maimonides and on the weekly Torah reading – and continue to doso posthumously, along with transcripts of further study-groupdiscussions. Though far better known in Israel than in theEnglish-speaking world, the publication in English translation of acollection of his writings in 1992 –Judaism, Human Values,and the Jewish State – opened the way to a growing criticalengagement with his thought beyond those oft disputed borders. Whileas recently as 2015 it was possible for one scholar to state that his“original and unique concept of Jewish religiosity has hardlybeen adopted by other Jewish thinkers and practitioners, in Israel andabroad” (Benbassat 2015, 141), one now finds a broadening ofLeibowitz scholarship beyond exclusively Jewish concerns and theKantian comparisons that were the staple of early critical work, to aclutch of recent attempts to place his work in proximity to that ofEmmanuel Levinas, whose work Leibowitz held in high regard,^[2] and Søren Kierkegaard. His radio broadcasts on Maimonides and on theweekly Torah reading of 1985–1986 are now also available inEnglish.

1.2 Methodology

In the 1953 piece “Mitzvot Ma’asiyot” (alater version of which was translated as “ReligiousPraxis,” inJudaism), at once the most succinctstatement of his philosophy and his most expansive essay thatforeshadows much of what he would go on to write throughout hiscareer, Leibowitz tells us that he is not concerned to“elaborate a philosophic justification or rationale for theMitzvoth [commandments],” but instead to expand on “theirmeaning for Jewish religion as we live it” (Judaism,4). Indeed, while some of Leibowitz’s ideas are certainly drawnfrom (and relevant to) the philosophy of religion more generally, hiswritings are very specifically directed to giving a philosophicalexposition of Judaism, and in particular of the mitzvoth that are atits heart. “Exposition” may, however, appear to be amisleading term to use given that the earliest published Hebrewversion of this piece opens with some introductory methodologicalremarks “designed to guide the argument,” in which hestates that argument “andnot exposition – shouldbe the main point of our discussion,” (Torah u-Mitzvot, 9).^[3] Leibowitz’s mixed signals here – talk of expanding on“meaning” suggests a more hermeneutical and expositoryapproach, and yet he wishes to eschew “exposition” forargument – indicate important limits on what Leibowitz sets out toachieve.

Given his scientific training, Leibowitz “argues” on thebasis of empirical (most often historical) evidence for certainfactual claims regarding, for example, the centrality of mitzvoth inJudaism to the exclusion of mysticism, philosophy, or dogma. Yet, onthe very same positivistic grounds, he is not willing to launchparallel “arguments” in order tojustify specificpractices or indeed Jewish practice as a whole (though this is a topicto which we will have cause to return). Leibowitz helps himself to astark fact/value distinction, insisting that “Values are notanchored in reality” (Judaism, 139); that there is“no relation of connection or mutual dependence betweenscientific cognition and evaluative decision” (Mada,7). Thus, if one is expecting to find an argument justifying thehalakhic way of life through syllogistic reasoning from foundationalprinciples, or justifications of the commandments in the manner of thegreat medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides, one is likely tobe disappointed. What we do find, in line with much contemporaryJewish philosophy, is an insider’s account of the meaning offaith in Judaism as understood from within that tradition, albeit withimplications beyond those boundaries. And for Leibowitz, such“meaning” is aligned with the purposes and values weespouse, such that at times he uses the expression “value andmeaning”, or some variation of it, as if it were a singlesyntactic unit (seeJudaism, 135–138, for example) AsLeibowitz notes when discussing Aristotelian science, two peoplelooking at the same things and agreed on all of the material facts and“efficient causes” can nonetheless attach very differentmeanings to the phenomena in question when they introduce theperspective of their final causes (Mada, 27). So while factsare relevant to his factual claims about the nature of Judaism, it isto values and purposes that we must turn if we are to fully understandmeaning, and the meaning of the faith of Judaism cannot therefore bejustified by appeal to the world of scientific cognition. At the sametime, in contrast to some of the best-known twentieth century Jewishphilosophers, Leibowitz is also wary of any appeal to religiousexperience to further his account of the meaning of Jewish faith.“Most characteristic of the Halakhah,” he tells us,“is its lack of pathos” (Judaism, 13). The onlyreliable tools that we can use in order to investigate the meaning ofthis evaluative notion of faith, therefore, remain those of discursivereasoning. Thus we generally find Leibowitz using the tools ofrational philosophical discourse to trace the implications of hisfoundational positions to their logical conclusions.

Rather than setting out his philosophy comprehensively in the form ofa system based on foundational premises, Leibowitz generally wroteshort articles devoted to specific topics. It is nonetheless fair tosay that there is a single axis around which his philosophy of Judaismrevolves and to which many of his views can ultimately betraced – the radical transcendence of God. In what follows we willbegin with Leibowitz’s understanding of God’stranscendence, which will enable us to proceed to his conceptions oftheology, Scripture, Jewish faith, ethics, and briefly politics, allof which ultimately wend their way back to that fundamental idea.While occasionally developments and changes in his thought will benoted, particularly in the political section, on the whole we will bedealing with his mature views since, as Hannah Kasher has argued, inthe 1992 English translations to which most readers of this will haveaccess, even the earlier essays have been translated in a manner thatoften reflects the later views (Kasher, 2000, 54).

2. God and Theology

According to Leibowitz, the central idea of Jewish monotheism is theradical transcendence of God, a view that has previously been givenits starkest exposition by his philosophical hero, Maimonides.Postponing discussion of its precise logical status for Leibowitz, andprovisionally accepting that “God is radicallytranscendent” is a cognitive statement, a rough firstformulation of its meaning would be that God is an existent entitythat is absolutely incomparable to any other form of reality that wecan possibly encounter.

Following Maimonides’ negative theology, Leibowitz claims thatwe are unable to make any meaningful statements that purport todescribe God. Any attempt to speak of God’s properties orcharacteristics transcend the limits of human thought and language. Ingood Kantian, or even positivist fashion, human categories of thoughtonly get any purchase in the human context within which they areformulated. They cannot be assumed to retain their meaning whenapplied beyond the boundaries of possible human experience. Of course,this depends on the further assertion that God is not a possibleobject of such human experience, a point to which Leibowitz swiftlyproceeds. For a thoroughgoing commitment to the idea of the radicaltranscendence of God yields a number of important ontologicalconclusions that go beyond the semantic point made thus far. ForLeibowitz, the idea of radical transcendence, if taken seriously,implies that God cannot be “contained” within any realitythat we encounter. Nature is nature, history is history – and ifGod is truly transcendent neither are God or are related to God in anydirect sense. Thus, in a self-aware, if not self-deprecating moment,Leibowitz sets out his “heresy” (his description, notmine) thus: “God did not reveal himself in nature or inhistory.” (Yahadut, 240) Were things otherwise, thennature and history would be “Godly” – and thus wouldbe perfect and worthy of worship themselves. There would be “noroom for ‘the holy God’ who transcends natural reality,since then reality itself is divine and man himself is God”(Judaism, 25).

For Leibowitz, the only alternative to this view is a form ofpantheism – the attribution of divinity in some sense to naturalobjects – an idea that he admits finds “echoes … inJewish mysticism,” which to that extent is therefore“incompatible with halakhic Judaism” (Judaism,26). The idea that any material object can be holy is something that,in Leibowitz’s eyes, is the ultimate definition of idolatry,potentially leading to the worship of people, objects,or – significantly for his brand of Zionism – land. Incontrast, though it might seem ironic at first glance given his viewof pantheism, Leibowitz here takes up an almost Spinozan approach tonature. For Leibowitz, taking God’s transcendence seriouslyentails the elimination of superstitious beliefs in holy entities withsupernatural endowments, and thus he endorses a Spinozandemythologization of the natural world.^[4] But while Spinoza is willing to speak of “God or nature,”for Leibowitz, the natural world must be purified ofanytrace of divinity; divinity – or holiness – is a notion thatLeibowitz retains as a term to be used in connection with the God whoradicallytranscends nature, with no remainder.^[5]

Denuding the world of divinity does not stop for Leibowitz at thenatural world. History, as the story of humankind in the naturalworld, can no more carry divine significance than can a materialobject. The idea that there is some divine purpose in history, thatGod exerts some form of providence over humankind, would similarlycontradict the idea of God’s transcendence and is thus abaseless notion for Leibowitz for whom “an unbiased examinationof the history of humankind and of the Jews as related in the Biblewill not reveal in the entire process … any design or definitedirection, or gradual approach to a specific goal”(Judaism, 102).

On the basis of these remarks, one immediately sees thatLeibowitz’s thought will be devoid of much that passes fortraditional Jewish or general theology. Faith cannot be formulatedaround propositions that speak of God and his providentialrelationship to the universe. Holiness is confined to God and cannotbe predicated of anything that exists in the world (which also,incidentally, explains his opposition to any ethnocentricinterpretation of the idea of Chosen-ness based on some intrinsic“property” of holiness that Jews inherit). Any attributionof holiness to objects that might be found in Jewish texts is to beunderstood as attributing functional rather than essential holiness tothe object in question.^[6]

Leibowitz’s God is not a providential God; history has noteleology; and we find no attempts at theodicy in Leibowitz. Incontrast to many contemporary Jewish philosophers, the holocaustmerits barely a mention in his philosophical writings, other than todismiss it from theological discussion. The holocaust, as a historicalevent, can have no religious meaning for Leibowitz given histhoroughgoing commitment to divine transcendence that does not allowfor a God who is involved in human affairs.^[7] Those who would question, indeed those who lost their faith in God asa result of Auschwitz “never believed in God but in God’shelp… [for] one who believes in God … does not relatethis to belief in God’s help” (Accepting theYoke, 21).

For Leibowitz, this is a direct result of taking one’scommitment to the radical transcendence of God to its logicalconclusion. It is one thing, Leibowitz might say, to pay lip serviceto the idea of God’s transcendence. But if God is to be trulytranscendent, then we cannot associate our reality at any level withthat of God. The one statement that we can make regardingGod – that he is radically transcendent – can only be fleshedout further by clarifying how God is not anything that we canencounter in ordinary, or for that matter extraordinary, humanexperience. That Leibowitz here goes beyond even Maimonides is clearinasmuch as for Maimonides, though we cannot speak of God’sintrinsic properties, we can speak of his “actions,” whichis to speak of the course of nature, of which God is the first cause.And yet for Leibowitz, even this would transgress the limits to whichthe notion of radical transcendence binds us. To say that naturereflects God’s actions renders God immanent in nature, and thusno longer transcendent. From both a semantic and ontologicalperspective, therefore, Leibowitz takes the notion of God’stranscendence further than even his own philosophical“idol” (see Statman 2005), leaving us with a Judaism thatas Avi Sagi notes, is empty of both “theology and‘religious facts’” (Sagi 1997a, 206).

3. Interpreting Scripture

Leibowitz begins with a definition of God and draws out itsimplications for how we are to conceive of the world from a Jewishperspective. But where does he find this starting point? Textuallyspeaking, one might claim to find grounding for the radicaltranscendence of God in various biblical verses and statements drawnfrom the Jewish tradition more generally, but no less than one canfind quotes to question this account of God’s relationship withnature and with history – as Leibowitz himself often acknowledges.^[8] Indeed, any plain reading of Jewish Scripture would seem to suggest aGod very closely involved with history and nature. Leibowitz’sreading of Jewish Scripture is therefore based on a very particularhermeneutic approach to theTanakh (the acronym used to referto Jewish Scripture, based on the three works of which iscomposed –Torah, (lit. instruction),Nevi’im (Prophets), andKetuvim(Writings)).

Leibowitz’s definition of theTanakh as Holy Scripturewould appear atypically to place him in uncontroversial territory.But, what, for Leibowitz, does it mean to accord it this status andhow is it to be interpreted? For simplicity’s sake, we willfocus in what follows on the Torah, the founding constitution ofJudaism and the most authoritative part of theTanakh.Traditionally, it was believed that: 1) The Torah is the word of Godas dictated to Moses; and 2) it contains both the history of ancientIsrael and the eternally valid laws that bind the Jewishpeople – the mitzvoth. Though both claims are contested incontemporary denominations of Judaism, Leibowitz is highly critical ofsuch denominations, identifying himself with Orthodox Judaism withinwhich these would usually remain fundamental tenets. Yet his view ofScripture is some distance from the traditional picture.

While many traditionalists would read the Torah as containing theprehistory of Judaism – if not of the world – and thus asbeing full of factual statements teaching such information, Leibowitzcannot accept this to be the case. Beginning with a basicepistemological point, as noted earlier Leibowitz’s scientifictraining and vocation led him to take a positivistic approach toknowledge claims. Thus he writes that “our source of informationis science. To the extent that we possess any real knowledge it is byway of scientific cognition” (Judaism, 136). But, givenGod’s transcendence, there can be nothing holy about history ornature, or the information it provides. So were the Torah a historybook or a scientific tract detailing the science of theuniverse – and it is of course often read as at least giving anaccount of the origins of the universe – “it would bedifficult to see where [its] sacredness resided”(Judaism, 140). The Torah cannot be a holy book if it isteaching us information that is by (Leibowitz’s) definition profane.^[9]

But this means that theprima facie factual assertions thatwe encounter must be read as nothing of the sort. The Torah is not awork of fact containing truths that we can obtain through standardepistemic procedures. It is rather, a sacred work, a work that isconcerned with the realm of the religious. Not for Leibowitz thereforethe time-honoured medieval conundrum regarding faith and reason. Whilefor his medieval Jewish forbears reason and revelation were competingfor the same territory – raising the question of the relevance ofthe latter for those enamoured of the former – Leibowitz is happyto give reason its due without worrying about its encroachment intothe territory of revelation, andvice versa. The Torah as asacred work is dealing in the realm of the sacred and is not supposedto be a repository of the propositional truths of history or science.What it provides instead is “the demand made of man to worshipGod” (Judaism, 136). As noted earlier, Leibowitz has notruck with the idea that there could be “religious facts”and the idea that belief in creation, for example, could be areligious demand would conflate facts and values. The Torah is thesource of the commandments – the mitzvoth – which are themanner in which Jews are to serve God.

In one sense, this hermeneutic serves Leibowitz well, allowing him tobypass textual objections to his anti-providential reading of theTorah by claiming that the apparent references to God’s role innature or history are no longer to be understood factually, but ratheras expressing something about the nature of our obligation to God.Similarly, stories of individuals are not to be mined for theirhistorical content but for what they teach regarding the nature ofreligious obligation. At the same time, it demands a far fromintuitive reading of much of Scripture, especially the stories ofindividuals that are certainly presented as if they are in some sensehistorical, and that in the later books of the Prophets that are alsopart of Holy Scripture surelyare historical in part. YetLeibowitz insists that in attempting the impossible – speaking ofGod – the Torah necessarily uses various literary forms amenableto human comprehension, but that nonetheless “from thestandpoint of religious faith, the Torah and the entirety of HolyScripture must be conceived as ademand which transcends therange of human cognition … a demand conveyed in various formsof human expression: prescriptions, vision, poetry, prayer, thought,and narrative” (Judaism, 140).

This does not rule out in principle the possibility of the narrativeshappening to contain historical information in part. Scripture’snarratives could at times coincide with historical facts, thoughwhether or not this is the case would be subject to independentverification of these purported historical facts by standard epistemiccriteria. But even allowing for this possibility, the historicalmeaning would be merely accidental. Such facts would not take on anysacred meaning in virtue of that facticity, but rather on account ofimparting an ahistorical sacred message. The Torah, qua HolyScripture, cannot be read as a repository of historical fact. To readit “from the standpoint of religious faith,” is to read itfor the demands it places upon us.

Nonetheless, given Leibowitz’s views on God’stranscendence, it is clear that the sacred and historicalinterpretations of the textare mutually exclusive when itcomes to references to God’s “intervention” inhistory or nature. Maintaining God’s transcendence demands thatthere can be no such incursions of holiness into the world of theprofane, and Leibowitz’s hermeneutic allows him to police theseboundaries and deny that the Torah teaches us anything aboutGod’s actual intervention in nature or his directing of history.Apparently factual statements to this end in the Torah are not to beconstrued as such, but rather in terms of the normative messages thatthey carry. Here, the priority that Leibowitz gives to hisunderstanding of God’s transcendence appears forcefully,constraining him to take this hermeneutic stance. It does, however,raise the question of Leibowitz’s understanding of the divinestatus of the Torah. For, if we cannot speak of it being revealed byGod in any historical sense, whence its divinity? Leibowitz, fullyaware of the problem, maintains that it is the Oral Torah thatestablishes the divinity of the Written Torah.

Traditional Jewish teaching maintained that at the same time as hetransmitted the Written Torah, God transmitted an oral teaching toMoses that was not to be written down. This Oral teaching developedinto the multi-layered work that was eventually written down as theTalmud by the end of the sixth century and that was the source of thecomplex practical system of law – halakhah – that governedJewish life until the nineteenth century and continues to structurethe life of contemporary Orthodox Jews. Leibowitz maintains that“religiously and from a logical and causal standpoint the OralLaw, the Halakhah, is prior to the Written Teaching”(Judaism, 12), and thus it is the Oral Torah that grantsdivine status to the Written Torah:

The decision about which books to accept as Scripture was notmade behind the veil of mythology or pre-history, but took place inthe full light of history and in the course of halakhicnegotiation…. Scripture is one of the institutions of thereligion of Israel. (Judaism, 12)

This, Leibowitz admits, yields an inescapably circular account wherebythe divinity of the Written Torah is established by the Oral Torah,which only gains its own authority on the basis of the Written Torahthat it is being used to support. More significantly Leibowitzemphasizes time and again that the Oral Torah is a human product. Thuswe end up with human beings stipulating that the Written Torah isdivine, a stipulation, however, that only has authority based upon theWritten Torah’s own statements to the effect that one mustfollow the words of the human sages.^[10] Reinforcing the circularity, this way of reading of the relevantverses in the Torah itself depends on interpretation by the sages.

Leibowitz maintains, then, that we can say one thing aboutGod – that he is radically transcendent, a statement the contentof which is exhausted in the denial of any element of divinity to anyother reality. Allowing for this denial of any positive theology thatwould relate God to history or nature, we still find one thing towhich we can attach divinity, and that is Scripture. However, the mostbasic question regarding whether or not God revealed the Torah in anyhistorical sense must be answered negatively by Leibowitz, as noted inStatman 2005 (60) and Sagi 1997a (213), leaving him with an account ofthe divinity of Scripture that is circular, and that ultimately seemsunable to escape its reliance on human decision.

4. Jewish Faith and Jewish Law

The “top-down” approach to Leibowitz’s theologytaken so far places extreme limits on what one can say or know aboutGod but does not yield a constructive account of the nature of Jewishfaith. His positive formulation therefore proceeds from an altogetherdifferent direction. Taking a more “bottom-up” approachmethodologically speaking, Leibowitz utilizes a historical argument indefining Jewish faith, arguing that throughout history, at least untilthe emancipation of European Jewry beginning at the end of theeighteenth century, Judaism was defined through adherence to Jewishpractice, to the commandments of the Torah itself, and the subsequentdevelopment of these commandments into the all encompassing system ofJewish law, or Halakhah. Any definition of Jewish faith must thereforecentre upon Jewish practice, on the mitzvoth that governed theeveryday life of Jews until modern times. Moreover, Leibowitz’shistorical account of faith makes no allowances for any theologicalaccretions, be they mystical or philosophical, which would purport todefine it. Jewish theology through the ages has always adapted itselfto prevailing philosophical or mystical winds, and is seen byLeibowitz as “episodic and fleeting” (Judaism,8). Whether the conceptual scaffolding was kabbalah or rationalistphilosophy, Judaism “was never dependent upon some specificphilosophy, ethic, world view, or theology” (Judaism,8–9), though it is mysticism and not rationalism which, alongwith Reform Judaism, he classifies one of “the two greatdistortions of Jewish faith” (Judaism, 111).

This historical account also melds with Leibowitz’s theologicalstarting point. Given God’s transcendence, we know that therealm of natural or historical fact cannot be holy. Faith cannottherefore be “a conclusion a person may come to after ponderingcertain facts about the world,” and instead is “anevaluative decision that one makes, and, like allevaluations, it does not result from any information one has acquired,but isa commitment to which one binds himself”(Judaism, 37, emphasis added). Jewish faith, therefore, sinceit cannot consist of propositional beliefs concerning God upon whichhalakhic observance is based, is instead founded upon the evaluativedecision to commit to that very system of observance. For Leibowitz itis the mitzvoth themselves “which demarcate the realm of thesacred … [and] anything outside that realm lacks sanctity andis unworthy of religious adoration” (Judaism, 25).

This assertion of the primacy of practice is not unique to Leibowitz,reaching back in modern Jewish philosophy to Moses Mendelssohn andresurrected in recent decades by scholars such as Menachem Kellner(2006) and Kenneth Seeskin (1990). Steven Schwarzschild memorablytermed this “the Jewish twist” (Schwarzschild 1977, 139)that in his view Jewish thinkers had applied since time immemorial tothe systems of thought with which they grappled. Leibowitz, however,gives this idea its most extreme formulation.

Ordinarily one might assume that the commitment to the practice of thehalakhic way of life is an independently specifiable mental act andcertain statements that Leibowitz makes in his earlier writings,vestiges of which remain in some less careful later formulations,might still appear to suggest this.^[11] Yet for Leibowitz, faith isnot an independently specifiablepsychological state that can be defined in isolation from itspractical fruits. Indeed he castigates those who “wish todistinguish a specific psychological-conceptual content of thereligious consciousness from its concrete institutionalizedembodiment” (Judaism, 38). Leibowitz will not allow usto pinpoint a particular psychological state that constitutes thiscommitment, and correlatively is highly critical of mysticalapproaches to Judaism that revolve around putative religiousexperiences. A religion devoted to halakhic practice “does notdepend upon the incidence of religious experience”(Judaism, 13), which is a mere “embellishment” tohalakhic practice. Indeed, “the aim of proximity to God isunattainable” (Judaism, 16).

Clearly for Leibowitz, the problem with specifying some psychologicalbasis for this commitment is defining what the content of this mentalact would be. To what am I committed? The natural answer is that weare committed to worshipping God. But any attempt to unpack thatstatement further will lead us to transgress the previously notedboundaries of human cognition. The proposition “I am committedto God” is not open to further elaboration if God is beyond ourcategories of language and thought. Belief in God for Leibowitz, whichcannot be formulated propositionally, can only then be embodied in acommitment to a particular way of life, which is expressed bysubordination to the actual practical regime of halakhic practice.Thus, we are thrust back to the practice itself as thecontent of our faith rather than the symptom of someindependently specifiable form of faith as psychological commitment.It turns out then that, “[Jewish] faith isnothing but itssystem of mitzvoth, which was the embodiment of Judaism”(Judaism, 38, emphasis added). Obviously, it is almost atruism that Jewish faith understood this way must involvesome form of mental state as the causal motivator of halakhicaction. Moreover, as we will see presently, the nature of this mentalstate does make a difference to one’s faith; it is only whenintended as “worship of God” that such acts are to beunderstood as full expressions of faith. But ultimately, in theabsence of the practical fruits, one has nothing for Leibowitz. Muchas “belief in” (in contradistinction to “beliefthat”) is incorrectly attributed to someone who consistentlyfails to act in accordance with that mental attitude, for LeibowitzJewish faith cannot be correctly attributed to a mere psychologicalstate in the absence of actual adherence to the halakhic system.Jewish faith is therefore equivalent to the observance of mitzvothintended as acts of worship; the concept isexhausted by suchintentional performance of mitzvoth.

This contraction of faith to an almost behavioural definition,however, means that halakhic observance itselfconstitutesthe faith upon which it is usually thought to be based, and this faithcannot be identified independently of this practice, which Leibowitzconcedes might create the appearance of paradox:

Halakhah is founded on faith, yet at the same time constitutesthis faith. In other words, Judaism as a living religion creates thefaith upon which it is founded. This is a logical paradox but not areligious paradox. (Judaism, 11)

Asa Kasher, a neo-Leibowitzian, has argued that Leibowitz here doesnot present a paradox at all, but instead a circle that is related tothe one discussed earlier in section 3. Kasher contends that Leibowitzis arguing that halakhah creates its faith through its designation ofthe institutions of Judaism, primarily the divinity of Scripture, withits demand to serve God, while Scripture designates the halakhicsystem as the way in which such divine service is realized. (A.Kasher, 1976, 239–40). Leibowitz in response concedes to Kasherthat there is no paradox, but stresses that no matter how many timesone goes around the circle, the ultimate commitment to the life ofmitzvoth must come from beyond the circle, from a conative – rather than cognitive – commitment that is beyond reason (see“Responses,” 277–278).

As a justificatory argument for engaging in the practice, this mightindeed create an impression of circularity – though circulararguments are neither formally invalid, nor paradoxical, but“merely” unpersuasive. Leibowitz, however, emphasizes timeand again that he is not attempting to “justify” thecommandments. Medieval Jewish thinkers believed that it was possibleto “justify” Judaism by appeal to universal standards.Thus, to take Maimonides for example, if truth is the standard, thenJudaism is clearly the most rational religion since it is a superiorexemplar of, or means to attaining the truth, relative to the othermonotheistic alternatives. If one were to begin from a neutralperspective, a rational being insofar as he is rational, could, inprinciple, be convinced of the superiority of Judaism. But this ideaof a neutral rational starting point from which we can assessaxiological alternatives is one that Leibowitz rejects.

Here we again see evidence of Leibowitz’s strict fact/valuedistinction, and the corresponding limits it places on rationalismwhen it is understood as the metaphysical thesis that the world isintelligible “all the way down.” The world and inparticular our evaluative commitments within it arenotrational all the way down. The fiction that as fully formed rationalbeings we cast our eye without prejudice over the various modes ofpractical evaluation and decide in favor of the most rational isdismissed by Leibowitz. Once wehave certain commitments, asevery person does at the time at which he begins to reflect on them,our rational faculties can indeed be used as tools for exploring them,but not in the expectation that such reflection can be expected toproduce a justification or meaning that will convince all rationalbeings to commit themselves to such a practice. And if we do ask“why commit?” in the expectation of some such answer, weare assuming the factual or theoretical stance towards faith thatLeibowitz contends is rejected by Judaism. When it comes to faith, inLeibowitz’s words:

I know of no ways to faith other than faith itself….[It] cannot be taught. One can only present it in all its might andpower. (Judaism, 37)

4.1 Faith, Practice, and God

While Leibowitz’s very bare account of faith seems hardly robustenough as an account of religious commitment, there is more to be saidfor Leibowitz’s account than first might seem.

The claim ultimately for Leibowitz – that the practice ofhalakhah constitutes faith, while faith is the basis for practice– can be broken down into the following two claims:

Claim 1:
Faith is defined as, or constituted by halakhic practice.

Claim 2:
Faith, defined as halakhic practice, is founded on that practice.

Claim 1 can initially be understood as the simpleempirical/theological claim discussed at the beginning of section 4.InClaim 2, Leibowitz’s point appears to bethat while one may wish to argue that one’s practice is foundedon some independently specifiable faith such as the belief that Godgave these commandments to the Jewish people, given that belief in Godhas no meaning other than one’s committed practice, in factone’s commitment to halakhic practice cannot but be founded onthe practice itself.

The first thing to note here is that as a matter of empirical fact,Claim 2 is more often than not true. It is indeedusually the case that halakhic practice precedes belief in God, suchthat one’s initial practice is not based on that belief in anymeaningful sense. At the point at which we are beings who are able toreflect thoughtfully about our commitment to our practices and theorigins of that commitment, we are already implicated in and formed bythem. Thus, practice is generally not based on an initial belief inGod, but on practice itself, passed down through parents or others. Itis only subsequent to being committed to the practice that we reflect,analyse, and even formulate the very idea that we are practicing outof a commitment to God. Talk of God thus supervenes on the commitmentto the practice rather than being a justification for it. Jewishfaith, Leibowitz tells us, “cannot be understood at all if theTorah and its precepts are not construed as data preceding recognitionof the Giver of the Torah” (Judaism, 5).

This goes on to yield an important sense in which Leibowitz’scircle is a virtuous one. Over time if we are good Leibowitzians whoobserve the mitzvoth, presumably including that of study of Torahitself, we will come to understand that this very practice in factdefines the nature of Jewish faith altogether. ThusClaim1, initially understood as a historical definition, takes onepistemic meaning for the person who practices mitzvoth. One willunderstand that faith is indeed this commitment to practice andnothing else – for Leibowitz “the purpose of the mitzvothis to educate man to recognize that knowing God and cleaving to himconsist in the practice of these very precepts”(Judaism, 27). What one comes to realize is that the faithcommitment cannot be cashed out other than in terms of that practiceitself. One might thus readClaim 2 as saying thatfaith is founded on mitzvoth, in the sense both of being acquired andmaintained through practice, and also by creating the understanding offaith spoken of inClaim 1, as over time one comes tounderstand that Jewish faith can indeedonly be definedpractically. Much as Aristotle believed that virtuous action precedesthe true acquisition of the virtues – the latter involves thatwe know what we are doing – our commitment to the mitzvoth andknowledge of their definitive role within Jewish faith (Claim1), or at least the conscious commitment that we make to thisas reflective beings, is founded on or created by participation inthose very halakhic practices (Claim 2).^[12] Just as for Aristotle it is only once we have acquired the virtuesthat those same acts becomes truly virtuous, in the same way halakhicactions only latterly become true acts of religious faith, in whichone is conscious of the manner in which they constitute faith.

One might therefore argue that the virtue of the circle is thatcontinued practice reinforces faith – the practical circleis persuasive as a way of reinforcing faith (i.e., practiceof the mitzvoth) in a way that the circle of logical justification isnot. In the original version of this entry, this idea was used toargue that Leibowitz could in this way be seen as offering aquasi-justificatory phenomenology of faith, whereby the meaning ofmitzvoth is revealed to its adherents through practice in a mannerthat simply cannot be presented in discursive terms. As Leibowitzwrites in homage to Wittgenstein: “That which cannot be said, issaid by the religion of the Torah and the Mitzvoth,”(Yahadut, 343) – or at least by a commitment to themthat cannot be given a specification independent of their practice.Yonatan Brafman, however, correctly points out that “ifone’s commitment to halakhic norms stems from habituation totheir practice, then one has not adopted service of God as avalue” (Brafman, 2014, 82–83); as we noted earlier, it isonly if intended as worship of God that an act is a genuine act ofreligious faith. At the same time, if “service of God” canonly be specified in terms of practice, the extent to which suchhabituation differs from this “service of God” is notentirely clear.

Ultimately then, the central problem that Brafman’s critiquehighlights is that of the difficulty Leibowitz has in specifying anycontent for the intent to serve God beyond the commitment to thepractice. First, what meaning can Leibowitz give to the idea that Godexists as the object of our worship? It would appear that Leibowitzmust at least retain an ontological commitment to there being anentity that we can call God, to whom halakhic practices are directed,such that “God is radically transcendent” remains acognitive statement. But beyond that, there is nothing more that canbe said. Of possibly greater concern though is the related question ofhow the mitzvoth can be seen to be God’s commands. The mitzvothare only “holy” inasmuch as they constitute holinessthrough beingGod’s commands. It is in this way thatthis practice can constitute faith. Otherwise his model rendersany commitment to a value system an expression of faith, atleast in the sense of being a conative leap that cannot be a result ofrational reflection.^[13] What then marks this out asJewish faith is simply that itis the Jewish form of life, one that derives from specifically Jewishsources and has a specifically Jewish history. But as notedpreviously, Leibowitz cannot construe statements in the Torahregarding the event of revelation at Sinai as historical statements.So the problem remains of how a people could have actually beencommanded if it is not the case that at some point in history thecommandments were revealed by God. That they could not have been onLeibowitz’s theology, renders problematic the idea that they areGod’s commands in any meaningful sense, and that our practice isthus divine worship.

The problem here for Leibowitz is that mitzvoth are indeed enacted byhuman beings and thus play a role in the natural world. As a result,they musthave a history. At the very least we can say thatat some point they made their incursion into history. But how? If notthrough some miraculous revelatory event – a possibility thatLeibowitz excludes – then it must have been through some form ofhuman initiative. Thus, in parallel to the attribution of divinity toScripture, as Sagi notes, “the system is made religiouslymeaningful by the believers’ perception of it as concerned withthe worship of God,” while God collapses into a formalrequirement of the system, “the supreme concept, uniting thesystem and endowing it with religious significance” (Sagi 1997a,213). Though it is not clear that this would concern Leibowitz, oneought to note that the mere institutional decision to categorize themitzvoth as holy is hardly a firm basis for recovering their divinityin any sense that would satisfy most of the religious adherents thenature of whose faith he is attempting to delineate.

Leibowitz’s exclusion of God from history thus leaves himapparently unable to account for the divinity of the commandments in amanner that would render their performance acts of commitmenttoGod in the ordinary sense. Indeed, when asked directly whetherthe statement “I believe in God” is meaningful,Leibowitz’s response was: “I do not understand these wordsif they are divorced from the obligations that derive from them… faith in God is not what I know about God, but what I knowabout my obligations to God” (Sihot, 97). Talk ofdivinity should not be understood cognitively but in terms of thenormative demands it imposes. Even talk of the revelation at Sinai isto be construed along these lines – “The meaning of therevelation at Sinai is the recognition of the command that we havebeen commanded” (Emunah, 154). Again, whether thisyields a system that can genuinely be termed divine rather than onethat is merely designated as such by humans, who after all, forLeibowitz, cannot themselves be a locus of holiness, is brought intoquestion.

5. WorshipLishmah and the Meaning of Mitzvoth

Leibowitz cannot make sense of the divinity of the mitzvoth byclaiming that God is their source in any straightforward sense. Havingreduced all meaningful discourse about God and faith to halakhicpractice, one might thus look to the meaning of the practice for somesuch mark of divinity. As we have noted earlier, talk of“meaning” for Leibowitz is bound up with that of value andpurpose, so it is to these that we must look for the meaning of thedivinity of the mitzvoth, and Leibowitz has much to say about thepurpose of the mitzvoth, particularly as they relate (or not) to humanvalues, based on a basic Talmudic distinction between two forms ofreligious worship – worship that is“lishmah,” or “for its own sake,” andworship that is “Not-lishmah,” or “not forits own sake.”

Worship that is “Not-lishmah” Leibowitz characterizes inteleological terms. It begins with a set of human values and beliefs,and understands religion as the instrument for the realization ofthese values. Thus religious acts will be derived from this set ofvalues, as the acts that best achieve them. These values, therefore,are prior to the religious act, much in the way utilitarian ethicaltheory prioritizes a definition of the good and defines right actionin terms of what maximizes that good. Religious action then is at basemotivated by human needs and the problem with such worship forLeibowitz is that it renders God the servant of man. It is what heterms “an endowing religion – a means of satisfyingman’s spiritual needs and of assuaging his mental conflicts. Itsend is man, and God offers his services to man”(Judaism, 14).

Reflecting an ambivalence that runs through statements in the Jewishtradition regarding such worship, Leibowitz vacillates betweenrecognizing worship “Not-lishmah” as a genuine if flawedform of worship and as not seeing it as worship at all – indeed,seeing it as idolatrous in its reduction of worship of God to worshipof man, thus implying that man is holy.^[14] Philosophically speaking, his negative attitude can again be tracedback to his strictly scientific approach to the world and his viewsconcerning God’s transcendence. Regarding the former, Leibowitzdismisses the idea that human beings exist at some supra-naturallevel. As creatures of flesh and blood, we are governed by the samenatural laws as the rest of nature. Human beings have no specialendowment that transcends their physical nature. Given that this isthe case, human needs cannot be sacred, and thus the service of humanneed cannot be the purpose of the mitzvoth. Coming from the oppositedirection, given that God is transcendent and cannot be related to anyform of concrete reality, including human reality, how could theservice of our own needs, which are a function of our humanity,constitute worship of God? God must be the exclusive locus ofreligious value, to the exclusion of human values. Man, in comparison,is but human, and a part of nature. Thus, while Medieval Jewishphilosophers usually take the statement at Genesis 1:27 that man wascreated “in the image of God” as placing man on a pedestalby somehow comparing him to God, for Leibowitz, the verse should betaken to indicate that man is a mere “image” in its moreprosaic, if not pejorative Platonic sense (Judaism, 90).

In marked contrast to all of this, Leibowitz presents the idea ofworship “lishmah,” which is the mark of ademanding religion. Here, the religious act is prior to any set ofhuman needs or values. It is characterized by acts of worship demandedby God, where the demands made, and the motivations for serving, aresimply that – they are Gods’ demands. Here man is“an instrument for the realization of an end which transcendsman … [who] serves his God lishmah – because He is worthyof worship” (Judaism, 14). Essentially, Judaism is areligion that demands that man serve God, not that God serve man.Mitzvoth, for Leibowitz, are not therefore based on human needs anddesires since that would subordinate God to human values, renderingGod a slave to humanity, and placing humanity at the pinnacle of allvalue. Most mitzvoth for Leibowitz must therefore “bemeaningless except as expressions of worship. They have no utility interms of satisfaction of human needs” (Judaism, 16).Relatedly, he therefore sees much of halakhah as constitutive ofreligious “reality” rather than as regulating apre-existing reality. The dietary laws, to take an obvious example,are not there to regulate some form of pre-existing sacred reality.Reality is equivalent to physical reality and the dietary laws arenothing more (nor less) than requirements of worship constituting ahalakhic “reality,” which is a reality that has noreferent beyond itself.

Thissui generis understanding of halakhah is important if weare to understand Leibowitz’s retreat from facts to values inthe realm of faith. We have seen that to speak of any factual realityas divine impugns God’s transcendence for Leibowitz. But onemight ask why speaking of God as a source of values within our worldis any less of an intrusion upon his transcendence. Leibowitz’spoint is that God is not a source of valueswithin our world,since halakhah is not a function of any human values, indeed not afunction of any set of values to which we have any independent access.In this way Leibowitz retains the transcendence of God in theevaluative realm of faith commitments in a way that is not possible inthe realm of facts. Nonetheless, the question of how such transcendentvalues entered human history, in essence, the problem of revelationdiscussed at the end of the previous section, rears its head oncemore. It is impossible to claim that mitzvoth were literally revealedby God given His radical transcendence, yet if we simply regard themas human, whence their divinity?

It is noteworthy that here a Kierkegaardian interpretation could offera solution. While one can find comparisons with Kierkegaard in Sigad1977, Harvey 2002, and scattered throughout Sagi 2009 (to name but afew such sources), it is Roi Benbassat who argues for a“fundamental analogy between the two thinkers” such thathe sees Leibowitz’s “religious position as a variation ofKierkegaard’s faith in the absurd developed from the sametypical existentialist conception of ethics” (2015, 143). Wewill investigate the specifically ethical bent of Benbassat’sclaim presently, but we here note that when we remarked earlier thatLeibowitz retreated from his claim that Jewish faith was based on aparadox, he may have spoken too soon. For what, other than a paradox,could account for the actual divinity of mitzvoth in the absence ofany possibility of divine incursion into the human arena? According toBenbassat, “to claim there is no paradox is to disregard thevery essence of Leibowitz’s position” (Benbassat 2015,151), and it might be that only a paradox will allow the ultimateconative commitment that is Leibowitzian faith to truly be worship ofGod. Whether this picture can indeed be assimilated to that drawn byLeibowitz – and his strong scientific grounding certainly leavesroom for doubt – it does, at this stage, seem to be the only wayfor him to maintain that performance of mitzvoth constitutes genuinelydivine service.

6. Ethics and Religion

Leibowitz’s view of mitzvoth has important implications for therelationship between ethics and religion in general and morespecifically for the relationship between ethics and halakhah.Leibowitz does not deny that there is a genuine realm of ethicalvalue, writing that both the theocentric (religious) andanthropocentric (Kantian) conceptions of value are“legitimate” (Judaism, 208). Leibowitz certainlyrecognizes that beyond the realm of halakhah “flourish many gooddeeds and events of grandeur and sublimity” (Judaism,25). Generally for Leibowitz, halakhah is not all-encompassing anddoes not govern all behavior, as he makes explicit in his interviewswith Michael Shashar where he asks rhetorically whether Judaism has aperspective on the decision whether to build a bridge over aparticular river (Sihot, 91). For Leibowitz then, there areclearly other aspects of human life that are necessary, indeedvaluable, and that need not be dedicated to the worship of God. If,therefore, one is acting for the sake of one’s fellow man, onemust simply recognize that this is the performance of a noble ethicalact, not a holy religious act. What Leibowitz stresses is theimportance of not confusing the one with the other.

So religion, it might be argued, must be the highest value forLeibowitz to which all others are subordinated in times of conflict;it need not be the only value. Religious values just cannot besubordinated to ethical values which, since dictated by humaninterests for Leibowitz, are profane by definition. Ethics, asLeibowitz notes, is the “atheistic category parexcellence” (Judaism, 18), placing man at the apex ofour values in place of God. In contrast:

The Torah does not recognize moral imperatives stemming fromknowledge of natural reality or from awareness of man’s duty tohis fellow man. All it recognizes are Mitzvot, divineimperatives. (Judaism, 18)

Unsurprisingly given the above, much has been made of the formalsimilarities between Leibowitz’s approach to mitzvoth andKantian ethics. Both stress “worshiplishmah”– or the categorical nature of both the ethical and halakhicimperative, neither of which can be instrumental means to ends beyondthe respective duties themselves. It is just that Kantian ethics“worships” man “lishmah,” or as anend in himself, while religion worships God. Moreover, as with Kantianmoral imperatives, the upshot of acting on religious imperatives forLeibowitz is autonomy. But while ethical action is autonomous for Kantinasmuch as it is a deliverance of our own practical reason, that veryfact means that for Leibowitz ethical action isnot anexpression of human autonomy, but of our enslavement to our ownnature. Recalling that for Leibowitz man is simply a part of naturelike any other, when acting in accordance with that nature, man is“in effect, nothing but a robot activated by the forces ofnature, just like the cattle grazing in the pasture, which are also‘free from the Torah and Mitzvoth’; that is, from any lawexternally imposed” (Judaism, 21).

Though perhaps his rhetoric gets the better of him in comparing manacting on his own nature to an animal acting on its own nature,Leibowitz’s central and apparently incompatibilist point is thatfreedom cannot be a function of acting according to one’s ownnature if man’s nature “is only the last link in a causalchain of the forces of inorganic and organic nature which act upon himand within him” (ibid.). If this is the case, then the ethicaldictates of human reason no more render man autonomous than do the‘acts’ of his digestive system. Man is only “freefrom the bondage of nature because he lives a life that is contrary tonature,” and thus “emancipation from the bondage of naturecan only be brought about by the religion of the Mitzvoth”(Judaism, 22).

Yet this contrast with Kant actually betrays a deeper similarity. Kantsees ethical action as the route to autonomy precisely because it isthrough practical reason that we transcend our own nature and makecontact with the noumenal realm. In effect therefore, and despiteKant’s wish to keep religion and ethics apart from amotivational perspective, Kant and Leibowitz are in agreement thathuman autonomy requires that man transcend his phenomenal nature. Thedifference is that while for Kant ethics is, in a certain sense,transcendent – at least transcending man’s empirical ifnot his rational nature – for Leibowitz ethics remains afunction of human nature and therefore mired in the“phenomenal” realm destined never to escape.Leibowitz’s view of autonomy appears to depend again on histhoroughgoing “naturalism” in regard to the physical andhuman world. Only the realm of mitzvoth can effect the sort ofLeibowitzian “transcendence” that yields autonomy.

Notably, Brafman argues that this idea enables Leibowitz to“offer an argument to the effect that service of God is actuallythe most fitting value for an individual to adopt” (Brafman,2015, 157). For Brafman, Leibowitz can argue that at least at theaxiological level, one can proclaim the superiority of service of Godto all other axiological choices. In brief, precisely becausepractical reason (correctly applied) “coerces” us to asingle conclusion, for Leibowitz it cannot be the seat of autonomythat Kant claims it to be. Only a choice that is not rational, onedevoid of any humanly understood value, can be truly autonomous. Andas we have seen above, for Leibowitz, it is service of God alone thatmeets this standard. Thus, the only truly free act, and thus the onlyact that is fully value-bearing, is that of serving God throughhalakhah since “halakhic norms satisfy no natural or rationalhuman concern” (ibid., 160). If we wish then to base thedivinity of the mitzvoth on their meaning as opposed to any historicalevent of revelation, the meaning of the mitzvoth that marks them outas divine is, in a sense, their very“meaninglessness.”

It is this total lack of rationality, however, that leads toBenbassat’s aforementioned Kierkegaardian reading of Leibowitz.For Benbassat, Leibowitz’s view of halakhic practice cannot bedeontological since that would require “an objective foundationof duty that allows it to be recognized as valid regardless ofend-determinations” (2015, 148). Kant provides that objectivefoundation through his account of practical reason. Leibowitz,however, presents halakahic practice as a groundless conativecommitment, the basis for the validity of which is simply faith,understood as “a purely subjective positing of a superiorend” (ibid, 149), that end being the worship of God.Nonetheless, this “end-determination” does not renderLeibowitz’s view teleological, since his view of faith, andindeed of divine worship does not “posit an end separate fromduty … [but rather] posits duty itself as an end” (ibid,150). While the earlier discussion of Kierkegaardian paradox may haveappeared counter to Leibowitz’s scientific background, on thisoccasion his radical take on human autonomy does seem to lend itselfmore naturally to an existentialist reading.

The flipside of this understanding of service of God in terms ofradical human autonomy is that halakhah must be understood asexpressing a form of primordial divine heteronomy. This yields afertile area of comparison to Levinas in Fagenblat 2004, though asFagenblat notes, for Levinas the realm of the ethicalitselfis a realm of transcendence beyond discursive human rationality.Unlike Leibowitz, for Levinas we need not go as far as mitzvoth tofind the realm of transcendence.^[15] Either way, whether Leibowitz’s views on the distinctionbetween religion and ethics hold up depends in large part on 1)whether one can indeed justify morality on rational or naturalisticfoundations, or whether it does in some way transcend human nature;and 2) the viability of his radicalized notion of freedom as the seatof ultimate value.^[16]

6.1 Ethical Mitzvoth

As we have noted, much as Kant does for moral value, Leibowitz locatesthe religious value of our acts in our intentions. Holiness, he tellsus, “is nothing but halakhic observance;the specificintentional acts dedicated to the service of God”(Judaism, 24, emphasis added). Presumably then, mitzvothcould be performed for the sake of worshipping God and yet haveincidental benefit to us. As long as the motivation is the worship ofGod, any incidental benefits would surely be legitimate, or at leastnot rule out the act as religiously worthy. What matters here is thehierarchy of values – observance of mitzvoth cannot besubordinated to ethical values. Leibowitz’sintentionalism dictates that religious acts, even if they incidentallysatisfy certain human needs, would still not be ethical acts giventheir religious motivation.

The idea of ethical mitzvoth, however, now becomes an oxymoron forLeibowitz. An act is either religious or ethical. Even “Youshall love your neighbor as yourself,” is to be regarded as amitzvah, not as an ethical precept. The key phrase in the versecontaining this commandment for Leibowitz is that which followsimmediately to end the verse: “I am God.” It is a dutytowards one’s neighbor that is based on man’s positionbefore God, not his position before his fellow man.

One of Leibowitz’s concerns is that for imperatives to be trulycategorical, they must draw their authority from something other thanhuman needs and values, which are too weak a foundation to groundcategorical imperatives. One can always excuse oneself with the claimthat other people’s needs are not overriding in any givensituation. There is no escape, however, from the authority of a divinedemand, so locating ethical imperatives within a religious systemgives them the necessary foundation. Their position as commandmentstransforms them from “mere good counsel, a noble aspiration, ora sublime ideal,” and instead gives them “the reality oflaw, something one is compelled to take seriously as one must take apolice ordinance seriously” (Judaism, 19). Yet givenhis intentionalism, for Leibowitz this must simultaneously deprive anact of its ethical character. Acting for noble ideals, whilelegitimate, would still render acts ethical, not religious.

This raises a problem for Leibowitz, since it is not clear that it cando justice to the ethical prescriptions of the Torah qua ethicalprescriptions. Ought I to act justly towards my neighbor out of myconcern for him, or out of concern for God? While it seems clear thatLeibowitz could only see the latter as a religious act, it is notclear that this sits comfortably with our ethical intuitions –though presumably Leibowitz would simply retort that this is preciselywhat it means to subordinate human interest to the ultimate value thatis the worship of God. While a Levinasian squaring of the circle wouldallow that our ethical concern for the other isitself a markof transcendence, for Leibowitz, a religious act, even if it may serveone’s fellow man incidentally, can neither be motivated by sucha goal, nor allow such goals to play a role in our understanding of itas a mitzvah, since this would render God the slave of humaninterests.

The question that arises, however, is whether in the case of ethicallymotivated acts that coincide with mitzvoth, a Jew ought to haveinstead performed the act for religious reasons – a positionthat would not leave much room for a religious person to perform anethical action. Indeed, it would seem that if one wishes toperform the mitzvah of, for example, “loving one’sneighbor,” one oughtnot to be acting based on ethicalmotives. As such, it is not clear what becomes of the legitimacy ofthe ethical realm for a religious Jew, since every ethically motivatedact constitutes a missed opportunity for the worship of God. Each actought to be religiously rather than ethically motivated, even when themere act itself would be the same. While it is not as if one who isethically motivated can sincerely transform that ethical motivationinto a religious one, it seems as if becoming the type of person whonaturally acts religiously in such cases would have to be the ultimateaim for Leibowitz. This would not deny all value to ethicallymotivated acts, but it certainly seems to problematize those thatcoincide with specific mitzvoth for Jewsqua Jews. Thoughhappily the demands of the two realms often coincided,Leibowitz’s picture, it seems, leads to the problematicconclusion that ultimately a Jew ought not to be ethical, but insteadreligious.

6.2 Meta-Halakhah and the Status of Women

Leibowitz’s account of halakhah is not uni-dimensional. Hisclaim thatmost of the mitzvoth are meaningless according tohuman conceptions of value (Judaism, 16) leaves an importantgap that he exploits elsewhere in his writings, particularly in ashort late piece on the status of women in Judaism, where hedistinguishes between two types of mitzvoth in a manner that rendersthe picture considerably more complex.

Thus on the one hand, we have the ritual commandments required of menand not required of women. These mitzvoth are indeed“meaningless,” having no intrinsic value beyond theirstatus as mitzvoth that God requires of men and not women. They do notreflect any exalted status for men or yield access to some sort ofreligious experience beyond the mere burden of performance. Giventhis, the desire of women to take on such practices in the name ofequality reflects a fundamental misunderstanding – or at least anon-Leibowitzian understanding – of the nature of thesecommandments. And yet, when it comes to the highest levels of Torahstudy and access to public office, both of which had traditionallybeen halakhically forbidden to women, Leibowitz takes a very differentview. Barring women access to the study of Torah “is not toexempt them from a duty … but is to deprive them of a basicJewish right … [that] renders their Jewishness inferior to thatof men” (Judaism, 129). The original restriction, aswell as that regarding attaining public office, reflected theprevailing socio-cultural norms of the surrounding society rather thanany essential halakhic determinations. Thus Leibowitz wishes todistinguish between

absolute demands reflecting acceptance of the ‘yoke ofthe kingdom of heaven’ that are not amenable to adjustment tonatural or social factors, [and] practices which reflect givencircumstances and the views shaped by them; in other words, betweenunconditional prescriptions and proscriptions and norms reflecting agiven sociocultural milieu and its prejudices.(Judaism, 131)

We find, therefore, a realm of mitzvoth that do appear to besubservient to human values and societal change. That Leibowitzbelieves in such a category, independently of the highly chargedgender question, is clear from the following:

Consider the proscription of ploughing with an ox and an assyoked together. Does this imply a duty to base agriculture on animalpower and to create the opportunity for fulfilling the prohibition?Reversing the terms, is mechanized agriculture, which obviates the useof animals as a source of energy forbidden because it removes allopportunity for observing this mitzvah? Or is it permissible to assumea hypothetical imperative: in the event that animals are used, avoidploughing with an ox and an ass yoked together?(Judaism, 149)

The Torah clearly contains laws or commandments that react topolitical and social institutions already in place – hence lawsconcerning slavery for example. Thus it turns out that there are twocategories of mitzvoth for Leibowitz: type₁ acts withoutintrinsic meaning that are constitutive of a halakhic reality and notamenable to change; and type₂ acts where the halakhiccommunity has responsibility for regulating a pre-existing reality.These halakhic acts can change depending on the general socioculturalnorms governing that particular aspect of reality, be it agriculture,or gender equality. Indeed, Leibowitz often notes explicitly thatJudaism is not to be identified with the specific laws with which itbegan, but with the “recognition of a system of precepts asbinding, even if their specifics were often only determined withtime” (Judaism, 4).

What is one to make of this concession? While there might be strongarguments for drawing such a distinction on both textual and commonsense grounds, the question is whether Leibowitz’s system canconsistently allow such external concerns to intrude upon religionwithout usurping it. The meta-halakhic issue, as Leibowitz terms it,regarding the status of women in the Jewish community, drives specifichalakhic changes. And ultimately what appears to be driving thesechanges is an ethical assumption regarding unjustified genderinequalities. But if one is allowing religious norms to besubordinated to human values, then by Leibowitz’s standards oneis serving man rather than God – if the motivation here isethical or more broadly social, then surely by his intentionaldefinition of mitzvoth, they cease to be religious acts.

In the particular case of gender equality, however, there are broaderconcerns that come into play – the survival of Judaism. Whilethis is not explicit in everything that Leibowitz writes, he makesprecisely this claim regarding the gender issue in an interview withMichael Shashar – “the future of Judaism depends onit” (Sihot, 110). One might argue therefore that ourbeing responsive to the ethical concerns presented in these cases hasreligious significance since it is subsumed under the overridingreligious concern to maintain the existence of Judaism. Thusthese acts would retain their religious significance given the moregeneral religious motivation for the changes. One might think of themas having religious value in a secondary sense, given that they servethe end of maintaining the halakhic system, while straightforwardmitzvoth or halakhic demands have religious value in the primarysense.

It is very difficult, however, to escape the feeling that Leibowitz isdriven here by his ethical impulses, and more significantly it isclear that all manner of halakhic decisions are motivated by explicitconsideration of ethical issues that impinge on the halakhic decisionmaking process. One could argue that given that such principles as“the ways of pleasantness” or “doing the right andthe good” are internal to the halakhic system, Leibowitz couldcontend that one need not go beyond the structures of the system inorder to make the changes that he endorses. One might thus considerthese as “principles” in the Dworkinian sense, as fullypart of the legal system and the bearers of “weight” whenit comes to deciding halakhic questions (Dworkin, 1977, 22ff).Leibowitz’s conception of the halakhic system seems, however, tobe more akin to legal positivism (see Brafman 2014, 101ff), as befitsa scientist, and it seems as if the above response would requireLeibowitz toreject a straightforward positivistunderstanding of the halakhic system. On such an understanding,ethical principles are seen as external to the system, even if able todetermine what the halakhah “ought to be” – but sucha view would entirely undermine the halakhic validity of any decisionsgiven that they would be serving human needs. The involvement ofprinciples in this manner though, need not necessarily undermine apositivist reading of Leibowitz, but could instead render his accounta form of inclusive legal positivism. Of course there are those whowould argue that thiswould undermine his positivism sinceinclusive legal positivism is incoherent, but this is a debate thatwould take us too far afield.

Regardless of these jurisprudential issues, vague principles such asthose mentioned are not going to decide the question of whetherspecific changes actually do advance the “ways ofpleasantness”.De facto it is surely almost impossibleto insulate such considerations from human interests, which would ofcourse disqualify them as considerations that should determinereligious acts on Leibowitz’s intentional model. Moreover, onemight even question the very idea that the mitzvoth should serve theclearly human purpose of the continued existence of Judaism, since itundercuts Leibowitz’s notion that the only purpose of themitzvoth is the knowledge that service of God consists in theirperformance. Then again, Leibowitz could presumably respond by appealto his identification of the performance of mitzvoth with faith inGod. This means that in the absence of the continued existence of theJewish people, the performance of mitzvoth would cease. Thus thecontinued existence of the people is indeed only a“purpose” inasmuch as its own purpose is the performanceof mitzvoth, i.e., service of God. Leibowitz, then, could possiblyfind a way of ensuring that all changes are ultimately directedtowards the service of God as his system demands. As a good positivistthough, he may balk at this ability to make almost any act into an actof divine worship, since his original sharp and well-defineddistinction between acts of worship and acts that answer to human orsocial needs will likely now suffer Anthony Flew’s “deathby a thousand qualifications” (Flew, 1950).

Unless then Leibowitz is going to allow ethical motivation for certainhalakhic decisions and problematize his system, or gerrymander hisdescriptions of those decisions so as to force them into his religiousstraitjacket, it appears as if these areas of decision and actioncannot be deemed religious in the strict sense. Leibowitz certainlyrecognizes that halakhic decisions are “grounded either in theHalakhah itself or in the conditions necessary for halakhicobservance” (Judaism, 4), and thus it may be that theseethical halakhic decisions are “enablers” rather thandirect loci of religious worship. By contracting the religious spherein this way, Leibowitz could maintain some indirect religious valuefor the ethically motivated acts of a religious Jew. But thecontraction that such a move necessitates would relegate enormoustracts of the Talmud to this lesser status, which seems problematic.And again to counter that all decisions are taken by the halakhicauthorities with the general motivation of “serving God,”would make it difficult to retain any form of distinction betweenreligion and ethics of the form that Leibowitz clearly wishes tomaintain. Of course many of these problems hang on the thread ofLeibowitz’s concept of intention – one that assumes thatintentions can be clearly and exclusively identified as“ethical” or “religious.” Melzer (1976, 261),however, among others, has argued that Leibowitz’s concept ofintention is impoverished.

Setting aside the problems just identified, Leibowitz’sdistinction remains problematic in the context of his overall system.He explicitly categorizes the realm of synagogue ritual totype₁ acts. Yet in much of contemporary orthodoxy, this isone of the most fought over issues, and one in which the inequalitiesfor women are understood by some as tantamount to the denial of“a basic Jewish right … [that] renders their Jewishnessinferior to that of men” (Judaism, 129). Should womenfeel so marginalized by this particular inequality that it threatensthe future of Judaism, leading to sanctioning the participation ofwomen in certain rituals, Leibowitz’s type₁ mitzvothwould have to be recategorized as type₂ mitzvoth and wewould have to conclude that the categories are fluid and thatcommandments can move between categories. But then the question of howwe categorize the commandments seems to become dependent on humanperception and values, which would once again be problematic forLeibowitz.

Ultimately then, Leibowitz struggles to maintain God’s radicaltranscendence and his intentional account of religious worship in itsmost pristine form. Neither history, nor nature, including humannature, are sources of religious value. God’s prescriptionsalone are holy and Jewish worship, indeed Jewish faith, is simply thecommitment to this behavioral regime. But while he begins with a tidydefinition of religious acts as absolute commands performed with theintention of serving God, as acts that cannot be motivated by humanconcerns or interests, the fact that life involves other given civiland social settings requires that we deal with such interests. Thisyields type₂ acts, with resulting questions regardingwhether or not these mitzvoth can be understood as such withoutLeibowitz’s theocentrism folding into a form ofanthropocentrism. The distinction necessary to prevent this amongsthalakhic decisors – that between the intention of“realizing the Torah” and the intention to “adaptHalakhah to a variety of human needs” (Judaism, 4)– is difficult to maintain, and, one imagines, could very easilyfall victim to self-deception. In general, it seems as ifLeibowitz’s system simply cannot take the strain of maintainingits pristine religious intentionalism while dealing with ongoinghalakhic questions in a functioning society.

7. Religion, State, and Israel

Leibowitz was an unabashed Zionist. However, Zionism for Leibowitz wasdefined simply as “the endeavor to liberate Jews from beingruled by the Gentiles” (Judaism, 214), an endeavor thatthe state of Israel “completely satisfies.” Thus, despitebeing a religious Jew, Leibowitz’s Zionism is avowedly secular,and his secular version of Zionism flows directly from the centraltenets of his philosophy. Firstly, it is dictated by his intentionalapproach to religious action – the motivation for setting up thestate was political and nationalistic rather than religious. Indeed,Zionism was initially a secular Jewish revolution, a politicalmovement with nationalist aspirations. Secondly, it is directlyimplied by his view that the service of human needs and interestscannot be equated with the service of God. For Leibowitz, the stateachieves a perfectly noble political purpose, serving human needs. Butagain this should not be confused with its havingreligiousvalue in itself:

Counterfeit religion identifies national interests with theservice of God and imputes to the state – which is only aninstrument serving human needs – supreme value from a religiousstandpoint. (Judaism, 226–227)

Thus, it would seem as if religion and state cannot possibly belinked, and this indeed was a position that Leibowitz would take. Herethough, it seems as if Leibowitz’s thought, or at least hisattitude towards what constitutes meaningful discourse, underwentsignificant development.

In his earliest writings of the early 1930s, written while still inGermany, Leibowitz was aligned with the religious Zionism of theMizrachi movement. For Leibowitz, the contraction of the halakhicsystem over almost two thousand years of exile had led to itsdisfigurement. Confined to the private sphere as a result ofJudaism’s exilic reality over this period, in combination then(and now) with the secularization wrought by modernity, the halakhicsystem had never had to deal with the challenge of nationhood. Withthe advent of Zionism, Leibowitz writes “we are presented withthe opportunity and the task of realizing through and within the landof Israel the concealed power of Torah” (Ratziti, 327),through the application, indeed restoration, of the system of Jewishlaw to its original nation-building purpose whereby it might produce astate that could run according to Jewish law; that could accommodate,for example, the needs of a country to have a fully working policeforce and electrical system on the Sabbath without being parasitic onJews who do not observe the laws forbidding such action on theSabbath. For Leibowitz, “a specific and detailed halakhic codefor administering the full panoply of state functions is called for… [to give] a clear picture of how the religious parties wouldrun the state if and when they came to power” (Judaism,170–171).

Initially, this “role of enacting new halakhiclegislation” was assigned by Leibowitz “to the religiouspublic as a whole” (Torah u-Mitzvot, 73). During thisearly period, as Moshe Hellinger points out, Leibowitz presents a“participatory democratic model” (Hellinger, 2008, 257),that yields a radical form of democratic halakhic Judaism. As early as1947, however, Leibowitz is noting how “the sector of thereligious public organized as a political movement lacks a religiousprogram for the conduct of the state” (Judaism, 154),leading him instead to look to the religious rabbinic establishment totake the courageous steps necessary to provide a vision for such a“halakhic state.”

This nation-building vision would have necessitated a halakhicrevolution, utilizing innovative and creative techniques of Jewishlegal interpretation and application. But instead, inLeibowitz’s eyes the religious parties prostituted themselves tothe state to protect their own brand of religious sectarianism,subordinating religion to the machinery of the secular government.Leibowitz’s initial radicalism thus came up against the halakhicconservatism of his fellow religious Zionists, which, together withwhat he saw as the moral corruption of its rabbinic leadership, led tohis disillusionment with religious Zionism, disillusion that wasfurther exacerbated by the Kibiyeh affair (see Hellinger 2008, 275ff),which served to reinforce his view regarding the perniciousconsequences of “applying the religious category of holiness tosocial, national, and political values” (Judaism, 189).Thus, by 1959, in recognition of this reality, Leibowitz changed histune, presenting a call for the separation of religion and state asthe only program “that would be in the religious interest in theexisting situation” (Judaism, 175).

Still, at this point, while reality has bitten, there is no statementthatin principle religion and state must remain separate. Adecade later, however, Leibowitz seems to espouse such a view, statingthat “no state whatsoever, in the past, present, or anyforeseeable future, in any society, in any era, in any culture,including the Jewish culture, ever was or will ever be anything but asecular institution” (Judaism, 215–216).

On the one hand, this should come as no surprise given that politicsis concerned with human institutions that serve human needs, andLeibowitz cannot allow for acts of religious worship that are directedtowards human needs. On the other hand, it does clearly represent ashift in his thought, from ade facto to ade jurerejection of the religious Zionist dream. Nonetheless, in noting thatthe state “sets the ground for the struggle for religion, whichis by its very nature an eternal struggle that will never end invictory” (Judaism, 215–216), he does appear toleave open the possibility of political action having some form ofreligious import. Indeed, he goes on to say that the reason thatIsrael has no religious significance is precisely “because nosuch struggle is being conducted in it” (ibid.), which appearsto imply the possibility of a state having such significance were itto provide for such a struggle, though at this stage the idea thatthis could eventuate in any form of democratic religious polity hasbeen replaced by a vision of the state as maximally “a mereplatform for struggles in the spirit of liberal ideas that celebratethe neutrality of statehood” (Hellinger, 2008, 279).

It remains the case then that Judaism qua Judaism cannot, forLeibowitz, present any specific form of political organization, sincepolitical acts cannot themselves be halakhic acts. But as mentionedearlier, Leibowitz speaks of “conditions necessary for halakhicobservance” (Judaism, 4), essential conditions forindividuals to worship God that would include human social andpolitical organization. Politics is the scaffolding without whichindividuals would not have the capacity to engage in their individual“religious struggles,” and this presumably yields thelesser category of “religious significance” to thepolitical state. Given his intentionalism though, mere politicalorganization can have no religious significance in itself forLeibowitz; presumably, once again, it could only have suchsignificance if political action is driven by theintentionthat the state be an enabling condition for religious worship. Andwhile many modern liberal states do indeed thus enable religiousworship, this is certainly not their primary intent, and they couldnot therefore be seen to have any substantive “religioussignificance” to speak of.

None of this is to say that religion cannot be relevant to the statein any way, even today. Though he does not wish to speak of howreligion can serve the state, since this inverts the correcthierarchical relationship between the two, religion can nonethelesshave a “function” within the state for Leibowitz as a“critical friend” that can “check the influence ofpolitical values and … restrain the patriotism andnationalistic enthusiasm” (Judaism, 209–210).Thus “if religion has a function, it is to place man’slimited values in a true perspective” (Judaism,210–211). Indeed, the mistaken religious significance thatpeople do impute either to the land or to the state is nothing shortof scandalous for Leibowitz, both religiously and morally.

It seems, therefore, that as time moved on, Leibowitz’s liberaland moral leanings prevent him from being willing to engage in what isultimately utopian speculation concerning a halakhic vision for thestate. The earlier program is a mere pipedream when the state iscatering to a nation that has no interest in Jewish observance, andcould thus only become a halakhic state through the totalitarianimposition of religious observance. Were the entire populationunanimously in favor of such observance, Leibowitz might once againtake up the cause, though given the freedom of thought that could leadthat population to then change its mind, this seems unlikely. ButLeibowitz is unwilling to engage in such idealistic guesswork, whichgiven his positivistic leanings he dismisses as meaningless, claimingfundamentally not to understand how one is to relate seriously to suchideals (Sihot, 92). The possibility that a state might havereligious significance “in principle” is not a discussionthat can have any political purchase. Political action simply cannotbe religious action. In reality then – and present reality is theonly reality he is willing to recognize by this point – Leibowitzwishes to keep political questions separate from religion, which inthe contemporary state must once again contract itself to the privatesphere.

The views described above have further significant ramifications forLeibowitz’s Zionism. Religiously speaking, a physical landsimply cannot be holy for Leibowitz: “The idea that a specificcountry or location has an intrinsic ‘holiness’ is anindubitably idolatrous idea.” (Judaism, 226–227).Thus, the claim that a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinianproblem cannot be countenanced because the land is holy to Jews isabsurd in Leibowitz’s eyes. Moreover, given his hermeneutic ofScripture, attempts to base the Jewish “right” to the landon the basis of historical claims in the Torah are just as baseless.Indeed, without quite using the term “nonsense on stilts”Leibowitz nonetheless evinces a Benthamite scepticism to the notionthatany nation has a legal right to a land – “talkof rights is pure nonsense. No nation has a right to any land”(Judaism, 241). Rights to land for Leibowitz are a matter ofhistorical consciousness. And the problem for Israel and thePalestinians is that both tell a story that stakes a claim on thisbasis such that “in consequence of centuries of history, membersof each feel passionately that this is their land”(Judaism, 241).

Moreover, imputing religious significance to the state (as opposed tothe land) is no less a form of “idolatry.” It yieldsviolence and injustice in the name of religion that is in truth thesheer willingness to commit moral atrocities in the name of the state,while hiding behind an illusory cloak of religious piety.

Leibowitz’s moral critique of the actions of the state and theIsraeli army, which rose to a new pitch subsequent to the Lebanon Warof 1982, gives a clear indication of the significance of morality quamorality for Leibowitz in a manner that is entirely consistent withthe view discussed earlier that morality must be subordinated toreligion and not vice versa. It is precisely because people mistakenlyimpute religious value to objects or institutions that they commitmoral atrocities in the name of religion for Leibowitz. And it isprecisely the understanding of the state as asecularinstitution that for Leibowitz would prevent such actions, since wewill then judge these actions correctly – i.e., morally,not religiously. And by ethical standards, Leibowitz clearlybelieves that the act of occupation cannot be justified. Yet again, itis the ascription of holiness to profane things, to the natural worldand our human needs and interests within it, that is at the root ofall that he decries in religion and that has dire political and moralconsequences in the contemporary political sphere. While one mightdisagree with his political assessment on political grounds, he wouldargue that it is only on such grounds that one can disagree, and thatis a dispute for a political, not theological forum.

Bibliography

Primary Literature

Cited Works of Leibowitz

• Torah u-Mitzvot ba-Zeman ha-Zeh [Torah and Commandmentsin Our Time], Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1954. Cited asTorahu-Mitzvot.
• Yahadut, Am Yehudi u-Medinat Yisrael [Judaism, the JewishPeople, and the State of Israel], Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1975. Cited asYahadut.
• Emunah, Historiah, ve-Arakhim [Faith, History, andValues], Jerusalem: Academon, 1982. Cited asEmunah.
• Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, EliezerGoldman (ed.), Eliezer Goldman, Yoram Navon, Zvi Jacobson, GershonLevi, and Raphael Levy (trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 1995. Cited asJudaism. [This is a selection ofarticles from the above Hebrew collections, translated intoEnglish.]
• Sihot al Mada ve-Arakhim [Conversations on Science andValues], Tel Aviv: Misrad ha-Bitahon Publications, 1985. Cited asMada
• Yeshayahu Leibowitz al Olam u-Melo’o, Sihot im MichaelShashar [Yeshayahu Leibowitz On Just About Everything: Talks withMichael Shashar], Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, 1988. Cited asSihot
• Accepting the Yoke of Heaven: Commentary on the Weekly TorahPortion, Shmuel Himelstein (trans.), New York: Urim Publications,2002. Cited asAccepting the Yoke. [This is a translation ofradio broadcasts originally published asHe’arotle-Parshiyot ha-Shavua (Notes to the Weekly Torah Reading),Jerusalem: Academon, 1988.]
• “Responses,” [Hebrew],Iyyun 26 (1976),265–81. [Leibowitz’s responses to a set of articles abouthis thought published in this issue of the journalIyyun.]Cited as “Responses”
• Ratziti lish’ol otcha, Professor Leibowitz: Michtavim elYeshayahu Leibowitz u-mimenu [I Wanted to Ask You ProfessorLeibowitz: Letters To and From Yeshayahu Leibowitz], Jerusalem: Keter,1999.Cited asRatziti

Further Selected Publications of Leibowitz

Study-Group Discussions

• Sihot al Pirke Avot ve-al ha-Rambam [Discourses on theEthics of the Fathers and on Maimonides], Jerusalem:Schocken, 1979.
• Sihot al Shemoneh Perakim la-Rambam [Conversations onMaimonides’Eight Chapters], Jerusalem: Keter,1986.
• Sihot al Mesilat Yesharim la-Ramchal [Conversations onThe Paths of the Righteous of Rabbi Moses Hayyim Luzzato],Jerusalem: Greta Leibowitz, 1995.
• Sihot al Torat ha-Nevu’ah shel ha-Rambam[Conversations on Prophecy in Maimonides], Jerusalem: Greta Leibowitz,1997.
• Sihot al Mivchar Pirkei ha-Hashgachah mitokh “MorehNevukhim” shel ha-Rambam [Conversations on Providence inMaimonides’Guide of the Perplexed], Jerusalem: MiraOfran, 2003.
• Sihot al Pirkei ta’amei ha-Mitzvot mitokh “MorehNevukhim” shel ha-Rambam [Conversations on the Reasons forthe Commandments in Maimonides’Guide of thePerplexed], Jerusalem: Mira Ofran, 2003.

Published Broadcasts, Interviews, and Correspondence

• Guf va-Nefesh: Habe’ayah ha-Psikho-Physit [Body andMind: The Psycho-Physical Problem], Tel Aviv: Misrad ha-BitahonPublications, 1984.
• Emunato shel ha-Rambam [The Faith of Maimonides], TelAviv: Misrad ha-Bitahon Publications, 1985. Translated asTheFaith of Maimonides, John Glucker (trans.), New York: AdamaBooks, 1989.
• Hamisha Sifrei Emunah [Five Books of Faith], Mira Ofran(ed.), Jerusalem: Keter, 1995.
• Sihot al Hagei Yisrael u-Moadav [Discourses on the JewishHolidays], Jerusalem: Greta Lebowitz, 1999.
• Sheva Shanim shel Sihot al Parashat ha-Shavua [SevenYears of Discourses on the Weekly Torah Reading], Jerusalem: GretaLeibowitz, 2000.
• Mah She-lema’lah u-mah she-lemattah: Dialogim im ToniLavi [What is Above and What is Below: Dialogues with Toni Lavi],Or Yehuda: Maariv Book Guild, 1997.

Selected Secondary Literature and Works Cited

• Benbassat, Roi, 2015. “Yeshayahu Leibowitz: JewishExistentialism”,Religious Studies, 51:141–163.
• Ben-Pazi, Hanoch, 2008. “Leibowitz’s Religious Thoughtas a Post-Holocaust ‘Radical Theology’” [in Hebrew],Iyyun, 57: 193–202.
• –––, 2016. “Theodicy as the JustifiedDemands of Atheism: Yeshayahu Leibowitz Versus EmmanuelLevinas”,Modern Judaism, 36: 249–276.
• Berlin, Isaiah, 1983. “The Conscience of Israel” [inHebrew],Ha’aretz, 4 March: 18.
• Brafman, Yonatan, 2015. “Yeshayahu Leibowitz’sAxiology: A ‘Polytheism of Values’ and the ‘MostValuable Value’”,Journal of Religious Ethics,43(1): 146–168.
• –––, 2014. “Critical Philosophy ofHalakha (Jewish Law): The Justification ofHalakhicNorms and Authority”, Doctoral Dissertation, ColumbiaUniversity.
• Cohen, Hermann, 1919.Religion of Reason out of the Sources ofJudaism, Simon Kaplan (trans.), Atlanta: Scholars Press,1995.
• Dworkin, Ronald, 1977.Taking Rights Seriously, London:Duckworth.
• Fagenblat, Michael, 2004. “Lacking All Interest: Levinas,Leibowitz, and the Pure Practice of Religion”,HarvardTheological Review, 97: 1–32.
• Flew, Anthony, 1950. “Theology and Falsification”, inNew Essays in Philosophical Theology, A. Flew and A.MacIntyre (eds.), London: SCM Press, 1955, 96–130.
• Hartman, David, 1990.Conflicting Visions, New York:Schocken Books.
• Harvey, Zeev, 2002. “Leibowitz on Abrahamic Man, Faith, andNihilism” [in Hebrew], inAvraham AviHa-Ma’aminim, M. Hallamish, H. Kasher, and Y. Silman(eds.), Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 247–352.
• Hellinger, Moshe, 2008. “A Clearly DemocraticReligious-Zionist Philosophy: The Early Thought of YeshayahuLeibowitz”,Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy,16(2): 253–282.
• Kasher, Asa, 1976. “Paradox – Question Mark” [inHebrew],Iyyun, 26: 236–41.
• Kasher, Asa and Levinger, Jacob (eds.), 1977.The YeshayahuLeibowitz Book [in Hebrew], Tel Aviv: Agudat ha-Studentim.
• Kasher, Hannah, 2000. “On Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s Use ofReligious Terminology”,The Journal of Jewish Thought andPhilosophy, 10: 27–55.
• Kasher, Naomi, 1976. “Kant’s Ethics andLeibowitz’s View of Religion” [in Hebrew],Iyyun,26: 242–55.
• Kellner, Menachem, 2006.Must A Jew Believe Anything,2^nd edition, Oxford: Littman Library of JewishCivilization.
• Maimonides, Moses.Guide of the Perplexed, trans. S.Pines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963.
• Marantz, Haim, 1997. “Bearing witness: morality and religionin the thought of Yeshayahu Leibowitz”,Judaism, 46:35–45.
• Melzer, Yehuda, 1976. “Ethics and Halakha Once Again”[in Hebrew],Iyyun, 26: 256–64.
• Nadler, Steven, 2006.Spinoza’s Ethics: AnIntroduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Newton, Adam Zachary, 2000.The Fence and the Neighbour,Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
• Ravitzky, Avi (ed.), 2007.Yeshayahu Leibowitz: BetweenConservatism and Radicalism, Jerusalem, Hakibbutz HameuchadPublishing House.
• Sagi, Avi, 1992. “Rabbi Soloveitchik and Professor Leibowitzas Theoreticians of the Halakhah”,Da’at, 19:131–48.
• –––, (ed.), 1995.Yeshayahu Leibowitz: HisWorld and Philosophy [in Hebrew], Jerusalem: Keter.
• –––, 1997. “Contending with Modernity:Scripture in the Thought of Yeshayahu Leibowitz and JosephSoloveitchik”,The Journal of Religion, 77:421–441.
• –––, 1997a. “Yeshayahu Leibowitz – ABreakthrough in Jewish Philosophy: Religion WithoutMetaphysics”,Religious Studies, 33:203–216.
• –––, 2009.Jewish Religion AfterTheology, Boston: Academic Studies Press.
• Schwarzschild, Steven, 1977. “Moral Radicalism and‘Middlingness’ in the Ethics of Maimonides,” inThe Pursuit of the Ideal: Jewish Writings of StevenSchwarzschild, Menachem Kellner (ed.), Albany: SUNY Press, 1990,137–160.
• Seeskin, Kenneth, 1990.Jewish Philosophy in a SecularAge, Albany NY: SUNY Press.
• Shatz, David, 2008. “Is There Science in the Bible: AnAssessment of Biblical Concordism”,Tradition, 41(2):198–244.
• Sigad, Ran, 1977. “Leibowitz and Kierkegaard” [inHebrew], inSefer Yeshayahu Leibowitz, A. Kasher and Y.Levinger (eds.), Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Students’ Union,42–46.
• Statman, Daniel, 2005. “Negative Theology and the Meaning ofthe Commandments in Modern Orthodoxy”,Tradition,39(1): 55–68.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Michael Harris, David Shatz, and Daniel Statmanfor helpful comments and discussion.