Leibowitz or God's Absence 9781644697955

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LEIBOWITZ OR GODʼS ABSENCE

LEIBOWITZ OR GODʼS ABSENCE Daniel Horowitz

BOSTON 2022

Acknowledgements The editors gratefully acknowledge the support of Boston College. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Horowitz, Daniel, 1945- author. | Sackson, Adrian, translator. Title: Leibowitz or God’s absence / Daniel Horowitz, Adrian Sackson. Other titles: Leibowitz, ou, L’absence de Dieu. English Description: Boston : Academic Studies Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2021053647 (print) | LCCN 2021053648 (ebook) | ISBN 9781644697948 (hardback) | ISBN 9781644697955 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781644697962 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Leibowitz, Yeshayahu, 1903-1994. | Judaism and philosophy. | Judaism and secularism. | Jewish philosophy--20th century. | Faith (Judaism) Classification: LCC BM755.L415 H6713 2022 (print) | LCC BM755.L415 (ebook) | DDC 296.3092--dc23/eng/20211210 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021053647 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021053648 ISBN 9781644697948 (hardback) ISBN 9781644697955 (adobe pdf) ISBN 9781644697962 (epub) Copyright © 2022 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved. Book design by Lapiz Digital Services Published by Academic Studies Press 1577 Beacon Street Brookline, MA 02446, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

À mes petits-enfants, non pas pour qu’ils pensent à moi, mais pour qu’ils pensent.

Contents

Prefaceix 1. Yeshayahu Leibowitz

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2. Torah13 3. Maimonides17 4. Judah Halevi

22

5. Baruch Spinoza

27

6. Magical Thinking

33

7. Values50 8. Cognitive and Conative

56

9. Faith60 10. Peoples, States, and History

75

11. Thou Shalt Not Kill

84

12. The Mind-Body Problem

91

13. Biology98 14. Science103 15. Zionism112 16. Christianity116 17. A Talent for Error

121

Afterword129 Sources132 Bibliography133 Index135

Preface

Yeshayahu Leibowitz’ thought enchanted me from the moment I first became aware of it, because it lies at the intersection of the two most fundamental questions of human condition: on the one hand, our desire to understand how the world operates, and on the other to know why it operates. Science assists us in finding answers to the first of these two questions. Scientific research is at the same time both possible and infinite, since when all is said and done every discovery does no more than trigger new questions. But our determination to understand the ultimate cause of the world, to understand why the world exists—in other words, our crave to figure out whether life has meaning—does not involve knowledge of any sort. From my earliest youth I understood it was an illusion to rely on religion in order to attempt to solve this puzzle. I knew intuitively that we are supposed to pose the question of the meaning of life to no one but ourselves. I have never experienced religious feelings. Quite early I began to distinguish between the mysteries of life and the foolish responses, simplistic and sometimes monstrous, that are supposed to resolve this question. I was rational even before I knew the meaning of the word. This led me to the view that one is born either a believer or an atheist, without one’s education playing a role in the decision. From my perspective, there was no significant difference between superstition and religion, since each of them appeared to me to be a personal, subjective affair. But since Judaism was deeply rooted in my identity, it suffused my existence, and I found it not merely meaningful but also sensible. As far as profound inquiry into the texts could go hand-in-hand with interpretation free of any coercion, I considered this a worthwhile intellectual activity.

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Preface

Religions, all religions, are forms of idolatry—that is, a reliance on magical thinking intended to keep fate and death at a distance. The role of these beliefs is to deny reality. In truth, if we look objectively at the Jewish religion as it developed over the course of history, it too is not unusual in this regard. But if we examine it more closely, it is also possible to think that rabbinic Judaism, whose origins date back to Pharisaic1 times, was nothing other than a well-intentioned replacement for idolatry. It seems that the role of Judaism, then, was to minimize the venom in which this idolatry was soaked and to gradually replace idolatry with a transcendent, abstract, absent, ultimately non-existent God. In the history of Jewish thought there exists a dialectic that leads from Moses to Maimonides and Spinoza, whose synthesis is clearly atheism, plain and simple. This is not Leibowitz’s conclusion, but I feel it is the inevitable outcome of his thought. The subjects discussed in this book reflect a variety of attempts to encompass the thought of Leibowitz from various angles, so that readers can form their opinions with regard to it and compare it to their own worldviews. Even when one does not agree with Leibowitz, it is impossible not to identify in him one clear, consistent thought. No matter what perspective we take on it, one thing remains constant: the search for truth. No more and no less. Admittedly, ever since Socrates we have known that the closer we come to approaching the truth, the more elusive it is; yet the search at least makes it possible to expose falsehood, and that is no small thing. My own ideas are scattered throughout the book, intertwined with Leibowitz’s, and it may not always be clear to the reader who is speaking. This reflects the virtual dialogue that I have maintained with this noble soul for many years now, some compensation for never having managed to meet him while he was still alive. Daniel Horowitz

1 The Pharisees were a religious sect of the Second Temple era, succeeded in the course of time by rabbinic Judaism, of which it was the spiritual source.

1

Yeshayahu Leibowitz

Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a scholar, philosopher, and remarkably learned Jew, was among the most prominent Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century. He was endowed with an extraordinary intellect and possessed fluent knowledge of eight languages: Hebrew, English, Yiddish, German, Russian, French, Aramaic, and Latin. His knowledge ranged from quantum physics to Jewish thought—via Greek tragedy, literature, chess, art, and music. Yeshayahu Leibowitz was born in 1903 in Riga, Latvia. He was educated by private tutors, graduated from high school when he was just sixteen, and earned doctorates at a relatively young age in several scientific fields and in philosophy. In 1934 he immigrated to Palestine, where he lectured in organic chemistry, biochemistry, neurology, biology, neurophysiology, philosophy, and Jewish thought at the universities in Haifa and Jerusalem. As an ardent Zionist, he took part in the War of Independence and fought as an officer in the ranks of the Haganah. He gave countless lectures and wrote numerous articles but left no single-volume summary of his thought. For 20 years Leibowitz was the Chief Editor of the Encyclopedia Hebraica, and many of the scientific, philosophical, historical, and religious entries in it are the fruit of his pen. Other than that, the greater part of his writings are no more than collections of articles, and the volumes in our possession are mostly transcripts of his university courses, which his students compiled after his death. His thought is thus an enigma whose coherence is up to each of us to reconstruct if we are to understand it. With regard to his intellectual rigor and his personal integrity, Leibowitz ranks among the heirs of Socrates. Precisely like him, Leibowitz was conscious of the ontological ignorance of humanity and therefore of the need to call into question matters that appear obvious. He continued to teach until the day of his death, at age 91.

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Leibowitz or God's Absence

His wife, Greta Winter, completed a Ph.D. in mathematics, and his sister, Nechama Leibowitz, was a lecturer in Bible and exegesis at the Hebrew University. Among his children and grandchildren are scholars in various fields such as neurology, psychiatry, astrophysics, mathematics, physics, and Jewish thought.

2

Torah

To understand Leibowitz’s thinking on Jewish matters, we must first of all clarify the precise meaning of the word “Torah.” The Torah, consisting of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, is the foundational text of the Jewish people. The Hebrew Bible itself, comprising 24 books in all, is divided into three sections—the Pentateuch (five books, Torah), the prophets (eight books, nevi’im), and the Writings (11 books, ketuvim)—whose Hebrew names give us the acronym “Tanakh,” by which the anthology is now sometimes called. Meanwhile, the word “Torah” has changed in the course of time to become the name of a genre designating the entire corpus of Jewish texts, in particular the Talmud and its interpreters who have enriched it throughout history. In this wider meaning, Torah is therefore a heterogenous anthology of texts that were written, transcribed, amended, interpreted, and edited over many centuries by many authors. Moreover, it would seem that the Torah itself did not appear out of nowhere, since we find a great resemblance between it and earlier chronicles, especially those that were written in Mesopotamia,1 which tell of tragedies like the Flood or discuss laws and ethics such as the Laws of Hammurabi.2 Abraham Ibn Ezra, a contemporary of Maimonides and exegetically a Spinozist avant la lettre, noted the chronological discrepancies in the Torah several centuries before the philosopher from Amsterdam did so. For example, the passage in which we read that “the Canaanites were then in the land,”3 which, in contradiction to rabbinic tradition, cannot have been written by Moses, but only by an author for whom the age of the Canaanites

1 This is roughly the same region as contemporary Iraq. 2 A Babylonian law collection. 3 Genesis 12:6.

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was indeed in the past. Baruch Spinoza4 asserts: “It is as clear as the sun at noonday that the Torah was not compiled by Moses but by a later writer who lived many generations after Moses.”5 The relevant question is not whether this or that event recounted in the Torah actually took place—or whether the Torah was the first to tell it— but how we are to understand the worldview that arises from the biblical narrative as the ancient sages recorded it. It is impossible to assign all 24 books of the biblical canon to one particular category. Some of them relate to various political or sectarian interests, others touch on social problems, and the rest have to do with politics, ethics, or philosophy. The style moves between prose and poetry, between third-person narrative and dialogue. The stories are packed full of events that may be historical or allegorical, epic or down to earth. They deal with the most intimate moments in life and also with the greatest moments in history. It is a collection of writings with a point of view fitted to human dimensions, hardly mentioning cosmology or metaphysics. It is a fact that Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, marks the creation of humanity, not the creation of the world. The creation of the world is given a cursory review in the first few chapters of Genesis, after which the text speaks primarily about the human condition. It is not merely that there is no point in trying to bridge the gap between Torah and science; we must actually make a clear, sharp separation between these two worlds. As to the question of how we should take the Torah’s assertion that the world is just a few thousand years old or that humanity was created ex nihilo, Leibowitz assumes (following Maimonides) that simple people require simple images—and that this, in large part, is the purpose of biblical narrative. Leibowitz believes that the Torah was intended to be inspirational, and not in any way, shape, or form to be considered a source of scientific knowledge. The essence of the Torah is not to teach anything about the world, history, nature, or humanity. The need to know how and when the world was created—or whether it was created at all—is a scientific question, and for Leibowitz it is completely irrelevant from a religious point of view. To him, the idea that the Torah was given to the Jewish people in order to reveal to it the world’s hidden secrets, and that the divine presence

4 See the chapter “Baruch Spinoza.” 5 Theologico-Political Treatise, ch. 8.

Torah

descended upon Mount Sinai in order to teach them science, is simply ludicrous. Moreover, it is important to note that the Torah makes no mention whatsoever of life after death or of the survival of the soul. In Biblical Hebrew, the word nefesh indifferently denotes the human being as a biological object or as a spiritual entity. It is a fact that Maimonides does not distinguish the nefesh from the body. He teaches that “the human self (nefesh) is one self with many functions,”6 and that the human being consists of the sum total of those various functions. According to Jewish tradition, God gave the Oral Torah along with the Written Torah on Mount Sinai, more than three thousand years ago. It was transmitted orally from generation to generation until the destruction of the Second Temple. Following that destruction, which took place in 70 CE, the Pharisees began to be concerned that the Mishnah would be forgotten. Toward the end of the second century CE, R. Judah the Prince, the head of the Sanhedrin, decided to have it put systematically into writing. This compilation of the Mishnah, in Hebrew, with the added comments in Aramaic called Gemara, was completed in the fifth century and gave rise to the Palestinian Talmud or Talmud Yerushalmi and the Babylonian Talmud or Talmud Bavli—that latter of which remains to this day the ethical and practical basis of Judaism. To Leibowitz, “The basis of our faith is that our Oral Torah—which is a human creation—is the Torah that obligates us. That is the dogma of Judaism.”7 From a rational point of view this is somewhat tautological, but from a religious point of view, according to Leibowitz, it is logical. The Oral Torah is the source of the Talmud and everything derived from it, on all of which together halakhah is based. The result is that Jews keep the commandments on the basis of halakhah and not directly on the basis of the Written Torah. Judaism as a historical phenomenon is regulated and put into practice by the Talmud, for which the Written Torah serves only as a literary support. The relationship of Moses to the Talmud is comparable to that 6 Maimonides, Eight Chapters, ch. 1, first sentence. These chapters are actually his introduction to Tractate Avot, the part of the Talmud that deals more with ethics than with Jewish law. 7 Michael Shashar, Yeshayahu Leibowitz: Al olam u’melo’o: Sihot im Michael Shashar [Yeshayahu Leibowitz: On Just About Everything: Talks with Michael Shashar], (Jerusalem: Keter, 1987), 98.

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of Homer to Plato’s Republic8 or Aristotle’s Politics.9 It is the Talmud that details, explains, and prescribes the 613 commandments and what they demand. Only many, many years after the exodus from Egypt did the Sages of the Oral Torah determine which books should be included in the biblical canon, among them those of the Written Torah, that is, the Pentateuch. The Talmud makes clear that decent behavior takes precedence over the Torah (‫)דרך ארץ קדמה לתורה‬.10 One must be virtuous independently of the Torah rather than relying on Torah to make one a decent person. One who is not, just as much as one who is in pain, is not in condition to “stand before God,”11 but one who achieves this level is described by Maimonides12 as having achieved perfection.13 The Talmud is a collection of discussions and debates that lead to conclusions that are implemented in daily life and that are used as the basis for legal decisions. Even when the topics themselves are no longer relevant, the nature of the talmudic discussion remains current by virtue of the kind of thought process it encourages. Though the Talmud has no legal force in Israeli jurisprudence, it is not uncommon for legal rulings and opinions to mention the Talmud in order to institute or reinforce a particular point of view.

8 9 10 11 12 13

The Platonic dialogue that deals with the body politic. Philosophical reflections on the body politic. The expression comes from Midrash Rabbah, an ancient interpretation of the Bible. An expression by which Leibowitz refers to observing halakhah. Eight Chapters, ibid. For this concept of the prophet, see Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed, 2:32-48.

3

Maimonides

Though in Orthodox circles Leibowitz is considered someone not to be associated with, excluding him in this way is not merely ludicrous—it is paradoxical, since the main points of Leibowitz’s religious thought are taken directly from Maimonides, a religious authority throughout the Jewish world for the last 800 years. Leibowitz is a relevant commentator on and disciple of Maimonides despite the many centuries that separate the two of them, so the ideas of these two thinkers should not be considered separately: It is impossible to understand the disciple without paying attention to the master. The truth is that, as opposed to Maimonides, Leibowitz cannot reconcile himself to a Judaism that speaks in different ways to different people, presuming that the masses are not able to think for themselves. But besides this, every aspect of Leibowitz’s faith demands understanding of that of Maimonides. R. Moses b. Maimon was a spiritual leader, philosopher, physician, and scientist of the twelfth century, born in Cordoba, Spain. As a boy of thirteen, he fled with his family from persecution by the Muslim theocracy of the Almohads, who controlled that part of Spain at the time. That began a journey that led him to Morocco and then, via the land of Israel, to Fustat, modern-day Cairo, where he settled and became a leader of the Jewish community and a halakhic authority. He remains to this day one of the most authoritative religious voices in all denominations of Judaism. After the tragic death of his brother David,1 who had up to that point taken care of Maimonides financially, he earned his living as a doctor. Maimonides 1 Maimonides never recovered from this loss. Eleven years later he wrote, “Every time I see his handwriting or one of his books, my heart skips a beat and my grief returns. I will go to my grave mourning for my brother. If Torah study were not my greatest delight, if my other studies did not distract me from my pain, I would be overwhelmed with grief.”

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did not think it was right to turn his Torah teaching to financial gain, and he expressed vigorous opposition to anyone who considered becoming a professional rabbi,2 in accordance with the talmudic teaching, “Love hard work, hate preeminence, and do not make yourself known to the government.”3 The “Great Eagle,” as he has been remembered ever since in the Jewish world, died in Egypt in 1204. He was buried in Tiberias. Among his books are the Mishneh Torah, a monumental collection of the Oral Law in 14 volumes divided into sections, chapters, and paragraphs. Maimonides deals there with all the commandments, including those operative only in the land of Israel before the destruction of the Second Temple. It is the guide to the halakhah, and it begins this way: I, Moses the son of R. Maimon the Spaniard, relying on the Rock, may He be blessed, and having pored over all the relevant books, have seen fit to compose such words as will clarify all these other compositions with regard to what is forbidden and what is permitted, what is unclean and what is clean, along with all the rest of the rules of the Torah: all in clear, concise language, so that everyone can understand the Oral Law in organized fashion.4

In addition to his religious writings, Maimonides composed many works of secular learning, among them a Treatise on Logic, which he wrote in JudeoArabic when he was just 18, as well as many medical texts. His last great book, the Guide of the Perplexed, is a theological work intended to be based on reason. It is an extensive and complex work of interpretation aimed at an intellectual elite learned both in philosophy and in Torah. Maimonides was a rationalist, intent on refuting anything supernatural or superstitious. He thought that the struggle against idolatry was of the highest importance both for society and for the individual. Throughout both his religious and his philosophical works, he warns against the irrational: The essence of the commandment against idol worship is that one must not worship any of the created beings—not an angel, not a sphere, not a star, not one of the four elements, nor any of the things created from them. Even if the worshipper knows that the Lord is God, and he worships this created thing

2 See further in Chapter 15, “Science.” 3 M. Avot 1:10. 4 Mishneh Torah, Introduction.

Maimonides

merely in the same manner as Enosh and those of his generation did when worship began, he is an idolater all the same. 5 It is not idolatry alone that is forbidden to think about. We are cautioned not to let any thought that causes us to uproot any of the core principles of the Torah enter our minds. We must not distract ourselves in this way or be drawn after such thoughts: since man’s knowledge is small, and not everyone’s mind can achieve the truth in its entirety, if everyone followed his thoughts wherever they might lead, he would end up destroying the world via this intellectual failure.6 You have therefore learned that anyone who acknowledges idol worship denies the entirety of the Torah, of all the prophets, of everything that the prophets were commanded, from Adam unto the end of the world, as it is written, “from the day that the Lord gave the commandments and on throughout the ages” [Num 15:23]; and everyone who rejects idol worship accepts the Torah in its entirety. That is the essence of all the commandments—every one of them.7 Anyone who believes these things and their like, and considers in his heart that they are true words of wisdom even though the Torah has forbidden them, is nothing other than a brainless fool, to be lumped together with women and children, whose intellect is not complete. But those who are wise and have perfected their intellect know by clear proofs that all these things that the Torah has forbidden are indeed not wise but are simply illusions, hot air that attracts brainless people, who neglect all the ways of truth on their account. That is why the Torah cautioned us against all these absurdities with the words, “You must be wholehearted with the Lord your God” [Deut 18:13].8

Maimonides was aware that a profound understanding of the essence of Judaism was not within everyone’s reach. As an illustration, the way in which he concludes his Eight Chapters—with the assertion that “the true recognition of God is that a person is unable to recognize God”9—is far too abstract for the ordinary person. Long before Spinoza, Maimonides—without explicitly saying so— viewed Judaism as essentially political. He explains in the Guide that: 5 6 7 8 9

Mishneh Torah, “Laws of Idolatry,” 2:1. Ibid., 2:4. Ibid., 2:7. Ibid., 11:18. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Conversations on Maimonides’ Shemonah Peraqim (Jerusalem: Keter, 1986), end of ch. 8.

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… the Law also makes a call to adopt certain beliefs, belief in which is necessary for the sake of political welfare. Such, for instance, is our belief that He, may He be exalted, is violently angry with those who disobey Him and that it is therefore necessary to fear Him and to dread Him and to take care not to disobey.10

Similarly, in his commentary to the Mishna, Maimonides writes: Since not everyone can attain the truth to the extent that our father Abraham did (may he rest in peace), the masses were permitted, in order to become settled in their beliefs, to perform the commandments in hope of reward, and to avoid transgression out of fear of punishment.11

We find a similar idea in Montaigne: “It being so easy to all sorts of phantasm on the human mind, [Plato] thought it an injustice not to feed it rather on profitable lies than on lies that were useless or harmful.”12 Maimonides was aware of the gap between his theology and popular religion. While for him the idea of a God who was immanent in the world amounted to superstition, for ordinary mortals it was impossible to think of any kind of God but an immanent one. The spirit of Maimonides, therefore, was characterized by an unavoidable divide between the religion of the masses and that of the elites. He was therefore led to an unavoidably divided conclusion: In the Mishneh Torah he explained to the people what they had to do, while in the Guide he explained to the elites why one had to do it. The idea of a God who did not intervene in the world was impossible for believers to grasp; they were not prepared to make do with this kind of abstraction, since, in the words of Maimonides, “Many things in our Law are due to something similar to this very governance on the part of Him who governs, may He be glorified and exalted. For a sudden transition from one opposite to another is impossible. And therefore man, according to his nature, is not capable of abandoning suddenly all to which he was accustomed.”13 Preserving the illusion that providence exists14 was, therefore, a regrettable necessity, since in certain circumstances it is preferable not to reveal the truth except to an elite capable of understanding it. 10 Guide 3:28. The English translation is taken from The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 2:512. 11 Introduction to Pereq Heleq. 12 The Complete Essays of Montaigne, translated by Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), 379; from the “Apology for Raymond Sebond.” 13 Guide 3:32; Pines, 526. 14 See the section of the Guide on providence, 3:8–24.

Maimonides

Maimonides avoided any discussion of topics like the immortality of the soul or the coming of the Messiah. With regard to the prophets’ speaking with God, he insisted, a careful examination of the Bible would reveal that every instance of a conversation with God really took place in a kind of dream or hallucination, in visions that must be understood allegorically. Nonetheless, he made one exception: Moses, he claimed, was the single prophet who did speak with God in a waking state. Many years later Spinoza would censure him for this, since it does not cohere with Maimonides’s own rejection of every kind of supernatural phenomenon.15 But the truth is that this assertion belongs to the double language that Maimonides employed to speak differently to ordinary people and to the elite. Maimonides’s Epistle to Yemen is just one of many examples this double language. In Maimonides’s time, the Jews of Yemen were being persecuted. The authorities there tried to convert them forcibly to Islam. Since in such distress the temptation to submit was intense, he sent them this Epistle to warn them against converting. He assured them that the Messiah was soon to arrive and even claimed to know the date when this would happen. In this way he violated the talmudic command,16 a command that he himself had brandished elsewhere, since according to him: Some of our Sages say that the coming of Elijah will precede the advent of the Messiah. But no one is in a position to know the details of this and similar things until they have come to pass. They are not explicitly stated by the Prophets. Nor have the Rabbis any tradition with regard to these matters. They are guided solely by what the scriptural texts seem to imply. Hence there is a divergence of opinion on the subject. But be that as it may, neither the exact sequence of those events nor the details thereof constitute religious dogmas. No one should ever occupy himself with the legendary themes or spend much time on midrashic statements bearing on this and like subjects. He should not deem them of prime importance, since they lead neither to the fear of God nor to the love of Him. Nor should one calculate the end. Said the Rabbis: Blasted be those who reckon out the end (B. San 97b). One should wait (for his coming) and accept in principle this article of faith, as we have stated before.17 15 I Wanted to Ask You, Prof. Leibowitz: Letters To and From Yeshayahu Leibowitz, ed. Mira Ofran, Avi Katzman, et al. (Jerusalem: Keter, 1999) [in Hebrew]. 16 B. Sanh. 97b. 17 Mishneh Torah, “The Book of Judges,” Hilkhot Melakhim 12:2, trans. Abraham M. Hershman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), 241.

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4

Judah Halevi

As snugly as Leibowitz is situated within the line of Maimonidean thought, he is equally distant from that of the thinker and poet R. Judah Halevi, Maimonides’s contemporary. Halevi represents the mystical aspect of Judaism, and his worldview therefore differed completely from that of Maimonides. The ideas of these two great religious thinkers are in total opposition, though this never resulted in a schism. What made that possible is that Judaism is primarily about the halakhah (orthopraxy), and only afterward about religious belief (orthodoxy). One may favor the rationalism of Maimonides or the mysticism of Halevi, but it makes no difference to what was central for each of them: keeping the commandments. Halevi’s theology is at the opposite pole from that of Maimonides and, therefore, also that of Leibowitz; it could even constitute a different religion. Today, the most widespread spiritual current in Judaism is that of Halevi. The most radical contemporary development of Halevi’s thought is exemplified by religious Zionism, of which Rav Kook1 was one of the first theoreticians. As important as it is to understand the intellectual affinity between Maimonides and Leibowitz, we must realize how different Leibowitz was from Halevi. Only in this way is it possible to understand his political opposition to the spiritual offspring of that current of thought in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, that is, the national-religious radical right wing in Israel. Halevi wrote a book called The Kuzari.2 It is a parable, written in the form of dialogues between the king of the Khazars, a pagan people of Central Asia, and four sages: a philosopher, a Muslim, a Christian, and a Jew. The king asks 1 R. Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935) was a kabbalist, a philosopher, and the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of pre-state Israel. 2 The full name of this book was The Book of Proof and Argument in Defense of the Despised Faith. It was written in Judeo-Arabic in 1139. It owes its briefer name to Judah Ibn Tibbon, the first to translate it into Hebrew.

Judah Halevi

them to interpret an enigmatic, recurrent dream that has been disturbing his sleep. He feels that some important message is hidden in it. In the dream the king hears a voice he believes to be that of God, ceaselessly repeating in his ears, “The king’s intentions are good, but his deeds do not reflect his intentions.” Though the king is an enlightened sovereign, who rules over his people wisely, he nonetheless understands intuitively that this nightly message is telling him to exchange the idol worship he inherited from his ancestors for more refined values. In other words, the king is in search of the truth. He first summons the philosopher, who defends the proposition that God is the First Cause of existence, who therefore is to be found at the moment of creation—but that First Cause does not intervene in history. This approach is useless to the king, since it offers no possibility of turning to this absent God in order to know what measures to adopt in response to his dream. The Christian and the Muslim come next, each emphasizing from his own perspective the existence of a personal God, whose will is recorded in the New Testament or the Qur’an, but neither of them can present an argument that the king finds convincing. Finally, the king summons the Jew, despite his prejudice against the Jewish nation. The Jew explains that the giving of the Torah was an event in history, experienced by 600,000 Jewish men and their families, when God approached them directly, from atop Mount Sinai, in a process of revelation.3 The Jew presents the factuality of that event as unquestionable due to the huge number of participants who witnessed it. This, to his mind, completely rules out any possibility of deception. After long conversations with the four sages and careful consideration of their arguments, the king at last decides to convert to Judaism and calls on his people to do the same. The Jew has persuaded him of the existence of a historical connection between God and the Jewish people through revelation. Even though this took place just once, the king considers that sufficient to establish the veracity of the God of Israel for all future generations. He acknowledges as well that the prophets of Israel were true spokesmen of God. From that time on, admittedly, communication between God and human beings is no longer direct, but continues only by means of religious practice, that is to say, through halakhah. But thanks to the revelation, the king believes that there is no room to cast any doubt on the existence of God.

3 See the section on revelation in Chapter 7 “Magical Thinking.”

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The story of The Kuzari highlights the tension between comprehension of the world via sense perception and comprehension of it through reason. For Halevi, there are things that simply cannot be comprehended other than through mystical experience. Perhaps these phenomena are elusive and ephemeral, but, he claims, they give us certainties just as formal as those acquired through reason. This is most certainly not because Halevi rejects reason, but because he uses it to bestow meaning on mystical states.4 Judaism, in his eyes, consists of a series of basic claims derived from the revelation. The Jewish people and the land of Israel were formed out of something essentially divine. These are supernatural entities, and they play a unique role in creation. According to this approach, the Jewish people is a living organism whose individuals are parts of a body intended to be a “light unto the nations.”5 For Halevi, Jewishness is not based on philosophical considerations nor on the Jewish religion but on the Jews themselves, as individuals who have genetic traits that were acquired during the revelation. As a result, in his opinion, to be a Jew in the full sense of that word demands that one be a descendant of those who witnessed that event—and they alone possess the privilege of being connected to the divine. Rav Kook was a spiritual teacher of the first rank, and he worked tirelessly, and wisely, to bridge the gap between Orthodox Judaism and the Zionism of his era. He believed that even the atheistic Zionists, ignorant of the Torah, bore a divine spark, by virtue of the fact that their presumed ancestors were witnesses to revelation. Leibowitz acknowledged and respected Rav Kook, but he condemned him for this teaching being essentially based on kabbalah. He also rejected the significance Rav Kook placed on the nation and the land of Israel, an approach that to Leibowitz smacked of fascism and little in common with religion. Though Rav Kook was a learned man, endowed with uncommon intellectual abilities, as a spiritual seeker in the Halevi mode he nonetheless sometimes made embarrassing assertions for a man of his stature. For example, Rav Kook thought that The difference between the Jewish Israelite soul—its inner desires, its aspirations, its qualities and its viewpoint—and the souls of all the other nations of whatever degree, is greater and more profound than the 4 This paragraph was inspired by the work of the Israeli intellectual Micah Goodman in The Dream of the Kuzari (Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir, 2012). 5 Isa 42:6 (see also 49:6, 60:3).

Judah Halevi

difference between the spirit of man and the spirit of animals, since the latter difference is merely quantitative; the difference between the former is a qualitative one.6

What Rav Kook is saying here is that the difference between Jew and Gentile is greater than the one that separates man from animal. But for Leibowitz, such view is absolutely unacceptable; it is racist and must be denounced. Subdividing humanity on a genetic basis is incompatible with Maimonides’s teaching that there is no essential difference between Jews and non-Jews, and that halakhically one must treat anyone who wishes to join the Jewish people as if he had always belonged to it. The important thing to Maimonides was not the blood flowing in a person’s veins but that person’s decision to fulfill the commandments. Moreover, one cannot infer anything from the Torah’s notion of the Israelites’ being chosen about special attributes reserved for the Jews alone, only about special obligations that the Torah prescribes. For Rav Kook, as a successor of Halevi, kabbalah was naturally central to his thought. Let us remember here that we are talking about a mystical tradition whose origins are ancient, and which spread throughout the Jewish world starting in the thirteenth century. Kabbalah is a reincarnation of neoPlatonism, a school that believes it is impossible to comprehend God except through mystical experience. This is a hermeneutic7 that seeks to bridge the gap between the unknowable God and the human consciousness by means of ten intermediate entities called sefirot, followed by 72 incorporeal angels. These divine emanations theoretically occur in between God and the material world; according to kabbalah, they are within reach of each and every one of us if only we make the required spiritual effort. In a way, everyone has a dormant sixth sense connected to this mystical realm. In opposition to this, R. Isaac bar Sheshet, a fourteenth-century Sephardic sage, claimed in one of his responsa: “The Kabbalists are worse than the Christians! The Christians pray only to three gods [the Holy Trinity], while the Kabbalists pray to ten [the sefirot]!”8 Though Rav Kook would have agreed with Leibowitz that kabbalah was liable to deteriorate into idolatrous behavior, he thought that the rationalism of Maimonides was an obstacle established by God in 6 R. Abraham Isaac Kook, Orot Ha-Teshuvah, ch. 5, a collection of the writings of Rav Kook, first published in 1920. 7 That is, a Jewish approach to textual interpretation. Hermeneutics is the science of exegesis. 8 Responsa are written clarifications sent in answer to halakhic questions.

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order to keep it within reasonable bounds. Leibowitz, however, was not persuaded by this hairsplitting, believing that “Kabbalah, despite the apparent originality of its symbolism, is none an outbreak of paganism in the midst of Judaism.”9, that is to say, idolatry. On this point he agrees with Spinoza, who wrote in his Theologico-Political Tractate, “I have read and known certain Kabbalistic triflers, whose insanity provokes my unceasing astonishment.”10 In general, Leibowitz categorizes mysticism as a form of mental illness, like anything else that results from giving one’s imagination free rein. Montaigne employs a term close to that of Maimonides with regard to the imagination. He writes as follows: It is probable that the principal credit of miracles, visions, enchantments, and such extraordinary occurrences comes from the power of imagination, acting principally upon the minds of the common people, which are softer. Their belief has been so strongly seized that they think they see what they do not see.11

For Leibowitz (let us remember in this connection that he was a professor of neuro-physiology), the imagination acts autonomously, like the digestion or the circulation of the blood. But while neither of these two systems cease their activity except under pathological circumstances, imagination must always remain under the supervision of reason. For Leibowitz, imagination neither invents nor discovers anything. At most, it has the power to combine components of knowledge in some original form. Nothing exists in the imagination that did not originate in the senses, and these cannot give one anything but a limited, subjective comprehension of the world. Human consciousness is therefore not disconnected from nature—as opposed to the teaching of Halevi. It follows that anyone who pretends to connect the products of his imagination to God, or who claims that the divine appears in his imagination, “falls” into idolatry and idol worship, because such a claim is nothing other than worship of a god with a human face.12 9 Yeshayahu Leibowitz, The Faith of Maimonides (Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense Press, 1989), from the Broadcast University series. This is from a letter from Leibowitz to Prof. Gershom Scholem, July 1941. 10 Theologico-Political Treatise, ch. 9, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover, 1951), 140. 11 “Of the Power of the Imagination,” The Complete Essays of Montaigne, tr. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), 70. 12 See Leibowitz’s “Conversations” on Pirke Avot and on Maimonides.

5

Baruch Spinoza

Baruch Spinoza was a seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher born into a family that had reverted to Judaism after having been forcibly converted to Christianity in Portugal. His absolute rationalism, reminiscent of the Stoics,1 has made him profoundly significant in the history of philosophy. He received the education of a learned Jew and was fascinated by Maimonides, though he leveled harsh criticism against Maimonides’ thought, in which he found reason mingled with a conciliatory stance toward religion. Spinoza’s theology can be boiled down to this: “God” and “nature” are synonyms, or at least interchangeable. But for Leibowitz, the first verse of Genesis indicates that if God created the world then by definition he cannot be a part of it. In a sense one could say that if humanity was created in the image of God, humanity too must of necessity not be part of the world, unlike everything else in it. To Leibowitz, then, the claim that “nature” and “God” are synonymous is absurd, since if we think that necessity is the force that drives everything, this eliminates the free will that enables man to express his ontological freedom. Spinoza, by contrast, asserts that it is the idea of a God external to the world that is absurd, since such a God is absent by definition. For Spinoza, given that there is nothing that is outside of the world, it is the awareness of determinism that paradoxically enables man to become free. Spinoza and Maimonides think alike on certain issues, especially in their interpretive approach to Scripture, but their respective places in history are very far apart. While Maimonides was a spiritual leader to 1 The Stoics (300 BCE–260 CE) were a Greco-Roman philosophical school whose main teaching was the improvement of character through the exercise of virtue and the avoidance of vice. They exercised great influence not just on Greek thought but on Jewish thought as well.

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whom many believers looked for halakhic guidance, and who therefore assumed responsibility for the Jewish community, Spinoza wanted only to be free, obligated to no one and to nothing but the truth. Maimonides is therefore remembered as one of the most authoritative figures in Jewish history, while Spinoza is known as a heretic, excommunicated from the Jewish world. But he never denied his Jewish origins; one might even say that he was a Zionist avant la lettre. He wrote in his Theologico-Political Treatise: I would go so far as to believe that if the foundations of their religion have not emasculated their minds they may even, if occasion offers, so changeable are human affairs, raise up their empire afresh, and that God may a second time elect them.2

This idea is not completely disconnected from Spinoza’s concept of Judaism as an essentially political ideology. That is, religion for him is a stratagem intended to unite the nation. But he adds in the same chapter that the blurring of boundaries between theology and nationalism is not unique to the Jewish people. He explains: Men go on to this day imagining miracles, so that they may believe themselves God’s favorites, and the final cause for which God created and directs all things. What pretension will people in their folly advance! They have no single sound idea concerning either God or nature, they confound God’s decrees with human decrees, they conceive nature as so limited that they believe man to be its chief part!3

Spinoza is therefore suspicious of organized religions, which for him are simply weapons in the hands of the authorities to oppress the people while promising to grant them eternal salvation. He writes: We see most people endeavoring to hawk about their own commentaries as the word of God, and giving their best efforts, under the guise of religion, to compelling others to think as they do: we generally see, I say, theologians anxious to learn how to wring their inventions and sayings out of the sacred text, and to fortify them with Divine authority.4

2 Theologico-Political Treatise, ch. 3, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover, 1951), 56. 3 Ibid., chapter 6, p. 82. 4 Ibid., chapter 7, p. 98.

Baruch Spinoza

Spinoza was one of the first philosophers to speak of a society in which religion was separate from the state and in which freedom of conscience was a right. “[S]uch freedom,” he adds, “is absolutely necessary for progress in science and the liberal arts: for no man follows such pursuits to advantage unless his judgment be entirely free and unhampered.”5 He asserted that democracy could be used as a bulwark against dictatorship, since in his view the state was not intended to govern thought, but the reverse: it must allow citizens to think for themselves: He who seeks to regulate everything by law, is more likely to arouse vices than to reform them6 … The ultimate aim of government is not to rule, or restrain, by fear, nor to exact obedience, but contrariwise, to free every man from fear, that he may live in all possible security; in other words, to strengthen his natural right to exist and work without injury to himself or others.7

Spinoza was a radical materialist who was amazed that nature had for so long served as inspiration for the supernatural. Since common sense tells us that every effect has a cause and every cause an effect, that is obviously how nature works. He therefore says that anyone who flees from this fundamental truth proves despite themselves how much “the will of God” is “the sanctuary of ignorance.”8 Science was therefore the decisive factor in turning thinkers like Spinoza away from the search for why in order to devote themselves to the search for how. The capriciousness of nature, with its illnesses, aging, and death, is reduced to a mechanism, and this makes the world comprehensible and meaningless. In the introduction to his Theologico-Political Treatise he skewers superstition mercilessly: Anything which excites their astonishment they believe to be a portent signifying the anger of the gods or of the Supreme Being, and, mistaking superstition for religion, account it impious not to avert the evil with prayer and sacrifice. Signs and wonders of this sort they conjure up perpetually, till one might think Nature as mad as themselves, they interpret her so fantastically. Thus it is brought prominently before us, that superstition’s 5 Ibid., chapter 20, p. 261. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 258 f. 8 Spinoza, Ethics, part I, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover, 1951), 2:78.

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chief victims are those persons who greedily covet temporal advantages; they it is, who (especially when they are in danger, and cannot help themselves) are wont with prayers and womanish tears to implore help from God: upbraiding Reason as blind, because she cannot show a sur3e path to the shadows they pursue, and rejecting human wisdom as vain; but believing the phantoms of imagination, dreams, and other childish absurdities, to be the very oracles of Heaven.9

Spinoza rejects biblical interpretation that does not relate to the periods in which the texts themselves were written. He asserts his right, and indeed his obligation, to analyze Scripture critically. In the Theologico-Political Treatise Spinoza views the Bible as literature, and as he would with any other writing, he mercilessly skewers the many chronological, historical, geographical, and factual peculiarities found on its every page. He condemns the religious establishment for appropriating the sacred writings as if they reflected the word of God. He likewise rejects Maimonides’s assertion in the Guide of the Perplexed that we must understand the anthropomorphic aspects of God in the Torah metaphorically. Unlike Maimonides, Spinoza thinks that this God whom Maimonides converts into a philosophical allegory was an intellectual fraud with a single goal: to defend religion, which could not otherwise withstand critical, rational analysis. Spinoza’s world was ruled by absolute determinism. Although it is difficult psychologically for people to accept this, doing so is in his view the only way to attain happiness. For Spinoza, existence is nothing but a string of causes in which everything is material, from the original formless matter of creation right through to humanity. The cosmos is nothing but the result of algorithms resolved by random combinations of atoms, as indeed Democritus10 already thought. Therefore, for Spinoza, “those who believe, that they speak or keep silence or act in any way from the free decision of their mind, do but dream with their eyes open.”11 Two hundred years after Spinoza, Darwin asserted that there was no essential difference between the most basic forms of life and homo sapiens except for their differing levels of complexity. Man, like animal, vegetable,

9 Theologico-Political Treatise, Preface, 3 f. 10 A Greek philosopher who died c. 370 BCE. 11 Spinoza, Ethics, part III, 2:135.

Baruch Spinoza

and mineral, is nothing other than organized matter whose parts join and separate ceaselessly. “Fate it is,” says Seneca,12 “on whom everything depends, the cause of causes.”13 The Stoics, Spinoza’s spiritual ancestors, held a tragic view of the world. They thought that everything that would happen in the future was predestined to occur, and that human beings had no control over the inevitable chain of causes and effects. But Spinoza, though he certainly accepted this assertion, drew different conclusions from it: He thought that life might be good if only man would agree to accept the world as it is, and that one need not “either cry about it or laugh about it, only understand it.”14 When Albert Einstein, a devout Spinozist, contemplated nature, he said, “The only thing that is incomprehensible is why the world is so comprehensible.” Spinoza belonged to the philosophical current that set aside the why of the world in favor of the how—a position that gives rise to the question: how ought one live in the world as it is? For Spinoza, the laws of nature, according to which everything comes into being and changes, are universal. As a result, he argues, “there should be one and the same method of understanding the nature of all things whatsoever, namely, through nature’s universal laws and rules.”15 Therefore: … the universal laws of nature, according to which all things exist and are determined, are only another name for the eternal decrees of God, which always involved eternal truth and necessity. So that to say that everything happens according to natural laws, and to say that everything is ordained by the decree and ordinance of God, is the same thing.16

For Leibowitz, by contrast, searching after the how, which belongs to the physical realm, does not eliminate the search for the metaphysical why. The truth is that, since metaphysics deals with problems that cannot be solved, one may wonder why man brings them up. Leibowitz would say that this is a metaphysical question. 12 Lucius Annaeus Seneca (3 BCE–65 CE), to give him his complete Latin name, was a Roman philosopher, politician, and playwright, active in the Silver Age of Latin literature. 13 Seneca, Natural Questions 45.1, trans. Harry M. Hine (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 185. 14 An expression much used by the contemporary French philosopher Michel Onfray (b. 1959) to explain Spinoza’s thought. 15 Spinoza, Ethics, part III, 2:129. 16 Theologico-Political Treatise, ch. 3, p. 44 f.

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Leibowitz believes that God is everything that the world is not. This idea is at the opposite pole from that of Spinoza, who thought that the world itself was God, and that there is consequently no point in looking for anything metaphysical outside of nature. Though Spinoza is sometimes considered a pantheist,17 he was really one of the first thinkers in the history of philosophy who followed logic right up to the edge of atheism, rejecting anything transcendental. Leibowitz was not wrong in thinking that Spinoza’s pantheism was nothing but the negation of God: “There is no difference between pantheism and atheism except for the name.”18 In truth, the issue of Spinoza’s pantheism is still debated. It is not merely that his thought is perceived as pantheistic; it may even be considered animistic,19 for it thinks that God and nature are synonymous, and therefore the spirit of God is found everywhere, in a grain of sand just as much as in a human being, the difference between them stemming from nothing other than their degree of complexity. For Spinoza, desire is the essence of man. Therefore, “in no case do we … desire anything, because we deem it to be good, but on the other hand we deem a thing to be good because we … desire it.”20 In this respect, Leibowitz is close to Spinoza: he argues that values—which in this context area synonymous with desires—are born in the soul of man without any logical or ethical basis. But for Spinoza, since desire may aim in any direction, understanding and accepting nature is the one thing that can lead to tranquility and even to joy. For Leibowitz, by contrast, the merging of man and nature is precisely what man must struggle with. Spinoza, the very Jew who was excommunicated 400 years ago by the unenlightened rabbis of Amsterdam, was called “the prince of philosophers”21 by Western thought of the last century. The philosopher Henri Bergson22 said of him, “Every philosopher has two philosophies: his own and Spinoza’s.”23 17 Pantheism is the view that God and the world constitute a single entity, immanent and devoid of personhood. 18 Leibowitz, Letters, “Religion and Science,” 116. 19 Animism is a belief in spirits, in a life force that animates all living creatures, but also objects and natural phenomena like stones or wind; it is also a belief in guardian angels. 20 Spinoza, Ethics, part III, 2:137. 21 A title given him by Gilles Deleuze, a French philosopher whose thought was very influential in the second half of the twentieth century. 22 A French philosopher and Jewish writer active in the first half of the twentieth century, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. 23 Letter from Henri Bergson to Léon Brunschvicg, February 1927.

6

Magical Thinking

A well-known midrash1 tells the story of Abraham smashing the idols: Once a woman came [to his father’s shop, when young Abraham had been left alone there] with a plateful of flour. She requested, “Offer this to the idols.” Abraham picked up a hammer, broke all the idols, and put the hammer in the hand of the largest of them. When his father returned he demanded, “Who did this to them?” “I cannot tell a lie,” Abraham replied. “A woman came with a plateful of fine flour and told me to offer it to them. When I did, one of them announced, “I’m eating first,” and another announced, “I’m eating first.” The largest of them got up, took the hammer, and broke them.” “What kind of fool do you take me for?” he said. “Do they know anything [about whether or not someone is making an offering for them to quarrel over]”? “Should not your ears listen to what your mouth is saying?!” he replied. [That is, why do you serve them if they don’t know that you are serving them?]

It is easy to imagine how surprised Abraham’s father would have been to hear this critique, and it is also possible to think that, thanks to his son’s common sense, the event described here might have made him realize the emptiness of idolatry. In any case, this is probably the moment when Jewish thought—which, it seems, was never anything but the struggle against the inclination to worship idols—was born.

1 Genesis Rabbah 38:13.

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It is astounding to hear, 4,000 year later, in Nietzsche’s2 Twilight of the Idols, a sort of echo of this legend, when the author informs us that he now intends to philosophize with a hammer in order to break the idols. It is astounding because Nietzsche’s aim apparently was the same as Abraham’s, i.e., to put an end to the nihilism of the ideologies that scorn reality in favor of fabrications that block the Will to Power.3 Idolatry implies treating objects, people, or ideas as if they could overcome fate or evade reality. From time immemorial, the dread of death and the difficulty of life have sown fear in the human heart, which attempts to repress it by turning to the irrational, to superstition, or to religion. Judaism tried to thwart this by offering a way of life that keeps idolatry at a distance and replaces it with an alternate God. In one of his books,4 the philosopher and linguist Asa Kasher5 explains that idolatry does not involve merely this or that cultic object or tradition or even any specific religion. Idols are not merely statues, totems, or other objects to which people attribute some power. Rather, they are imaginary entities that exist nowhere but in the human mind, which generate behavior that is harmful both to the individual and to society. It is interesting to realize that the Torah commandment about idols does not precisely specify what object they might be: You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them.6

That is, anything that exists on earth, including anything that could possibly be imagined, may be the object of idolatry. Idolatry is therefore not defined by the inclination toward something, whether material or spiritual, but by an overemphasis on something.7 To put a person, a plot of ground, one’s property, looks, strength, money, or abstractions like freedom, reason, or art at the top of one’s scale of values—this smacks of idolatry. Asa Kasher 2 Friedrich Nietzsche was a nineteenth-century German philologist, philosopher, and poet. 3 One of the main concepts in Nietzsche’s thought. 4 Asa Kasher, Judaism and Idolatry (Ministry of Defense Press, 2004; in Hebrew). 5 Asa Kasher (b. 1940) is a professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University who also works in the area of professional ethics. In 2000, he won the Israel Prize in Philosophy. 6 Exod 20:4-5. 7 Per Asa Kasher in the aforementioned book.

Magical Thinking

provides us with the key to understanding the following remarkable passage in Ecclesiastes: A season is set for everything, a time for every experience under heaven: A time for being born and a time for dying, A time for planting and a time for uprooting the planted; A time for slaying and a time for healing, A time for tearing down and a time for building up; A time for weeping and a time for laughing, A time for wailing and a time for dancing; A time for throwing stones and a time for gathering stones, A time for embracing and a time for shunning embraces; A time for seeking and a time for losing, A time for keeping and a time for discarding; A time for ripping and a time for sewing, A time for silence and a time for speaking; A time for loving and a time for hating; A time for war and a time for peace.8 The lesson of this passage, for Kasher, is that nothing in the world is worthy of being the object of hysteria, of monomania, of obsession, or of fanatic attention to the extent that it ends up befogging one’s thought and one’s critical judgment. Idolatry is an anthropological fact, and it is as old as the human species itself. It feeds on human fear; it was and still is a political tool in the hands of the cunning. The essential purpose of Judaism was not to exchange many gods for a single God. Its ultimate goal was to get believers gradually to abandon idol worship and turn, eventually, to a transcendent God who, they would ultimately realize, is nothing but an abstraction devoid of object. Throughout the 24 books of the biblical canon, and especially in the story of the Golden Calf, the Bible tells us that idolatry never stopped rearing its ugly head despite the threats of the prophets. To Leibowitz, superstitions like gematria (according to which the numerical values of the Hebrew letters conceal esoteric truths) are complete nonsense.9 Communicating 8 Eccl 3:1-8. 9 Leibowitz, Letters, 497.

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with the dead, magic, amulets, false messiahs—these are all sleight of hand, and Judaism has been struggling against them from its inception.10 King Solomon was considered the wisest of men, but even he eventually fell into the trap of idolatry: “Solomon followed Ashtoreth the goddess of the Phoenicians, and Milcom the abomination of the Ammonites.”11 Despite the pleading of the prophets, the Jewish world was never cleansed of idolatrous practices, and throughout history false messiahs have distorted the principles of Judaism. Even though Judaism was apparently intended from the very first to eradicate idolatry, the founding figures of the religion12 preferred a gradual process over radical change. Since the gullibility of human beings knows no bounds, it is reasonable to assume that they were worried, as Karl Jaspers put it, that “those who do not believe in God are often liable to believe in everything else.”13 In ancient times all the peoples of the Middle East offered sacrifices. Such practices were preserved among the Israelites in the biblical period because their spiritual leaders knew that people do not like to change their ways. But these cultic practices were kept within narrow limits, and it was forbidden to practice them outside the Temple, lest they spread into the private sphere. The suspicion of popular practices inherited from paganism is especially prominent in the exhortations of Isaiah, who called the Jews to order and told them that offering sacrifices did not absolve them from behaving ethically: “What need have I of all your sacrifices?” Says the Lord. “I am sated with burnt offerings of rams, And suet of fatlings, And blood of bulls; And I have no delight In lambs and he-goats. That you come to appear before Me— 10 Ibid. 11 1 Kgs 11:5. 12 That is, both the spiritual and the temporal leaders who were active at the birth of the Jewish people, from the end of slavery to the exodus from Egypt (c. 1313 BCE), in the course of which Moses and his followers received the Torah. 13 Jaspers (b. Germany, 1883; d. Basel, 1969) was a psychiatrist and philosopher who also worked on Christian theology.

Magical Thinking

Who asked that of you? Trample My courts no more; Bringing oblations is futile, Incense is offensive to Me. New moon and sabbath, Proclaiming of solemnities, Assemblies with iniquity, I cannot abide. Your new moons and fixed seasons Fill Me with loathing; They are become a burden to Me, I cannot endure them. And when you lift up your hands, I will turn My eyes away from you; Though you pray at length, I will not listen. Your hands are stained with crime— Wash yourselves clean; Put your evil doings Away from My sight. Cease to do evil; Learn to do good. Devote yourselves to justice; Aid the wronged. Uphold the rights of the orphan; Defend the cause of the widow.14

Limitation of the custom of offering sacrifices in those days apparently served as a sophisticated pedagogical method of distancing the people from paganism. Maimonides expresses it this way in The Guide of the Perplexed: His wisdom, may He be exalted, and His gracious ruse, which is manifest in regard to all his creatures, did not require that He give us a Law prescribing the rejection, abandonment, and abolition of all these kinds of worship. For one could not then conceive the acceptance of [such a Law], considering the nature of man, which always likes that to which it is accustomed. At that time this would have been similar to the appearance of a prophet in these times 14 Isa 1:11-17.

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who, calling upon the people to worship God, would say: “God has given you a Law forbidding you to pray to Him, to fast, to call upon Him for help in misfortune. Your worship should consist solely in meditation without any works at all.” Therefore He, may He be exalted, suffered the above-mentioned kinds of worship to remain, but transferred them from created or imaginary and unreal things to His own name, may He be exalted.15

This paragraph strengthens the impression that the goal of Judaism was to bring about an alteration in the collective consciousness toward a more ethereal conception of God, without any rapid changes. Here, as on many other occasions, it is obvious that Maimonides thought that one must treat the masses differently than one would the elite. Prayer appeared in Second Temple times and ultimately, after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, replaced the sacrifices. We must understand this abandonment of sacrifices as a stage on the way to making the idea of God more abstract, which the ultimate intention must be, according to Maimonides’s formulation: “This would have been similar to the appearance of a prophet who would say: ‘God has given you a Law forbidding you to pray to Him, to fast, to call upon Him for help in misfortune. Your worship should consist solely in meditation without any works at all.’” 16 Ever since the destruction of the Temple, prayer has replaced sacrifice and become the method of worship. There is no doubt that this is progress relative to sacrifices, and yet there is still no check on the illusion that it is possible to pressure God in one way or another to grant one favors. In Montaigne’s words, “There are few men who would dare place in evidence the secret requests they make of God.”17 But God is no one’s accomplice, nor is he a “service provider.”18 Leibowitz was disgusted by the repulsive habit many believers have of saying “with God’s help” at every moment. In his view, prayer is not intended to serve any human interest whatsoever: It is not necessary to request satisfaction of one’s needs or to praise God. But because there is a deep religious reason for praying at fixed intervals using 15 Guide 3:32; Pines 2:526. 16 Ibid. 17 “Of Prayers,” The Complete Essays of Montaigne, tr. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), 235. 18 Leibowitz, Letters.

Magical Thinking

unchanging formulas, the carrying out of this prescription has been given the form of praise and supplication.19

In Maimonides’s view, there are two rational ways to establish the existence of God. The first assumes that, since every effect has a cause, it is possible to follow the causes back infinitely, and this implies that there must be a First Cause that causes Itself. This is Aristotle’s argument. Maimonides does not share this point of view, since it implies that God is present in the world, and this, in his opinion, is incompatible with the story of creation, which requires that God be external to the world. He therefore offers a different point of view, saying that it is impossible to think about the world without God. In other words, God is not a question that man asks but one that logically necessitates itself, an approach that Leibniz20 formulated years later when he asked, “Why is there something instead of nothing?”21 Although this question may be philosophically convenient, there is no way to connect it to anything tangible in real life. Here is where revelation enters the picture. With revelation, God bursts into the world in an event unparalleled in history, putting an end to metaphysical uncertainty, at least among the Jews. Thanks to the revelation of this hitherto unimaginable, indescribable God, abstract and transcendent, the Jews can know precisely what is permitted and what is forbidden, up to the slightest detail, as for example whether or not it is possible to tear paper on the Sabbath, or the correct way to tie one’s shoes. In the Mishneh Torah, Maimonides grounds the Torah’s divinity in revelation as a historic event that the Jewish people experienced at Mount Sinai after the exodus from Egypt. This event put an end to the metaphysical dread of the Jewish people. Maimonides explains how God revealed himself and reminds us that “our own eyes saw, not a stranger’s; our own ears heard, not another’s.”22 What he means is that the offspring of the witnesses to revelation experience it again, spiritually, in every generation, as if they themselves had been present.

19 Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, ed. Eliezer Goldman, trans. Eliezer Goldman et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 32. 20 Gottfried Leibniz, the seventeenth-century philosopher, scientist, and mathematician. 21 Leibniz, Principles of Nature and Grace, 1714. 22 Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Yesodei Torah 8:2.

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Thus it was that 600,000 adult males,23 along with their wives and children—millions of human beings—apparently heard God address them directly, thereby confirming Moses’s stature as prophet. This implies that, ever after, any attempt to annul the Torah is negated in advance, since that would simultaneously involve annulling the conditions under which it was accepted.24 Since Moses received the Torah directly from God himself, subsequent developments are out of the question unless they are congruent with the Torah from Sinai. Though it was impossible to foresee all the principles of halakhah at the moment of revelation, there would always be trustworthy spiritual leaders, inspired by God’s law, to guide the people: “I will raise up a prophet for them from among their own people, like yourself: I will put My words in his mouth and he will speak to them all that I command him.”25 According to the Mishneh Torah, the people themselves heard God pronounce the first two commandments: “I the Lord am your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt” and “You shall have no other gods besides Me,”26 and this was enough to give legitimacy and authority to the entire Torah, even though it was only transmitted to Moses, in the second step of the process. Based on revelation, the rabbi and intellectual Ouri Sherki27 asserts that “a foundational story of national identity cannot be an invention unless it existed before the birth of the people. Revelation assures us that history has meaning and that God has not abandoned humanity.”28 Menachem Mendel Schneerson, known to all as the Lubavitcher Rebbe, grounded faith in a similar argument: All agree … that the Jews left Egypt and, forty-nine days later, stood before Mount Sinai and heard the Ten Commandments from G–d. This is known, not just because a book (the Torah) tells us so, but simply by tradition—by the fact that generation after generation of Jews have transmitted this story, and that it is based on the actual experience of an entire nation. It therefore remains an undisputed historical fact. The Jews who left 23 24 25 26 27 28

This is the number preserved by tradition. David Lemler, Entre éternité et contingence: la Loi chez Maïmonide, Yod 2010. Deut 18:18. Exod 20:2 and 3. Sherki teaches at Yeshivat Mekhon Meir and is the rabbi of Bet Yehuda in Jerusalem. https://ravsherki.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6479:thedivine-origin-of-the-torah&catid=264&Itemid=102514.

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Egypt witnessed the Ten Plagues, the Exodus, and revelation at Sinai, and transmitted these events down the generations. Throughout Jewish history there were never less than approximately a million Jews who transmitted this tradition, and the basic story remained the same even when the Jews were dispersed and scattered to the four corners of the earth.29

Now back to Maimonides. Leibowitz remarks that Maimonides employs a two-sided discourse, whose purpose is to strengthen the faith of believers in need of certainty. This is one of the cases in which Maimonides distinguishes true beliefs from necessary ones,30 the latter being a form of pious falsehood. He apparently adopted this from Plato, who believed that “[t]he rulers of the city retain the right to lie, whether about enemies or about citizens, when the interests of the city are at stake.”31 As for revelation, Leibowitz corrects his interlocutors at every opportunity about the meaning of the text, and angrily preaches at them: “Must I teach you what Maimonides says about revelation in Part 2, Chapter 33 of the Guide?”32 In that chapter, Maimonides clearly disaffirms the version of revelation intended for the masses and hints to the elite that revelation was not a literal fact. Along with Maimonides, let us consider the following verses from the Torah, at the heart of revelation: On the third day, as morning dawned, there was thunder, and lightning, and a dense cloud upon the mountain, and a very loud blast of the horn; and all the people who were in the camp trembled. Moses led the people out of the camp toward God, and they took their places at the foot of the mountain. Now Mount Sinai was all in smoke, for the Lord had come down upon it in fire; the smoke rose like the smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain trembled violently. The blare of the horn grew louder and louder. As Moses spoke, God answered him in thunder.33

When Maimonides comes to analyze this passage, he concludes that the people heard nothing but a prolonged, ceaseless sound, not any articulation 29 Nissan Dovid Dubov, https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/108386/jewish/ Proof-of-Gds-Existence.htm. 30 Guide 3:28. 31 Plato, The Republic, book 2. 32 Yeshayahu Leibowitz, On Just About Everything: Talks with Michael Shashar (Keter, 1987; in Hebrew), 101. 33 Exod 19:16-19.

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of speech.34 Since Moses was the only man who capable of understanding the meaning of that sound, which presumably came from God, he translated its content in a way that the people would be able to understand35—an assertion that completely eliminates the belief that millions of witnesses apparently heard God addressing them directly. It is clear, therefore, that Maimonides does not accept revelation as a literal fact; he rejects the belief that it constituted a historical event; and he denies the idea of direct contact between the Jewish people and God, even during the course of that onetime event called revelation. We therefore see that when he addresses the elites, Maimonides contradicts what he wrote for the masses. It is a fact that he summarizes the chapter of the Guide devoted to revelation somewhat enigmatically: It is impossible to expound the Gathering at Mount Sinai to a greater extent than they spoke about it, for it is one of the mysteries of the Torah. The true reality of that apprehension and its modality are quite hidden from us, for nothing like it happened before and will not happen after. Know this.36

This passage is critical to Leibowitz’s thought, since it absolutely destroys the foundations of popular faith and leaves man to his own devices, alone in the universe. If there was no revelation in the historical sense of that word, religion must be considered a value, which, like all other values, is not anchored in the material world. Religion can in no way be based on the self-revelation of God, since that would mean that God belongs to the realm of knowledge. The question of faith does not arise until man is absolutely convinced that God is not part of the world. That is the point at which, according to Leibowitz, will enters the picture. Religion, therefore, is the result of decision, not of revelation. The paradox here is that the necessary condition for religion is the certainty that there is no proof—and that there cannot be any proof—of the existence of God in the world. Only from this postulate can religion find a place in human consciousness. The term messiah is an expression of the longing for a better world, not only for the Jews but for all of humanity. But even if we accept the unlikely assumption that a messianic age is indeed on the way, still, according to Maimonides, the laws of nature will not change in any way. In an interview 34 Guide 2:33. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid.; Pines, 366. The italicized words are in Hebrew in Maimonides’s original JudeoArabic text.

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with Leibowitz, a professor asks him whether he believes in the coming of the messiah, and he replies enigmatically: “Yes, I am one of those people who believe that the messiah will come.” He makes sure to emphasize “will come.” The interviewer insists: “When?” He raises his voice and responds angrily, “He will come! Forever! Every messiah who does come is a false messiah, since the essence of the messiah is that he will come!”37 In the Mishneh Torah, Maimonides discusses the messiah in a measured way, making sure to eliminate any ambiguity that might hint at the supernatural. He writes: Do not think that King Messiah will have to perform signs and wonders, bring anything new into being, revive the dead, or do similar things, as fools say.38 … Let no one think that in the days of the Messiah any of the laws of nature will be set aside, or any innovation be introduced into creation. The world will follow its normal course … All expressions used in connection with the Messianic age are metaphorical. In the days of King Messiah the full meaning of those metaphors and their allusions will become clear to all. Said the Rabbis: The sole difference between the present and the Messianic days is delivery from servitude to foreign powers.39 

Note that the phrase in which Maimonides calls those who believe that the messiah will resurrect the dead “fools” is, strangely, missing from the version of this text found on the website of Chabad, which claims that Maimonides does not reject the principle of resurrection,40 clearly contradicting the versions of the Mishneh Torah found elsewhere. In this connection, when Leibowitz, in an interview, was asked his opinion of Rabbi Schneerson, whose multitudes of students took him to be the messiah, he hesitated, assumed a thoughtful expression, and finally said, “I am very familiar with Schneerson’s writings. I have read it all, but I have not managed to decide definitively whether the Lubavitcher Rebbe is a psychopath or a con man.”41

37 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz-QMDPW5RM. 38 Mishneh Torah, “The Book of Judges,” Hilkhot Melakhim 11:3; trans. Abraham M. Hershman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), 239. 39 Ibid., 12:1-2; Hershman, 240-241. 40 On the French Chabad website this passage is accompanied by an explanation that “Maimonides is not claiming that this will not happen, merely that this is not necessarily a sign that the messiah will be obligated to fulfill.” 41 Per https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLGYqDtvzOo.

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For Leibowitz, “God does not reveal Himself either in nature or in history.”42 He rejects any notion of “providence” as that word is understood in popular religion, which cannot accept a “God” who has no role to play. But the clear implication of the first verse of the Torah, “When God began to create heaven and earth,” is that God is not part of the world.43 The hymn to God written by Solomon ibn Gabirol44 emphasizes this wonderfully: Lord of the world, who reigned Before any being was created.

Leibowitz also teaches that God does not oversee the world, does not pull the strings, and does not influence reality. What is called “providence” is, on the one hand, the laws of nature (general providence),45 and on the other, man’s ability to take his fate into his own hands by means of his conscious will (individual providence).46 This phenomenon is not dependent on anything external; rather, it is an expression of man’s ontological freedom. Though the animal and vegetable realms live within nature, man qua man employs nature. This is the meaning of the verse, “God blessed them and God said to them, ‘Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it; and rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and all the living things that creep on earth.’”47 So, for Leibowitz, man qua man is obliged to construct himself despite nature and even in opposition to it, and he must control his body from the moment he wakes until the moment he goes to sleep.48 Observing the commandments is not connected to providence, since for Leibowitz any religious activity whose aim is to receive something in return is in vain. To get around this difficulty, religious schools insist that if the supplications of believers do not bear fruit (in this world), that is only because they will be taken care of in the World to Come. But the truth, as everyone can see, is that “experience and the whole history of the human race testify that there is no correlation between worship of God and the fate of man or of the nation. This is one of the fundamentals of 42 Leibowitz, Letters, 103. 43 See the previous chapter on Spinoza. 44 An eleventh-century Andalusian rabbi, poet, theologian, and Neo-Platonic philosopher. 45 Leibowitz, Conversations on the Eight Chapters of Maimonides (Jerusalem: Keter, 1986; in Hebrew), 150. 46 See ch. 9, “Cognitive and Conative.” 47 Gen 1:28. 48 The idea on which this assertion is based is that man does not control his body while he sleeps, implying that he is at the mercy of his imagination until he wakes.

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faith.”49 Elsewhere Leibowitz repeats, “There is no correlation between what happens to a person and whether or not the person worships God. That is an empirical fact that no thinking person can fail to agree with.”50 The Talmud says nothing different when it discusses the fact that “bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people.”51 But this is paradoxical only for those who confuse faith in God with faith in God’s help. Those who insist on believing, against what common sense tells us, that everything that happens transpires “with God’s help” must logically accept that the victims of the Holocaust were likewise slaughtered “with God’s help.” This was, in fact, the opinion of R. Schneerson—that one must view the Holocaust as akin to surgery performed on the sick body of the pre-war Jewish people, who were assimilating at a rapid pace. Schneerson thought that God wanted the Holocaust to happen and therefore, in his opinion, it was a positive thing52 from a Jewish perspective. He asserted53 that: It is not impossible for the physical destruction of the Holocaust to be spiritually beneficial. On the contrary, it is quite possible that physical affliction is good for the spirit.54

He compares God to a physician who amputates one of the limbs of the sick person in order to save his life: [A limb that] is incurably diseased … The Holy One Blessed Be He, like the professor-surgeon … seeks the good of Israel, and indeed, all He does is done for the good.… In the spiritual sense, no harm was done, because the everlasting spirit of the Jewish people was not destroyed.55

But Leibowitz, in complete opposition to popular religion, rejects belief in a God who controls the universe. As evidence, he cites the book of Job, one of his favorite books in the entire Bible, which begins this way: There was a man in the land of Uz named Job. That man was blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil. Seven sons and three daughters 49 Leibowitz, Letters, 225. 50 Leibowitz, Conversations on Prophecy, independently published, 230. 51 B. Ber. 7a. 52 Mada ve-Emunah, Lubavitch Institute, Kfar Chabad, 1980. 53 See in this context Yehuda Bauer, “God the Surgeon,” Haaretz, May 31, 2007: https:// www.haaretz.com/1.4823447. 54 Mada ve-Emunah, 116. Translation from Haaretz; see previous note. 55 Ibid., 117, 118. Translation from Haaretz.

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were born to him; his possessions were seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen and five hundred she-asses, and a very large household. That man was wealthier than anyone in the East.56

But as the story continues, everything changes, for a bitter fate strikes Job: he loses his family, his health, and his wealth. Yet his faith is not weakened at any stage of the process. Even though his friends know he is righteous, they try, one after another, to persuade him that if fate has treated him so cruelly after he was so fortunate, then he must have angered God. They insist that he must take stock of himself, recall the sins that he must have committed, and atone for them. But Job’s conscience is clear, for he knows that his behavior has been faultless. His friends implore him to admit his guilt, but he will not give in. Even his wife loses hope and tells him to deny God and die. He passes every test, though he does beg God to curse the day he was born. He is sure that despite everything that has happened, the world must have some hidden meaning, and he implores God to give him the key to this mystery. But God does not answer. Ultimately, after profound thought, Job understands that God’s silence is actually signaling him that the world has no meaning in human terms and one cannot question it. From this biblical parable we can conclude that the belief that God oversees the world, as they teach in religious schools, is a fraud.57 Though the parable of Job entered the biblical canon, it is in the tragic tradition of the Stoicism of Seneca and Spinoza, and it was therefore apparently influenced by Greek mythology. Simply replacing “God” with “nature” in the story makes this obvious. When Job sees his world collapsing around him, with not a thing remaining to him of the world that he knew— not health, not family, not possessions—we witness this scene: Then Job arose, tore his robe, cut off his hair, and threw himself on the ground and worshiped. He said, “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord has given, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” For all that, Job did not sin nor did he cast reproach on God.58

56 Job 1:1-3. 57 Lior Tal, head of the Binah Institute for Jewish Learning, “Yeshayahu Leibowitz—A First Step Toward Atheism” (in Hebrew). 58 Job 1:20-22.

Magical Thinking

Now replace “God” with “nature” and there arises from the cry of Job the spirit of Spinoza: “‘Nature has given, and nature has taken away; blessed be nature.’ For all that, Job did not sin nor did he cast reproach on nature.” We turn now to a passage from Ecclesiastes, another of Leibowitz’s favorite biblical books: The living know they will die. But the dead know nothing; they have no more recompense, for even the memory of them has died. Their loves, their hates, their jealousies have long since perished; and they have no more share till the end of time in all that goes on under the sun. Go, eat your bread in gladness, and drink your wine in joy; for your action was long ago approved by God. Let your clothes always be freshly washed, and your head never lack ointment. Enjoy happiness with a woman you love all the fleeting days of life that have been granted to you under the sun—all your fleeting days. For that alone is what you can get out of life and out of the means you acquire under the sun. Whatever it is in your power to do, do with all your might. For there is no action, no reasoning, no learning, no wisdom in Sheol, where you are going.59

For many believers, Judaism is connected to religious principles like resurrection of the dead, the messiah, revelation, and providence. Leibowitz rejects all of this categorically. Drawing upon Maimonides, he argues that there is no religious obligation to accept beliefs that have no practical consequences. Maimonides writes: “As I have already explained many times, when there is a dispute between the Sages on a religious principle that does not involve any particular action, we do not say that the halakhah follows so-and-so.”60 In his Commentary to the Mishnah, Maimonides offers an assemblage of 13 principles that for him are integral to Judaism.61 The “13 Principles of Faith” found in the Jewish prayerbook are a paraphrase of these principles, but they are quite different from the original, so much so that Leibowitz was of the opinion that the version in the prayerbook does not reflect either the 59 Eccl 9:5-10. 60 Commentary to the Mishnah, Sotah, 3:5. 61 Leibowitz did not consider himself obligated to adopt these principles, and he explained why in his book Conversations on Prophecy. See also Conversations on Prophecy and Selected Chapters in Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed (independently published, 1997; in Hebrew).

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style or the ideas of Maimonides. In any case, Leibowitz was restrained in this opinion, since these principles are controversial in the rabbinic world and are therefore not regarded as obligatory. The Jews of Maimonides’s day were tempted to convert to Islam, and the 13 principles were inserted into the liturgy to oppose conversion without attacking Islam frontally. Principles 7 and 8, for example, say (after the introductory formula): “I believe with perfect faith that the prophecy of our master Moses (on whom be peace) is true, and that our master Moses is the greatest of all the prophets.” What the Jews had to understand, in between the lines, was: “I believe with perfect faith that Muhammad the messenger of God was a false messiah.”62 As for the rest of the “Principles of Faith,” Leibowitz observes that Maimonides was careful to clarify them one by one in his introduction to Perek Helek, in his Mishnah commentary, but when he reached the 13th principle—the resurrection of the dead—he sidestepped and said, “I have already explained this.” If we try to find out what he was alluding to, we discover that shortly before, he had written, “And they [the Sages, in B. Ber. 18b] said this: The wicked are called ‘dead’ even while they are alive; the righteous even when they are dead are called ‘living.’”63 In other words, the righteous continue to live in the collective consciousness even after they are dead, while the wicked are forgotten even before they die. This, of course, is incompatible with popular religion, but Leibowitz considers any speculation about the resurrection of the dead “folkloristic.” It is astounding that Maimonides does not mention the resurrection of the dead at all in the Mishneh Torah, nor does he say a word about it in the Guide for the Perplexed. This provoked an angry reaction against him and, apparently in order to placate his critics, he was forced to write a clarificatory work entitled The Essay on Resurrection. There he asserted, surprisingly and in utter contradiction to his real beliefs, that “the individuals who will return to their bodies will eat, drink, marry, and procreate, and they will die after a long life, like those who will live during the messianic age.”64 But the Maimonides scholar Maurice-Ruben Hayoun65 says that the authenticity of this document is in doubt and that it was actually the 62 Ibid., 220. 63 Introduction to Perek Helek. 64 Crisis and Leadership: Epistles of Maimonides, trans. Abraham Halkin (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985), 219 f. 65 Maurice-Ruben Hayoun was a scholar of Jewish thought, philosopher, and lecturer at the University of Geneva. See Hayoun, Maimonides (Ellipses, 2009).

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students of Maimonides who circulated it, to cleanse their teacher of any suspicion of heresy. It is evident, therefore, that this epistle was intended for the ignorant and aligned with popular religion. Evidence for this is that it is accompanied by a prologue written by Maimonides, intended for the elite alone, in which he notes that this Epistle was only written for fools whose minds are “filled with the senseless prattle of old women and noxious fantasies,”66 matching the truths accepted by the masses. That, then, is what is necessary to remember about Maimonides’s opinion on the resurrection of the dead.

66 Crisis and Leadership, 212, cited in Leibowitz, Letters, 278.

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Values

Leibowitz’s thought revolves around the idea of values. There is no way to understand his thought or the positions he takes without appreciating that he believes man is endowed with free will.1 This freedom is expressed in the values that people choose to adopt, but it does not express what anyone is physically or mentally, much less what he consciously aware, but only what he wants.2 Values are an element of the kind of mental complexity unique to human beings. They change from person to person, and it is impossible to point to any general rule that might logically explain the differences between them. Unlike the laws of nature, values correspond to no objective criterion, nor do they necessarily match any particular reality. A person’s values do not operate on a scale of right or wrong, even if he finds himself alone on a desert island. Values are the way people express their humanity. There is no humanity without values and there are no values without humanity. A “value” is anything that a human being finds significant. By definition, values are a matter of choice, and yet they are intimately linked to the human condition. Leibowitz thought that everyone conceals in the depths of his soul a supreme value, to which he subordinates all other values. One of the most common values is that of life itself. It is possible to teach values, but it is impossible to transmit them. In this, they are unlike knowledge, which not only is transmissible but is accepted by anyone who receives it from the moment he is capable of understanding it. Unlike scientific disagreements, there is no method of resolving a dispute about values. Yet the most profound questions, those that have engaged humanity since the dawn of time—whether life has 1 On determinism, see Chapter 15, “Science.” 2 See Chapter 9, “Cognitive and Conative.”

Values

meaning, whether something is good or evil, desirable or undesirable, harmful or helpful—these questions occupy us and will go on occupying us. Science is of no help in resolving them, since values depend on each person’s subjectivity. Values are the expression of choices that are unsubstantiated and are therefore impossible to confirm rationally. When we choose, for example, not to lie and not to cheat, we waive an advantage that we might have gained had we lied. The only possible explanation for this is that we value honesty and equity, without being able to explain why on the basis of reason. It is possible to agree on the multiplication tables, but not on matters of good and evil, right and wrong. No one can rely on some external authority in order to determine his values for him,3 since not a single one of them can be derived from knowledge; knowledge is value-free. In order to render a value judgment about something, one cannot rely on nature, on history, or on culture. This is an existential situation, and each of us must face it alone, since there is nothing whatsoever that can help us determine which values are the “good” ones. Moreover, human beings are prone to internal struggles, since nothing can aid us in making the “good” choice from among the contradictory values inside us. It follows, therefore, that a person determines his or her values randomly and arbitrarily. They are formed in each of our minds according to our will; the conclusions we reach are not predetermined and cannot be attained through logic. The values that a person “discovers” are the result of algorithms that stem from his own reality. For example, it is highly probable that someone who grows up in the Alps will like to ski, but not all inhabitants of the Alps enjoy this activity. Every individual is the transcendent product of multiple foundational elements: their genetic inheritance, their roots, their nation, their era, their family, their friends, chance encounters, their health, the traumas that they faced in life, and all sorts of other random events. Each person is therefore different from all other human beings, even those who are most similar. Indeed, even identical twins experience life completely as individuals, each of them with his own mental world. Man cannot know any other person other than through what he perceives in him. It is impossible to experience anyone else’s inner life, since 3 Leibowitz, cited in Jean-Marc Joubert, “La pensée politique de Yeshayahou Leibowitz,” https://journals.openedition.org/yod/680.

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this, of necessity, is part of his private, personal domain.4 Billions of people live on this planet, all of them completely human, and yet each one of them is utterly unique. We are surprised by everything that differs among them: their biology, their psychology, their talents, their desires, their longings, their interests, their orientations, their thoughts, their opinions, their ideas, their character. When you’ve seen one atom of hydrogen, you’ve seen them all. When we comprehend the forces that govern the interaction of the earth and the moon, we understand the interactions of other astronomical entities. But knowing one particular person (or imagining we do) tells us nothing about the person who is standing next to him. Each individual is a world unto himself, different from everyone else. Therefore, although we can discern laws of nature, there are no such laws to be found in the social sciences,5 such as sociology, economics, politics, or history.6 Duty, for example, is a value we accept arbitrarily, unconnected to any natural phenomenon. Even saying that we “must” eat has a value connotation; we must eat because of the value we attach to life. But anything that is genuinely optional belongs to the realm of value and not to that of necessity. “Life has no meaning a priori … it’s up to you to give it a meaning.”7 What distinguishes man is the fact that he imposes obligations and prohibitions on himself, even when there is nothing that obligates him to do so. Each person has his own set of values, and whenever necessary we are ready to pay whatever price they require. There are no universal values, for people determine their values subjectively. Epicurus and his like think that the mere fact of existence gives meaning to life. Others try to make sure they will leave descendants. Others are attached to their nation. Others think the only worthwhile thing is pleasure. Some devote their lives to helping others, some prefer the pursuit of honor and power. Still others devote their lives to science, sports, or art. In this way, “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism.”8

4 See Chapter 13, “The Mind-Body Problem.” 5 Even the distinction between the social sciences and the humanities is not universal; it does not exist in France. 6 Leibowitz, People, Land, and Nation (Jerusalem: Keter, 1991; in Hebrew). 7 Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1947), 58. 8 Ibid., 18.

Values

Aesthetic preferences belong to the realm of values. They vary from person to person and cannot be objectively evaluated in any way. Let us assume, for example,9 that we have before us a green tablecloth. Everyone present agrees on this, but that is not persuasive; they could be lying. Suppose we start with the presumption that they certainly are not lying— there still exists the possibility that they are colorblind and that some of them think the tablecloth is green while others think it is red. Even if we eliminate those two possibilities—none of them is a liar and none of them is colorblind—it is still possible that they are hallucinating and seeing things that exist only in their imagination. So, at this stage, we are forced to admit that we cannot determine the color of the tablecloth with absolute certainty. Here science enters the picture, making it possible to obtain an objective answer. We can formulate the question in such a way as to be able to figure out objectively what determines the color, in other words, what is the reason for it. Only then can the question be formulated this way: What causes the color of this tablecloth to be green? We can get an unequivocal answer to this question if, using an appropriate instrument, we measure the wavelength of light that is being reflected from the tablecloth. Anyone can carry out a measurement of this kind, independent of what he thinks he sees or does not see. Even someone who is blind can do it. This will prove conclusively that the wavelength of light that the tablecloth is reflecting corresponds to the color green. It is therefore possible to resolve the problem through the use of precise, scientific methodology, in which human judgment does not intrude. From this point of view, it is possible to say that science is universal, since it depends not on the subject but on the object. The question remains: Is this a nice color? Some will say yes, some will say no. Although we would be happy to obtain an objective answer to this question too, we run afoul of the impossibility of figuring out an algorithm that will reveal what causes any particular thing to seem attractive or unattractive. This kind of cause is what is called a value judgment, and there is no way to consider its worth objectively. In order to illustrate the implications of such subjective values, one can consider the question of whether a particular person is attractive or not, in a situation where the answer to the question will determine his fate, the fate of the person who asks the question, and the fate of others 9 Leibowitz, Between Science and Philosophy (Jerusalem: Akademon, 1986; in Hebrew).

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who are involved. Since we cannot determine the answer scientifically, it is obvious that the basic, most decisive questions linked to human experience are value judgments. These change from person to person and have no objective basis. What applies to the aesthetics of color goes for other values too, meaning that there are no universal values. Throughout the ages, philosophers from different cultures pointed out that there is no way to arrive at a set of values rationally. Maimonides writes: “With regard to what is of necessity, there is no good and evil at all, but only the false and the true.”10 Pascal11 writes: It is right that the majority should win; but this “right” results from convention and not from the essential nature of things. For the relationship of the majority to the minority is not that of the more just to the less just, but of the stronger to the less strong.12

For Leibowitz, ethics belongs to the realm of values and therefore cannot be based on anything objective. Scientific questions can be answered quantitatively, but there is no way to determine what is ethically right or moral. Leibowitz points out that during World War II Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of the American president, declared that the war was being fought in the name of a “higher good”—that all the children in the world would have enough to eat—at the same time that Hitler declared that the war was being fought in the name of a different “higher good”—that the Aryan race should control the whole world. At the same time, the Japanese General Hideki Tojo also claimed that the war was being fought for a “higher good”—dying for the Emperor of Japan. Each of these people chose to fight in the name of values whose rightness they considered unquestionable.13 Leibowitz was of the opinion that these people “were genuinely ethical not only in their own eyes but also in absolute terms.” He loved to provoke audiences by claiming that “Hitler was one of the most ethical people of the twentieth century.” At first glance this claim might seem shocking, especially to Jewish ears, but it was no more than an expression of the idea that there is no way to justify any particular set of values. The only thing one can do is to fight for them. 10 Guide 1:2; Pines, 25. 11 Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher, moralist, and theologian of the seventeenth century. 12 Pascal, Pensées, “Of Causes and Effects.” 13 These examples recur often in Leibowitz’s letters.

Values

This was also Leibowitz’s way of illustrating the need for humility in order to avoid falling into the trap of imaginary “universal values.” This being the case, each person is authorized to establish his own morality. An individual decides what is good and what is evil using his own mental faculties, that is, what is good or evil to his own mind and his own conscience, known only to him, no one else being anything like him. Even when a group of people agrees on the contours of a particular morality, the result would still not be a principle that would be valid in every situation, at all times, for everyone. Regardless of the conventions in any given society, it is obligatory for each and every one to reevaluate those conventions when situations or his own views change. People find it hard to agree. Everyone’s goals are different. But since man is “a political animal by nature,”14 he needs other people in order to access a communal space of awareness.15 He must, therefore, control his impulses if he is to cooperate with the others, who are always different from him. That is the basis of morality, even though it is only necessary if one grants that life in society has value.

14 Aristotle, Politics, Book 1, chapter 1. 15 See Chapter 13, “The Mind-Body Problem.”

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Cognitive and Conative

In addition to cognition—our ability to understand—human beings are endowed also with conation—the ability to will. There is no causative relationship between these two abilities, nor does either of them have any connection to objective reality. To illustrate this, it must be understood (for example) that there is no way to rationalize the decision to be fair, even if we understand perfectly well what fairness is. The only possible explanation is that people will—that is, they choose—to be honest. According to Leibowitz: Everyone has to eat and drink; we have no choice in the matter—and ‘values’ are not involved. But no one is forced, for any reason rooted in reality, to be an honest person; he can be a scoundrel. The decision to act honestly therefore belongs to the realm of values. We might say that values are things for which there is no objective necessity. The decision to advocate certain values, or to practice them, may lead someone to adhere to them even at the price of his needs.1

It follows that what a person does is not reflective of what he knows or thinks he knows; it is an expression of his will. According to Socrates, “No one is deliberately wicked”;2 in his opinion, evil can be the result of nothing but ignorance. But Leibowitz does not share this view. He cites the example of Richard III, when the future king declares right at the beginning of Shakespeare’s play what he intends to do once he ascends the throne: “I am determined to prove a villain.” For Leibowitz, the awareness of one’s own will is the basic element of the human personality. It does not proceed from any cause, internal or external. In other words, it is impossible to derive the action of the will from one or 1 Between Science and Philosophy, 276-277. 2 Plato, Gorgias.

Cognitive and Conative

another aspect of reality. It depends on whatever relationship the person arbitrarily cultivates with reality. Such a relationship, by definition, cannot be explained logically.3 This explains why the term “value” is inextricably linked to the will. Without conscious will, there can be no values.4 Leibowitz thinks that there is nothing in nature like the human will. It would seem that nothing in the world wants anything consciously, since everything else is simply the playing out of cause and effect. A planet orbits its star by virtue of the law of gravity, or as a result of whatever other forces impel it, but no planet wants to have any particular orbit. Man is unquestionably the product of a series of events—physical, biological, historical, psychological, or otherwise—but he has also been endowed with an ability to reflect that enables him to see himself from the outside. Everything he does, then, is the result of an act of will. From a legal perspective, though it is possible that someone who is psychotic cannot be considered responsible for his actions, nonetheless this detail in no way contradicts the fact that he only ever does what he wills to do. Unlike Spinoza,5 Leibowitz claims that man alone is capable of willing something other than what nature dictates to him, and even of working against nature. The interplay of will and consciousness is the sole phenomenon that Leibowitz views as literally supernatural. Yet man, having free will, is obligated to grant that same free will a meaning other than the one of adapting himself to nature. Maimonides says: “And this is not the action of man in his capacity as a rational creature; rather, it is the action of man in his capacity as an animal, ‘like the beasts that perish.’”6 In order to escape the clutches of causality, then, man must activate that which exists in him only in potential—his awareness that he is free. This is also what led Sartre to say that man “did not create himself, yet, in other respects is free; because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”7 In this, Sartre goes much further than Maimonides: He thinks that even when man does nothing, that is still doing something. Anyone who denies this is, in Sartre’s words, intellectually dishonest. Whatever explanation we may give for the fact that this biochemical machine, the human being, can be aware of its freedom, it is utterly 3 Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Science and Values (Ministry of Defense Press, 1985; in Hebrew). 4 See Chapter 8, “Values.” 5 See Chapter 6, “Baruch Spinoza.” 6 Maimonides, Eight Chapters, ch. 5; the biblical phrase is from Psalm 49. 7 Sartre, Existentialism, 27.

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inconceivable from a logical standpoint.8 Man therefore has an ontological duty to extricate himself from randomness by means of his will. In this sense, Judaism is a kind of existentialism. If man does not do so, it means that he cannot express his essential nature and is not a perfected man in the Maimonidean sense. The human will is distinct from any other phenomenon in the universe in that it does not stem from necessity of any kind. For this reason, even if there is some consensus about knowledge, it is impossible to cause everyone to will the same thing. The universalistic ideal is therefore an illusion. Intellectuals of superior wisdom may nonetheless find themselves on opposite sides of this issue or that. Such a thing is possible only because their decisions correspond to what they want, and not to what they know. Similarly, political alternatives are not subject to reason. They cannot be reconciled, since they are based on values and not on facts. For Leibowitz, “So-and-so acknowledges a particular thing that imposes an obligation on him, even when he knows that this acknowledgment is not universal and that he will have to struggle to achieve it. It follows that conflicts between people—whether between individuals or between the various human collectives —are inevitable. We might even say that such struggles constitute the value content of human reality. A harmony that is achieved by consensus, if that were even possible, would deprive human existence of all meaning.”9 Nothing can prevent someone from wanting. Moreover, there are things that one wants even though one knows they are unattainable. The will does not err, for it is its own justification. Whatever a man’s situation might be, he (unlike anything else in the world) is not obligated to do what determinism instructs him to do. Leibowitz asserts, “Man, whether as individual or in the collective, in whatever existential situation he may be, is never forced to do any particular thing. He can do the exact opposite. And this is true for every human being, every human group, and every social and political reality. The question is what he wants to do.”10 The will is the most basic element of human existence. To will does not mean to decide what is preferable, logical, or rational.

8 See Chapter 13, “The Mind-Body Problem.” 9 Science and Values, 553. 10 Avi Sagi, Yeshayahu Leibowitz: His World and Thought (Jerusalem: Keter, 1995; in Hebrew).

Cognitive and Conative

Man was not born with the desire to attain any particular thing but with the undifferentiated ability to desire. This distinguishes him from the realms of animal, vegetable, and mineral. From the moment that a man knows something he is already incapable of not knowing it, but there is no functional relationship between what he knows and what he wants. He is of course unable to choose anything other the things that he knows (or thinks he knows), but he will always decide in favor of what he wants. Semantically, will is the antithesis of deduction. To prove this, it is enough to see that there is no contradiction in saying “I know that smoking is bad for my health, but I want to smoke.” Let us turn now to a passage from The Fall, by Albert Camus, one of Leibowitz’s favorite writers. A rich lawyer decides at the end of a busy day to walk home in the dead of night, in order to get a little fresh air, despite the light November rain that is falling in Paris. He heads for the Left Bank and walks across the Pont Royal. Years afterward, he remembers his walk: On the bridge, I passed behind a figure leaning over the parapet and apparently looking down at the river. Getting closer, I could make out a slender young woman, dressed in black. All that could be seen of her between the dark hair and the collar of her coat was the back of her neck, fresh and damp, which I found touching. But, after a moment’s hesitation, I continued on my way. Reaching the end of the bridge, I turned along the quai towards SaintMichel, where I was then living. I had already gone some fifty metres when I heard the sound—a sound which, despite the distance, seemed immense in the silence of the night—of a body hitting the water. I stopped dead, but without turning round. Almost at once, I heard a shout, repeated several times, which was also travelling down the river, then abruptly stopped. The ensuing silence seemed interminable, as though the night had stopped dead. I wanted to run, but couldn’t move. I was trembling, I think, with cold and shock. I told myself that I had to act quickly, but I felt an irresistible weakness flood through my body. I forget what I thought at that moment. ‘Too late, too far away …’, or something like that. I kept on listening, not moving. Then, slowly, I walked away through the rain. I reported the incident to no one.11

11 Albert Camus, The Fall, trans. Robin Buss (London: Penguin, 2006), 44.

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Faith

As we have already seen in the chapter on magical thinking, Leibowitz notes: “There is no correlation between what happens to a person and whether or not the person worships God. That is an empirical fact that no thinking person can fail to agree with.”1 Elsewhere he writes: “Experience and the whole history of the human race testify that there is no correlation between worship of God and the fate of man or of the nation. This is one of the fundamentals of faith.”2 It is therefore not easy to pin down Leibowitz’s religious beliefs, since we are faced with the following paradox: Leibowitz is a Jew who strictly observes the commandments while at the same time rejecting any notion of divine intervention in the world or any mechanism for reward or punishment from God. In view of this, what exactly does his faith consist of, and why would he observe the commandments? It is essentially because he is a nihilist who thinks that halakhah is the sole possible response to the vacuity of the world while simultaneously not denying the reality of the body. Observance of the commandments is for him a way of life that does not assume any divine quid pro quo, be that what it might; observance itself is the quid pro quo. In the 1990s, “disputations”3 were held in front of overflow crowds in the halls of the Hebrew University, in which Leibowitz and Fr. Marcel Dubois4 set out their very distinct worldviews. In one of these disputations, 1 Leibowitz, Conversations on Prophecy, independently published, 230. 2 Leibowitz, Letters, 225. 3 In the Middle Ages such “disputations” were debates pitting the proponents of Judaism and those of Christianity against each other. 4 Marcel Dubois (1920–2007) was a Dominican priest, philosopher, theologian, and spiritual counselor who served as chair of the philosophy department at the Hebrew University until his death.

Faith

Fr. Dubois declared: “My Christian faith helps me achieve redemption of my soul in the World to Come.” Leibowitz responded: “But why wait for the World to Come to achieve redemption if it’s possible to do that while we are still alive, here and now?”5 Halakhah is at the very heart of the Jewish way of life and the Jewish community, in which intellect rules the roost, considered superior to every other method of acquiring knowledge. It is not a matter of preparation for some “world behind,”6 since Judaism’s “doctrine of redemption” is directed not at heaven but at the earth. Redemption is to be attained not after death but during one’s life. This belief depends on people assuming obligations, but it does not pretend to be a cure for the tumult of existence nor a divine promise. Psychologically, Leibowitz explains, we know that our lives will come to an end, but death itself is an experience that cannot be verified or confirmed; we cannot even imagine what it would be like. Our minds are certainly real enough while we are alive, but we cannot know a thing about whatever reality might persist after death. In any case, Leibowitz thinks that this question is entirely devoid of religious interest, since the Torah does not require us to fulfill the commandments after we die but only while we are alive. In practical terms, observing the commandments has an instant result: it establishes a barrier against idolatry and idol worship. The world is forced on our consciousness as an unquantifiable reality. We perceive a universe that is subject to the laws of nature, but all we human beings can know about it is what is accessible to our senses. So everything we can know about the universe, even who we are as individuals, constitutes a multiply subjective reality, since we do not know what the world is like for anyone else. This is because another person’s genealogy, his personal history, his body and everything that constitutes his personality are unique data points that are characteristic of him and no one else. Since the beginning of time, suffering, disease, and natural disasters have raised questions, and man has sought to use them to give meaning to existence. Shakespeare, that master of the human psyche, put the following words into the mouth of Macbeth:

5

The series of public “disputations” between the two men, which took place at the Hebrew University in 1992, is available on YouTube. 6 The expression comes from Nietzsche’s book Thus Spake Zarathustra and refers to the World to Come implied both in Christianity and in the writings of Plato.

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Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.7

We are faced with the absurdity of existence, and this presents us with a challenge. There is something incomprehensible in the fact that, while we constitute a part of the world, we are capable of thinking about its absurdity. Do the realms of animal, vegetable, and mineral also “think” that the world is absurd? We know nothing about that. But the shiver that we feel when we confront the concept of existence is inseparable from human consciousness. Yet for Leibowitz any search for meaning in reality is destined to fail. It can lead nowhere but to a dead end. We might say that the fact that we can experience this absurdity must mean that there is a flip side to absurdity. In other words, the absurd could not emerge into our consciousness if there were not something quite other than it, which must exist outside the world. Wittgenstein8 says something similar: “The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value—and if there were, it would be of no value.”9 “What is God?” asked the Roman philosopher Seneca, and he responded, “The intelligence of the universe … he eludes our sight and must be perceived by thought.”10 In Judaism this desire to know God makes man aspire to be something different from nature. Indeed, for Leibowitz, this alone is the role of halakhah. That is why Judaism obligates one to “be as strong as a lion to rise in the morning for the service of one’s Creator, to such an extent that he himself rouses the dawn.”11 Leibowitz’s faith stems from a thirst for the absolute that hints that God must be something other than the world. So expressions like “religious humanism” and “ethical monotheism” have no meaning for him; ethics is focused on humanity, but Judaism is focused on God. To Leibowitz, ethics is completely separate from religion and has a merely utilitarian role: putting 7 Macbeth, Act V, Scene v. 8 Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), an Austrian thinker and mathematician, known for his work on the foundations of mathematics and on the philosophy of language. 9 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden and F. P. Ramsey (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922), 183, proposition 6.41. 10 Seneca, Natural Questions 30.1, trans. Harry M. Hine, 138, 134. 11 Shulhan Arukh, Orah Hayyim, 1:1.

Faith

man in a situation where he must turn to God. As a result, Leibowitz disputes man’s being central to the world and considers the Kabbalistic mystical tradition idolatrous, since it claims that the world was created for the sake of man. Let it be said in Leibowitz’s defense that he, unlike Spinoza, took a great conceptual step forward in opening up a metaphysical space for God outside the world. In some sense he has given back to God what belongs to God and give back to the world what belongs to the world. As a scientist he takes a mechanistic view of nature and rejects any intervention of the non-rational in science, history, or quotidian life. In this respect he is close to naturalism, which causes him to say unapologetically that he is an out-and-out materialist, while at the same time, as one who observes the commandments, he is an Orthodox Jew. Consequently he is a positivist, since he thinks that there is no human knowledge other than what is acquired through empirical observation of the actual world and rational consideration of it. Following this principle, it is impossible to formulate any truth that is not objectively grounded. The faith of Leibowitz, as a positivist thinker, is thus not the result of knowledge, but of will. He thinks faith can be compared to mathematics in the sense that neither deals with physical reality.12 The analogy would be that God, like mathematics, is a product of the mind. This is an impressive intellectual achievement, since Leibowitz is unconcerned about claiming, at the very same time, that even though every scientific question has—at least theoretically—an answer, biology and physics contain profound secrets that may never be solved, since no one can formulate the questions to which these secrets would provide the solution. Among these secrets are the relationship between body and mind, the relationship between life and non-life, the relationship between what is determined and what is left undetermined, between classical physics and quantum mechanics, and many other fields of thought. Leibowitz thinks that it is precisely these unanswered questions that most deserve our attention. Leibowitz’s faith is as distant from popular religion as east is from west. So it is not surprising that his name is not mentioned in traditional batei midrash—houses of study. The paradox lies is in the fact that his beliefs are based in large part on the texts that are studied in those very same houses of study. That is actually the reason why he makes sure to insist 12 See Yosi Ziv, “Conversation with Yeshayahu Leibowitz,” Mashshavot 65, July 1993.

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at every opportunity that nothing he says is original and that his world view is based on the works of the Sages. Though the Jewish world has its share of disagreements, most Jews agree unequivocally that Maimonides is an incontrovertible authority. Leibowitz presents himself as a follower of Maimonides and declares himself to be perfectly in tune spiritually with what Maimonides expresses in the Guide of the Perplexed. According to Leibowitz, God is not found in nature, and we are therefore incapable of knowing anything whatsoever about him. Anyone who thinks differently is like one of the prisoners in Plato’s allegory of the cave:13 They treat the shadows flickering on the walls as if they were something real. To Leibowitz, the absurdity of the world is obvious despite the intellectual squirming of those who study Torah and see traces of God in the world and in human existence. But instead of a profession of faith, Leibowitz prefers to rely on the book of Ecclesiastes, which opens with the words, “Utter futility!—said Koheleth—Utter futility! All is futile!” and closes by saying, “The sum of the matter, when all is said and done: Revere God and observe His commandments! For this applies to all mankind.”14 It would be futile to try to rationalize religion and to attempt to prove the existence of God. On this, Leibowitz agrees with Kant, who thought that even if metaphysical questions were legitimate, reason was obligated to recognize its own limits. If one asserts that God is transcendent, then there is in any case nothing to prove. Leibowitz picks up on this idea and makes clear that any attempt to prove the existence of a transcendent God and to claim at one and the same time that he is immanent is an oxymoron. In other words, God cannot be outside the world and inside it. This viewpoint turns the notion that the revelation at Mount Sinai should be considered anything other than allegorical into absurdity. Leibowitz adds that if God were to burst into the world of reality, this fact would be devoid of meaning other than its being a matter of scientific interest. That is the sense in which he rejects any appearance of the divine in nature or in history. In the words of Lior Tal, head of the Binah Institute for Jewish Learning, “Leibowitz is apparently the first Jewish thinker who explicitly called for giving up the illusion that we can prove the existence of God,” not because it is impossible but because it is unthinkable. What remains in our hands is the option to decide on faith just as one might choose any other 13 Republic, book 7. 14 Eccl 1:2 and 12:13 respectively.

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value. As already noted, in this respect Judaism is a kind of existentialism. Like Sartre, Leibowitz claims that we are “thrown” into the world, that this situation obligates us to make decisions, and that it is inescapable” “Man becomes man solely through what he achieves, and if he achieves nothing, what is left of him is merely the shape of a man—he is not really a man.” Maimonides tells us here that man, though born as a human creature, is not yet man; rather, he is born as an animal. And how does man differ from all the other animals? Obviously—by having a human mind. But this, as noted, is in potential only. Man is different from the other animals in that he is capable of being man.15

For all that a person is inclined to do one thing or another, he certainly has the potential to intervene before his inclination leads him to action, that is, the actual deed, and thus to resist his impulses. “Every man who sets up a determinism is a dishonest man,” wrote Sartre.16 On the question of whether man can do anything that occurs to him, Leibowitz answers that he does not merely have the potential to do whatever he wills, he does nothing except what he wills. This is the opposite of what Spinoza thought. Aristotle believed that hierarchy was woven inextricably into the fabric of the world and concluded that, since every effect has a cause, and every cause is itself the outcome of a preceding cause, there must obviously be a First Cause that was its own cause—that is, a God. But this notion does not correspond to that of Maimonides. The Torah begins with this verse: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen 1:1), and so by definition God cannot be part of a world by Him. Moreover, even if the world did not exist, that would not alter the essential nature of God in the slightest. God ought not, therefore, be treated as the force that moves the cosmos, but the opposite: as a being who is something other than that cosmos. Judaism is discreet in theological matters: “Since it is clear that God is not a physical body,” says Maimonides, It is evident that none of the accidents of the body can occur to Him: Neither conjunction nor disjunction, neither location nor quantification, neither ascent nor descent, no right or left, no front and back, no sitting and no standing. He is not locatable in time in such a way that He would have a 15 Leibowitz, Conversations on the Eight Chapters, 70. 16 Sartre, Existentialism, 53.

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beginning or an ending or an age; and He does not change, since there is nothing that could cause a change in Him.17

And “it is impossible to say anything whatsoever about Him, even that He exists.”18 During the Hellenistic era, more than 2,000 years ago, they even suspected the Jews of having no god whatsoever, since the God they did have was invisible and ineffable. The word “atheism” was not coined until Renaissance times,19 but in truth, the Jews, by taking the road to monotheism, were perhaps the first to think of it. Leibowitz claims that nothing contingent can have any value. The people we love, the world we live in, the things we know, the art that uplifts our spirits—all these are no more than a speck in the darkness of time. No matter how seriously we take our attempts to divide the world into things that are important and things that are not, as far as Leibowitz is concerned, nothing in the world is holy—not a place, not an object, not a person. Neither the Tablets of the Law, nor the Western Wall, nor even the soil of the land of Israel are holy to him, and we must be careful not to see God’s hand at work in history, nor to seek in history any kind of proof for the existence of God. From Leibowitz’s point of view, even the Torah is not holy—it was written by human beings. These words to which we attach such value—what will become of them in another ten or ten billion years, or when time itself ceases to exist? “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” says Ecclesiastes. What then remains true when there is nothing true among the things that we know? Says Leibowitz: The Jewish religion is the creator of the faith on which it is based. This is paradoxical from a logical perspective, but religiously there is no paradox. The halakhah is not the husk of the religion or of the Jewish faith, it is the sole form that appropriately embodies it, and it is the collective revelation of Judaism.20

17 Mishneh Torah, Book of Knowledge, chapter 1. 18 This formulation is attributed to the Gaon of Vilna, Elijah b. Solomon Zalman, a rabbinic authority of the eighteenth century. 19 Jean Meslier, a priest and Enlightenment philosopher, was considered one of the first thinkers to formulate the concept of atheism in radical form. In 1762, Voltaire published a version of his work under the title Extraits des sentiments de Jean Meslier. 20 Yeshayahu Leibowitz, “Practical Commandments (The Meaning of the Halakhah),” published in a speech at a seminar on Jewish Studies, Haifa, 1953.

Faith

Halakhic practice, embodying custom and cult and their details, was formulated by the Sages with the intent of eliminating idolatry and superstition and replacing it with a God who is incomprehensible and therefore also irrefutable. A Jew takes upon himself the obligation to fulfill them, but this commitment is not directed at any spiritual, physical, or psychological need. For Leibowitz, “Religion is not what I know about God but what I know about my obligation toward God.”21 According to him, any religion that purports to stem from actual knowledge of any kind is simply a form of idolatry. Religious faith and religious practices are of a piece; they come from one and the same source. Any anthropomorphic representation of the divine or of any action attributed to the divine is completely unfounded. In Part 3 of the Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides devotes about 20 chapters to detailed interpretation of the commandments.22 Some of the commandments seem to have obvious purposes, others are obscure, but one must in no way, shape, or form waver from the obligation to fulfill them all equally strictly. In his conclusion, Maimonides declares: Know that all the practices of worship, such as reading the Torah, prayer, and the performance of the other commandments, have only the end of training you to occupy yourself with His commandments, may He be exalted, rather than with matters pertaining to this world; you should act as if you were occupied with Him, may He be exalted, and not with that which is other than He.23

Observance of the commandments fits perfectly well with acceptance of the world as it is. It is not therapeutic, not comforting, not even ethical. Despite this, it is a meaning that man imposes on himself in order to extricate himself from the absurdity of existence. Leibowitz teaches that this is the only way man can achieve true freedom, since by this means he forces himself to keep apart from the world of the contingent, devoid of meaning, in which nothing is certain except for the awareness of existence.24 One must fulfill the commandments without any expectation of reward, physical or spiritual. The commandments were not intended to achieve anything, whether for the individual, the family, the nation, or humanity as a whole. 21 22 23 24

Yeshayahu Leibowitz, On Just About Everything: Talks with Michael Shashar. Guide 3:25–54. Guide 3:51; Pines 622. Such is the claim of René Descartes, Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings.

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In Leibowitz’s opinion, the Bible has no particular literary value. He thinks some of the books that comprise it are mediocre. As good as the Torah might be, “as a means of moral education perhaps Sophocles’s Antigone or Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals are superior; as philosophy, Plato and once again Kant are more important; as poetry, perhaps Sophocles or Shakespeare are better; as history, certainly Thucydides is more interesting and more profound. Only as the words of the living God is the Bible incomparable to Sophocles and Shakespeare, Plato and Kant, Thucydides or any other human creation.”25 The Torah was intended to highlight one’s religious obligations, and it is essentially an allegory directed at the masses. The Torah “does not recognize any ethical commands that stem from natural reality or the recognition of any obligation between people—it recognizes nothing but commandments.”26 Indeed, though it is routine to speak of “humanistic values” in Judaism, Leibowitz considers this idiotic, since in contrast to Judaism, humanism sees man as the highest value.27 To Leibowitz, humanism must be atheistic, since otherwise it would have man taking precedence over God.28 The story of the Binding of Isaac wonderfully epitomizes the Torah’s complete independence of anything that a human being might aspire to. When one of his interlocutors shares with Leibowitz his concern about the rise of pornography and exhibitionism in Israeli society, he replies:29 Not only is that not a disease; it is an essential part of Western culture, to which Israel now belongs. From the perspective of humanistic values, that is, atheistic ones, there is nothing improper in sexual freedom, as long as the participants consent and do not violate anyone’s human rights. Leibowitz admits that he sometimes toys with the idea of reading pornographic novels, and he points out that the Talmud teaches, “If a man sees that his [evil] desire is conquering him, let him go to a place where he is unknown, don black and cover himself with black, and do as his heart desires, but

25 Leibowitz, “Practical Commandments.” 26 Ibid. 27 Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Body and Soul: The Mind-Body Problem (Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense Press, 1982; in Hebrew). 28 Per Michael Shashar, Why Are People Afraid of Yeshajahu Leibowitz? (Jerusalem: Shashar Publishing, 1995). 29 Leibowitz, Letters, 298.

Faith

let him not publicly profane God’s name.”30 Another correspondent31 asks him how a woman is supposed to dress according to halakhah. Leibowitz replies that halakhah calls on women and men alike to dress properly, but does not clarify what proper dress consists of. He explains that the Torah is not interested in fashion, that propriety varies from era to era, and that it is impossible to define it formally. He knows that some Orthodox Jews regard a woman wearing a short skirt, pants, or a short-sleeved blouse as indecent, but he explains that this is really just because their grandmother did not dress that way. He reassures his correspondent that a woman can conform to halakhah even if she is wearing pants. All the ancient cultures known to us somehow forgot to assign a place for women in intellectual life.32 In Aristotle’s Greece, so fundamental to Western civilization, women were missing from public discussion. In that culture, which spans more than 1200 years, there is not a single mention of a woman as a rational, thinking creature. There was nothing forbidden about it; woman’s intellectual inferiority was understood at the time as a fact of nature. Just as dogs were not legally forbidden to read, women were not legally forbidden to think, simply because everyone agreed that they did not think. The rare exceptions to the rule were taken as curiosities, with no influence on the established order. From this perspective, historical Judaism is no different than other cultures, even though in theory the Torah sees both men and women as human in the full sense of the term. In practice, however, throughout Jewish history women had no access to education, despite the disagreements in the Talmud on this subject. Ben Azzai,33 for example, thought that “a man must teach his daughter Torah.” Yet R. Eliezer34 completely opposed this, arguing, “Anyone who teaches his daughter Torah, it is as if he taught indecency.”35 Maimonides, though ahead of his time in many respects, adopted this latter point of view and wrote in the Mishneh Torah that:

30 B. Kid. 40a; Soncino translation. 31 Letters, x. 32 These words about the situation of women are inspired by a talk that Leibowitz gave in the 1980s. 33 Shimon b. Azzai was a 3rd-generation Tanna, from the beginning of the 2nd c. CE. 34 R. Eliezer b. Hyrcanus, one of the greatest Tannaim of the 2nd generation, in the period of the destruction of the Second Temple and afterward. 35 Both quotations come from M. Sotah 3:4.

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Most women cannot focus on learning. They turn words of Torah into idle matters because of their lack of intelligence. The Sages say that teaching one’s daughter Torah is akin to teaching her indecency. Meaning what? The Oral Law. But, although one should not teach her the Written Law either, if one does this is not akin to teaching her indecency.36

Participation in the Torah reading on the Sabbath is one example among many of the exclusion of women. Even though there is no explicit proscription of women’s participation, the Talmud states, “Women may not read from the Torah, out of respect for the congregation.”37 This was not a formal prohibition, just a recommendation, based on the presumed inability of men to control their sexual urges when a woman is at the center of attention. That is also the reason why women in Orthodox circles are forbidden to sing in public or to run for office. Orthodox Judaism has many rules preventing women from participating intellectually in religious life, on the pretext that various activities, such as rendering judgment or teaching men, are “not appropriate for women.” Nechama Leibowitz, Yeshayahu’s sister and a well-known scholar of the Bible, had an international reputation; students of all kinds of backgrounds and various interests flocked to her talks at the Hebrew University. But when she published a book of Torah commentary, people in Orthodox circles wondered whether men were permitted to read this book, since it had been written by a woman. Certain rabbinical courts would not consent to this unless the name on the cover of the book was N. Leibowitz and not Nechama Leibowitz, so as not to confront readers with an author that could be identified as a woman. Leibowitz thought that no society worthy of the name could stand a situation in which women were not involved in intellectual, scientific, artistic, social, and political life. For him, this demand was not at all contradictory to the spirit of the Torah, and he argued that women’s participation in intellectual life was actually the most culturally significant revolution in the history of humanity. There is a phrase in the book of Deuteronomy that has become idiomatic in the course of time: “It [the Torah] is not in heaven.”38 What it 36 Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Talmud Torah 1:13. 37 B. Meg 23a. 38 Deut 30:12. The expression appears in a number of contexts in rabbinic literature, among them the talmudic tractates of Baba Metzia and Eruvin.

Faith

means is that the Torah was given to the Jews at the time of the revelation at Mount Sinai, since which time it has been incumbent upon them to extract teachings from it by means of reason alone. Here is what Leibowitz said on the matter, in conversation with Michael Shashar: The only thing in the history of Judaism that no one argues about is that our Oral Law, which is entirely a human invention, is the divine Torah. You never see in the Talmud “the Shekhinah says” or “the Holy Spirit says”; instead, it is “Abbaye says” or “Rava says”—Jews like me and you. The Sages never once claimed that the Shekhinah was speaking through them, so disagreement is perfectly legitimate. Just because Abbaye disagrees with Rava does not mean that he is disagreeing with the word of God. What this means is that a disagreement between two legitimate scholars in our own day, as long as both say what they say for the sake of heaven, is also the word of God.

Bringing metaphysical authority into the world of the halakhah, according to Michael Shashar, was considered by Leibowitz as outright idol worship.39 People’s choices are determined by their values. People, cultures, and traditions differ in their perspectives on reality—and this situation is what justifies pluralism. As Avi Sagi writes: (1) Judaism is a value system that does not make truth claims about the world or about God. It simply constitutes a value system. (2) The meaning of the system is internal in the sense that it is not dependent on facts external to it. This meaning is derived by analyzing the norms and values that constitute Judaism. (3) A person’s commitment to the religion reflects the autonomous submission of one who chooses to implement this particular world of religious values.40

In Leibowitz’s opinion, Judaism41 is not based on anything factual. He is inspired here by Wittgenstein, explaining that the language of Judaism reflects a value system that is not interested in anything outside the narrow bounds of the religious community. From the moment that Judaism is seen as nothing but the result of its believers’ wills, with 39 Shashar, Why Are People Afraid, 36. 40 Sagi, Yeshayahu Leibowitz: His World and Thought, 196. 41 This section on pluralism was inspired by the chapter “Pluralistic Religious Thought” in Orthodox Judaism Faces the Postmodern World, the doctoral thesis of the intellectual and lecturer Gili Zivan.

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no validity except in their minds, it becomes obvious that it is just as legitimate to adhere to any other religion. Leibowitz recognizes the role of history in the appearance of various spiritual approaches and does not fly the flag for Judaism; he claims that it obligates no one other than those who adhere to it. Pluralism as a worldview bears much affinity to that of postmodernism, which rejects any model that pretends to be based on human nature in general. That is to say, different cultures lead to different moralities which consequently are all equally legitimate. Leibowitz does not go quite so far, but he nonetheless notes that: In a “metaphysical” religious system that makes certain assertions about the world and about God, there is no room for a pluralistic approach, one that recognizes the internal worth of an alternative world view. After all, if the “metaphysical” claims of the religion are correct, alternative world views are false. Yet if Judaism is a value system whose meaning is internal, that does not exclude the existence alongside it of other world views, since their meanings too are internal.42

The assertion that values cannot be quantified is the cornerstone of Leibowitz’s thought, which is based on the impossibility of arriving at ethical or religious norms through observation of humanity, history, or nature. Different value systems, then, cannot have shared norms, since these derive from different backgrounds. Values are unquantifiable because it is impossible to compare them, to evaluate them, or to appraise them, since there is no third set of values with shared criteria that could serve as a common denominator. Paradoxically, this fact enables Leibowitz to be at one and the same time an Orthodox Jew and a pluralistic thinker. It follows that a Jew’s choice of the Torah does not in any way contradict a Muslim’s choice of the Qur’an. There may be unresolved conflicts between religions or between competing ethical approaches, but to comprehend this, one must accept that values are unquantifiable, recognize the profound gulf between the two sets of values, and give up the idea that the conflicts are based on a simple misunderstanding. Since they have no logical basis, they cannot be resolved rationally.

42 Sagi, Yeshayahu Leibowitz: His World and Thought, 195.

Faith

Yet Leibowitz observes that for the individual, there do exist certain values that are absolute: For me, my own values are absolute! What I’m opposed to is the idea that values are universal. No values are universal. But there are people whose values are absolute. That is, they are ready to kill or be killed for their values, and they give no one else any right to hold other values even though they know that their values are personal and not universal at all. That is what I meant by the saying I quoted ten minutes ago [that there is nothing one can do for a political manifesto but fight for it]—it is impossible to argue about values. One can only fight for them.43

This principal naturally applies to politics as well: “A person’s political perspective is subject to his will. Political platforms are not drawn from reality. They express what those who hold them want them to express.”44 In one of his commentaries on the Torah, Leibowitz expresses an explicitly pluralistic stance. He describes the story of the Tower of Babel as an illustration of the danger that lies in wait for any society based on one single idea. He explains: It appears to me that the basic mistake (or sin) of the generation of the Dispersion was not in building the city and the tower, but in their purpose: to establish, by these artificial means, that situation of “one language and one set of words” [Gen 11:1]—in short, of centralization, which in modern terms we would call totalitarianism. “One language and one set of words”—many innocent people in our own day would consider this ideal: all of humanity united into one, without differences and as a result without conflict. But someone more thoughtful will realize that there is nothing more threatening than artificial conformism of this kind: A city and a tower symbolizing the concentration of all humanity around a single thing—requiring that there be no differences of opinion, no fighting for different perspectives and different values. It is impossible to imagine anything more tyrannical, anything more ideologically barren—no exceptions, no deviation from the general consensus established artificially by the city and the tower. The Holy One, in his kind mercy for humanity, prevented this from happening and created a humanity in which there can be no single-minded totalitarianism, for there are always 43 Yeshayahu Leibowitz, The Limits of Reason: Thought, Science and Religion (Jerusalem: Keter, 1997; in Hebrew), 87. 44 Ibid.

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differences and disagreements, differences in ideals and differences in values, and in which people must fight for their values, their aims, and their aspirations, so different one from another.45

Leibowitz’s faith stems from the desire to know God, precisely because of his profound conviction the world is unthinkable without God. But the longing to know God cannot be satisfied by means of “the human spirit.” Nor is Judaism, any more than any other religion, the bearer of truth. At least, says Leibowitz, it can help foil one’s hubris.

45 Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Notes to the Weekly Tora Readings (Jerusalem: Academon, 1988; in Hebrew), 15.

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Peoples, States, and History

What is a people? According to Cicero,1 it is “a group that has become amalgamated through their adherence to the same law and who have a certain community of interests.”2 But this definition is vague and unsatisfactory. Most of us understand intuitively what a people is, but it is difficult to pinpoint the term formally since a “people” is not something that exists in nature. The question remains: How does a group composed of various individuals turn into an entity that claims to be a people? According to Leibowitz, no historian, no sociologist, no anthropologist, and no psychologist has ever succeeded in providing a satisfactory definition of this phenomenon, let alone a comprehensive one. He examines a number of the suggestions that have been made before offering his own. Taking a biological approach, one can define a people as a group that is related biologically. Here the defining principle is that of the family unit, expanded to include a whole population whose cohesion is based on its genetic inheritance. In these terms, a people is a population descended from the same stock. But the upheavals of history and the mixing of races have done their thing, and it no longer possible to distinguish any group that has not been genetically “compromised.” Even if it were possible to carry out some such examination, the bottom line is that there is no objective connection between genetic relationship and ethnic consciousness. So a “people” is not really connected by blood. It is a group that is characterized by acquired markers of identity, not innate ones.

1 Marcus Tullius Cicero, politician, orator, writer, and philosopher in ancient Rome (first century BCE, during the Republic). He is considered by far the most important writer of Classical Latin. 2 Cicero, De re publica.

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For example, twins separated at birth can certainly end up belonging to two different peoples; there is nothing contradictory about that. Moreover, anyone can have multiple ethnic backgrounds—as do Jews, for instance, who from this perspective display a wide variety indeed. One might suggest a geographic explanation: A group that has lived on the same territory for many generations is a people. But there are homogeneous regions inhabited by different peoples, whose joint existence in that region has gone on for many years. The Iberian Peninsula, for example, counts both Portuguese and Spaniards among its inhabitants, and within Spain itself, there are also Catalans and Basques, peoples that do not align with natural boundaries. On the other hand, some groups consider themselves a people even though they are not connected to any particular geographic area—for example, the Roma. As for the Jewish people, it was born without a country, and has passed (and continues to pass) most of the years of its existence in a situation of Diaspora. One can define a people as a political union, but this is certainly not a necessary condition for a people. On the one hand, there are peoples that came into being before they organized into a political entity; on the other hand, we find nation-states composed of multiple peoples. Belgium, for example, is a political entity with at least two different peoples (the Flemings and the Walloons). The Jewish people had a political framework only intermittently, and still today most of those who consider themselves part of the Jewish people are not citizens of Israel and do not aspire to become Israelis. A people ought to have a common language, but this, too, is not a necessary condition. The United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia share the same language even though they are different peoples. In Switzerland and India, by contrast, the “people” is made up of multiple language communities, which nonetheless constitute one people. Aramaic, Yiddish, and Ladino were all used as Jewish vernaculars, even though Jews mostly spoke the language of the country in which they were living. Most of the Jews who live outside Israel do not know Hebrew. Consequently, there is no language that can be considered the language of the Jewish people. A few years ago, the historian Shlomo Sand published a provocative book on the origin of the Jewish people.3 In it, he attempted to prove 3 Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (London: Verso, 2009); originally published in Hebrew in 2008.

Peoples, States, and History

that the connection between Israel and the Jewish people is based on a myth, in contrast (so he thinks) to other peoples whose legitimacy has an objective basis. His mistake is that, in truth, peoples—all peoples, without exception—are not biological, territorial, political, or even linguistic entities. Peoplehood is always a fiction.4 In any case, the Jewish people is a multiethnic, geographically scattered people; it is not identified with any political entity and has no common language. Yet since it does exist, we must conclude that what constitutes the Jewish people is “a collective consciousness based on historical continuity.”5 A people is therefore an intersubjective entity, and every group has the right to so define itself without explanation or justification. A group’s consciousness of being a people is an exact replica of an individual’s consciousness of values. Every people is founded on a myth and embodies the conscious, consistent will of the human beings who constitute it. In our day, being a Jew means having a sense of belonging to a people whose foundational myth has yielded to what has been the actual history of the Jews for many centuries. That is why Leibowitz thinks that it is necessary to continue to keep religion and state separate, to prevent making Judaism into a tool of the state, which ultimately will turn entirely into chauvinistic nationalism. He also thinks that we must expropriate from the state every trace of religion, and that the religious community is obligated to find ways to maintain an autonomous existence. Orthodox Judaism, as it exists today, originated with the Pharisees around the beginning of the Common Era and served as the basis of Jewish identity until the nineteenth century. All during this period there was a symbiosis between the religion and the Jewish people, but nowadays it seems that Jews no longer have any shared values.6 Now, many Jews consider their identity a matter of belonging, not of religion, with the result that someone can define himself at one and the same time as a Jew and as an atheist, without knowing exactly what that means. If so, the Jewish people intrinsically contains a kernel that is liable to grow into an even more profound schism. The Orthodox, who were the reason for the existence of the Jewish people for so many centuries, today are quite separate from secular Jews because their ways of life are so different. Orthodox Jews and 4 For more, see https://danielhorowitz.com/blog/index.php/2011/05/05/linvention-dupeuple-juif-dapres-shlomo-sand/ [in French]. 5 Yeshayahu Leibowitz et al., People, Land, State (Jerusalem: Keter, 1991; in Hebrew). 6 Yeshayahu Leibowitz, On Just About Everything: Talks with Michael Shashar.

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secular Jews have very little in common. After all, they cannot even eat together, let alone marry each other or envision a shared future. It is true that millions throughout the world define themselves as Jews, yet this assertion is a largely empty one. They think of themselves as Jews, but their values are based on humanism and modernity more than on Judaism. Perhaps we are bearing witness to the birth of a new people, different from historic Jewry, just as the contemporary Greek nation is not that of Homer and the Egyptians of our day not those of Pharaonic times. A large segment of the Jewish people has moved far away from the spiritual content that united the Jews throughout their history, and the state of Israel is liable in the near future to be nothing but a pseudo-western country, in which Judaism will continue to exist as no more than folklore. When the collective consciousness of a people dissolves, that people ceases to exist, no matter what its genetic, territorial, political, or linguistic origins. This explains why, throughout history, peoples have disappeared without the human beings who constitute them going extinct (for example, the Normans). For Leibowitz, it is quite possible that historic Judaism as it has been perpetuated for thousands of years is going to disappear, gradually, right before our eyes. From ancient Rome right up to Freud, the saying homo homini lupus [“man is a wolf to man”] has haunted the psychological world and the political world alike. Leibowitz expresses a similar idea and asserts that the role of society is to curb aggression so that people can cooperate and live together in society. He expressed his point of view in a letter to a reader, citing Pascal: Nothing in the world is logically “correct.” Common practice establishes what is right. There is no reason for it other than the fact that it is conventional. That is the secret of its authority, and any attempt to establish it on a principle [i.e., on some logical basis] simply destroys it.7

Leibowitz is troubled by the constant danger of the state slipping toward fascism. The state is an institution, a human creation.8 It must therefore be a means and not an end. In his opinion, treating the existence of the state as an end is quintessentially fascist, as already sketched by Plato when he said that the state must determine “the supreme good.” 7 Leibowitz, Letters, 22. 8 Leibowitz et al., People, Land, State.

Peoples, States, and History

In a fascist regime, the state is identified with the very existence of the nation, and as a result the value of the individual is evaluated solely by the extent of his loyalty to the nation and the state. Fascism draws its strength from national unity since its intrinsic idea is that the nation is a metaphysical body whose value is greater than the sum of its parts. From a fascist perspective, the nation is a superhuman creation. Leibowitz thinks that expressions like “the good of society” and “the national interest” are fascist terminology, and he “objects forcefully to the assertion that ‘the good of society’ constitutes some sort of moral standard. This is a distinctly Communist and Fascist idea. That is what the Bolsheviks and the Nazis thought and think.”9 To Leibowitz, “peoples” are a mix of individuals who do in fact want to live together, but they remain individuals with different interests. Declaring in the name of the state that certain values are shared by all is therefore deceitful. That is also the reason there must be a radical separation between religion and state. Leibowitz loved to quote Saint-Just,10 who asserted that “a people has just one truly dangerous enemy: its government.”11 People do not “sprout” from the state; it sprouts from them, even if it is correct to say that the nation needs a government in order to guarantee the social order and defend against external threats. The state is contrary to human nature. After all, it can impose laws on its citizens and retains for itself a monopoly on the use of force. It must therefore be viewed as a necessary evil whose only role is to regulate relations between its citizens. But in order to prevent this evil from turning into fascism, citizens must refrain from sanctifying the state and dedicating themselves to it, body and soul. There may even be circumstances under which it is permissible to disobey the state. Democracy is a bulwark against fascism by virtue of the fact that, in a democracy, the government is subordinate to the people and not vice versa. This situation makes it legitimate for everyone to assert and defend his own values, in contrast to what happens in a totalitarian state, where values are absolute and protest is illegal. 9 Leibowitz, Letters, 35. 10 A philosopher who was one of the most prominent political personalities of the French Revolution. 11 Leibowitz quoted this in a conversation with Joseph Algazy, the Israeli intellectual, journalist, and historian. See Algazy, Israel’s Bad Conscience: Conversations with Yeshayahu Leibowitz (in French).

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That said, one cannot rely permanently on either the wisdom or the good will of the citizenry, since intellectually and spiritually they are generally shallow. But democracy in the full sense of the word means that even though people are not equal, they have equal rights. Yet we must make sure not to think that the voice of the people is an ethical one simply because it is sovereign. A majority, too, can be evil and stupid. But let it be said in favor of democracy that it makes it possible to transfer power within the system and not by means of violence. Leibowitz thinks that in a democracy there is an obligation to oppose censorship in all its forms. The government is liable to use it as a weapon against free expression. And freedom of expression must be total, even if it might offend that which is most “sacred” to the nation. Censorship is unacceptable because there is no way to determine who is authorized to do the censoring, what can be censored, when, and what criteria to use. The notion of the state using force to muzzle its citizens is unbearable, even when it is a matter of keeping the peace. In any case, it is dangerous to grant any person the authority to determine what one can and cannot say. Leibowitz loved to quote a statement by Edward Gibbon12: “History … is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” This historian [i.e. Gibbon] told the truth. But he did not tell the whole truth. Though history is a register of crimes, follies, and misfortunes, it is also a record of the struggle against crimes, follies, and misfortunes, and the fact that this struggle has persisted in every generation and in every human society is what makes history matter.13

For folk Judaism, inspired by the Kabbalah, history is synonymous with messianism, a process that is supposed to end with the victory of Torah for the good of all mankind. The Jewish people must show the way by means of a process of tikkun olam (“perfecting the world”), in other words, by doing good. Hegel reworked this teleological principle,14 followed by Marx (who removed the divine element from it) and finally our contemporary humanism, which obligates individual to learn history in order to understand its meaning, after which, all that one is obligated to do is to be on the side of progress by struggling against reactionary forces. 12 An eighteenth-century English historian and Member of Parliament. 13 Leibowitz, Notes to the Weekly Tora Readings, 15. 14 Teleology is the idea that the world, nature, or history has a purpose.

Peoples, States, and History

The idea of “human progress,” however, is a religion like any other, since history obeys no laws. The human race is evolving, in the Darwinian sense of the word, and this evolution, though slow at first, may be accelerated thanks to the rise of trans-humanism and artificial intelligence. This process could multiply man’s intellectual and physical abilities tenfold by incorporating information technology into his biochemistry.15 But it seems that, ethically speaking, there has been no progress since the appearance of Homo sapiens. It is true that in western civilization there is a tendency to think that human society does progress, but this is merely an illusion created by technological progress—which is most certainly real and constitutes a vast disruption in human history. As opposed to scientific progress, there is no consensus on what “human” progress might be. The question, “What is progress?” belongs to the same category of questions as “What is good?”—to which the answer is: It depends who you ask. There is, therefore, no rational answer to this question, since it does not belong to what man knows but to what man wants.16 An ecological activist’s idea of progress is not the same as a banker’s. There are native Americans who are opposed to the extraction of the raw materials underneath their land, since their own notion of progress differs from that of the government, which needs those same raw materials in the name of “progress.” For a large segment of humanity during the twentieth century, communism was synonymous with progress. But dialectical materialism,17 which the communists took to be scientific, produced the opposite result from what their theory anticipated. Instead of capitalism collapsing from within and letting communism take power, it was communism that collapsed and capitalism that took over. Today, no one sees any sign of the revolutionary impulse except among the do-gooders of the western bourgeois intelligentsia. The working class is not interested in replacing the socio-economic powers that be, nor are they prepared to hand the means of production over to the state. Instead, they aspire to get what they need within the framework of the capitalist system. In much of the western world, this aspiration has already been achieved thanks to liberalism, and as a result Leibowitz privileges liberty over equality. 15 See Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2018). 16 See Chapter 9, “Cognitive and Conative.” 17 The materialistic approach to history of the school of Marx and Engels.

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To him, freedom must take precedence in any political system. As a rule, he does not advocate equality at any price. He would likely have approved of this remarkable paragraph by Renaud Camus18 : It takes a great deal of contempt to view men as equal. It means reducing all their accomplishments, their virtues, their efforts, their charms, their talents, their love for life, their most precious aspects and the most distinctive elements of their personalities to nothing. They are equal in the cries of the newborn and in the groans of the dying, equal when facing oblivion, but in between those two moments, except for the judicial pronunciamento imposing equality by law, they are equal only in what is less than human in them. From the moment a man (and, it goes without saying, a woman) exists, there is inequality, that is, humanity.19

History goes in all directions because people themselves go in all directions, and what they want is not subject to any rule. History, then, is a consequence of the infinite multiplicity of human aspiration, and its nature is therefore random. “Human history,” says Leibowitz, is completely opposed to nature, in which the present is the predetermined result of the past and the future is the predetermined result of the present. Everything in history is contingent—though it happened to transpire, events could equally have gone otherwise. So it is impossible to learn anything from history.20 Though man alone is capable of learning lessons from the past, it is impossible to predict how a collective might regard its past. Peoples, countries, social classes and other human groups have no objective or even consistent awareness of the past, due to the heterogeneity of the groups that make them up. Thus, it is impossible to learn lessons from history by looking at these groups, and therefore sayings like “history teaches us that …” are

18 Renaud Camus is a highly gifted writer, but at the same time a controversial figure due to his exacerbated nationalism which led to him being sentenced by a French court for incitement to hatred. He has also been accused of antisemitism by notorious French figures, but was defended by others. Quoting him in this book does not in any way constitute taking a position one way or another. 19 Le Grand remplacement, 2011. This passage echoes views on individuality similar to those of Leibowitz, whom Israeli public opinion labelled a leftist due to his views on the territories occupied by Israel during the Six Days War in 1967. In conventional terms Leibowitz was probabaly more of a right-wing thinker. 20 Leibowitz, Limits of Reason.

Peoples, States, and History

devoid of meaning. The best we can do is to acquire some knowledge of the past, but that does not mean we can reach any particular conclusions.21 The book of Esther takes place during the exile in Babylonia, after the destruction of the First Temple. Even though the Jews were subjects of the king of Persia, one of his most influential advisers, Haman, threatens to destroy them. They are saved at the last minute thanks to the intervention of Queen Esther, of whose Jewish origins the king is unaware. Yet God is not mentioned one single time in the story, and there is nothing miraculous about this happy ending, at the conclusion of which Haman, his sons, and his partners in crime are all hanged. The conclusion we must draw from this is that it is people who make history and not history that makes people, nor even God. Jean-François Revel, a thinker and writer (1924-2006), was the editorin-chief of the French weekly L’Express. As an enlightened observer, with long experience of our turbulent world, he wrote: History makes no appointments with anybody, it only stands them up. Only a human being can make appointments with himself, and only he has the ability to keep them.22

21 See above. 22 Jean-François Revel, Mémoires (the 2018 posthumous edition).

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Thou Shalt Not Kill*

Imagine an alien, some creature from another planet—capable of thought, but without any knowledge concerning our human capability to establish values. Such an alien would see no difference between a rock and a flower, a dog and a human being. For such a creature, Leibowitz explains, all these things would equally be part of nature. We, however, as human beings, relate differently to members of our own species than we do to the rest of nature, despite the fact that we are aware that we too are part of it. This unique interrelationship is what establishes the values that we impose on ourselves by our own free choice, it being impossible to justify them rationally. With regard to the title of this chapter, we assert that it is forbidden to take a life because it is forbidden to take a life. From the moment a person identifies as a member of a particular society and acknowledges its fundamental principles, he has both rights and obligations. One can re-examine them in light of changing circumstances and when necessary even reject them. Law must be subordinate to reason, and every jurist must be prepared to make certain, at any given moment, whether this or that rule is still applicable or has become superfluous. For example, a society can decide to build a bridge, a road, or a building, or to destroy them, in line with whatever criteria the society establishes. In the same way it can define who owns a particular bridge, road, or building. But life is not a human creation. The fact that we are alive is not dependent on any legal foundation; there is no such law recorded anywhere in nature. That is the deeper meaning of the text that tells us, “You were fashioned in the womb without being consulted and born without being

*

This chapter is drawn in large part from articles published by Yeshayahu Leibowitz in the collection Between Science and Philosophy (Jerusalem: Academon, 2002; in Hebrew).

Thou Shalt Not Kill

consulted, and without being consulted you are alive.”1 Life itself is a phenomenon that cannot be justified legally, since one cannot base ethical assertions on nature. As a result, the right to take someone’s life cannot derive from any causality rooted in nature. Though the ethical rule “if someone comes to kill you, make sure to kill him first”2 does exist in Judaism, Leibowitz asserts that, except for selfdefense, it is forbidden outright to kill a human being. He thus opposes the death penalty and thinks that no legal system ought to include it among its punishments. He also opposes euthanasia and abortion, all in the name of the sanctity of life. He therefore thinks that the idea that justice was served by the execution of Adolf Eichmann is an illusion and an insult to the memory of those who were slaughtered in the Holocaust, since this would turn him into a kapparah—some sort of sacrificial atonement for the Jewish people. No one can imagine this to be a halakhic perspective.3 Let us note here that Leibowitz’s opposition to the death penalty is that of a twentieth-century intellectual, and that in this specific case he is not basing himself explicitly on Judaism. But if we look more closely, the truth is that Leibowitz is perfectly aligned with the Talmud, which already unofficially eliminated the death penalty almost 2,000 years ago. This is but one example of many that demonstrates that Jewish law cannot be derived from the Torah; it must be derived from the interpretation of the Torah formulated by the talmudic Sages. Thus, since the Torah includes and permits the death penalty, the Talmud does not go so far as to repeal it outright, but instead establishes extreme conditions which must be met in order for it to be carried out. The Talmud grants the right to carry out the death penalty to special courts that are quite difficult to convene. And their precautions go even further. In their first discussion of the death penalty, the Sages warn:

1 M. Avot 4:22. 2 We should mention that the source of this expression is in midrashim on God’s command to Moses about the Midianites (Num 25:17-18). On B. Sanh. 72a and on B. Yoma 85b, the rule is mentioned in connection with the thief who “tunnels” into a house (Exod 22:1). 3 Michael Shashar, Leibowitz: Heretic or Believer? (Jerusalem: Keter, 2002; in Hebrew), 223.

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A Sanhedrin that kills one man in seven years is called ferocious. R. Eliezer b. Azariah says: one in seventy years. R. Tarfon and R. Akiba say: If we had been on the Sanhedrin, no one would ever have been killed.4

It is R. Akiba who gets the last word, and he believes that if ever again the Jewish people got the opportunity to reestablish its own legal system, the death penalty still must never be inflicted. Perhaps the talmudic solution is wiser than abolishing the death penalty in so many words, as in modern democracies. From a halakhic perspective, in any case, the death penalty continues to exist in Judaism symbolically. But it has become essentially impossible to carry out. The Hippocratic Oath, though it originated in ancient times, still remains relevant today. Its point is to distinguish what the physician needs to aspire to in terms of conscience, because curing sickness is a scientific affair, while healing a human being is a value. So physiological diseases and psychological diseases are conceptual entities based in medicine even though the diseases themselves do not exist except in the human mind.5 According to Nietzsche, one must die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death selected voluntarily, death at the right time, consummated with brightness and cheerfulness in the midst of children and witnesses: so that an actual leavetaking is possible.6

To Leibowitz, the question of euthanasia is whether a person is allowed to put an end to someone else’s life with good intentions, shortening thereby the suffering of someone who no longer has any chance of recovering, just of prolonged pain. This question is particularly pointed when the sick person is fully aware and wants to die. In such a case, there is a great temptation to think not only that it should be possible to fulfill the sick person’s request but that ethically one is obligated to do so. In different form, the same question can be asked about a person who is brain-dead but whose body is kept alive through artificial means. Perhaps there is no justification for stubbornly keeping him alive, especially since there are emotional and material consequences for his loved ones. On the other hand, when the sick 4 M. Mak. 1:10. 5 See Leibowitz et al., People, Land, State. 6 Twilight of the Idols, The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, vol. XI, ed. Alexander Tille, trans. Thomas Common (New York: Macmillan, 1908), 192 f.

Thou Shalt Not Kill

person is no longer able to feel anything and we hide behind the idea that we are killing him out of kindness, the truth is that we are not being kind to him at all—we are merely “feeling the pain” of his family or of society in general. Whatever the case may be, the basic question that arises from euthanasia is a question of law. A person can be in a situation where his suffering is so great that our sensitivity to his pain prods us to help him die. Leibowitz thinks that we must not permit our emotions to guide us, since this would call into question the foundations of law as it relates to the sanctity of life. He believes it is impossible for us to live together in a society unless the prohibition against killing is fundamental. Life is a fact, a constant, a given. This fact imposes itself on us without nature specifying for us the criteria by which it is possible to evaluate to what extent life is worth living. If we permit ourselves to ask whether the life of a person who is a “vegetable” is worth living, we must first, obviously, ask on what basis we assert that the life of a man who is in perfect health is worth living. The truth is that there is no answer to this question, since it is impossible to reason it out logically. Even though it is legitimate for us to destroy a bridge that is no longer useful, nothing permits us to destroy a human being who is no longer useful. If the goal is to decide whether life is worth living, Leibowitz thinks that we must oppose the very legitimacy of any such discussion. From the moment that someone asserts the authority to rule on a question of this kind, crossing the line will inevitably lead to its abuse. Euthanasia of a person who is a “vegetable,” breathing by means of a ventilator, on the pretext that it is not worth it to him to live such a life, will lead to euthanasia of a person who is a “vegetable” but breathing independently. Next will come the assertion that the life of a person who has dementia is not worth living, no more than that of an incurable psychopath or an incorrigible murderer—and in this way, via the “slippery slope,” the prohibition against killing will be rendered null and void. Woe to a society, says Leibowitz, that accepts the idea of a “life not worth living.” Well before the outbreak of World War II, Hitler had asserted that there can indeed be a “life not worth living,” and he liquidated thousands of disabled people on the pretext that relieving them of their burdensome lives would liberate them while simultaneously freeing society from the burden that they imposed on it. In just this way, he later claimed that the lives of Jews were valueless, so liquidating them would serve the common good.

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A different point of view justifies mercy killing in specific cases. Some people are so ill that they are at the end of their life’s course; some people’s suffering is too great to bear; some can no longer function in the outside world; some are in good health but can no longer bear their lives for psychological reasons. All these may want to die, but even though we can make these subtle distinctions, we cannot assert for any one of them that he is objectively “qualified” to die. The Talmud asserts that “the last moments of a person’s life are to be considered life in every respect.” It follows that the last moments of life have no more or less value than any other moment of life. Admittedly, we do find in halakhah the opinion7 that we should not prolong life unduly, but this is a minority opinion that deviates from the predominant position in halakhah, which rules in favor of the sanctity of life. Some transplants also pose an ethical problem, particular heart transplants, in which the donor must be alive at the moment when the heart is removed. The removal of a living organ from a dying man in order to save someone else’s life is a remarkable scientific advance, but it obligates us to fix the moment at which the donor’s life is no longer worth living. Leibowitz notes that euthanasia is extremely controversial among people whose morality is impeccable, whether they are physicians or not, since euthanasia is not a medical question.8 It presents us with ethical problems that simply cannot be solved, even for those who support it. For example, it is impossible to fix a clear boundary between proactively shortening life and refraining from prolonging it. As for abortion, Leibowitz relies on the halakhah when it is a matter of choosing between the life of the child and the life of the mother. The Torah commandment “Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor”9 tells us that we must give aid to those who are in danger of losing their lives.10 The halakhic principle here is “the law of the pursuer.”11 When the child that the woman is carrying in her womb threatens her own life, the halakhah teaches that we must abort the child in order to save the mother. It is self-evident in such a case that 7 “If there is something hindering the departure of the soul … it is permissible to remove the hindrance.” This is the gloss of R. Moses Isserles, the sixteenth-century scholar, philosopher, and halakhist, to Shulhan Arukh, Yoreh De’ah 339:1. 8 See Yeshayahu Leibowitz, On Just About Everything: Talks with Michael Shashar. 9 Lev 19:16. 10 See the website of R. Eliezer Melamed, “Pearls of Halakhah” (in Hebrew), https://ph.yhb. org.il. 11 B. Sanh. 73a, which discusses attempted homicide.

Thou Shalt Not Kill

the child is not doing anything deliberately; it is, nonetheless, threatening the life of the mother, and the halakhic analogy to attempted murder is logically acceptable. Though no ethical problem can be solved scientifically, science can nonetheless provide us with a basis on which to decide when life begins. As a scientist, Leibowitz believed that the child-to-be is human in the full sense of the word. The fact that it is developing in its mother’s womb does not grant her the right to decide on life or death on the pretext that it is dwelling inside her for a limited period of time. He therefore emphatically opposed abortion in all cases. Abortion is not a curative medical procedure, since pregnancy is not a disease. When Simone Weil, the French Minister of Health from 19741979, presented a proposal to legalize abortion, she made clear that it was necessary “to make women aware that there is nothing normal or routine about abortion; it is rather a serious decision that cannot be taken without weighing the consequences, and that must be avoided at all costs.”12 If abortion were a strictly personal and private matter, such a warning would be quite inappropriate, and there would be no need for any parliamentary discussion about it. The fact is that abortion is a dilemma for most of the people whom it affects, both the pregnant women themselves and the physicians whom they consult. In actual fact, in most countries where abortion is legal, doctors have the right of conscientious objection and are not required to provide it against their will. Though Leibowitz’s position on this goes against contemporary ideas, the wide variation of the laws in countries where abortion is legal shows that we should not take it lightly. The thing that in and of itself testifies to this is the utter confusion about the stage of pregnancy at which abortion is acceptable. It is well known that the embryo has developed into a fetus by the end of the 8th week of pregnancy, yet in certain countries it is still permissible to have an abortion up through the 12th week, while in others the limit goes up to somewhere between the 18th and 20th weeks. After that time abortion is considered a crime, even though before that time it is considered a right. What this tells us is that the legal designation of when the status of the fetus changes from that of a disposable object to that of a human being is completely subjective. The inconsistency is even more glaring in places where abortion is permissible at any stage of pregnancy 12 1974 address to the National Assembly.

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when abnormalities like Down’s Syndrome are diagnosed. It follows that in such a case it is permissible to destroy the viable child of a woman who is about to give birth, even though doing the same just a few moments later is a felony punishable by a term in prison. When it comes to euthanasia or abortion, Leibowitz’s goal is not to settle for ethical norms detached from reality. He is aware that some suffering is impossible to minimize in the name of abstract parameters, and that we must consider each case humanely. Therefore, despite his principled opposition to euthanasia, he is careful to make clear that he respects those who perform euthanasia after giving the situation due consideration. He agrees that “for them, this is definitely a genuine problem. I, a physician who does not practice medicine, do not have the moral right to tell other people how I would behave in their place.”13 But this is only apparently a contradiction, since the aim of Leibowitz’s approach is to highlight the semantic drift in the use of terms like “euthanasia” or “pro-choice,” whose clinical coolness is actually intended to slide the bar further from the prohibition of killing. As a philosopher, he wants to name things precisely, and this does not imply that he considers all murders equal. The fact is that court decisions themselves can change according to circumstances, from a symbolic punishment right up to 30 years in prison. The philosophical approach of consequentialism means varying the application of an ethical principle through consideration of its possible consequences. Though a pure Kantian approach would obligate us, for example, to tell a killer where his intended victim was hiding, consequentialism makes it permissible to lie. But that does not turn the lie into a truth. In this sense, Leibowitz accepts that we can think about euthanasia or abortion as corresponding to what we consider good. Even so, these actions remain violations of the prohibition against killing.

13 Algazy, Israel’s Bad Conscience.

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The Mind-Body Problem

“All the sublime thoughts that might occur to anyone have already been thought about,” said Goethe; “all that remains is to think about them again.”1 In his book Body and Mind,2 Leibowitz analyzes the mind-body problem, which is as old as philosophy itself. When his interlocutors expressed astonishment at some of his ideas, he insisted that he had not invented anything or created anything original. As for the mind-body problem, he observed that many thinkers, from Aristotle to Karl Popper3 via Descartes and Spinoza, have already described the question of how spirit connects with matter, how the mind connects to the body, as impossible to resolve. Moreover, they wondered what lessons about human thought this question might hold for us.4 Man cannot but think; he cannot not think. His train of thought is continuous, and every thought brings other thoughts in its wake—thoughts that, in their turn, affect his mental reality. Thought and consciousness belong to the reality of the mind and are thus separate from material reality. They have nothing to do with any physical function or phenomenon and cannot be described using categories found in nature. It is impossible to locate consciousness anywhere in the body, not even in an electrical relay like the pineal gland, as Descartes thought.5 Attempts to build thinking machines that would have artificial intelligence therefore have no chance of succeeding. The “thought” of a computer is in no way analogous to human 1 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. 2 See Chapter 10, “Faith,” n. 27. 3 Karl Popper (1902-1994) was a philosopher of science and author of the influential book The Logic of Scientific Discovery. 4 According to the introduction Yves Boissières wrote to the French edition of Body and Mind (Éditions du Cerf, 2010). 5 See René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul.

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thought, since the thinker is the one who possesses the brain, not the brain itself. Therefore, according to Leibowitz, there is a dualism between the human “processor,” that is, the brain that carries out neurological functions, and consciousness itself. For Leibowitz, it is the mind that enables man to circumvent determinism. As a neurobiologist, he views thought as a function of the brain, yet he nonetheless considers consciousness impossible to understand scientifically, since thought does not emit either matter or energy. It leaves no trace. He does not think that thought is located in the brain, which is no more than a relay station between the body and the mind. To this day there are scientists who think that research will one day enable us to understand the connection between the body and the mind. To Leibowitz, this is nonsense.6 The mind-body problem is connected, he thinks, to the relationship between the brain—the body’s computer—and thought—an entity which is mental and therefore immaterial, no matter what angle we look at it from. Man is endowed with an ability to reflect on himself that enables him to rise above nature, a fact that suggests there is a dualism between matter and spirit, at least to the extent that humans can perceive it. The mind-body problem therefore brings up the question of free will. Leibowitz believes that we have free will, even if this is a reality whose nature we do not comprehend. He thinks that even though the mind-body problem is interesting, we will never know the answer to it because the search for that answer is at the margin of science, bordering on metaphysics. We recognize a world of physical objects that possess volume and mass, that interact with their environment, and whose characteristics can be quantified. These things belong to “the public domain of knowledge.”7 Anyone can observe them, and no one has any epistemological advantage with regard to knowing them. When, for example, we show a table to someone who has never seen one before, he is perfectly capable of learning what a table is and thereafter being able to recognize one. But we also know a world of things that are not physical, that have no volume or mass, and whose activity cannot be quantified scientifically— free will, pain, thought, desires, sensations, memories, and the like. These things belong to “the private domain of knowledge,” since the one who has 6 Leibowitz, On Just About Everything. 7 This term and its matching term “the private domain of human knowledge” are terms used by Leibowitz.

The Mind-Body Problem

them is the only one who can know them. When (for example) someone has a toothache, there is no way to prove the existence of this toothache scientifically, even though the person who has the toothache is perfectly well aware of it, since he experiences it directly. We can see the abscess, the source of the pain, we can anesthetize the sensitive area, but we cannot see the pain itself and cannot even know whether it exists, unless we ask the person who feels it. We therefore see that there is a mental reality and a physical reality with no logical link between them. We cannot discern any functional connection between them, because thought has no physical form. When a person thinks about the arithmetic operation 2 + 2 = 4 and concludes from it that 4 + 4 = 8, his thought simply flows to that conclusion. Even if we could observe the neural activity linked to that thought, that would not give us any signals about the thought itself. It is certainly possible to discern chemical and electrical activity in the brain, but this cannot tell us whether a person is thinking at that moment about 4 + 4 = 8, or whether perhaps at that moment he is remembering a scene from a Woody Allen movie that was filmed at a sidewalk café in Paris. As for the body, it has an independent existence just like any other physical object. The coagulation that stops the flow of blood from a wound is explainable physiologically; the body behaves like a living object, that is, an organism. So there is no rational objection to, on the one hand, the physical world, and on the other hand, the mental world “living their own lives” autonomously. Yet even so, emotions, decisions, the will and all the other manifestations of the mind may affect the physical world. For example, when we raise an arm, there is an obvious connection between the mental origin of the action—the will—and the fact that we have raised an arm. Yet it is impossible to pinpoint the location of the will; it takes up no volume in space and has no observable physical characteristics.8 Even if it were possible to analyze the movement in physical, biological, and chemical terms, the connection between the will and the actual movement remains mysterious. Conversely, the influence of the physical on the mind is not understood any better. This tells us that knowing what is real does not imply understanding it. We thus perceive the bidirectional linkage of body and mind, yet we are not capable of comprehending it. We do not even know how to begin studying it. It is

8 See Leibowitz, Body and Mind.

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like finding someone in the middle of the night searching underneath a streetlamp: Passerby: Man: Passerby: Man:

Did you lose something? Yes, my watch. You lost it under this streetlamp? No, but this is where there is light.

The concomitance of our physical and mental realities is an empirical datum that challenges reason, but the problem is forced on us by the very fact that we perceive both realities, each of which has its own characteristics. They seem to us to be connected, but they do not interconnect logically, because scientifically will and thought cannot be comprehended—let alone analyzed—in the mathematical categories of volume, mass and weight, chemical composition, or any such physical characteristics, like temperature, electrical charge, color, hardness or softness, emitting or absorbing energy, etc. That is, a thought does not correspond to any sign of a physical object or event. The point is, thoughts, emotions, desire, memories, feelings and moods, pain, and so on and so forth do not exist except in the mind, and no other person can know that they exist.9

There have been attempts to solve the mind-body problem, but so far there is no persuasive explanation. Interactionism10 claims that the brain can provoke thought and vice versa. There are different versions of the theory, but they miss the mark through their superficiality; they presume in advance what they are trying to prove because they begin by assuming a cause. Scientifically, a cause means the existence of a functional connection between cause and effect, a connection that can be observed. Interactionism is problematic because we are incapable of understanding what a claim like “brain activity can provoke thought” might mean. Parallelism11 implies that there is, on the one hand, a stream of physical events and also, on the other hand, a stream of mental events that are somehow congruent, even though there is no interaction between them, no 9 Leibowitz, Letters, 66. 10 Interactionism is a view developed in the United States out of a combination of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and communications. 11 A flow of mental alongside physical or vice versa. The source of the term is a metaphor that Leibniz first formulated in 1702.

The Mind-Body Problem

cause and effect. This theory merely shifts the problem, both because, if it is correct, there must be a first cause that sets things in parallel, and because it ignores the fact that we know perfectly well that there is a connection between mental events and physical events. Epiphenomenalism12 claims that there is a material world that produces the spirit. Matter engenders the spirit (as it were) without the spirit being able to act on matter in turn. Supposedly physical stimuli set neural processes into motion, and these in turn create mental events. Against this we might point out that the brain’s mental processes cannot create any kind of content unless consciousness operates it, and this consciousness— at least conceptually—is a separate entity. In other words, it is impossible by definition to observe mental events by categorizing physical states in the brain. Hallucinationism emerges from the point of view that the mental world is the only one that exists. In those conditions our “perception” of the physical world is actually imaginary, yet this does not explain how one could distinguish, in this kind of hallucination, two such different categories, unconnected and unalike. “Hallucinationism” does not solve the mind-body problem, because it does not explain how we can perceive two sets of processes, objective on the one hand and subjective on the other, that are so different. Some philosophers would argue that there really is no physical world at all, a claim that they say is impossible to refute logically. Bertrand Russell concludes his discussion of the subject this way: If someone believes that the world does not exist except in his mind, outside of which there is nothing, this is an assertion that is impossible to refute. All that is left to do is to hospitalize him in an insane asylum. But that is not a philosophical argument.13

In contrast to received opinion, the brain does not think. The brain holder is the one who does the thinking. While it is possible to understand the role of the brain neuro-physiologically, the role of the brain holder (that is, the consciousness) does not belong to science. Neuro-physiology examines the brain—like any other part of the body, indeed, like any inanimate object— with regard to its material composition. It closely monitors the connection between neural states and the behavior of the subject. Scientifically, it 12 “Epiphenomena” are side effects. 13 See Ziv, “Conversation with Yeshayahu Leibowitz,” Mashshavot 65.

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presumes a correspondence between neural states and mental states, an assertion that we can neither ignore nor understand. While neuroscience uses quantitative categories and numerical expressions, mental entities do not lend themselves to measurements of this kind. We cannot “measure” how beautiful a flower is. In other words, it is impossible to apply a quantitative, scientific approach to a mental reality. The fact that the brain is the mechanism that provides our mental activity is not obvious on the face of it. We are well aware that we walk with our feet and breathe with our lungs, but we do not sense when we think that we are using our brain, perhaps because the brain is not in fact what is thinking. If it were indeed the site of consciousness, it should be possible to imitate it computationally. But a computer, no matter how complex, can perform only physical tasks: it operates, but it does not think. Even though a computer has vast computational power, only consciousness can translate this kind of capability into anything meaningful. It cannot exempt a person from thinking—only from computing, which is not the same thing. To be sure, this functionality is powerful, opening an even broader perspective for thought, since it liberates the brain from mechanical tasks. “One might even say that the more a computer computes, the more it invites people to think.”14 A computer can be considered analogous to the brain in only these two ways: First, neither one of them is thinking; second, intentionality is reserved to whoever is operating them. A robot will always do what it is programmed to do, things that are predictable and can be repeated identically. In order to prove that a robot is conscious, we would need to cause it to make some decision that it is not forced to take in any way by what it knows and what it learns but only by what it wants. But there is the rub: a computer does not want anything. The secretions of the liver and the lungs are the result of material changes, and the process of secretion is accompanied by a transfer of energy. This can be described physically, chemically, and quantitatively in observable ways. By contrast, says Leibowitz, to declare that “the brain secretes thoughts” is nothing but empty rhetoric.15 Such a claim is no more scientific than the metaphor of the poet who speaks of the “violins” of autumn “sobbing,”16 when autumn has nothing to do with sobbing or violins. 14 Ibid. 15 Leibowitz, Body and Mind. 16 Paul Verlaine, “Song of Autumn” (1866).

The Mind-Body Problem

On the one hand, we cannot discern any connection between the body and the mind; on the other, our intuition tells us that such a connection must necessarily exist, and that this necessity is one of the essential components of being human. Paradoxically, this makes all of reality unintelligible to us. Leibowitz sums up the mind-body problem by saying that we must cope with a dualism that highlights the autonomy of both mind and matter. It does not mean that this duality is an objective reality, just that we perceive two separate worlds.

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Biology*

Leibowitz often refers to Claude Bernard,1 who said, “I have never examined life,” thereby expressing the fact that understanding the physical and chemical phenomena of life does not solve the mystery of life. These phenomena can specify how life reproduces, but not how it occurs. We perceive the world of life as different from the inorganic world. Yet the dichotomy is not really between organic and inorganic, but rather between physics and biology. Conceptually there is no obvious meaning to the assertion that a chemical process can generate this mechanism we call life. It would seem nonsensical to say that a chemical response could explain why a blade of grass grows up rather than out.2 The secret of life, Leibowitz explains, is the difficulty of defining criteria to determine whether a particular entity is a living thing. Are there objective differences between what is living and what is not, or do such differences belong merely to our perceptions? Since we ourselves are living creatures, this perception of ours must be subjective, and it could be that the borderline—if there is any such—is not in the place where we are looking for it. Living materials have components that are far more complex than we find in inorganic materials. A living organism is dynamic, constantly exchanging matter and energy with its environment. It must be dynamic, not static, to ensure its survival, protect its chemical and physical stability, Thoughts about life, drawn from Eliahu Zaarur, Yeshayahu Leibowitz: Thinker and Man of Letters, and Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Between Science and Philosophy. 1 Claude Bernard (1813-1878) was a French physician and physiologist who is considered to be the father of the scientific method in medical research and endocrinology. 2 See “On the Things We Understand that Cannot Be Understood,” a conversation with Tzvi Yannai about biology, philosophy, and the philosophy of science, in Ma’arakhot, April 1988. *

Biology

and fend off attacks. It has the potential to develop and to reproduce. It responds to stimuli. But these characteristics are not sufficient to define unequivocally what separates something that is alive from something that is not, especially in borderline cases. Since such cases are uncategorizable, all we can do is follow our intuition about which category they belong to. Mechanists consider life a phenomenon that is part of the causality of nature; they seek to identify the categories that might help us distinguish between living and non-living things. For them, the question about life is a scientific question, since they think the difference between the two states is one of degree, not one of essence. But Leibowitz is doubtful that life is the result of generation by physical and chemical mechanisms. This problem presents a striking analogy: the connection between neurophysiology and one’s mental reality on the one hand, and the connection between biology and the phenomenon of life on the other. Both cases involve objective mechanisms that lead to phenomena that cannot be categorized scientifically. Vitalism, by contrast, ostensibly alludes to a source inaccessible to scientific inquiry, a “life force” somehow intermingled with the physical and chemical elements of life—which, in this view, constitute a kind of machine that does not operate on its own but is driven by some essentially metaphysical power, a power resistant to any scientific characterization. In order to better grasp the concept of life we must differentiate between an organism and a mechanism. An organism is an entity composed of interlinked components, each of which fulfills its own essence. But at the same time these components depend on each other and influence each other functionally. They combine to create something new, the organism as a whole. By contrast, a mechanism is a combination of elements, like for example the parts of a watch. These parts had their own independent existence and they existed before they were assembled into the finished product. But no component of an organism can exist except in cooperation with all the other parts that make up the organism. It is the organism itself that fashions its own components. That is, in an organism the whole precedes the parts, whereas in a mechanism the parts precede the whole. It follows that an organism simultaneously generates the living thing and is itself a living whole. In other words, it is at one and the same time its own creator and its own creation. While a mechanism has no existence except by virtue of the design that turns the matter it is made of into an object, in an organism the matter and

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the life are of a piece. At first glance, the constant exchange of the material of which the organism is made presents us with a body that is constantly renewing itself—yet we treat it as if it had not changed. In truth, the organism is not defined by the stability of the material that comprises it, but the opposite. It is the continuous flow of the material that constitutes the organism. An essential quality of an organism, which differentiates it from a mechanism, is the connection between it and the material of which it is composed. While the components of a mechanism are part of a mechanical process and the components operate in hierarchical, unidirectional, irreversible causality, with an organism the connection between the components is mutual and circular. There is a complex interdependence between the conditions in which the organism functions and the actions that produce those conditions. For example, the proper functioning of the physiological processes in the human body depends on a temperature of 98.6º Fahrenheit, but this temperature is regulated by these very same processes, independent of the temperature outside. The cooperation between the various parts of the organism is in some sense autarkic, since it is maintained “organically” and is not the result of “mechanical” causality. The development of the organism determines its future, whereas nothing impels the inanimate matter to turn into anything other than it is. A tree grows, sends roots deep into the earth, puts forth branches and leaves, and bears fruit, all by its very nature. Yet its wood does not turn automatically into furniture the moment it dies unless some external force intervenes. By contrast, an organism spontaneously manifests what exists in it only in potential. Life is not static. What we take for “life” is a process consisting of continuous change. Life is a process of constant becoming, and as a result the biology of the organism is liable to differ at every moment from what it was just a moment before and from what it will be just a moment later. These differences are called at one and the same time life and aging. Biologically, aging accompanies us throughout the lifespan. We are older at every moment than we were the moment before. This is a strange process; we do not understand biologically why an organism must age. Yet we are beginning to comprehend the mechanisms of this process even though we do not understand why it must occur. We cannot understand death by observing life. The essential mechanism of life is the way the organism remains alive. These varied, complex processes are in fact the manifold functions that

Biology

keep life going—that is, they perpetuate themselves. The goal of life, the thing that motivates the organism, is self-preservation. Since homeostasis regulates the balance of the organism and ensures its continued existence, we do not understand why this does not continue forever. It is not merely that there is no obvious reason why this process should stop; stopping the process actually runs counter to the observable mechanisms of life. Death3 is not part of the process of life, and in this sense it is not a biological phenomenon, since all the processes of life are in fact mobilized to prevent it. It is impossible to relate the fact that man is mortal to the fact that he is a living creature. On the contrary, he is entirely created and constructed so that he should live forever. Biologically, an elderly man at death’s door is a living creature in the full sense. Even if we speak of the mechanisms that “still” impel him, this does not change the fact that they constitute a force whose essence is to maintain life. Nonetheless, they eventually cease to function, even though there is nothing that points to life as in fact the source of death. When Leibowitz was asked, “Do you believe in evolution?” he replied: “It is not that I believe in evolution, but that I know it, just as I know that there is a continent called Australia, even though I have never set foot there.”4 Darwinism5 is the theory of the development of life developed in the nineteenth century by the naturalist Charles Darwin. It has taken various forms since it was first devised, eventually being accepted by the scientific community as neo-Darwinism. The article on Darwinism in the Hebrew Encyclopedia was written by Leibowitz, who also wrote the introduction to the Hebrew edition of Darwin’s book The Origin of Species. In his book Between Science and Philosophy, Leibowitz explains that every individual of the same species can be distinguished from any of the others by color, build, physiology, behavior, and additional properties. This differentiation is conspicuous in species that reproduce sexually, which do not have identical individuals, except—perhaps—in the case of identical twins. Farmers have bred domesticated animals and cultivated plants with certain genetic traits, thereby successfully creating results that fit their needs. Dogs, for example, all belong to the same species despite the glaring 3 See Zaarur, Leibowitz. 4 From an interview in Yediot Achronot in 1993. 5 This section is taken from Leibowitz’s thoughts on evolution in his book Between Science and Philosophy.

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differences between them; think of a Pekinese versus a Saint Bernard. Darwin was able to formulate a law of nature by paying close attention to this human activity. In nature, Leibowitz explains, the possibilities for reproduction go far beyond what is necessary to perpetuate the species. But the conditions that permit a population to explode exist only rarely, since when food or space is lacking, only the fittest survive. So, for example, rabbits surprised by a fox will flee as soon as he appears, but he will catch the slowest of them and kill them, as a result of which they will no longer have the opportunity to reproduce. Their relative slowness will not be passed down genetically, meaning that over time foxes contribute to making the rabbits run faster—a development that in turn influences the foxes themselves. This is just one of the points of departure of the theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet Leibowitz adds that in the course of research Darwinism has led to ever more complicated questions, like how a species mutates into another species, or whether acquired characteristics can subsequently be passed down genetically. As difficult as it might be to grasp the mechanism by which it takes place, the development of species is a fact that no biologist can ignore. There is no doubt that the lifeforms that exist today did not exist millions of years ago and that lifeforms that did exist millions of years ago have vanished. Yet these processes remain enigmatic, since we do not understand how they operate genetically. It may even be that we will never understand it, insofar as it stems from the mystery of life itself. Leibowitz observes that some religious schools do not include evolution in the teaching of such disciplines as biology, zoology, or botany, because there are teachers who consider evolution heretical. This situation is unbearable, since ignoring something so important is an insult to an educational institution. Leibowitz understands that Darwinism still has a long road before it, but teachers have an obligation to enlighten their students about these as-yet-unsolved questions and to caution them against making pseudo-philosophical deductions from Darwinism. In his opinion, evasion or silence about scientific achievements at this level would be nothing but intellectual laziness and stupidity. It would damage those same institutions by subjecting them to ridicule. Sooner or later, the students will gain access to this information, and they may end up believing that religion and science are incompatible.

14

Science*

“The goal of knowledge is knowledge itself,” writes Aristotle in the Metaphysics.1 “All human beings naturally crave for knowledge. An indication of this is our esteem for the senses; for apart from their use we esteem them for their own sake.”2 Fifteen hundred years later Maimonides repeats the same ideal: Our Sages warned against this and said, “Do not make the Torah a crown for self-glorification or a spade with which to dig” (Ethics of the Fathers 4:7). They hinted at what I have just explained to you, that the end of wisdom is neither to acquire honor from other men nor to earn more money. One ought not to busy oneself with God’s Torah in order to earn one’s living by it; nor should the end of studying wisdom be anything but knowing it. The truth has no other purpose than knowing that it is truth. Since the Torah is truth, the purpose of knowing it is to do it.3

But “knowing” is not the same as “thinking,” notes Leibowitz. The Sages warned us centuries ago that certain learned people had great knowledge but had no understanding whatsoever about what they knew. “Just so,” Leibowitz teaches us, “the believers who shut themselves up in Torah learning without taking any interest in other aspects of intellectual life are on the wrong path; this leads to foolishness.” A rabbinic saying has it that “those who pretend they know nothing but the Torah do not know the Torah * See Eliahu Zaarur, Yeshayahu Leibowitz: Thinker and Man of Letters, and Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Between Science and Philosophy. 1 Aristotle wrote 14 books that were collected under this title after his death. 2 Metaphysics, Book 1, 980 a 22 (trans. Hugh Tredennick; LCL 271, 1933). 3 Introduction to Perek Helek on reward and punishment; “Helek: Sanhedrin, Chapter Ten,” trans. Isadore Twersky, A Maimonides Reader (New York: Behrman House, 1972), 405.

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at all.” This is what Leibowitz said about R. Eliezer Schach, an authority in the Orthodox world, who declared, “The Holy One ran an account for the Jews, one at a time, an account that went on for centuries, until it amounted to the sum of six million Jews, at which point the Holocaust took place. This is what a Jew must believe. Any Jew who does not subscribe wholeheartedly to this belief is an atheist … and if we do not accept this as a punishment, it is as if we do not believe in the Holy One”4—as a result of which Leibowitz viewed him as an ignorant and malicious old man. Leibowitz defines the search for knowledge as the ability to ask ourselves questions, in particular the great philosophical questions, even when we know that they have no answers. He nonetheless feels that occupying ourselves with such questions constitutes the height of what humanity can achieve by means of the intellect. Jewish tradition attaches great significance to the commandment that requires us to learn. Religiously, this obligation must be understood as an objective in and of itself, which must not be distorted by using it to attain special privileges. For Leibowitz, it is immoral for someone who learns Torah to use his learning as an excuse to depend on someone else to support him, or demand that he spill his blood by going into battle to keep him safe. In certain Orthodox circles there exists a notion that society is obligated to assume the burden of supporting those who devote their lives to Torah study, though Maimonides denounces this idea in no uncertain terms, declaring in the Mishneh Torah: One … who makes up his mind to study Torah and not to work but to live on charity, profanes the name of God, brings the Torah into contempt, extinguishes the light of religion, brings evil upon himself … “All study of the Torah, not conjoined with work, must, in the end, be futile, and become a cause of sin” [Avot 2:2]. The end of such a person will be that he will rob his fellow creatures.5

Scientists have spent a long time trying to make sense of reality in a way that would harmonize it with religion. The fact is that Aristotelianism, which ruled up until the Renaissance, took scientific investigation and the search for meaning as a unit and did not distinguish between them. But the seventeenth century witnessed the rise of an approach that took true knowledge to be based on nothing but causality. The relationship 4 Yated Ne’eman, 12 Shevat 5751, 29 December 1990. 5 Mishneh Torah, the Book of Knowledge, Laws of Torah Study 3:10; trans. Twersky, Maimonides Reader, 67 f.

Science

between religion and science changed, and since that time scientific rigor has ordered that any religious, ethical, or ideological considerations must be ignored, and we must refrain from using science for teleological conclusions of any kind. Leibowitz teaches that science does not pretend to prove or disprove this or that world view, because it is interested in nothing but facts. It is therefore impossible to derive any prohibition, any commandment, or any set of ethical demands scientifically. Science deals with reality, inserts the facts into a framework containing other facts with which they must dovetail, and uncovers the functional connections that exist between them. All science can do is to assert that “it is so and not otherwise,” as Sartre put it.6 Scientific analysis leads to the same conclusions no matter who is formulating them. Science belongs to the realm of logic; there is no way solve a scientific problem by employing values. Science is designed to identify the facts and is inescapable, as opposed to values, which do not lend themselves to evaluation, arbitration, or quantification. Science belongs to the public domain of knowledge, from which it follows that scientific research is objective by nature. That is, any statement must be acceptable to everyone, if it is established scientifically. As long as this condition is fulfilled, every scientist understands the same thing, and the facts speak for themselves. Not only that, but even when it turns out that the methodology was flawed, it does not change the principle of objectivity, in the sense that as long as conditions are equal, the conclusions will be equal too. Once a person is confronted with scientific certainty, he has no free will. When he acquires knowledge, he must submit to it, and if that piece of information does not conform to his values, he can do nothing but accept it for what it is. Scientific research poses no dilemmas: once a new discovery is made, there is no way around it. For example, nuclear physics has no connection to the possible uses that might be made of it. The scientist is not required to predict the consequences of his work; this would be opposed to the very spirit of science. We must all be careful not to believe in so-called “sciences” of the occult. There is, for example, no theoretical or empirical basis for the existence of extra-sensory perception. There is not a single scientifically confirmed 6 Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: NLB, 1976), 32

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experiment proving that ESP is real. Psychics who perform for the public succeed in deluding their audiences, but in their private lives they cannot guess anyone’s thoughts. If they want to communicate over long distances, then just like anyone else they have to use a telephone. As for astrology, Leibowitz notes that Maimonides corresponded on this topic with a group of rabbis from Provence who wanted to know what he thought about it. In the letter that he writes to them, he warns them: Know, my masters, that every one of those things concerning judicial astrology that (its adherents) maintain—namely, that something will happen one way and not another, and that the constellation under which one is born will draw him on so that he will be of such and such a kind and so that something will happen to him one way and not another—all those assertions are far from being scientific; they are stupidity.7

In his opinion, it is not merely that astrology is fraudulent but that the determinism that it presumes is incompatible with free will. He makes clear that one should not confuse astrology with astronomy, which is in his words an “exceedingly glorious” science. But he condemns all pseudoscientific practices unequivocally: Whoever believes in these and similar things and, in his heart, holds them to be true and scientific and only forbidden by the Torah, is nothing but a fool, deficient in understanding, who belongs to the same class with women and children whose intellects are immature. Sensible people, however, who possess sound mental faculties, know by clear proofs that all these practices which the Torah prohibited have no scientific basis but are chimerical and inane; and that only those deficient in knowledge are attracted by these follies.8

With regard to relationships between people, there is no obligation to speak the truth, and often enough it is easier to lie. But Leibowitz explains that the term “truth” has a different connotation when it comes to science, since scientific truth does not defer to humanity. It is impossible to solve a scientific question by means of a lie; a machine cannot operate if it is not assembled correctly. Truth is the very essence of scientific research; in science, falsehood manifests itself automatically. If we return to the example 7 “Letter on Astrology,” trans. Twersky, Maimonides Reader, 466. 8 Twersky, Maimonides Reader, 75 f.

Science

of the tablecloth,9 we know that anyone can make use of the device that measures the wavelength of the tablecloth’s color; but the assertion that the tablecloth is red when the wavelength demonstrates that it is green—such an assertion has no chance of being accepted. Scientific activity does not point to any ethical standard. People often insist that the scientific community is obligated to contribute to the solution of social problems, but this is nonsense. Science has nothing to teach us, nothing to contribute, with regard to values. The world of science deals with what is, and the world of values asserts what must be done with what is, and there is no point of contact between these two realms. Values are not inevitable and they therefore cannot be subjected to scientific verification. We must resist the temptation to deduce values from science, since the purpose of any such step can only be to justify human desires—and these are not objective in any way, shape, or form. As for the relationship between religion and science, Leibowitz insists that it is wrong for a believer to grant the Torah pride of place (when it comes to reality) on the pretext that science is apparently nothing but a chain of inferences and therefore less reliable than Scripture. To Leibowitz, treating the Torah as if it were a collection of articles on physics, chemistry, biology, or history more trustworthy than what one is taught at university demonstrates gross stupidity, a complete failure to understand either Torah or science. Determinism, for Leibowitz, is one of the philosophical questions that can never be answered, but which nevertheless provide us with rich insights. Moreover, the question of determinism has not been a merely philosophical one ever since modern physics cast the chain of causality in nature into doubt. Taking free will as no more than an epiphenomenon of a chain of cause and effect that produces one’s behavior automatically would mean that people are no freer to act than the Earth is “free” to orbit the sun. But according to Karl Popper, “physical determinism is a theory which, if it is true, is not arguable, since it must explain all our reactions, including what appear to us as beliefs based on arguments, as due to purely physical conditions.”10 In other words, if our behavior is produced deterministically, 9 See Chapter 8, “Values.” 10 Karl Popper, Of Clouds and Clocks: An Approach to the Problem of Rationality and the Freedom of Man (St. Louis: Washington University, 1966), 11.

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we cannot know this, since if we think we are not subject to determinism, that could be the result of deterministic forces that make us think so. Radical determinism implies that consciousness is no more than a phenomenon like many others, that is, it is material and obedient to scientific laws like any other natural phenomenon. Yuval Noah Harari writes in his book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow: When trillions of water molecules coalesce in the sky we call that a cloud, but no cloud consciousness emerges to announce, “I feel rainy.” How is it, then, that when billions of electric signals move around in my brain, a mind emerges that feels “I am furious!”? As of 2016, we have absolutely no idea.11 Leibowitz observes that many philosophers think there is no such thing as consciousness. The truth is that atoms and molecules do not want anything, and combinations of atoms and molecules, no matter how complex, also do not want anything. Once we must face the non-existence of consciousness, it is hard to see what could introduce any exception from causality. But, says, Leibowitz, we live with consciousness as an empirical fact. Long before a child knows that there is such a thing as the world, he thinks, feels, experiences, and has no doubt that he is doing so. It is only secondarily that he wonders if there is a world outside of himself and, if there is, what he can know about it. The implication is that the world is in fact more hypothetical than consciousness, since consciousness imposes itself on us a priori. On the other hand, one is perfectly capable of saying to oneself that the world is an imposed certainty and that, accordingly, his own consciousness is hypothetical. In contrast to the natural sciences, in the social sciences there is no information that obligates a person in any way. Social sciences belong to the world of values, and any kind of research with a sociological tinge involves morality by way of the personal inclinations and ideas of the researcher. Any attempt to create a science that would define the functional connections between social facts without considering the subjectivity involved would be idiotic. In economics, for example, one sometimes gets the impression that we are dealing with a branch of science, but this fails to take into account the human factor, which eludes any algorithm and does not permit statistics to 11 Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (London: Harvill Secker, 2016), 128.

Science

confine it. This explains the fact that economics, as a discipline, is incapable of making reliable predictions. The scientific approach seeks to discern the functional relationships that exist between various phenomena, but in the combination of body and mind the decisive factors are sociological and psychological, not physiological. There is no rule in the social sciences that can be applied to everything, except in totalitarian regimes where such apparent unanimity is based on falsehoods. For Leibowitz, then, any theory can be challenged, any standpoint or social convention can be questioned. It is perfectly reasonable to doubt them, even struggle with them, because the social sciences are based on qualitative categories and subjectivity. One cannot reduce human behavior to numerical or mathematical rules; it is simply impossible, even if we could somehow affect causality, to neutralize the question of meaning. The social sciences, then, cannot derive any laws pertaining to society, since the most basic and profound problems of human behavior depend on free will. Scientific questions can only arise in connection with phenomena that belong to the public domain of knowledge, which means that everyone must be equally capable of grasping the phenomena in question, as long as they have the necessary data. One’s blood pressure or temperature can be measured, whether by oneself or by someone else, using the appropriate devices. But when a person feels sad, there is no scale on which the sadness he feels can be quantified in order to compare it to the sadness we feel. That particular person is the only person who experiences that particular sadness. Similarly, there is no way to know whether the sadness is real, or how deep it is. Although it is possible to ascertain information from the testimony of the person himself or to observe the external signs of sadness, no one else can really experience that person’s sadness directly. For a statement to be considered scientific, we must be able to reduce it to quantitative concepts. If one particular object is heavier than another, then even without knowing the weight of either of them, it is clear that the difference between them can be expressed quantitatively. But if someone says that he likes chocolate more than fish, he is certainly expressing a psychological state, but it is impossible to know whether he likes chocolate twice as much as he likes fish or a million times more. It is not merely that there is no way to determine the precise ratio, but that the very question is meaningless. Similarly, when we like one person more than another, or one piece of music less than another, we have no criterion by which to quantify these differences.

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Various attempts have been made to connect psychology with the hard sciences by examining human behavior with statistical tools and defining it formulaically, with the goal of determining what might in some cases be considered “laws.” This process generally leads nowhere but a dead end, or else to untenable conclusions. For example, if we set up a study of people smiling, they will have similar expressions or gestures. But despite the similarity, it could be that some of them are happy while others are just acting happy. Some may be happy because they ran into a friend or because they did not run into him, because they won the lottery or because their neighbor did not win. Studies of this kind afford us no objective clue to the true source of the smile, and we cannot establish with certainty what lies behind it. This or that neural stimulus makes it possible to fall in love with a particular person or to vote for a particular party. To Leibowitz, it is impossible to identify the relationship between a particular neurological event and its corollary in the mind. When we set up studies with psychochemical parameters, we must take into account the person’s state of mind, since obviously the results will not be the same whether the person knows that he is the subject of a study or not. Methodologically, then, the results of the study will be ambiguous. Psychology deals with people’s mental lives, but it is not one of the hard sciences because the latter are realms of a completely different nature.12 Sometimes confusion is created when we try to determine the relationship between the psycho-chemical activity of the nervous system and the world of emotions, since there is no tool available that can corroborate a causative connection between these two realms. When psychologists make the claim (in good faith) that they are successful in reducing people’s suffering, this does not prove that their treatment had anything to do with it, since a placebo effect might lessen suffering, psychological or physical, simply because the patient is aware of being treated. By contrast, it is possible to establish definitively that psychotropic drugs influence the nervous system. The truth is, according to Leibowitz, that practicing psychology depends on intuition, empathy, reflection, and experience. He does not attempt to devalue psychology or to claim that it has nothing to do with science. Nor is he expressing a value judgment. He in no way doubts that psychology involves both great knowledge and great wisdom. But literature, 12 See Zaarur, Leibowitz, the discussion on psychology and science.

Science

art, and the rest of the disciplines connected with psychology, though they are profoundly important for understanding human experience, do not belong to the realm of science. Psychoanalysis,13 by contrast, has no scientific or empirical basis. Karl Popper—on whom Leibowitz relies when it comes to the philosophy of science—rejects Freudianism as unscientific, because it makes no falsifiable claims. As a result, he calls it pseudo-scientific, just like astrology or homeopathy. Leibowitz thinks that psychoanalysis as a discipline is an insult to the intelligence, and to psychology. He considers psychoanalysis a kind of mythology. Empirically, he believes, it has never relieved anyone’s suffering. In fact, he thinks it has probably disturbed the mental balance of countless patients,14 since it is based on a legend made up out of whole cloth, with no scientific, historic, or statistical basis. For Leibowitz, psychoanalysis deals with the structure of the mind via a metaphor borrowed from the Christian trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, corresponding (respectively) to the Freudian id, ego, and superego. Leibowitz considers psychoanalysis dangerous because it befogs the mind, undermines the emotions, and silences the will. He regards tales of psychoanalytic healing as imaginary or simply false. Most of the genuine medical community does not consider psychoanalysis credible at all; on the other side of the scale is the damage that can be caused by manipulating the patients’ imaginations, which is liable to detach them from reality. To Leibowitz, psychoanalysis is the intellectual fad of a civilization in decline, characterized by its rejection of critical thinking and its denial of reality. All this with the goal of seeking shelter from reality in dreamland, which relieves people of the necessity of coping with existential questions. He denounces it as characteristic of our contemporary indulgence in mystification, just like parapsychology, ESP, meditation, anthroposophy,15 all those same things about which Maimonides said, 800 years ago, “No one needs to pay any attention to these simpletons who believe everything they hear, nor to the charlatans who are ready to swindle anyone who heeds them.”

13 It is reasonable to assume that Leibowitz is referring specifically to Freudian analysis. 14 See Leibowitz, Letters, the chapter “Connected to the World.” 15 See once again Maimonides, “Letter on Astrology.”

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15

Zionism

When Leibowitz immigrated to Palestine in 1934, he hoped that Judaism would furnish the religious infrastructure for the emerging polity. Not only did Israel need to be a country of Jews; it also had to be a Jewish state as described in Jewish law—which, he knew, would have to be supplemented in order to take account of a situation it had never before faced, since halakhah was established for the Diaspora. But once he realized that no one would go along with him on this, he headed in the opposite direction, eventually turning into a fierce supporter of separation between religion and state. In general, he did not think a state of this kind actually had any religious significance whatsoever. The State of Israel was not established “for Judaism, nor under the sway of Judaism, nor in the interests of Judaism, but in the framework of the national independence of the Jewish people.”1 The various kinds of Zionists are quite heterogeneous, but their one common denominator is the Jewish people’s aspiration for national sovereignty. Indeed, we must differentiate between religion, which is intrinsically spiritual, and Zionism, which is intrinsically political. For Leibowitz, Judaism in and of itself is a matter for every Jew, Zionist or not. Modern Zionism originated in the course of the nineteenth century and advanced the idea of the nation-state, but it was not a natural part of Judaism. When asked why he was a Zionist, Leibowitz used to answer curtly, “We are fed up with being ruled by goyim—that is the entire essence of Zionism,”2 since the establishment of the State of Israel did not entail any turning point from a religious perspective. Zionism is part of the two political currents that shaped the twentieth century: decolonization on the one hand, and on the other the consolidation 1 Leibowitz, On Just About Everything, in the discussion on Israel and Judaism. 2 Shashar, Leibowitz: Heretic or Believer?, 65.

Zionism

of the national consciousness of the Jews as a response to constant antisemitism. This despite the fact that in the course of the nineteenth century the Jews were integrated as full citizens into the various countries where they lived. We are, therefore, talking about a national liberation movement unconnected to religion. Israel was therefore founded for no other reason than to enable the Jewish people to attain national sovereignty after two thousand years of exile. The Jewish way of life in the Diaspora took shape in a context in which the Jews, like everyone else, were subjects of whoever ruled their countries. The establishment of the state posed a new problem that never existed in the past, since the religious dimension and the national dimension do not correspond to each other. Even if all the Jews observed the commandments, the state (in Leibowitz’s opinion) would remain an essentially secular institution, since its role is to respond to human needs and not to serve God. As a result, religion can never identify with any political regime, even if it recognizes the need for such a regime, and even if people who are themselves religious hold the reins of power in it. 3 To Leibowitz, after the euphoria of the military victory of the Six Day War had faded, the war—in which Israel conquered and established its rule over territories inhabited by an Arab population—turned out to be a disaster. He thought that ruling over another group of people by means of an oppressive regime corrupted the country’s youth and wasted national resources, most of which needed to be diverted to national security uses. In his opinion, this situation created social and cultural problems and called the essential nature of the existence of the State of Israel into question. He did not think Israel had malicious intentions regarding the Palestinians, but he thought that the existing situation, by its very nature, led to a dead end. In his eyes, it is unjust to continue the occupation. The argument that Israel has rights to the territories conquered in the course of the war is unfounded. In his opinion, religious Zionists who call for the realization of the idea of a Greater Israel are misrepresenting Judaism and distorting the Torah. For him, the use of religion for the aggrandizement of the nation is a kind of idolatry, and this form of justification for the occupation is unfounded, especially given the fact that most of the Jews in Israel do not observe the commandments.

3 Leibowitz, On Just About Everything, in the discussion on Israel and Judaism.

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According to the Torah, the land belongs to God, who makes it available to the various peoples as he wishes. The national-religious right claims Greater Israel in the name of a theological demand insisting that, according to the Torah, God gave the promised land to the Jews. But Leibowitz observed that this involves an inconsistency. One must remind those who rely on what is written in the Torah to justify their aspirations for conquest that, after God gave Israel to the Jews, he also gave it to the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the Crusaders, the Mamelukes, the Turks, and the British—and only eventually back to the Jews. All of which means that modern Zealots must resign themselves to the fact that God is not a member of any political party. Leibowitz was furious that the Israel’s international image was stained by what he called the “mediatization” of the occupation. Denial of the rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination is incomprehensible to the international community, to whom it appears as a kind of ethnic cleansing. Moreover, he thought that the conflict could not possibly be resolved through negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, since negotiations between rulers and their subjects are morally unacceptable. Israel must end the occupation unilaterally and need not take into account Palestinian hostility in order to make this decision. In fact, any discussion of whom to return these territories to is completely uninteresting; in any case, they do not belong to Israel. Leibowitz thought that Israel must get out of the territories and let the people who live there do whatever they want with them. But he was careful to make clear that Israel can in no way make the mistake of deluding itself that returning the territories will bring peace. He thought there was no possibility of peace in the foreseeable future, since both sides stubbornly persist in desiring the same piece of land. The best thing to do would be to separate from the Palestinians, thereby preserving the existence of the State of Israel.4 Leibowitz called on the nation not to trust the political echelons but to mobilize against them in passive resistance. Not only because of this or that perspective on the occupation but because of its perpetuation, which he considers menacing. He called for a refusal to cooperate in any way with military rule over the occupied population, and warned that anyone who mobilized against the occupation must expect to be viewed as an enemy of the state, with all the consequences that would entail. Moreover, he 4 Leibowitz, Letters, “The Occupation.”

Zionism

found the position of Peace Now worthless, since its activists justified the occupation by refusing to encourage Israeli soldiers to desert. At this point it should be made clear that Leibowitz never was or ever pretended to be a pacifist. He recommended withdrawing from the occupied territories because he thought this would strengthen the Jewish state. At the same time, he insisted on Israel’s right to respond militarily in case of attack; and it is a fact that during the war of Independence he was an officer in the Haganah.

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Christianity

In the course of his trial in Jerusalem, Adolf Eichmann refused to swear on the New Testament, as the presiding judge had suggested. But he acknowledged that he was a believer and the court permitted him to swear “by God,” without anyone knowing precisely which God he meant. The Christian world emitted a groan of relief, having feared—justly—that the trial would promote a link between the Nazism and Christianity. From a Jewish perspective, however, for Eichmann to swear on the Christian Bible would have been quite consistent with his behavior, since as one of the architects of the Holocaust (at least conceptually), everything he did served the Christian obsession with the eradication of the Jews. This obsession is the “raison d’être” of the religion created by the apostle Paul after the death of Jesus. Even the Christian denominations that are most comfortable with the Jews, such as the evangelical Christians of America, have the ultimate goal of converting the Jewish people to Christianity once they return to Israel. For Leibowitz, then, Eichmann was nothing but the embodiment of 2,000 years of Christian antisemitism. Martin Luther, the sixteenth-century founder of Protestantism, wrote this: We must set fire to the synagogues and schools of the Jews, destroy their prayer books, raze their homes, and confiscate all their money and possessions. It is forbidden to show mercy or compassion to them or to afford them any legal protection. These toxic, poisonous worms must be punished by hard labor or expelled once and for all. We are guilty not to kill them.1

It is amazing to realize how close the antisemitic rhetoric of Luther is to that of the Nazis. But it is no surprise, since what the Church preached for 1 Martin Luther, On the Jews and Their Lies.

Christianity

centuries ended up being an inseparable part of the collective Christian unconscious, so much so that even when the organic link between church and state was snapped, antisemitism did not come to an end. The crimes committed by Eichmann and his accomplices against the Jews were therefore no more than the fulfillment of what had been smoldering beneath the surface of the Christian worldview since the earliest days of Christianity. The charge that the Jews are Christ-killers, so common for so many years, is no longer “in style” in Catholic Christianity, and ever since the Holocaust most Christians refrain from pinning that accusation on the Jews. In contrast to the widespread view, though, it is not the myth that the Jews killed Christ that explains Christian antisemitism, but rather the existence of Judaism as a sibling religion hostile to Christianity. The Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) put a damper on the charge of Christkilling, but did not put an end to Christianity’s endemic revulsion toward the Jews. It is in this connection that Karl Barth, the twentieth-century Swiss scholar and theologian, wrote: Israel according to the flesh is the ghostly and monstrous form of the Synagogue—the Synagogue that hears the Word of God and yet for and in all its hearing remains unbelieving, with its Jewish obduracy and melancholy, its Jewish caprice and fantasy, its vaunting lie, the nationalist-legalistic Messiah-dream of the Synagogue.2

Leibowitz believes that, from a Jewish point of view, Christianity, which seeks to be the continuation of Judaism, is nothing but a regression to idolatry. Though Christianity borrows some of the same biblical characters, it is in truth nothing but a byproduct of idolatrous Hellenism. It is not merely that Leibowitz views Christianity negatively; he genuinely despises this idolatrous religion which, he claims, is originally not Jewish but Greek, pagan, and Hellenistic, the epitome of idol worship.3 It is important to note that in Judaism monotheism does not stand in opposition to polytheism in that there is one only God rather than many. Had the Greeks decided to eliminate all their gods and devote themselves only to Zeus, the latter would still not have had any conceptual resemblance to the transcendent God of the Torah. The basic assumption of the Torah that “God is one” has nothing to do with how many gods there are, nor does 2 Adapted from Karl Barth, Dogmatics, § 34. 3 Shashar, Leibowitz: Heretic or Believer?, 45.

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it mean that there is only one God. What it means is that God is essentially different from anything that human beings can comprehend. Whether in practice, in theology, or in ideas, Christianity is the antithesis of Judaism. As long ago as the twelfth century Maimonides, inspired by the Talmud, wrote: Know that this Christian nation, who advocate the messianic claim, in all their various sects, all of them are idolators. On all their festivals it is forbidden for us to deal with them. And all Torah restrictions pertaining to idolators pertain to them. Sunday is one of their festivals. Therefore, it is forbidden to deal with believers in “the messiah” on Sunday at all in any manner whatsoever; rather, we deal with them as we would deal with any idolators on their festival.4

And this: Even of Jesus of Nazareth, who imagined that he was the Messiah, but was put to death by the court, Daniel had prophesied, as it is written, “And the children of the violent among your people shall lift themselves up to establish the vision; but they shall stumble” (Dan. 11:14). For has there ever been a greater stumbling than this? All the prophets affirmed that the Messiah would redeem Israel, save them, gather their dispersed, and confirm the commandments. But he caused Israel to be destroyed by the sword, their remnant to be dispersed and humiliated. He was instrumental in changing the Torah and causing the world to err and serve another besides God.5

It is well known that, during the Second World War, Pope Pius XII maintained a deafening silence about the persecution of the Jews, of which he could not possibly have been unaware. Why did he not denounce these crimes before the entire world? He did not do this because he was guided by his faith.6 As God’s representative on earth, he could do nothing other than let the Nazis have their way, since they were fulfilling the essence of Christianity. It could be that as a human being the Pope was not indifferent to the fate of the millions of Jews who were being led to the slaughter, 4 Commentary on the Mishnah, Avodah Zarah 1:3; trans. David Novak, “Maimonides’s View of Christianity,” in Jewish-Christian Dialogue: A Jewish Justification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 57 f. 5 Mishneh Torah, the Book of Judges, Laws of Kings 11:10; trans. Twersky, Maimonides Reader, 226. 6 See Leibowitz’s review of The Deputy, the controversial 1963 play by the German Rolf Hochhuth.

Christianity

but this great Christian saw in the Holocaust the beginning of the end of Judaism—and for him, this took priority. As the Vicar of Christ, he sincerely believed that Judaism constituted a barrier to the conversion— and therefore to the redemption—of the human race as a whole. Christianity relates to Judaism in a different way than does Islam or any of the other religions, since it pretends to be the true Judaism (though postdating it) by virtue of the fact that it was inspired by the Bible, the “Old Testament.” It is like a son who deposes his own, still living, father, but continues to worry about his inheritance as long as the father is still alive and has not given up the ghost. From a Christian perspective, therefore, Judaism is illegitimate and its perpetuation is experienced as a burning insult. Christianity cannot make its peace with this situation unless the Jews are condemned for their unbelief. In other words, the more the Jews suffer, the more their suffering proves that they are in error for not taking refuge under the wings of Jesus. The truth is that, at first, the Church did not wish for the physical extermination of the Jews and it even welcomed their conversion, which in a way confirmed the continuity between the two religions. But when it became clear, with the passage of time, that it would be impossible to convert all the Jews, the one thing to which Christianity could aspire was their destruction. The appearance of Hitler was therefore a golden opportunity for the Christian world: Someone else—the Nazi Party— would handle the job. Pius XII could therefore see the hand of God in Hitler’s rise. At this point it must be noted that this Italian aristocrat did not especially like Hitler, was scornful of the Nazis, and considered them uncivilized and brutal. But he thought that he was incapable of opposing the divine providence that had brought them to power in order to eradicate Judaism. He believed that theologically he had no right to interfere with God’s actions or to oppose the “Final Solution,” a solution that he took to be the fulfillment of the divine will, of which the Nazis were no more than the secular arm. It is impossible to explain the indifference of the world to the Holocaust otherwise than through the persistence of antisemitism in the collective memory of the Christian world, which continues to view the eradication of the Jews as a commandment whose purpose is the creation of a new civilization. But if that is so, then religious antisemitism has finally mutated into secular antisemitism and emerged once again in full force even in the most atheistic regimes.

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Nowadays the majority of people in the Christian world who continue to practice the religion do so for reasons of tradition, not out of belief. Many people who celebrate Christmas do not believe that Jesus was the son of God and are definitely not prepared to die in his name. But suspicion, phobia, aversion, disgust, and hatred for the Jews—all these continue to exist at every level of Western society: in rural areas, in the middle classes, and among the elites, completely unconnected to political views. Many intellectuals in the same West that, to a large extent, no longer believes in Christianity, do not think there is any proof that Jesus ever lived and breathed, yet they nonetheless remain persuaded of the opinion that the Jews murdered him.7 The elites refrain from expressing their antisemitism outright, but they continue to feel that the Jews are ontologically other. This was already true during the Enlightenment, when Voltaire, Kant, Goethe, and Hegel all thought there was no place for the Jews in this rising era of “human rights.” For this reason, Leibowitz concludes, cooperation between Judaism and Christianity is simply inconceivable, and dialogue is impossible except between Jews who have shed their Judaism and Christians who have shed their Christianity.8

7 See Leibowitz, On Just About Everything, discussing Israel and Judaism. 8 See again Leibowitz’s review of The Deputy.

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A Talent for Error

Leibowitz had strong views about society, politics, and ethics. These views stemmed from the values that he defended, but these values, as he contended, needed no justification. He did not claim that they stemmed from any particular knowledge that he had, but rather from his desire to promulgate them. As meticulous as he could be when it came to science, he was controversial when it came to values, which he would defend relentlessly, sometimes by insincere means. His connection to religious practice led him to recognize a certain logic in the assertion that an absent, abstract God was the truth and that the real world was actually the deception. Yet common sense teaches us that a God about whom it is impossible to know anything, who is not the cause of anything, not aware of anything, and not responsible for anything is not a God toward whom there could be any kind of obligation. Since for Leibowitz this God is understood to exist entirely outside the world, it is hard to see what the content of any such obligation could be. Certainly nothing could prove that halakhah, which Leibowitz takes to be a human creation, corresponds to any such obligation. According to Leibowitz, Religion is in fact manifested in a system of commandments. In other words, accepting the yoke of the kingdom of heaven means accepting the yoke of the Torah and the commandments. The Jewish faith is a religion of commandments, and outside of this religion no such thing as the Jewish faith exists.1

1 Ways to Faith in Judaism (Jerusalem: Ministry of Education, 1980/1; in Hebrew); see also Faith, History, and Values (Jerusalem: Akademon, 1982; in Hebrew).

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Yet it seems that we have here a confusion between categories, since faith is the “I believe,” while religious practice is the action one takes. When it comes to “the God of Leibowitz,” we cannot see any functional connection between the two, and even less do we see any possibility of amalgamating the two. As a result, when he claims in the same breath that it is impossible to say anything about God but that we are obligated to serve Him through submission to the teachings of the Torah, this is a nonsensical argument, plain and simple. The starting point of Judaism is the struggle against idolatry by means of reason, something that anyone who is healthy in body and mind should be capable of. It is enough for someone to be receptive to logical argument in order to understand that bringing an offering to an idol so that it will protect you against your enemies is a ridiculous thing to do. The paradox of Leibowitz, though, is to renounce reason by means of reason. He refutes the notion of idols and replaces them with a God whose existence is impossible to prove, and whom it is therefore impossible to refute. His theology, therefore, leads to a God whose principal characteristic is that He does not exist. The majority of Jews who keep the commandments believe that the revelation is an established fact. But Leibowitz, citing the Guide for the Perplexed, does not believe in revelation as an event in history.2 Yet obedience to a God about whom nothing can be said, and who himself does not say a thing in the course of a revelation that never took place, would be an absurd kind of obedience. We therefore cannot see how an appeal to God could be of value in any way, since no one can imagine, represent, or conceive of such a God, let alone worship him. Leibowitz teaches that appealing to God is a personal decision, which everyone is obligated to take with utmost seriousness. But at the same time, he says that it is impossible to get Jews out of their Jewishness, whether they are believers or not. He reminds us that the Torah was “given” to the Jewish people and understands this to mean that God revealed Himself to human consciousness by means of the halakhah. This is an alarming premise: It presumes that “turning to God” is something metaphysical, entailing that “any Jew who does not submit to the commandments is a transgressor.”3

2 See Guide 2:33, the chapter on revelation. 3 Algazy, Israel’s Bad Conscience.

A Talent for Error

If our human ability to prescribe values for ourselves is a cosmic exception, as Leibowitz thinks, then why do all values not stem from God? On what does he base his assertion that all values that are not Jewish values do not stem from God, as halakhah does? It is easy to refute the assertion that the commandments are not intended to satisfy any human need: if we are obligated to serve God, then anyone who does so feels the satisfaction of doing his duty. It is even possible to argue that Christianity goes much further in this respect, since it despises pleasure as such and thinks that anyone who adopts suffering, mortification of the flesh, poverty, and sexual abstinence can, by doing so, redeem himself. Leibowitz notes the paradox that the Jews who “witnessed” the revelation at Mount Sinai more than 3,000 years ago nonetheless turned their backs on God in favor of the Golden Calf just 40 days later. On the other hand, he adds that the Jews continued to appeal for more than 2,000 years to a God who is deaf, dumb, and blind. He writes: Not a single one of all the generations of the exile received any sign from God. God did not rescue them nor ever came to their aid in time of trouble. And yet, those generations believed in God. To this very day, even though God does not reveal himself, no sign of God appears, and no prophet brings us word from God, there are still Jews who believe.4

Leibowitz presents this as proof that the Jews kept the commandments even though they knew that keeping them would not affect any of the hardships of their existence in the Diaspora. But he prefers to forget that in this case, all this proves nothing except that, like billions of other believers throughout history, these Jews too continued to put their faith in a God whose ways are hidden rather than concluding that he did not exist. This is certainly the case among the majority of believing Jews, and it is reasonable to assume that if they were ever to acknowledge that God does not intervene in nature or in history (as Leibowitz teaches us), many of them would cease to observe the commandments. Leibowitz is inconsistent in his condemnation of abortion and euthanasia: He does not treat everything connected to the sanctity of life with equal rigidity. He says that he is not a pacifist and considers it quite legitimate for him to have fought in the War of Independence. If we think, as he does, that it is possible to take up arms in certain circumstances, that 4 Ibid.

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is, that it is possible to wage a war that we consider just even though we are aware that innocent people will die, then we must likewise agree that it is impossible to forbid abortion and euthanasia outright on the grounds that life is sacred. With regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Leibowitz was wrong in many respects, from his ad hoc assertions, through his predictions and manner of expressing himself, right on through to his choice of rationales. He advocated withdrawal from the territories occupied in the Six-Day War because, in his view, the occupation was not Israel’s manifest destiny; in fact, it constitutes a demographic threat. He opposed it and never ceased to condemn it in the harshest terms. But if Israel had evacuated Sinai after the Six-Day War, as he demanded, it is quite possible that there would never have been a peace treaty with Egypt. Moreover, he was not completely sincere in his demand about the occupied territories, since he insisted on making an exception for Jerusalem: Jerusalem was already a city with a Jewish majority under Ottoman rule and it remained majority Jewish throughout the period of the British Mandate. Today, 75% of its inhabitants are Jews. Therefore, since it is impossible to split a city that constitutes a living body back into two, it is desirable for it to remain under Israeli sovereignty.5 I would prefer that Jerusalem remain in our hands—with all the troubles this will entail. I am not deluding myself: It will be difficult to keep it.6

In other words, he had nothing against people dying for Jerusalem, though he himself said that the Western Wall is nothing but a pile of stones turned into a place of idolatrous worship. He accused Yitzhak Rabin of not wanting to meet with Yasser Arafat. This refusal, in his opinion, meant that Rabin was not interested in peace. The fact is that Rabin did eventually meet with Arafat and paid with his life for it. As for Hezbollah, he writes: It is impossible to disengage from them as long as we occupy any part of the territory of Lebanon. Violence cannot be prevented until Israel withdraws from the security zone.7 5 Algazy, Israel’s Bad Conscience. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid.

A Talent for Error

But history has refuted his claim, since after Israel evacuated southern Lebanon, Hezbollah established its own state-within-a-state there, which is still threatening Israel’s destruction, thanks to the financial and military support of Iran. In 2005, Israel evacuated the Gaza Strip. Leibowitz was no longer among the living. Yet it is a reasonable estimate that, like many other Israelis, he would have considered this a step in the right direction. Reality, however, demonstrates that this process was of no benefit either to Israel or to the inhabitants of Gaza. Though the rulers of Gaza declared that after Israel left Gaza there would be an “economic miracle,” a “Middle Eastern Singapore,” what was established there instead was a terroristic theocracy. The end of the occupation in Gaza led to an increase in violence, not a decrease; stained Israel’s international image; and undermined the credibility of the Palestinian leadership. The “peace camp” in Israel likes to claim that Leibowitz’s opposition to the occupation was somehow prophetic. But this posthumous appropriation of Leibowitz is unwarranted. It ignores the fact that Leibowitz was not a pacifist. On the contrary, he thought that peace between Israelis and Arabs was impossible, since from an ontological perspective their respective claims to the territory are mutually exclusive. Though he sought an end to the occupation, he did not expect it to result in an end to the conflict, as opposed to Peace Now, which thinks that leaving the territories will be enough to get peace in return. Leibowitz thought that certain Israeli circles had what he considered a “Judeo-Nazi” mentality, and he predicted that the government would not hesitate to set up concentration camps to intern those who opposed the occupation. He compared the “treatment” reserved for Palestinians by the Shin Bet to the way Dr. Mengele treated the Jews in Auschwitz.8 A sickening combination like this might have originated in some wild fantasy or hallucination, but it could be that deep inside he thought that such an extreme description would somehow be persuasive. The truth is that his rhetoric worked against him rather than for him. In any event, outrageous behavior of this kind deprived him of credibility, and it did not result in significant numbers of new adherents to the policy that he preached, of withdrawal from the territories. 8 See The Limits of Intelligence: Conversations on Thought, Science, and Religion with Yeshaiyahu Leibowitz and Joseph Algazy (in Hebrew).

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In conversation with Joseph Algazy, Leibowitz complains: “I feel attacked every time someone violates the Sabbath in front of my home; I’m equally sorry that I can’t prevent the murder of a 1½-year-old baby by Israeli soldiers.” Combining these two claims into a single statement is shocking. An Israeli has a perfect right to desecrate the Sabbath, but we cannot see how Leibowitz could reach the conclusion that there is any kind of equivalence between violating the Sabbath and murdering children (as he says the IDF does). The implication of the analogy is that Israelis have a right to murder children, just as they have the right to desecrate the Sabbath. Many people have never forgiven him for this inflammatory rhetoric, guns blazing in all directions and repeating as his own the most disgusting Arab antisemitic propaganda. To Leibowitz, obedience to the state was not a supreme value. Men who hid behind their military obligation to serve in the occupied territories rather than desert were in his opinion using the same justification as Eichmann, who considered it legitimate to obey the Nazi laws. It is not just that this kind of hyperbole, totally removed from reality, expresses pointless evil—it actually reveals a strange clumsiness on the part of an intellectual who was otherwise so brilliant. He was once asked why he expressed himself so violently. This was his answer: I am a man who, with malice aforethought, profanes things that others sanctify; I do this deliberately and wickedly by saying things that hurt their feelings. I do this on purpose to offend them.9

There is a widespread consensus throughout the Western world that the Holocaust was unprecedented and therefore deserves a unique place in our collective memory. In any case, the inexpressible horror of the Holocaust makes any comparison to other enormities border on denial of it. What Leibowitz said about this was not justifiable, since he stained the image of Israel and insulted the IDF, an army that may not be perfect but is undoubtedly more moral than the armies of other nations. He never retracted this statement but merely claimed that he had been misunderstood and that he had never called anyone a Nazi, merely pointed out that in certain circles there prevailed an atmosphere reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s. But this is outright dishonesty, since he was quite aware of how excruciating his choice of words would sound to the collective consciousness of the Jews. 9 From an interview Leibowitz granted to Maariv in 1992.

A Talent for Error

The subtleties that he subsequently hid behind merely demonstrated his stubborn pride. As for antisemitism, he presumed that it was no longer part of the Zeitgeist, that the threat of it was slowly dissolving, and that the small amount of antisemitism that remained was nothing to worry about. He noted that everywhere in the world Jews enjoy the benefits of modernity in politics, the academy, business, and culture. In fact, he argued, the one place in which Jews were in danger was Israel. All this points to a surprising blindness in someone who was familiar with what things were like in Germany, the country in which Jews were slaughtered after it seemed that their integration into society was unchallenged. In fact, he acknowledged that when the Nazis took power he himself did not notice any antisemitism in his daily life. Half a century later he repeated his claim, minimizing the persistence of antisemitism in the post-war world. Even worse, he did not understand that the relative security that Jews today enjoy throughout the world is directly connected to the existence of the State of Israel, which has become the guardian angel of the Jewish people. Leibowitz abhorred nationalism, which he conflated at every opportunity with Fascism. He once called the national flag “a painted rag which they hoist on a pole and call ‘a flag.’”10 These are extraordinarily violent words coming from the mouth of the same Leibowitz who fought under that very flag, about which he said on another occasion, “We must wave the flag in celebration of our national holiday, because the independence of the Jewish people is expressed by its flag.”11 It would not be difficult to parody his own words and joke that he wore on his head “a rag called a skullcap” or that he wrapped around his shoulders “a rag called a prayer shawl.” Leibowitz rejected the idea that the commandments have any ethical dimension, since ethics cannot be established objectively but vary from time to time and from culture to culture. The verse “and thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself ”12 is not, in his opinion, an ethical principle because one must read it together with the words that immediately follow it: “I am the Lord.” The Torah, therefore, commands us to love our neighbor because it is a command—not out of humanism. 10 Leibowitz, Letters, 301. 11 Leibowitz, On Just About Everything. 12 Lev 19:18.

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To Leibowitz, there is no “morality” as such in the Torah. Though some of the commandments correspond to humanistic values, it is impossible to conclude anything at all from this. But such intellectual acrobatics are dubious. There are many rules in the Torah, regarding society, property, and justice, whose source is the Code of Hammurabi, which predated the Torah by many centuries. In truth, the redactors of the Talmud sought to distance the Torah from the common morality of the time, and they therefore asserted that the commandments, because they were divine, were also eternal. As if to add to the confusion, Leibowitz asserts that the commandments are divine, because that is what the redactors of the Talmud decided! Yet here too he is inconsistent: He holds that we must update the halakhah to bring it in tune with modern times, especially with regard to the status of women, homosexuality, and other social questions.

Afterword

To Leibowitz, one of the main reasons for the intellectual regression of contemporary Judaism lies in the importance that kabbalah has attained in the consciousness of believers, for whom it has more or less replaced metaphysics. Religious Zionism, for its part, has turned into a nationalism who origins are in Judah Halevi,1 and the various kinds of Orthodoxy continue to worship a personal God who rewards and punishes, without even a shred of proof that there is any such God. They are essentially cultivating a Judaism of unenlightenment. Leibowitz grew up in an observant family and chose to continue on that path. He could have not done so, but we may assume that had he not, he would have been consumed with guilt. It could be that his adherence to the tradition is not dependent on profound faith as much as on his discomfort with denying his roots. As someone endowed with amazing intelligence, he spent his whole life trying to persuade himself—or at least to persuade others—that his faith rested on a solidly intellectual foundation. But this was one of his weaknesses: He considered himself so Cartesian2 that nothing could possibly entice him away from reason. The truth is that this was not his only paradox: He warned, for example, that idolatry must be avoided because it was irrational, yet at other times he agreed that his own religious beliefs were equally non-rational. He would certainly respond that it would be easy to prove the non-existence of the pagan gods, but the transcendent God of Judaism was ineffable. Moreover, he declared that the obligation to appeal to God did not relate to what a person knows but to what he wants. Leibowitz wanted God. 1 See Chapter 5, “Judah Halevi.” 2 That is, he considered himself a rational being who adhered solely to facts and common sense.

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He must have concluded very early in his life that the existence of a personal God of the sort believed in by his co-religionists was ridiculous. Yet it did not fit any better into the Judaism of Maimonides, despite the fact that the latter was one of the most prominent halakhists of all time. In asserting the absence of God, he preferred to think about Judaism and sometimes even beat up on it rather than abandon it. Yet he realized that, ultimately, religion had been corrupted into another form of idolatry. The more attempts were made to use halakhah to entice the Jews away from idolatry, the more the halakhah itself was idolized. He considered this a universal problem, which the Torah was no better able to solve than any other spiritual approach. The founding fathers of Judaism thought that they had put idolatry on a path to extinction by replacing the many gods with just one. But they did not follow their own logic through to the end, for they ought to have combined God with nature, like Spinoza, or declared the death of God, like Nietzsche. It is no coincidence that it was a Jew—Spinoza—who changed the history of Western civilization when he replaced the God of Moses with a God of nature. It is difficult not to see, as a meticulous analysis of Judaism demonstrates, that Jewish thought never had any other goal than the eradication of idolatry. All Spinoza did was to follow that logic to the end, by which he wished to reduce religion to an anthropological phenomenon. Leibowitz left no followers behind. Though he was a radical rationalist, he remained connected to religious practice, at least partially, as a result of his personal history. He would never have admitted it, but the fact is that he had a passion for Jewish thought and saw himself as a follower of Maimonides, whose writings he never ceased to study. We cannot plumb the depths of Leibowitz’s thought to determine whether it was faith that motivated him or whether he thought, like Maimonides, that the most important thing was to entice the Jews away from idolatry, even at the cost of persisting in the belief that there was a transcendent God toward whom human beings owe an obligation. In fact, it is worth noting that when he was asked why he wore a skullcap, he replied, “There is no source in halakhah for wearing a skullcap, but it is an accepted custom among those Jews who keep the Torah and the commandments, and I don’t want to make a show of separating myself from this group.”3 But

3 Leibowitz, Letters, 500.

Afterword

it could be that he also was not aware that he was really on the last step of the gangplank leading inexorably, in my opinion, from Judaism to atheism. In a letter to Gershom Scholem,4 Leibowitz expresses his disapproval of the outbreak of kabbalah in Judaism5 and of the fact that Maimonideanism, despite its well-known influence, had not taken precedence. But it could be that he was inconsistent in wanting to put an end to the illusion of a personal God while at the same time retaining the practice of Judaism. Asked what faith could mean in the absence of God, he responded that Judaism was not a faith but a demand. To the question of whether this demand came from God, he responded that he knew nothing about that, but he knew what his obligation was. Leibowitz never considered himself a spiritual guide, but the fact is that he opened his home to anyone who was curious enough to want to understand his thought, or simply wanted to ask him some questions about one of the scientific fields that he taught. Some came to seek clarification with regard to religion and left with their faith strengthened; others came out atheistic, which panicked the rabbinic establishment: There were cases in which yeshiva students saw their spiritual world crumble under Leibowitz’s implacable logic. As a result, everything they had learned during their long years of study dissolved, and their faith vanished forever. In light of the foregoing, it is impossible not to find comfort in the idea that Leibowitz’s spiritual legacy lies in the notion that Judaism was, from its very beginning, no more than a step toward atheism. In this sense, Judaism is humanism—despite itself.

4 In a letter from July 1941; Leibowitz, Letters, 255. 5 See also Algazy, Israel’s Bad Conscience.

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Sources

Blaise Pascal, Pensées Aristotle, Politics Plato, The Republic Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Albert Camus, The Fall Baruch Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise Judah Halevi, The Kuzari Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed; Mishneh Torah The Bible The Talmud Leibowitz in English Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, Harvard University Press, 1995. The Faith of Maimonides, MOD Books, 1999. Accepting the Yoke of Heaven: Commentary on the Weekly Torah Portion, Urim Publications, 2002. About Leibowitz “Yeshayahu Leibowitz,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/ entries/leibowitz-yeshayahu/

Bibliography

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Index

Algazy, Joseph, 79n11, 90n13, 122n3, 124-126, 131n5 Allen, Woody, 93 Amsterdam, 13, 32 Arafat, Yasser, 124 Aristotle, 16, 39, 65, 69, 91, 103 Methaphysics, 103 Politics, 16 Australia, 76, 101 Barth, Karl, 117 Belgium, 76 Ben Azzai, 69 Bergson, Henri, 32 Bernard, Claude, 98 Boissières, Yves, 91n4 Camus, Albert, 59 Fall, 59 Camus, Renaud, 82 Grand replacement, 82 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 75 Cordoba, 17 Darwin, Charles, 30, 81, 101-102 Origin of Species, 101 Deleuze, Gilles, 32n21 Descartes, René, 67n24, 91 Democritus, 30 Dubois, Marcel, 60-61 Dubov, Nissan Dovid, 41 Egypt, 16, 18, 36n12, 39-41, 78, 124 Eichmann, Adolf, 85, 116-117, 126 Einstein, Albert, 31 Encyclopedia Hebraica, 11 Epicurus, 52 Freud, Sigmund, 78, 111

Gaon of Vilna, 66 Gaza Strip, 125 Germany, 126-127 Gibbon, Edward, 80 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 91, 120 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 91 Goodman, Micah, 24n4 Haifa, 11 Halevi, Judah, 22-26, 129 Kuzari, 22, 24 Harari, Yuval Noah, 81n15, 108 Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, 108 Hayoun, Maurice-Ruben, 48 Hideki, Tojo, 54 Hochhuth, Rolf, 118n6 Holocaust, 45, 85, 104, 116-117, 119, 126 Homer, 16, 78 Ibn Ezra, Abraham, 13 Ibn Gabirol, Solomon, 44 India, 76 Iran, 125 Israel, 76 Jaspers, Karl, 36 Jerusalem Joubert, Jean-Marc, 51n3 Kant, Emmanuel, 64, 68 Metaphysics of Morals, 68 Kasher, Asa, 34-35 Kook, Abraham Isaak, 22 Latvia, 11 Lebanon, 124-25 Leibniz, Gottfried, 39, 94n11 Leibowitz, Nechama, 12, 70

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Leibowitz or God's Absence

Lemler, David, 40n24 Lubavitcher Rebbe, see Schneerson, Menachem Mendel Luther, Martin, 116 Maimonides, x, 13-22, 25-28, 30, 37-39, 41-44, 47-49, 54, 57, 64-65, 67, 69, 103104, 106, 111, 118, 130 Commentary to the Mishnah, 47 Eight Chapters, 15n6, 16n12, 19, 44n45, 57n6, 65n15 Epistle to Yemen, 21 Essay on Resurrection, 48-49 Guide of the Perplexed, 16n13, 18-20, 30, 37, 41-42, 48, 54n10, 64, 67, 122 “Letter on Astrology,” 106, 111n15 Mishneh Torah, 18-21, 39-40, 43, 48, 65-66, 69-70, 104, 118 Treatise on Logic, 18 Marx, Karl, 80, 81n17 Melamed, Eliezer, 88 Mengele, Joseph, 125 Meslier, Jean, 66n19 Montaigne, Michel de, 20, 26, 38 Mount Sinai, 15, 23, 39-42, 64, 71, 123 Mesopotamia, 13 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 34, 61n6, 86, 130 Thus Spake Zarathustra, 61n6 Twilight of the Idols, 34, 86 Onfray, Michel, 31n14 Palestine, 11, 112, 114, 124-125 Pascal, Blaise, 54, 78 Pensées, 54n12 Pius XII, Pope 118-119 Plato, 16, 20, 41, 56, 61n6, 64, 68, 78 Gorgias, 56 Republic, 16, 41, 64n13 Popper, Karl, 91, 107, 111 Portugal, 27 R. Akiba, 86 R. Eliezer ben Azariah, 86 R. Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, 69 R. Tarfon, 86 Rabin, Yitzhak, 124 Revel, Jean-François, 83 Riga, 11 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 54

Sagi, Avi, 58n10, 71-72 Saint-Just, Louis Antoine Léon de, 79 Sand, Shlomo, 76-77 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 52n7-8, 57, 65, 105 Schach, Eliezer, 104 Schneerson, Menachem Mendel, 40, 43, 45 Scholem, Gershom, 26n9, 131 Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), 117 Second World War, see World War II Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, 31, 46, 62 Shakespeare, William, 56, 61-62, 68 Macbeth, 61-62 Shashar, Michael, 15n7, 68n28, 71, 85n3, 112n2, 117n3 Sherki, Ouri, 40 Shimon b. Azzai, see Ben Azzai Six Day War, 82n19, 113, 124 Socrates, x, 11, 56 Sophocles, 68 Antigone, 68 Spain, 17, 76 Spinoza, Baruch, х, 14, 19, 21, 26-32, 46-47, 57, 63, 65, 91, 130 Ethics, 29n8, 30n11, 31n15, 32n20 Theologico-Political Treatise, 14n5, 26, 28-31 Switzerland, 76 Tal, Lior, 46n57, 64 Thucydides, 68 Tiberias, 18 United Kingdom, 76 United States, 76 Verlaine, Paul, 96n16 Voltaire, 66n19, 120 War of Independence, 11, 115, 123 Weil, Simone, 89 Winter, Greta, 12 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 62, 71 World War II, 54, 87, 118 Yannai, Tzvi, 98n2 Zaarur, Eliahu, 98, 101n3, 103, 110n12 Ziv, Yosi, 63n12, 95n13 Zivan, Gili, 71n41