## 1. Life and Works



Born to an observant Jewish family in Riga in 1903, Leibowitz gained
his education at the *Gymnasium*, with concurrent
home-schooling for his Jewish studies, before the family fled Russia
in 1919 for Berlin. At the University of Berlin, Leibowitz studied
chemistry and philosophy, receiving his doctorate in the former in
1924. After studying at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute from
1926-1928, Leibowitz went onto study medicine in Koln and
Heidelberg, though with the Nazis gaining power he would gain his
formal medical degree in Basel. In 1935 he moved to Palestine,
initially as professor of biochemistry at the Hebrew University, going
on to be appointed as head of biological and organic chemistry and
professor of neurophysiology at the Medical School, as well as
lecturing on the history and philosophy of science. Yet these formal
academic appointments formed but one side of his work, and far from
the most public, for in addition Leibowitz taught Jewish thought,
whether in an academic context, in small study groups, or on
television and radio, with a number of these broadcasts and
study-group notes having since been published. But aside from these
activities and his being editor in chief of several volumes of the
*Encyclopedia Hebraica*, it was for his political interventions
that Leibowitz would gain most notoriety on the Israeli public scene,
whether in his criticism of the religious parties as the "kept
mistress" (*Judaism*, 115) of the Israeli government, his
argument as early as 1968 that Israel should withdraw from the
newly-occupied West Bank and Gaza strip, or his public call for
conscientious objectors from the time of the Lebanon war of 1982 and
subsequently in the Palestinian territories. Leibowitz's ability
to stir up public controversy was in evidence as late as 1993, the
year before he died, in a speech to the Israel Council for
Israeli-Palestinian Peace, where he reiterated his call on soldiers to
refuse to serve in the Territories, using, not for the first time,
highly provocative language comparing special units of the Israeli
army to the SS. The speech followed the announcement that he was to
receive the Israel prize - the country's most prestigious
civilian award - in recognition of his life's work, a move
that precipitated an appeal to the Supreme Court, and a threat to
boycott the ceremony by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Leibowitz,
however, saved everyone further embarrassment by declining the
award.


### 1.1 Works



Leibowitz's philosophy found expression in numerous essays that
first appeared in Hebrew periodicals and were subsequently collated,
with some overlap, into a handful of volumes published at irregular
intervals, most significantly *Torah u-Mitzvot ba-Zeman ha-Zeh*
[Torah and Commandments in Our Time] (1954); *Yahadut, Am Yehudi
u-Medinat Yisrael* [Judaism, Jewish People, and the State of
Israel] (1975); and *Emunah, Historiah, va-Arakhim* [Faith,
History, and Values] (1982). 1982 also saw the publication of the
transcripts of his study-group on Maimonides' *Shemoneh
Perakim* - the section of Maimonides' *Commentary to
the Mishnah* that serves as an introduction to Tractate
*Avot* (generally known in English as the *Ethics of the
Fathers*). A number of his contributions to Israeli television and
radio also appeared in print - including series on the philosophy
of Maimonides and on the weekly Torah reading - and continue to do
so posthumously, along with transcripts of further study-group
discussions. Though far better known in Israel than in the
English-speaking world, the publication in English translation of a
collection of his writings in 1992 - *Judaism, Human Values,
and the Jewish State* - opened the way to a growing critical
engagement with his thought beyond those oft disputed borders. While
as recently as 2015 it was possible for one scholar to state that his
"original and unique concept of Jewish religiosity has hardly
been adopted by other Jewish thinkers and practitioners, in Israel and
abroad" (Benbassat 2015, 141), one now finds a broadening of
Leibowitz scholarship beyond exclusively Jewish concerns and the
Kantian comparisons that were the staple of early critical work, to a
clutch of recent attempts to place his work in proximity to that of
Emmanuel Levinas, whose work Leibowitz held in high
 regard,[2]
 and Soren Kierkegaard. His radio broadcasts on Maimonides and on the
weekly Torah reading of 1985-1986 are now also available in
English.


### 1.2 Methodology



In the 1953 piece "*Mitzvot Ma'asiyot*" (a
later version of which was translated as "Religious
Praxis," in *Judaism*), at once the most succinct
statement of his philosophy and his most expansive essay that
foreshadows much of what he would go on to write throughout his
career, Leibowitz tells us that he is not concerned to
"elaborate a philosophic justification or rationale for the
Mitzvoth [commandments]," but instead to expand on "their
meaning for Jewish religion as we live it" (*Judaism*,
4). Indeed, while some of Leibowitz's ideas are certainly drawn
from (and relevant to) the philosophy of religion more generally, his
writings are very specifically directed to giving a philosophical
exposition of Judaism, and in particular of the mitzvoth that are at
its heart. "Exposition" may, however, appear to be a
misleading term to use given that the earliest published Hebrew
version of this piece opens with some introductory methodological
remarks "designed to guide the argument," in which he
states that argument "and *not exposition* - should
be the main point of our discussion," (*Torah u-Mitzvot*,
 9).[3]
 Leibowitz's mixed signals here - talk of expanding on
"meaning" suggests a more hermeneutical and expository
approach, and yet he wishes to eschew "exposition" for
argument - indicate important limits on what Leibowitz sets out to
achieve.



Given his scientific training, Leibowitz "argues" on the
basis of empirical (most often historical) evidence for certain
factual claims regarding, for example, the centrality of mitzvoth in
Judaism to the exclusion of mysticism, philosophy, or dogma. Yet, on
the very same positivistic grounds, he is not willing to launch
parallel "arguments" in order to *justify* specific
practices or indeed Jewish practice as a whole (though this is a topic
to which we will have cause to return). Leibowitz helps himself to a
stark fact/value distinction, insisting that "Values are not
anchored in reality" (*Judaism*, 139); that there is
"no relation of connection or mutual dependence between
scientific cognition and evaluative decision" (*Mada*,
7). Thus, if one is expecting to find an argument justifying the
halakhic way of life through syllogistic reasoning from foundational
principles, or justifications of the commandments in the manner of the
great medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides, one is likely to
be disappointed. What we do find, in line with much contemporary
Jewish philosophy, is an insider's account of the meaning of
faith in Judaism as understood from within that tradition, albeit with
implications beyond those boundaries. And for Leibowitz, such
"meaning" is aligned with the purposes and values we
espouse, such that at times he uses the expression "value and
meaning", or some variation of it, as if it were a single
syntactic unit (see *Judaism*, 135-138, for example) As
Leibowitz notes when discussing Aristotelian science, two people
looking at the same things and agreed on all of the material facts and
"efficient causes" can nonetheless attach very different
meanings to the phenomena in question when they introduce the
perspective of their final causes (*Mada*, 27). So while facts
are relevant to his factual claims about the nature of Judaism, it is
to values and purposes that we must turn if we are to fully understand
meaning, and the meaning of the faith of Judaism cannot therefore be
justified by appeal to the world of scientific cognition. At the same
time, in contrast to some of the best-known twentieth century Jewish
philosophers, Leibowitz is also wary of any appeal to religious
experience to further his account of the meaning of Jewish faith.
"Most characteristic of the Halakhah," he tells us,
"is its lack of pathos" (*Judaism*, 13). The only
reliable tools that we can use in order to investigate the meaning of
this evaluative notion of faith, therefore, remain those of discursive
reasoning. Thus we generally find Leibowitz using the tools of
rational philosophical discourse to trace the implications of his
foundational positions to their logical conclusions.



Rather than setting out his philosophy comprehensively in the form of
a system based on foundational premises, Leibowitz generally wrote
short articles devoted to specific topics. It is nonetheless fair to
say that there is a single axis around which his philosophy of Judaism
revolves and to which many of his views can ultimately be
traced - the radical transcendence of God. In what follows we will
begin with Leibowitz's understanding of God's
transcendence, which will enable us to proceed to his conceptions of
theology, Scripture, Jewish faith, ethics, and briefly politics, all
of which ultimately wend their way back to that fundamental idea.
While occasionally developments and changes in his thought will be
noted, particularly in the political section, on the whole we will be
dealing with his mature views since, as Hannah Kasher has argued, in
the 1992 English translations to which most readers of this will have
access, even the earlier essays have been translated in a manner that
often reflects the later views (Kasher, 2000, 54).


## 2. God and Theology



According to Leibowitz, the central idea of Jewish monotheism is the
radical transcendence of God, a view that has previously been given
its starkest exposition by his philosophical hero, Maimonides.
Postponing discussion of its precise logical status for Leibowitz, and
provisionally accepting that "God is radically
transcendent" is a cognitive statement, a rough first
formulation of its meaning would be that God is an existent entity
that is absolutely incomparable to any other form of reality that we
can possibly encounter.



Following Maimonides' negative theology, Leibowitz claims that
we are unable to make any meaningful statements that purport to
describe God. Any attempt to speak of God's properties or
characteristics transcend the limits of human thought and language. In
good Kantian, or even positivist fashion, human categories of thought
only get any purchase in the human context within which they are
formulated. They cannot be assumed to retain their meaning when
applied beyond the boundaries of possible human experience. Of course,
this depends on the further assertion that God is not a possible
object of such human experience, a point to which Leibowitz swiftly
proceeds. For a thoroughgoing commitment to the idea of the radical
transcendence of God yields a number of important ontological
conclusions that go beyond the semantic point made thus far. For
Leibowitz, the idea of radical transcendence, if taken seriously,
implies that God cannot be "contained" within any reality
that we encounter. Nature is nature, history is history - and if
God is truly transcendent neither are God or are related to God in any
direct sense. Thus, in a self-aware, if not self-deprecating moment,
Leibowitz sets out his "heresy" (his description, not
mine) thus: "God did not reveal himself in nature or in
history." (*Yahadut*, 240) Were things otherwise, then
nature and history would be "Godly" - and thus would
be perfect and worthy of worship themselves. There would be "no
room for 'the holy God' who transcends natural reality,
since then reality itself is divine and man himself is God"
(*Judaism*, 25).



For Leibowitz, the only alternative to this view is a form of
pantheism - the attribution of divinity in some sense to natural
objects - an idea that he admits finds "echoes ... in
Jewish mysticism," which to that extent is therefore
"incompatible with halakhic Judaism" (*Judaism*,
26). The idea that any material object can be holy is something that,
in Leibowitz's eyes, is the ultimate definition of idolatry,
potentially leading to the worship of people, objects,
or - significantly for his brand of Zionism - land. In
contrast, though it might seem ironic at first glance given his view
of pantheism, Leibowitz here takes up an almost Spinozan approach to
nature. For Leibowitz, taking God's transcendence seriously
entails the elimination of superstitious beliefs in holy entities with
supernatural endowments, and thus he endorses a Spinozan
demythologization of the natural
 world.[4]
 But while Spinoza is willing to speak of "God or nature,"
for Leibowitz, the natural world must be purified of *any*
trace of divinity; divinity - or holiness - is a notion that
Leibowitz retains as a term to be used in connection with the God who
radically *transcends* nature, with no
 remainder.[5]



Denuding the world of divinity does not stop for Leibowitz at the
natural world. History, as the story of humankind in the natural
world, can no more carry divine significance than can a material
object. The idea that there is some divine purpose in history, that
God exerts some form of providence over humankind, would similarly
contradict the idea of God's transcendence and is thus a
baseless notion for Leibowitz for whom "an unbiased examination
of the history of humankind and of the Jews as related in the Bible
will not reveal in the entire process ... any design or definite
direction, or gradual approach to a specific goal"
(*Judaism*, 102).



On the basis of these remarks, one immediately sees that
Leibowitz's thought will be devoid of much that passes for
traditional Jewish or general theology. Faith cannot be formulated
around propositions that speak of God and his providential
relationship to the universe. Holiness is confined to God and cannot
be predicated of anything that exists in the world (which also,
incidentally, explains his opposition to any ethnocentric
interpretation of the idea of Chosen-ness based on some intrinsic
"property" of holiness that Jews inherit). Any attribution
of holiness to objects that might be found in Jewish texts is to be
understood as attributing functional rather than essential holiness to
the object in
 question.[6]



Leibowitz's God is not a providential God; history has no
teleology; and we find no attempts at theodicy in Leibowitz. In
contrast to many contemporary Jewish philosophers, the holocaust
merits barely a mention in his philosophical writings, other than to
dismiss it from theological discussion. The holocaust, as a historical
event, can have no religious meaning for Leibowitz given his
thoroughgoing commitment to divine transcendence that does not allow
for a God who is involved in human
 affairs.[7]
 Those who would question, indeed those who lost their faith in God as
a result of Auschwitz "never believed in God but in God's
help... [for] one who believes in God ... does not relate
this to belief in God's help" (*Accepting the
Yoke*, 21).



For Leibowitz, this is a direct result of taking one's
commitment to the radical transcendence of God to its logical
conclusion. It is one thing, Leibowitz might say, to pay lip service
to the idea of God's transcendence. But if God is to be truly
transcendent, then we cannot associate our reality at any level with
that of God. The one statement that we can make regarding
God - that he is radically transcendent - can only be fleshed
out further by clarifying how God is not anything that we can
encounter in ordinary, or for that matter extraordinary, human
experience. That Leibowitz here goes beyond even Maimonides is clear
inasmuch as for Maimonides, though we cannot speak of God's
intrinsic properties, we can speak of his "actions," which
is to speak of the course of nature, of which God is the first cause.
And yet for Leibowitz, even this would transgress the limits to which
the notion of radical transcendence binds us. To say that nature
reflects God's actions renders God immanent in nature, and thus
no longer transcendent. From both a semantic and ontological
perspective, therefore, Leibowitz takes the notion of God's
transcendence further than even his own philosophical
"idol" (see Statman 2005), leaving us with a Judaism that
as Avi Sagi notes, is empty of both "theology and
'religious facts'" (Sagi 1997a, 206). 


## 3. Interpreting Scripture



Leibowitz begins with a definition of God and draws out its
implications for how we are to conceive of the world from a Jewish
perspective. But where does he find this starting point? Textually
speaking, one might claim to find grounding for the radical
transcendence of God in various biblical verses and statements drawn
from the Jewish tradition more generally, but no less than one can
find quotes to question this account of God's relationship with
nature and with history - as Leibowitz himself often
 acknowledges.[8]
 Indeed, any plain reading of Jewish Scripture would seem to suggest a
God very closely involved with history and nature. Leibowitz's
reading of Jewish Scripture is therefore based on a very particular
hermeneutic approach to the *Tanakh* (the acronym used to refer
to Jewish Scripture, based on the three works of which is
composed - *Torah*, (lit. instruction),
*Nevi'im* (Prophets), and *Ketuvim*
(Writings)).



Leibowitz's definition of the *Tanakh* as Holy Scripture
would appear atypically to place him in uncontroversial territory.
But, what, for Leibowitz, does it mean to accord it this status and
how is it to be interpreted? For simplicity's sake, we will
focus in what follows on the Torah, the founding constitution of
Judaism and the most authoritative part of the *Tanakh*.
Traditionally, it was believed that: 1) The Torah is the word of God
as dictated to Moses; and 2) it contains both the history of ancient
Israel and the eternally valid laws that bind the Jewish
people - the mitzvoth. Though both claims are contested in
contemporary denominations of Judaism, Leibowitz is highly critical of
such denominations, identifying himself with Orthodox Judaism within
which these would usually remain fundamental tenets. Yet his view of
Scripture is some distance from the traditional picture.



While many traditionalists would read the Torah as containing the
prehistory of Judaism - if not of the world - and thus as
being full of factual statements teaching such information, Leibowitz
cannot accept this to be the case. Beginning with a basic
epistemological point, as noted earlier Leibowitz's scientific
training and vocation led him to take a positivistic approach to
knowledge claims. Thus he writes that "our source of information
is science. To the extent that we possess any real knowledge it is by
way of scientific cognition" (*Judaism*, 136). But, given
God's transcendence, there can be nothing holy about history or
nature, or the information it provides. So were the Torah a history
book or a scientific tract detailing the science of the
universe - and it is of course often read as at least giving an
account of the origins of the universe - "it would be
difficult to see where [its] sacredness resided"
(*Judaism*, 140). The Torah cannot be a holy book if it is
teaching us information that is by (Leibowitz's) definition
 profane.[9]



But this means that the *prima facie* factual assertions that
we encounter must be read as nothing of the sort. The Torah is not a
work of fact containing truths that we can obtain through standard
epistemic procedures. It is rather, a sacred work, a work that is
concerned with the realm of the religious. Not for Leibowitz therefore
the time-honoured medieval conundrum regarding faith and reason. While
for his medieval Jewish forbears reason and revelation were competing
for the same territory - raising the question of the relevance of
the latter for those enamoured of the former - Leibowitz is happy
to give reason its due without worrying about its encroachment into
the territory of revelation, and *vice versa*. The Torah as a
sacred work is dealing in the realm of the sacred and is not supposed
to be a repository of the propositional truths of history or science.
What it provides instead is "the demand made of man to worship
God" (*Judaism*, 136). As noted earlier, Leibowitz has no
truck with the idea that there could be "religious facts"
and the idea that belief in creation, for example, could be a
religious demand would conflate facts and values. The Torah is the
source of the commandments - the mitzvoth - which are the
manner in which Jews are to serve God. 



In one sense, this hermeneutic serves Leibowitz well, allowing him to
bypass textual objections to his anti-providential reading of the
Torah by claiming that the apparent references to God's role in
nature or history are no longer to be understood factually, but rather
as expressing something about the nature of our obligation to God.
Similarly, stories of individuals are not to be mined for their
historical content but for what they teach regarding the nature of
religious obligation. At the same time, it demands a far from
intuitive reading of much of Scripture, especially the stories of
individuals that are certainly presented as if they are in some sense
historical, and that in the later books of the Prophets that are also
part of Holy Scripture surely *are* historical in part. Yet
Leibowitz insists that in attempting the impossible - speaking of
God - the Torah necessarily uses various literary forms amenable
to human comprehension, but that nonetheless "from the
standpoint of religious faith, the Torah and the entirety of Holy
Scripture must be conceived as a *demand* which transcends the
range of human cognition ... a demand conveyed in various forms
of human expression: prescriptions, vision, poetry, prayer, thought,
and narrative" (*Judaism*, 140).



This does not rule out in principle the possibility of the narratives
happening to contain historical information in part. Scripture's
narratives could at times coincide with historical facts, though
whether or not this is the case would be subject to independent
verification of these purported historical facts by standard epistemic
criteria. But even allowing for this possibility, the historical
meaning would be merely accidental. Such facts would not take on any
sacred meaning in virtue of that facticity, but rather on account of
imparting an ahistorical sacred message. The Torah, qua Holy
Scripture, cannot be read as a repository of historical fact. To read
it "from the standpoint of religious faith," is to read it
for the demands it places upon us.



Nonetheless, given Leibowitz's views on God's
transcendence, it is clear that the sacred and historical
interpretations of the text *are* mutually exclusive when it
comes to references to God's "intervention" in
history or nature. Maintaining God's transcendence demands that
there can be no such incursions of holiness into the world of the
profane, and Leibowitz's hermeneutic allows him to police these
boundaries and deny that the Torah teaches us anything about
God's actual intervention in nature or his directing of history.
Apparently factual statements to this end in the Torah are not to be
construed as such, but rather in terms of the normative messages that
they carry. Here, the priority that Leibowitz gives to his
understanding of God's transcendence appears forcefully,
constraining him to take this hermeneutic stance. It does, however,
raise the question of Leibowitz's understanding of the divine
status of the Torah. For, if we cannot speak of it being revealed by
God in any historical sense, whence its divinity? Leibowitz, fully
aware of the problem, maintains that it is the Oral Torah that
establishes the divinity of the Written Torah.



Traditional Jewish teaching maintained that at the same time as he
transmitted the Written Torah, God transmitted an oral teaching to
Moses that was not to be written down. This Oral teaching developed
into the multi-layered work that was eventually written down as the
Talmud by the end of the sixth century and that was the source of the
complex practical system of law - halakhah - that governed
Jewish life until the nineteenth century and continues to structure
the life of contemporary Orthodox Jews. Leibowitz maintains that
"religiously and from a logical and causal standpoint the Oral
Law, the Halakhah, is prior to the Written Teaching"
(*Judaism*, 12), and thus it is the Oral Torah that grants
divine status to the Written Torah:



> 
> 
> The decision about which books to accept as Scripture was not
> made behind the veil of mythology or pre-history, but took place in
> the full light of history and in the course of halakhic
> negotiation.... Scripture is one of the institutions of the
> religion of Israel. (*Judaism*, 12)
> 
> 
> 



This, Leibowitz admits, yields an inescapably circular account whereby
the divinity of the Written Torah is established by the Oral Torah,
which only gains its own authority on the basis of the Written Torah
that it is being used to support. More significantly Leibowitz
emphasizes time and again that the Oral Torah is a human product. Thus
we end up with human beings stipulating that the Written Torah is
divine, a stipulation, however, that only has authority based upon the
Written Torah's own statements to the effect that one must
follow the words of the human
 sages.[10]
 Reinforcing the circularity, this way of reading of the relevant
verses in the Torah itself depends on interpretation by the sages.



Leibowitz maintains, then, that we can say one thing about
God - that he is radically transcendent, a statement the content
of which is exhausted in the denial of any element of divinity to any
other reality. Allowing for this denial of any positive theology that
would relate God to history or nature, we still find one thing to
which we can attach divinity, and that is Scripture. However, the most
basic question regarding whether or not God revealed the Torah in any
historical sense must be answered negatively by Leibowitz, as noted in
Statman 2005 (60) and Sagi 1997a (213), leaving him with an account of
the divinity of Scripture that is circular, and that ultimately seems
unable to escape its reliance on human decision.


## 4. Jewish Faith and Jewish Law



The "top-down" approach to Leibowitz's theology
taken so far places extreme limits on what one can say or know about
God but does not yield a constructive account of the nature of Jewish
faith. His positive formulation therefore proceeds from an altogether
different direction. Taking a more "bottom-up" approach
methodologically speaking, Leibowitz utilizes a historical argument in
defining Jewish faith, arguing that throughout history, at least until
the emancipation of European Jewry beginning at the end of the
eighteenth century, Judaism was defined through adherence to Jewish
practice, to the commandments of the Torah itself, and the subsequent
development of these commandments into the all encompassing system of
Jewish law, or Halakhah. Any definition of Jewish faith must therefore
centre upon Jewish practice, on the mitzvoth that governed the
everyday life of Jews until modern times. Moreover, Leibowitz's
historical account of faith makes no allowances for any theological
accretions, be they mystical or philosophical, which would purport to
define it. Jewish theology through the ages has always adapted itself
to prevailing philosophical or mystical winds, and is seen by
Leibowitz as "episodic and fleeting" (*Judaism*,
8). Whether the conceptual scaffolding was kabbalah or rationalist
philosophy, Judaism "was never dependent upon some specific
philosophy, ethic, world view, or theology" (*Judaism*,
8-9), though it is mysticism and not rationalism which, along
with Reform Judaism, he classifies one of "the two great
distortions of Jewish faith" (*Judaism*, 111).



This historical account also melds with Leibowitz's theological
starting point. Given God's transcendence, we know that the
realm of natural or historical fact cannot be holy. Faith cannot
therefore be "a conclusion a person may come to after pondering
certain facts about the world," and instead is "an
*evaluative decision* that one makes, and, like all
evaluations, it does not result from any information one has acquired,
but is *a commitment to which one binds himself*"
(*Judaism*, 37, emphasis added). Jewish faith, therefore, since
it cannot consist of propositional beliefs concerning God upon which
halakhic observance is based, is instead founded upon the evaluative
decision to commit to that very system of observance. For Leibowitz it
is the mitzvoth themselves "which demarcate the realm of the
sacred ... [and] anything outside that realm lacks sanctity and
is unworthy of religious adoration" (*Judaism*, 25).



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



Ordinarily one might assume that the commitment to the practice of the
halakhic way of life is an independently specifiable mental act and
certain statements that Leibowitz makes in his earlier writings,
vestiges of which remain in some less careful later formulations,
might still appear to suggest
 this.[11]
 Yet for Leibowitz, faith is *not* an independently specifiable
psychological state that can be defined in isolation from its
practical fruits. Indeed he castigates those who "wish to
distinguish a specific psychological-conceptual content of the
religious consciousness from its concrete institutionalized
embodiment" (*Judaism*, 38). Leibowitz will not allow us
to pinpoint a particular psychological state that constitutes this
commitment, and correlatively is highly critical of mystical
approaches to Judaism that revolve around putative religious
experiences. A religion devoted to halakhic practice "does not
depend upon the incidence of religious experience"
(*Judaism*, 13), which is a mere "embellishment" to
halakhic practice. Indeed, "the aim of proximity to God is
unattainable" (*Judaism*, 16).



Clearly for Leibowitz, the problem with specifying some psychological
basis for this commitment is defining what the content of this mental
act would be. To what am I committed? The natural answer is that we
are committed to worshipping God. But any attempt to unpack that
statement further will lead us to transgress the previously noted
boundaries of human cognition. The proposition "I am committed
to God" is not open to further elaboration if God is beyond our
categories of language and thought. Belief in God for Leibowitz, which
cannot be formulated propositionally, can only then be embodied in a
commitment to a particular way of life, which is expressed by
subordination to the actual practical regime of halakhic practice.
Thus, we are thrust back to the practice itself as the
*content* of our faith rather than the symptom of some
independently specifiable form of faith as psychological commitment.
It turns out then that, "[Jewish] faith is *nothing but its
system of mitzvoth*, which was the embodiment of Judaism"
(*Judaism*, 38, emphasis added). Obviously, it is almost a
truism that Jewish faith understood this way must involve
*some* form of mental state as the causal motivator of halakhic
action. Moreover, as we will see presently, the nature of this mental
state does make a difference to one's faith; it is only when
intended as "worship of God" that such acts are to be
understood as full expressions of faith. But ultimately, in the
absence of the practical fruits, one has nothing for Leibowitz. Much
as "belief in" (in contradistinction to "belief
that") is incorrectly attributed to someone who consistently
fails to act in accordance with that mental attitude, for Leibowitz
Jewish faith cannot be correctly attributed to a mere psychological
state in the absence of actual adherence to the halakhic system.
Jewish faith is therefore equivalent to the observance of mitzvoth
intended as acts of worship; the concept is *exhausted* by such
intentional performance of mitzvoth.



This contraction of faith to an almost behavioural definition,
however, means that halakhic observance itself *constitutes*
the faith upon which it is usually thought to be based, and this faith
cannot be identified independently of this practice, which Leibowitz
concedes might create the appearance of paradox:



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



Asa Kasher, a neo-Leibowitzian, has argued that Leibowitz here does
not present a paradox at all, but instead a circle that is related to
the one discussed earlier in section 3. Kasher contends that Leibowitz
is arguing that halakhah creates its faith through its designation of
the institutions of Judaism, primarily the divinity of Scripture, with
its demand to serve God, while Scripture designates the halakhic
system as the way in which such divine service is realized. (A.
Kasher, 1976, 239-40). Leibowitz in response concedes to Kasher
that there is no paradox, but stresses that no matter how many times
one goes around the circle, the ultimate commitment to the life of
mitzvoth must come from beyond the circle, from a conative - rather 
than cognitive - commitment that is beyond reason (see
"Responses," 277-278).



As a justificatory argument for engaging in the practice, this might
indeed create an impression of circularity - though circular
arguments are neither formally invalid, nor paradoxical, but
"merely" unpersuasive. Leibowitz, however, emphasizes time
and again that he is not attempting to "justify" the
commandments. Medieval Jewish thinkers believed that it was possible
to "justify" Judaism by appeal to universal standards.
Thus, to take Maimonides for example, if truth is the standard, then
Judaism is clearly the most rational religion since it is a superior
exemplar of, or means to attaining the truth, relative to the other
monotheistic alternatives. If one were to begin from a neutral
perspective, a rational being insofar as he is rational, could, in
principle, be convinced of the superiority of Judaism. But this idea
of a neutral rational starting point from which we can assess
axiological alternatives is one that Leibowitz rejects.



Here we again see evidence of Leibowitz's strict fact/value
distinction, and the corresponding limits it places on rationalism
when it is understood as the metaphysical thesis that the world is
intelligible "all the way down." The world and in
particular our evaluative commitments within it are *not*
rational all the way down. The fiction that as fully formed rational
beings we cast our eye without prejudice over the various modes of
practical evaluation and decide in favor of the most rational is
dismissed by Leibowitz. Once we *have* certain commitments, as
every person does at the time at which he begins to reflect on them,
our rational faculties can indeed be used as tools for exploring them,
but not in the expectation that such reflection can be expected to
produce a justification or meaning that will convince all rational
beings to commit themselves to such a practice. And if we do ask
"why commit?" in the expectation of some such answer, we
are assuming the factual or theoretical stance towards faith that
Leibowitz contends is rejected by Judaism. When it comes to faith, in
Leibowitz's words:



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


### 4.1 Faith, Practice, and God



While Leibowitz's very bare account of faith seems hardly robust
enough as an account of religious commitment, there is more to be said
for Leibowitz's account than first might seem.



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



**Claim 1:**
  

Faith is defined as, or constituted by halakhic practice.



**Claim 2:**
  

Faith, defined as halakhic practice, is founded on that practice.



**Claim 1** can initially be understood as the simple
empirical/theological claim discussed at the beginning of section 4.
In **Claim 2**, Leibowitz's point appears to be
that while one may wish to argue that one's practice is founded
on some independently specifiable faith such as the belief that God
gave these commandments to the Jewish people, given that belief in God
has no meaning other than one's committed practice, in fact
one's commitment to halakhic practice cannot but be founded on
the practice itself.



The first thing to note here is that as a matter of empirical fact,
**Claim 2** is more often than not true. It is indeed
usually the case that halakhic practice precedes belief in God, such
that one's initial practice is not based on that belief in any
meaningful sense. At the point at which we are beings who are able to
reflect thoughtfully about our commitment to our practices and the
origins of that commitment, we are already implicated in and formed by
them. Thus, practice is generally not based on an initial belief in
God, but on practice itself, passed down through parents or others. It
is only subsequent to being committed to the practice that we reflect,
analyse, and even formulate the very idea that we are practicing out
of a commitment to God. Talk of God thus supervenes on the commitment
to the practice rather than being a justification for it. Jewish
faith, Leibowitz tells us, "cannot be understood at all if the
Torah and its precepts are not construed as data preceding recognition
of the Giver of the Torah" (*Judaism*, 5).



This goes on to yield an important sense in which Leibowitz's
circle is a virtuous one. Over time if we are good Leibowitzians who
observe the mitzvoth, presumably including that of study of Torah
itself, we will come to understand that this very practice in fact
defines the nature of Jewish faith altogether. Thus **Claim
1**, initially understood as a historical definition, takes on
epistemic meaning for the person who practices mitzvoth. One will
understand that faith is indeed this commitment to practice and
nothing else - for Leibowitz "the purpose of the mitzvoth
is to educate man to recognize that knowing God and cleaving to him
consist in the practice of these very precepts"
(*Judaism*, 27). What one comes to realize is that the faith
commitment cannot be cashed out other than in terms of that practice
itself. One might thus read **Claim 2** as saying that
faith is founded on mitzvoth, in the sense both of being acquired and
maintained through practice, and also by creating the understanding of
faith spoken of in **Claim 1,** as over time one comes to
understand that Jewish faith can indeed *only* be defined
practically. Much as Aristotle believed that virtuous action precedes
the true acquisition of the virtues - the latter involves that
we know what we are doing - our commitment to the mitzvoth and
knowledge of their definitive role within Jewish faith (**Claim
1**), or at least the conscious commitment that we make to this
as reflective beings, is founded on or created by participation in
those very halakhic practices (**Claim
 2**).[12]
 Just as for Aristotle it is only once we have acquired the virtues
that those same acts becomes truly virtuous, in the same way halakhic
actions only latterly become true acts of religious faith, in which
one is conscious of the manner in which they constitute faith.



One might therefore argue that the virtue of the circle is that
continued practice reinforces faith - the practical circle
*is* persuasive as a way of reinforcing faith (i.e., practice
of the mitzvoth) in a way that the circle of logical justification is
not. In the original version of this entry, this idea was used to
argue that Leibowitz could in this way be seen as offering a
quasi-justificatory phenomenology of faith, whereby the meaning of
mitzvoth is revealed to its adherents through practice in a manner
that simply cannot be presented in discursive terms. As Leibowitz
writes in homage to Wittgenstein: "That which cannot be said, is
said by the religion of the Torah and the Mitzvoth,"
(*Yahadut*, 343) - or at least by a commitment to them
that cannot be given a specification independent of their practice.
Yonatan Brafman, however, correctly points out that "if
one's commitment to halakhic norms stems from habituation to
their practice, then one has not adopted service of God as a
value" (Brafman, 2014, 82-83); as we noted earlier, it is
only if intended as worship of God that an act is a genuine act of
religious faith. At the same time, if "service of God" can
only be specified in terms of practice, the extent to which such
habituation differs from this "service of God" is not
entirely clear.



Ultimately then, the central problem that Brafman's critique
highlights is that of the difficulty Leibowitz has in specifying any
content for the intent to serve God beyond the commitment to the
practice. First, what meaning can Leibowitz give to the idea that God
exists as the object of our worship? It would appear that Leibowitz
must at least retain an ontological commitment to there being an
entity that we can call God, to whom halakhic practices are directed,
such that "God is radically transcendent" remains a
cognitive statement. But beyond that, there is nothing more that can
be said. Of possibly greater concern though is the related question of
how the mitzvoth can be seen to be God's commands. The mitzvoth
are only "holy" inasmuch as they constitute holiness
through being *God's* commands. It is in this way that
this practice can constitute faith. Otherwise his model renders
*any* commitment to a value system an expression of faith, at
least in the sense of being a conative leap that cannot be a result of
rational
 reflection.[13]
 What then marks this out as *Jewish* faith is simply that it
is the Jewish form of life, one that derives from specifically Jewish
sources and has a specifically Jewish history. But as noted
previously, Leibowitz cannot construe statements in the Torah
regarding the event of revelation at Sinai as historical statements.
So the problem remains of how a people could have actually been
commanded if it is not the case that at some point in history the
commandments were revealed by God. That they could not have been on
Leibowitz's theology, renders problematic the idea that they are
God's commands in any meaningful sense, and that our practice is
thus divine worship.



The problem here for Leibowitz is that mitzvoth are indeed enacted by
human beings and thus play a role in the natural world. As a result,
they must *have* a history. At the very least we can say that
at some point they made their incursion into history. But how? If not
through some miraculous revelatory event - a possibility that
Leibowitz excludes - then it must have been through some form of
human initiative. Thus, in parallel to the attribution of divinity to
Scripture, as Sagi notes, "the system is made religiously
meaningful by the believers' perception of it as concerned with
the worship of God," while God collapses into a formal
requirement of the system, "the supreme concept, uniting the
system and endowing it with religious significance" (Sagi 1997a,
213). Though it is not clear that this would concern Leibowitz, one
ought to note that the mere institutional decision to categorize the
mitzvoth as holy is hardly a firm basis for recovering their divinity
in any sense that would satisfy most of the religious adherents the
nature of whose faith he is attempting to delineate.



Leibowitz's exclusion of God from history thus leaves him
apparently unable to account for the divinity of the commandments in a
manner that would render their performance acts of commitment *to
God* in the ordinary sense. Indeed, when asked directly whether
the statement "I believe in God" is meaningful,
Leibowitz's response was: "I do not understand these words
if they are divorced from the obligations that derive from them
... faith in God is not what I know about God, but what I know
about my obligations to God" (*Sihot*, 97). Talk of
divinity should not be understood cognitively but in terms of the
normative demands it imposes. Even talk of the revelation at Sinai is
to be construed along these lines - "The meaning of the
revelation at Sinai is the recognition of the command that we have
been commanded" (*Emunah*, 154). Again, whether this
yields a system that can genuinely be termed divine rather than one
that is merely designated as such by humans, who after all, for
Leibowitz, cannot themselves be a locus of holiness, is brought into
question.


## 5. Worship *Lishmah* and the Meaning of Mitzvoth



Leibowitz cannot make sense of the divinity of the mitzvoth by
claiming that God is their source in any straightforward sense. Having
reduced all meaningful discourse about God and faith to halakhic
practice, one might thus look to the meaning of the practice for some
such mark of divinity. As we have noted earlier, talk of
"meaning" for Leibowitz is bound up with that of value and
purpose, so it is to these that we must look for the meaning of the
divinity of the mitzvoth, and Leibowitz has much to say about the
purpose of the mitzvoth, particularly as they relate (or not) to human
values, based on a basic Talmudic distinction between two forms of
religious worship - worship that is
"*lishmah*," or "for its own sake," and
worship that is "Not-*lishmah*," or "not for
its own sake."



Worship that is "Not-lishmah" Leibowitz characterizes in
teleological terms. It begins with a set of human values and beliefs,
and understands religion as the instrument for the realization of
these values. Thus religious acts will be derived from this set of
values, as the acts that best achieve them. These values, therefore,
are prior to the religious act, much in the way utilitarian ethical
theory prioritizes a definition of the good and defines right action
in terms of what maximizes that good. Religious action then is at base
motivated by human needs and the problem with such worship for
Leibowitz is that it renders God the servant of man. It is what he
terms "an endowing religion - a means of satisfying
man's spiritual needs and of assuaging his mental conflicts. Its
end is man, and God offers his services to man"
(*Judaism*, 14).



Reflecting an ambivalence that runs through statements in the Jewish
tradition regarding such worship, Leibowitz vacillates between
recognizing worship "Not-lishmah" as a genuine if flawed
form of worship and as not seeing it as worship at all - indeed,
seeing it as idolatrous in its reduction of worship of God to worship
of man, thus implying that man is
 holy.[14]
 Philosophically speaking, his negative attitude can again be traced
back to his strictly scientific approach to the world and his views
concerning God's transcendence. Regarding the former, Leibowitz
dismisses the idea that human beings exist at some supra-natural
level. As creatures of flesh and blood, we are governed by the same
natural laws as the rest of nature. Human beings have no special
endowment that transcends their physical nature. Given that this is
the case, human needs cannot be sacred, and thus the service of human
need cannot be the purpose of the mitzvoth. Coming from the opposite
direction, given that God is transcendent and cannot be related to any
form of concrete reality, including human reality, how could the
service of our own needs, which are a function of our humanity,
constitute worship of God? God must be the exclusive locus of
religious value, to the exclusion of human values. Man, in comparison,
is but human, and a part of nature. Thus, while Medieval Jewish
philosophers usually take the statement at Genesis 1:27 that man was
created "in the image of God" as placing man on a pedestal
by somehow comparing him to God, for Leibowitz, the verse should be
taken to indicate that man is a mere "image" in its more
prosaic, if not pejorative Platonic sense (*Judaism*, 90).



In marked contrast to all of this, Leibowitz presents the idea of
worship "*lishmah*," which is the mark of a
demanding religion. Here, the religious act is prior to any set of
human needs or values. It is characterized by acts of worship demanded
by God, where the demands made, and the motivations for serving, are
simply that - they are Gods' demands. Here man is
"an instrument for the realization of an end which transcends
man ... [who] serves his God lishmah - because He is worthy
of worship" (*Judaism*, 14). Essentially, Judaism is a
religion that demands that man serve God, not that God serve man.
Mitzvoth, for Leibowitz, are not therefore based on human needs and
desires since that would subordinate God to human values, rendering
God a slave to humanity, and placing humanity at the pinnacle of all
value. Most mitzvoth for Leibowitz must therefore "be
meaningless except as expressions of worship. They have no utility in
terms of satisfaction of human needs" (*Judaism*, 16).
Relatedly, he therefore sees much of halakhah as constitutive of
religious "reality" rather than as regulating a
pre-existing reality. The dietary laws, to take an obvious example,
are not there to regulate some form of pre-existing sacred reality.
Reality is equivalent to physical reality and the dietary laws are
nothing more (nor less) than requirements of worship constituting a
halakhic "reality," which is a reality that has no
referent beyond itself.



This *sui generis* understanding of halakhah is important if we
are to understand Leibowitz's retreat from facts to values in
the realm of faith. We have seen that to speak of any factual reality
as divine impugns God's transcendence for Leibowitz. But one
might ask why speaking of God as a source of values within our world
is any less of an intrusion upon his transcendence. Leibowitz's
point is that God is not a source of values *within* our world,
since halakhah is not a function of any human values, indeed not a
function of any set of values to which we have any independent access.
In this way Leibowitz retains the transcendence of God in the
evaluative realm of faith commitments in a way that is not possible in
the realm of facts. Nonetheless, the question of how such transcendent
values entered human history, in essence, the problem of revelation
discussed at the end of the previous section, rears its head once
more. It is impossible to claim that mitzvoth were literally revealed
by God given His radical transcendence, yet if we simply regard them
as human, whence their divinity?



It is noteworthy that here a Kierkegaardian interpretation could offer
a solution. While one can find comparisons with Kierkegaard in Sigad
1977, Harvey 2002, and scattered throughout Sagi 2009 (to name but a
few such sources), it is Roi Benbassat who argues for a
"fundamental analogy between the two thinkers" such that
he sees Leibowitz's "religious position as a variation of
Kierkegaard's faith in the absurd developed from the same
typical existentialist conception of ethics" (2015, 143). We
will investigate the specifically ethical bent of Benbassat's
claim presently, but we here note that when we remarked earlier that
Leibowitz retreated from his claim that Jewish faith was based on a
paradox, he may have spoken too soon. For what, other than a paradox,
could account for the actual divinity of mitzvoth in the absence of
any possibility of divine incursion into the human arena? According to
Benbassat, "to claim there is no paradox is to disregard the
very essence of Leibowitz's position" (Benbassat 2015,
151), and it might be that only a paradox will allow the ultimate
conative commitment that is Leibowitzian faith to truly be worship of
God. Whether this picture can indeed be assimilated to that drawn by
Leibowitz - and his strong scientific grounding certainly leaves
room for doubt - it does, at this stage, seem to be the only way
for him to maintain that performance of mitzvoth constitutes genuinely
*divine* service. 


## 6. Ethics and Religion



Leibowitz's view of mitzvoth has important implications for the
relationship between ethics and religion in general and more
specifically for the relationship between ethics and halakhah.
Leibowitz does not deny that there is a genuine realm of ethical
value, writing that both the theocentric (religious) and
anthropocentric (Kantian) conceptions of value are
"legitimate" (*Judaism*, 208). Leibowitz certainly
recognizes that beyond the realm of halakhah "flourish many good
deeds and events of grandeur and sublimity" (*Judaism*,
25). Generally for Leibowitz, halakhah is not all-encompassing and
does not govern all behavior, as he makes explicit in his interviews
with Michael Shashar where he asks rhetorically whether Judaism has a
perspective on the decision whether to build a bridge over a
particular river (*Sihot*, 91). For Leibowitz then, there are
clearly other aspects of human life that are necessary, indeed
valuable, and that need not be dedicated to the worship of God. If,
therefore, one is acting for the sake of one's fellow man, one
must simply recognize that this is the performance of a noble ethical
act, not a holy religious act. What Leibowitz stresses is the
importance of not confusing the one with the other.



So religion, it might be argued, must be the highest value for
Leibowitz to which all others are subordinated in times of conflict;
it need not be the only value. Religious values just cannot be
subordinated to ethical values which, since dictated by human
interests for Leibowitz, are profane by definition. Ethics, as
Leibowitz notes, is the "atheistic category par
excellence" (*Judaism*, 18), placing man at the apex of
our values in place of God. In contrast:



> 
> 
> The Torah does not recognize moral imperatives stemming from
> knowledge of natural reality or from awareness of man's duty to
> his fellow man. All it recognizes are Mitzvot, divine
> imperatives. (*Judaism*, 18)
> 
> 
> 



Unsurprisingly given the above, much has been made of the formal
similarities between Leibowitz's approach to mitzvoth and
Kantian ethics. Both stress "worship *lishmah*"
- or the categorical nature of both the ethical and halakhic
imperative, neither of which can be instrumental means to ends beyond
the respective duties themselves. It is just that Kantian ethics
"worships" man "*lishmah*," or as an
end in himself, while religion worships God. Moreover, as with Kantian
moral imperatives, the upshot of acting on religious imperatives for
Leibowitz is autonomy. But while ethical action is autonomous for Kant
inasmuch as it is a deliverance of our own practical reason, that very
fact means that for Leibowitz ethical action is *not* an
expression of human autonomy, but of our enslavement to our own
nature. Recalling that for Leibowitz man is simply a part of nature
like any other, when acting in accordance with that nature, man is
"in effect, nothing but a robot activated by the forces of
nature, just like the cattle grazing in the pasture, which are also
'free from the Torah and Mitzvoth'; that is, from any law
externally imposed" (*Judaism*, 21).



Though perhaps his rhetoric gets the better of him in comparing man
acting on his own nature to an animal acting on its own nature,
Leibowitz's central and apparently incompatibilist point is that
freedom cannot be a function of acting according to one's own
nature if man's nature "is only the last link in a causal
chain of the forces of inorganic and organic nature which act upon him
and within him" (ibid.). If this is the case, then the ethical
dictates of human reason no more render man autonomous than do the
'acts' of his digestive system. Man is only "free
from the bondage of nature because he lives a life that is contrary to
nature," and thus "emancipation from the bondage of nature
can only be brought about by the religion of the Mitzvoth"
(*Judaism*, 22).



Yet this contrast with Kant actually betrays a deeper similarity. Kant
sees ethical action as the route to autonomy precisely because it is
through practical reason that we transcend our own nature and make
contact with the noumenal realm. In effect therefore, and despite
Kant's wish to keep religion and ethics apart from a
motivational perspective, Kant and Leibowitz are in agreement that
human autonomy requires that man transcend his phenomenal nature. The
difference is that while for Kant ethics is, in a certain sense,
transcendent - at least transcending man's empirical if
not his rational nature - for Leibowitz ethics remains a
function of human nature and therefore mired in the
"phenomenal" realm destined never to escape.
Leibowitz's view of autonomy appears to depend again on his
thoroughgoing "naturalism" in regard to the physical and
human world. Only the realm of mitzvoth can effect the sort of
Leibowitzian "transcendence" that yields autonomy.



Notably, Brafman argues that this idea enables Leibowitz to
"offer an argument to the effect that service of God is actually
the most fitting value for an individual to adopt" (Brafman,
2015, 157). For Brafman, Leibowitz can argue that at least at the
axiological level, one can proclaim the superiority of service of God
to all other axiological choices. In brief, precisely because
practical reason (correctly applied) "coerces" us to a
single conclusion, for Leibowitz it cannot be the seat of autonomy
that Kant claims it to be. Only a choice that is not rational, one
devoid of any humanly understood value, can be truly autonomous. And
as we have seen above, for Leibowitz, it is service of God alone that
meets this standard. Thus, the only truly free act, and thus the only
act that is fully value-bearing, is that of serving God through
halakhah since "halakhic norms satisfy no natural or rational
human concern" (ibid., 160). If we wish then to base the
divinity of the mitzvoth on their meaning as opposed to any historical
event of revelation, the meaning of the mitzvoth that marks them out
as divine is, in a sense, their very
"meaninglessness."



It is this total lack of rationality, however, that leads to
Benbassat's aforementioned Kierkegaardian reading of Leibowitz.
For Benbassat, Leibowitz's view of halakhic practice cannot be
deontological since that would require "an objective foundation
of duty that allows it to be recognized as valid regardless of
end-determinations" (2015, 148). Kant provides that objective
foundation through his account of practical reason. Leibowitz,
however, presents halakahic practice as a groundless conative
commitment, the basis for the validity of which is simply faith,
understood as "a purely subjective positing of a superior
end" (ibid, 149), that end being the worship of God.
Nonetheless, this "end-determination" does not render
Leibowitz's view teleological, since his view of faith, and
indeed of divine worship does not "posit an end separate from
duty ... [but rather] posits duty itself as an end" (ibid,
150). While the earlier discussion of Kierkegaardian paradox may have
appeared counter to Leibowitz's scientific background, on this
occasion his radical take on human autonomy does seem to lend itself
more naturally to an existentialist reading.



The flipside of this understanding of service of God in terms of
radical human autonomy is that halakhah must be understood as
expressing a form of primordial divine heteronomy. This yields a
fertile area of comparison to Levinas in Fagenblat 2004, though as
Fagenblat notes, for Levinas the realm of the ethical *itself*
is a realm of transcendence beyond discursive human rationality.
Unlike Leibowitz, for Levinas we need not go as far as mitzvoth to
find the realm of
 transcendence.[15]
 Either way, whether Leibowitz's views on the distinction
between religion and ethics hold up depends in large part on 1)
whether one can indeed justify morality on rational or naturalistic
foundations, or whether it does in some way transcend human nature;
and 2) the viability of his radicalized notion of freedom as the seat
of ultimate
 value.[16]


### 6.1 Ethical Mitzvoth



As we have noted, much as Kant does for moral value, Leibowitz locates
the religious value of our acts in our intentions. Holiness, he tells
us, "is nothing but halakhic observance; *the specific
intentional acts dedicated to the service of God*"
(*Judaism*, 24, emphasis added). Presumably then, mitzvoth
could be performed for the sake of worshipping God and yet have
incidental benefit to us. As long as the motivation is the worship of
God, any incidental benefits would surely be legitimate, or at least
not rule out the act as religiously worthy. What matters here is the
hierarchy of values - observance of mitzvoth cannot be
*subordinated* to ethical values. Leibowitz's
intentionalism dictates that religious acts, even if they incidentally
satisfy certain human needs, would still not be ethical acts given
their religious motivation.



The idea of ethical mitzvoth, however, now becomes an oxymoron for
Leibowitz. An act is either religious or ethical. Even "You
shall love your neighbor as yourself," is to be regarded as a
mitzvah, not as an ethical precept. The key phrase in the verse
containing this commandment for Leibowitz is that which follows
immediately to end the verse: "I am God." It is a duty
towards one's neighbor that is based on man's position
before God, not his position before his fellow man.



One of Leibowitz's concerns is that for imperatives to be truly
categorical, they must draw their authority from something other than
human needs and values, which are too weak a foundation to ground
categorical imperatives. One can always excuse oneself with the claim
that other people's needs are not overriding in any given
situation. There is no escape, however, from the authority of a divine
demand, so locating ethical imperatives within a religious system
gives them the necessary foundation. Their position as commandments
transforms them from "mere good counsel, a noble aspiration, or
a sublime ideal," and instead gives them "the reality of
law, something one is compelled to take seriously as one must take a
police ordinance seriously" (*Judaism*, 19). Yet given
his intentionalism, for Leibowitz this must simultaneously deprive an
act of its ethical character. Acting for noble ideals, while
legitimate, would still render acts ethical, not religious.



This raises a problem for Leibowitz, since it is not clear that it can
do justice to the ethical prescriptions of the Torah qua ethical
prescriptions. Ought I to act justly towards my neighbor out of my
concern for him, or out of concern for God? While it seems clear that
Leibowitz could only see the latter as a religious act, it is not
clear that this sits comfortably with our ethical intuitions -
though presumably Leibowitz would simply retort that this is precisely
what it means to subordinate human interest to the ultimate value that
is the worship of God. While a Levinasian squaring of the circle would
allow that our ethical concern for the other is *itself* a mark
of transcendence, for Leibowitz, a religious act, even if it may serve
one's fellow man incidentally, can neither be motivated by such
a goal, nor allow such goals to play a role in our understanding of it
as a mitzvah, since this would render God the slave of human
interests.



The question that arises, however, is whether in the case of ethically
motivated acts that coincide with mitzvoth, a Jew ought to have
instead performed the act for religious reasons - a position
that would not leave much room for a religious person to perform an
*ethical* action. Indeed, it would seem that if one wishes to
perform the mitzvah of, for example, "loving one's
neighbor," one ought *not* to be acting based on ethical
motives. As such, it is not clear what becomes of the legitimacy of
the ethical realm for a religious Jew, since every ethically motivated
act constitutes a missed opportunity for the worship of God. Each act
ought to be religiously rather than ethically motivated, even when the
mere act itself would be the same. While it is not as if one who is
ethically motivated can sincerely transform that ethical motivation
into a religious one, it seems as if becoming the type of person who
naturally acts religiously in such cases would have to be the ultimate
aim for Leibowitz. This would not deny all value to ethically
motivated acts, but it certainly seems to problematize those that
coincide with specific mitzvoth for Jews *qua Jews*. Though
happily the demands of the two realms often coincided,
Leibowitz's picture, it seems, leads to the problematic
conclusion that ultimately a Jew ought not to be ethical, but instead
religious.


### 6.2 Meta-Halakhah and the Status of Women



Leibowitz's account of halakhah is not uni-dimensional. His
claim that *most* of the mitzvoth are meaningless according to
human conceptions of value (*Judaism*, 16) leaves an important
gap that he exploits elsewhere in his writings, particularly in a
short late piece on the status of women in Judaism, where he
distinguishes between two types of mitzvoth in a manner that renders
the picture considerably more complex.



Thus on the one hand, we have the ritual commandments required of men
and not required of women. These mitzvoth are indeed
"meaningless," having no intrinsic value beyond their
status as mitzvoth that God requires of men and not women. They do not
reflect any exalted status for men or yield access to some sort of
religious experience beyond the mere burden of performance. Given
this, the desire of women to take on such practices in the name of
equality reflects a fundamental misunderstanding - or at least a
non-Leibowitzian understanding - of the nature of these
commandments. And yet, when it comes to the highest levels of Torah
study and access to public office, both of which had traditionally
been halakhically forbidden to women, Leibowitz takes a very different
view. Barring women access to the study of Torah "is not to
exempt them from a duty ... but is to deprive them of a basic
Jewish right ... [that] renders their Jewishness inferior to that
of men" (*Judaism*, 129). The original restriction, as
well as that regarding attaining public office, reflected the
prevailing socio-cultural norms of the surrounding society rather than
any essential halakhic determinations. Thus Leibowitz wishes to
distinguish between



> 
> 
> absolute demands reflecting acceptance of the 'yoke of
> the kingdom of heaven' that are not amenable to adjustment to
> natural or social factors, [and] practices which reflect given
> circumstances and the views shaped by them; in other words, between
> unconditional prescriptions and proscriptions and norms reflecting a
> given sociocultural milieu and its prejudices.
> (*Judaism*, 131)
> 
> 
> 



We find, therefore, a realm of mitzvoth that do appear to be
subservient to human values and societal change. That Leibowitz
believes in such a category, independently of the highly charged
gender question, is clear from the following:



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



The Torah clearly contains laws or commandments that react to
political and social institutions already in place - hence laws
concerning slavery for example. Thus it turns out that there are two
categories of mitzvoth for Leibowitz: type1 acts without
intrinsic meaning that are constitutive of a halakhic reality and not
amenable to change; and type2 acts where the halakhic
community has responsibility for regulating a pre-existing reality.
These halakhic acts can change depending on the general sociocultural
norms governing that particular aspect of reality, be it agriculture,
or gender equality. Indeed, Leibowitz often notes explicitly that
Judaism is not to be identified with the specific laws with which it
began, but with the "recognition of a system of precepts as
binding, even if their specifics were often only determined with
time" (*Judaism*, 4).



What is one to make of this concession? While there might be strong
arguments for drawing such a distinction on both textual and common
sense grounds, the question is whether Leibowitz's system can
consistently allow such external concerns to intrude upon religion
without usurping it. The meta-halakhic issue, as Leibowitz terms it,
regarding the status of women in the Jewish community, drives specific
halakhic changes. And ultimately what appears to be driving these
changes is an ethical assumption regarding unjustified gender
inequalities. But if one is allowing religious norms to be
subordinated to human values, then by Leibowitz's standards one
is serving man rather than God - if the motivation here is
ethical or more broadly social, then surely by his intentional
definition of mitzvoth, they cease to be religious acts.



In the particular case of gender equality, however, there are broader
concerns that come into play - the survival of Judaism. While
this is not explicit in everything that Leibowitz writes, he makes
precisely this claim regarding the gender issue in an interview with
Michael Shashar - "the future of Judaism depends on
it" (*Sihot*, 110). One might argue therefore that our
being responsive to the ethical concerns presented in these cases has
religious significance since it is subsumed under the overriding
*religious* concern to maintain the existence of Judaism. Thus
these acts would retain their religious significance given the more
general religious motivation for the changes. One might think of them
as having religious value in a secondary sense, given that they serve
the end of maintaining the halakhic system, while straightforward
mitzvoth or halakhic demands have religious value in the primary
sense.



It is very difficult, however, to escape the feeling that Leibowitz is
driven here by his ethical impulses, and more significantly it is
clear that all manner of halakhic decisions are motivated by explicit
consideration of ethical issues that impinge on the halakhic decision
making process. One could argue that given that such principles as
"the ways of pleasantness" or "doing the right and
the good" are internal to the halakhic system, Leibowitz could
contend that one need not go beyond the structures of the system in
order to make the changes that he endorses. One might thus consider
these as "principles" in the Dworkinian sense, as fully
part of the legal system and the bearers of "weight" when
it comes to deciding halakhic questions (Dworkin, 1977, 22ff).
Leibowitz's conception of the halakhic system seems, however, to
be more akin to legal positivism (see Brafman 2014, 101ff), as befits
a scientist, and it seems as if the above response would require
Leibowitz to *reject* a straightforward positivist
understanding of the halakhic system. On such an understanding,
ethical principles are seen as external to the system, even if able to
determine what the halakhah "ought to be" - but such
a view would entirely undermine the halakhic validity of any decisions
given that they would be serving human needs. The involvement of
principles in this manner though, need not necessarily undermine a
positivist reading of Leibowitz, but could instead render his account
a form of inclusive legal positivism. Of course there are those who
would argue that this *would* undermine his positivism since
inclusive legal positivism is incoherent, but this is a debate that
would take us too far afield.



Regardless of these jurisprudential issues, vague principles such as
those mentioned are not going to decide the question of whether
specific changes actually do advance the "ways of
pleasantness". *De facto* it is surely almost impossible
to insulate such considerations from human interests, which would of
course disqualify them as considerations that should determine
religious acts on Leibowitz's intentional model. Moreover, one
might even question the very idea that the mitzvoth should serve the
clearly human purpose of the continued existence of Judaism, since it
undercuts Leibowitz's notion that the only purpose of the
mitzvoth is the knowledge that service of God consists in their
performance. Then again, Leibowitz could presumably respond by appeal
to his identification of the performance of mitzvoth with faith in
God. This means that in the absence of the continued existence of the
Jewish people, the performance of mitzvoth would cease. Thus the
continued existence of the people is indeed only a
"purpose" inasmuch as its own purpose is the performance
of mitzvoth, i.e., service of God. Leibowitz, then, could possibly
find a way of ensuring that all changes are ultimately directed
towards the service of God as his system demands. As a good positivist
though, he may balk at this ability to make almost any act into an act
of divine worship, since his original sharp and well-defined
distinction between acts of worship and acts that answer to human or
social needs will likely now suffer Anthony Flew's "death
by a thousand qualifications" (Flew, 1950).



Unless then Leibowitz is going to allow ethical motivation for certain
halakhic decisions and problematize his system, or gerrymander his
descriptions of those decisions so as to force them into his religious
straitjacket, it appears as if these areas of decision and action
cannot be deemed religious in the strict sense. Leibowitz certainly
recognizes that halakhic decisions are "grounded either in the
Halakhah itself or in the conditions necessary for halakhic
observance" (*Judaism*, 4), and thus it may be that these
ethical halakhic decisions are "enablers" rather than
direct loci of religious worship. By contracting the religious sphere
in this way, Leibowitz could maintain some indirect religious value
for the ethically motivated acts of a religious Jew. But the
contraction that such a move necessitates would relegate enormous
tracts of the Talmud to this lesser status, which seems problematic.
And again to counter that all decisions are taken by the halakhic
authorities with the general motivation of "serving God,"
would make it difficult to retain any form of distinction between
religion and ethics of the form that Leibowitz clearly wishes to
maintain. Of course many of these problems hang on the thread of
Leibowitz's concept of intention - one that assumes that
intentions can be clearly and exclusively identified as
"ethical" or "religious." Melzer (1976, 261),
however, among others, has argued that Leibowitz's concept of
intention is impoverished.



Setting aside the problems just identified, Leibowitz's
distinction remains problematic in the context of his overall system.
He explicitly categorizes the realm of synagogue ritual to
type1 acts. Yet in much of contemporary orthodoxy, this is
one of the most fought over issues, and one in which the inequalities
for women are understood by some as tantamount to the denial of
"a basic Jewish right ... [that] renders their Jewishness
inferior to that of men" (*Judaism*, 129). Should women
feel so marginalized by this particular inequality that it threatens
the future of Judaism, leading to sanctioning the participation of
women in certain rituals, Leibowitz's type1 mitzvoth
would have to be recategorized as type2 mitzvoth and we
would have to conclude that the categories are fluid and that
commandments can move between categories. But then the question of how
we categorize the commandments seems to become dependent on human
perception and values, which would once again be problematic for
Leibowitz.



Ultimately then, Leibowitz struggles to maintain God's radical
transcendence and his intentional account of religious worship in its
most pristine form. Neither history, nor nature, including human
nature, are sources of religious value. God's prescriptions
alone are holy and Jewish worship, indeed Jewish faith, is simply the
commitment to this behavioral regime. But while he begins with a tidy
definition of religious acts as absolute commands performed with the
intention of serving God, as acts that cannot be motivated by human
concerns or interests, the fact that life involves other given civil
and social settings requires that we deal with such interests. This
yields type2 acts, with resulting questions regarding
whether or not these mitzvoth can be understood as such without
Leibowitz's theocentrism folding into a form of
anthropocentrism. The distinction necessary to prevent this amongst
halakhic decisors - that between the intention of
"realizing the Torah" and the intention to "adapt
Halakhah to a variety of human needs" (*Judaism*, 4)
- is difficult to maintain, and, one imagines, could very easily
fall victim to self-deception. In general, it seems as if
Leibowitz's system simply cannot take the strain of maintaining
its pristine religious intentionalism while dealing with ongoing
halakhic questions in a functioning society.


## 7. Religion, State, and Israel



Leibowitz was an unabashed Zionist. However, Zionism for Leibowitz was
defined simply as "the endeavor to liberate Jews from being
ruled by the Gentiles" (*Judaism*, 214), an endeavor that
the state of Israel "completely satisfies." Thus, despite
being a religious Jew, Leibowitz's Zionism is avowedly secular,
and his secular version of Zionism flows directly from the central
tenets of his philosophy. Firstly, it is dictated by his intentional
approach to religious action - the motivation for setting up the
state was political and nationalistic rather than religious. Indeed,
Zionism was initially a secular Jewish revolution, a political
movement with nationalist aspirations. Secondly, it is directly
implied by his view that the service of human needs and interests
cannot be equated with the service of God. For Leibowitz, the state
achieves a perfectly noble political purpose, serving human needs. But
again this should not be confused with its having *religious*
value in itself:



> 
> 
> Counterfeit religion identifies national interests with the
> service of God and imputes to the state - which is only an
> instrument serving human needs - supreme value from a religious
> standpoint. (*Judaism*, 226-227)
> 
> 
> 



Thus, it would seem as if religion and state cannot possibly be
linked, and this indeed was a position that Leibowitz would take. Here
though, it seems as if Leibowitz's thought, or at least his
attitude towards what constitutes meaningful discourse, underwent
significant development.



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



Initially, this "role of enacting new halakhic
legislation" was assigned by Leibowitz "to the religious
public as a whole" (*Torah u-Mitzvot*, 73). During this
early period, as Moshe Hellinger points out, Leibowitz presents a
"participatory democratic model" (Hellinger, 2008, 257),
that yields a radical form of democratic halakhic Judaism. As early as
1947, however, Leibowitz is noting how "the sector of the
religious public organized as a political movement lacks a religious
program for the conduct of the state" (*Judaism*, 154),
leading him instead to look to the religious rabbinic establishment to
take the courageous steps necessary to provide a vision for such a
"halakhic state."



This nation-building vision would have necessitated a halakhic
revolution, utilizing innovative and creative techniques of Jewish
legal interpretation and application. But instead, in
Leibowitz's eyes the religious parties prostituted themselves to
the state to protect their own brand of religious sectarianism,
subordinating religion to the machinery of the secular government.
Leibowitz's initial radicalism thus came up against the halakhic
conservatism of his fellow religious Zionists, which, together with
what he saw as the moral corruption of its rabbinic leadership, led to
his disillusionment with religious Zionism, disillusion that was
further exacerbated by the Kibiyeh affair (see Hellinger 2008, 275ff),
which served to reinforce his view regarding the pernicious
consequences of "applying the religious category of holiness to
social, national, and political values" (*Judaism*, 189).
Thus, by 1959, in recognition of this reality, Leibowitz changed his
tune, presenting a call for the separation of religion and state as
the only program "that would be in the religious interest in the
existing situation" (*Judaism*, 175).



Still, at this point, while reality has bitten, there is no statement
that *in principle* religion and state must remain separate. A
decade later, however, Leibowitz seems to espouse such a view, stating
that "no state whatsoever, in the past, present, or any
foreseeable future, in any society, in any era, in any culture,
including the Jewish culture, ever was or will ever be anything but a
secular institution" (*Judaism*, 215-216).



On the one hand, this should come as no surprise given that politics
is concerned with human institutions that serve human needs, and
Leibowitz cannot allow for acts of religious worship that are directed
towards human needs. On the other hand, it does clearly represent a
shift in his thought, from a *de facto* to a *de jure*
rejection of the religious Zionist dream. Nonetheless, in noting that
the state "sets the ground for the struggle for religion, which
is by its very nature an eternal struggle that will never end in
victory" (*Judaism*, 215-216), he does appear to
leave open the possibility of political action having some form of
religious import. Indeed, he goes on to say that the reason that
Israel has no religious significance is precisely "because no
such struggle is being conducted in it" (ibid.), which appears
to imply the possibility of a state having such significance were it
to provide for such a struggle, though at this stage the idea that
this could eventuate in any form of democratic religious polity has
been replaced by a vision of the state as maximally "a mere
platform for struggles in the spirit of liberal ideas that celebrate
the neutrality of statehood" (Hellinger, 2008, 279).



It remains the case then that Judaism qua Judaism cannot, for
Leibowitz, present any specific form of political organization, since
political acts cannot themselves be halakhic acts. But as mentioned
earlier, Leibowitz speaks of "conditions necessary for halakhic
observance" (*Judaism*, 4), essential conditions for
individuals to worship God that would include human social and
political organization. Politics is the scaffolding without which
individuals would not have the capacity to engage in their individual
"religious struggles," and this presumably yields the
lesser category of "religious significance" to the
political state. Given his intentionalism though, mere political
organization can have no religious significance in itself for
Leibowitz; presumably, once again, it could only have such
significance if political action is driven by the *intention*
that the state be an enabling condition for religious worship. And
while many modern liberal states do indeed thus enable religious
worship, this is certainly not their primary intent, and they could
not therefore be seen to have any substantive "religious
significance" to speak of.



None of this is to say that religion cannot be relevant to the state
in any way, even today. Though he does not wish to speak of how
religion can serve the state, since this inverts the correct
hierarchical relationship between the two, religion can nonetheless
have a "function" within the state for Leibowitz as a
"critical friend" that can "check the influence of
political values and ... restrain the patriotism and
nationalistic enthusiasm" (*Judaism*, 209-210).
Thus "if religion has a function, it is to place man's
limited values in a true perspective" (*Judaism*,
210-211). Indeed, the mistaken religious significance that
people do impute either to the land or to the state is nothing short
of scandalous for Leibowitz, both religiously and morally.



It seems, therefore, that as time moved on, Leibowitz's liberal
and moral leanings prevent him from being willing to engage in what is
ultimately utopian speculation concerning a halakhic vision for the
state. The earlier program is a mere pipedream when the state is
catering to a nation that has no interest in Jewish observance, and
could thus only become a halakhic state through the totalitarian
imposition of religious observance. Were the entire population
unanimously in favor of such observance, Leibowitz might once again
take up the cause, though given the freedom of thought that could lead
that population to then change its mind, this seems unlikely. But
Leibowitz is unwilling to engage in such idealistic guesswork, which
given his positivistic leanings he dismisses as meaningless, claiming
fundamentally not to understand how one is to relate seriously to such
ideals (*Sihot*, 92). The possibility that a state might have
religious significance "in principle" is not a discussion
that can have any political purchase. Political action simply cannot
be religious action. In reality then - and present reality is the
only reality he is willing to recognize by this point - Leibowitz
wishes to keep political questions separate from religion, which in
the contemporary state must once again contract itself to the private
sphere.



The views described above have further significant ramifications for
Leibowitz's Zionism. Religiously speaking, a physical land
simply cannot be holy for Leibowitz: "The idea that a specific
country or location has an intrinsic 'holiness' is an
indubitably idolatrous idea." (*Judaism*, 226-227).
Thus, the claim that a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian
problem cannot be countenanced because the land is holy to Jews is
absurd in Leibowitz's eyes. Moreover, given his hermeneutic of
Scripture, attempts to base the Jewish "right" to the land
on the basis of historical claims in the Torah are just as baseless.
Indeed, without quite using the term "nonsense on stilts"
Leibowitz nonetheless evinces a Benthamite scepticism to the notion
that *any* nation has a legal right to a land - "talk
of rights is pure nonsense. No nation has a right to any land"
(*Judaism*, 241). Rights to land for Leibowitz are a matter of
historical consciousness. And the problem for Israel and the
Palestinians is that both tell a story that stakes a claim on this
basis such that "in consequence of centuries of history, members
of each feel passionately that this is their land"
(*Judaism*, 241).



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



Leibowitz's moral critique of the actions of the state and the
Israeli army, which rose to a new pitch subsequent to the Lebanon War
of 1982, gives a clear indication of the significance of morality qua
morality for Leibowitz in a manner that is entirely consistent with
the view discussed earlier that morality must be subordinated to
religion and not vice versa. It is precisely because people mistakenly
impute religious value to objects or institutions that they commit
moral atrocities in the name of religion for Leibowitz. And it is
precisely the understanding of the state as a *secular*
institution that for Leibowitz would prevent such actions, since we
will then judge these actions correctly - i.e., morally,
*not* religiously. And by ethical standards, Leibowitz clearly
believes that the act of occupation cannot be justified. Yet again, it
is the ascription of holiness to profane things, to the natural world
and our human needs and interests within it, that is at the root of
all that he decries in religion and that has dire political and moral
consequences in the contemporary political sphere. While one might
disagree with his political assessment on political grounds, he would
argue that it is only on such grounds that one can disagree, and that
is a dispute for a political, not theological forum.