Can Judaism Survive the State of Israel?
By Menachem Kellner
July 19, 1992
JUDAISM, HUMAN VALUES, AND THE JEWISH STATE
By Yeshayahu Leibowitz. Edited by Eliezer Goldman. Translated by Eliezer Goldman, Yoram Navon, Zvi Jacobson, Gershon Levi and Raphael Levy.291 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. $39.95.
Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a native of Riga and a physician, chemist and philosopher, has long been a thorn in the side of the cultural, political and religious elites of Israel. An exciting lecturer and indefatigable polemicist, Mr. Leibowitz, who is now 89 years old, has a large and enthusiastic following in Israeli intellectual circles.
“Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State,” a collection of 27 essays, edited and introduced by the American-born Israeli philosopher Eliezer Goldman and ably translated by him and four others, for the first time makes Mr. Leibowitz’s writing available in America. The book reflects his strengths and weaknesses. The essays are incisive, provocative, fearlessly consistent; they are also repetitious, idiosyncratic and doctrinaire. But, whatever his faults, Yeshayahu Leibowitz faces hard questions head on, raising them in their sharpest possible form, and for that, if not for the answers he provides, his work continues to be important. No one interested in Israel, Judaism and the nexus of the two can afford complacently to ignore the questions Mr. Leibowitz refuses to stop asking.
At first glance, he appears to be a bundle of contradictions: an observant Jew, a Zionist and an Israeli patriot, he sees these identities as representing three distinct commitments, commitments that injure one another when they mingle. Thus he represents that rare breed in Israel, an observant Jew who argues forcefully for the separation of synagogue and state, not out of concern for the state but out of concern for the synagogue. In his view, political involvement corrupts Judaism: politicized religion is not truly religious, since it focuses on religion’s utility and not the demands it makes on the believer. No one has phrased the problem more sharply than Mr. Leibowitz: Can Judaism survive the state of Israel? His solution calls for the creation of new categories and structures in Jewish law to deal with new realities, and especially for the total divorce of Judaism from the state.
HE maintains that investing a state with sanctity (“fascism,” according to Mr. Leibowitz) both debases religion and endangers the state, leading to actions that “can be vindicated and even justified — and are nevertheless accursed.” Mr. Leibowitz has been vilified for criticizing Israel while remaining silent about Arab behavior. Yet this criticism misses the point. He is not unaware of crimes by Arabs; but as a Jew seeking to make Israel better, he is fundamentally uninterested in them — they are not his responsibility.
Mr. Leibowitz’s Zionism (“the endeavor to liberate Jews from being ruled by the Gentiles”) leads him to insist on a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the territories Israel occupied after it was forced into war in 1967. Continued occupation is bad for Jews, Judaism and Israel, he maintains. (This is something Mr. Leibowitz has been warning about since 1968.) Moreover, as a philosophical nominalist, he denies that nations have any extra-mental existence. Since purely mental entities can have no legal or moral rights, the dispute between Jews and Palestinians is not one that can be settled in terms of national rights, and the repartition of the land of Israel is the only practical solution. Mr. Leibowitz is a thorn in the side of almost all major Israeli politicians, of whatever persuasion; the winners of the recent elections will hardly find him more comforting than their predecessors did.
His fundamental insight is that religion properly understood makes demands of humans; it does not endow them with benefits. It is in this respect that Mr. Leibowitz — who reduces Judaism to a system of commandments, explicitly excluding from its purview theology and ethics — argues for the superiority of Judaism over Christianity and, by implication, over Islam. Christianity, which for him is fundamentally pagan and anti-Judaic, promises individual salvation, liberation from the “bondage” of law, permanent rest. Halakha (Jewish law) in his view recognizes no such thing: it sets a permanent challenge before Jews, a task that can never be completed but may never be abandoned. For him, Abraham, in his unhesitating willingness to sacrifice Isaac in order to fulfill the will of God, represents the highest ideal of religious behavior.
Mr. Leibowitz believes prayer, as the sincere outpouring of an anguished soul, is thus religiously irrelevant, since it reflects the needs of the person praying. Prayer achieves religious significance only when it is done as obligatory work, executed in fulfillment of a command, and without reference to the needs, feelings and desires of the individual praying. Only then is it worship. Supplicatory prayer is not worship; it is blasphemous, seeing God as an agent for the satisfaction of the individual’s needs and seeking to influence God. Mr. Leibowitz seems to accept St. Paul’s critique of Judaism as a burdensome set of obligations that cannot be satisfied; but he makes that a virtue, not a vice.
What Mr. Leibowitz calls “endowing” religions, pre-eminently Christianity and Reform Judaism, gratify certain psychic needs and are therefore popular, but they are not truly religious in his view; the ultimate perfection of religion can never be truly realized — whether by individual salvation in the world to come or by self-fulfillment in this world.
A consequence of this view is that Mr. Leibowitz must claim that the Messiah will never actually come, but “is essentially he who always will come . . . the eternal future. The Messiah who comes, the Messiah of the present, is invariably the false Messiah.” Messianism is thus always a goal, a task, never a benefit, gift or endowment. This idea — which Mr. Leibowitz borrows from the neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen, and which has been defended by the American philosopher Steven Schwarzschild — leads him to reject as false messianism any attempts to see the state of Israel as part of the messianic advent. Thus, referring to the self-proclaimed 17th-century messiah Sabbatai Zevi, he labels as “Sabbatean” groups like the Israeli settler movement Gush Emunim, which emphatically understands the state of Israel as representing the first flowering of the messianic fulfillment and derives practical conclusions from that understanding.
Consistent with his view of Judaism as a religion of challenges and tasks is his insistence that mitzvah (commandment) and Halakhah (Jewish law) are central in a correct description of Judaism. Judaism is a religion of commandments, making demands, insisting on obedience for its own sake (lishmah, a fundamental category for Mr. Leibowitz). This Judaism is contrasted with religions of values and beliefs, endowing religions, which are “a means of satisfying man’s spiritual needs and assuaging his mental conflicts.” Indeed there is nothing in Judaism beyond the commandments. As such, the national identity of the Jewish people is nothing other than Judaism, life according to Torah. In this Mr. Leibowitz follows the 10th-century rabbi and philosopher Saadia Gaon (who said Israel is only a people in virtue of its Torah) and stands in stark opposition to Solomon Schechter, the founder of the American Conservative Jewish movement, who defined Judaism as the religion of the Jewish people, turning Judaism into a form of religious nationalism.
Commandments have profound educational significance to Mr. Leibowitz, marking off the realm of the sacred in life, reminding us that sanctifying anything outside of that realm, be it a place or a people or a value, is idolatry. This most emphatically includes the people of Israel, the land of Israel and specific places in the land. Mr. Leibowitz reserves some of his sharpest barbs for those Jews guilty of what he calls idolatry with respect to Erez Yisrael, the land of Israel, or the Western Wall in Jerusalem, or values like national security and military discipline. Only tasks can be holy.
As a religion of Halakha, Judaism has no specific moral system, no position on the best form of political or social organization; as a way of serving God, Judaism has no “particular conception of man, of the world or of history.” Halakhah is, furthermore, ahistorical, growing out of its own inner dynamic, essentially uninterested in and uninfluenced by social change. Mr. Leibowitz identifies as Christian the idea that human history can have religious significance; to make history religiously significant is to put humanity, not God, at the center.
But he does not mean that Judaism is a religion of mechanical practice. Proper observance of the commandments demands proper intention, or kavanah, without which the commandment is literally unfulfilled. Obedience by habit or rote is no obedience.
Mr. Leibowitz’s position on dogma reflects his understanding of faith: it is not a conclusion but 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 . . . . Faith is the supreme, if not the only, manifestation of man’s free choice.” This position is very convenient for Mr. Leibowitz, allowing him to eat his cake and have it too. By denying that religion makes any truth claims whatsoever about the nature of the universe, he solves the problem of religion and science to his satisfaction: the two operate in entirely independent spheres and cannot possibly conflict. Religion supplies no information, science tells us nothing about how we ought to behave, and the two therefore cannot possibly come into conflict.
Mr. Leibowitz’s protestations to the contrary, his representation of Judaism is prescriptive, not descriptive. This raises a general problem: to what extent can he fairly speak about “Judaism” when the religious system he prescribes would be barely recognizable to most of the scholars, saints and sinners who, through the generations, have studied, practiced or violated the norms of what they took to be Judaism?
Students of Maimonides will also be surprised to find Mr. Leibowitz’s views consistently attributed to the great 12th-century philosopher and Talmudist. Many readers will feel that Mr. Leibowitz has not successfully risen to the challenges he sets. But those challenges, like the Judaism he espouses, cannot be ignored.
From The New York Times, here.