Wrestling with the Angel

...Here halakha is depicted as enabling man to reconcile humility with majesty, to ease existential loneliness by entering the life of the community...

...The Jewish communities of the Middle Ages left behind a rich literature of chronicles and respon-sa documenting centuries of effort to synthesize local custom, individual need and the encompassing jurisdiction of the law...

...In a seminal 1944 essay, "Halakhic Man," Soloveitchik, a major Talmudist and expositor of halakha, etched a portrait of religious life similar to Leibowitz', drawing even more explicitly on the anti-romantic (or anti-Hasidic) ideology of the great 19th-century centers of Lithuanian Jewish learning...

...More deeply, Judaism itself often enacts the creative tension between communal prerogative and individual identity...

...man's] needs, not even of his spiritual needs...

...Reading this first English edition of his major essays reminded me of an observation made by legal historian Grant Gilmore about the first dean of Harvard Law School, Christopher Langdell, inventor of the case method of study...

...Yet as Hebrew University philosopher Shalom Rosenberg has pointed out, to Maimonides the nonritual elements of halakha are one vast elaboration of the command "love thy neighbor," an interpretive process that must proceed through human ethical ideas and impulses...

...Langdell, Gilmoresaid, "hit on one idea to which ...heclungwithallthe tenacity of genius...

...Halakha, Leibowitz says, mandates no particular social or economic order...

...Not through what we call "spirituality," which to Leibowitz is simply a smug and inferior kind of esthetics...

...Reviewed by Yehudah Mirsky Contributor, "Economist," "Washington Monthly," "Jerusalem Report" Jewish theology is hard to pin down...

...crowd, whose ostentatious criticism on moral grounds has flourished in recent years, is his deep rootedness in the society he so vehemently criticizes...

...The form their theology takes, though, is sustained and (hopefully) coherent reflection on the texts and practices of Jewish religious life...

...As Soloveitchik has pointed out, according to the Shulkhan Arukh the Jew at prayer is commanded to join with others in a minyan, and then whisper his prayer in silence...

...it accepts them all as givens, as so much bush to be hacked through en route to fulfilling God's eternal demands...

...One could easily multiply objections of this sort (a Hebrew volume entitled Against Negation, published in 1983, sets forth some 450 pages of infuriated argument with Leibowitz by a score of authors...

...The thought of Yeshayahu Leibowitz is the would-be exception that proves the rule...

...Within the confines of human reality," he writes, "there is only functional holiness...

...Further, Maimonides, Leibowitz' biggest hero, harbored what in others he would view as the nearly-idolatrous notion of halakha as a system of moral and spiritual education...

...In Christianity this process starts with the Fourth Gospel's "In the beginning was the Word," a breathtakingly deft synthesis of Plato and Genesis...

...In a swipe at Jewish nationalism, he also says that the Land and Peoplehood of Israel are not values in their own right, but only to the degree that the Jews are halakhically obligated people, and some of their obligations are directed toward the particular kilometers of dirt halakhically considered the Land of Israel...

...A figure stalked past us, hands buried in the pockets of his raincoat, staring ahead at some invisible, impossibly straight line, leading him down the street and around the corner...

...It "offers no solution to the essential problem of the Jewish people, that of the continuity of its historic spiritual and cultural being...

...What differentiates Leibowitz from the usual "whither Israel...

...Leibowitz, bom in Riga in 1903, trained in chemistry, medicine and philosophy at the universities of Berlin and Basel and emigrated to Palestine in 1934...

...To Leibowitz this is idolatry...

...is always the same, regardless of any personal circumstances...

...Jews do think about their religion anyway...

...To him, halakha is no mere pedagogy, uplift or communion, it is a bracing, insistent call for daily struggle with a forbidding God, who demands total transvaluation of human experience and, what's more, thinks He can get it...

...And he attacks the secular authorities for attempting to emasculate religion by subsidizing it, draining religion of its inherently anti-statist impulses...

...As are sult, Jewish theology generally bears the stamp of the individual reflector to a striking degree...

...There are, of course, a number of empirical holes to be punched through this construct...

...In Maimonides' case, Leibowitz sees the goal of that education as complete renunciation...

...For by his reasoning halakha is self-limiting as regards certain kinds of political authority, inherently uncomfortable with any human sovereignty, and more accurately seen as an overlay of religious life meant to cut against the grain of the surrounding society...

...But 20 years later Soloveitchik folded this idea into his classic lecture, "The Lonely Man of Faith," recently issued by Doubleday as a book (see David Singer's "Understanding the Two Adams," NL, June 1-15...

...Thus, "man's position before God...

...In Leibowitz' world, religious vocabulary creates it own strange universe, one where holiness "signifies both the goal toward which we must strive and the striving itself...

...A longtime professor of biological chemistry and neurophysiology at Hebrew University, he eventually emerged as perhaps Israel's most provocative, penetrating and arresting social critic...

...There is a Bergman-like quality to this religiosity, recalling the Knight in The Seventh Seal who searches unto death for a God he comes to realize he will never encounter...

...In other words, "God's divinity is entirely intrinsic to Him and does not consist in His relation to the world, whose contingent existence adds nothing to God's divinity...

...His politics neatly derives from his theology: "The function of the state is essentially secular...

...Although in the first flush of Israeli independence he called for the meshing of halakha with the gears of government, by the late 1950s he had concluded that the separation of religion from the state was vital for the integrity of both...

...Since Leibowitz recoils from ascribing any such religious significance to a terrestrial community, it is not surprising that his political and social positions have made him a familiar scourge among Israel's intellectuals...

...He similarly rejects the attempt by many of Kook's followers to ascribe redemptive power to the extension of Israeli territorial sovereignty beyond the pre-1967 borders into the Biblical heartlands of Judea and Samaria...

...To begin with, the ostensible uniqueness of halakha is undercut by the Islamic sharia (though in fairness, few modern Jewish thinkers of any stripe reckon seriously with Islam...

...To him, Zionism is "nothing more than...

...There are echoes of Nietzsche in Leibowitz' assertion that "willing acceptance of a way of life which does not derive from human nature implies [an] emancipation of man from the bondage of raw nature" that "can only be brought about by the religion of the mitzvoth...

...Clearly, some form of collective action is necessary to secure Jewish interests in the post-Holocaust world...

...For another, to many devout Jews "theology" is Greek, and not just etymologically but in terms of the character of the enterprise: It has historically aimed to reconcile the respective claims of revealed religion and human reason, to confirm Clement of Alexandria's bold assertion that "the river of truth is one...

...Several years ago I was walking in Jerusalem with an elderly uncle of my own...

...Liebowitz' background as a natural scientist informs his theology in a number of interesting ways...

...Leibowitz' one idea is the utter, total, unremitting Otherness of God, and its corollary, the inescapably idolatrous nature of any conflation of His ways with recognizably human motives or goals, however beneficent or well-intentioned...

...Leibowitz, the audacious theologian and tenacious social critic, is also the village heretic and cranky uncle...

...It is not often recognized that some of Kook's most prominent disciples also reject what they see as the vulgarization of his teachings...

...Nevertheless, a viable and authentic Jewish politics must fulfill two criteria: It must protect and promote the concrete interests of Jews as individuals and as a community, and it must reflect and enact Jewish values as understood in the light both of Jewish historical experience and the classic texts of Jewish tradition...

...Accomplished scientist and devoutly Orthodox Jew, ardent Zionist and one of Israel's fiercest critics, Leibowitz is an extraordinary one-man show, with an opinion to upset every apple cart...

...Leibowitz, to be sure, is a vehement Zionist, but he understands that commitment differently than most...

...Leibowitz has deeply internalized a key element of halakha's self-understanding that it shares with other legal systems??namely, that the law qua law is its own jurisdiction, justification and reward...

...His writings hold the reader's feet to the fire, insistently and often maddeningly forcing a response...

...In addition, many of the master halakhists, including Joseph Karo, author of the 16th-century Shulkhan Arukh, the authoritative code of Jewish law, were themselves steeped in mystical tradition...

...Yet one cannot deny a terrible grandeur to Leibowitz' notion of the religious life...

...Essential holiness pertains to God alone...

...Throughout he insists on the "empirical" nature of his emphasis on halakha, arguing that possessing this body of law has been Judaism's one truly distinctive feature??unlike the philosophy shared with the Greeks and Church Fathers, the Gnostic and Neoplatonist-influenced Kabbalah, and certainly unlike the progressive ethics so beloved by nervous Jewish thinkers since the Enlightenment...

...activities on behalf of national sovereignty...

...My uncle leaned over to me and whispered: "Leibowitz...

...This dramatically distances him from the religious Zionism articulated by the first Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Abraham Isaac Kook, one of the most innovative and important Jewish thinkers in modern times...

...All one can do before this forbidding God is bend the knee...

...I do not mean to suggest that Leibowitz' thinking is irrelevant to the current discourse in Israel...

...He can conceive of no middle way between idolatry and alienation...

...On the contrary, his practical divorce of institutionalized religion from statist politics goes some way toward removing a significant stumbling block to Jewish political thought ??specifically, how to create an autonomous space for politics and society outside the absolutist grasp of halakha...

...For one thing, the word "Jewish" as we know it appears only in the Scheherazade-like Book of Esther, the one Biblical text, the Talmud helpfully points out, that never mentions God...

...In Judaism it proceeds with far greater difficulty, not because the rabbis weren't familiar with Greek thought??much modern scholarship has shown that they were??but because so many of Judaism'score concepts, such as the law, the Land of Israel and the Jewish people, are deeply resistant to the universalizing implicit in rationalist thinking...

...The paradoxical thing about him is that while he attempts to banish all traces of mortal sensibility from Judaism, his body of work, powerful as it is, remains uniquely and idiosyncratically his alone...

...The State of Israel of our day has no religious significance...

...Moreover, to assign "intrinsic value" to a state "is the essence of fascism," especially when "the values of 'the Judaism of Torah' are attached to it...

...Leaving no bridge unburned, Leibowitz scorns the non-Zionist Orthodox as well, saying that by accepting the largess and patronage of the Israeli government they have exchanged "religious struggle for clerical politics...

...Even when the approach was undertaken by the greatest post-Talmudic sage, Maimonides, it was viewed with suspicion as a prelude to heterodoxy...

...it is the framework within which the Jews as a nation and as individuals are enjoined to serve God...

...Indeed, Leibowitz is the very model of what Michael Walzer calls the "connected critic," the man who forces his own community to confront itself in the harsh light of its own ideals, makes himself a part of the landscape and has no intention of ever leaving...

...Not, as is often claimed, through a conventional ethics, which "regards man as the supreme end and value [and] deifies man...

...Rather, "man can worship God only by committing himself to the observance of mitzvoth [the precepts comprising halakha, or traditional Jewish law], which are the expression of the divine will and not means for the satisfaction of his [i.e...

...Leibowitz' remorselessly Sisyphean view of religious life is not only too much for the average human to bear, and not only untrue to millennia of Jewish life, it is virtually a celebration of alienation as a supreme value...

...Leibowitz, as might be expected, has from the outset bitterly criticized the corrosive effects of occupation on Israeli society, though his vaunted empiricism at times deserts him when it comes to analyzing Israel's security needs...

...This is an important feature of halakhic ideology and readily invites comparison with the work of the preeminent American Orthodox thinker, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik...

...In Kook's theology (still felt in Israel today), political Zionism is the first step of the redemption that will solve the spiritual crises of modernity...

...The scientific bent is further on display in Leibowitz' striking assertion that human history is ultimately insignificant, ontologicalfy no different from the natural world it unfolds in: "The world as it is, including human nature and history, is intrinsically indifferent...