Yeshayahu Leibowitz (; 29 January 1903 – 18 August 1994) was an Israeli Orthodox Jewish public intellectual and polymath. He was a professor of biochemistry, organic chemistry, and neurophysiology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and an editor of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica, a comprehensive encyclopedia in the Hebrew language. He was known for his outspoken views on politics, religion and Jewish philosophy.
Leibowitz argued that the State of Israel and Zionism had become more sacred than Jewish humanist values and described Israeli conduct in the occupied Palestinian territories as "Judeo-Nazi" in nature while warning of the dehumanizing effect of the occupation on the victims and the oppressors. He was referred to as the "prophet of wrath" due to his frequent criticism of Zionism.
His views elicited significant interest within different groups in Israeli society, including among those who were opposed to them.
Biography Yeshayahu Leibowitz was born in Riga, Russian Empire (now in Latvia) in 1903, to a religious Zionist family. His father was a lumber trader, and his cousins included philosopher Isaiah Berlin and future chess grandmaster Aron Nimzowitsch. Orientalist scholar Ernst Mainz was a cousin-by-marriage.
Leibowitz grew up speaking German and Yiddish with his mother while conversing in Hebrew with his father. He and his sister were taught by a private tutor, with religious studies handled by their father. As a child, Leibowitz was a fan of the Yiddish works of Sholem Aleichem and Hayim Nahman Bialik. Leibowitz ultimately became fluent in eight languages: German, Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, French, English, Aramaic, and Latin. In 1919, Leibowitz's family left for Germany due to the Battle of Riga.
Career
Leibowitz studied chemistry and philosophy at the University of Berlin. After completing his doctorate in 1924, he worked for the Kaiser Wilhelm Society before resuming his studies in biochemistry and medicine at the University of Cologne and Heidelberg University. In 1933, he was blocked from finishing his MD in Germany due to his Jewish background and instead completed his studies at the University of Basel.
In 1935, following the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws, Leibowitz immigrated to Mandatory Palestine, settling in Jerusalem. In 1941, he became a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, first teaching organic chemistry, then biochemistry at the Faculty of Natural Sciences as well as neurophysiology at the Faculty of Medicine as a senior professor since 1952. He was also a guest instructor of Jewish studies in Haifa.
Between 1956 and 1972, Leibowitz served as the editor of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica. Apart from his innumerable articles and essays, Leibowitz authored a wide range of books on philosophy, human values, Jewish thought, the teachings of Maimonides, and politics. Many of his lectures and discourses, including those given as part of the Broadcast University project run by Israeli Army Radio, were subsequently compiled and printed in book form. Leibowitz was a prolific letter writer, and his advice or comment was sought out widely. The first collection of his letters (in Hebrew) was published posthumously.
In the 1949 Knesset election, Leibowitz headed the United List of Religious Workers, which failed to win a seat.
In the mid-1950s, Leibowitz co-founded and led the "Volunteer Line" (שורת המתנדבים) to fight government corruption; and in 1962 he co-led the Public Committee for Nuclear Disarmament.
Leibowitz retired from his teaching position in 1970, but remained an emeritus member of the Department of Philosophy.
Personal life and family Leibowitz was married to Greta, with whom he had six children, two of whom died at young ages. His son Elia was chairman of the Tel Aviv University astrophysics department, and the longest-serving director of the Wise Observatory. Another son, Uri, was a professor of medicine at Hadassah University Medical Center. His daughter, Yiska, was a district prosecutor.
Leibowitz's sister, Nechama Leibowitz, was a world-famous biblical scholar. Leibowitz was active until his last day. He died in his sleep on 18 August 1994. Shamai Leibowitz and Hagit Ofran are among his grandchildren.
Philosophy
Religion
Halakha and Mitzvot Leibowitz was an Orthodox Jew who held controversial views on the subject of halakha, or Jewish law. He wrote that the sole purpose of religious commandments was to obey God, and not to receive any kind of reward in this world or the world to come. He maintained that the reasons for religious commandments were beyond man's understanding, as well as irrelevant, and any attempt to attribute emotional significance to the performance of mitzvot was misguided and akin to idolatry. He believed that Jews should perform mitzvot solely for the sake of worshipping God and that although they could also have incidental benefit to the one performing the mitzvah, it would only be a religiously worthy act as long as the motivation was to worship God. He denied the idea of ethical mitzvot, believing that any mitzvot which set out duties towards others were duties based on a person's position before God rather than their position before their fellow man.
The essence of Leibowitz's religious outlook is that a person's faith is his commitment to obey God, meaning God's commandments, and this has nothing to do with a person's image of God. This must be so because Leibowitz thought that God cannot be described, that God's understanding is not man's understanding, and thus, all the questions asked of God are out of place.Zev Golan, "God, Man, and Nietzsche: A Startling Dialogue between Judaism and Modern Philosophers" (New York: iUniverse, 2008), p. 43 Leibowitz claimed that a person's decision to believe in God (in other words: to obey him) defines or describes that person, not God.
In his view, prayer for personal reasons, done for the needs of the person praying, was religiously meaningless and even blasphemy, as it seeks to influence God and sees God as an agent for fulfilling human needs. In his eyes, the only legitimate form of prayer was one done to fulfill commandments without any reference to the needs of the person praying.
God and Torah Leibowitz viewed God as transcending all reality as humans know it, believing that as an entity God is incomparable to any other form of reality humans can encounter, and is completely separate from the material world. He viewed human history in the natural world as having no divine significance and rejected the idea that God had set out a divine purpose in history or extended some form of providence over humanity. He did not see Torah as an account of historical and scientific truths, but rather as the source of the mitzvot or commandments on how Jews are to serve God. He believed that the stories presented as factual in the Torah were simply using literary forms within the realm of human comprehension to deliver demands on how to worship God, writing that "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 - the demand to know God and serve him - a demand conveyed in various forms of human expression: prescriptions, vision, poetry, prayer, thought, and narrative." He believed that the Torah should not be read as a purely factual historical account, that the inclusion of any actual historical information in the Torah would be merely coincidental, and that all descriptions of God intervening in nature and history were not to be seen as factual but rather interpreted in terms of the messages they carry, as his ideas of God's transcendence denied that there could be any such contact between holiness and the world of the profane.Yeshayahu Leibowitz - Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyLeibowitz, Yeshayahu: Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, p. 140
One result of this approach is that faith, which is a personal commitment to obey God, cannot be challenged by the usual philosophical problem of evil or by historical events that seemingly contradict a divine presence. When someone told Leibowitz that he stopped believing in God after the Holocaust, Leibowitz answered, "Then you never believed in God".Zev Golan, Thundering Leibowitz , The Jerusalem Post, Sept. 15, 1997 If a person stops believing after an awful event, it shows that he only obeyed God because he thought he understood God's plan, or because he expected to see a reward. But "for Leibowitz, religious belief is not an explanation of life, nature, or history, or a promise of a future in this world or another, but a demand".Golan, God, Man and Nietzsche, p. 89 He viewed the Holocaust as having no Jewish religious significance, as such a belief would contradict his ideas of God having no involvement in human affairs.
Reform Judaism and Kabbalah He was critical of Reform Judaism, calling it a "historical distortion of the Jewish religion", as well as Kabbalah, seeing them as encouraging people to not perform mitzvot for their own sake but ascribing a stated purpose to them. Reform Judaism teaches the concept of "ethical monotheism" and Judaism as having the mission of being a "light unto the nations" and Kabbalah seeks universal redemption through the performance of mitzvot. This was in contrast to Leibowitz's idea that mitzvot should be performed solely to serve God and not for any other explicit purpose. He rebuked the concept of Tikkun olam, a Kabbalistic idea which remains popular in Reform Judaism as a basis for supporting social justice. Further, he also claimed that placing the State of Israel, Jewish history, and Jewish culture above God was committing Avodah Zara, or idol worship.
Mind–body problem Leibowitz maintained the idea that Mind-body problem is inherently unsolvable. He argued that humans cannot rationally understand how a mental event causes a physical event or vice versa, nor can they grasp how such events are consistently and synchronously linked without understanding the original cause of this linkage. He argued that the failure to understand the psychophysical connection reflects a fundamental limitation of human reason and cognition.
Views and opinions
Zionism Leibowitz considered himself a religious Zionist and was affiliated with the Mizrachi movement. He viewed Zionism as a "historic opportunity for the renewed political independence of the Jewish people to test the values of Jewish heritage against the realities of modern statehood". He looked favorably on a system of law based on halakha.
Following Israeli Declaration of Independence. Leibowitz was disappointed with the way the religious parties compromised with the secular government. In his view, they had prostituted themselves to the government to guard their own brand of religious sectarianism, subordinating religion to the government. He viewed the Chief Rabbinate of Israel as morally corrupt, calling it "datikan". As a result, he became disillusioned with Zionism as a whole.
Leibowitz later claimed that Zionism is "not an ideology, but a complex of activities undertaken to restore independence to the Jewish nation in its own land - an expression of being fed up with being ruled by the Goyim". However, he claimed that he was never disappointed by the State of Israel itself, but by its injustices committed against the Palestinians.
Following the Qibya massacre in 1953, Leibowitz became increasingly critical of Israeli government policy. He condemned the massacre calling it a moral and political abomination and warned that the use of military force without moral restraint would corrupt the foundations of Israeli society. Leibowitz also argued that such acts betrayed Judaism's ethical legacy and undermined the moral integrity of the nascent state.The Israeli Press and the Qibya Operation, Benny Morris, 1996, Journal of Palestine Studies, p. 52