After viewing this interview with Leibowitz we decided it is worth making this available to our readers. There is no doubt that Yeshayahu Leibowitz was a controversial man. A complex thinker that often angered many over his harsh comments on the political realities of the day. You may not agree with all of his conclusions but it is worth the time to listen to his understanding of the many topics discussed. We have also included a detail composite of who this man was from various sources.
Part I
http://[youtube=youtu.be/buQ1C5RJ2Vk&w=520&h=315]
Part II
http://[youtube=youtu.be/AVYGRwVfSSQ&w=520&h=315]
Yeshayahu Leibowitz was born in Riga in 1903, to a religious and Zionist family. His father was a lumber trader, and his cousin was future chess grandmaster Aron Nimzowitsch. In 1919, he studied chemistry and philosophy at the University of Berlin. After completing his doctorate in 1924, he went on to study biochemistry and medicine, receiving an MD in 1934 from the University of Basel.
He immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1935 and settled in Jerusalem. Leibowitz was married to Greta, with whom he had six children.[1] His son, Elia, was chairman of the Tel Aviv University astrophysics department and the longest-serving director of the Wise Observatory.[2] Another son, Uri, was a professor of medicine at Hadassah University Medical Center.[1] His daughter, Yiska, is a district prosecutor.[1] His sister, Nechama Leibowitz, was a world famous biblical scholar.
Leibowitz was active until his last day. He died in his sleep on August 18, 1994.[3]
In 2005, he was voted the 20th-greatest Israeli of all time, in a poll by the Israeli news website Ynet to determine whom the general public considered the 200 Greatest Israelis.
Leibowitz joined the faculty of mathematics and natural science of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1936. He became a professor of biochemistry in 1941 and was promoted to the position of senior professor of organic chemistry and neurology in 1952. He taught at the Hebrew University for nearly six decades, lecturing in biochemistry, neurophysiology, philosophy, and the history of science.[3]
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.
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.[5] Leibowitz claimed that a person’s decision to believe in God (in other words: to obey him) defines or describes that person, not God.
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.”[6] 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.”[7]
Leibowitz was a staunch believer in the separation of state and religion. He believed that mixing the two corrupted faith. He condemned the veneration of Jewish shrines, cynically referring to the Western Wall as the Discotel (a play on the words “discothèque” and “Kotel“).[3]
In contrast to his strict views on some religious matters, he was surprisingly liberal in others. On the subject of homosexuality, for example, Leibowitz believed that despite the ban on homosexual relations in Judaism, homosexuals should do their best to remain observant Jews.[8]
Source: Wikipedia
Yeshayahu Leibowitz: Prophet of wrath, harbinger of the future
Because of his provocativeness, it’s easy to miss Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s profound moral seriousness and the great relevance of his thought today.
Rinat Klein and Uri Rosenwaks’ three-part documentary series “Leibowitz: Faith Country and Man” could not have come at a more important time. Fewer and fewer people know who Yeshayahu Leibowitz was, or know only that he coined the term “Judeo-Nazis.” Fortunately, a number of screenings of the documentary have sold out; hopefully this indicates a renewed discussion of Leibowitz’s thought and ideas.
I had the privilege of spending a lot of time with Leibowitz privately, mostly at the residence of his late friend Father Dubois, a Dominican Monk, but also at Leibowitz’s home. He was as close to the ideal of the Renaissance man as I anybody I have ever met. The breadth of his knowledge was truly staggering: His professorship was in organic chemistry, but he taught subjects like history and philosophy of science, Jewish philosophy and the mind-body problem. I studied Maimonides’ “Guide of the Perplexed”with him and interviewed him a number of times. In private, he was a very kind man but he was also a consummate showman who enjoyed the limelight and had an uncanny feeling for provocation.
Because of his provocativeness, it’s easy to miss Leibowitz’s profound moral seriousness and the great relevance of his thought today. He is often pigeonholed as belonging to the extreme left, which is a mistake. Leibowitz, never willing to bow to collective pressure, was the most unlikely of combinations: On the one hand he was a libertarian, an extreme form of classical liberalism, and believed that human beings should be free to determine their way of life without any state interference. On the other hand, he was an ultra-Orthodox Jew who insisted that the state and religion must be separated completely to avoid corrupting each other.
Leibowitz argued vehemently for two positions: that holding any state as a value in itself was inherently fascist and that sanctifying any piece of land, including Israel, was a form of idolatry. Very soon after the Six-Day War, Leibowitz predicted that if Israel didn’t withdraw immediately from the occupied territories, all of the state’s energy would be tied up in ruling another people against its will. In some respects Leibowitz’s prediction has turned out to be false. Israel has continued to evolve economically, culturally and its creative energies have turned out to be remarkable.
But in a central respect his prophecy of wrath has turned out to be true. Israel’s political system has become completely incapable of solving some of Israel’s most pressing dilemmas and unable to create a legal system with true equality before the law. To this day it is an incoherent mix of liberal democracy and clerical rule.
More than anything, Israeli public discourse is shaped by the collective denial that the occupation has been Israel’s political and moral catastrophe. This denial has created an often-shocking emptiness of political discourse and an inability of truly facing existential questions. Instead, as Leibowitz predicted, nationalism, militarism and the value of the state dominate public discourse, and politicians compete with each other in the use of nationalist clichés in order to become electable.
I do not think that Leibowitz should be sanctified, or that he was right on all counts. But there are profound reasons why so many of us who knew him deeply admire and love the man. He embodied moral clarity and the possibility to stand up to both worldly and religious powers on matters of principle. He was adamant that the collective or the majority must never be allowed to determine either what is true or false, or what is morally right or wrong. And he thought that ruling Palestinians under occupation was a moral catastrophe. Period.
I think that it is also important to understand his relation to Israel, because many who have no idea who he was think that he was some kind of post-Zionist. Leibowitz was against one state west of the Jordan with equal rights for all. Israel’s raison d’être for him was only for Jews to have a homeland: He was a fervent Zionist even though he was against any form of nationalism, and was fond of quoting the Austrian writer Grillparzer who said “from humanity to nationality to bestiality.”
What can we learn from Leibowitz now, almost two decades after his death? It is time we accept that Israel is like all nations. Nations make mistakes, and their greatness in the end is measured by their ability to take responsibility for them, and to change. This holds true for Palestinians, whom Leibowitz held responsible for their own tragedy by rejecting the partition plan of 1947, and it holds true for Israel for believing after 1967 that it could hold on to the territories indefinitely.
The question is whether a political leadership will emerge that is imbued with Leibowitz’s moral clarity. Such a leadership must be able to tell the settlers that Israel’s government made a historical mistake in encouraging them to settle in the West Bank under the illusion that Israel would rule it. In the same way, a Palestine leadership must admit to its people the terrible the mistake of rejecting the partition plan of 1947.
Such leadership must be capable of facing the moral and emotional truths that Leibowitz embodied. Doing so will enable both Israelis and Palestinians to embark on a process of collectively mourning decades of senseless suffering. Without such mourning we are doomed to repeat the past by trying to repress it.
