To the Editor:
Allan Nadler’s powerful review of Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, by Yeshayahu Leibowitz [Books in Review, November 1992], calls attention to yet another emperor’s nakedness. Mr. Nadler implicitly raises two questions.
- If Leibowitz took contrary positions to those Israel-loathing ones that he so ferociously proclaims, would anyone pay attention to him?
- Why did Harvard, of all presses, publish so tendentious and obviously sectarian a document?
The two questions add up to one answer: the man is a creation of his own politically-correct opinions. Saying what the right people want to have someone say, he gets a whole lot of publicity. But the fact is, as dogmatic and poorly argued as the book is, . . . the man at a seminar is still less able to argue cogently. I attended a session with him fifteen years ago, at which he sat in the middle of the room in a circle of American professors, talked for two hours without stopping or taking questions or exchanging so much as a hello with anyone present, and then, presumably talked out, just walked out—in anger. I never could figure out what that roomful of silent, astonished, but polite American academics could have done so to infuriate a man to whom no one had ever gotten to say a word. . . .
Jacob Neusner
Distinguished Research
Professor of Religious Studies
University of South Florida
Tampa, Florida
_____________
To the Editor:
Thank you for Allan Nadler’s review of Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s book on Jewish values. . . .
There are certain expressions and ideas of Leibowitz’s which I admire and with which I agree—when he calls the Western Wall “God’s discotheque,” for example, or when he disputes the concept of “holy places”—not on the basis of modernism, but on the basis of halakhah. When he tells the ultra-Orthodox that if they make use of the benefits of modern medicine, they must also approve of autopsies, without which modern medicine is impossible, I agree. And I also agree when he suggests that a valid analogy may be drawn between the situation in ancient Israel, when it was permissible to offer sacrifices on the Sabbath because they represented a national function which took precedence over the Sabbath laws, and the situation today in Israel, when the functions of the police, the army, and utilities are also national needs that take priority over Sabbath laws.
But when he claims that the doctrine of the Messiah is not central to Orthodox Judaism, or that Maimonides did not really believe in that doctrine, I think he is copping out on the difficult position in which he has placed himself. On the one hand, he insists that no compromise with original Judaism is permissible, but, on the other hand, he tries to be consistent with his own predilection for rationalism and naturalism.
When he claims that the relationship between God and man is restricted to one-sided worship, an unquestioning fulfillment of duty which is totally devoid of utility for man, he is being not only cruel and unreasonable, but false to the Jewish sources themselves. The Torah and Talmud are full of references to the practical rewards of fulfilling specific commandments (mitzvot). . . .
I attended a philosophical conference at the University of Haifa in 1979 at which Leibowitz was the summarizer, and he did not cover his head with a kippah. So the question is: is the kippah part of halakhah or not? If it is, why did he not wear it in the company of his academic colleagues? And if it is not, why does he make a point of wearing it in the company of his religious colleagues? . . .
Leibowitz’s opposition to all forms of non-Orthodox Judaism is particularly irritating in view of the fact that . . . in matters of basic conviction, as well as in his rationalism and naturalism and his contempt for superstition and meaningless ritual, he is much closer to Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist thinkers than he is to the Orthodox authorities in Israel or anywhere else in the Jewish world.
. . . Clothing himself in the mantle of Orthodoxy does not give Leibowitz the privilege of defaming Israel as a fascist state and calling those who disagree with him on religion falsifiers and hypocrites. . . .
[Rabbi] Jacob Chinitz
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
_____________
Allan Nadler writes:
Although I agree with most of Rabbi Jacob Chinitz’s observations regarding the problematics and inconsistencies which permeate Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s theology, I question his concluding observation that Leibowitz is closer in his thinking to the Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist movements than he is to Orthodoxy. Leibowitz’s total banishment of ethics from the realm of religion makes him radically opposed to Reform Judaism. And his complete removal of Judaism from the state of human history renders his theology entirely inconsistent with the fundamental tenets of both Conservative and Reconstructionist Judaism.
As I stressed in my review, Leibowitz’s system has no real precedent in Jewish thought. However, it is, in my opinion, closest to the religion of the most radical rabbinic opponents of Hasidism of the last century—the Mitnagdim. In the course of rejecting Hasidism’s celebration of God’s presence in all dimensions of earthly existence, the disciples of Elijah ben Solomon Zalman of Vilna (best known as the Vilna Gaon), went to the opposite extreme. These Lithuanian rabbis responded to Hasidism’s immanentism by producing a theology of transcendence, which tended to divorce religion from life. (This theology is described in detail in my forthcoming book, A Religion of Limits: The Religion of the Mitnagdim, to be published later this year.) In fact, a disproportionately high number of Leibowitz’s very limited sources for his theology come from the Lithuanian-Mitnagdic school.
Finally, as one whose own kippah is not surgically fused to his skull, I hesitate to join in Rabbi Chinitz’s criticism of Leibowitz for baring his head in certain circumstances.
