YESHAYAHU LEIBOWITZ A HUMANIST - By Uri Rapp - English Articles

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YESHAYAHU LEIBOWITZ A HUMANIST
IN SPITE OF HIMSELF
By Uri Rapp

Rapp replies to the Leibowitz paper a) that Leibowitz’s definition of humanism is wrong and wrong-headed, and b) that, on a more reasonable definition of humanism, Leibowitz was three-quarters of the way there.

The personal tone taken by Yeshayahu Leibowitz in his address to the 1992 Congress of Humanists (see previous chapter) calls for a reply in the same vein. In distant days, when I was a student in Jerusalem, I was privileged (with a small group of others) to study Rambam’s Guide to the Perplexed with Leibowitz for two years. Since then I have found out that great Rambam specialists disagree with his interpretation, though I am not qualified to decide who is right. This was the beginning of a curious argumentative friendship between us and, in making this rejoinder to him, I am thus able to rely on things he told me or put in writing. My fellow humanists and I stand reprimanded by Leibowitz for, so he says, ‘deluding ourselves’. It is my duty to repel his attack on our attempt to combine humanism with a commitment to the Jewish people and its culture.

Judaism is a Matter of Personal Choice
Leibowitz disturbs the peace of a being from another world to help him define what Judaism is and what is specific to it [see previous chapter]. He starts out from the postulate that we all agree on the fact that the Jews are a people. I have never, however, heard a definition of Englishness or of Frenchness. A person’s identification with a people is a complex historical matter made up of a great many elements, such as language, literature, customs, awareness of one’s history and leading figures, habitat, religious organization, political organization, and more ---- not necessarily all together, or every single one of them in all its fullness. I cannot accept his attempt to define for me what my identity is and what my worldview must be.

But in truth, Leibowitz’s approach to Jewishness is not such an overbearing one. His own Judaism is bound up with Torah and the commandments, but he sees this as his personal and group choice, as a freely-chosen self-submission to the authority of Torah and commandments. He, thus, acknowledges man’s autonomy and his right to make conscience-based decisions, and in so doing finds himself very close to humanism, for he is affirming that Jewishness is in the hands of man and not of God. Why then not ask the Jews themselves in what way they identify with their people? As we have seen, Leibowitz does indeed go on to ask this very question. The trouble is that he supplies his own answers, and answers of a truly grotesque kind.

To Be a Decent Human Being
Maxims such as that of Hillel the Elder --- ‘Do not do to another what you would not wish done to you’ --- have not been said by Jews alone, as Leibowitz points out. However, Hillel the Elder added immediately: ‘This is the whole of Torah.’ Did Hillel not know what Judaism was? Further, though the first sentence proclaims a universal value (though in negative terms), and one that is a core component of humanist teaching, we know, do we not, that this is not the whole of Torah. Leibowitz’ Judaism --- authentic Judaism, as the Orthodox would insist --- often interprets the ‘another’ in Hillel’s dictum restrictively, as referring to fellow Jews only, and not to all fellow human beings (Rambam himself is tainted with the same ‘racism’). Leibowitz himself, by contrast, genuinely acknowledges many universal values which make no distinction between peoples or religions. As soon as he raises his eyes beyond the narrow domain of the Mishnah and Talmud, he comes across as a true humanist. In one of our conversations, I asked him what was the source of the authority for ‘decency’, one of his favorite qualities, and what was its normative basis. ‘Decency’ and ‘To be a decent human being’, are not to be found in Torah (Orthodox Jews admit that ‘even the Devil can cite Torah for his purpose’). His answer was that any intelligent man knows that this is the way to behave. In other words, this ethic of his was autonomous.
And that leads directly to my conclusion: anything considered as specifically Jewish --- be it historical or ideological --- must be tested against universal values, such as those developed in the spiritual climate of humanism, and that these values take precedence over, and constitute the basis for, any specific element of any national or religious culture. Actually, this is the way Leibowitz himself behaved all his life, and so I take the liberty of pronouncing that his flaunted anti-humanism was, at root, a rhetorical pose.

Leibowitz as an Exception
Judaism is identified by Leibowitz with Saadia Gaon’s maxim: ‘All that makes our nation a nation is Torah’, a definition he applies to the people of Israel over three thousand five hundred years (with the exception of the last two hundred). Not so.
For almost the first thousand out of these three thousand five hundred years, the people of Israel was alive and well, settled in its own country and speaking its own language --- and worshipping idols or worshipping ‘the gods of Israel’ in the guise of bulls heads. For a third of its history, it was a pagan people, and only a relatively small monotheist group desperately fought for their new fanatical creed: this group, however, was the one that wrote the history of the people in what was to become the Book of Books. What is specific to the people of Israel is the constant internal battle over social and spiritual norms, a fight which faded away during the long period of exile in favor of rule by rabbinically-interpreted Torah, a from of regime which a non-Jewish historian designated as a ‘cathedrocracy’. Thus, in the long beginning of its existence, and again in the last two hundred years, the people of Israel has not exactly given a shining example of observance of Torah and the commandments, as rabbinic tradition have them.

In an era when one form of Judaism was ‘the standard and the norm’, as Leibowitz puts it, there were, he added, a great number of ‘exceptions’ outside Judaism, outside normative Judaism, that is. Well, these ‘exceptions’, from the time of Sanballat early in the Second Temple period [Sanballat was a Samaritan Jew, who bitterly opposed Nehemiah’s rebuilding of Jerusalem’s walls after the return from Babylonian exile] to Jacob Frank in the eighteenth century [Frank proclaimed himself a ‘new messiah’ and led a Sabbatian sect of Jews who practised sexual licence and devised their own garbled version of Kabbalah], were made exceptions because the cathedrocratic regime of the time thought it wise to expel them from their people (and not only from their religion). There is no little irony in the fact that Leibowitz himself was, throughout his life, a kind of ‘exception’ vis-a-vis Israel’s religious establishment.

Judaism Is What Jews Do
The Jewish people today has lost, according to Leibowitz, the particular features which made it special in the past and it has no longer a common content. As against this, the Jewish collectivity displays many, though not all, of the characteristics which define many peoples in our time (the Armenians, the Gypsies, even the Germans are other examples), and there has also grown up a Jewish identity self-defined by Jews themselves --- as Leibowitz himself sorrowfully notes. The State of Israel has become part of that definition. Today, it can be said, no less than in any other period, that ‘Judaism is what Jews do’ --- and Jews do wicked things as well (as judged not by the eye of God, but by human conscience).
Jewish humanists exert their feeble powers to make Jews do things which are good in the eyes of God and of man. ‘To do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God’ (Micah 6: 8). The fact that there is no one collective answer to the question of the content of Jewishness, which so worries Leibowitz, does not bother me at all. This is the mark of a normal people, or of a people on the road to normalization. Our generation has suffered enough and to spare from ideological collectivization. It is better for each of us to be Jewish in hor her own way, as long as the feeling of belonging and the solidarity is not lost (some will withdraw from the collectivity, as has always happened).

Let us now turn to the three specimens of Jews highlighted by Leibowitz in his attempt to show Jews being Jewish ‘each in his own way’.

Three Specimens of Jew
Concerning the first specimen, the sports-loving Jew, ‘grotesque’ is really the only word to describe Leibowitz’s conception. His contempt for sport --- particularly for competitive sport --- is well known. From the heights of his intellectual plane he launches a flight of arrogant arrows in the direction of whoever identifies with the success of a football team of fellow-Jews. And yet, what is to be done? --- different people are interested in different things at different levels. A national football team may be the object of national pride, just as a Nobel prize winner for physics, or an illustrious statesman, a celebrated author or artist. Not all Jews (nor all gentiles) take their models from the one sphere of activity. And even the most dedicated sports buff finds interest in other national concerns.

The second specimen, the man deeply imbued with knowledge of Mishnah and Talmud, deserves great respect and is undoubtedly an authentic Jew, in the eyes of humanists too. And yet, say what you will, many such people seem to me impaired, spiritually blemished, not only because of the gratuitous hatreds they feel for each other and loudly voice, but also in their total disregard and ignorance of the cultural values which I find important, and in their self-segregation within the Jewish people. The Jew replete with Mishnah and Talmud, be he even perverse or absurd --- I see us as brothers because he is a Jew, and because he is a Jew I am involved in his fate. Him as a person I want nothing to do with.

The third type of Jew is also defined in a flight of grotesquerie. Devotion to the national flag (‘flying over the tomb of Khamor, father of Shechem, on Mount Gerizim’) may be a matter for controversy, but the flag is not --- in words used elsewhere by Leibowitz --- ‘a rag on a pole’. The flag is a symbol, a symbol representing an important value for a great number of people. Jewish-Israeli nationality encompasses far more than a flag --- it is a living partnership with wide-ranging content which respects numerous symbols. If this partnership is to be democratic (a universal value), then it will entail fierce, profound and legitimate differences of opinions. Where to place the flag is one of them, though not necessarily the most central.

All That Makes Our Nation a Nation is Our Humanity
How kind of Leibowitz to allow us to call ourselves humanist Jews and to take our place with the other Jewish ‘specimens’ he describes. He might not agree to the maxim in the title of this sub-section (‘All that makes our nation a nation is our humanity’), though it applies to him as it applies to many of the best of the people of Israel, though certainly not to all. Leibowitz makes a careful distinction between humanity and humanism: for him humanity is a feature of mankind that most men do not practise. Am I to understand from this that humanity is a desirable but unfortunately a rarely found one, and that it makes no distinction between different religions? If this is his postulate, we are talking about humanism as worldview, and the humanism of the Jews is a Jewish humanism. Every other people will have its own.
Leibowitz then goes on to his basic dispute with humanism per se. First he makes a statement: humanism, he decides, with absolute arbitrariness, is ‘seeing the individual human being as supreme value’. And yet, the truth is that one of the essential characteristics of humanism is that it has no supreme value, but a multitude of values and that no one value exercises totalitarian rule over the others (I have tried to clarify this point in the chapter on pluralism in my book Humanism, the Theory and its History). Leibowitz himself, in one of his articles, expands the above definition of humanism thus: ‘seeing the individual human being or humankind itself as supreme value’. Humankind, with all its achievements and values, is indeed no less important than the individual, all the more so because the efforts needed today to ensure the continued existence of man (in the face of ecological, nuclear, demographic and other holocausts) will of necessity entail infringing on the rights, wishes and interests of many individuals. Nonetheless, this is humanism.

Humanism is not a ‘concept’ that can be defined in the sort of one, no-punches-pulled, bull’s-eye of a sentence which tickled Leibowitz’ fancy. It is a multi-faceted, multi-trend historical phenomenon, and one would need the whole of its rich creative world to express its essence. As someone who defines himself as a non-humanist, Leibowitz has no right to dictate to my friends and myself who we are and what we should think. In fact, what he did in the address published here, was to set up a straw man in order to tear it down again. Let us observe this process using the four elements which make up humanism --- according to Leibowitz, that is.

Defining a Humanist
First criterion: ‘the humanist must be cosmopolitan and cannot have national feeling’. This is contradicted by historical fact. Most humanists have been men and women with national feeling. European nationalism, in the sense of national feeling, evolved in the beginning, at least in part, in a humanist context. To be human does not simply mean to be a man, but a man within a specific culture, heritage and mentality --- and, according to humanists, to have the ability to question and criticize that heritage (no less than the prophets of Israel did). What one may legitimately ask of a humanist is respect and understanding for other peoples and cultures. There is, indeed, humanist nationalism and there is anti-humanist nationalism. A humanist may be both nationalist and ‘cosmopolitan’ since ‘nothing human is alien to him.’

Second criterion: ‘a humanist must be a pacifist in the deepest sense of that word…’ Ridiculous. It is not true that, according to the humanist approach, no individual may be sacrificed for any value. Researchers in the field of medicine have given their life to find a new drug to save the lives of others. Parents may give their life for their children. Humanist ideals, such as equality of rights, freedom from tyranny, and the like have led to conflicts and to wars where human lives have been lost and suffering caused. It would be desirable, of course, that any such sacrifice --- such as military service in time of war or at any time --- be made willingly and voluntarily; this is, however, not possible, even from the humanist point of view, as the next sub-section makes clear. It is, however, a historical fact that humanists have taken part in wars, while yet trying to decide whether war-making can be right. Leibowitz will reply that they were not true humanists: this is insufferable arrogance. Among humanists there have also been pacifists, albeit in small numbers, and their sacrifice for this ideal must be respected and honored. It was not they, however, who created the practical conditions for the development of society towards humanism --- this was the work of the combatants and fighters.

Which leads us to the third criterion: ‘a humanist is necessarily an anarchist since he recognizes no form of government’. Codswallop! Every single norm the humanists are fighting for --- such as equality before the law (yes, the law!), freedom of fear, development of human potential, participation in decisions altering our life and fate, freedom of expression, research and creativity, even the life, the freedom and property of every individual --- any such norm relies on an organized society using its power for these purposes and to prevent any infringement of them by opposing interests. True, all regimes tend to be non-humanist, and this makes it vital to pursue an ongoing, organized politico-civil struggle to ensure the continued existence of a humanist-oriented public and state system. A measure of coercion --- tcoercion itself being closely supervised --- is indispensable for a proper public life, and there is no contradiction with humanism in that. Incidentally, the few anarchists who were ‘amiable’ and non-vi---- men like Kropotkin ---- contented themselves with expressing their views in writing, since they were against any form of organization.

A Humanist Is an Atheist
The fourth and last Leibowitz criterion, that ‘a humanist is an atheist,’ is one that I personally tend to accept, because I think --- personally! --- that believing in any god is not intellectually reasonable or acceptable from a moral point of view. But this is my personal opinion: a great many people whom I acknowledge as humanists in the fullest sense of the term believe in some form of deity, or argue that this is a question without an answer. At the same time, however, they will not accept a religious establishment which speaks in the name of that deity, or an intolerant religious fanaticism; they will not grant the truth of exploded beliefs just because they have been passed down from century to century. Leibowitz himself goes even further: he equates a belief in God with the acceptance of the Commandments. This is a Jewish worldview of small vision. True humanism includes all religions and beliefs in its attempt to clarify metaphysical problems (as of now, the majority of mankind is not even monotheist). To accept divine rule in the sense of accepting the rulings of halakhic authorities, of a Pope, an ayatollah or even of any written text (‘Holy Scripture’) --- no, thank you! Leibowitz himself was not a man to accept authority and sought and took advice only from himself. According to his own definition, I would say that he was three-fourths of a humanist. But, who am I --- who are we indeed --- to define what he was, and stick a label on him he did not want? Would that there were many like him, religiously observant people ready to fight with us for social justice, against rule over another people, and even for equality of rights for women.

It Is Hard to be a Humanist
It is true, as Leibowitz said, that authentic humanists are few and far between, but not for the reasons he states. It is difficult to be a humanist, though many try. It is easier to be part of a movement which has made humanism its banner, a movement aspiring to change social and cultural reality in accordance with that spirit. For that purpose, a state is necessary, as are institutions and international laws. The manner in which Leibowitz portrayed such movements and the spiritual climate of humanism is distorted and grotesque and I categorically denounce it. Forgive me for being still convinced that this argumentation of his was made for the sake of rhetoric alone. And what a master of rhetoric he was!

As for the Jewish people, Leibowitz is right to discern a deep split within it. He himself, like all those who live according to rabbinic law (halakhah), grieved sincerely for the departure of the people from that way of life. It made him sad to see it. But who are the ones who want to base the continued existence of the Jewish people, both in its own state and in the Diaspora, on the same foundations and values as the most advanced nations possess --- democracy, progress, the well-being of all mankind? It is we, the humanists, with all our weaknesses, and precisely by what names we are called is of no matter. The continued existence of Hebrew-Jewish culture and creativity is in the hands of the secular public, and we are the ones who have the right to say with the utmost sincerity: ‘Am Yisrael khai!’ The people of Israel is alive and well