Description
Book SynopsisThese hard-hitting essays by Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the first to be published in English, constitute a comprehensive critique of Israeli society and politics and a probing diagnosis of the malaise that afflicts contemporary Jewish culture.
Trade ReviewThe essays are incisive, provocative, fearlessly consistent… No one interested in Israel, Judaism and the nexus of the two can afford complacently to ignore the questions Leibowitz refuses to stop asking. -- Menachem Kellner * New York Times Book Review *
The most significant criticism of Israel that Israel has ever been handed by one of its own citizens. [Leibowitz] has a rare moral presence. -- Moshe Halbertal * New Republic *
The essays in this fine collection amply reveal Leibowitz’s unswerving consistency… At the same time, though, a close reading of the essays reveals tensions which, although possibly reconcilable, nevertheless point to a certain elasticity in this seemingly inflexible thinker. In the end, Leibowitz’s humanity stands revealed as much in these rare moments of inconsistency as in his fanatic adherence to principle. -- David Biale * Religious Studies Review *
Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s significance in contemporary Jewish intellectual life, and in Israel’s political and intellectual life, is comparable to that of figures better known in the United States—Buber, for example, or Scholem. Leibowitz is more locally involved, and he is more openly polemical. But he is never mysterious or evasive, oracular or reticent. He just fights his battles, but the result of all his battles is a remarkably consistent doctrine. It remains lean and elegant—and, even for people who disagree, heartening and enlivening. -- Michael Walzer
Table of ContentsIntroduction by Eliezer Goldman PART 1: FAITH 1. Religious Praxis: The Meaning of Halakhah 2. Of Prayer 3. The Reading of Shema 4. Fear of God in the Book of Job 5. Divine Governance: A Maimonidean View 6. Lishmah, and Not-Lishmah 7. The Uniqueness of the Jewish People 8. The Individual and Society in Judaism 9. Ahistorical Thinkers in Judaism 10. The Religious and Moral Significance of the Redemption of Israel 11. Redemption and the Dawn of Redemption 12. The Status of Women: Halakhah and Meta-Halakhah 13. Religion and Science in the Middle Ages and in the Modern Era PART 2: RELIGION, PEOPLE, STATE 14. The Social Order as a Religious Problem 15. The Crisis of Religion in the State of Israel 16. A Call for the Separation of Religion and State 17. After Kibiyeh 18. Jewish Identity and Israeli Silence 19. The Jew in His Community, on His Land, and in the
