Leibowitz did not accept the Sinai revelation as a historical truth, but as a normative truth.

Leibowitz did not accept the Sinai revelation, and he did not even know why the Torah was given.

Aharon, do you have support for what you’re saying?

I’m considering offering a prize of 1000 shekels to anyone who clearly shows that he did not believe in the giving of the Torah by an existent God.

Leibowitz always kept coming back to the fact that after the giving of the Torah there was the sin of the Golden Calf. Therefore it has no significance from the standpoint of faith.

Where do I collect the thousand shekels?

With Heaven’s help, eve of the festival of Shavuot, 5780

In my humble opinion — to no rabbi in particular,

In the words of Prof. Leibowitz that you cited, it is not said that the Sinai revelation did not happen, but rather that it has no significance for faith; and his intention is that it is not the basis of faith, since even those who were present at Sinai and saw or heard abandoned the faith within a short time. The fact that a person sees miracles and wonders still does not bring him to faith, and it is still possible that he will choose not to believe.

It may be that, according to Leibowitz, the choice to believe depends on the inner willingness to accept the yoke of the commandments that follows from that faith, and that this is the necessary condition for faith. Since Leibowitz was prepared to observe the commandments of the Torah, it seems that he also believed in it.

And I bless you that you should merit to celebrate the season of the giving of our Torah in comfort, even without Moshe’s thousand shekels 🙂

With blessings, S. Tz.

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… significance for faith, …

There are things he cannot say explicitly. But from his words it is as clear as day that God did not reveal Himself to the Children of Israel, because otherwise they would not have worshipped the calf and said, “These are your gods, O Israel.” If they confused the God who was revealed to them with a calf, that is proof that God was not revealed to them.

The Last Decisor,
Making speculations about Leibowitz’s words seems unnecessary to me. If there is a source, written or filmed, in which Leibowitz says this, I’m willing to hear it, but just interpretations and inferences seem unnecessary to me.

One has to distinguish between what he said explicitly and interpretation. What he said explicitly — and repeated things like this in several places — is that “a person’s religious-faith stance in Judaism does not depend at all on information about what happened at some point in time, nor on how he understands the event or events,” but rather, “faith is entirely a person’s decision to serve God.”
And afterward he says: “Go and see: the Torah tells us that the generation that was eyewitness and earwitness to the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai… did not believe in God and refused in practice to accept the Torah upon themselves…”

But in any case he adds that all the conceptions and interpretations of the Sinai revelation — of Maimonides, Rashi, Rabbi Kook, and many others — are all religiously valid, “because their proponents were united in faith, that is, in recognition of the obligation to observe Torah and commandments.”

According to Leibowitz’s view, the Torah is not a history book (and what the Torah says is not what actually happened in reality, but something like prophecy).

The Last Decisor,
If there is no command, then what exactly is the religious person obeying? Or: what is “the service of God”? Just actions that I do for the sake of Heaven? If I jump five times on one leg for the sake of Heaven, is that equivalent to putting on tefillin?

To Shai Zilberstein, and to Moshe:

I don’t have Leibowitz’s books in front of me, so I’m copying quotations of Leibowitz that appear in two articles I have before me. One is “Daniel Statman — Observance of Commandments in a World Emptied of Religious Meaning” — (highly recommended), and the other is “The Thought of Yeshayahu Leibowitz — Tal Wolfson”; both are online and cite the precise sources in Leibowitz’s writings.

“God was not revealed either in nature or in history” — (cited in Statman, p. 33).

“The faith-meaning of verses about God is not information about God, but rather they express, in the specific theological language, man’s consciousness regarding the obligation that he recognizes: the service of God” (ibid., p. 35).
“The meaning of the Sinai revelation is recognition of the command with which we were commanded” (Wolfson p. 6. She expands and explains that, according to Leibowitz, the Sinai revelation denotes not a factual matter but a normative one).

There is much more material on the matter.

I ask that the friends here make sure Moshe transfers me the 1000 shekels he promised.

Shai,

Regarding your last remark, that is what Statman deals with. Worth reading.

With Heaven’s help, eve of “the festival of Shavuot you shall make for yourself… according to the measure of the freewill offering of your hand,” 5780

To Aharon — warm greetings,

It would be advisable for you to leave your bank account details so that Moshe can transfer to you “the thousand to you, Aharon.” Good that this is happening close to the season of the giving of our Torah, when Moses grew rich from the chips of the tablets, and so he’ll be able to pay generously 🙂

With the blessing of receiving the Torah with joy, S. Tz.

Or perhaps there were two Yeshayahus: one believed in the Sinai revelation as historical truth, and the other as a “normative truth” 🙂

With blessings, Dr. Shatzius von Loewenhausen

Aharon,
You wrote: “The meaning of the Sinai revelation is recognition of the command with which we were commanded.” What command were we commanded, if God did not command the Children of Israel anything? I don’t have the time or urgent interest to read Statman. What is his answer in general?

In general, Statman argues that according to Leibowitz this is a paradox; he truly does not understand the matter.

He writes: “Not for nothing did Leibowitz repeatedly evade the question whether the Sinai revelation was a historical event or not” — p. 41.

As for the sentence, “The meaning of the Sinai revelation is recognition of the command with which we were commanded,” the intention is not recognition of a historical event in which you were commanded, but a demand for normative recognition: you must recognize / feel / believe that the system of commandments is commanded to you from above (and is not your own volunteering), and of course behave accordingly.

According to Leibowitz, the Written Torah has meaning only by virtue of the Oral Torah. And the religious person decided to accept the Oral Torah, and from that the importance of the Written Torah is derived. And not because of the Sinai revelation.

To Shai:

Maybe I’ll sharpen it a bit:

“The meaning of the Sinai revelation is recognition of the command with which we were commanded.”

The Sinai revelation is a story, and its point is the moral lesson.

The purpose of reading the story is that you should feel and act as though the story happened historically.

You need to form norms of consciousness (a sense of obligation) and norms of behavior as if there had been in history a revelation and a transmission of a system of commandments.

To “The Last Decisor” (by the way, your nickname is annoying; it projects arrogance):

Leibowitz did indeed deal with the paradoxical relationship between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah, in which the Oral Torah defines the boundaries of the Written Torah while drawing its authority from the Written Torah.

That still does not mean that the Sinai revelation has no meaning. Would Leibowitz have suggested deleting the Sinai revelation from the Torah because it is superfluous?

The Sinai revelation is not superfluous. It comes to teach that there is no magic. Human beings’ demand for sorcery and magic, such as that God should reveal Himself, has no effect on the improvement of man. They immediately worship the calf.

And on the substance of the matter: if the Torah itself is from God, then why should the things written in it happen by means of human beings? Is God subject to human beings?

As for the nickname: since the Jewish law follows the later authority, it is forbidden for any of the heretics and Korah’s followers to disagree with me.

Thanks, A. By the way, you can link to a specific moment in the video.
Right click and then choose copy video URL at current time.
Like this: https://youtu.be/9iIGnIKn528?t=963

You’re welcome, Chatterbox. Tell Moshe he owes me 1000 shekels.

I, like the existent God, combine thought with action.

Bottom line, Leibowitz apparently liked word games.
Kind of reminds me of the case of Levinas.

Very sorry, but I saw no proof whatsoever. The statement that he believed in the description of the fireworks display at Sinai literally does not mean there is no reality of command in a non-literal sense (up to the extreme interpretation of prophetic inspiration into the heart of each and every Jew who was present there), and after all there are those who interpreted the Guide for the Perplexed that way.

Note that Leibowitz was not an idiot who thought there is no command and the whole matter is just adopting a value — Judaism or chess — and Statman and the like do him an injustice.

Moshe, I wasn’t able to understand what you wrote.

I suggest to you and to others to read Statman carefully.

He is a professor of philosophy at the University of Haifa, and deals extensively with exactly this issue.

(As for the payment, we can reach a compromise).

Moshe, did you see the video I sent?

To A.,

What did you find in that video?

And I, in my innocence, thought that the nickname “The Last Decisor” conveyed humility and lowliness of spirit, along the lines of the saying of the Sages:

“Rabbi Zeira said in the name of Rava bar Zimuna: If the earlier ones were sons of angels, we are sons of men; and if the earlier ones were sons of men, we are like donkeys.”

To The Last Decisor, I have two points to respond to you:
First, regarding your claim that he thought the Sinai revelation was a “total failure”: that is because, in his view, a *conclusion* has no absolute hold over a person; rather, a person has to grasp his conclusion and *decide* in accordance with it! And the fact is that people who saw God sinned not long afterward. (Though in their conclusion there certainly was “the Merciful One.”) And people many, many generations later did not see God and died for the sanctification of God’s name. (That is more or less a quote of his that I remember from some interview.) And that is Leibowitz’s point — the decision! (And of course this statement of his has nothing whatsoever to do with trying to spin interpretations that he denied the Sinai revelation, as I saw above here.)
–
And a second point: Leibowitz’s view that it does not matter whether a person imagines the Sinai revelation in form A or form B (the multiplicity of interpretations among the commentators) does not mean that he is claiming it is some muddled game of magic, etc. He simply holds that the Sinai revelation has substantive value and not physical value, and however you calculate its physical picture is perfectly fine, so long as you accept its essential value — which is the main thing in that whole event. (Which happened in one physical form or another, and the essential content [which is the common denominator in all these interpretations] was transmitted there.)

“The Last Decisor” is certainly not out of humility, but rather the way by which one can address everyone regarding the truth:
Those whom the truth interests will accept my words because of the truth. (Unless I am mistaken.)
And those who are captive to rules and routines will have to accept my words because of the nickname, since Jewish law follows the later authority.

Shai Zilberstein
If you jump on your leg for the sake of Heaven, that will certainly be service of God. But you will not be a Jew. A Jew is someone who has accepted Jewish law upon himself as service of God. (According to Leibowitz).

Daniel Koren
“And when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain… he took it from their hand, fashioned it with a graving tool, and made it a molten calf; and they said: These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.”

If they said about a calf that it was God, that is proof that they had never seen God and did not understand what God is at all. In other words, there was no revelation to the Children of Israel. At most, Moses our rabbi put on some effects there for fools so that they would be intimidated. But it did not help. When stupidity is celebrating, nothing helps.

Leibowitz did not deny the Sinai revelation. The Sinai revelation in the Torah comes to teach that “the revelation of God” is a failure known in advance. But for you, “denied the Sinai revelation” means that this is something that happened in history, in reality. But that is not denial. It is just a historical-scientific question that has no evaluative significance according to Leibowitz.

You need to start distinguishing between the Torah and history, because it is obvious that you still think they are the same thing, as though the Torah came to describe historical stories.

And one can make the following argument: if the Torah came to describe historical descriptions that happened on planet Earth, then it is not Torah from Heaven. And that is denial. And one must choose.

To The Last Decisor, hello. First of all, don’t push Leibowitz into your own theories. Leibowitz had a very, very deep distinction between conclusion and decision, and not every act a person does testifies to his conclusion before the act. This is a major foundation in his thought. A person can know that the Torah was given, and nevertheless not observe it — and no, not because he thinks the Torah was not given, but because he does not feel like accepting the yoke of commandments. To go deeper into his approach on “conclusions and decisions,” you are invited to watch this video https://youtu.be/o7dntFd5UeE in which he lectures on this whole topic (not from a religious standpoint; independently — on this psychological phenomenon). And that is Leibowitz’s view. You can accept it or not accept it, but call a lady by her proper name: if you think otherwise, don’t just force him into your own notions. Regarding the sin of the Golden Calf — forgive me, but you are making a very unnecessary analogy (to put it mildly). The matter is clear and well known in the commentators and in the words of the Sages: there was a real mystical craving to worship idols in ancient times. (And not for nothing was the ancient world as a whole idolatrous.)
As I understand it, they needed something tangible, and for them the calf replaced Moses. It is similar to a person who commits a grave sin in order to satisfy his desire, even if he knows it is forbidden. (The desire is real, and mere knowledge is not enough.)
To understand exactly what was going on in their heads, it seems to me nobody can; this comes to strengthen the point that man is a much baser creature than we imagine — that he needs to do deep inner work in order to accept upon himself “the service of God,” and the command alone is not enough…

And regarding your last point, my friend — that the Torah does not describe history — I agree with you in principle.
However, one has to distinguish between the book of Genesis and the book of Exodus onward. About Exodus onward there is mass testimony that the thing happened in history… (Genesis of course does not describe history; it is quite allegorical.)
Even if you want to argue with me about what exactly happened at Sinai in physical terms — in any case, from the psycho side (that is, the conscious perception of the witnesses), the entire description that appears in the verses of the event had mass testimony behind it. It really does not interest me whether there was lightning in physical reality or whether there was not. As far as I am concerned, the very fact that the whole people are vividly imagining there to be lightning exactly as described in the verses is what matters to me. (The essential content.)
My point is that there was an experience of divine revelation — define it however you want.
With blessings, Daniel 🙂

Daniel. If God reveals Himself to you, you will never in your life say about a calf statue, “These are your gods, O Israel.”
It’s very simple. There was no revelation. At most, Moses our rabbi put on some effects there for idiots so they’d be cowed. But it didn’t help. When stupidity is rampant, nothing will help.

Most of the things I said are mine, not Leibowitz’s. But they are in Leibowitz’s spirit.

If it seems to you that anything has changed in human beings regarding the desire for idol worship, you are mistaken. Nothing has changed.

If that is your conclusion, then apparently you did not succeed in understanding Leibowitz’s distinction between “conclusion and decision.” I invite you to watch the lecture I sent you. (Meaning: your words are really not “in Leibowitz’s spirit” — heaven forbid.)

We are all witnesses that people do not worship idols as in the past… meaning, things have indeed changed. (Maybe it has been replaced by other things, and by many things… that only proves that when there was not such a proliferation of such things, the desire was much more focused and extreme. Think carefully.)

Hello, A., you said two things.
A — that Leibowitz did not accept the Sinai revelation.
B — that he did not even know why the Torah was given.
Regarding A, I am fairly perplexed, and it probably requires further study (I, like Moshe [since now there is a doubt lest there be a monetary stake here {and one may resolve this doubt from his statement: “I am considering offering a prize… etc. etc.” — from here one should infer that he is exempt, because he has not yet obligated himself!}] feel the claim is a bit ridiculous — that he accepted there was the force of a command without there being actual support for it…) and further study is needed in Statman’s words).
And regarding B: he did not understand philosophically why God chose one nation out of all the nations, and why we received all these commands specifically; that does not mean he did not accept it.
With blessings, Daniel 🙂

I am too insignificant to understand what connection there is between the distinction of conclusion and decision and the question whether there was a revelation to the Children of Israel.

To The Decisor… hello. If you are refuting the revelation (apparently a conclusion) by means of their decision (the sin of the Golden Calf), then you did not understand the above philosophical concept… “conclusion — decision” are separate categories. Think carefully, my friend.

Hello Daniel, I got here by chance — because of Google’s search algorithm — and read your question. Both from reading Leibowitz’s materials and from personal feeling, I can say that “faith” is what Leibowitz called a “value decision.” In other words, first of all, he recognizes that God is not a concept like other material concepts. Therefore the “impression” of God is not an impression in the same senses as an ordinary impression… But after a person (in historical Judaism at least, a Judaism that no longer exists) accepts that he exists in the presence of God, he still has to decide whether that existence also obligates him to maintain the religious way of life — that is, to accept the yoke of Torah and commandments — or not. Besides that, one should understand that Yeshayahu Leibowitz was first and foremost a fierce opponent of the existing regime. In this he was quite lonely in academia and in general. From this it follows that the opposition of most public figures in Israel to Yeshayahu Leibowitz stems first and foremost, and especially, from this state of affairs. It also follows that the discussion between Leibowitz and his opponents is usually a dialogue of the deaf. That is, the people with whom he debated **did not want** to understand him. And their declarations that Leibowitz was hard for them to understand are fundamentally false. As Leibowitz sometimes joked, people make every effort to confuse themselves, so long as they do not have to face what is unpleasant for them. The question is from two years ago, but I couldn’t resist.