A Latter Day Prophet

The first thing one remembers about Yeshayahu Leibovitz is his magnificent vigor.

Well into his tenth decade, one could spot his cotton-white tufts of hair--always protruding from an austere, black yarmulke--throughout his adopted Israel, visiting this university or that Kibbutz.

He was a man of vast learning in widely disparate fields. Trained as a chemist in his native Germany, he taught science at the Hebrew University for over five decades. His discourses on Jewish philosophy were renowned. In learned volumes and popular radio programs, Leibovitz established himself as one of his generation's foremost--and most radical--interpreters of Maimonides, that towering figure in the intellectual history of the Jews.

But Leibovitz's scholarly endeavors alone could not account for his national renown when he passed away last August. Indeed, the obituaries and encomia for him in Israeli newspapers made only casual mention of his academic career. Leibovitz was remembered--and will continue to be remembered--as a twentieth century gadfly, a latter-day prophet.

The story of Leibovitz's ascent into the company of Socrates and Jeremiah begins in 1967. Immediately following the Arab-Israeli war (a moment Israelis wittily call "the seventh day" of the Six-Day War), Leibovitz predicted that Israeli occupation of the newly conquered West Bank and Gaza Strip would erode the moral fiber of the Jewish state.

His clarion call for unilateral withdrawal from "the territories" went against the grain of the unbridled popular euphoria in the wake of Israel's stunning military victory. It was only some decade-and-a-half later, following Israel's Vietnam-like experience in Lebanon, that his writings and speeches began to win attentive audiences across Israel.

It took the Intifadah, the Palestinian popular uprising that began in December of 1987, to clinch Leibovitz's status as "seer." Israeli newspapers reported the daily incidents from the territories: pitiable, rock-throwing Arab youth and ruthlessly professional Israeli soldiers, together engaged in a macabre dance of death. Editorialists began to wonder how long the undeclared war could go on without taking a severe moral toll on the occupiers.

Leibovitz's 20-year-old meditations on the causal connection between occupation and the sickness of the Israeli polity were re-discovered and their author pronounced a prophet.

Leibovitz was a man of irony and rhetorical excess. A devoted Orthodox Jew, he relentlessly campaigned for the separation of synagogue and state. A witness to the unspeakable horrors of Nazi Germany, Leibovitz infuriated the Israeli public by referring to Israeli soldiers as "Judeo-Nazis."

After that celebrated turn of phrase, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin--who has been seen, of late, pumping the flesh of men of less repute--refused to share a podium with Leibovitz. All this from an octogenarian clad in plaid, with tooth-white hair and a black yarmulke.

Leibovitz's legacy is a politics--indeed a world-view--that is idiosyncratic, defiant and ultimately restless. His life was devoted to an assault on the dangers of ideology, both secular and religious.

But, in the end, what emerges from his quirky mix of piety and heresy is a vision of hope, a hope born not out of the panaceas of elected officials, but the crucible of carnage that time and again rears its gruesome: head in the Land of Prophets.

May his memory be for a blessing.

Samuel I. Rascoff's column appears on alternate Fridays.