Can You Love a God Who’s Nothing Like Anything You Know?
The Question That Wouldn’t Leave Him Alone
It’s Friday evening in Jerusalem, 1985. A girl named Noa strikes a match and lights the Shabbat candles, as her family has done for generations. She watches the flames flicker, then turns to her father. “Why do we do this? What does it have to do with God?” Her father thinks for a moment. “Because God commanded it,” he says. Noa frowns. “But what is God like? If I can’t see God or understand God, how can lighting candles connect me to God?” These were not just a teenager’s questions. They are the questions that drove one of the most provocative Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century — Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903–1994).
Leibowitz was born in Riga to a religious Jewish family, and after fleeing the Russian revolution, studied chemistry and philosophy in Berlin. He later became a professor of biochemistry and neurophysiology in Jerusalem. But he was not famous for science. He was famous for his sharp, uncompromising ideas about what it means to be a religious Jew. His answer to Noa’s question would be startling: God is so completely other that you cannot know anything about God — and the only thing that counts as faith is doing the commandments, not what you think or feel while you do them.
God Is Off the Map
If you ask someone “Where is God?” you might picture a grand sunset, a powerful storm, or a moment of extraordinary luck. Leibowitz would say that all of this is a mistake. His starting point was radical transcendence — the idea that God is completely unlike anything we can ever encounter. God is not “more powerful” or “invisible.” God is so far beyond our world that our words, our thoughts, our experiences cannot capture God at all.
This is an ancient idea. The medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides (1138–1204) taught a negative theology: you can only say what God is not. God is not a body, not located in space, not having feelings like a human. Leibowitz pushes this even further. He writes that God is not revealed in nature or in history. To believe that a storm is God’s anger or a victory is God’s blessing would be to shrink God into something inside the world — an idol. For Leibowitz, even saying that nature shows God’s handiwork makes God too small.
That means the universe is just the universe, running by the laws of science. A beautiful mountain is not “holy.” A historical event, even the Holocaust, has no religious meaning. Leibowitz did not try to explain suffering as part of God’s plan. That would bring God into history, which he refused to do. As he often said, “God did not reveal himself in nature or in history” — and he himself called this statement his “heresy.”
If you think that rocks, buildings, or countries can be holy, you are, in his eyes, practicing idolatry. The only “holy” is God, and God is not in the world. So what, then, is a holy book?
The Bible Is Not a Science Textbook
For many people, the Torah is valuable because it tells us how the world began and what heroes did long ago. But Leibowitz could not accept this. If God is utterly transcendent, then history and nature are ordinary — there is nothing special about the facts of the past, even the history of the Jewish people. So why treat the Torah as holy?
His answer: the Torah is not a book of information. It is a book of demands. “The Torah is not a work of fact,” he would say. It is a collection of mitzvoth (commandments) that tell Jews how to serve God. The stories of Abraham, Moses, or the Exodus are not there to teach us what happened in a factual sense; they are there to teach us about the nature of our obligation to God. Even when the Torah seems to describe God acting in the world — splitting a sea, bringing plagues — we must not read those as historical reports. They are ways of using human language to express a demand that itself goes beyond human understanding.
This raises an obvious problem. If the Torah is supposed to be divine, where does that divinity come from if God never literally dictated it? Leibowitz gave a surprising answer: it comes from human tradition. The Oral Torah — the centuries of rabbinic discussion that became the Talmud — is what established which books are Scripture. It was the rabbis, in full historical daylight, who made that decision. They then claimed that the Written Torah itself authorizes them to do so. Leibowitz knew this was a circle: the Oral Torah gives the Written Torah its status, but the Oral Torah only has authority because the Written Torah says so. He accepted the circle. For him, the starting point is always a human commitment, not a proof from outside.
Your Practice Is Your Faith
So if God is beyond knowing, and Scripture is a set of demands, what does it mean to have faith? Leibowitz’s answer was blunt: Jewish faith is not a belief about God; it is a way of life. Throughout history, he argued, Judaism was defined by adherence to the halakhah — the system of Jewish law built from the mitzvoth. Theology, mysticism, and philosophical ideas came and went, but the practice remained constant.
Faith, for Leibowitz, is an “evaluative decision” — a choice you make, not a conclusion you reach by weighing evidence. It does not arise from studying nature or history. It arises from committing yourself to a system of observance. In fact, he went so far as to say that “faith is nothing but its system of mitzvoth.” The doing is not a sign of some inner state; the doing is the faith.
This creates a curious circle: you do the commandments because you have faith, but your faith is nothing other than doing the commandments. Leibowitz did not see this as a flaw. He compared it to the way you learn to play an instrument: you start because your parents or community put a violin in your hands, and through the practice itself you come to understand what it means to be a musician. Similarly, through mitzvoth you come to understand that serving God consists in the practice itself.
But there is a crucial condition: the mitzvoth must be done lishmah — for their own sake, not to satisfy any human need. If you keep kosher because you think it’s healthier, or pray because it calms you, you are treating God as a tool for your own comfort. That, for Leibowitz, is putting man at the center, not God. True worship demands that you obey simply because God commanded, even if the act makes no sense to you. Most mitzvoth, he bluntly said, are “meaningless” from any human perspective. Their only meaning is that they are God’s commands.
Why would this be valuable? Because, Leibowitz argued, only by obeying commands that come from beyond our nature can we be truly free. Everything else — our desires, our reasoning, even our moral instincts — is part of nature. A cow follows its nature; a person who follows only nature is no freer than a cow. Serving God, by contrast, is an act of radical autonomy: you break free from the chain of causes that makes you a mere part of the natural world.
When Serving God Clashes with Being Good
This sharp separation between serving God and serving human interests leads to a tough question: what about moral duties, like helping a neighbor or being honest? Leibowitz did not deny that these are genuinely valuable. He called ethics the “atheistic category par excellence” — not because it is bad, but because it puts human welfare at the summit of value, whereas religion puts God there.
For him, a religious Jew must keep these two realms distinct. When the Torah says “love your neighbor as yourself,” that is not an ethical teaching; it is a mitzvah, a divine imperative. The key is the end of the verse: “I am God.” You love your neighbor not because your neighbor deserves it, but because God commands it. If you help someone out of pure compassion, Leibowitz would say that is a noble ethical act, but it is not religious worship. Only an act motivated by the intention to serve God qualifies.
This view becomes especially tricky when it comes to mitzvoth that seem to be about social justice or kindness. Leibowitz did not want ethical values to creep in and shape halakhah. Yet he himself made a surprising exception. In a late essay on the status of women in Judaism, he drew a line between two types of mitzvoth. Some (like daily prayer or dietary laws) are pure demands with no human reason behind them. But others (like barring women from Torah study or from leadership roles) were shaped by the social attitudes of ancient times and can change as society changes. He strongly argued that depriving women of serious Torah study denied them a basic Jewish right and that such restrictions should be overturned.
This was an explosive move. It meant that human values — a sense of fairness and equality — were allowed to influence halakhah after all. Critics pointed out that if you let that horse in the barn, it’s hard to keep it from taking over. Leibowitz would have insisted that such changes were meant only to protect the very possibility of living a halakhic life, not to serve human interests for their own sake. But the tension in his system remained: can you really separate a “religious” intention from an “ethical” one so cleanly?
No Holy Land, No Holy State
Because Leibowitz believed that nothing in the world can be holy, he drew fierce conclusions about politics. He was a committed Zionist who wanted Jews to be free from rule by others, but he insisted that the state of Israel is a secular institution, like any other state. It serves human needs — safety, justice, order — and has no religious significance. To treat the state, the army, or the land itself as holy was, in his eyes, the most dangerous form of idolatry.
From this, he launched public criticisms that made him a lightning rod in Israeli society. As early as 1968, he argued that Israel should withdraw from the territories it had occupied in the Six‑Day War, because controlling another people leads to moral corruption. He called on soldiers to refuse to serve in occupied territories, even using deeply provocative language. In 1993, a year before his death, he compared certain Israeli army units to the SS — a reference that caused uproar and led to a boycott threat from the prime minister when Leibowitz was to receive the Israel Prize. In the end, he declined the award.
His point was not to be shocking for its own sake. It was that when people dress up nationalism and military power in religious language, they commit terrible injustices while telling themselves they are serving God. The only way to prevent that, he believed, was to keep religion and state completely separate. Religion’s role is to act as a “critical friend” — to remind people that all human values are limited and that no political achievement is sacred.
This matters today because the habit of mixing religion with national identity is not gone. People still claim that a piece of land is promised by God, or that a particular political program carries divine blessing. Leibowitz challenges us to ask: if God is truly beyond everything we can grasp, can any human institution ever be “holy”? And if not, then maybe the most religious thing we can do is to judge our governments by ordinary moral standards — and never let them hide behind a holy mask.
Think about it
- If you perform a good deed only because you believe God commands it, is that different from doing it because you feel compassion? Should it matter?
- Leibowitz thought that calling a country or a piece of land “holy” is idolatry. Can you think of a situation where treating a place as sacred might be valuable, or is it always dangerous?
- If you can’t describe God at all — not even to say God is loving or just — what could it mean to worship God? Is such a God still worth serving?
