Yeshayahu Leibowitz was the greatest Jewish thinker of the 20th century, or rather, the greatest 20th century thinker on the subject of Judaism.

What I find heroic in him is his unbending will to assimilate the horrors of the 20th century while hanging by a fingerhold to faith. And how this tenuous grasp becomes the basis for a religious life.

I’ll come back to the issue of free will, which, incidentally, Leibowitz conflates with the four cubits of rabbinic law, but first I’d like to describe the God he would have us believe in.

This God was most expertly defined by the Rambam in the opening chapters of his Mishneh Torah. His is the God of strictly negative attributes. That is, the God one can say nothing about other than that which is not. This is the God of medieval Islam. What Leibowitz does is displace this remote medieval God ten or fifteen removes further still, to a realm of the multiverse where It has absolutely nothing to do with you, the lives of your children, or the ecosystem you inhabit.

Leibowitz takes it as fact that the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology hold sway throughout the multiverse; there is no relationship between the Divine and anything we recognize as extant.

We have nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with It, and It has nothing to do with us or the world we inhabit or anything we might ever dream up.

What compelled Leibowitz to subscribe to and then magnify the Rambam’s conception of God? Let’s just say it was theodicy, or Auschwitz and the gas chambers, the piled corpses of the Gulag, and the burned bodies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was a child of the 20th century, born in Riga, 1905, with a Jewish heart that could not abide the barbarism of a God permitting all this. What is remarkable is that he did not forsake this God as did many others or deny Its existence.