“There are those who hold that life is random and ever-changing, and is therefore not the true reality (in the words of Ecclesiastes -- vanity of vanities), but they ascribe to this vanity of vanities value by serving God, Who is in fact The Truth and The Eternal. This position is in no way tied to belief in the world to come.”

I found this quote from Yeshayahu Leibowitz in the book Leibowitz— Heretic or Believer, by Michael Shashar. It strikes me as perhaps essential to an understanding of the Leibowitz Weltanschaung. I’d like to go through it carefully and draw the broadest conclusions.

When Leibowitz says, “There are those who hold ...“ he includes himself in that group of moderns who identify with Heraclitus and that philosopher’s analogy of the ever-changing river as the clearest expression for ever- changing reality. And Leibowitz adds to this truth of mutability the fact that because the world is ever-changing, there is no true reality. This isn’t mere agnosticism, but rather an admission of ignorance fraught with the dismay of knowing one will never come to a point at which one might say, I’ve got it. I know what’s true!

There’s angst in the Hebrew term for what we translate as “vanity of vanities.“ Something that’s vain is unnecessary or frivolous, not empty or hollow.
A better translation of hevel-havalim might be: gaping emptiness, or uselessness. When Leibowitz says that Ecclesiastes used the term to express the idea that the world we find is “not the true reality,“ it’s with bitter resignation that he acknowledges this fact. What are the prospects for a man alive in a world that is not the true reality, in a world that is random, brimming with threats, impenetrable?