No longer welcome in synagogues
Yesha News gleefully reported, last night, that Attorney Shamai Leibowitz, advocate for Marwan Barghouti, was thrown out of two synagogues during Shabbat. Besides being Marwan Barghouti’s advocate he is also known to be one of the more vocal refuseniks (he’s currently number 50 on the list). You can read his beliefs here. But the worshippers didn’t refuse to pray with him because he is defending Marwan Barghouti nor for his refusing to defend his country in a time of war. What really offended them was his reported comparison, in court, of Marwan Barghouti with the biblical Moses.

You can read about the incident here: “The relative tranquility inside the courtroom was at one point punctuated by loud guffaws from the audience when Leibowitz compared Barghouti, accused of orchestrating attacks in which 26 Israelis were killed, to the biblical Moses. "Moses, too, did not recognize the Egyptians' jurisdiction to try him and fled the country," said Leibowitz, a grandson of the late biblical scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz.

Quoting Exodus, he continued: "Moses saw cruel occupation and he killed the Egyptian and left him in the sand." A patient (Judge) Gurfinkel carefully retorted "but Moses killed an Egyptian taskmaster who was beating an Israelite, not just any innocent Egyptian."”.

Jews know Moses as Moshe Rabenu, Moses our teacher. I think you could say that if Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are regarded as the biological forefathers of the Jews, Moshe is our spiritual father, God’s vessel for teaching the Jewish people what was required of them. For a religious Jew (and Shamai Leibowitz is a religious Jew) such a comparison of Moshe Rabenu with the guy that Bish always used to call “whatsisname, the little one with the moustache”, a little schneck of a terrorist turned politician turned terrorist, is going way over the line.

Now, Jews aren’t into idolizing spiritual teachers. This is widely regarded as sacrilege. Although Moshe freed the Israelites from Egyptian bondage, led them out of Egypt, and to the Promised Land, supplying them with a whole new set of beliefs and laws on the way there, he is not mentioned even once in the Passover Haggada. This is the book the Jews (even the secular ones) read together every Passover, which tells the story of the Israelites’ exodus out of Egypt. The reason for this is to emphasize that it was God who freed the Israelites and Moshe was only His helper.

So it looks like the worshippers difficulty with Leibowitz’s comparison is essentially the same as Judge Gurfinkel’s. Moshe’s killing of an Egyptian taskmaster, who was beating an Israelite slave, cannot be compared to Barghouti’s sending suicidal mass murderers to indiscriminately slaughter innocents, many of them children.

In his much quoted explanation of why Israeli Jews should refuse to serve in the territories, he maintains that what we are doing there is collective punishment of innocents. He brings a few examples from the Bible to prove that Jewish sources view collective punishment as wrong. Among other things, he quotes Deuteronomy: “The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers; every man shall be put to death for his own sin.” (Deuteronomy 24:16); and the prophet Ezekial who said: “The soul that sins, it shall die. The son shall not hear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself alone.” (Ezekial 18:20)

In this case, the bringing to trial of Marwan Barghouti is what Leibowitz himself has been demanding: Punishment of those responsible.

I believe that every person has the right of a decent defense, when put on trial (not a right automatically granted to Palestinian defendants in Palestinian courts, by the way). But by offering himself as Barghouti’s defense lawyer, and by claiming that the Israeli court has no jurisdiction to try Barghouti for the mass murder of innocents in Israel, Attorney Leibowitz contradicts his own explanation for his refusal to serve his country. I’m not saying that Barghouti’s defense lawyer should not use this line of defense. I’m not a lawyer and I don’t know. I’m saying that Attorney Shamai Leibowitz, personally, has no moral right to use this claim.

Moral right? What am I talking about? The man’s a lawyer!

By the way, with regard to Shamai Leibowitz’s grandfather, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, I highly recommend reading anything written by him, you can get your hands on. I know he is known to have said some things that annoyed a few people (well a lot of people), but everything I’ve read of his has been exciting, inspirational and thought provoking.

Bish rephrased the Talmud and commented on Shamai Leibowitz: “The vinegar is the grandson of the wine”. (The original is “vinegar son of wine” in the Gemara, Bava Metziya, 83b, meaning something on the lines of: a ne'er do well son of a righteous father).

If you understand Hebrew, you can listen to Moshe Gantz, from a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting and furthering Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s philosophies, explaining why Shamai Leibowitz does not represent his grandfather’s way of thinking.

Update: Yisrael Neeman from Mideast: On Target discusses Shamai Leibowitz here. He is less fond of Grandpa Leibowitz than I am.