“Every day I check my mailbox, but I have not found a letter from the Almighty confirming it.” That was Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s reply when I asked whether he considered the Zionist state “the beginning of the flowering of our Redemption.” The phrase ‘reshit tsmiḥat geʼulatenu’ appears in the prayer for the State of Israel, composed in 1948 and recited in many synagogues around the world. Of course, quite a few congregations—mostly Haredi (or ultra-Orthodox)—refuse to recite it, precisely because it imbues the Zionist project with a messianic dimension.

Our conversation took place in the professor’s modest home on Usishkin Street in Jerusalem. His study desk was crowded with piles of scholarly journals. When I spotted the Soviet journal ‘Voprosy filosofii’ (Problems of Philosophy), I realized he knew Russian, and we continued talking in my native language—which he, too, had learned as a child in Riga, then part of the Russian Empire. We shared several interests, including the history of science, which I then taught at the Université de Montréal. Moreover, we had both begun our academic lives as chemistry students. His weekly Torah commentaries on Israeli radio and sharp public critiques of Israeli society made him well known far beyond academic circles.

Professor Leibowitz was raised as an Orthodox Jew and remained one throughout his life. I had become observant barely a decade earlier and was drawn to this brilliant polymath—a deeply committed Judaic scholar and a fearless critic of oppression and injustice. I was eager to understand his views on science, Judaism, and Zionism.

In his youth, Leibowitz identified with religious Zionism in its........

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