Leibo Yeshaya: old tradition & new interpretation

Quite often his supporters disagreed with him on other issues; they may even fail to follow his line of thought. Because his conclusions were often grounded in idiosyncratic considerations, he was often admired for the wrong reasons, and his views on political questions met with angry dissent & often provoked vehement reactions from the general public, but he seemed to enjoy the Socratic role of the gadfly & remained undaunted by unfavorable reception of his message

Not so much his intellectual attainments & achievements as a thinker & teacher made so profound an impression ...
as the unshakable moral & political stand which he took up for so many years in the face of so much pressure to be sensible, to be realistic, not to let down the side, not to give comfort to the enemy, not to fight against conventional current wisdom ... Yeshayahu Leibowitz never betrayed the ideals & beliefs which brought him to Israel: he was also a Zionist & held that it was possible & right to create a free, democratic, tolerant, socially harmonious sovereign Jewish state, a self-governing & independent community of socially & politically equal citizens enjoying full civil liberties, free from ex-ploitation of one body of men by another, &, above all, free from that kind of political control by the majority over mi-norities which Jews have suffered so long & so crually as defenseless strangers in every land ... Of him it could be said more truly than of anyone else that he was the conscience of Israel: the clearest & most honorable champion of those principles which justify the creation of a movement & of a sovereign state at so high a human cost both to the Jewish nation & to its neighbors. This is a just characterization of him as political & moral critic: he himself did not accept this assessment. He did not deny his public activity & moral political positions, but disclaimed the motives attributed to him. In short: a many-splendoured person like Yehoshua haNatsri before him:
'a true Jew'! Sleep well, dream soft & sweet: you can tell us all about it sometime if you really want to do so ...