Strauss - non-believing Jews

(This blog should have been called 'It's more complicated than it looks'.) Leo Strauss' atheism is more complicated than it looks, simply because he was a Jew, and like other Jews, he remained a Jew while not being a believing Jew. It's a question that always arises when I teach Biblical Studies. Students ask: is Judaism a religion or an ethnicity, or neither, or both, or what? Here are a couple of quotes from Strauss. 

The kingdom is Yours, and You will reign in glory for all eternity. As it is written in Your Torah: "The Lord shall reign for ever and ever." And it is said: " And the Lord shall be King over all the earth: on that day the Lord shall be One, and His name One."

No nobler dream was ever dreamt. It is surely nobler to be a victim of the most noble dream than to profit from a sordid reality and to wallow in it. Dream is akin to aspiration. And aspiration is a kind of divination of an enigmatic vision. And an enigmatic vision in the emphatic sense is the perception of the ultimate mystery, of the truth of the ultimate mystery. The truth of the ultimate mystery — the truth that there is an ultimate mystery, that being is radically mysterious — cannot be denied even by the unbelieving Jew of our age. That unbelieving Jew of our age, if he has any education, is ordinarily a positivist, a believer in Science, if not a positivist without any education.

"Why We Remain Jews" (1962)

Science, as the positivist understands it, is susceptible of infinite progress. That you learn in every elementary school today, I believe. Every result of science is provisional and subject to future revision, and this will never change. In other words, fifty thousand years from now there will still be results entirely different from those now, but still subject to revision. Science is susceptible of infinite progress. But how can science be susceptible of infinite progress if its object does not have an inner infinity? The belief admitted by all believers in science today — that science is by its nature essentially progressive, and eternally progressive — implies, without saying it, that being is mysterious. And here is the point where the two lines I have tried to trace do not meet exactly, but where they come within hailing distance. And, I believe, to expect more in a general way, of people in general, would be unreasonable.

"Why We Remain Jews" (1962)

Strauss also said, somewhere, words to the effect: "philosophy should always been challenged by theology and theology should always be challenged by philosophy." 

Also on Strauss, Renaud Fabbri has made useful notes on Strauss at the link below:

Leo Strauss on the phenomenon of esoteric writing