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. In his youth, Leibowitz identified with religious Zionism in its early form, well before the onset of messianic militancy after the June 1967 war. He became a principled opponent of the occupation and settlement of the Palestinian territories that Israel conquered in that war. Leibowitz expected the Zionist state to abide by the moral principles of Judaism and was bitterly disappointed that it did not.