 In his earliest writings of the early 1930s, written while still in Germany, Leibowitz was aligned with the religious Zionism of the Mizrachi movement. For Leibowitz, the contraction of the halakhic system over almost two thousand years of exile had led to its disfigurement. Confined to the private sphere as a result of Judaism’s exilic reality over this period, in combination then (and now) with the secularization wrought by modernity, the halakhic system had never had to deal with the challenge of nationhood. With the advent of Zionism, Leibowitz writes “we are presented with the opportunity and the task of realizing through and within the land of Israel the concealed power of Torah” (Ratziti, 327), through the application, indeed restoration, of the system of Jewish law to its original nation-building purpose whereby it might produce a state that could run according to Jewish law; that could accommodate, for example, the needs of a country to have a fully working police force and electrical system on the Sabbath without being parasitic on Jews who do not observe the laws forbidding such action on the Sabbath. For Leibowitz, “a specific and detailed halakhic code for administering the full panoply of state functions is called for … [to give] a clear picture of how the religious parties would run the state if and when they came to power” (Judaism, 170–171).