 Unless then Leibowitz is going to allow ethical motivation for certain halakhic decisions and problematize his system, or gerrymander his descriptions of those decisions so as to force them into his religious straitjacket, it appears as if these areas of decision and action cannot be deemed religious in the strict sense. Leibowitz certainly recognizes that halakhic decisions are “grounded either in the Halakhah itself or in the conditions necessary for halakhic observance” (Judaism, 4), and thus it may be that these ethical halakhic decisions are “enablers” rather than direct loci of religious worship. By contracting the religious sphere in this way, Leibowitz could maintain some indirect religious value for the ethically motivated acts of a religious Jew. But the contraction that such a move necessitates would relegate enormous tracts of the Talmud to this lesser status, which seems problematic. And again to counter that all decisions are taken by the halakhic authorities with the general motivation of “serving God,” would make it difficult to retain any form of distinction between religion and ethics of the form that Leibowitz clearly wishes to maintain. Of course many of these problems hang on the thread of Leibowitz’s concept of intention – one that assumes that intentions can be clearly and exclusively identified as “ethical” or “religious.” Melzer (1976, 261), however, among others, has argued that Leibowitz’s concept of intention is impoverished.