Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity Read online

  It’s not that the rabbis didn’t have rakhmones (pity) for these victims of persecution, Mrs. Schoenfeld explained, but it required a stern hand to pull them back into true Yiddishkeit.

  Da Costa had been put in kherem not once, but twice. Both times he had begged the community to allow him back, and they had granted him this, once he had fulfilled the terms of his penance. However, eventually he committed suicide — he seems to have been meshugga, a lunatic— and this had been a terrible shock and tragedy for the community, as you can well imagine. And then, at the time of Spinoza’s excommunication, there was another man, older than Spinoza but his friend, a Spanish doctor by the name of Daniel de Prado, who also was excommunicated for questioning the basic beliefs of Judaism. He, too, was allowed to make his penance.

  For everyone else the ban of excommunication had included ways in which the person in question could repent and have the ban removed when the allotted period was up. Baruch Spinoza’s kherem was declared permanent, with no possibility of his returning to the Jewish community. His offense was seen as being far deeper than any of the others’, perhaps because the young man’s arrogant behavior at the synagogue had shown the rabbis and parnassim that he was incapable of t’shuva, repentance.

  When a messenger came to where he was now living with his non-Jewish friend and brought news of his excommunication to him, Spinoza reportedly said to him, “All the better; they do not force me to do anything that I would not have done of my own accord if I did not dread scandal; but, since they want it that way, I enter gladly on the path that is opened to me.”10

  And what was this path, girls? Later he would publish his ideas and he would make the entire world angry — the Christians, too. The worst of his works he couldn’t even publish when he was alive. This was called The Ethics, and it was in this work that he would say that God is nothing but nature and he would deny that there is any moral truth beyond our own pleasure and he would deny that we have free will to choose what we do, and he would argue that there is no world-to-come when we stand before the Throne of Glory and are judged for the lives we lived here on earth. His false ideas were against every religion, not just Judaism.

  Spinoza didn’t convert to any other religion. There had been Jewish apostates before him, those who converted to Christianity or Islam. But a Jew who believed in nothing at all? This was a new phenomenon. This is why he is called the first “modern Jew.” This, girls, is what “modernity” means: believing in nothing.

  Unfortunately it would be a Jew, at least someone who had been born a Jew, who would take goyisha philosophy much further than it had ever gone before into godlessness and immorality. It would be a Jew who would make philosophy into one long argument against the existence of God and against the difference between right and wrong, so that philosophy, girls, has been, ever since modernity, the most dangerous subject that you can possibly study.

  Once again I felt reluctantly compelled to ask a question. It seemed so glaringly obvious that I waited for someone else to ask it, but since no one did, I had to: If he didn’t believe in ethics, then why did he name his book The Ethics?

  It was his malicious sense of irony, answered my teacher, with the linguistic facility that so delighted me. Just as he had taken on the name Benedictus after his excommunication, since Benedictus means “blessed” in Latin as Baruch means “blessed” in Hebrew, with that same cynicism he would call this book of his The Ethics. But there is nothing ethical about the book. Spinoza goes out of his way to deny that there is anything like the true knowledge of good and evil that the Torah gives us. The ideas in this book were so irreligious and unethical, not only for Jews who wouldn’t have read him anyway, but also for Christians, that he never dared to publish it during his lifetime.

  Did he ever publish anything? another student asked.

  Yes, he did. While he was still working on The Ethics, he broke off for a few years in order to write another book, which he did publish, although anonymously. But it became known who the author was and all those who had a fear of God, Christian people, condemned him. On the title page he listed a fictitious author.11 But once again nobody was fooled by his sly tricks. Everyone who read it — who of course were only non-Jews, since the kherem forbade that any Jew read Spinoza’s works — immediately guessed who the real author was. That’s how notorious he had already become, how much shame he had already brought on the Jews.

  Are Jews still forbidden to read Spinoza?

  I remember how strangely she looked at me when I asked her this question (provoked partly out of my wondering whether my teacher had read Spinoza herself). I remember thinking, as she stared at me for several long seconds before answering me, that she liked neither me nor my questions very much. The discovery upset me, since she was by far my favorite teacher.

  The kherem against Spinoza has never been rescinded, she said, impressing me once again with her mastery of the English language (I’d read words like “rescinded” but never heard anybody use them), even as her tone of voice foreclosed further questions along these lines. I understood her to be saying that yes, Jews were still forbidden to read this philosopher’s works, an answer that upset me almost as much as the discovery that my favorite teacher didn’t like me.

  The roots of this treatise that he published under a false name went back to his kherem. Right after he was excommunicated, he had started to write, in Spanish, what is called an apologia, defending his ideas. You should understand, though, girls, that even though such a work is called an apologia, there was going to be nothing apologetic in the work. No t’shuva, no remorse. We know this because instead of publishing his so-called apologia, he eventually turned his ideas into this treatise, written not in Spanish, which was the language that the Portuguese Jews often used for scholarly and literary works, but rather in the goyisha Latin. This treatise vindicated the two former friends of his who had first brought the charges against Spinoza. His treatise showed that all the rumors and suspicions about him had been justified. The treatise was a twisted perversion of all that his rabbis had tried to teach him. Spinoza denied that there could be any sort of prophecy or revelation. He denied that miracles were possible. He claimed that the Torah didn’t come from Ha-Shem, that it hadn’t been dictated by Ha-Shem to Moshe Rabbenu, but rather that it had been written by several men over an extended period of time and that it suffered from internal inconsistencies.

  Of course, what seem like inconsistencies are nothing new to you, girls. You know much better than that. You know that sometimes the Torah teaches us through what seem like contradictions. The Torah has endless ways of teaching us, and the appearance of inconsistency itself transmits knowledge. Rashi and the other commentators explicate all this for us, she said, mentioning the famous acronym for Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac (1040–1105), the leading exegete of Torah and Talmud of all times, at least for the Orthodox. We had been learning Rashi’s commentaries since elementary school.

  But Spinoza had the arrogant love of his own mind, Mrs. Schoenfeld continued, and he seized on these apparent contradictions so that he would not have to recognize the authority of any mind over his, not even Ha-Shem’s.

  Atheism always comes down to arrogance. Remember that, girls. It might dress itself up as careful thinking, but underneath it is the vanity and arrogance of thinking that human beings are the highest forms of intelligence in the universe.

  However, continued Mrs. Schoenfeld, Spinoza did retain one Jewish virtue, and a very important one at that: Respect for his parents. Just think about that for a moment, girls. Even a man like that, completely godless, still honored his parents. He waited until both his parents had passed away before he revealed his apikorsus. His mother had died when he was a young boy. He had been brought up by a stepmother. By the year of his excommunication, 1656, she, too, had died, as had his father. In fact, he had only sat shiva for his father a year before he was put into kherem. He had followed exactly the prescribed mitzvahs for mourning a parent, going every day to the s
ynagogue, saying Kaddish. And while his father lived, he had kept his silence because of shalom bayis.

  Shalom bayis means peace within the household, within the family. It was an exceedingly familiar phrase to all of us. So important is shalom bayis, so constitutive of the Jewish way of life, that sometimes, for its sake, you can do things that otherwise wouldn’t be allowed. For example, say a Talmudic scholar, who ought to be devoting his hours to study, has a wife who doesn’t see the point of a devotion that keeps him away both from the house and from a good parnosa, or living. She doesn’t recognize that to “sit and learn,” as the expression goes, is the most sanctified activity in which her husband can engage. For shalom bayis, the man can forsake his studying, as he himself will know if he is a true scholar, a talmid khokhem, which in Judaism entails not only intellectual but moral merit. A talmid khokhem will know the fundamental importance of a household free from resentment, rancor, discord: he will sacrifice even learning Torah for the sake of shalom bayis.

  Mrs. Schoenfeld’s choice of this particular phrase suddenly brought the story of Baruch Spinoza home to me in a startlingly immediate way. All along, I had listened with special interest to this tale of a man whose trajectory of philosophical reasoning had brought him into disastrous collision with his close-knit Jewish community, a collision that inaugurated this intriguing thing called “modernity,” of which I was uncertain whether to approve or disapprove.

  But now, with this phrase, Spinoza burst into vivid life before me. It was as if I suddenly knew him, knew the manner of person he was. I certainly felt that I understood him better than I did those bumulkes lurking around the kosher pizza shop. “That’s how it was,” I thought, with that familiar phrase peircing me inside, “that’s how he was.”

  He had not wanted to hurt his family by speaking his doubts aloud. Though he was a man who had given himself over entirely to the search after truth — I knew this instinctively — still he would not speak the truth so long as his doing so might hurt those whom he loved.

  And from this one fact about Spinoza I knew that Mrs. Schoenfeld was mistaken in thinking that it was his arrogance that explained his departure from Orthodoxy. An arrogant person would not have shown such heightened consideration for others’ sensibilities. He would not have waited until his father had died before revealing how deeply he questioned the beliefs of the fathers. The thought occurred to me that he must have been a lovable man.12 I sat in Mrs. Schoenfeld’s class and I felt that I loved him.

  My teacher had tried to make us feel Spinoza’s betrayal as our own, as if we, too, were part of that close-knit community of former Marranos, which in some sense we were. She had tried her best to put the seventeenth-century philosopher into familiar terms, and she had succeeded, though, at least in my case, not exactly as she had intended. Though I could not fathom what his ideas truly were, had no sense of what he might have meant by saying that God was nature, still, I felt that I knew him. An ignorant little girl in a calf-length skirt, I felt myself astonished with the sudden sense of knowing this philosopher, Benedictus Spinoza, who held such a formidable position in a construct of which I had only the dimmest notion: the Western canon.

  I remember one more thing that Mrs. Schoenfeld had to say about Spinoza. It was in her summation of him.

  There was nothing at all of Yiddishkeit that remained in Spinoza, she said. If you, God forbid, were to read any of his works, you would not find anything that would betray who Spinoza really was, that he had been brought up as a God-fearing Jew, a brilliant student who had once been a favorite of his rabbis, who were themselves great Torah scholars. He had learned to write in the language of goyisha philosophy, Latin, and this language pervades all his thinking, so that none of Torah’s truth could survive in it.

  Think about it, girls: If he were a true Jewish thinker, then would he have found his place among the philosophers? If he hadn’t betrayed Yiddishkeit, would the world have called him great?

  It would be some years before I would find my way back to Spinoza, even though I did go on to become a professional philosopher. But my studies in philosophy were confined to what is called analytic philosophy, which is generally quite opposed to the very possibility of metaphysics, meaning here by “metaphysics” the attempt to use pure reason (as opposed to experience) to arrive at a description of reality. (“Metaphysics” can be used in a wider, looser sense, referring just to ontological commitments — commitments concerning what sorts of things exist in the world. In the latter sense of “metaphysics,” even analytic philosophers have a metaphysics. The sense in which they reject the very possibility of metaphysics is in the sense of a nonempirical deduction of the nature of reality.)

  And Spinoza’s project is metaphysics on a grand scale— the very grandest, in fact. Never had there been quite so ambitious a metaphysical project as Spinoza’s. He is audacious in the claims he makes for pure reason. Logic alone, he argues, is sufficient to reveal the very fabric of reality. In fact, logic alone is the very fabric of reality. And into this fabric are woven not only the descriptive facts of what is, but the normative facts of what ought to be.

  In the philosophical tradition toward which I gravitate, such overinflated talk of reality — of, even more preposterously, Reality, and a Reality enriched with ethics, no less — is philosophically absurd. Or, as my old yeshiva mentors would have put it, such talk is assur, forbidden.

  The new mentors with which I replaced the likes of Mrs. Schoenfeld might well, much like her, have alluded to Spinoza by way of a cautionary tale, and one, too, that bespeaks a certain arrogant overconfidence in the powers of human reason. Of course, my new teachers wouldn’t be arguing that reason’s powers must be augmented by divine revelation, but rather by observation and scientific explanations. We learn the nature of reality — though that word itself, even uncapitalized, was slightly off-color in the analytic circles I frequented — through the laborious, peer-reviewed, one-step-forward-three-steps-backward collective efforts of science. A project such as that of Benedictus Spinoza’s, metaphysical to the heights, was one upon which I was trained to look askance, as exceeding not just the limits of knowability but the very conditions for meaningfulness. Such a system was composed of not just unsubstantiated speculations, but of highfalutin nonsense. It was presumptuous to think that we might be able to use pure reason to deduce, with absolute certainty, not only the nature of Reality but even the nature of our ethical obligations: how we ought to go about living our lives, what we ought to care about. Such claims impute far too much power to the faculty of reason.

  Spinoza had made such claims — all of them. In fact, in the panoply of Western philosophers, Spinoza stands out as having made the strongest claims for the powers of pure reason, unassisted by empirical observation and induction. Anything which we can truly know is to be known through purely deductive thought, which begins with axioms and definitions (which capture the very essence of the things defined) and proceeds onward by strict logical deductions. Spinoza took as his model the system of Euclid’s geometry, which is what gives the strikingly eccentric form to his philosophy. All the truths arrived at in this way are necessarily true, and we know them with absolute certainty. Though we cannot know all truths, since these are infinite and we are finite, still reason can take us far indeed. It can take us all the way to our salvation.

  Reason reveals, according to him, the surprising nature of reality, which is so extraordinarily different from what our senses misleadingly present. And reason, too, shows us where our true salvation lies: the truths we must think about ourselves in relation to reality, which truths shall change our very nature in the knowing, setting us free.

  Mighty claims indeed for the power of pure thought, and claims that my philosophical training led me to condemn as the height of philosophical delusion. The philosophical tasks we analytic philosophers set ourselves were far more modest. We entertained no metaphysical delusions about bypassing science to arrive at a priori certainty about the nature of R
eality; and, too, we believed it to be a fallacy— sometimes referred to as the “naturalist fallacy,” or that of ignoring the “is-ought gap”—to think to derive, as Spinoza claimed to have derived, normative statements from descriptive statements. Conceptual truths (which trace the logical connections between concepts and can be known a priori) do not entail descriptive truths — concerned with what exists; and descriptive truths do not entail normative truths— concerned with what ought to exist, what values ought to guide our actions and lives. Spinoza, outrageously, makes claim to all of these entailments.

  Not even reason can produce something out of nothing. It can’t get more out of the premises than what is already implicitly deposited within them. But this would seem to imply, or so an analytic philosopher is apt to argue, that conceptual truths — stating the logical possibilities — can’t entail descriptive or ontological truths — describing the way the world really is, what sorts of things exist, what properties they have; and, in turn, descriptive truths can’t entail normative truths — proclaiming what ought to be. The putative divide between the descriptive and the normative is famously referred to as the “is-ought gap.” The putative divide between the conceptual and the descriptive might be dubbed, though so far as I know no one ever has, the “if-is gap.”