Betraying Spinoza (4 page)

This is how it often is, girls—that the vilest accusations against the Jews come from irreligious Jews themselves. It is as if, betraying the special task of holiness that
Ha-Shem
bestowed on the Jewish people, they must go to the opposite extreme, become leaders of godlessness among men.

I don’t have to remind you girls that Karl Marx was Jewish.

Spinoza refused to defend himself against his accusers. He said only that he was sorry for everyone there who had chosen to judge him so hastily and so harshly. Rabbi Morteira, informed of how his former prize student was accounting for himself at the synagogue, now rushed there and confronted the
apikorus
himself. He asked Spinoza whether this was to be the fruit of all the pains that he, his former teacher, had taken with his education, and whether he wasn’t afraid of falling into the hands of the living God? The scandal was great, but there was still time to repent. But if there was to be no sign of contrition, then the community would have no choice but to excommunicate him.

And do you know, girls, how this so-called philosopher, whom the world has decided to call great, answered his former rebbe, how he threw off his
derekh eretz
together with all else that he had been taught? He answered his teacher that he understood very well the seriousness of the charges against him and the nature of the threats that were hanging over his head, and in return for the trouble Rabbi Morteira had taken to teach him the Hebrew language, he, Spinoza, was quite willing to show him the proper method of excommunicating someone.

When Rabbi Morteira heard the way this young man spoke to him, with so much chutzpa, he dismissed everyone and left the synagogue. He saw that he had been completely mistaken in who this young man was. Before, he had told people that he was as impressed with Spinoza’s character as with his mind,
⁷
that it was rare that one so brilliant would also be so modest. But now he saw that the situation was exactly the reverse. Baruch Spinoza was a monster of arrogance. There was no way of reasoning with this young man, as brilliant as he no doubt was.

Human intelligence is the greatest gift that
Ha-Shem
gave to human beings, making us closer to the
malakhim
—the angels—than to the beasts of the field. But if we forget from Whom we got this divine gift, if we begin to believe that we are somehow the source of our own intelligence and that we are capable of figuring out everything for ourselves without relying on the Torah, then we fall even below the animals. This is why all philosophy is
apikorsus
. The very word
apikorsus
, girls, comes from the name of a Greek philosopher, someone who was called Epicurus, who believed that pleasure is all that people have to live for.

After this confrontation in the synagogue, Spinoza moved away from the community, taking rooms with a non-Jewish friend of his outside of Amsterdam. He had already, for some time now, been mixing with non-Jews, preferring them to his own people. He had been studying Latin with a former priest who had also become a heretic in his own religion, by the name of Franciscus van den Enden.

In fact, there are some who say that Baruch tried to marry van den Enden’s daughter but that she rejected him for another student of her father’s who wasn’t going to become an impoverished philosopher, like Spinoza, but rather a doctor. Some say that this young man gave the young lady in question a pearl necklace and that is what finally decided her. Whether it’s true or not that he had tried to marry this non-Jewish girl, Spinoza never did marry, and in fact it seems that he never again tried to.

He lived alone, very simply, supporting himself by grinding lenses for telescopes and other optical instruments, and writing his blasphemous works. He had a small group of friends with whom he discussed his ideas. These were all Christians, although renegades among the Christians. Once he moved away from his old home, he had nothing more to do with Jews, nor with his old yeshiva friends, or even with his family. Because of the
kherem
, which in his case was permanent, no Jews were allowed to speak with him for the rest of his life, so he really had no choice here.

He had been studying Latin, girls, because in those days all the
goyisha
scholars wrote in Latin. If Baruch wanted to reject his
rabbayim
and study
apikorsus
, then he would have to learn Latin. He was particularly interested in studying the works of René Descartes, who was a French-Catholic philosopher whom many of the so-called freethinkers in Europe were excited about.

Descartes believed that there is a God, but he had still made the Catholic Church angry enough to put him onto its list of banned writers, called the Index.
⁸
The reason he was considered dangerous to the Catholics was that he had written that people should not believe in God unless they can prove His existence according to the strictest rules of logic. If there are errors in the proofs for God’s existence, then the believer should no longer believe. In other words, Descartes taught that there is no room for
emunah
, for faith.

Spinoza agreed with this heresy of Descartes, only he, the Jew, went much further. Unlike Descartes, Spinoza would go on and argue for atheism, saying that the God that we can prove is nothing over and above nature, which, of course, girls, isn’t God at all, not for the Christians and not for the Jews. For no one. Spinoza wasn’t fooling anyone by playing around with words, saying that he believed in God, only making God be nothing more than nature, which of course everybody believes in. Who doesn’t believe in nature, since it’s what we see all around us? Really, girls, when you think about it, it’s ridiculous.

It
was
ridiculous, at least the way that Mrs. Schoenfeld had presented it—which is why I found myself wondering whether she was doing justice to Spinoza’s thoughts. Otherwise, why would the
goyim
proclaim him a great philosopher? I knew enough to know that the thinkers whom the world called great weren’t stupid.

But none of these ideas of his were yet known at the time of his excommunication, Mrs. Schoenfeld was explaining. All that the Amsterdam community knew was what the young men had reported about Spinoza’s views and the way that he had conducted himself in the synagogue when the accusations had been brought before him; they had heard for themselves the terrible way in which he had spoken to his former teacher, Rabbi Morteira.

And so the
parnassim
voted to put Spinoza into
kherem
. Others from the Amsterdam community had also been placed in
kherem
, sometimes for a day or two, sometimes for longer. It depended, of course, on the
khayt
(the transgression). This community of returnees, trying to find their way back to Judaism, relied on the
kherem
as a means of guidance. Sometimes it was a matter of not keeping the law the right way, of buying meat from an unauthorized butcher or cheating in business. Or if someone wrote a letter to a Marrano in Spain or Portugal that put the recipient into danger of being discovered by the Inquisition, then this, too, was grounds for excommunication.

Then, too, even before the famous Spinoza, there had been other heretical thinkers who had been placed in
kherem
because of their so-called philosophical ideas. There had been a very famous case, when Spinoza himself was a child, of a man named Uriel da Costa, who had been excommunicated. This da Costa had been born in Portugal into a family of converts from Judaism. His father was a very religious Catholic, and he himself had become a minor church official. However, from reading the Torah he became convinced that Judaism is the true religion and he went to Amsterdam to live as a Jew. But he wanted his Judaism to be based on the Torah alone; he didn’t accept any of the Talmud, any of the laws that derived from the Oral Law and from the rabbinical decisions. The way that he imagined Judaism, as a Christian back in Portugal, that’s the way he wanted it to be. You can see some of the difficulties that the rabbis of these former Marranos had to contend with. They had to be
makhmir
(strict) in order to impress on these sadly ignorant Jews the nature of
halakha
.

(
Halakha
means “Jewish law.” The term derives from the Hebrew root of the verb “to go,” and so connotes the right way to go. The sources of
halakha
are basically three. There are the 613 commandments—or mitzvahs—that are contained in the Torah, the work that is traditionally considered the “Written Law,” the author the divinely directed Moses. Then there are the writings in the classical rabbinical sources that are the discussions and debates about the written laws, especially in the Mishnah [referred to as the Oral Law, by tradition taught by Moses and passed down through the ages until it was written down in the third century c.e.] and the Gemorah [which is rabbinical commentary on the Mishnah, the first version authored in Jerusalem in the fifth century; the second, which is the one more commonly studied, authored in Babylonia in the sixth century]. The Mishnah and the Gemorah together comprise the Talmud. And then, third, there is the codified law as it is laid out in the
Shulkhan
Arukh
, a work whose title literally means “The Set Table,” composed in the sixteenth century by the Sephardic kabbalist Joseph Karo. The
Shulkhan Arukh
culls from all the Talmudic discussions and controversies and sets forth [as in a set table] the redacted
halakha
. Orthodox Judaism is, for the most part, governed by the
Shulkan Arukh
, which is interesting since mainstream Judaism rejects the kabbalistic approach that was the [suppressed] inspiration for Karo’s work. To quote the great secular kabbalist scholar Gershom Scholem, “R. Joseph Karo deliberately ignored kabbalism in his great rabbinic code
Shulkhan Arukh
, yet there is little doubt as to the secret eschatological motives of its composition.”
⁹
)

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.