Betraying Spinoza (22 page)

“You’ll be a
khakham
of the community yourself, someday. You’ll be the first child born here in Amsterdam to lead the community.”

Baruch, seeing the expression on his father’s face, the false light cast backward from this imagined future glory making his dark eyes glow, kept his silence. Even as he grows older, his doubts mounting, he preserves the Jewish virtue of
shalom bayis
, peace within the household, and keeps his thoughts to himself. And he sits
shiva
faithfully for his father, keeps all the laws of mourning as they extend over the year following his father’s death, and also keeps up with his pledges to the community’s various charities, since such donations had meant so much to his father.
¹³

The explanations Spinoza hears, even the most rational of them—never mind the wild imaginings of the kabbalistic master Aboab and his followers—feed the doubt in Spinoza’s chest, gnawing now like a hungry beast. Still, he continues to study, even after he officially leaves the yeshiva and goes into business, first his father’s and then, after his father’s passing, founding an import and export business with his younger brother: Bento y Gabriel de Spinoza.

There are various independent learning centers,
jeshibot
, in the community, supported by the wealthy, so that the men can continue to observe the mitzvah of Torah learning even while they earn their living. After all, scholarship has, ever since the destruction of the Temple, taken the place of the old ceremonies of worship, the pilgrims’ holidays, and sacrifices. Advance in Jewish learning constitutes, in itself, an ethical activity. The rabbis were right in this.
The mind’s absolute virtue is to understand. The mind’s highest good is the knowledge of God, and the mind’s virtue is to know God
.
¹⁴

Years later, after Spinoza’s excommunication, a man named Daniel Levi—his alias “Miguel”—de Barrios, a Spanish-born Marrano and a poet, writing in Spanish, and also the Amsterdam community’s official chronicler, alludes to Spinoza’s attendance in Rabbi Morteira’s school, which is called Keter Torah, or Crown of the Law, as well as to that of the other excommunicated heretic, Daniel de Prado, in carefully chosen words:

The Crown of the Law [
Corona de la ley
], ever since the year of its joyous foundation, never ceased burning in the academic bush, thanks to the doctrinal leaves written by the most wise Saul Levi Morteira, lending his intellect to the counsel of Wisdom and his pen to the hand of Speculation, in the defense of religion and against atheism.
Thorns
[
Espinos
] are they that in the
Fields
[
Prados
] of impiety, aim to shine with the fire that consumes them, and the zeal of Morteira is a flame that burns in the bush of Religion, never to be extinguished [emphases in the original Spanish].
¹⁵

He chooses Rabbi Morteira’s establishment, even though the man’s authoritarian manner can be grating on the nerves. The rabbi’s self-regard often pushes him toward putting a wrong construction on others’ words, understanding them to be stating obvious falsehoods. A man like Rabbi Morteira will
take most pleasure in contemplating himself, when he contemplates some quality which he denies others
.
¹⁶
Therefore, it is characteristic of the rabbi to deny others’ intelligence.

Still, the rabbi’s rationalistic approach has more to offer than do the kabbalistic ravings of Aboab. One would have to believe that these visionaries’ visions—Ha-Ari’s claimed communiqués from the prophet Elijah—were self-authenticating forms of experience. There is nothing in their content that convinces Baruch that they were. Whatever it is that these mystics are seeing, their sight does not come from the eyes of the mind. If any faculty of their minds is particularly active it is their imaginations.

He is always surprised to hear what it is that others find convincing. He understands, of course, what it feels like to have a powerful need for answers pounding inside. But the answers that people come up with to stop the pounding: he would rather live with the pounding. Better the pounding than the gnawing.

By now Baruch has come to question another constant feature in all the explanations of the rabbis: the special role they incessantly insist on giving the Jewish people. This insistence is a presupposition of all discussions. It is the very air that they all breathe. How startling to consider that one could simply step away and breathe in another atmosphere entirely.

The idea of the separate destiny of the Jewish people is inseparable from explanations in terms of divine final causes. If one gives up the latter, one is forced by logic to give up the former. But if the former is false, then all the woe of the Jews is in some sense brought on them by their own insistence on their separate destiny, and the hatred that this very insistence has incurred, which hatred then, in a macabre dance of reciprocity, ensures their separate existence.
That they are preserved largely through the hatred of other nations is demonstrated by historical fact
.
¹⁷

It is distressful to view the history of the Jews from this perspective. One cannot completely overcome one’s passive sympathy for people one understands so well. It is more distressful in some ways than participating vicariously in the litany of their sorrows, as he had long been accustomed to doing, from boyhood up, feeling each lash on the body of the nation of Israel as falling directly on himself. But to think in this way—in the words of the kabbalistically crazed Aboab, to conceive that “[a]ll Israelites are a single body and their soul is hewn from the place of Unity”—is to think narrowly and thus erroneously, from inside a point of view that is simply the passive bequest of the conditions of one’s birth.

Our knowledge of truth can’t possibly be a function of such brute contingencies. Our apprehension of the truth can’t be passive at all, but active, a function of the exercise of reason—the same reason that exists in all men. He has far more in common with men, whichsoever people they may have been born into, who reason their way to their conclusions rather than accepting them as gifts from the ancestors.
In so far only as men live in obedience to reason, do they always necessarily agree in nature
.
¹⁸

And to exercise this reason, to find through it a perfect-fit explanation, is exquisite pleasure. It is the pleasure of feeling one’s point of view expanding outward, taking in more of reality, and this expansion of the mind means that one’s very own self is expanding as well. And the expansion of the self is the very essence of pleasure, as the contraction of the self is pain. So even if the explanation itself is not to one’s personal liking, even if one had personally wished the world to be arranged otherwise—to believe, for example, that one is so fortunate as to have been born into the people most favored by God—still to expand one’s point of view is, in itself, pleasure. It is rational pleasure—rational both because it consists in reason’s work and because it is a pleasure that lies entirely in the mind’s own power to perform— inward and private, like the Marranos’ inner avowal of the hegemony of the Mosaic Law. No outer authority, no inquisitorial ferocity of church or mosque or synagogue, can remove the mind’s own decision to think clearly for itself, to seek perfect-fit explanations, and to find them and rejoice. This is freedom.

Spinoza is engaging in his new business adventure with his brother, Gabriel, and his dealings in the bourse, the mercantile exchange, open up his world somewhat wider. He meets disaffected Christians from some of the dissenting sects—the Mennonites, the Remonstrants, the Quakers— who collectively call themselves Collegiants, because they have meetings, or “colleges,” every other Sunday, when they discuss questions of theology, studying Scripture for themselves and trying to interpret it without the influence of the established answers. The atmosphere of these colleges is vastly different from that of the jeshiva.

It is shocking at first to feel himself to have so much more in common with these Gentiles than with the majority of Jews he has known all his life and with whom he shares his history. It is shocking to discover that he understands these strangers better, as they understand him better, than the members of his synagogue, even of his family. Within his community there is only de Prado with whom he can talk about matters of religious belief. Those he has the most in common with are those who think about the questions he thinks about—and why should those questions be determined by what quarter of Amsterdam one resides in? The world is equally there for all of us to think about, the same world, posing the same questions to our intelligence.

It is impossible that man would not be a part of nature, or that he should not follow her general order; but if he be thrown among individuals whose nature is in harmony with his own, his power of action will thereby be aided and fostered, whereas if he be thrown among
such as are but very little in harmony with his nature, he will hardly be able to accommodate himself to them without undergoing a great change himself
.
¹⁹

Knowing ancient Hebrew as he does, he has much to teach his new friends about the reading of Scripture, though of course he does not teach it as he had been taught. He is trying to work out the right methodology of applying scientific principles to these most problematic texts, asking questions of them that have never been asked.
²⁰
But the extent of his own ignorance that is opened up to him in his conversations with others amazes him. He has spent a lifetime studying, yearning above all else to attain knowledge, and what, after all, does he know?

He begins to haunt Amsterdam’s bookshops. Amsterdam is famous throughout Europe for its bookshops, of which there are reputed to be upwards of four hundred. The civil authorities here are far more tolerant of the printed word than are those anywhere else, so authors from all over Europe send their manuscripts to this city in order to be published. This makes for unbelievable riches for the bibiophiles who flock here. You can find books in many of Europe’s languages, and also find people who themselves are native speakers of other languages, seeking books here that they can’t obtain in their own countries. There are exceedingly fine conversations to be had in the aisles of bookshops, people to be met here who make one question whether solitude is a state always to be preferred over company.

Nothing can be in more harmony with the nature of any given thing than other individuals of the same species; therefore for man in the preservation of his being and the enjoyment of the rational life
there is nothing more useful than his fellow-man who is led by reason
²¹
He learns of the explosive ideas of the Frenchman René Descartes, the author of such works as
Discourse on Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Searching After Truth in the Sciences, Meditations on First Philosophy
, and
Principles of Philosophy
. Descartes is a revolutionary in diverse ways. Even the language he chose in which to publish wasn’t the Latin that serves as the lingua franca of all scholars, but rather the vulgate French. All men, not only the trained scholars, have the capacity for reason. In fact, it might be easier for the uninitiated to exercise their
lumen naturale
, their natural light of reason, than those who have had it occluded by the dense fogs of Aristotelian Scholasticism.

Lumen naturale
. The phrase delights Spinoza, though perhaps not so much as it had delighted the Frenchman, who often invoked it in place of proofs.

Descartes, too, had made his home for a while in Amsterdam, availing himself of its comparative tolerance. Spinoza had seen him once, he was almost certain, rushing down the Houtgracht. Spinoza hadn’t known then who he was, though he had certainly noticed him, there being something arresting about him even though he was not really much to look at. A short compact body, topped by a large unprepossessing head, walking exceedingly quickly, with short, almost mincing steps, but carrying the great bulk of his head with incongruous dignity. It was the incongruity that had made Baruch, even in his ignorance, take note.

He stares into the face of his ignorance and grows disgusted at its sight. It would be easy to blame the rabbis, blame the narrowed gaze of his insular community, keeping out the new ideas that are setting men’s thoughts on fire with new methods for attaining truth. Some of the rabbis fancy themselves learned in the world’s philosophy—ben Manasseh, Morteira—but the little they know is already outmoded. The old Aristotelian system is crashing to the ground under the intellectual onslaught of such men as Descartes and Galileo, who confirmed that the Polish astronomer of the last century, Nicolaus Copernicus, had been correct in asserting that the earth revolves around the sun rather than, as Aristotle had had it, the entire universe revolving around the earth. This change, large as it is, represents an intellectual change even greater, the switch from thinking of man as always at the center, all explanations revolving around him. Explanations in terms of final causes belong to the old order. The new men of genius construct explanations out of the certainty of mathematics, not the make-believe of teleological storytelling. And of course for the rabbis it is not only the old form of teleological storytelling that they repeat, but always they must have the Jews playing an essential role in the plot.

Yes, it would be easy to blame his old teachers for the hideous aspect of his own ignorance. But it is the responsibility of each person to increase his own understanding. It is the most profound responsibility that we have, as even the rabbis, in their confused way, had perceived, equating a man’s moral progress with his intellectual progress.