Betraying Spinoza (3 page)

The pivotal figure in modernity was the late-eighteenth-century thinker Moses Mendelssohn, grandfather of the famous composer, both of whom were also mentioned as part of the extended cautionary tale. Moses Mendelssohn had urged that Jews not keep themselves intellectually and culturally separate. He had argued that adherence to the Torah, to which he held firm—he was not an
apikorus
, girls—did not exclude participation in the arts and sciences. He had urged that Jews educate themselves in the accomplishments of Western civilization. So had argued the grandfather. And the grandson, Felix, was a great musician. His compositions are still played by famous orchestras all over the world. But, girls, he was also a convert to Christianity. The descendents of this illustrious family probably don’t even remember that they were once Jewish. They probably don’t know the first thing about the
Yiddishkeit
of their ancestors.

Mrs. Schoenfeld’s expressions, both on her face and in her voice, made the articulation of the moral of the Mendelssohn story gratuitous: admiration leads to accommodation, which leads to assimilation, which leads to the worst. The so-called Haskalah had wanted to mix the immiscible: the insular Torah Jew into the modern world, the modern world into the Torah Jew. We were in favor of insularity, and Mrs. Schoenfeld was no exception, despite her fancy way around English syntax. I still unconsciously think of the word “modernity” as being a Hebrew word, hearing it pronounced with its
r
rolled and with a tone of stern admonition.

Spinoza predated Moses Mendelssohn by a good century and a half, but Mrs. Schoenfeld spoke of him as a precursor. He was, she very rightly suggested, the first modern Jew. Spinoza headed the long line of yeshiva boys who were not as pious as they might have been. He was one of the so-called enlightened Jews, a so-called
maskil
, long before the term had been introduced. (I remember a student in the class once mistakenly saying
masik
—which means “a little devil,” often used affectionately for children—for
maskil
, an error which propelled sober Mrs. Schoenfeld to the very verge of laughter.) This Benedictus-né-Baruch was an early sign of the sickness to come, and his own community had tried to keep the contagion from spreading. That is why they took the drastic step of putting him into
kherem
, girls, excommunicating him when he was only twenty-three years old. Had Moses Mendelssohn studied the case of Spinoza a little better, he might have saved himself, his family, and the Jewish people a lot of
tzurris
.
³

Mrs. Schoenfeld suggested that a lot could be learned from understanding the case of Spinoza, as opposed to the philosophy of Spinoza. About the latter she said very little; only that he had had two basic beliefs: The first was that the Torah was not a divine revelation but rather written by man—written in fact by several men who came much later than Moshe Rabbenu, Moses Our Teacher. And the second was that God was identical with nature.

Mrs. Schoenfeld used the English word “God,” which was not a word we normally used. Instead we said
Ha-Shem
, Hebrew for “The Name,” a designation that at once circumvents and underscores the prohibition against uttering God’s true and awful name. If His true name were transcribed, then the paper on which it was written would be too holy to be thrown away. It would have to be buried like a human corpse. Even the English word radiated sanctity, which is why we were taught to write “G—d.”

As brief as it was, Mrs. Schoenfeld’s synopsis of Spinoza’s philosophy intrigued me, by reason of its very incomprehensibility, so that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. First of all, if Spinoza thought that God was identical with nature, then of course he didn’t think the Torah was revealed by God. The denial of divine authorship seemed barely worth mentioning, once one had made the astounding claim that God and nature were one.

But what did the man mean by this inscrutable identification?

Did he mean that nature had hidden mystical qualities, that it was imbued with
nefesh
, with spirit, the very spirit of God? Did he think that nature was a great deal more than what we normally think of it as being?

Or was Spinoza saying that nature is only nature—that it was all those things that the Torah taught were created on the first five days (light and dry land and the heavenly bodies and plants and animals)—and was his assertion that God is nature just a sneaky way of denying the existence of God?

I rarely posed questions in class, preferring to try to think things out for myself, but I was intrigued and confused enough to ask Mrs. Schoenfeld to explain more about what Spinoza had meant by saying that
Ha-Shem
was nature. Ironically, given how happy I was that
historia
was being taught in English, I had used, out of habit, the Hebrew designation for the Unutterable.

Mrs. Schoenfeld’s response came mainly in the form of rebuking me for saying
Ha-Shem
. She had deliberately said “God” and not “
Ha-Shem
” because whatever Spinoza meant by the word, it certainly wasn’t
Ha-Shem. Berayshis barah Elokim es ha-shemayim vi’es ha-eretz
—In the beginning the Lord created the heavens and the earth. This is the first sentence of the Torah, and if someone doesn’t know this about
Ha-Shem
, he doesn’t know the first thing about
Ha-Shem. Elokim
—the Lord.
Ha-Shem
is the Lord over all He creates. He chose to create nature. He chose
that
it should be and
what
it should be. If someone says that God is nature—is the heavens and the earth—then he is not talking about
Ha-Shem
.

Then Spinoza was an atheist?

Yes, she answered me, an atheist. Why do you look so baffled by that? Do you still have a question, Rebecca?

I did, and since she was pushing me, I asked it: Why did he take such a roundabout way just to say that God doesn’t exist? It sounds like he was trying to say something more by saying that God is nature.

No, Mrs. Schoenfeld answered me, and so assertively that I thought to ask her if she herself had read the works of the heretic. Of course, I didn’t pose the question that rose to my lips, since it could have been heard as disrespectful of her, a veiled challenge, and
derekh eretz
—literally, “the way of the land,” a phrase meaning “respect for parents and teachers”— was a virtue drilled into us from an early age.

Spinoza, my teacher reiterated, was an atheist, even though when the Amsterdam community excommunicated him he hadn’t yet revealed the full extent of his godless immorality. He had left the yeshiva when he was a teenager. We don’t know why exactly, since a student of his caliber would have been expected to go on and get
smikha
(the ordination for the rabbinate). His teachers, including Rabbi Morteira, an Ashkenazic scholar who had come from Vienna to lead this Sephardic congregation (
Ashkenaz
means “Germany” in Hebrew), had permitted themselves to indulge the highest expectations for him, a true
talmid khokhem
(a gifted scholar, literally a “disciple of the wise”), emerging out of this community of first- and second-generation former Marranos. But Spinoza left the yeshiva and instead went into his father’s business, importing dry fruits. Maybe his father’s business was suffering and he had to help him out—his younger brother also went into the family business—or maybe, despite his brilliance in the yeshiva, he had already begun to think like an
apikorus
and that’s why he didn’t pursue his yeshiva studies.

He hadn’t yet published any of his blasphemous works when he was put into
kherem
, but he had spoken to people about some of his ideas. It was a very close community, as you can well imagine, girls, since such hardship as they had suffered, and over generations, make for very strong bonds. They had clung to
Yiddishkeit
under cover of silence and secrecy, risking their lives, but much had been lost, forgotten, sometimes confused with Christian beliefs. Some of the Sunday prayers of the Christians had gotten mixed up into their own liturgy. They would refer to Queen Esther (the heroine behind the Jewish festival of Purim) as St. Esther, just like the Catholics, who have official saints. Now they were relearning what it means to be good Jews, the centerpiece of their efforts being the yeshiva, the Talmud Torah, where Baruch had studied. Because of his brilliance, people were interested in him, in what he thought.

But soon rumors of Spinoza’s strange ideas began to emerge, so that his community began to be afraid for him and also afraid of him. Some of his former schoolmates from the yeshiva, knowing how he was straying into alien
goyisha
ideas, asked him whether he thought, as they had heard he did, that God is made out of matter, and that there are no angels, and that the soul isn’t immortal. Remember, girls, that Maimonides, the greatest Jewish philosopher of all time, had laid it down in his Thirteen Articles of Faith that we must never think of God in bodily terms and that we must believe in
tekhiyas ha-maysim
, the resurrection of the dead.

Think about it, girls: Of course the soul must be immortal, must survive bodily death; otherwise, how could there be an
olam haba
—a world-to-come? And if there is no
olam haba
, then how can the soul come before the Ultimate Judge and be held accountable for its conduct during its life? How could the good who had suffered during their lives receive their reward, and how could those who were evil and had gotten away with it get their divine punishment? Think of the
tzadikim
(the righteous) who died in Hitler’s ovens. Think of the innocent children. And think of the Nazis who escaped, who are enjoying life right now in Europe or South America. Without
olam haba
, we can’t make any moral sense out of the world; without
olam haba
, there
is
no moral sense to the world. This is why denying the soul’s immortality is tantamount to denying
Ha-Shem
.

Spinoza tried to evade the young men who asked him his views, and when they continued to press him, he used his Torah learning to confuse and mislead, making it seem as if he were still a good Jew, citing the Torah. He said that since the Torah says nothing about noncorporeality we are free to believe that God has a body; and also that the Torah says nothing about the creation of angels, which is why the Sadducees
⁴
were never declared heretics even though they didn’t believe in angels. As for his thoughts on immortality, here Baruch let slip out probably more than he intended. He argued that the Torah uses the Hebrew words for “soul”—
ruakh
or
nefesh
or
neshama
—only to mean life or anything that is living, and that it nowhere commits us to believing that the soul survives the body’s death. On the contrary, he said, there are many places in the Torah where the exact opposite of immortality can be shown, and nothing is easier than to prove this.

When word of Spinoza’s ideas got back to the rabbis, they were stricken with horror. Here was one of their most brilliant students spouting ideas that not even the non-Jewish
apikorsim
would dare to contemplate. It was terrible to think that a boy who had shown so much promise and who had received such a fine education from the best rabbis in the community—learned rabbis, who had published books of their own—could reject everything. And the community also had to worry about what the
goyim
would think if word got out that such a wild heretic was living among them.

Remember, girls, these were former Marranos who had seen the very worst of what Christian intolerance can mean for the Jews. Amsterdam was a relatively tolerant city, Protestant rather than Catholic. Still, who knew how far their tolerance could be extended? It was true that the seventeenth-century Dutch were a very practical society, concerned at least as much with their economy as with their theology, and this practicality was good for the Jews. At the time of Spinoza’s birth, 1632, the Jews had been living in Amsterdam only a few decades, but they were already contributing to the thriving Dutch economy, using their connections to other Marranos scattered around the world, including those still back in Spain and Portugal, to import and export. Still, there were Protestant theologians even in Amsterdam, particularly the Protestants known as “Calvinists,” who weren’t thrilled about the Jewish newcomers. The Calvinists were not as tolerant as some of the other Protestant sects. And it had been a condition of the Jews being allowed to reside in Amsterdam—because, of course, they had had to get official permission—that they keep order and decorum among their own, in regard not only to behavior but to beliefs as well. Strangely enough, the Dutch authorities wanted the Amsterdam Jews to abide by the Torah. They wanted Amsterdam’s Jews to be
frum
(pious).

So the community leaders approached Spinoza and gently tried to change his mind. When he showed his stubborn arrogance, they begged him at the least to keep his ideas to himself, lest the Christian authorities learn of them and bring sanctions against the whole community. But apparently it did no good. The community met together in the synagogue. It was the
parnassim
, the community’s lay leaders, who, strictly speaking, had the power of excommunication, rather than the rabbis. The rabbis were also present in the synagogue, except for the chief rabbi, Rabbi Morteira, who had an obligation elsewhere.
⁵
The community met to give Spinoza an opportunity to answer his accusers.

The two young men who had questioned Spinoza stood before the congregation and told them that they had spoken with Spinoza several times and that his views were full of heresies, and that he didn’t deserve to be held in such high esteem as a brilliant scholar by his former teachers. They said that Spinoza had spoken of the Jews as “a superstitious people born and bred in ignorance, who do not know what God is, and who nevertheless have the audacity to speak of themselves as His people, to the disparagement of other nations.”
⁶
Spinoza had said that so far as the authorship of the Torah was concerned, it had been by someone other than Moses. The Five Books of Moses, he was saying, weren’t written by Moses, but rather by someone who had come many generations later, and someone who had known more about politics than about religion. It would take only some small good sense to discover the imposture, this
apikorus
said, and whoever continued to believe in it was as naïve as the Jews of Moses’ time.