Betraying Spinoza (5 page)

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against Spinoza has never been rescinded, she said, impressing me once again with her mastery of the English language (I’d read words like “rescinded” but never heard anybody use them), even as her tone of voice foreclosed further questions along these lines.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 synagogue, 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?

I
t 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 Reality; 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.”