The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (25 page)

Along with Jean-Paul Sartre, Bergson is revered as one of the leading French philosophers of contemporary times.

Bergson’s philosophy was so attractive and popular due to his marvelous style as a writer and his ability to construct analogies, which could be readily understood. Yet despite his 1927 Nobel Prize for literature, his flair for writing was criticized by some as too rhapsodic, his philosophy lacking precise justification or scientific proof.

Bergson could not have minded such criticism for he believed that the expression of his ideas demanded a new approach. No mechanical or material outlook would do. Time, for example, was not only a scientific concept that could be measured like the sand in an hourglass. Theories of natural science could not explain the way people directly experience time. The standard units of time measured by a clock were fine to express seconds, minutes, hours, and years. Much of what we do is marked by what time it is, what time has passed, and what time it will be.

For Bergson, however, time was not simply a unit measured by a machine, but a flow of life, what he called “pure” time or
durée reele
(real duration). Time is experienced not in spaces but as a continuing whirl, flowing inevitably. Trying to represent time in an abstract or spatial manner lessens our understanding of what we are. Unlike the great Descartes who stated “I think, therefore, I am,” Bergson urged that “I am something which continues.”

Bergson’s concept of duration was revolutionary. Many philosophers since the ancient Greek Plato had assumed that time was an illusion, finite now and eternity all the same. Spinoza, for example, had represented reality as an aspect of the everlasting. Bergson viewed time in its durational aspect. When one contemplates time in its real duration, knowing that one is acting freely and not as an automaton, then personal freedom is achieved. Man’s acts are never free until they are spontaneous, arising out of one’s personality at that moment.

Bergson did not develop like many other great philosophers, uttering forth at a young age a grand philosophical system. Rather, he patiently addressed in a series of books single subjects, submitting all to his concept of time.

To understand the connection between the spiritual and the material, how our minds and bodies operate together, Bergson sought to fathom the workings of memory. The brain, he asserted, is not a great storehouse of information, but rather a filter that retains only what we practically need to go on. Indeed, the brain works more to forget than to remember. Only man possesses consciousness or pure memory—the ability to remember only what is needed. Man’s pure memory unites with a quality common to all living things, instinct or “habit memory,” in a uniquely human synthesis of remembrance.

Bergson also investigated how the intellect works. Likening the intellect to his concept of time, he noted the “cinematic method” of the intellect, a living and continuous motion picture, consisting of individual static frames, understood one by one, but also in a great kaleidoscopic wave. Although the intellect carves up everything into easily recognizable pieces and remains outside of what it knows, intuition allows the mind to wade into a sea of consciousness, flowing without end, of never-ending duration, becoming part of what it knows, producing knowledge absolutely. Bergson recognized that intuition arises not necessarily from flashes of inspiration, but rather from a heightened form of thinking.

Expanding his concepts of time, mind and matter, intuition and intellect, Bergson analyzed evolution. He felt that philosophy must be added to biological history. Bergson believed that an original impetus of life, the “vital impetus,” gave force to all living things. Such impetus was derived from human creativity.

Bergson’s professional life was largely spent teaching metaphysics in French schools of higher education, culminating in a position at the Académie Française. He served also as a diplomat during the First World War and as an official at the League of Nations.

Toward the end of his life, Bergson was drawn to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. To be one with God was only possible through a special intuition, akin to what is known as mysticism. However, people are blocked by their everyday routine, strife, struggle to make a living, to stay alive, to reach very often this special state of blissful consciousness. Although drawn to Christian mystical thought, Bergson as a figure of international prominence during the Nazi era could not bring himself to convert, remaining Jewish publicly for the rest of his life.

S
ometimes when religious or political movements become unresponsive to human needs, a great yearning for simplicity, a rebellious spirit, infects the common people, and they seek change. In the early eighteenth century, most Jews in Eastern Europe lived in small villages with little hope for any material comfort. Jewish society then favored the learned, the most highly skilled. Villages were run by families of wealthy merchants, rabbis, and lawyers. The poor were powerless before the might of the grand village councils.

Into this community of half of the world’s Jews, led by oligarchy and oppression, was born the Baal Shem Tov, or the Master of the Divine Name. Israel ben Eliezer was a poor man, a wanderer, an orphan, a teacher’s assistant, a Podolian lime digger, an innkeeper, a jack-of-all-trades, a maker of amulets, a faith healer. Most of the stories of his life were retold by his followers, simple tales woven into miraculous legends. He left no writings. We know of his wondrous deeds only through the recollections of disciples. Yet his influence on the development of modern Judaism is enormous. Along with the development of orthodox rabbinic Jewish thought culminating in the Vilna Gaon and the liberalization led by the Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, the Besht (the acronym for Baal Shem Tov), supplied the heart, brought ecstasy to prayer, passion to dry words of devotion.

To some contemporaries, the Besht was a leader of heretics, similar to the followers of the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi, or the mad Jacob Frank, who preached free love and later converted his group en masse to Catholicism. But the common people adored the Besht. He preached that anyone could commune with God. Scholarship was not as important as piety. Only through total abandonment of the self via spiritual exaltation would the righteous gain heavenly grace. Anyone could pray, even if he was not the most learned. The whistle of a simpleton reached straight to Heaven, carrying with it the prayers of a community.

To the Besht, since God was everywhere, from the lowly slug to the most magnificent forest, all was joy, happiness surrounded every living thing. God commanded us to be joyful, to sing and dance, to feel with each ounce of our beings his wondrous bounty. Hasidic prayer meetings were therefore very noisy affairs. He taught that Heaven lay behind the sacred words available to anyone who trusted the rapture of prayer to lead the way.

One of his most fundamental creations, the
tzaddik,
was used by his followers to create great dynasties of rabbis, some of which have continued to the present day (for example, the Lubavitcher Hasidic movement traces its origins back to the late eighteenth century and the disciples of the Besht). A
tzaddik
was a superior person whose unique righteousness brought him specially close to God. The
tzaddik
could even intercede with the divine will. The Baal Shem Tov’s successors, Dov Baer and Rabbi Nachman of Bratislava, contributed mightily to the expansion of the political importance of the
tzaddik,
also called the rebbe, whose spiritual values were the exemplar of his community, and the bearer of sacred gifts.

After the death of the Baal Shem Tov, Eastern European Jewry was for many years divided between his ecstatic ideals and his more traditional opponents led by the Vilna Gaon. The Hasidim dubbed his followers Mitnagdim, “opponents” of their greater joy. The Jewish Middle Ages ended in the conflict between the Hasidim and the Mitnagdim, later becoming relatively meaningless before the specter of the secular Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah. Hasids concentrated more on Talmudic study. This brought them closer to mainstream custom and away from the raptures of the Besht. For without his pipe-smoking presence, apart from his physical example, some structure was required.

Yet his lessons remain the loving essence of Judaism. There is no greater joy than performing the commandments of God.

J
acob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn, grandson of the sage of the German Enlightenment, Moses Mendelssohn, was one of the most gifted and influential musicians of the 1800s. Child prodigy, virtuoso pianist, innovative conductor and pioneering administrator, composer of Romantic music of great classical beauty and restraint, Mendelssohn in a short period of time changed the way music is composed, played, and listened to. Mendelssohn’s life is also symbolic of the rise of the nineteenth-century Jew out of centuries of oppression and degradation to the most enlightened level of expression, embodied in a personality of gentility and compassion.

Like his grandfather, Felix always strove to illuminate, to express with the greatest clarity. Although his music often has literary or geographic reference (in keeping with the Romantic movement), it is tempered by a close attention to classical form. His
Violin Concerto,
beloved as the finest work of its kind, is the most perfect example of the fusion of the classical with the Romantic. Mendelssohn has been rightly compared to the great German poet Goethe for a unique combination of classical and Romantic influences. Although we hear echoes of Bach, Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven in his music, Mendelssohn also served as a model for many of the composers who followed him, including Wagner, Brahms, Dvorak, and Mahler.

Felix was born into a home of considerable wealth and influence. His father, Abraham, was a northern German banker who provided his family with a luxurious home made richer by the musical activities of his children. Felix’s two sisters and brother were talented musicians who participated in the frequent family musicales organized around their prodigy sibling. In particular, his sister Fanny was an extraordinary pianist and composer as well as her famous brother’s lifelong confidante.

Felix Mendelssohn was probably the greatest child prodigy in the history of music, including Mozart. Like Mozart, he had a keyboard-playing sister who aided his development and served as a sounding board for his ideas. Like Mozart, he was exposed early to the most important literary, artistic, and musical figures of his youth, in Mendelssohn’s case, Goethe, the philosopher Hegel, and the composer-pianists Muzio Clementi, Ignaz Moscheles, and John Field. From the supreme German poet, Goethe, Felix was influenced to combine classical formal design with pure aristocratic expression.

By hiring large groups of professional musicians to come to their home and audition the teenager’s works, Mendelssohn’s father enabled Felix to mature much earlier than normal (even for great composers). A series of string symphonies composed in his early teens was followed at ages sixteen and seventeen respectively with the great chamber work
Octet
and the overture to Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The
Octet
and overture are so advanced harmonically and melodically that it is almost impossible to believe they were written by someone so young. It is also amazing to realize that when these works were written, Beethoven was still alive in Vienna writing his tortured final works. From his materially more comfortable perch, Mendelssohn, even before Berlioz and Schumann, Wagner and Liszt, set the musical stage for the rise of Romantic music. Although influenced by Beethoven in the use of the orchestra and formal patterns, Mendelssohn restored color and lightness to the musical palette. The
Sturm und Drang
of Haydn and Beethoven was relieved by a more pastoral outlook. Mendelssohn’s music is so much more soothing and comforting for its relaxed line and easy grace.