Betraying Spinoza Read Online Free PDF Page A

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