Betraying Spinoza Read Online Free PDF

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