Season 2: Episode 10 - A Blessing and a Curse

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God lets men direct their particular passions and interests as they please, says Rebbe Yehudad Leveh, but the result is the accomplishment of His plans, and these differ from the end sought by those whom He employs. Now, I don't know about God's will, but I sure am seeking the end. I'm not just seeking the end, I'm telling the story of the past in order to make a present identity that can get us to that end of which we dream, because I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story. Converso consciousness is going to be a critical element of the coming phase of our story, so we need to get a working definition. We've talked around it for quite some time. But in order to really drill down to what this way of knowing the world means, we have to start by asking a question we've asked before.

What did it take to hold on to Emunah, to hold on to faith in the face of events of the last 300 years? Now Emunah in its essence, in my eyes, is a depth of God consciousness. In the present, its beliefs about the past and hopes for the future, that messianic vision. And converso consciousness is what emerges when Emunah develops over time against a colonizing culture. now you might hear that and say that to some degree that's the nature of exile and therefore the consciousness that I'm describing really flows from the first Roman colonization and you would be right to a certain sense but the converso experience was the immersive phase of the current exile we were literally swallowed by the nations and at this phase one can no longer identify the clear boundary between us and them, which has been the premise of Jewish identity and consciousness since our wall builders way back when with Ezra and Nehemia.

Go back to series one if you don't remember. But if you do recall, they built an identity of us here and them there, which, with all its flaws, is what allowed the Jews to remain the Jews in the face of incredible dispersion and immersion in other cultures. But that wall, or those walls, began to crumble in the face of the converso experience. Suddenly, we are they. By this point in our story, it's been 300 years since that first explosion, which Rav Hazai Kreskas described as, the Lord bent his bow like an enemy against the community of Sevil. They set fire to its gates and killed many of its people. Many died to sanctify his name, and many violated the Holy Covenant. And if you recall, the waves of conversion rippled across Spain from that moment until the expulsion a hundred years later.

And in 1492, those who'd managed to hold fast to their faith were driven across the border to Portugal, only to be baptized en masse five years later, their backs hopelessly to the sea. And from the beginning of the 16th century, the Iberian Peninsula was officially Judenrein. It was empty of all Jews, but it was filled with new Christians, as they and their descendants actually became known. The purity of blood laws and the cultural conflict of the old Christians of Spain and Portugal kept these new Christians separate and identifiable as a group. And many clung to their ancestral faith, pushed into a posture of trying to hold a space of consciousness inside of them, which could deny any truth to the actions and profess faith which they were showing on the outside.

They would share whatever knowledge they had and their whispered faith in the law of Moshe and the promise of redemption. Just picture Marina Davia, a young woman at the end of the 16th century, as the priest raises the host in church whispering the crypto-Jewish formula, I see a piece of bread, I worship you Lord instead. And over time, even positive expressions of Judaism were increasingly done through a Catholic cultural medium, like the young Isaac de Pinto taught to say Shema whenever he entered a church. So here we have it. An alienation from surrounding culture, built on maintaining a space between consciousness and action. And that's what really makes convergent consciousness a colonized way of being.

We can add to this the fiery, messy anacope, which we've spoken about in previous episodes, the faith in redemption which sustained these people in the darkest places of exile. And there's other pieces, but one critical element of converso consciousness that we haven't really discussed, and which will influence much of our story going forward, is skepticism. We've seen along the way in our story the phenomenon of individuals who, when trapped between two warring faiths, basically declared a pox on both their houses and chose neither. And these unassimilated conversos became the true wandering Jew, roaming back and forth between Christianity and Judaism, drifting between them and some sense of universalism.

And as such, this unassimilated converso became the precursor of modernity. built on skepticism and the breakdown of any trust in traditional structures. And it's not hard to understand how someone who's neither a Christian nor a Jew, but rather divided between the two, or once they escape from the peninsula, possess memories of the one which actually existed inside the other, might be inclined to develop doubts about both, or even to question the foundations of religion altogether. So, dual existence, the passion for redemption, skepticism toward divine truth claims, all go into making up the converso consciousness. Now, from a numbers perspective, you might be tempted to say, yeah, but how many Jews are we really talking about?

And it's true that in the early modern period, we've seen the population center of world Jewry shift decisively to Eastern Europe, where the converso experience was marginal at best. But the Jews have never been a people of numbers. And we've seen the converso spread out across the globe in previous episodes, making their fortunes and finding their freedom in the wake of the Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch empires. We saw their cross-cultural power in the messianic hope of Rav Menashe ben Israel. We tasted their bitterness over the failure of the modern Pharisees of the rabbinic establishment in the story of Uriel da Costa. And in the last episode, we touched on their role in the mythic explosion of Shabtai Tzvi.

And by the way, that story is far from over. You know, when Nathan the prophet received the news of his Messiah's apostasy in early November 1666, he immediately announced that it was all a deep mystery that would resolve itself. Now, the resolution was far from immediate. The false messiah had ignited something in the mythic imagination of Am Yisrael, which would continue to bubble and boil literally for centuries. But the chill wind of rational skepticism began to blow through Am Yisrael at just about the same time. And both will play their role in the coming chapter. You know, Gershom Shalom was the first scholar to note the, quote, immediate attraction with a hidden messiah had on former conversos, who themselves may have spent a considerable part of their lives in hiding their real identities.

In a true sense, this is how converso consciousness really colors this stage of our story, not to mention the world that we still live in. How many of us are hiding our real identities, one way or another? Miguel and Fernando Cardozo were born in the beginning of the 17th century as new Christians in Rio Seco, Spain. And they led the life of educated, wealthy youths, culminating in their attendance at the medical school of the prestigious University of Salamanca. Fernando, at least, went on to a career as a physician, philosopher, a scientist, and actually entered the most distinguished intellectual circles of the capital in Madrid. But the year of the publication of his first major book, a work on Mount Vesuvius, also saw the public burning of six new Christians accused of beating a crucifix.

A number of them happened to be his neighbors, by the way. And so, in 1648, the brothers fled Spain for Italy. In a story that we know, there they openly embraced Judaism. Miguel became Abraham, and Fernando became Isaac. Isaac Cardozo continued his intellectual activity and became a leading rationalist defender of Judaism. And his Philosophia Libera, his great work published in 1673, had the following goal. Quote, We shall investigate nature and its founder, so that from the world and its multitude of things, as if by a ladder, with enlightened and instructed mind, we may be lifted to God, its maker. Isaac Cardozo was not just a Jew, he was a master of the scientific and philosophical tools of his day, and he was determined to use them as a rational defense of his newfound faith.

Meanwhile, as Isaac was attempting to reconcile Judaism with rational 17th century philosophy, his brother Abraham had become a Sabbatean prophet. Apparently, unlike Isaac, Abraham was an enthusiast for the Messiah from the outset, which as we know from last week's episode, hardly made him exceptional. What did make Abraham Cardozo unique was his response to Shabtai Tzvi's conversion. While his brother Isaac hardly mocked the failed Messiah, seeing his collapse as further support for his rationalist rejection of Kabbalah and all other vain superstition, Abraham saw Shabtai Tzvi's apostasy as an essential phase in the process of redemption. It fired his imagination and awoke his pen. Only a converso could describe the events of 1666 like he did in a letter to his brother.

For the King Messiah wanted nothing other than to sanctify God's name. Thus he was anus, violated, forced, in every way and from every quarter. And the reason for our iniquities and the prime secret to which we are obligated by the Torah is that all of us must be anusim, all of us must be conversos before we leave the exile as it's written in the Torah you shall serve other gods of wood and stone therefore the apostasy not only of the Messiah but of all of Am Yisrael was a necessary part of redemption and he didn't stop there Avram saw Shabtai Tzvi as playing out the mythic drama of redemption on a plane which the human mind could not grasp as he says in his work Magin Avraham. Now we must make clear that no creature is able to grasp with knowledge the affairs of the King Messiah, because his knowledge is greater and higher than all who have ever passed through the world, or whoever will.

There is no one who is able to comprehend them in any way or manner, because they are profoundly hidden acts of tikkun, of reparation. Well, with such an anti-rational stance, the fight between the brothers was on. Avram Cardozo began to gather followers, soon declaring himself not only a prophet, but actually the Messiah, son of Joseph, meant to precede the final Redeemer. He wasn't just an apologist for an apostate Messiah, or even just a prophet. He was aiming to overturn the whole nature of Judaism as he knew it. And in order to do so, he attacked the rabbinic establishment, claiming that their opposition to Shabtai Sui's mission was because they'd forsaken the true knowledge of God. He went so far as to teach that the Torah as it now exists would soon no longer be necessary.

Furthermore, Avram Cardozo introduced a critical concept into Sabbatean thought, which would re-emerge in Jewish thought in general in many ways over the coming centuries. Because he said that in order to achieve this new Torah, there was a need to cast off the yoke of exile and all it involved quote its religious and institutional forms in order to return to the original fountainheads of Jewish faith And in their own contradictory ways, the coming movements of Zionism and reform will make Shlilata Galut, the negation of exile, an essential aspect of their movements, but it began with Shabtai Tzvi. so his brother Isaac kept up his rational defense of Judaism as well as his vocal opposition to his brother's surfeit of mythic imagination until he passed away in 1683 and Abraham continued his Sabbatian mission until he too died in Cairo 20 years later but of course the Sabbatian movement didn't die with him it will keep popping up in our stories but most of all the tension between the rational mind and the mythic imagination, and the question of which one embodied the truth of Judaism was far too big to die with the Cardozo brothers.

Truth of the matter is, Isaac Cardozo's rationalism was quite tame. It was small potatoes relative to the competition. Now, we've spoken about the epistemological breakdown which shook the foundations of Europe in the early modern era. Go back to, I think it was episode 4 in this series, if you really want the depth of it. How the empiricists of the first stages of the scientific revolution began to break down traditional thought simply by asking, look through the telescope, don't tell me what you believe, describe to me what you see. Because these empiricists believe that only our sensory experience can provide knowledge of the world in which we live. And the new scientific understandings which the empirical approach offered were one of the primary forces which began to uncouple knowledge from tradition, as we've said.

But not everyone shared their belief in the trustworthy nature of observation. And not everyone who disagreed with the empiricists was simply a traditionalist. There was another breed. Rene Descartes was one of the greatest philosophers and scientists of the 17th century, and he was neither an empiricist nor a traditionalist. He was a rationalist. Now before you just claim that everybody is a rationalist who acts rationally, we have to define that the rationalist claimed against the empiricist that knowledge does not depend upon sensory experience. Rather, there are two methods by which we can know anything. Number one, we know certain truths as part of our very nature. Truth is part of what we are. Number two, we have a rational intuition that allows us to grasp certain truths intellectually and simply know that they are true.

And Descartes wasn't just a rationalist. In his day, he was the rationalist. And he gained this status through a simple but profound change he introduced into the method of rational inquiry. He used doubt to show what was true. Descartes begins his great work, Meditations on First Philosophy, by claiming that true philosophy must begin by discarding any belief acquired from childhood into the present day. But Cartesian doubt isn't just a child's rejection of everything we've been taught. It's a systematic process of questioning the truth of every proposition, be it philosophical assertions, religious doctrines, or even sensory input in order to arrive at something whose truth lies beyond doubt. This truth will depend on rational intuition, an idea that you can discover the truth of a claim just by thinking about it.

And Cartesian doubt really was the ultimate tool for uncoupling knowledge from tradition. Nothing is to be taken as a given, not even what we see. This was the method of inquiry, by the way, which brought Descartes to his ultimate realization, I'm sure I said that wrong. I think, therefore I am. And when Descartes reached rock bottom, after doubting everything he believed in, he tried to doubt his own existence, but now suddenly doubt itself proved his existence, since he clearly couldn't doubt if he didn't exist. I think, therefore I am, actually ought to be said, I doubt, therefore I am. and that's the postmodern version. And by the way, he then goes on to argue that he, as a mind, a thinking creature, could exist without having a body, and therefore that it's possible in general for minds to exist without bodies.

And he thus planted the mind-body split at the formative stages of modern European philosophy. But that's further than we need to go, and I'm very wary of over-philosophizing in this episode. and you might see such thoughts as fascinating, utterly irrelevant, or just a highbrow version of those late-night high school conversations. Dude, how do we know we're not dreaming right now? But the religious powers that be, and the kingdoms which they supported, did not take the undermining of traditional thought and authority lightly. Back in episode 4, we also spoke about the Copernican Revolution, and how in his day, Copernicus really didn't make so many waves. Well, apparently the 17th century was less forgiving than the 16th, because in 1633, the great astronomer and scientist Galileo Galilei was condemned as a heretic by the Inquisition and sentenced to his fortune to house arrest.

If that's what Galileo got, simply for insisting that the sun was at the center of the universe, what could Descartes expect in return for doubting everything? Fortunately, he'd taken the precaution of removing himself from the reach of the Inquisition, before he began to put his doubts down on paper. And we've spoken about Holland as a refuge for conversos fleeing the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal, but it's important to remember that free thinkers of every type also found a safe haven there. Descartes was indeed, in Holland, hard at work on his first work of philosophy when he heard of Galileo's fate. In a panic, he actually destroyed his book and notes. Apparently, even in Holland, the power of the Inquisition was enough to reduce four years of his time and effort to a pile of ashes.

So, before we go on, it's critical to get a couple of terms straight for the next phase of our story, because, unfortunately, it will involve a bit of name-calling. Descartes was rightly labeled a heretic to his Catholic faith, at least in its traditional formulation. But the accusations of atheism leveled at him, that he claimed there was no God, were nothing more than defamation. Because despite the bold nature of Descartes' doubt, he never outright rejected religion. He even developed a famous proof for the existence of God. If he was an atheist, he was under deep cover. But he did tread the thin line between theist and deist. Now, classically, a theist is simply one who believes in God, or the gods.

For that matter, you can be a polytheist. But in early modern Europe, theism meant belief in the God of the Bible, and in particular, a belief in a God who communicates with humanity through revelation and intervenes in history through miracle. And with the rise of empiricism and rationalism, many European thinkers began to rethink and insist that religious beliefs be founded on human reason and the observed features of the natural world. And thus, the deist was born. A deist believes that nature and reason can reveal the one deity who created the world, but that this creator does not alter the original plan for the universe. meaning no miracles and no revelation, and thus no religion as we know it.

You see the conflict coming? The Seniors of the Mahmoud of the Portuguese nation in Amsterdam, having long known of the evil opinions and acts of Baruch de Spinoza, daily receiving more and more serious information about the abominable heresies which he practiced and about his monstrous deeds have decided that said Espinoza should be excommunicated and expelled from the people of Israel. Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night. Cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up. Cursed be he when he goes out and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not spare him, but the Lord, his anger and his jealousy shall smoke against that man and the Lord shall blot out his name. Whew, that's pretty intense.

According to the historian Joseph Kaplan, 40 different individuals were put under the van in Amsterdam between 1622 and 1683. and not a one of them even approached the wrath directed at Spinoza. Many actually only lasted for a day or two. So what exactly were these monstrous deeds of his? By all accounts, before the Cherem, before the Excommunication, Benedito de Espinosa, or Baruch, as he was known amongst the Jews, both of which of course mean blessed, led the typical life of a child to conversos, growing up in Amsterdam in the early 17th century. We know the story. His father Miguel had come to the city in 1627, having escaped from Spain, and was soon a successful merchant, upstanding member of the synagogue, a supporter of the Talmud Torah, where his sons received the first proper Jewish education in his family since 1492.

Baruch was the youngest son, and by all accounts, exceedingly bright. His teachers at the Ketur Torah Yeshiva included our famous Rab Menashe bin Israel, who could not have failed to notice this star pupil. Legend has it that Spinoza was indestined for the rabbinate, though I think that might have simply been the standard assumption about the destiny of any bright youngest son of a successful merchant. But, as we'll see, it was not to be. Young Baruch's elder brother Yitzhak died, and at the age 17, Baruch left the Talmud Torah to join his father in business. But his love for learning did not fade, and at age 20, Spinoza began studying Latin with Francis van den Enden. Now this former Jesuit priest was a notorious freethinker.

He was known as a radical democrat, and by the 1660s he would be considered a Cartesian, an atheist, and his books had the distinction of being placed on the Catholic index of banned books. Basically, a who's who of heretics in the 17th century. And it was Van Enden who gave Baruch Spinoza the gift of Latin, the language of international scholarship, and likely introduced him to modern philosophy, most particularly to the thought of Rene Descartes. Now, he wasn't the only important figure in Spinoza's development. There was another. He wasn't exactly a teacher in the traditional sense, but it seems, according to many historians, that he served as a willing ear and a partnering conversation as Spinoza's thoughts developed.

In the early 17th century, Juan de Predo was a new Christian of good standing with a doctoral degree in medicine from Toledo University, living the good life on the peninsula. He was also secretly a leading Judaizer, organizer of the Converso Underground at the university and elsewhere. But eventually, the Inquisition got wind of his activities, and he managed to escape just in front of them with his life. And we know that he appears on the registry of the Amsterdam community in October 1655, having pledged three Florins to the synagogue. And we know also that Prado returned over at Judaism and took the name Daniel. But he found himself in a painful situation, not unlike that of Oriol da Costa, who had taken his own life, you'll recall, only 15 years before, out of shock at what he found in rabbinic Judaism and the inability to adjust.

It wasn't just the rabbis. So in Spain, for Prado, being a Jew had meant the exciting life of the underground. conversos fighting for their existence, sharing words of faith and inspiration, forging the powerful ties that people share when they have such a common fate. In Amsterdam it meant a system of norms laws articles of faith all of which must be embraced in their totality as an absolute condition of re into the community and into historical Judaism at all. There was very little room for a free thinker, if any at all. Faced with this new situation, Prado found that certain heretical ideas about religion in general, which maybe had been dormant in his mind during his days in the Converso Underground, began to bubble up.

And he was used to the underground approach to undermining traditional society, and therefore he didn't want to keep his mouth shut. As his friend, and then opponent, Balthazar Orobio wrote about him later, it is only to you that it so happened to be a fake Christian and a true Jew where you could not be a Jew, and to be a fake Jew where you could be truly Jewish. It may hurt, but it was true. Prado's excommunication would follow only one year or so after Baruch Spinoza's. And we can actually pinpoint the cause from the records of the sting operation that the rabbis of Amsterdam set up to trap him. The following is from a report of a student who was sent to lure Prado into expressing his true opinions.

On Monday evening before the lesson, as he sat talking to me, he said that there's no reason why we should believe in Moses any more than we believe in Muhammad. Then he asked me whether reward and punishment exist, and I replied, Is that in doubt? Don't you know that it's one of the thirteen articles of faith? To which he replied sarcastically, But up to now, no one's returned from the next world to ask for our help. He especially mocked the wisdom of the sages, regarding the resurrection of the dead, saying that such a thing is impossible, and defies common sense, so that everything that has been said about the resurrection of the dead is sheer nonsense. He also says that the world was not created, but has always existed in the same form and will continue to exist forever.

These were key influences in Spinoza's early life. And between the thoughts of the defrocked priest and the words of the atheistic converso, we can make a decent guess at what Spinoza's monstrous deeds and abominable heresies may have been. But the truth is, we don't actually know. There's so little evidence from Spinoza's life before excommunication. The ban itself never tells us. There's no evidence in previous records of the community, and Spinoza left no records of his early life. There is, however, one account, discovered by historians in the archives of the Inquisition in the 1950s, a letter from Brother Tomas Solano y Robles, who traveled through Amsterdam in 1658 and reported on the life of the conversos he found there.

He reports having met Spinoza and Juan de Prado after their excommunication. He says that they told him they had been observant of Jewish law, but they changed their minds. They claim to have been expelled from the community for saying that the law of Moses was not true, that the soul was not immortal, and that there was no God, except in a philosophical sense. Now, maybe that doesn't sound so shocking to you, but the rabbis and the lay leaders of the community of Amsterdam had labored tirelessly for decades to reclaim their people from spiritual exile and to set their children on a solid foundation of Jewish tradition. Remember, the Amsterdam Jewish community was unique at this stage in that the vast majority of its members had actually been born as Christians.

It's not hard to believe that these thoughts of Spinoza's were found to be abominable as they threatened the very fabric of the world which the previous generation had built. But the ban did not silence Baruch de Spinoza, and the threat that he ultimately posed to the normative order of religious life had only just begun. And so Baruch de Spinoza became Benedict Spinoza. Both names, of course, still mean blessed. His earliest biographer reports that when he was told of his excommunication, Spinoza's response was, Very well. This does not force me to do anything I would not have done of my own accord had I not been afraid of a scandal. I gladly enter upon the path that is open to me. And before we get to exactly what this path was, his philosophy, it's important to note actually what it was not.

Spinoza lived the life of converso consciousness, but not as we know it from Spain. In the beginning, he was a converso of reason, hiding himself amongst the Jews, who of course themselves were mostly former conversos. He was pretending to be a Jew while being a heretic, a philosopher on the inside. And then, once he cut his ties with the Jewish world and turned to a philosophical life within the Christian community, again he continued to conceal his inner thoughts, because they were far too radical for the Calvinist-dominated Holland no matter how liberal it was relative to its neighbors. It's also important to note that unlike prominent excommunicates before him, Spinoza did not leave the Jewish fold for any other faith.

He had many close friends from dissenting Christian sects and was even buried in a Christian graveyard, but he never accepted baptism nor joined any Christian church. And in that sense, Baruch Spinoza was the first secular Jew. so what did he think? now I'm going to give you my typical caveat I'm not a scholar of Baruch Spinoza nor do I think that you want to sit through an exposition of his multiple works but I can tell you that Spinoza's tool de force as a philosopher was a general introduction of course to Cartesian thought written at the request of his friends and students he synthesized and represented Descartes' rationalism in a geometric format, meaning axioms, definitions, and demonstrations.

The Euclidean approach would actually later define Spinoza's great work, The Ethics. And the publication of The Principles of Philosophy of Rene Descartes, demonstrated according to the geometric method, brought Spinoza his first fame as philosopher. But he was wrongly labeled a Cartesian. And as we'll soon see, while Descartes had to split the world in two in order to solve his philosophical dilemma, Spinoza would take the Jewish way out by claiming that there is no God and world, that there's only one thing. So his work on Descartes may have brought Spinoza recognition, but ultimately it was a distraction. He was not a Cartesian. At this point, he was hard at work on an exposition of his own thought, which would ultimately only be published after his death.

And, by the way, it would be considered so foundational to rational philosophy that the great philosopher Hegel himself would say that to be a follower of Spinoza is the essential commencement of all philosophy. But the ethics was only published posthumously because the political events of the day caused Spinoza to take another stand. History has handed down to us an interesting detail from Spinoza's life, that the ring he wore was engraved with the warning, carefully. Just imagine the weight this word must have held for the child of refugees from the Inquisition, who himself had chosen the life as a converso of reason. Nevertheless, despite this caution, Spinoza cherished the freedom of tolerance of the Dutch Golden Age too much to stand silent.

You know, the 13th article of the Union of Utrecht, which brought the Republican to being, had promised, quote, every individual should remain free in his religion, and no man should be molested or questioned on the subject of divine worship. And when Spinoza saw this commitment beginning to waver in the face of a rising tide of nationalist politics and conservative religion, he could not remain silent. The result was the Theological Political Treatise. In its essence, the treatise is an extended plea for freedom in the civic realm, Freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and most especially, freedom of philosophy and religion. It's a plea for tolerance. And Spinoza identified the chief enemies of such grand goals as the power which superstition holds over the minds of men and which ecclesiastic authority holds over their lives.

Because in his eyes, the two worked together. Spinoza called the treatise a defense of true religion and it really consists of a critical deconstruction of what passes for religion amongst most people and as such, you can imagine, was not always well received so he begins with a brief natural history of religion meaning Christianity and Judaism which he defines as nothing more than organized superstition religion, as we know it, says Spinoza is not grounded in reason, the holy grail of this rationalist philosopher, but rather in the passions of hope and fear, hope for material good to come, and fear of loss and death in particular. And superstition, according to Spinoza, is the ignorant man's way of explaining the world and attempting to control it.

Since he lacks true reason, therefore he allows the imagination to give order to the world, and furthermore, Spinoza says his fear engenders, preserves, and fosters this superstition. And it's the origin of what he calls spurious religious observance. This type of ritual action that rationalists saw in religion as an attempt to gain illusory control over the world. You know, Spinoza also points out that there is a very particular class of people who have quite a bit to gain from stabilizing and regularizing such sort of proto-religious acts into a systematic relationship with nature. And those are the priests. And thus the result of that power dynamic and superstition is what we call organized religion.

It gets harsher. So Spiros also points out that behind all organized religion lies what he considers an irreverent and false conception of God. This is the notion that God is a rational agent like you and I, that God is basically a character, granted one who transcends nature, but nevertheless one with purposes and expectations, who commands and judges all the things, of course, that biblical religions take to be true. In order to deal the death blow to this conception of God, which he considered idolatrous, and to the sectarian religions, which he considered a threat to human freedom, Spinoza went for the throat, or rather for the foundation, because Spinoza was one of the fathers of modern biblical criticism.

In his Guide for the Perplexed, the Rambam, the great sage of the 12th century, Maimonides, describes a prophet in the following terms. Quote, His imaginative faculty, which is as perfect as possible, acts and receives from the intellect an overflow corresponding to his speculative perfection. This individual will only apprehend divine and most extraordinary matters, will only be aware and achieve knowledge of matters that constitute true opinions and general directives for the well-being of men. To Maimonides, a prophet is someone who knows everything a philosopher knows, he has his speculative perfection, but whose holy imagination allows him to grasp connections and see a scope of reality which the philosopher will miss.

Now, Spinoza believed he must kill this notion of the prophet philosopher in order to set philosophy free from religion and to protect society from organized superstition. And in order to do this, reason must vanquish imagination. In opposition to the Rambam, he asserts, those with a more powerful imagination are less fitted for purely intellectual activity, while those who devote themselves to the cultivation of their more powerful intellect keep their imagination under greater control and restraint. in Spinoza's eyes the prophets may have been people of high moral character and certainly of extraordinary imagination but they were not philosophers and therefore their words held no ultimate truth other than the basic moral principle of loving one's neighbor.

As he says, we must believe the prophets only with regard to the purpose and substance of the revelation, all else one is free to believe as he will. now, Sminoza doesn't dismiss the importance of prophetic teachings but he sees them as directed toward the moral improvement of the ignorant masses they're better than raw superstition he sees them as fictional stories which are a better guide for the average person than rigorous philosophical proofs that he himself chose it was not enough for Sminoza to downgrade the wisdom of the prophets to a product of moral imagination and make it inferior to reason As he says, I quote, If he's to free the body politic from the threat of sectarian religion, Spinoza knows he must do more than downgrade the prophets.

He has to disarm their most potent weapon, the Bible as the word of God. And, for better or worse, he'd been well educated for the task. Unlike other, mostly Protestant, biblical critics of his day, Spinoza was fluent in the Hebrew language. And furthermore, the teachers of the Talmud Torah in Amsterdam had introduced him to the full range of medieval commentators. And following certain hints he found there, particularly in the Ibn Ezra, if you're curious about it, you can send me an email, and building on his own grammatical knowledge, Spinoza came to the radical conclusion that the Bible was a perfectly natural human document, that the five books of Moses were not written by Moses, and even though there may have been a mosaic core to the Hebrew Scriptures, they'd pass through many hands and generation and much corruption before they reached our own.

He actually calls the Bible a mutilated text. And furthermore, identifies Ezra, that great 6th century leader of the return to Zion, that 6th century before the Common Era. He identifies him as the final editor of the Bible as we know it. Now, Spinoza's arguments for the deconstruction of the text are long and involved, and there's really no reason to review them all here. And furthermore, you should know there are many more points in the theological-political treatise about the nature of God, the nature of religion and politics, that we're simply not going to touch on. But now at least we have some inkling of what the rabbis of Amsterdam found to be so monstrous. He killed the God of the Bible, dismissed his prophets, and undermined their texts.

All in the name of the freedom to philosophize. and by the by, it wasn't just the rabbis who found Spinoza so monstrous after all, he had defined the ceremonies of all organized religions Judaism and Christianity as empty and meaningless practices they have nothing to do, he said, with true piety which Spinoza defined as love your fellow human beings and treat them with justice and charity according to him, that's all that's essential to the true religion everything else is just superstition. The imagination run wild. As you can imagine, after its publication, the treatise was condemned by political and religious authorities across Europe as a book forged in hell. That's a quote. It was printed anonymously originally, and even in the later printings had to have false cover pages, and still had to be smuggled into certain countries.

But despite the opposition, its message spread like wildfire, and all the authorities of Europe were up in arms against it. It seems, in fact, that the only thing which Catholics and Jews, Anglicans, Lutherans, and Calvinists could all agree on in this contentious age of religious war was that the real threat to society lay in godless works like Spinoza's theological-political treatise. There is so much more we could say about Spinoza's thought and its long-term impact. It is beyond question that his willingness to boldly go where no man had gone before, in the name of tolerance and truth, made him one of the fathers of the Enlightenment. I just want to touch on one last point. We mentioned earlier the injustice in the label of atheist which was applied to Descartes.

Well, Spinoza was tarred with that brush as well, and it deeply wounded him. And rightly so. Spinoza devoted his whole life to God, just not in the way of his religious contemporaries. There are two statements from The Ethics, Spinoza's great work which really explains his own thought, published after his death in 1676, that can help us locate and perhaps even identify Spinoza's God. The first is from the Prelude. That eternal and infinite being we call God, or nature, acts from the same necessity from which he exists. The other one is from the first section, the 18th quote. God is the imminent, not transitive cause of all things. Meaning to Spinoza, there is no contrast between God and the world, and therefore no relationship between them, no command because there is no commander who stands outside of the commanded, No revelation other than that which reason can reveal in the world itself.

God is nature. This position is often called pantheism, though the word wasn't coined actually until about 20 years after his death. And don't be afraid. We're not about to take a deep dive into theology. But by the way, if you want to talk a little bit more about it, you can always drop me a line at robmikefoyer at gmail.com. Spinoza's claim was that there was only one substance to existence, which all attributes in here, and that this substance has two names, God or nature. And that's not a rejection of God. And in fact, it wasn't even a rejection of the notion of salvation, because the fifth and final book of the Ethics, where its whole essence and goal are expressed, actually offers a way to the salvation, and even the eternity of the soul in a sense, just one that challenges all established religious and mystical beliefs.

Because unlike other modern philosophers, Spinoza never gave up on the absolute spiritual goal of religion. He just thought that reason itself was the proper tool that led to these goals. And remember, Spinoza's notion of reason was not your everyday rationality. It was what he called scientia intuitive, a scientific intuition. It's not simply analytical and descriptive. Rather, it's a holistic comprehension that offers an unmediated knowledge of God or nature. We understand God from within. And Spinoza may have secularized religion in order to fight what he saw as the irrationality of the imagination. but he also sanctified reason by making it the path not just to knowledge but actually to a connection with God and therefore salvation.

Now, for better or worse, for all his contributions to Western thought and his ultimate influence on European culture as a whole, Spinoza's impact on the Jewish world of his day was nil. When he died in 1676, the resurgence of Sabbatine heresy was far more on the minds of Jewish leadership than some obscure philosopher who had been excommunicated in Amsterdam 20 years ago. And our friend Avram Cardozo had just begun to stir up the mythic imagination of the masses in 1676. And he would condemn his brother Isaac as a philosopher, a scientist, and therefore heretic, who had the audacity to demand a rational explanation for everything, and was therefore ready to dismiss the sayings of the sages of Israel, including the Torah, if they lacked such grounding.

One has to wonder what he would have said about Spinoza. And the battle within the soul of Am Yisrael between the holy imagination and the light of reason is far from over in this age. There is a struggle which lies ahead. In fact, a polarization. The modern world is going to be marked by a growing sense that one has to choose size between these two ways of knowing the world. That either you can live the mythic imagination, that drama that the Arizal introduced us to, that the actions of the human being can actually complete the process of creation, or you can step into the cold light of reason and know the truth, even if it means killing God. And this, despite the fact that the Rambam says that only reason and imagination together can bring prophecy.

Now, I want to end with a final note about Spinoza's pantheism. Because the truth of the matter is, for Am Yisrael, the identification of God with nature wasn't a chiddish. It was actually not Spinoza's original thought. Ever since Abraham Abulafia, who I hope you remember, back in 13th century Spain, the Kabbalists have paid close attention to the fact that the gematria, the numeric value of the words Elohim, which means God, and Hateva, which means the nature, are exactly the same. Now the idea has undergone much evolution and found varied expression. But in essence, what the mystic tradition is trying to teach is that nature is a contraction of the infinite. Nature is the divine in a contract and therefore comprehensible form.

but don't make the mistake you can contract the world in order to know it but that doesn't mean that there's not something which lies beyond our knowing and there's a new iteration of holy imagination which lies just on the horizon of our story one which will strive to relate to God as both imminent and transcendent as one who fills the world and yet surrounds it as well and in my opinion this path will ultimately open the door to a reuniting of reason and imagination in the service of God and maybe, just maybe that's why when Rav Kook commented on Spinoza he had the following to say still, he, meaning Spinoza was after all of the seed of Israel his inner essence has a fundamental principle which after much refinement can enter our camp Rav Moshe Mendelssohn, who we will discuss began purifying it but he didn't finish its repair the holy Baal Shem Tov purified it without knowing who he was purifying for he did not need its source he drew his knowledge from its inner essence and purified it and the process is still not finished it's ongoing and when it's entirely complete Baruch Spinoza will leave the category of the cursed and be among the blessed instead.

I just want to thank a few people. I want to thank all the people who give their hard-earned money to help make this material happen and keep it free and widely available. I have a campaign going right now. I'm looking for 36 new supporters before the eighth night of Hanukkah. I'm asking you to go now to www.patron.com and you can click the button there for a little bit of per-podcast support. If that's too much info, you can find me at RobMikeFoyer on Facebook, or you can send me an email at robmikefoyer at gmail.com, and I'll shoot you the details. And I want to thank the Land of Israel Network for providing a platform that allows me to reach so many wonderful people. I want to thank the Pardes Institute, P-A-R-D-E-S dot org dot I-L, for giving me the opportunity to teach so many wonderful, wonderful young Jews.

I want to thank Suom Yaakov, because he's my home. and I want to thank you for listening. I'm Rav Mike Feuer and this is The Jewish Story.