Season 2: Episode 14 - The German Socrates

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What glitters is born for the moment, says Goethe. The truth remains for future generations. Well, I'm definitely speaking in the moment, but I have my eyes on all those generations of people to come, because I'm Rav Mike Feuer and this is The Jewish Story. Episode 14, The German Socrates. So, what exactly was the Enlightenment for the Jews? The answer is certainly many things, and we have to start by making a distinction between the intellectual philosophical movement of the Enlightenment and the parallel process of civil emancipation that we're actually going to consider in a coming episode, so keep that to the side. That being said, what was the Enlightenment? It's worth it to start with Kant's definition that we heard in the last episode, that clarion call, dare to know.

because really, daring to know is nothing new for Am Yisrael. Certainly, Avram Ha'ivri, the one who stood on the side against the rest of the world, the father of the Hebrew nation, he dared to know. He dared to know the one God when the whole world was steeped in the dark illusion of idolatry. And his courage to know broke all the molds of the ancient world. He was, after all, the first iconoclast. And his children haven't lost courage since. It's true, we're choosy about what we choose to know But please God, let that never be from a lack of daring But rather an expression of the precious nature of chosen consciousness And here on The Jewish Story We've followed the struggle between philosophy and the Torah's wisdom of Chochmah Since our battle back in antiquity with the Greeks And we saw how once the Greeks were gone as a cultural force Rav Sa'ad Yagaon re-engaged their philosophy in the 10th century and brought it into the rabbinic fold.

He was the first to give us a philosophical presentation of Chochmah in his work, Emunot Videot. And most importantly for our current discussion, he crafted an epistemology, an understanding of how we know anything, specifically for the Torah, and it placed reason and revelation together as the two paths to a singular truth. Go back and listen to Season 1, Episode 17 for the full story there. But for now, recall the four sources of knowledge that Rav Sajah outlines in the introduction to Munot Videot. Number one, direct sensory perception, seeing is knowing. Number two, logical deduction, where there's smoke, there's fire. Number three, intellectual comprehension, you've got to read people if you want to know things that you've never seen.

And number four, authentic tradition. now the first three are reason in its purest form I mean, you know what you see, you know what you figure out, and you know what you learn and the highest meaning of authentic tradition for Rav Saadjah was of course the Torah that we've inherited from Moshe so by inoculating Greek philosophy and by breaking ground basically in every important field of study of the Hebrew language, grammar, philology etymology, poetry, Rav Saadjah opened the door to the Middle Ages especially to the Spanish Middle Ages. And there, philosophy and Chokhmah flourished together under the Muslims in Spain, reaching, of course, perhaps their greatest expression in the Rambam, Rav Moshe ben Maimon, Maimonides.

And even later under the Christians, Jews continued to dare to know. And to reason, and the philosophical synthesis with wisdom, with Chokhmah, continued to thrive. And though we discussed back in Season 1 at length how philosophy began also to undermine the fabric of religious observance amongst the Jews of Spain. And we witnessed two rounds of devastating communal conflict over the works of the Rambam himself that culminated in the burning of his books. Do a little review if you don't remember. Nevertheless, a tradition of philosophical synthesis lived on in Am Yisrael even after the expulsion from Spain. Though it's worth noting that at that point the Kabbalah mysticism had emerged as a serious competitor with philosophy for addressing the big questions of life.

So then, early modernity exposed us to this new phase of struggle that we call religion versus science. It's just a new way of talking about philosophy and Chofma as two ways of knowing the world. And we saw that as the horizons of thought began to lift, there were more than a few individuals in Am Yisrael who dared to know both the Torah and science. In specific, go back and check out episodes 3 and 4 from this series for the foundations of that story. So basically, daring to know is nothing new for Am Yisrael. So what was the Enlightenment, and why, by the way, did it prove to be so devastating for traditional Judaism? Let's touch those four elements of Rav Sajjah's epistemology again. And in particular, we need to look at the relationship that they assume between reason and revelation.

Now, we've been speaking for the last few episodes about how the arguments between empiricists, rationalists, and skeptics in early modernity began to erode confidence in the first three pieces of his epistemology. Even the information of our senses will come to doubt. However, Mav Sajja had assumed these to be universal and therefore unassailable. Remember, Descartes had to go all the way back to I think before I am in order to have a basis for knowing anything. And what's even more powerful, in 1781, which lies just in our episode today, Kant will introduce his doctrine of transcendental idealism, which by the way, if you don't understand it, you should do a little work, because it underlies much of modern thought.

With it, he basically turned the tables on objective knowledge itself. He claimed that our knowledge doesn't conform to objective existence that exists outside of us, but rather that existence outside of us conforms to our knowledge. He put subjectivity in the center of the philosophical field. And the shifting nature of knowledge is a critical piece in understanding our progress over the rest of the Jewish story into the modern and post-modern levels of consciousness. But I've got news for you. Am Yisrael isn't easily overwhelmed by epistemological earthquakes. The first three elements of Rav Sajj's guide to knowing the world were, after all, borrowed from the outside, and therefore our relationship to them is malleable.

The real bombshell that comes with the Enlightenment was the failure of the fourth source of knowledge, of authentic tradition. And the story that we're going to pursue over the coming several episodes will be about the evolution of our relationship to Torah as an authentic and therefore authoritative source of knowledge. Out of this shifting relationship will emerge Hasidut as we know it, the Reform Movement, Orthodoxy and Secular Judaism, and probably everything else we can't imagine yet. But before we can trace such major movements, we need to meet the Jewish Enlightenment in its personal origins. Moses, the son of Menachem Mendel, Mendelssohn, was born in Dessau, Germany, on September 6, 1729.

He was a descendant on his mother's side, of the great 16th century leader of Ashkenazi Jewry, of whom we've spoken, of Moshe Isserlis, also known as the Ramah, and who was indeed his namesake. And the world into which he was born was typical of 18th century German Jewry. It was a small community, founded at the end of the 17th century, if you recall, that's when Jews really began to come back to Germany, numbering only a few hundred souls. This is in contrast, if you recall, to the main Jewish centers at the time over in Poland and Lithuania, where there were hundreds of thousands of Jews. And overall, even, German Jewry was numerically quite small, perhaps no more than 70,000 at this point, scattered in communities over the more than 300 German states.

But they were growing in economic and cultural power. And we've touched on the role which certain Jews played in the process of modernization and centralization of the German states. We called them the court Jews. We also mentioned how these court Jews were also the avant-garde of assimilation. Their intimate interactions with the Christian elite are what led them in many ways to be the first to loosen the bonds of both religion and cultural separatism that had defined European Jewry for almost a thousand years. So young Moshe's great potential began to show itself already in Cheder, in primary school. That's the institution which really gave education to most of European Jew in his day. And what that means is that he showed a remarkable ability to grasp the complex questions of the Talmud, which was still the principal and sometimes sole yardstick for measuring out the few youths who would continue with advanced studies in a yeshiva, an institution of higher education, and perhaps someday achieved the title of rabbi.

Now, I know we've spent quite a bit of time in the last few episodes speaking about the deterioration of the rabbinate in early modernity. Nevertheless, within the educational track of European Jewry, it was the ultimate destination. And one might not have the aptitude to be a rabbi or the desire. Often the economic realities of life actually demanded that a promising youth would set out to support himself and his family and abandon his education altogether. But there was no alternative career track in the traditional educational system. This was a society, much like the ultra-Orthodox world today, that had placed the value of learning as its central social organizing principle. There was a religious elite wedded to the economic elite, often literally.

And they led the way. And by the way, it's noteworthy because this was a time when capitalist economies were already becoming powerful in Europe and consuming traditional values at an alarming rate. But a scholar, as defined by the Jewish community, studied Talmud and Halakha, Jewish law, and maybe dabbled in mysticism and perhaps other realms of Jewish thought. But there was no academic path to knowledge. So young Moshe was a diligent scholar, and he was quickly taken under the wing of Dessau's rabbi, Rav David Frankl, who's also known as the author of the Korban Eda, a commentary on Yerushalmi, which by the way, those of you who have a little background and knowledge should know that that sets him apart already from the majority of the rabbinate in Europe, the fact that he focused on the Jerusalem Talmud.

And from the age of 11, young Moshe studied in Rav Frankl's yeshival until in 1743, the rabbi was called to Berlin to fill the post of Chief Rabbi. He's moving on up. And this event was actually a turning point not only for the teacher, but for the student as well. Young Moshe left his physical father and family behind and followed his father in Torah to the big city. And there are legends, by the way, many legends about Moses Mendelssohn, as we'll speak about later, but here they're told of how this frail 14-year-old who was known to have a sickly constitution walked the 90 miles from Dessau to Berlin, though it seems that they're more likely fantasy than reality. But what is certain is the story of the Jewish guard who stopped young Moshe at the gate of Berlin and demanded that the young traveler prove he had come to the city with the sole desire to study Torah.

Why? Well, recall that Jews had only been re-admitted into Berlin in 1671, less than 80 years earlier, and their numbers were tightly controlled to those who were, I quote-unquote, economically productive. Not to mention that they were all still confined to the ghetto. These are critical factors to remember when we get to the discussion of civil emancipation. But nevertheless, despite these restrictions, by the 1740s the community numbered some 2,000. Urbanization is one of the stories of modernity that I can't really address directly. But just know that all across Europe, the 18th and 19th centuries will witness a steady shift in population from the countryside into the cities, and the Jews will be an early and significant part of this rising tide.

So, alarmed at the growing number of Jews, the authorities in Berlin enlisted the Jewish communal leadership to enforce a policy that would keep all non-productive Jews out of the city. And thus, young Moshe was met at the gate by a Jewish guard who wanted to know why he had come. And by the way, if he hadn't given the right answer, he'd have given the auf right there and then. Fortunately, his answer was for the sake of the Torah, because despite the government restrictions, the community had gained permission to admit each year a certain number of Torah students who were supported from communal funds. And so, the young scholar arrived in Berlin and the Beit Midrash, from all accounts looking forward to settling himself even deeper into the rabbinic tract which had been laid before him.

But, unbeknownst to him, a year before his arrival in the city, a new book was added to the shelves of the Beit Midrash which would change the course of his life forever. I mean, in truth, it was an old book. It had just fallen off the map of traditional learning. And the path that Moses Mendelssohn forged for European Jewry would be marked at its beginning by the book which Moses Maimonides wrote more than 600 years before. In 1742, Israel ben Avraham, a Christian convert to Judaism who owned a printing house near Dessau, reprinted The Guide for the Perplexed, the Rambam's great work of Jewish philosophy. Though it was written in the 12th century and first printed in the 16th, and of course marked by controversy since the first reader got their hands on it, go back to Season 1, Episode 21 for the full story, The book had fallen out of favor.

The Rambam's attempt at a synthesis between his comprehensive grasp of the Torah and his adherence to philosophy in particular, Aristotelian philosophy, had basically lost traction amongst mainstream European Jewry in the early modern period. And the book had not been reprinted for some 200 years, which meant that it was not so simple to find. But, its appearance in the Beit Midrash in Berlin in 1742 transformed young Moses Mendelssohn. In fact, many years later, Mendelssohn would attribute his legendary physical weakness and the curvature of his spine to the great effort he invested in studying Maimonides book He afflicted my flesh and I became feeble because of him And yet I loved him greatly for he transformed many hours in my lifetime from sorrow into joy So what exactly did the young scholar find so compelling in the worlds of a medieval rabbinic philosopher?

It was what he described as the Rambam's intellectual ideal, that those capable of profound thought are obligated to aspire to perfection and to recognize the truth in God by means of their intellect rooted in the Rambam's rendering of the last lines of the ninth chapter of Jeremiah. Thus says the Lord, Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom, nor the strong man boast of his strength, nor the rich man boast of his riches, but let him that boasts exult in this, that he understands and knows me. but to open such a complex text the 14 year old needed a teacher whom he found in the person of Israel Samos Samos was a scholar there in Berlin whose abilities had gained him the patronage of some of the community's wealthiest Jews in his lifetime he authored many works including commentaries on the 11th century book Chovot Halivavot, Duties of the Heart by Rav Bachya Ibn Pakuda which we spoke about long ago and Rabbi Yehuda Alevi's 12th century Kuzari, both classics of Spanish medieval thought.

And therefore, there could be no more suitable teacher for young Moses Mendelssohn in Jewish philosophy. But, like all teachers, Samoz communicated far more than his understanding of the text at hand. His dedication to science and philosophy were fed by a uniquely comprehensive worldview. And that, in turn, led him to frustration and harsh criticism of the religious culture from which he came. He was horrified by the contempt in which the rabbinic scholars held this external wisdom, dat chit soni, the sciences and philosophy which were so beloved to him. And some historians, particularly the Jews of the late 19th century, and we will discuss the impact that those specific historians have on the way we know Judaism today.

Some of them saw Samoz as a subversive, whose goal was to undermine rabbinic culture by expanding its horizons and exposing it to critical thought. But truth is, on the face of it, his criticisms were actually aimed at saving that very culture, to which he not only belonged, but in which he took pride. And he wanted to do it through the purification of belief, the improvement of religious scholarship, and what he called the eradication of ignorance. And he gave that mission to young Moses Mendelssohn. Now, Samoz was not the only rabbi in Berlin of the 1740s bothered by what he considered the Jews' cultural inferiority to the Christians. And it's important to keep in the back of your mind how much of this has to do with how a Jew sees himself in light of the non-Jewish world.

There was a growing circle of young scholars dedicated to saving neglected Jewish texts on science, the Hebrew language and philosophy, and learning these external wisdoms. And Moses Mendelsohn found himself at the center of this emerging cultural revolution. At age 16, he began attending gymnasium lessons, that's the secular high school version, and without abandoning his Torah studies, by the way, he never abandoned that. He mastered French, German, and English, just in order to gain access to the philosophical literature of his time. He even managed competency in Latin. By the end of the 1740s, his desire to learn had become a burning passion to expand his intellectual horizons, to read ever more science and philosophy, and to devote long hours to contemplation.

Now, just to appreciate the type of barriers he had to overcome and what drove him to do it, the first Enlightenment work he studied was John Locke's essay concerning human understanding. At the time, it existed only in the original Latin, which Mendelssohn could not read. But undeterred, he mastered both the essay and the language together by dint of a dictionary and endless hours of labor. And was deeply influenced by Locke's words specifically on the pleasures of philosophy. At the end of his life, when his health began to fail, Doctors actually ordered him to forego excessive intellectual thought. And this is what he said. Ha, philosophy, he wrote. In my younger years, you were my beloved wife, who was my consolation in all my tribulations.

And now, I shall fear to go to you as a man would fear approaching his beloved, in whose bones resides decay. And yet my desire for you heightened, and I was unable to quell my desire, and would often risk my life to make love to you. and so the young student who had made his way to Berlin in pursuit of the Torah was swept up in the excitement of the German Enlightenment which was at that moment revolutionizing the culture and society around him and furthermore driven by a desire to return Judaism to its rightful place of cultural parity or even supremacy over Christianity and burning with a personal passion for philosophy Moses Mendelssohn was poised to become the voice of the Jewish Enlightenment.

It was in early 1753 when a friend took Mendelssohn to one of Berlin's scholars' clubs, the Learned Coffee House. There, every week, mathematicians, physicists, philosophers, theologians would meet, reading papers, discussing, arguing, playing chess and billiards. it was, for young Mendelssohn, heavenly. Now keep in mind, from the perspective of the absolutist state, which Prussia certainly was at this point, such gatherings were downright subversive. Even in merry old England, there were attempts in the first half of the 18th century to close down clubs and coffeehouses where unrestrained conversation took place, and all the more so amongst the Jews. But the freedom of thought, which was the hallmark of modernity, could not be suppressed.

You might as well try to hold back the wind. And it was at the learned coffeehouse that Mendelssohn made his most important friend, one who served as the young Jews bridged into German Enlightenment society, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. At the time, Lessing was a well-known writer and philosopher, but he would ultimately go on to become one of the most influential thinkers of the German Enlightenment. At their first meeting, the two young men played chess and over the game they discovered that they actually shared a common language that transcended the cultural gap between them. They quickly became lifelong friends. It was also at the Learned Coffeehouse where Mendelssohn took his opening steps into the philosophical discourse of his day.

His first essay, Thoughts on Probability, was given an anonymous public reading at the coffeehouse before the members of the Society of Friends of Literature. But when the reader made a mistake in his reading, Mendelssohn couldn't hold back and immediately corrected him. His authorship was revealed, amazing the audience, and immediately securing his place amongst the intellectual elite that filled the room. And then, the ascent of this Jewish wonder kid, who overcame foreign language and alien culture, became a Cinderella story in Enlightenment circles. Shepherded by Lessing, in the early 1750s, Mendelssohn moved deeper and deeper into the world of the scholarly elite of Berlin. But this is not a story of a rabbi to be, who left the fold for the temptations of philosophy.

It's important to make clear from the outset that Moshe Mendelssohn himself remained deeply committed to the divine and binding nature of Torah for his entire life, and in all of his thought. In coming episodes, we're going to look at the impact of the Enlightenment on traditional society. Right now we're just looking at its embodiment. And we're going to have to ask some very hard questions about what culpability, if any, Mendelssohn holds for the collapse of much of what he held sacred. And in order to do that, we're going to have to work through how his memory was received and even used by the generations which followed him. He would be eulogized by his first biographer, Yitzhak Eichel, as Yakab Doror Yachid Baamo, precious in his generation, unique amongst the people.

And a later author of the Enlightenment, the Jewish Enlightenment, would go so far as to say that Moshe, son of Amram, received the Torah from heaven, Moshe Maimonides gave it a living soul, and Moshe Mendelssohn built for it a temple in Jerusalem. That's on one side of the equation. To the Orthodox movement, that actually emerged in reaction to the cultural and religious crisis of modernity, Mendelssohn became a demonic figure responsible for all the crises of the modern era. Rabbi Akil Yosef Schlesinger, student of the Chatham, so fair, important religious leader of the day, described Mendelssohn as, quote, the evil Moses of Dessau, the leader of the rebels who has the cunning of a snake, has begun bringing the foreign harlot amongst the Jews to make them go whoring after false gods.

Well, that's quite a reputation. But for now, in our story, we see Moshe Mendelssohn as a young scholar enchanted with the intellectual horizons of the Enlightenment, but not naively so. In 1754, Mendelssohn's friend Lessing published a play entitled Dayuden, The Jews. Its protagonist was a high-minded, cultured man, and the revelation of this character as a Jew to the audience, is meant to force the reader, or the watcher, to confront the stereotypes current in Christian culture, the lying Jew, morally inferior and culturally backward, and of course to protest the legal and social barriers which still existed between Jews and Christians in the day. This was the Enlightenment at its finest, drama as a tool for moral education.

The theater, after all, said Lessing, should be a school of the moral world. and his play's Jewish protagonist was meant to present an image of the new Jew to assert the possibility that he could be an exemplary, educated, moral citizen. You recall from last episode the discussion we had that in the mind of some Enlightenment thinkers, like Montesquieu, the backwardness and perhaps lying nature of the Jew was simply a product of the environment of formation. So Lessing agreed and said that if we allow the Jew into the Enlightenment, he will be enlightened. So in the summer of 1754, not long after the play was published, Johann David Michalis, a university professor in Göttingen, published a critique of Yayun.

And his critique was actually quite simple. From a literary standpoint, a good playwright is committed to putting real-life characters on stage. And he failed when he chose a preposterous character who everyone knows does not exist in life. Jews, wrote Michaelis, were hostile toward Christianity by the very nature of their religion and immoral by virtue of their occupation with trade, which by definition makes them deceive their customers. Michaelis' article was quite widespread and angered and humiliated Mendelssohn. But not just that, it evoked a crucial response. Moses Manson recognized that so long as Jews were absorbed in their intra-Jewish discourse, only speaking to each other in a language, sometimes literally, sometimes conceptually, which only they shared, they had no ability to respond to this hatred and prejudice, which really underlay the civil restrictions under which they suffered.

But now that he himself had emerged as a full-fledged member of the German Enlightenment, Confronting it became not only possible, but necessary. I'm not going to detail the series of letters and essays that followed on both sides. Just know that from this point on, Mendelssohn realized that his calling lay well beyond philosophical study. He had a responsibility to universalize one simple conclusion, which he saw as rooted in reason, natural rights, and the humanism which drove the Enlightenment, that a Jew is a human being. and in order to do this he felt the need not only to fight from the outside but to bring the light of reason to his people as well and you men God labors for you because of you valleys will be adorned with grass and beneath your feet flowers and herbage will burgeon look and see the plain all around welcoming you as a beloved wife a beauteous woman who paints her eyes with henna and comes wearing precious jewels to the love of her life.

These are the opening words of Kohelet Musar, a collection of new Hebrew literature published in Berlin by Moses Mendelssohn and his friend Tobias Bach sometime in the early 1750s. They originally envisioned it as a weekly periodical, a project driven by Mendelssohn's desire to bring the beauty which he had found in Enlightenment culture to his people in their holy language. And indeed, the next article took up the battle of the Hebrew language. A battle, by the way, which would become critical, central even, to the entire Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment. Mendelsohn lamented there the neglect of biblical Hebrew and said that it was tragic that generations of Jewish scholars had focused solely on the Talmud.

He called for a revival of Hebrew, renewed Bible study, and the creation of a new literature out of this most perfect of languages. In the next episode, we'll speak about his own project called the Biur, where he actually translates the Bible into German. He cited the example, by the way, of other European peoples who were at that very moment reviving their languages. And he asks, why are we dreaming and inert? Why do we not apply their example to our language, which is most eminent and ancient? So as I said, this call to re-engage biblical Hebrew will become a hallmark of the Maskelim, the Jewish Enlighteners, and oddly enough, will eventually make the Bible itself and the Hebrew language a battleground between Haskalah and Orthodoxy.

So Kuala Et Musar apparently made little impression in its day. Only two editions were ever printed and its circulation was negligible. But, as is true with so many of the things which Mendelssohn did, its significance lies in its innovation. For the first time a new medium was introduced into European culture adopted of course from model influential in England Germany and other European countries But the very idea of publishing a journal devoted to moral reformation which was free of rabbinic supervision, was basically a subversive step. You have to understand that the Hebrew-Niedish books of ethics, which were quite popular in Mendelssohn's generation, depicted a world in gloomy, dangerous, shadowy colors, a world that required strict caution to avoid the punishments a sinner could expect.

But Mendelssohn had a different vision. He was a new kind of moralist. He was a philosophical guide who promised a better life in a broader and brighter world. He was on a mission to expand the horizons of his co-religionists and to invite them to join the new society whose joys he had tasted. And we'll see in the coming episode that the end of Mendelssohn's life, a far more successful journal modeled on his early efforts, would become the principal voice of the Jewish Enlightenment of the Haskalah in all of Central Europe. It was called Hame'asef. We'll speak about it. But in a very real sense, the Jewish Enlightenment began with Kohelet Musar. So Mendelssohn's reputation as a philosopher outside of the circle of the Jews continued to grow through the 1760s.

He had become a champion of natural theology, asserting together with many members of the German Enlightenment that philosophical study is the way to know God and to grasp, even without divine revelation, the truths of creation. It was a religious universalism. As Mendelssohn wrote to a Christian friend, our common God is not the God of Jews or Christians, but the God of all human beings. and in 1763 just to give you a sense of what's going on one of his essays actually took first prize in the Royal Academy of Science competition and in case you're unimpressed Immanuel Kant who as we mentioned the 1780s would actually revolutionize philosophy was also a competitor in that but he only received a commendation so Mendelssohn's essay was an assertion that philosophy could include genuinely objective arguments and in it he constructed a rational philosophical proof for the existence of God.

It was an argument that would forever remain critical to his understanding of both Judaism and philosophy and because of that it would serve as a critical bridge for many traditionalist believers into philosophical thought. So success in the non-Jewish world only fueled Mendelssohn's aspirations to bring his people into the light. and one work which he chose in order to do that was the explanation of logical terms it's a short, poorly known 12th century treatise written by the Rambam as an introduction to logic it had not been reprinted since 1567 but Mendelsohn took it, translated it into German and he added a commentary thus transforming it into a basic textbook for philosophy students and together with his attempt to arouse the love of the Jews for Biblical Hebrew, this small work is a perfect expression of how the early Maschilim, these Enlighteners, were actually revolutionaries in the true sense.

I say that because the word revolution means to come around to where you began. And somewhere inside every revolutionary, you can find the sense that the cause, be it the country, the people, the culture, the cause has gone astray from its original intention. and the revolutionaries fighting to return it to its pristine, original glory. We saw this element, if you recall, within the teachings of Al Shem Tov, who aimed to return Am Yisrael to their roots as the children of the prophets. And we'll hear it time and again in the words of the Maskelim, whose goal is explicitly, to return the crown to its former glory. And so the explanation of logical terms was a minor classical text, marginalized in Ashkenazi culture, but in Mendelssohn's hands, it became a bridge to the Enlightenment and to what he considered to be the true inheritance of the Torah.

Because logic, he said, is like geometry, neutral and objective, has nothing to do with faith or the commandments, and therefore should pose them no threat. Not only that, he went further and said that true Torah knowledge is impossible without it, because a truth-loving, educated man is one who embraces inquiry and allows it to align his intellect and teach him to walk the straight and narrow path and in the circles of justice and not to deviate to the left or the right from the path of truth. So in the midst of all these intellectual efforts, Mendelssohn somehow found time to fall madly in love with young Fromet Guggenheim and they were married in the summer of 1762. Their courtship and life together would later be held up by the Maskelin, by the Jewish Enlighteners, as an expression of the modern ideal of romantic love in opposition to the matchmaking prevalent in Jewish society at the time.

And in general, as we will see, Mendelssohn's life became the embodiment of many ideals for later Maskelin and their impotence, whether he had actually done the things they claimed or not. But despite their seemingly modern romance, In one respect, the young couple were quite traditional. They had ten children. But unfortunately, the first birth ended in tragedy. Death has knocked at my door and robbed me of a child, which has lived but eleven innocent months. But God be praised, her short life was happy and full of bright promise. Mendelsohn was writing to a friend in the wake of his tragic loss. And he went on to insist that the child's brief life had not been in vain, saying, I cannot believe that God has set us on this earth like foam on the wave.

And from this personal tragedy, the question of the immortality of the soul became an urgent existential issue for Mendelssohn. And he set out on a quest to find logical proof of his existence. And consciously or not, he was engaging a question which dominated the unspoken thoughts of his day. we have to know that there was a deep fear that had begun to seep into the lives of the educated elites of enlightened Europe as their world of religion began to fade around them because for all the freedom offered by throwing off the shackles of superstition as they called it religion offers relationship to a world unbounded by the human capacity to know if you think like a philosopher it says that epistemology and ontology are not the same thing.

But if you don't, you just have to know that it's often illogical answers, it's being religion. Depressing questions may not make sense in the philosophical way, but they can instill a sense of magic, hope, and potential into life. You know, the great sociologist, Max Weber, calls this aspect of modernity disenchantment, or desacralization. It's removing the sacred. He characterizes modern society as bureaucratic and secularized, and he notes that scientific understanding is intrinsically more highly valued than sacred beliefs. And despite the extensive space he gives to laying out the benefits that this more reasonable worldview offers, Weber does note that something was lost, because he characterizes traditional society as one in which the world remains a great enchanted garden.

And it really was in the later half of the 18th century when the reality of life without magic began to set in for many Europeans. And because of that, skepticism and philosophical materialism quickly rose to fashion. And though many intellectuals sensed that these perspectives were really threats to the foundations of European society, they struggled to be able to fight them. Because you have to fight them with meaning, and you have to root meaning in truth. Moses Mendelsohn, however, had spent his whole life struggling to combine a deep faith in the Torah with Enlightenment philosophy. He was therefore uniquely positioned to address the root causes of the existential fear bubbling up underneath the brightness of the European Enlightenment.

As a Jew, the bedrock of his reality was the existence of a creator who cared enough for his creation to grace it with the Torah. And as a philosopher, he was an optimist in the School of Leibniz, for those of you who have some philosophical background. And what matters, really, is that he rejected the radical and what he considered to be frivolous philosophy represented by Voltaire and the French Enlightenment that we touched on briefly in the last episode, and to which we will return. In Mendelssohn's view, living without God and submitting to one's basic instincts are the greatest of all evils which threaten mankind. He saw that modern man needed new anchors to hold on to so as not to be swept into atheistic despair or gross hedonism and that more than anything else it was the fear of death which cast its shadow over the world of the Enlightenment.

In Fadon, his greatest work of philosophy which appeared in 1767 was the response. The book is a defense of the simplicity, and therefore immortality, of the soul. It was written as a series of dialogues, which revisit the classic Platonic dialogue Phaedo, in which Socrates argues for the immortality of the soul in preparation for his own death. And Mendelssohn argues that it is inconceivable that living is the sole aim of life, and that nothing exists beyond it. It's equally inconceivable, he says, that no explanation and no solution exists for suffering and evil, whether we understand them or not. Further, he asserts that it's inconceivable that the same fate awaits the righteous and the evildoers alike.

And he backs up these assertions with a potent philosophical argument. And as a philosophical argument, it builds on the work of Descartes and Leibniz. but the essence was an innovative approach all his own and it addressed what Kant called the Achilles heel of rational thought as a whole it was an argument so compelling that Kant himself was forced to refute it in the critique of pure reason and his commentators disagree over whether he succeeded but the impact of Mendelssohn's writing extended well beyond his fellow philosophers and we're not going to get into the details of it because frankly I'm not that much a philosopher what matters for us and where we see how Mendelssohn really represented a synthesis between the faith-based vision of his Jewish heritage and the fearless intellectual pioneering of the Enlightenment was that the Faden became one of the most widely read German books of its day.

It overwhelmed the German-speaking world with the power of its content and the beauty of its style and was, by the way, quickly translated into several other languages. The first edition sold out within four months and many more followed. A total of 11 editions were published in his lifetime alone. That's an average of one every two years. And Phaedon was credited for consoling countless readers. It was the work which gained Mendelssohn the title of the German Socrates. So Moses Mendelssohn was more than a famous enlightened philosopher who happened to be Jewish. and his groundbreaking path led well beyond the revisiting of intellectual territory that had long been neglected by, if not downright off limits, to Am Yisrael.

He was also a breach in the walls which separated Jewish and Christian society. And as I've said several times now, we're going to need to explore the continuation of his story in coming episodes, and in particular, his role in the civil emancipation of European Jewry. but for now, I want to highlight the nature and consequence of this breach in the walls that Ezra built you're going to have to reach back to the very beginnings of the Jewish story and recall a return to Zion when the Jews came back from the Babylonian exile and in reality the whole second temple period and that strategy that we spoke about for crafting national identity which pursued by Ezra, Nehemiah and the sages that followed them they believed that healthy identity and therefore healthy relationships are built on clarity of the boundary between self and other good fences make good neighbors and we've spoken many times about the twin tools they wielded to make this identity building an ongoing process entirety and exclusivity meaning that a claim to be the entirety of the Jewish people gives one exclusive authority over the text which lies at the heart of our story.

And this exclusive control of the story in turn allows us to define who is and who is not part of the people. And this linkage between text and peoplehood rests at the heart of the wars of identity which have raged down to our very day throughout the Jewish story. And we will pursue it into modernity. Trust me. But because we're at a turning point, I want to see the back story. So, we remember the birth of Christianity, which broke away from the body of Israel to claim the identity of a new spiritual Israel, a claim which of course was rooted in their interpretation of the text. And we followed the hermeneutic struggle, that battle to tell a story of the past, which will get us to the redemption of the future, which we believe it dictates.

So we followed that struggle over text, identity, and redemption, for 1500 years. In the meanwhile, we saw the rise of the Geonim, those great masters in Babylon in the 9th, 10th, 11th century, who transformed the conversation of our sages into the canonical document of the Gemara, and through this, created a cultural matrix on which medieval Jewry could be built. Yet another central text. And we watched as Ezra's walls of identity first really cracked with the emergence of the converso problem at the dawn of the early modern era when suddenly it wasn't so simple to break the world into us and them. And now the hope of Mendelssohn and the Enlighteners, which will follow in his footsteps, is that the age of walls is over.

That the liberal humanist winds blowing through Europe will carry away dark superstition will get rid of fear and hatred and will allow all men to see self in other and finally stand as one human race together in the light of reason Sounds reasonable, no? Apparently not to everyone. So Moses Mendelsohn, much like Rav Menashe ben Israel before him, by attaching himself to the mainstream of non-Jewish culture have become the Jewish voice of his society and as such, like Rav Mahesh ben Israel, a prime prize for conversion. In April 1763, a group of enlightened European youth made the pilgrimage to Berlin, heart of the German Enlightenment and of course, they included on their cultural tour the absolute necessary element of a series of visits to the German Socrates.

and among the group was one Johann Kasper Lavater he was then a young theology student from Zurich who repeatedly pressed Mendelssohn to share his views on religion and in specific on Jesus of Nazareth their host demurred again and again until in their last conversation after receiving promises that no public use would be made of anything he said Mendelssohn said that he was prepared to state with extreme caution that although he had little direct knowledge of Christianity, he bore no hatred toward Christians and even respected the morality of Jesus' character. Lest you be shocked, which I'm betting you're not, you should know that Mendelssohn's words were consistent with a small but growing trend of tolerance toward Christians to which several contemporary rabbis subscribed.

Yes, I did say tolerance toward Christians. We're going to need to speak about how the rejection worked in two directions there. But for now, even Rav Yaakov Emden, ever zealous for the purity of the faith and the honor of the Torah, as I hope you recall from last episode, even Rav Yaakov Emden praised Jesus' mission to the Gentiles in his work, Seder Olam Rabbah Vezuta, saying that the Nazarene brought about a double kindness in the world. On the one hand, he strengthened the Torah of Moses majestically, and on the other hand, he did much good for the Gentiles by doing away with idolatry and removing the images from their myths. Emden went on to assert that one who helps others to observe is actually greater than one who observes but does not help others to do so.

In other words, the reward which would await the Christian states of Europe for creating an enlightened society which tolerated and even facilitated the observance of the Torah by the Jews would be very great. So Mendelssohn's tepid admission of the moral stature of Jesus was hardly radical. But unfortunately, he was unaware of Lavender's real agenda. Five years after their conversation, Moses Mendelssohn received a package in the mail. It was a copy of a book, Philosophical and Critical Inquiries Concerning Christianity, newly published by Charles Bonnet, a naturalist and philosopher from Geneva, which had been translated into German by none other than Lavender. The book itself is irrelevant, What mattered was Lavender's preface, where on the very first page, he issued a public challenge to the German Socrates.

Before the God of truth, your and my Creator and Father, I beseech you to read this work, I will not say with philosophical impartiality, which I am confident will be the case, but for the purpose of publicly refuting it, in case you should find the main arguments in support of the facts of Christianity untenable, or should you find them conclusive, With the determination of doing what policy, love of truth, and property demand, what Socrates would doubtless have done had he read the work and found it unanswerable. As a personal challenge, Lavender's words were offensive and annoying. Mendelssohn had spent the better part of his scholarly life building bridges between people and therefore avoiding confrontation on matters of faith.

It must have been tempting to simply ignore it and allow his life's work to speak for itself. But the preface appeared in every copy of the German translation. It couldn't be ignored. You know, on one level, such a thing is a throwback to the Middle Ages. The community of scholars was there awaiting Mendelssohn's response. Could he refute philosophical arguments in favor of Christianity? And if not, would he relinquish his religion in the name of truth? That doesn't sound so much different than the disputation at Barcelona. But on another level, this is a uniquely modern dilemma. Remember that the legal political arena, Mendelssohn, like all other Jews, is still stuck in the suffering and inferiority of the past, of the medieval era.

And certainly, the antagonism between Christians and Jews hasn't disappeared. But where this is a uniquely modern dilemma is because the realm of culture and letters, this new realm of enlightenment, was supposed to be dominated by reason, and was supposed to bring with it religious tolerance and social equality, even though society hadn't woken up to that. And we'll speak about that fight for social equality and emancipation, as I said. But for now, let's talk about tolerance. Lavender's challenge was a test of the limits of tolerance within the Enlightenment. Is there truly a new consciousness dawning in Europe, whose light is driving away the shadows of ignorance that fueled the oppression of all kinds in the Middle Ages?

Or is this an Enlightenment Christian culture, which all are invited to join, but only at the price of checking their culture at the door. The letter to Deacon Lavender of Zurich was a short essay that became one of Mendelssohn's most important and well-known texts. Now, refutation of the arguments of the book was hardly a difficult task. He had long ago polished his arguments for the absolute preeminence of Judaism over Christianity. But he didn't respond directly to Lavender's ultimatum. Rather, the philosopher pointed out to him why the very demand that he do so ran counter to the nature of Enlightenment culture. In the letter, Mendelssohn explains that unlike Christianity, Judaism does not claim exclusivity and is not a missionary religion.

As we've spoken about before, Judaism is a particulous, inclusive religion. Meaning what? Well, the Christian church may declare that there can be no redemption outside of it, which means that everyone's willing to join. But if you don't join the club, you're out. Judaism grants divine reward to anyone observing what we call the seven commandments of Noah. In other words, though we're particulars, we're Jews and you're not. It's an inclusive worldview because you don't have to be a Jew to have the divine reward. So he goes on to articulate what I see to be the critical message of Judaism in the modern and even postmodern era. one, by the way, which was largely lost on the Jews and non-Jews alike, but we will continue to return to it.

He says that Judaism is the only religion that can resolve the tension between universality and particularity, between man as man, and man as member of nations and religions. This is going to be an important point that we will come back to. So, the absolutism of reason, which gave the Enlightenment its power to drive away ignorance and break down these very powerful sociopolitical structures of centuries was essentially a homogenizing force. Its power was coupled with the demand that all bow to the same God in the same way. And this link between universalism, progress and the homogenizing out-of-humanity primitiv i.e. non-European cultures will define much of the modern era. So for Mendelssohn, the question of modernity wasn't about truth.

It was about tolerance. In the two years of polemic correspondence which followed Lavender's challenge, perhaps the angriest line that he wrote was the fact that the small, despised, and scattered group of Jews still exists can be credited to a humanist theologian, may his ashes be blessed. who was the first to proclaim that God keeps us as living proof of the truth of Christianity. Were it not for this brilliant notion, we would have been obliterated long ago. That's August then, if you recall. And here the bitterness of Mendelssohn showing the hypocrisy of an Enlightenment society that now wants to use reason as a new tool for conversion. So, eventually the storm subsided. Lavender even penned a public request for forgiveness, and an apology for presenting his ultimatum in the present preface to a public work.

But he neither abandoned his vision of the conversion of the Jews, nor ceased to pester Mendelssohn, and asked him how as a philosopher he dealt with what he perceived to be irrefutable proofs of the truth of Christianity. But Mendelssohn took the olive branch, at least in public. In private letter he expressed regret, and especially over the reaction of his fellow Jews to this highly public debate. And it's worth it for us to think about. It's sometimes uncomfortable when our champion goes to bat. He says, I don't understand at all how so many of our faithful friends are always shouting that for heaven's sake, I should not write any further on this subject. God knows I was not happy to end the debate.

And if it were up to me, I would have given a completely different response. So the story of Moses Mendelsohn is far from over. In fact, the key episodes are going to lie at the end of his life. And we will revisit the life and works of the German Socrates in the coming episode as a bridge to the question of how civil emancipation actually hovered over, or underlays, the intellectual world of the Enlightenment. But just to wrap up our current episode, I want to return to that question with which we opened. What was the Enlightenment for the Jews? And of course, at this point, I'm sure you're aware, you know that the answer is, well, it depends on who you ask. You know, I have friends who like to call it the endarkenment.

And that's not just a rebellion against the obnoxious implication that everything which preceded the Enlightenment, some of the richest and most beautiful chapters in the Jewish story, were filled with ignorance and darkness. Or even, by the way, against the assumption that everything which occurs in the dark is bad, because frankly, not everything deserves the light of day. It's also an assertion that there's a way of knowing which can be lost through an over-reliance on reason. Remember Rav Sajjah? Authentic tradition is more than just the fourth element in his epistemology. Because the truth is that without some story to stitch it all together, the knowledge gained through sensory experience, logical analysis, and intellectual comprehension can be downright meaningless.

And long ago our sages taught that Greece darkened the eyes of Israel. And how do they do that? by undermining the legitimacy of tradition and spiritual experience as an authentic source of knowledge. And in fact, as we said long ago, the great rabbinic chronology Seder Olam Rabbah links the end of prophecy with the arrival of Alexander the Great in the land of Israel. So reason offers its light at a price. If you want to live in a reasonable world, then you have to reduce the world to what you know. It's true that reason can drive out much ignorance, but too much of it risks darkening the light of the soul. So we touched already on how we frame Mendelssohn's life, and how it became a symbol of struggle between the Maskelim, the Jewish Enlighteners, and the Orthodox in the coming century.

Was Mendelssohn precious amongst his generation, unique among his people? Or was he the evil Moses of Dessau, leader of the rebels with the cunning of the snake? Well, it really depends on what you think enlightenment is. And at the end of the day, I hold by the definition which I offered back at the beginning of our journey into modernity, that the shift to modern consciousness is characterized by two things. The first is the uncoupling of knowledge from tradition, which we can now see as separating the first three elements of Rav Sajjah's epistemology from the fourth. and the idea that one can know the world without some tradition or narrative frame to guide them is a hallmark of that quest for objectivity which gave so much energy to modernity.

But the collapse of that notion will be the hallmark of the entry into our post-modern world, which we will discuss and certainly Moses Mendelssohn never sought to undermine the integrity of Jewish tradition. On the contrary, as we saw with the faith then, it was his roots in Jewish tradition that actually allowed him to offer new insight to the German Enlightenment. Now, he didn't seek to undermine Jewish tradition, but he did challenge his people to think. The other element of the shift to modern consciousness, which we spoke about, was the lifting of the horizons of thought. And here we've seen how Manderson played a key role. He wasn't just a believer that Jews should enter into a wider world.

He was an activist in bringing them there. and we'll see how those who saw themselves as his disciples, the masculine to come, will take on an ever more strident voice in their demand that the Jews look beyond their self-imposed intellectual horizon and how orthodoxy will take on an ever more reactionary stance in their defense of those very boundaries. And in this case, Mendelssohn was certainly responsible for breaching the walls of identity. But before we judge him, it's worth recalling the words which the Holy Baal Shem Tov heard from the Messiah himself when his soul ascended into the heavens in order to ask how long, how long, how long Lord by this, said the Messiah shall you know the time of my coming that when your teachings will be widespread and known throughout the world in other words redemption depends on breaching the walls which surround the Torah from within in order that its light illuminate the whole world.

I just want to thank a few people. I want to thank all the folks who give their hard-earned money to help make this project happen. I want to invite you to join them. You can go right now to robmike.com. You'll see in the upper right-hand side there a little button that says Donate. You can go to my Patreon page for a little bit of per-podcast support. I want to thank the Land of Israel Network. Amazing. Check it out. Lots of incredible programs. Thank you for creating a platform that allows me to reach so many 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 reach so many wonderful Jews. And I want to thank you for listening. I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story.