By Leon Cohen
The great 17th-century Dutch Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza has been one of my heroes ever since I read a popular history of philosophy when I was a teen. But I and about 15 other Milwaukee Jews have particular reason to remember him this Passover season.
During the past few weeks, we had the privilege of hearing four fascinating lectures about Spinoza’s philosophy presented at Congregation Sinai as part of that synagogue’s Beit Midrash Adult Learning program. Speaking was Steven Nadler, professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of two acclaimed books about Spinoza.
I do not want to try to present or even summarize Spinoza’s philosophy here. It is very complex and intellectually challenging, and Nadler acknowledged he couldn’t tell us everything about it in four lectures. Nevertheless, as I thought about the lectures later, I perceived a theme that seemed important to recall during Passover.
The 18th-century German Romantic poet Novalis called Spinoza a “God-intoxicated man” and with reason. Though Spinoza’s conception of God totally differs from those of Judaism, Christianity or Islam, it lies at the foundation of all his thought; and attaining what he called the “intellectual love of God” is one of the goals of the good life as he defined it.
But Spinoza seems to have written as much about freedom as about God; and it strikes me that, as Nadler described him, Spinoza was as much freedom-intoxicated as God-intoxicated.
His masterwork, the “Ethics,” fundamentally is about freedom, and strives to show how an individual can attain freedom from bondage to the emotions. His “Theological-Political Treatise” was partly a call for intellectual freedom and for a democratic state, and he did this during a time when these were dangerous positions to advocate.
But freedom is not purchased for free. Spinoza knew that, too, and paid a price. His thinking conflicted with both the Judaism of his time and the Christianity of his host society. The Amsterdam Jewish community excommunicated him, and apparently someone in the community tried to assassinate him. The “Theological-Political Treatise” was banned and had to be sold with false title pages; and the experience caused Spinoza to withhold publication of the “Ethics” during his lifetime. One of his best friends, liberal political leader Jan de Witt, was murdered by a mob, and Spinoza is said to have been restrained from risking his own life to denounce the crime.
Despite all this, Spinoza became famous enough to be offered a university position and a pension for dedicating a work to French King Louis XIV. But he turned both offers down, in order to maintain his freedom of inquiry. Instead, he supported himself as a lens-maker, a craft that may have damaged his lungs and led to his early death at age 45. (He also never married, but I don’t know if that was a result of his desire for freedom.)
Spinoza’s quest for freedom may have taken him out of the Jewish community of his time, but his insights are not so incompatible with the community of our time. I have read of a recent rebirth of interest in Spinoza as a Jewish figure, with some scholars calling him the first Reform Jew or the first secular Jew, in any event the first modern Jew. Some significant modern Jews are known to be or to have been Spinoza admirers, including Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein and David Ben-Gurion. That, too, makes him appropriate to remember this Passover.
At this writing, I am planning to attend a non-traditional seder for the first night of Passover, one in which the guests are supposed to prepare something to discuss or do beyond the traditional text of the Haggadah. I hope my hosts will allow me to dedicate one of the four cups of wine to Spinoza, who loved freedom for himself and helped define it and fight for it for us today.
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