This is the fourth in an occasional series of stories about the rich array of classes offered to Milwaukee’s Jewish community and the people who participate in them.
The great Dutch Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza is a fascinating 17th-century figure, but one tough author to read. Just ask Whitefish Bay High School senior Ilan Moscovitz.
Moscovitz, 18, took a class in ethics at Lawrence University in Appleton last summer after developing an interest in philosophy. “There’s something different about it than other things,” he said as he struggled to explain why the subject fascinates him. “It doesn’t know bounds like other sciences do.”
He tried to read Spinoza’s masterwork, the “Ethics,” which is written in the manner of Euclidean geometry, with definitions, axioms, theorems and proofs. “I painfully got through the first ten or 15 propositions,” said Moscovitz. “I don’t remember much except the pain.”
So Moscovitz jumped at the chance to be one of the 20 or so people who came to Congregation Sinai Tuesday for the first session of a four-lecture class on Spinoza taught by an expert.
“Whenever I hear of something like this, I like to give it a shot,” said Moscovitz. “There’s not a whole lot of philosophy that can be done in circumstances that are not solitary…. It speeds things up to have people explain it [and] to have discussion. You don’t have to think of all the points yourself.”
Others came to the class less from interest in philosophy than in Jewish subjects generally. Neil Wallace, a liquor store manager, came because “I enjoy learning about Judaism in all forms,” and Spinoza held “a radical view compared to mainstream Judaism.”
Meg Roeck, a product manager for a technology firm, decided to attend because “I love Jewish learning and I want to learn about Spinoza,” she said.
She is a participant in the KEVA program of the Reform movement’s Union of American Hebrew Congregations, which recognizes adults who amass 100 hours of adult Jewish learning. Roeck said she currently has 25 hours toward that total, and this Spinoza class will contribute more.
But Roeck also has a particular interest in Spinoza. She had attended a previous class on how philosophers conceive of God, and “I was a non-believer” until she heard about Spinoza’s conception of God, and she wants to know more about it.
Attorney Marc Kartman came from a more generalized interest. “It’s nice to learn something outside what you normally do,” he said. “It keeps your mind sharp.”
These students certainly had plenty to whet their minds on. Teaching the class was Steven Nadler, professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of “Spinoza: A Life” and “Spinoza’s Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind,” the last of which won the Koret Jewish Book Award for Biography in 2000.
Nadler is a lively lecturer who sweetened his presentation with humor. Still, the concepts were challenging and illustrated why the Dutch Jewish community excommunicated Spinoza in 1656. Spinoza challenged a host of traditional Jewish teachings about God, nature, “the purpose of existence,” immortality, the “divine election of Israel” and more; and his reasoning, as Moscovitz found, can be difficult to grasp.
Afterward Kartman acknowledged that these rarified ideas don’t “have a lot of relation to everyday life.” Wallace said, “I’m not sure I agree with it, but I like listening to it.” And Roeck said she found Nadler’s presentation “very interesting, but some of it is baffling.”
But then, as Spinoza wrote in the famous last sentence of the “Ethics”: “All excellent things are as difficult as they are rare.”
This series, which will continue on March 25, April 1 and April 8, constitutes session five of the synagogue’s Beit Midrash Adult Learning program. For more information, call 414-352-2970.
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