Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity by Rebecca Goldstein
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Age of Hope

“Inherited religion is no religion.” I have no recollection of the source of this aphorism but it was a startling revelation to my youthful mind. It was so obviously true to me. Without a critical investigation of one’s spiritual heritage, authentic religious conviction is impossible. We are all the product of our cultures, including its religion. Simple acceptance, ‘faith’, in the tenets of culture is expedient tribalism, not spiritual enlightenment and certainly not thought. Meaningful thought about religion irritates people, including oneself. Baruch Spinoza is the epitome of such thought.

The ancient Hebrew idea of the nahala or covenantal inheritance is, I think, Spinoza’s philosophical touchstone, especially in his philosophy of religion. Goldstein’s analysis implicitly shows how Spinoza took this idea as the core of not only his Jewishness but also of his humanity. What he created was a personal statement offered to others, inviting, not demanding, participation in the process of intellectual discovery that he considered religion to be. This statement is a modern formulation of the covenant of the nahala. It is a way to both appreciate and transcend one’s culture simultaneously. It is the positive motivation which, I think, underlies and complements Goldstein’s analysis

Baruch Spinoza at the age of 23 was excommunicated from the Portuguese Jewish Congregation of Talmud Torah in Amsterdam on July 27, 1656. The reason for this drastic action are unclear. Given that Judaism was not a state sponsored religion, there were no civil consequences. Spinoza may have regretted the expulsion but he neither protested it nor mourned the formal separation from his spiritual community. The later German poet, Novalis, would call Spinoza “God-intoxicated.” Yet he was better known in history as the first secularist, the one who opened the attack on organized religion in Europe. Goldstein’s book is an exploration of this apparent paradox.

The synagogue rejected Spinoza but Spinoza did not reject the synagogue. According to biblical law, the nahala of Judaism is an irrevocable legacy shared by every Jew. It cannot be taken away or alienated. Historically the nahala was eretz Israel, the physical land. But over generations of dispersal, voluntary and forced, Jewish religious thought recognized that the abiding legacy of Judaism was cultural not geographical - the law, that is the rules of correct behavior, among people as well as between people and God. The law, in turn, was a part of the ‘covenant’, that permanent arrangement with the eternal, unnameable divine being within which the realities of existence could be progressively discovered.

This covenant of the nahala had no fixed content. It evolved continuously as reflected in biblical documents. Each interpretation of the law provoked further interpretations, not only of the law, but also of the character of human identity, of the meaning of being human. Spinoza’s recognition that this covenant is a process not its temporary result is of fundamental philosophical as well as religious import. It is, in a sense, the essence of Judaism, that the covenant demands an eternal search for its eternal object. Any attempt to limit this search by either law or social convention is a breach of the covenant. Spiritual learning inherits the past but it never stops transforming itself into a new inheritance.

Spinoza understood the difficulties his co-religionists as well as the rest of the world had with this concept of the covenant. Most of us would prefer stability, intellectual stability as well as emotional and political stability. But such stability can only be purchased at the cost of hope. Religious faith seeks to restrict thinking to an established set of doctrines about the world. Religious hope projects thought into some unknown future with a confidence that is more profound than faith. It is this hope that is the real substance of both the covenant of the nahala and Spinoza’s philosophy. He was the first to announce an epochal change - from the Age of Faith to the Age of Hope. To recognize that hope may not be enough to hope for is not betrayal; it is learning in the Spinozan (and Jewish) tradition.

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