A Yom Kippur question for Spinoza

At Yom Kippur services last week I couldn't help thinking about Baruch Spinoza.

The dramatization of his trial for heresy, The New Jerusalem, has been discussed in a half dozen articles at BSR, including my own review (click here). One area, however, hasn't been addressed: How did Spinoza react to his expulsion from his congregation? And how did he feel about being barred from the observation of this day, the most holy in the Jewish calendar?

Many modern Jews who avoid services year-"'round nevertheless show up faithfully on Yom Kippur. It's almost a superstitious attachment, as if they'd be rejecting the memory of their parents if they skipped the Kol Nidrei (the annulment of unkept vows) or the Yizkor (memorial prayer).

The Yom Kippur liturgy is dominated by entreaties to a God who passes judgment on each individual and marks him or her for punishment or reward. Over and over, the prayers beseech God to forgive transgressions: "Be gracious... pardon me... heal me... inscribe me in the Book of Life."

Einstein's God

According to the text recited by the congregation, God will decide who will die by fire, who by water, who by earthquake and who by plague in the new year.

Spinoza rejected that idea of a providential God who would or could intervene in earthly affairs. God and Nature, he wrote, were one and the same, and God was impersonal. Spinoza's world, God provides neither reward nor punishment nor immortality.

In that respect, Spinoza had much in common with Albert Einstein, who remarked in 1929, "I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings."

So how, I found myself wondering, could Spinoza sit in the congregation and put up with the Yom Kippur prayers?

Spinoza in mourning

Perhaps he absented himself from those services. But that seems unlikely in such a close-knit community, especially since Spinoza was the student (and at one time the presumptive successor) of the rabbi. In addition, at the time of Spinoza's trial in 1656, his father had recently died, and Baruch fulfilled the rules of mourning, which included attending services and reciting the Kaddish prayer daily for 11 months.

We know nothing about Spinoza's feelings. He studiously excluded human emotions from his writings. While he wasn't trained as a scientist, Spinoza approached philosophy in a scientific manner. Logic and the weighing of evidence culminated in his rules of ethics.

(Rebecca Goldstein, in her lively, non-technical 2006 book, Betraying Spinoza, made a valiant attempt to flesh out the man beneath the veneer of rigorous rationality, and to crack the mystery of the breach between the philosopher and his Jewishness.)

Hypocritical?

Perhaps Spinoza rationalized the Yom Kippur prayers, as many Jews do today. That is, one can utter the prayers while interpreting them as goals towards which each person should strive— that is, the individual knows that death could possibly come within the year, even to those in good health, and he or she feels impelled to rectify sins and errors before that happens.

Widely accepted modern Jewish philosophies— the Reconstructionist branch, for example— readily accept that it's not hypocritical to pray that way on Yom Kippur. Spinoza could have done the same. But it's also possible that his excommunication came as a relief to Spinoza, freeing him from the obligation to participate in a ritual to which he couldn't subscribe.♦


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