Lantern Theater's "New Jerusalem' (3rd review)

My Philosophy 1 class, more than a half-century ago, consisted of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Russell and a few other thinkers. Spinoza wasn't included.

I remember how nervous the professor was. He chain-smoked in class, sometimes so caught up with what he was explaining that he lit a second cigarette before he'd finished the first. One time, when he had lit two at once, he picked up the second and jammed it into the blackboard, confusing it with the chalk.

Someone this tense shouldn't teach Spinoza, I realized earlier this month, when I saw the Lantern Theater's production of David Ives's New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza at Talmud Torah Congregation: Amsterdam, July 27, 1656.

Spinoza agitated many people in his day, and this play depicts the grilling, and ultimately the ostracism, that he suffered from both the Dutch authorities and his Jewish community because of his outlandish ideas about God and— probably even more— his devastating use of logic and mathematics to prove his points.

(The subtitle of Spinoza's major work, Ethics, published after his death, is More Geometrics. Euclid's Elements of Geometry was its structural model.)

A God beyond comprehension

As Ives presents Spinoza's central concept, God is so utterly remote from human affairs, so far beyond normal comprehension, that He bears no relevance to life as humans live it— an assumption that threatened Christians and Jews alike.

Worse, Spinoza sometimes used the word "Nature" as a synonym for God, creating the impression that he equated God with the material world ("pantheism"), when he was actually saying that anything that exists is an attribute of God, fixed and immutable ("Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.")

This is knotty stuff; some parts of Ethics remain baffling even today. Clearly, in order to fully understand Spinoza and feel comfortable in his thinking, you need to smoke something more potent than Lucky Strikes.

Penalty of brilliance

As a thinker, Spinoza was far superior to any of his interrogators, including the learned rabbi who had mentored him. They recognized his special mental ability, but they also recognized that if they followed his logic, they'd have to accept his conclusions.

Among these were some unpleasant deductions about free will, Jews as the chosen people, the Torah as the word of God, and the generosity of the Dutch government, which thought well of itself for harboring the Jews who had been expelled from England, France, parts of Germany and Italy and, more recently, Spain and Portugal.

Lantern's production has broad shoulders and bears the weight of this philosophy and history sturdily. Ives has a chronological convenience in his favor: Spinoza was only 23 when the trial took place and consequently still forming his ideas. Several times during his explanations to his questioners he remarks, "I'm still working this out." As he thinks aloud, Spinoza (played by Sam Henderson) presents, as it were, early rough drafts of his philosophy before it became even more subtle and opaque to his contemporaries (not to mention 21st-Century theater audiences).

Audience on trial

The audience's role in this production is noteworthy. The Lantern production seated us on three sides, so that in effect we represented the Jewish community summoned to the synagogue on July 27, 1656, to determine Spinoza's fate.

Rabbi Saul Levi Mortera (David Bardeen) advised us of our solemn duty; but unlike a jury, which renders a verdict and leaves the fallout to the defendant, the Jews of Amsterdam had their own wellbeing at stake. In exchange for the relative freedom the Dutch allowed, the Jews agreed to forgo the liberties enjoyed by full citizens. Rabbi Mortera had been the chief negotiator of this compromise.

Certainly one can view New Jerusalem as a conflict between the rabbi and his brilliant, beloved and unmanageable student. Or it can be seen as a clash between the rabbi's ethical principles, absorbed through decades of Torah study, and the practical cause of saving his congregation.

But it's another thing to imagine that the survival of the community— even our individual safety and comfort— depends on a pre-determined guilty judgment. Yet that verdict is exactly what we, the congregation, are asked to render, regardless of any sense of justice or sympathy or moral behavior that our religion may have instilled in us.

In real life, we're almost never called upon to make such a momentous decision. In the Lantern Theater, we have a chance to hope that we would rise to the occasion and do the right thing.

I'm embarrassed to say that, after Phil 1, I never did catch up with Spinoza and his thinking until this production. But now I see that he could have fit right into that freshman course. In fact, he smoked— and that, too, bothered some people.

More important, you can get into the weeds of Spinoza's arguments, as you can with Aristotle and Russell and the rest, and your head will spin. You can also cherry-pick among some very abstruse arguments and find a simple, direct lesson: Speak up and speak out.♦


To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.
To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.
To read a related comment by Jim Rutter, click here.
To read a related commentary by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
To read a related commentary by Steve Cohen, click here.