Jewishness After Spinoza
A Writ of Severance in Defence of Liberated Jews and True Religion
On the 369th anniversary of Baruch Spinoza’s excommunication, this essay revisits two key passages from his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus to illuminate the enduring conflict between truth-telling and institutional power. Spinoza famously linked freedom of thought and speech to perceived threats against piety and public peace, and he condemned those who inflame the anger of the masses while sheltering under the cloak of religion. With Tractatus—and in the spirit of Spinoza’s own severance from institutionalised religion—this essay weaves philosophical reflection, political critique, and personal reckoning.
The “Vilest Hypocrites”
On 27 July 1656, the Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam excommunicated the 24-year-old Baruch Spinoza. The writ of excommunication (herem) was recited theatrically from the Ark of the community’s largest synagogue. The seven people who signed the herem expressed an ancient ideology whose metaphorical signature appears on countless repressive reactions to reason, fearful reactions to the unknown, and othering reactions to dissent.
From the day he found himself on the receiving end of these reactions and until his death at 47, Spinoza’s life and work set a rare example for anyone confronting falsehoods propagated in the name of God. His example is worthy of emulation not only because he rose above his congregation’s histrionic hatred, but also because he found a way to publish his work in a culture that enshrined orthodoxy and routinely punished dissent with imprisonment and exclusion.
The archetypal form of anti-Spinozist religion finds expression under ever-changing names, Jewish and non-Jewish identities, religious and secular organisational brands. In whatever guise it appears—whether today, in 1656, or in ancient history—this ideology exhibits a pattern that few dare to acknowledge. Spinoza dared. He recognised the pattern in his youth and later articulated it in his Theological-Political Treatise:
The vilest hypocrites, urged on by that same fury which they call zeal for God’s law, have everywhere prosecuted men whose blameless character and distinguished qualities have excited the hostility of the masses, publicly denouncing their beliefs and inflaming the savage crowd’s anger against them. And this shameless license, sheltering under the cloak of religion, is not easy to suppress. (Chapter 18)
This quote serves as the epigraph to Steven Nadler’s A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age. The title refers to an early anonymous description of Spinoza’s Tractatus as “a book forged in hell by the apostate Jew and the devil himself.” In what follows, I show how this description inverts a deeper truth: that the Tractatus may in fact help us recognise the devil’s work—hidden behind the sanctimonious masks of malevolence and mendacity.
Severance from Sanctified Bullshit
To recognise the reality behind the masks, we must seize the means of perception. For this, we must use the right senses. The reality hides in plain sight because it is easier to smell than to see. We don’t need to open our eyes to sense it; it’s enough to sniff around the vilest hypocrites. The scent is unmistakable. What we encounter through the olfactory bulb is sanctified bullshit. After this moment of recognition, we can begin to translate this new perception into language.
Think of sanctified bullshit as a bioinformational weapon. The ideology that impelled the signatories to Spinoza’s excommunication continues to use this weapon today, now enhanced with the latest technologies, to repress dissent. Here and now, just as there and then, these idealogues claim to see in dissenters what they cannot see in themselves: “abominable heresies” and “monstrous deeds.” Through this case study in guilt projection, we learn more about the idealogues than we do about the people they prosecute. Most importantly, we learn that we must sever what connects us to these instruments of organised hypocrisy.
For Jews among Jews, something strange happens when Jewishness is reduced to a Judaism that disavows Spinoza. Suddenly, the game isn’t worth the candle. A Judaism that cannot tolerate Spinoza predictably tolerates delusional paths to destructive ends. This Judaism not only subverts, but also inverts, the ancestral wisdom guiding Jews and non-Jews alike to the utopian horizon.
Severance from this distortion of Jewishness—and from fundamentalist religion more broadly—is not an event but a lifelong commitment. Without it, we risk being sucked into the vortex of control systems that fetishize belief without evidence and fuel savage tribalism. These ‘religions’ tend to:
Use selective and theatrical outrage to fuel repressive responses to free speech.
Spiral into messianic fervour such as Sabbateanism, the world-spanning Jewish movement in the seventeenth century galvanized around the charismatic figure of Sabbatai Zevi, who claimed to be the Messiah.
Double down on supremacist ideologies to the point of sparking reactions which they use to reinforce identitarian splits between “us” and “them.”
Treasure their incoherent and increasingly weaponised definitions of “us” (e.g., Jews).
Recoil from uncertainty into absolutism.
What Drives Us to Ignore the Obvious?
I was about 13 when I first sniffed what I now call sanctified bullshit “under the cloak of religion”, and I was 44 when I finally started to translate the olfactory data not only into thought and speech, but also action. The action included severances from servants of the same ideology that Spinoza confronted in 1656 at the Talmud Torah Synagogue in Amsterdam. I’ve now been translating the olfactory data for more than six years, and I’ve often wondered what caused me to ignore the obvious for three decades. I returned to the famous folktale about “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Here, the Child says the quiet part aloud: the Emperor is naked. By contrast, the adults in the story disconnect their speech from their thoughts, and they enact the story told by the con artists—the weavers. They ignore the obvious because, to do otherwise would mean appearing weak or stupid.
The moral of this story seems self-evident but persistently ignored in the recurring cycles of mania about the latest Emperor’s sartorial choices. In the third chapter of her book on Willful Ignorance, Margaret Heffernan argues that we ignore the obvious because our ideologies fuel dangerous convictions, and because “It’s as easy to fall in love with an idea as with a person. Big ideas are especially alluring. They bring order to the world, give meaning to life.”
We cannot tolerate life without meaning, so we understandably gravitate to big ideas. We defend them as maps and sources of meaning. We even accept loss of contact with reality to affirm our beliefs and to avoid cognitive dissonance. To this end, we employ every form of motivated reasoning, every known defence mechanism.
The problem with “big ideas” isn’t their size. It’s their integrity. They either have it, or they don’t. It’s either strong or weak. It’s not hard to evaluate big ideas on these two basic dimensions. But it often seems psychologically impossible to acknowledge errors in our evaluations. As a result of this impossibility, we often find our lives reorganised around big lies.
Sadly, we don’t seem to understand that some big lies are bigger than others. Ordinary big lies come and go, but the biggest lies get built into the very way we understand the world. We can see and hear big lies—but the biggest ones, we neither see nor hear. That’s precisely what makes them the unrecognised rulers of our reality.
Merely big lies strut their hour upon the stage; the biggest lies are the stage. They endure. They are immune to language. They co-opt resistance. They cloud awareness. They are the building blocks of our life inside -isms. We stay trapped in this matrix because of a dangerous conviction propagated by the con artists: that the Emperor’s new clothes are only invisible to the weak and the stupid. The fear of being described with these adjectives drives everyone, except the Child, to ignore the obvious.
Does anything reveal human stupidity and weakness as clearly as what humans sacrifice in order not to appear stupid and weak?
Addiction to Falsehood: A Pattern of Ceaseless Recurrences
Tracking the spread of sanctified bullshit, however, only maps the side effects of what really matters: learning to recognise what no language-based responses to reality can fully capture. Pattern recognition, by contrast, does not require language at all.
When we shift from defining abstractions to recognising patterns, we begin to see the ubiquity and ceaselessness of the hypocrisy perpetrated by our priestly classes. But we must also acknowledge our own complicity in the recurring pattern of addiction to falsehood in our families, culture and politics. This addiction grows out of the deep need to believe and to belong. It pulls us into the vortex of big ideas and big lies.
Evolution has wired us for coherence and connection. These needs appear irrepressible. What’s remarkable is that these attachments not only survive disconfirmations and betrayals, but often grow stronger because of them. When we do recognise the falsehood of our beliefs or the toxicity of our connections, we tend to replace them with other, often more severe, forms of falsehood and toxicity. The same patterns of distortion and distraction that once led us into self-destructive behaviour are still leading us there today. Whether they will continue to do so depends on how seriously we take our responsibility as engineers of the initial conditions of our future.
In 2015, we saw an example of how we pretend to take this responsibility seriously. The same synagogue that performed Spinoza’s highly ritualised excommunication held a standing-room-only symposium with four leading Spinoza scholars, including Steven Nadler. In his recap of the event, Nadler wrote:
Once in every generation, it seems, someone calls for Spinoza’s ban to be lifted; David ben Gurion did so in 1953. But it was not until 2012, when a member of Talmud Torah raised the issue once again, that the congregation’s directors decided to have closer look.
Nadler also acknowledged that “the real question of the day…was whether there is room in an orthodox Jewish community for freedom of ideas and expression.” With this framing, participants’ views split along familiar liberal—conservative lines, as outlined by two rabbis. Nadler writes:
Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo from Jerusalem argued that there was [room for free expression]. “For God’s sake,” he said, “lift the ban.” Rabbi [Pinchas] Toledano, on the other hand, while agreeing that freedom of expression is generally a good thing, nonetheless denied that it is an absolute value, especially within a religious community. Any congregation, he said, needs to police what ideas are being floated around, and especially when those ideas would “destroy” the foundations of Judaism.
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) also covered the event. According to the report, Rabbi Toledano dismissed the suggestion that orthodox Judaism limits freedom of thought unduly. He then pointed out that Spinoza’s books are available for sale at the synagogue’s souvenir shop. This was the conservative perspective on the “real question of the day.”
On the liberal side, Rabbi Cardozo held up a portrait of Spinoza that Cardozo’s father, a secular Jew, had drawn in the 1940s while he was in hiding from the Nazi occupation. “He was our family’s only rabbi,” Cardozo said of Spinoza. To counterbalance this loving view of Spinoza, Cardozo said that he opposes Spinoza’s views of Judaism, that he finds them “deliberately biased” and “ultimately based on Spinoza’s utter ignorance” of the Talmud. Still, lifting the ban “would remove a huge stigma from Judaism as being dogmatic and narrow-minded, as Spinoza mistakenly argued.”
I attended a similar event at an orthodox Sephardic congregation in New York, and even though I hadn’t yet cracked open Spinoza’s Ethics or the Tractatus, I recognised a pattern I couldn’t yet name. However, I felt strongly that none of what I read or heard about “lifting the ban” even came close to the “real question of the day.” I caught the unmistakable scent of the nectar of hypocrisy that I first smelled at the age of 13.
Unlike my 13-year-old self, I could now examine these “symposia” through the prism of a 20-year career in corporate public relations (PR). It seemed glaringly clear to me that these events had little to do with Jewish theology. Rather, I was observing pure propaganda, an elaborate theatre production whose stated purpose served as a mere fig leaf for the actual mission. I was, by turns, repulsed, amused and impressed.
It didn’t matter what anybody said about lifting the ban or defending the “foundations of Judaism.” These performances, recurring in every generation, mainly served to re-legitimise the false authorities who, in 1656, felt exposed by Spinoza’s piercing insight. At moments like this, PR proves remarkably effective at re-concealing the naked reality behind the self-aggrandising narratives and epistemic power grabs of Rabbinic Judaism.
The recurring symposia on lifting the ban give congregational leaders a stage on which to perform as champions of free speech—sometimes even appearing to celebrate it. But these apparent tributes to free expression and pluralism employ one of the oldest PR tricks: they allow freedom within tacit constraints to deflect attention from the institutional suppression of any expression that strays beyond the bounds of pre-approved opinion.
This same pattern recurs across domains. The genius of these performances lies not only in their orchestration by manipulative institutional elites, but in the willing complicity of the masses. When congregants petition leaders to “lift the ban”, or rally behind either the liberal or the conservative rabbi, they reinforce the very orthodoxy they think they are challenging. Regardless of the context, the orthodoxy sustains itself by harnessing the emotional energy of its adherents, by adapting as needed to preserve its authority.
Experts and intellectuals are complicit too. They may not petition the congregational leaders to lift the ban, but they participate in the spectacle by helping the leaders weigh the reasons—for and against—lifting the herem. The aura of scholarly balance and sophistication rounds out the performance of a community genuinely grappling with complex issues.
In reality, however, the congregation offers its members the choice of two versions of the same falsehood: the liberal and the conservative. We are presented with this choice in every generation, every election cycle. I used to think that the right response was “none of the above.” I no longer think this response is adequate. It’s not radical enough.
Checking boxes next to a list of choices doesn’t seem like an adequate response to purveyors of sanctified bullshit. An adequate response begins with first doing no harm. When people who claim to appreciate Spinoza’s work petition Talmud Torah to lift the ban, they legitimise and empower an ideology that fetishizes superstition and execrates Jews who know the truth about the Emperor’s new clothes.
The Great Affirmation: Resolving the Decisive Inner Conflict
By first doing no harm, we can carve out space for affirmative responses to the dangerous convictions of the Emperor’s courtiers. If we do intend to take seriously our responsibilities as ancestors of our future, we must begin our affirmative responses by aiming at a resolution of what Martin Buber called the “decisive inner conflict” that stems from misalignments of thought, speech and action. In The Way of Man, Buber writes:
It is the conflict between three principles in man’s being and life—the principle of thought, the principle of speech, and the principle of action. The origin of all conflict between me and my fellow-men is that I do not say what I mean, and that I do not do as I say. For this confuses and poisons, again and again and in increasing measure, the situation between myself and the other man, and I, in my internal disintegration, am no longer able to master it but, contrary to all my illusions, have become its slave.
In the Emperor’s new clothes, this unresolved conflict allows the reigning consensus to conceal the con. Only the Child dares to speak truthfully, and he doesn’t just speak up because he’s a child—i.e., not yet fully indoctrinated into falsehood—but also because he represents a certain psychological type. The Child is free from the decisive inner conflict. He remains truthful throughout his journey from the womb to the tomb.
This archetypal character suggests a way to resist the patterns of falsehood and hypocrisy we inhabit: We must learn to hear the Child, in whatever guise he appears. That’s also the message of Psalm 8:3: “From the mouths of infants and sucklings, You have ordained strength because of your foes, to still the enemy and the avenger.”
Despite the message of the Psalm, we can observe our collective fear of the Child every day. This fear helps explain why the biblical creation myth continues to inspire and justify so much miscreation. The Genesis story is simple—In the beginning was the Word, and the Word became Flesh. Or, in Latin, In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum caro factum est. However, something is tragically lost in the translation of Word into Flesh, something that the Child still possesses.
In Principio (Bereishit, in Hebrew) is the story of our world, its origin and its future. We know the story well, but we also don’t know it at all. We know the story because it’s been with us for centuries. It’s intimately familiar. This is also a reason we don’t know the story at all; its familiarity blinds us to our ignorance of its meaning. The story is easy to tell (and even diagram) but almost impossible to hear.
Channelling Hillel the Elder, I can tell the story briefly enough for the reader to consume while standing on one leg: In the beginning, there is silence. From silence, thought arises. From thought, arises speech. From speech, arises action, which dissolves back into silence. The end of the story is also its beginning. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, we articulate potential into actuality and watch it dissolve back into unmanifest potential.
Through these cycles, every human life reenacts the story of Genesis. However, despite centuries of reenactment, we still don’t understand the story well enough to avoid lapsing into miscreation. Again and again, the story of our becoming gets derailed by what the poet W.H. Auden described as the “forces we pretend to understand.”
After studying these forces for more than a decade, the clearest outcome is not an achievement but a loss. Through reading and writing, observation and experiment, I didn’t achieve understanding as much as I started to lose my appetite for pretence. The desire for a life without pretence helped me realise the urgent relevance of the Child’s message.
This realisation brings to mind a passage that has stayed with me since my college days in the 1990s. The passage comes from an essay by a professor of philosophy who was also a rabbi. It was a lyrical meditation on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year in Judaism. Though I haven’t been able to find the essay online, even after 30 years, I still remember these two sentences: “A road not taken vanishes into oblivion. A voice not heard lapses into silence.”
To break the pattern of recurring miscreation, we must hear the Child and separate ourselves from individuals and institutions determined to silence him. I can’t see a clearer path to living in the light of this Great Affirmation.
Writ of Severance
Much of my recent work has been organised around what I’ve been hearing from the Child in the guise of Baruch Spinoza. At a young age, he confronted both the Emperor and the courtiers in the guise of his congregation’s board of directors. These gentlemen were faced with a choice: whether to acknowledge the meaning of the Child’s speech act. How they responded to this choice leads me to at least two conclusions.
First, Spinoza’s excommunication reveals more about his congregation than it does about Spinoza. The accusations directed at Spinoza are, in fact, confessions by the accusers. Read through this inverted lens, the incendiary text of Spinoza’s herem can serve as a survival guide for anyone on the receiving end of institutionally underwritten repressions of free speech.
Second, what the excommunication reveals is as urgently relevant today as it was in 1656. The ideology that attacked Spinoza through his congregation is still with us, under ever-changing names. It is the same ideology responsible for countless other denialist and repressive responses to reality and reason. Below is my personal response to their herem. I hope it inspires readers to write and publish their own responses to “the vilest hypocrites.”
Honoured Lords,
There are Jews among Jews, estranged from strangers in strange lands. They have a Promised Land too, but they don’t always have a place in the Jewish community. They are excluded because they see clearly and speak truthfully. The clarity of their vision cuts through your obfuscations. Their courage terrifies you. Their speech exposes you as hypocrites. On this day in 1656, you excommunicated one of these Jews, and I’d like to begin by thanking you for memorialising this herem in writing.
Thank You for Your Confession. We Believe You.
Before Spinoza even published any of his works, you accused him of “abominable heresies” without providing any details. You only described these heresies as abominable, their promulgation as insolent, and their promulgator as worthy of being anathematised and cut off from the people of Israel. In this malediction, you claimed high authority, citing “the judgment of the angels and the sentence of the saints.”
You recited the herem theatrically. Based on the historical record, it seems you put on quite a show. After extensive study and deep reflection, I can’t help but interpret this performance as a case study in guilt projection. You ascribed to the 24-year-old Baruch Spinoza the corruption of character that you couldn’t recognise in yourselves and in the ‘powers and principalities’ you serve. In other words, your accusations are not mere admissions, but also full-throated confessions. Even at 24, Bento figured you out. And, to put it in a modern idiom, you got triggered.
So, thank you for confirming what now seems self-evident: You are impressively skilled merchants of some of the highest-quality sanctified bullshit in recorded history. Nothing even comes close to the daring ambition of your project. Bravo!
However, with all due respect for your skill and chutzpah, I must return the BS where it belongs: with the sender. I’m transmitting the message textually, but I won’t try to match your writing style. No need for the foaming-at-the-mouth bombast. At the same time, just as you did in your herem, I’d like to offer my readers a clear view of the terms of our severance.
Hear O Israel! We Sever Our Ties with Agents of Pharaoh.
In the ceaseless search for more fruitful responses to the agents of Pharaoh serving as leaders of our communities and countries, severance is ultimately the most fruitful response. Once we see them for what they are, we cannot tolerate them any more than they can tolerate our free speech. We hereby “dissolve the political bands” that have exposed us to their bad faith. We take this action against them not because we hate or fear them the way they hate and fear us, but because we treasure our life and freedom.
In 1656, the leadership of the Talmud Torah Congregation (Lords of the Ma’Amad) confessed to their premeditated promulgation of bullshit in the name of God. Their goal was to silence a young man who would later teach the world how to liberate Torah study from the tyranny of superstition. After a close study of the Lords’ confession and related evidence, we find the Lords guilty, and with this Writ of Severance, we make a lifelong commitment to cleansing our world of their overt and covert influence. To mark this severance, we recall Spinoza’s response to his herem:
All the better, they do not force me to do anything I would not have done of my own accord if I didn’t dread scandal. But, since they want it that way, I enter gladly on the path that is opened to me, with the consolation that my departure will be more innocent than was the exodus of the early Hebrews from Egypt.
All the better, we say with Spinoza. As we sever what has connected us with the Lords, we remain grateful for their confession. It allows us to use their tools not to smash their idols but to simply see them for what they are.
The Lords prohibited the reading of Spinoza’s writings. By contrast, we urge people to read the books that the Lords claim to understand and venerate. More importantly, we urge people to use Spinoza’s Tractatus as a key to a true appreciation of mythopoetic literature.
The Lords wanted “the wrath and displeasure of God to burn henceforth” against Spinoza. They wanted God to “blot out his name from under the sky.” By contrast, we simply remain grateful that God, or Nature, has made self-evident the urgent relevance of Spinoza’s work.
Finally, the Lords admonished everyone not to do Spinoza any service, not to communicate with him either through speech or in writing, not to come within four cubits of him, not “to read any document dictated by him or written by his hand.” By contrast, we only urge people to see the Lords for what they are, based in part on their own confession. Once we dare to see the truth about the Emperor’s new clothes, the subsequent do’s and don’ts will appear as they’ve always been: obvious.
A Garden of Forking Paths
Now that I have served the Writ of Severance, I’d like to note that I don’t trivialise the difficulty of recognising the obvious. Until we recognise it as such, it’s not obvious at all. That’s why there are perfect crimes hidden in plain sight, sparks of meaning between the lines of written text, stories we often tell but seldom hear, naked Emperors and their courtiers engaged in brazen epistemic power grabs. The most natural response to this reality is to look away.
Distraction is often a good-enough remedy for painful reality. As addicts to this remedy, we are blessed (and cursed) with an abundant supply of “the people’s opium.” Once we catch even a glimpse of the naked reality behind the Emperor’s new clothes, we can always anesthetise our senses and join the courtiers admiring the ruler’s sense of style. That’s the easy path. Recognising the obvious is often mission impossible. What’s surprising isn’t that more people don’t recognise the obvious but that so many people do.
For many Jews among Jews, this recognition occurs when Jewishness is reduced to a Judaism that excludes what Spinoza represents. Judaism with an anti-Spinozist stance feels uncanny. It’s a game shaped by false authority, superstition, and epistemic power grabs veiled by nothing but the wilful ignorance of the “bewildered herd.” Ignorance of this ignorance is the actual fabric of the Emperor’s new clothes.
Because of this second-order ignorance, find themselves on the path constructed for them by the “vilest hypocrites”, the path of what we might call anti-Spinozist religion. Based on my experience, the Jewish lane on this path raises the following questions: What are the normative ideals of anti-Spinozist Judaism? What can this religion tell its adherents about the meaning of Jewishness? It offers a highly unappealing path to the future. Here are four arguments to support this claim.
First, the biggest problem with anti-Spinozist Judaism is that it espouses an incoherent view of Jewishness. Its definitions collapse under the weight of internal contradictions. After fifty years of life as a Jew, including four years of a college education at the bastion of Modern Orthodox Judaism, I’ve heard the “official” answers, in varied formulations. Over the past three years, I re-examined them closely. None of them survive scrutiny, neither the answers given by rabbinic authorities and generally accepted by the wider world, nor the answers popular among antisemites and generally rejected by the wider world.
The reigning ideology of denialism not only militates against the free exploration of the meanings of Jewishness, but it also fosters broad acceptance of false answers. In fact, the more I explore the question, the more I uncover a mystery cloaked in clear but contradictory answers, including the canonical and the conspiratorial. This argument encompasses definitions of Jewishness in terms of biology, belief, praxis, and sociology—for example, Jewishness as a religion, an ethno-religion, an ethnicity, a people, a race, a culture, a nation, a country, and a genetic condition transmitted either matrilineally or patrilineally. Of course, this argument also encompasses definitions of Jewishness as a reality shaped by perceptions of Jews among people who hate Jews and Jewishness.
The second problem with anti-Spinozist Judaism is that it esteems traditions of scriptural exegesis anchored in superstition and cult-like denials of reality. The same is true for adherents of other anti-Spinozist religions that react with annihilative rage to free speech that crosses the constraints of allowable opinion. These religions cannot tolerate any speech that acknowledges the clearest hazard in canonical approaches to scripture: they tend to slip and fall at the intersection of matter and metaphor.
The third problem with anti-Spinozist Judaism is that it serves as a gateway to rank messianism. Consider the story of one of the signatories to the herem against Spinoza, Issac Aboab da Fonseca, Chief Rabbi of the Sephardic community in Amsterdam. He became a fervent supporter of Sabbatai Zevi, the highly charismatic figure at the centre of a messianic movement that consumed world Jewry before the mania collapsed in embarrassment. Likewise, the story of the Chabad movement bears a strong resemblance to the stories of countless cults for whose adherents prophecy never fails because it’s unfalsifiable.
Fourth, anti-Spinozist Judaism is a gateway to lethally dangerous ideological perversions including Jewish supremacy and violent ultranationalism represented by numerous prominent leaders, including one of the most charismatic Jewish supremacists Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League (JDL).
I’m not arguing counterfactually that embracing Spinoza would have prevented or cured these problems. My point is that when Jews among Jews dare to look closely at the pulsing heart of anti-Spinozist religion, they soon recognise a pattern: this heart pulses to a rhythm that they don’t recognise as their own.
Severance as Surgery
The moment of recognition isn’t only painful. It’s a medical emergency. Neither mainstream medicine nor its “alternatives” are equipped to help the people undergoing this ordeal. Neither the pseudo-liberal perspective expressed in 2015 by Rabbi Cardozo nor the pseudo-conservative perspective expressed by Rabbi Toledano will improve the prognosis. In fact, exposure to these misleading perspectives only aggravates the crisis.
Jews among Jews need alternatives to alternatives as they confront a life-and-death choice: they can either struggle to unsee what they saw when they gazed into the heart of darkness, or they can learn to breathe with the rhythm of their own hearts. This is where matter meets metaphor.
A Jew among Jews who survived this ordeal in 1656 wrote about the perspective required for survival. He called it Sub specie aeternitatis (under the aspect of eternity). It’s an objective and universal view that transcends time and the daily urgencies of an individual life. From this vantage point, a survivor must dare to express himself. If necessary, he must scream.
In Speech and Reality, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy explains why we express ourselves at all, using speech as a response to reality. He writes:
“Without this effort, we would go to pieces by either too much inner, unuttered desire, or too many impressions made upon us by our environment, too many petrified formulas fettering us from the past, or too much restless curiosity about the future.”
He continues
“Anarchy, decay, war, revolution are four forms of social death. Because they are death in its social disguise, and because man is in constant search for life, these social perils, in their variety, compel us to speak our minds.”
Similarly, in the Gospel of Thomas (verse 70), we read:
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
Finally, in the epilogue to Spinoza’s Tractatus, we read:
“Freedom of thought and speech may be granted without danger to piety and public peace, and this freedom cannot be withheld without danger to piety and public peace.”
Knowing what’s at stake, Jews and non-Jews alike should think of severance as life-saving surgery—not only for themselves, but for the individuals and institutions ideologically programmed to suppress free speech or to compel us to speak in the voices of alien ideologies. As we shed our illusions, we realise that the vilest hypocrites Spinoza discussed in Chapter 18 of the Tractatus do more than silence truth-tellers. Purveyors of sanctified bullshit go beyond replacing sincere truth with synthetic dogma. They seek to annihilate truth-tellers, erase them, and sacrifice them at the altar of ideology, whether it takes the form of the latest Golden Calf or naked Emperor.
Rabbi Meir Kahane quotes the Talmud: “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.” Precisely because I would prefer to live the rest of my life without spilling blood, I undertake severance as surgery now to avoid violence in self-defence later.
I don’t think of severance as a single surgery, rather a series of surgical procedures and therapeutic interventions. This work may take months, years or lifetimes. But, in the end, severance means not giving sanctified bullshit any space in our lives. It’s possible that we may not achieve a 100% bullshit-free life, and we may need to settle for asymptotic progress. But we always aim for the stars.
Jews liberated from the tyranny of superstition, false authority, and ritual observances that, in Spinoza’s words, “contribute nothing to blessedness” can find true religion in justice and loving-kindness toward their neighbours. Whether or not one defines this path as a religion, it expresses a truth that passes my sniff test. The more we seek to silence the adherents of this truth, the more the stench of bullshit pervades our world.
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