`I Believe'

For Christmas 1969, when I was a high school senior, I received A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry, edited by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, as a gift from my parents. I had asked for it, and only now does it seem like an unusual request. I was not Jewish, my family was not bookish, and my father was mildly anti-Semitic (by “mildly,” I mean I don’t recall him attending any conferences on Holocaust denial). I have no idea what my parents made of the book, my desire to read it, or the fact that their oldest son was interested in such things. The poem that I remember most tenaciously from the Howe-Greenberg anthology is “I Believe,” by Aaron Zeitlin (1889-1973), who was born in Russia and immigrated to the United States in 1939, the year World War II started.

“I Believe” is translated into English by Robert Friend. The poem is a Jewish credo, an angry renunciation of other gods, composed in 11 irregularly rhymed stanzas. It’s the first stanza that has stayed with me, and that helped spark my sustained interest in Spinoza:

“Should I believe in Spinoza’s geometric god?
A god that cannot change its own creation,
That snared by its own law must suffer its own rod,
A pitiful slave to its of situation;
A god without horror or miracle,
A god coldly heretical,
a distant relative
who won’t acknowledge me as his relation;
who is incapable
of making it his concern
whether I die or live,
or burn
in every fire until
the final generation;
a god, a bookkeeper, to whom my cry
will not reach when I die;
a god with ciphers for his seraphim.
Rather than in him,
I’d willingly believe in Satan and damnation.”

Even as a callow and rather vulgar atheist, I was impressed by the ferocity of Zeitlin’s rejection of a 300-year-old philosopher and his notion of God. And that, of course, made Spinoza even more attractive to my 17-year-old understanding. Soon, I bought the two-volume edition of Spinoza’s work published by Dover, and read Isaac Bashevis Singer’s great story “The Spinoza of Market Street.” I thought of Zeitlin and his angry poem again this week while reading Hilary Putnam’s oddly belated review in the New York Observer of Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, by Rebecca Goldstein. Last June, I devoted three consecutive posts to the book, which I’m convinced is one of the best published in 2006. Putnam seems to agree:

“Betraying Spinoza is beautifully crafted. What seem like separate issues – Spinoza’s pioneering advocacy of complete freedom of thought in religious matters; the turmoil in the Jewish community; the fateful events in Amsterdam in the closing years of Spinoza’s life; the philosophical developments of the 17th century; Spinoza’s idea of a philosophical religion utterly purged of all anthropomorphism, even to the extent of denying that God is a “person” in any sense—come together as if by themselves (the sure sign of a fine artist!) to answer my puzzle: how to understand Spinoza the human being, a man for whom reason itself was a kind of salvation.”

I appreciate Putnam pointing out the beauty of the book’s architecture, and also this admission, particularly as it comes from a respected philosopher:

“His philosophy attempts to answer the great three-word question -- How to live? -- in a way that includes saying what the ideal life would be and what the place of man in the cosmos is, and not just rules for conduct. And I do not believe that one can understand what a philosopher who proposes to answer that three-word question really means if one doesn’t understand the philosopher as a fellow man (even if Spinoza would have thought that the latter sort of understanding is irrelevant).”

The book is personal in the best sense: It chronicles Goldstein’s almost 40-year relationship with Spinoza, while also explicating the man and his thought. Here’s her stirring final paragraph:

“The world has been transformed (though not enough) by a long and complicated chain of causes and effects that reaches back to Spinoza’s lonely choice to think out the world for himself.”