CONVERSATIONS WITH SPINOZA

After a long flight from Rio de Janeiro to Amsterdam I spent the night in a student hostel on the edge of the great canal, where I rented a tiny room, which barely had a bed and a chair, even smaller than Van Gogh painted; the window was a ship hatch that only opened a few inches outward, overlooking an inner courtyard where young people played video games.

The following day, in the morning, already redone from the long flight, but still  confused about the time zones, after crossing the canal separating the Noord neighborhood from the rest of Amsterdam by ferry, I walked to the train station and embarked for a journey to Leyden passing through the cultivated low plains of Holland, from the window I saw its famous  sunflowers fields that follow the trajectory of the sun, which still glowed even though it was late autumn. I went down to the station in the famous city of Leyden, where the electric capacitor was discovered through an artifact called the “Leyden bottle”, accidentally invented in 1746 by a certain  Pieter van Musschebroek, a professor at Leyden University, who stored enough electricity to cause strong electric discharges. From Leyden I boarded a bus that would take me to the village of Rjnsburg, crossing the beautiful university where the bottle was discovered, and about half an hour later I arrived in Rynsburg, asking a nice young Dutchman where Spinoza Huis was, and he informed me that I still had to do a walk of about half an hour to my destination.

I walked through empty streets, flanked by beautiful small Dutch houses that seemed uninhabited. No one around to confirm the previous information. However following the instructions received, it was with great excitement that around the corner I caught a glimpse of Spinoza Huis, the modest brick-hut I already knew from photos, finally I entered the modest house of the excommunicated Jew Baruch Spinoza, who taught me to know a God quite different from that I prayed to in the Synagogues. I was received very kindly by a Dutch lady with whom I was able to communicate in English. I explained to her that I came from Brazil especially to visit the hovel where Spinoza lived. She led me up a narrow staircase that led to the attic almost close to the roof, something in the shape of a sharp inverted V seemed to be a cockloft.

In this small space Spinoza, after being expelled from the Portuguese Synagogue of Amsterdam, he lived his exile reading, studying and polishing his lenses on a rough wooden lathe moved by crank-driven strings. In this humble place lived frugally the man who was banished by all religions, including Jewish, being excommunicated by Rabbi Saul Morteira with whom he had studied to be a rabbi himself, and with whom  he had disagreed refusing to interpret the prophecies as divine revelations. In fact, he perceived them as human speeches, written with syntaxes and linguistic idiosyncrasies proper to a Hebrew of biblical dated times, entering into a collision course with the exacerbated mysticism of a community of frightened Sephardic Marranos fleeing from the Portuguese Inquisition. Nevertheless  today he is considered the thinker who made the concept of God intelligible even to the most skeptical scientists. "The God who I believe is the God of Spinoza, the one who represents the balance and Harmony of all things, and not the one who is concerned with watching or punishing what men do," - said Albert Einstein.

I affectionately embraced his bronze bust marked by the stains of the time and asked him why God was not the Creator as we Jews learned in the Torah and in our prayers in the Synagogue. "God is not the creator of things, simply because everything from a prosaic stone to the human being is a finite mode of being of God," he told me in an archaic Portuguese as spoken by the poet Camoes. "God is the Natura Naturans in continuous act of existence and transmutation in His infinite modes of being" - he continued to speak. "The essence of God involves His existence," which is to say that God exists necessarily and sufficiently because HE IS, - Spinoza explained to me in his beautiful Lusitanian accent learned, still in the cradle, with his mother, the Portuguese Jewess Hannah Debora Gomes Garcez.

- And what are the attributes of God?" I insisted. "They are the ways in which one understands God, and they are two: extension and thought."

- “Does this mean that we can perceive God through our perception of the material world just as we can understand God  through the ideas we have about Him? - I asked triumphantly as if I had understood perfectly his definition and he nodded.

"So God has only two attributes?" - I ventured. – “Of course not”! He exclaimed almost irritably. "We humans only understand Him through these two forms of understanding, but God has infinite other infinite attributes that are not perceptible to us! Remember that we are only one finite mode of existence of God!” - He concluded in a more professorial tone, as if he was speaking to one of his students.

I thought in a low voice, without the courage to speak to such a severe master, that the universe as we perceive it by the two attributes of the senses and reason is only one of the infinite possibilities of perception among infinite existences of other parallel universes  inaccessible and incomprehensible for us.

I then remembered the Kabalah lessons I had with Rabbi Ysrael Bukiet at the Beit Chabad in Salvador. He told me that an infinite God in order to create a finite Universe had to contract Himself from His infinity to the finitude of matter. This contraction is designated as tzintzum in the Kabalah. And we humans only perceive God through the tzimtzum, like a faint light that crosses several superimposed curtains. We would be blind if we looked directly at God without these slightly translucent bulkheads filtering out His infinity. We perceive only dimly God after the tzintzum, that is, we perceive Him after His various contractions as His light passes through curtains filtering His infinite splendor. I felt encouraged to ask Spinoza if the attributes would be the tzimtzum of Kabalah, but prudence told me to shut up ...

I asked him to leave, and I went to visit the rest of his small house. I checked the attendance list and checked the visit of “Albert Einstein from Berlin” in the open notebook on the table. I also used to leave my registration and signed "Roberto Ponczek from Rio de Janeiro". I checked his little library and also some editions of his books on a glass counter. There I could see that the book Renati Des Carti, Principiorum Philosophie and Cogitata Metaphysica was published still in his life, where he was designated himself as Benedictum of Spinoza, which corresponds to the Latinization of his original Hebrew name Baruch de Espinoza, just as René Descartes was Latinized for Renatus Cartesius or Renati Des Cartis. I wondered if this new, latinized name would not be a way for Spinoza to break completely with his Jewish past.

I went down the narrow stairs and on the ground floor I consulted some manuscripts and his little library. I was struck by a letter from the first Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben Gurion, dated 1956, addressed to a certain H. F. K. Duglas, director of Spinoza Huis of that time, which I now translate:

Dear Mr. H.F.K.Duglas,

There is a small mistake in your letter. In my article I did not ask to cancel the excommunication of Spinoza because I took for granted that this excommunication has long since been anachronistic and void. What I asked was that the Hebrew University of Jerusalem publishes his complete work in Hebrew, considering him the most profound thinker of the last centuries. And this is already being done by the aforementioned university.

In Tel Aviv there is already a street with his name and there is no reasonable person in this country who thinks that excommunication should still be in force.

I'd like you to let me know what the expenses are for the maintenance of Spinoza's  grave so I can tell you what our contribution will be.

Respectfully,

D. Ben Gurion

Immediately as I read this letter I ran back to Spinoza's bust, gave him a big hug and said:

- Baruch, you see that enlightened Jews love you and we consider you one of the greatest thinkers of all time. Forget this ridiculous excommunication uttered by a community of limited, fanatical and brutalized Portuguese Jews for centuries of persecution and who could never understand you, for you were far ahead of your time. See that in XXth century, the Israeli leader, David Ben Gurion, regards as null and void the excommunication that your coreligionists submitted to you in Amsterdam and gave your name to one of the streets of Tel Aviv, a new city that you did not know. Your complete work has already been translated into the language of the Scriptures you knew so well!

I hope you feel embraced by all of us Jews from  XX th and XXI th centuries .

Baruch Ha Shem,

From a modest reader of your work,

Roberto Leon Ponczek