| The Wondering Jew |
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| Written by New Voices | |||||
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Lox et Veritas, Who Was Baruch Spinoza? Who Was Baruch Spinoza? by Hasdai Westbrook Baruch Spinoza did heresy right, blaspheming his way through Jewish and Christian pieties into the ranks of the great philosophers. Born in 1632 in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, Spinoza grew up in a community of former "marranos"– Spanish Jews who had ducked the Inquisition by fronting as Catholics (once the authorities got wise, these "crypto-Jews" were forced to leave Spain). His first radical yearnings came while he was still toiling away in his family’s lens-grinding business, and he was soon consorting with the community’s most notorious heretics. By the age of 24, Spinoza came under threat of excommunication from Amsterdam’s rabbis. His associations with thinkers who questioned rabbinical authority, the sanctity of scripture, and even the existence of God, had made him a marked man. Still, the rabbis were open to a compromise—a little kowtowing, a nibble of humble pie, and they would have happily let Spinoza off with a warning. Grovelling hypocrisy, however, was not quite his style. Refusing to knuckle under, Spinoza instead penned a tract justifying his decision to leave his synagogue and break with the community. Excommunication followed soon after, as did an attempt on his life, courtesy of a local fanatic. Taking the hint, Spinoza abandoned Amsterdam and began wandering from city to city, wearing the coat gashed by his would-be assassin’s blade as a reminder that thought is not always well-loved. For the next fourteen years, Spinoza worked on the Ethics, which would become his masterpiece. But in 1670, he took time out to publish the Theological-Political Treatise. The book, with its condemnation of Christianity for invoking war, intolerance, and hatred, caused a continent-wide uproar. It was banned in 1674, having been denounced by every major religious and intellectual group. "Spinozim" became an internationally recognized insult. Three years later Spinoza was dead, his heart giving out before the Ethics was even published. But for enlightened thinkers, the book had already become a sacred text, with famous philosophers like Leibniz paying secret visits to Spinoza to gain access to it. The Ethics marks Spinoza’s definitive attempt to construct a unified vision of the universe. To his mind, God is no independent creator but an integral part of that universe. The structure of existence cannot be broken down into atoms. It is made up of a universal substance, the only difference between seemingly distinct properties or objects being their "mode" or name. All is one —mind and body, being and God, stab wound and pain. Cut off from society, his work the source of so much discord and fractious debate, Spinoza still sought to unify all that he saw around him. But while he is now universally accepted as one of history’s most important thinkers, in life he might have been more beloved had he stuck to grinding lenses. Lox et Veritas The Truth About Fish and Kashrut by Miriam Felton-Dansky Since, according to Kosher law, fish are neither meat nor dairy, they hold a special place on the Jewish dinner table. The only organisms with hearts and brains that can bat for both gastronomic teams, our finned friends accompany vegetables in the "pareve" category—food that can be eaten at either meat or dairy meals. But didn’t all those fleshy types evolve from the ocean in the first place, crawling onto the shore and then flopping onto our dinner plates? Aren’t meat’s fishy forebears being denied their culinary due? New Voices decided to investigate: just why are sea-dwellers separated on the menu from their more evolved, land-lubbing descendents? Casting out our drift nets for answers, we were lucky enough to pull in Rabbi Andrew Bachman of NYU’s Bronfman Center. The Torah, explains Rabbi Bachman, bases much of Kosher law on the prohibition against cooking an animal in its mother’s milk ("Think of how cruel that would be!" adds Rabbi Ben Tzion Krasnianski of Chabad). Fish do not lactate (even cowfish)—making it impossible to violate this biblical injunction when eating them. Sea dwellers are therefore distinct from milk-producers like cows, whose offspring live in constant fear of being converted into cheeseburgers (a fate far worse than the ordinary burger, to which many enterprising young calves aspire). But classifying fish proves a far more slippery proposition than first meets the glassy eye. To the question of why they cannot be called meat, Rabbi Shlomo Chein of Chabad had a rather different answer: "Scientifically, I don’t think they call a fish an animal, a fish is a fish." Ah, so not being an animal, it cannot produce meat. But wait, didn’t that great taxonomist Bing Crosby once sing that "a fish is an animal [that swims in a brook]"? Pressed on the matter, Rabbi Chein equivocated, adding, "fish might be in the general animal specie, but one does not usually refer to them as animals." Fair enough, we thought: Bing must simply have mis-crooned. And so our piscine puzzle seemed solved. But then, in an apparent effort to cover halachic ass, Chein added a confounding caveat: "besides, the Torah prohibits meat and milk, not animals and milk." Gutted, we turned to Raymond Westbrook, professor of ancient Near-Eastern studies at Johns Hopkins University, to find out how biblical biologists might have distinguished between meat and animals. Westbrook blew us out of the water by explaining that "animal" is itself a modern category. "’Animal’ is an Aristotelian scientific concept," he explained. In the time of Deuteronomy, sea dwellers would have been as distinct from land-crawlers as they were from, say, potatoes. Not just distinct but distinguished, says Rabbi Krasnianski. "Fish," he explained, "is unique: a fish is absorbed in its source of life, it’s a much more refined, more spiritual creature." And purity is no new-age phenomenon for fish. "The flood," added Rabbi Krasnianski, "did not affect the fish because they were not corrupted. Noah didn’t have fish-tanks on the ark!" (Depravity ran rampant in the antediluvian animal kingdom: according to recently discovered parchments, unchecked gopher gangs and burgeoning bear brothels were among God’s reasons for sending the flood.) "The idea of slaughtering an animal is to elevate it," Krasnianski went on. "Fish doesn’t need that…and that’s why the Torah says it’s no problem to eat it with milk or meat." No problem, you say? Well, fish might be pareve, but rabbinic custom instructs us not to mix it with meat. What gives? Rabbi Chein warns that the rabbis saw danger in eating meat with fish—in fact, that mixture apparently puts the unwitting muncher in danger of "tzaarat"—an affliction of the skin commonly known as leprosy. New Voices is currently testing this hypothesis on a group of freshmen, having placed them on a strict diet of carp and roast beef smoothies. At the first drop of an appendage, the good Rabbi will be vindicated. Lest the meat-eschewing think themselves immune, Rabbi Krasnianski hastened to add that the injunction against mixing applies to fish and dairy too, though it can only be transgressed by "drinking the cup of milk together with the fish in one mouth." Pity, there’s nothing like dunking your kippers in a nice cool glass of milk. Got leprosy? If you’re partial to lox with a shmear, the answer is probably yes. Our deepest condolences. We promise to visit you at the colony. FIN
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