Let me first suggest that you and I and all sitting here, and those who subscribe to the platforms of the Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, Renewal, Humanistic movements and of course all Jewish secularists are FREE JEWS – That is free from the dominion of Halachic religion, free from an exclusive religious interpretation of mitzvot, from a religious interpretation of Jewish celebration, traditions, and culture, Jews FREE of one inflexible view of the Bible and post-biblical literature.

The FREE Jew determines how and through what forms he or she will participate in the ethnic solidarity which distinguishes Jewish identity.

FREE Jews believe in God as the hero of their central book and other classic works of Jewish literature. God has been perceived by Jews as a living functioning agent in all areas of our history and culture. God continues to function as the emblem of a long literary tradition—though without any practical authority in our personal or political life.

FREE Jews believe in the Bible as a literary and historical anthology which stands at the core of Jewish culture and identity. Within the Bible can be found all the literary genres of western literature. The corpus of the Bible—books of literature, laws, history, chronicles, philosophy and rhetoric represents the first thousand years of Judaism as the pluralistic natural culture of the Jewish people.

FREE Jews believe in humanism and democracy. The ethics of humanism were defined by Hillel. Hillelian values allow for a more humanistic understanding of the commandments, the prophets, the controversies over Talmudic law. FREE Jews believe in pluralism as fundamental to Jewish identity and culture.

FREE Jews believe in openness to other cultures. Cross fertilization and cultural flexibility render Judaism one of the most influential and influenced cultures in the West. FREE Jews believe in holiday celebrations, but are free to redefine the practices, pouring new content into old vessels.

FREE Jews believe that Judaism is part of world culture.

FREE Jews believe in Jewish education, which is the vanguard of the socialization of all Jewish women and men of all ages.

FREE Judaism teaches pluralism, humanism; it stresses the participatory role of the individual in the interpretation and modes of practice which defines the Jews as a nation.

Literary and artistic creativity entails a ceaseless attempt to define the human. Our classic literature in the Bible represents the human through characterization and plots shaping such human heroes as God, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Jepthah, Ruth, Saul, David and Job. These literary heroes represent the human in their complexity, their sin, their remorse, their hopes and disappointments. Like all great literature, the books of the Bible do not offer moral paragons of behavior; instead they convey a human reality that allows us to draw moral conclusions. The writers and artists who created God as the literary hero of mythical plots sometimes evoke an amoral figure possessing cosmic powers and freedom, as in Job; and sometimes paint God as the wellspring of morality and justice—as in Amos’s and Jeremiah’s poetic eloquence. FREE Jews then believe in a God shaped by the biblical redactors in their literary creation. This, too, is the belief of Maimonides’ view in Guide for the Perplexed, as he states that “God is beyond human grasp and no concrete, or even conceptual, picture can ever come close to describing him. Any attempt to define God in a literary plot, in a painting or through some concept of concretization, limits the infinity of a deity whose essence, by definition, can never be limited or bounded.” The implication of Maimonides’ view is that all statements of God in the Bible, about his hands and feet or his words to Moses or the prophets, are merely metaphors for the unenlightened, who cannot grasp God’s unfathomable and sublime essence. And so we finally come to Maimonides.

Moses, son of Maimon is know to English speaking audiences as Maimonides and to Hebrew speaking ones as Ram-Bam, was born in Cordova Span in 1135. At 13, he had to flee and journeyed through North Africa, spent time in the Holy Land, and finally settled in Cairo, where he did most of his scholarly and scientific work. His Mishnah Torah, a 14 volume study of Jewish Law, is the greatest such compilation ever attempted. Deeply versed in philosophic literature, his writings also indicate a thorough knowledge of the physics, astronomy, mathematics and logic of his time. A practicing physician, author, teacher, court physician, director of a public clinic and spiritual leader of the Jewish community in Cairo, he was both a theoretician and a man of action. His masterpiece was the Guide to the Perplexed, written in Arabic in 1190.

The two most difficult notions to understand in the Guide are (1) the Torah and sacred writings of Judaism are true and (2) the Torah and sacred writings of Judaism do not ask us to accept anything reason shows to be impossible. Thus the religion Maimonides envisions is one in which spirituality and enlightenment go hand in hand, a religion in which everything is subjected to scrutiny, in which everything must be explained and defended. Maimonides doesn’t doubt that scripture is the word of God, but what is written cannot be the end of the matter. Interpreting scripture can be decided only by rational argument. Moreover, it is not enough to know that something is true; to reach a real understanding, we must ask why it is.

The dominant theme which emerges from a study of the Guide to the Perplexed is that any conflict between faith and reason is less real than apparent. Judaism must be justified by its claim to the truth.

Throughout much of Maimonides’ life he fought a two-front war; there were those who thought philosophy and science could answer all questions; on the other hand there were those that thought everything we needed to know was contained in the Torah. Maimonides was convinced that every issue must be explained on its own terms and every piece of relevant information brought to bear on it. And, despite his love for the Torah, only a person who has mastered philosophy and science can decipher the wisdom the Torah contains.

For Maimonides, Jewish education is first and foremost education. We must take truth from whichever source originates it and articulates it so that every person on earth can understand it. Underlying Maimonides’ view of education is a conviction that no deep-seated psychological views exist between Jews and gentiles. All human beings are subject to the lure of idolatry and all are capable of grasping the truth. Thus, all education must operate according to universal principles. In this respect religion, like philosophy or science, seeks a truth that has nothing to do with blood or birth. If by faith, one means commitment to a belief for which there is not supporting evidence, then in Maimonides’ conception of Judaism, there is little if any room for faith.

Reason is not just another human faculty; it is the very image of the divine in us. When reason is no longer the focal point, when people decide that personal differences or outward shows of piety are more important, the Judaism that results is badly warped. If large segments of its Jewish community have come to distrust reason and look for substitutes they are hardly alone. Ours is an age in which reason is under attack from many quarters. Not everyone is as rational as Maimonides seems to think. Maimonides may have overlooked the extent to which human behavior is influenced by love, hate, greed, jealousy, national pride, and other emotions. Nevertheless, Maimonides insists that rationality is an ideal to which God calls us but to which we need necessarily respond.

Maimonides is the most important of a long line of thinkers who maintain that reason is an instrument for human betterment, a way of looking at people not at what they are but what they might become.

For Maimonides reason involved a commitment to a way of live which shuns complacency, dogmatism, and inflated estimates of one’s own needs and accomplishments.

Maimonides would be the first to admit that the life he recommends is fraught with risk. The path of learning contains pitfalls and it is true that what passes for reason is often only another set of prejudices.

Maimonides has set before us the choice between understanding and intellectual complacency. Properly interpreted, it is tantamount to a choice between life and death. Maimonides’ advice us is choose life.

And now we move to the next step in our search for God through reason and ethical justice by examining Baruch Spinoza, born in 1632 and died in 1677. He represents not only a central figure in European civilization but one crucial in shaping the evolution of modern Jewish thought. His Theological-Political Treatise first appeared in 1670 and marked the clear estrangement from his ancestral heritage. Spinoza, although indebted to medieval philosophy, especially Moses Maimonides ultimately repudiated the assumption on which Maimonides built his rational edifice of Judaism. Spinoza offered a radically new understanding of the separation of church and state. He argued that the Bible should be understood for precisely what it says, not allegorically. He rejected the Maimonidian equation of biblical prophecy and philosophy. He denied the chosen status of the Jewish people. And he questioned the rationale for continued observance of ceremonial law as determined by rabbinic authority.

For Spinoza, reason had now come to judge the Bible and Jewish religious tradition on the basis of its own assumptions, and the shattering results sent back shock waves throughout the intellectual world of Europe. True faith meant, for Spinoza, the unhampered activity of the human mind; reason and faith had to be disentangled to preserve the integrity of each. Spinoza thus became the first post-Jewish-Christian thinker to subject the religions of the West to a devastating rational critique. Every Jewish and Christian thinker after him had to address and responds to his arguments, which placed the intellectual tradition of the West in direct opposition to Jewish religious authority. Spinoza had underscored the tension between personal autonomy and reason and Jewish communal demands, a tension to be felt acutely by all subsequent thinkers.

Spinoza’s philosophy represents a critical turning point in the history of Jewish thought.

He came out of a converso milieu in Amsterdam. He received a traditional rabbinic education plus a knowledge of classical sources. When his father died, he stopped observing the traditional Jewish life, left Amsterdam, broke fully from Judaism, though he did not convert. In his Theological-Political Treatise, he was careful not to offend Christianity, but was openly hostile to Judaism.

His significance to Jewish thought is his break from the tradition of medieval philosophy, especially the 12th century Moses Maimonides.

His newness is first of all in his political beliefs. For him, the ideal state was the Protestant sate—not the Mosiac Theocracy--where church and state were separate.

His target was Maimonides. Spinoza rejected Maimonides’ ideal of a theocracy, his equation of philosophy with prophecy and his allegorical manner of reading the Bible. Spinoza’s reading of the Bible was radically new, reading it naturally for what it says, exactly, in contrast to the way Maimonides had read it—arbitrarily and artificially. Spinoza laid this foundation of modern textual criticism of the Bible, arguing that the Bible was not written by God but by human beings. He saw the prophets speaking in fantasies to those unable to know God rationally, relying on fallacious miracles to convince their illiterate following.

His critique of Judaism is devastating and leaves the defense of the Jew and Jewish particularly in question. Having undermined the divinity of the Bible, there is no longer any justification for the closeness of the Jewish people. There is also no rationale for observing the ceremonial laws nor for accepting the authority of the rabbis. The biblical stories of Moses and the prophets are fables meant to appeal to the uneducated slave population.

The impact of Spinoza’s critique is enormous; every subsequent thinker must deal with the implications of his positions. Reason had now come to judge the Bible on its own assumptions and thus, had negated the possibility of reconciling reason and faith, the primary objective of medieval religious philosophy. Spinoza had argued persuasively against the perpetuation of Judaism as a particular faith and community. Religion was meaningful only when universal, shared by all human beings, without particular barriers between Christians and Jews. Spinoza’s critique was equally applicable to Christianity but he nevertheless went out of his way to present Christianity more favorably than Judaism. For Spinoza, Jesus had begun the process of universalizing the religious experience, which reached a culmination in the Apostle Paul. In some respects, Spinoza saw himself as the new Paul, further universalizing religion by underscoring its pure rational foundations.

Spinoza’s critique laid bare the contradiction between communal values and secular liberal ones. In many respects, Spinoza already offered the classical literal argument about the incompatibility of being liberal and being Jewish in a traditional sense. The ideal of complete freedom to follow one’s own path, baldly contradicted the demands of a Jewish communal tradition and its commandments and other requirements.

Modern Jewish thought represents to a great extent, a series of responses, repudiations, revisions and acknowledgements of Spinoza’s understandings. Beginning with Moses Mendelsohn and throughout the twentieth century Jewish thinkers who advocate Jewish continuity must find a way of reconciling personal autonomy with the communal authority. In some respects, Marx and Freud use a Spinoza-like argument in repudiating Judaism in the name of a higher ideal. They were universalizers as well. And many Jewish thinkers had to address the more favorable treatment of Christianity over Judaism.

But, as is usually the case, it took a long time, about three hundred years, before the masses began to use the philosophy of Spinoza as a vehicle for making changes in denominational religion. Next week we’ll see how two of them, Buber and Rosenzweig made their accommodations and changes. Will they tell us that reason and faith can be complimentary or that prayer and ethical justice can be friends.