Spinoza in Shtreimels: An Underground Seminar
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“I’m sitting in my armchair” Abraham tells me on the phone. He is a Satmar Hasid from New York, calling me in Montreal where I sit—less comfortably I suspect—in my McGill philosophy department office. I don’t laugh right away, so he adds, “Don’t you do philosophy in an armchair? I’m ready to give it a try!” And then a cascade of big questions (and answers) pours over me: Does God exist? (He doubts there’s a proof.) Are space and time finite? (He thinks they are infinite and wonders if the creation story is a myth.) Do we have good reasons to observe God’s commandments? (“If there’s no God, perhaps as social conventions?”) I do my best to reply, apparently to his satisfaction. A friend of a friend who heard that I was interested in doing philosophy with people who are not academic philosophers had given Abraham my number. “I have a group of friends who may be interested,” he says. “We’re kind of an underground debating club.”
A couple of months later I move to Princeton for a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study. Once settled in, I call Abraham to organize our first meeting. We meet at the Star Bar, a trendy bar and lounge in Soho. Abraham and two friends—Isaac, a fellow Satmar, and Jacob, a Lubavitcher—wink at me from their bar stools. Their black attire stands out in the hip crowd that has already gathered here for an after-work drink. Jake, the bartender—Chinese letters tattooed on his fingers, an unlit cigarette in the corner of his mouth—pours us a draft beer that we take with us to the management office on the second floor where Moshe and Miriam, a Lubavitcher couple, are already waiting for us. Moshe owns the property. He made money in the diamond trade and then invested in real estate. Abraham, who deals with professional electronic equipment, proudly points out that the bass drums we hear through the floor come from a sound system bought from him. (Here and throughout, I have changed names and some details to preserve the anonymity of my students.)
“So what’s in it for you?” Moshe asks me as we sit down. “I’m trying to find out if one can use philosophy to address real-life concerns and to have debates across cultural boundaries,” I explain, somewhat professorially. “The clash between modernity and religious tradition, for example, gives rise to fundamental questions. And I want to know if philosophy can help.”
We are all a bit nervous. I hand out the syllabus: We will start with Plato’s dialogues Apology and Euthyphro to meet Socrates and discuss the idea of an examined life and the nature of moral norms. Then we will read the Deliverance from Error, the intellectual autobiography of al-Ghazali, the great 11th-century Muslim thinker. “How do you pronounce his name?” Jacob asks. “Just add an i to chazal,” (the standard Hebrew acronym for the scholars of the Rabbinic period: “our sages of blessed memory”) I reply, and they laugh.