blogs/brentspodek

Anyone can be a sinner, but it takes both knowledge and integrity to be a heretic. 

I’m very excited to explore two of Judaism’s most important heretics - Alisha ben Abuya and Baruch Spinoza. 

Alisha ben Abuya, known also as Acher, or Other, was a Talmudic sage who left the fold when he could no longer reconcile the tradition he received with the reality he experienced.  Although he was “excommunicated” from Judaism, he remains a character in the Talmud, asking difficult questions which need to be asked. We’ll encounter him primarily through the novelistic retelling of his life in As a Driven Leaf by Milton Steinberg as well as an exploration of the original Talmudic stories in which he appears. 

More recently (relatively speaking) Baruch Spinoza was Sephardic Jew who lived in the Jewish community of Amsterdam. He had the audacity to claim that the Torah was not written by God, and for that, he was functionally “excommunicated” at age 23, though it helped cement his status as one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy. We’ll learn more about his thought, and what it means today from Rebecca Goldstein’s book, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity.

If you are interested in learning more about these two heretics and what they might mean for us today, please click here to register for the Art of Heresy!