Six

I finished the Yiddish book that same day. I became so engrossed in it I even forgot my hunger. There were only a few pages devoted to most philosophers in this book. Some of them—Plato, Aristotle, and Democritus—were familiar to me from browsing through Guide to the Perplexed, The Khuzari, and Faiths and Opinions and other volumes in our house as well as the Book of the Covenant. I understood only a little of what I read, but I plowed right through lest my father catch me, tear these heretical books to pieces, and slap me besides. I was anxious to discover as quickly as possible why men and animals had to suffer. The philosophers offered various opinions regarding the creation of the world, but I clung to the question “How do they know?” Since they weren’t in heaven, and neither God nor the First Cause nor the Entelechy spoke to them, how could I reply to them? I encountered such words as idea, form, categories, substance, monads, idealism, materialism, empiricism, solipsism, but the questions of how things could exist forever, how the world could be without limit, and why cats caught mice remained unanswered. Only one philosopher, Schopenhauer, mentioned the sufferings of men and animals, but according to this book, he offered no explanations for it. The world, he said, consisted of a blind will, of passions that had no reason and that the intellect served them like a slave ….

After a while, I turned to the Hebrew book. Reading about philosophy in Hebrew was even harder for me than in Yiddish. Actually I didn’t read but scanned through the pages for parts that would answer my questions in clear fashion, but there was less clarity here than in the books on the cabala, particularly The Pillar of Service. The pleasure that I got from these two books gradually turned into despair and rage. If the philosophers didn’t know and couldn’t know—as Locke, Hume, and Kant themselves indicated—what need was there for all those high-flown words? Why all the research? I had the suspicion that the philosophers pretended, masked their ignorance behind Latin and Greek phrases. Besides, it seemed to me that they skirted the main issues, the essence of things. The question of questions was the suffering of creatures, man’s cruelty to man and to animals. Even if it provided answers to all the other questions but this one, philosophy would still be worthless.

Those were my feelings then, and those are my feelings still. But in reading about these philosophers I got the impression that the question of suffering was of little consequence to them.

My brother had left a dictionary of foreign words and phrases in the house, and I looked up the more difficult words. On one page of one of the philosophy books it discussed whether the sentence “Seven and five equals twelve” is a priori or synthetically a priori. I looked up the meaning of a priori and “synthetic” as well as of “analytic,” which was mentioned there, too, and at the same time I thought: “How can it help the chewed-up mouse or the devoured lamb whether the sentence ‘Seven and five equals twelve,’ is analytic or synthetic?” I know today that the whole Kantian philosophy hangs on this question, but the problem of problems is still to me the suffering of people and animals. I have the same feeling today when I try to read the convoluted commentaries of Wittgenstein and his disciples who try to convince themselves and others that all that we lack is a clear definition of words. Give us a dictionary with crystalclear definitions (if such a thing is even possible) and the pains of all the martyrs of all times and of all the tortured creatures would become justified forever ….

In the course of the month that I kept the two books (I don’t know to this day who their authors were) I read them virtually day and night. I constantly referred to the dictionary, but the more I read and probed in these books, the more obvious it became to me that I would find no answers to my questions in them. Actually, the philosophers all said the same thing I had heard from my mother—that the ways of God (or of nature or of Substance or of the Absolute) were hidden. We didn’t know them and we couldn’t know. Even then I detected the similarity between the cabala and Baruch Spinoza. Both felt that everything in the world is a part of God, but while the cabala rendered to God such attributes as will, wisdom, grandeur, mercy, Spinoza attributed to God merely the capacity to extend and to think. The anguish of people and animals did not concern Spinoza’s God even in the slightest. He had no feelings at all concerning justice or freedom. He Himself wasn’t free but had to act according to eternal laws. The Baal Shem and the murderer were of equal importance to Him. Everything was preordained, and no change whatsoever could affect Spinoza’s God or the things that were part of Him. Billions of years ago He knew that someone would assassinate the Austrian archduke and that Nikolai Nikolaevich would have an old rabbi in a small Polish town hanged for being an alleged German spy.

The book said that Spinoza proposed that God be loved with a rational love (amor Dei intellectualis), but how could you love such a mighty and wise God who didn’t possess even a spark of compassion toward the tortured and beaten? This philosophy exuded a chill, though still I felt that it might contain more truth (bitter truth) than the cabala. If God were indeed full of mercy and benevolence, He wouldn’t have allowed starvation, plagues, and pogroms. Spinoza’s God merely fortified the contentions of Malthus.

When the Germans entered Warsaw, the hunger became even worse. An epidemic of typhus broke out. My younger brother, Moishe, caught the spotted typhus and was taken to the municipal hospital. His life was in danger, and Mother cried her eyes out begging God (or whoever was in charge) in his behalf. Spinoza taught me that prayers couldn’t help in any way, but the cabala books said that prayers recited with fervor went straight to the Throne of Glory and could avert the worst decree. How could Spinoza be so sure that God had no will or compassion? He, Spinoza, was no more than blood and flesh himself, after all. Thank God, Moishe recovered.

Between 1915 and 1917, hundreds of people died on Krochmalna Street. Now a funeral procession passed our windows and now the ambulance taking the sick to the hospital. I saw women shake their fists at the sky and in their rage call God a murderer and a villain. I saw Chassidim at the Radzymin study house and in the other study houses grow swollen from malnutrition. At home we ate frozen potatoes that had a sweetish, nauseating taste. The Germans kept scoring victories, but those who foretold that the war wouldn’t last longer than six weeks had to admit their error. Millions of people had already perished, but Malthus’ God still hadn’t had enough.

In the midst of all this, the Revolution broke out in Russia. The Tsar was overthrown, and the Jews in the Radzymin study house promptly began to say that this was an omen presaging the coming of the Messiah. The dead rotted, but new hopes were aroused in those still living. It was possible that this Revolution was an act of Providence, but the hunger and sicknesses in Warsaw grew steadily worse. Father became so dejected by the situation that he just about stopped paying attention to me, and I was free to read all the books I could get my hands on. Nor did I neglect to study the Gemara and the commentaries. I studied, read, and let my imagination soar. Since both the cabalists and the philosophers made everything up out of their heads, why couldn’t I ferret the truth out with my own brain? Maybe it was destined that I should uncover the truth of Creation? But all my ruminations came smack up against the exasperating enigma of eternity and infinity and against the even deeper mystery of suffering and cruelty.