Sister Samuel - the original "Dominican" in Skippy's life - was the enforcer of the 'Way of the Land.' She was the 8th Grade Nun and rode herd on 25 boys who were 13 or 14 and had perpetual hardons. Her job was to beat back Satan who was awake now and raging in the adolescent monkeys, screaming in Aramaic Hormones all the names of the Anshe Shem - the 'Men of Names' - which we call the Fallen Angels. Sister Samuel was 4'-10" with arthritic knuckles the size of baseballs - she could beat the shit out of all 25 of us at once. She was the Firewall between us and the World where the World is the middle name of Lucifer. Skippy used to goad her with his Pubescent Theology - his Innocent questions which had been instilled in his quick-study mind by Murmur himself. "But if Jesus was god wasn't then the Crucifixion a fix?" He would ask, his Prussian Blue eyes twinkling thru the guile. "Hell is being prepared!" The Dominican would hiss. Skippy and Spinoza had many things in common. Their places in Hell having been reserved being only one.
Bento de Spinosa was up against 3 Streams of Jewish Scholarship and Tradition: Talmudic Legalistic Disputation, the Rationalist Semiphilosophical Rants of the great Maimonides, and the Mystical Confabulations of the Magikal Kabbalah. Jewish Amsterdam was a Battle Royal between the 3. In Spinoza's time there were 2 Jewish communities in Mokum Aleph each with its own Synagogue: Beth Jacob and Neve Shalom. When Beth Jacob had a civil war over the minutiae of meat-butchering it split into 2 and for awhile there were 3 synagogues. Over time the 3 coagulated into the 1 grand Synagogue imaged above. That's Maimonides with Skippy in Cordoba - he was the greatest of all Jewish thinkers, so you just know that Spinoza is going after him.
Rabbi Morteira - Ashkenazic - Rembrandt's drinking buddy - both of them shitfaced on Absinthe & Gin was a glorious noise on the narrow Kolk which led to the rows of stinking warehouses where lumber, whale oil and unprocessed blubber was stored. Morteira was the honcho at Beth Jacob and the acknowledged Dean of Mokum Rabbis. He had come from Venice as a Yoot and was outside of the Marranos' world - in fact, like Sister Samuel ripping the Paganism out of Skippy, Rabbi Mort saw it as his mission to strip the remnants of the Converso Christian Patina off the new Ex-Marranos in ADAM. Morteira was dyed in the wool Rationalistic, a Maimonides freak with little patience for the Lurianic Kabbalah Hippies who were the offshoots of the Marranos and had brought Kabbalah with them up out of Iberia where it had been born - the Mutant-Child of Andalucia. Messianic Mysticism - dangerous, dangerous, drugs - it's a toss up which fucks with your mind the most. But Amsterdam was the New Jerusalem - even the Goyim were saying that, and all the new Jews out of the Spains and Portugal - they had this "Narrative of Redemptive History" Shtick goin'. They were living themselves the Heilgeschichte of the Tribe, for Christ's sake! Had not the Kabbalah told them that they were the Shattered Light, like god himself, which had been exiled out into the world? And now here was this Haven in Mokum A, this 'Jerusalem of the West' which was nourishing them and yes, even making them rich. How could you not see the Kabbalah manifesting around them? Rabbi Morteira would shake his sad old Rabbinical head and reach for the ornate Whippin' Stick that he used to beat the Halakha into his dreamy eyed yoots. He had laboriously carved the sigils of the original 200 Fallen Angels - the Anshe Shem - in twin serpentine paths which wound around the stick. He liked to start a wuppin' with Murmur, who before he fell from heaven had been - like all the Jews of the Diaspora - a Hybrid. Murmur was partly of the order of Thrones, but half his angelic ass was also from the order of Angels. In hell, Murmur was a Grand Duke with 30 Legions of the Infernals attending his every command. Murmur is a teacher of Philosophy and he makes the souls of the dead appear before him so that he can ask them Questions. He wants to find the wise-asses and punks like Skippy and Spinoza . . . Rabbi Mort would do a whiplash with his stick and the Yoots would end up with a Sigil of Murmur welt the size of Sister Samuel's knuckle.
Go ahead click Murmur's Sigil above and watch a slide show of how the tentacles of the Sephiroth reach everywere into the thickening kultur around us. Skippy ripped most of the images off the WWW within 3 minutes - the time of a soft-boiled egg. Google is overseen by a Semantic Web of Watchers who suck Absinthe & Gin as they congregate on the head of a pin and wait for our lusts to be entered into the data search field before breaking for the Portaelucis. The Goyim didn't much know what to do about the sub current of Kabbalah which ran thru ADAM like a long hit from the bong. It seemed peaceful enough and as long as it didn't turn the Sephardim and the Ashkenazim into crazed Shiites and Sunnis the Old Christians pretty much didn't care. Bidnez was good. And besides there was an undercurrent of Sex which ran thru Kabbalah and Sex was the Chi which Christians needed - like Crack - to feed their Inner Demons.
And Sex was always good for Bidnez in ADAM. Sex 'was' bidnez in ADAM. Import/Export was Mokum's true faith and the stuff that people wanted was Spice & Hashish & Girls from all over the globe. Your average Christian Dutchmen lived in a reasonable world and god had recently Set the Dutch Table with a feast. All the world's flesh came thru the Portaelucis of the Jerusalem of the West and besides - the first thing the Fallen Angels did was Fic Fic with the Monkey Girls - and like Leibniz was saying: Everything fits its Reason in the Best and most Reasonable of Worlds. So it was god who brought all the girls to the feast. Who the hell were they to refuse to belly up to the groaning boards?
Everything's for sale. That's a given in a Port. So the Yoot Spinoza grew up in a city that was one big Market, one huge Les Halles. Where everything is for sale - there everything can also be thought. So Baruch grew up in a city where commodities, ideas, and morals were loose and promiscuous - how did Wallace Stevens put it? ". . . and bid him whip in kitchen cups concupiscent curds . . " Yah! That was it. Philosophy - and Pussy - in Amsterdam, was Concupiscent. Open to everything and everyone - for a Specified Sum. Oh well, Skippy mused, the Catholics sold Indulgences and box seats in Heaven. Everything's for sale. Young Baruch was a lively lad, quick witted and fun to be around - but he had a flaw. He was brilliant and understood things too quickly and in the hands of a Yoot, this can be a fatal flaw. Rabbi Morteira was teacher, friend, and guide. He had seen enough to know that Baruch Spinoza should rightfully take his place as his successor - Baruch would become a Rabbi and the head of his people in the Haven of Mokum Aleph. He was too bright for anything else and besides - what else could there be? What else should you want to be?
Well, that would depend on whom you asked. If you popped the question to Rabbi Isaac Aboab da Fonseca - himself Sephardic with a wild Lurianic Kabbalah mindset - you could get all kinds of Neoplatonic suggestions. Rabbi Aboab - with Morteira, and Rabbi Manasseh ben Israel were the 3 spiritual leaders of the Jews in Mokum A. during Spinoza's time. Rabbi ben Israel was a Messianic fury - Kabbalistic Tradition said the Messiah could not come until the Jews had been dispersed to the 4 corners of the world - in his time only England was Judenfrei and so ben Israel went to England to negotiate with Cromwell the return of the Jews to Britain so that the Messiah would appear. But the tension was between Morteira and Aboab - between Tradition/Law and Mysticism. Bean counter vs. Wild eyed Hippy. The two of them were fighting for the souls of the Dutch Jews and the battleground was over Derekh Eretz - the 'Way of the Land.' As it was with Sister Samuel and her little Catholics at the redbrick school so oddly named: Immaculate Heart of Mary. Derekh Eretz was a term that meant 'respect.' It had the connotation of the Way things Are and Have Always Been - that type of mind numbing platitude which drives young deconstructors like Spinoza and Skippy right up the wall. The Catholics called it 'Filial Piety and Patriotism.' It meant that you had to love and respect your Parents, your Teachers, your Dogma, your Church, your Country.
Derekh Eretz was the system of Glial Cells that held the Jewish mind together - it was the Glue which bound a Yoot to his Kultur. Yahweh sets it all in motion in his Big Wind speech when he tells the Chosen People that they Have to Love him and only him and to Teach this shit to your Kinder, and write it in your heart, on your doorposts, on scraps of parchment for your phylacteries, and on your Gates. And now - You - have to do this because goddamn it - it has always been done. It's True. It's Right. It's Righteous. And it's the 'Way of the Land.' Ken Kesey says the same thing to the Yoot of his generation when he warns them that "you are either On the Bus, or Off the Bus." Every age has some fuckin' prophet with a new version of this message 'for your eyes only.'
Use your Browser to go Back or Click on this to Follow Spinoza to his Cherem.