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Epicurus and Apikorsim
by Yaakov Malkin
Published (2007) in English by The Library of Secular Judaism and Milan Prees, translated by Shmuel Gertel; 173 pp.
The book discuses apikorsut as the belief of secular Jews, and it’s relation to the non-religious beliefs of other peoples: in the mid first millennium BCE in India and in Greece; and the Hellenistic era – in western cultures, including Judaism.
Apikorsut is often wrongly seen primarily as apostasy. This perception is clearly refuted by the beliefs expressed by the Greek philosopher Epicurus and by non-religious Jews called apikorsim.
Every belief – religious or secular – implies rejection of other beliefs. The beliefs of apikorsim imply repudiation of the obligation to observe religious precepts uttered in God’s name by their human inventors, just as many religious beliefs imply the repudiation of evolution, or other scientific assertions regarding the development of the universe that lack a creating, governing God, as described in the Bible.
The prevailing belief among apikorsim, generally called “secular” Jews, is similar to that expressed by Epicurus: man is sovereign and bears exclusive responsibility for his actions within his physical and social environment, and hence bound by the principles of justice - as articulated by Hillel and Kant for example, aimed at preventing harm to others; and by moral values, as the standard for evaluation and preference of human behaviour, based on the desire to fulfil our goals and improve our lives and those of others, by improving quality of life, and increasing pleasure and happiness.
This belief implies the rejection of unnecessary religious precepts (those without “reasons” or worthy goals); or those that violate the principles of justice and moral values, such as the human right to equality and dignity – violated by precepts that discriminate against the female half of society.
This book will stress the relationship between the beliefs of apikorsim – today and throughout Jewish history – and the Epicurean beliefs that enjoyed a wide following in western cultures during the Hellenistic-Roman period, and can be discerned in the books of Ecclesiastes and Job. Such Epicurean beliefs resurfaced in the non-religious beliefs that gained popularity among western peoples with the diffusion of the secularisation process, beginning in the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment.
Epicurean beliefs are expressed in a variety of ways today, by people who are, for the most part, unaware of the resemblance they bear to Epicurus’ own assertions regarding pleasure and quality of life as the ultimate purpose of moral behaviour - or “altruistic hedonism” as Norman De Witt, one of the most important Epicurean scholars of the 20th century, termed Epicureanism.
Such expressions of Epicurean beliefs include: the belief that the ultimate purpose of our behaviour is the quality of life of the individual and society, or the belief in man’s right to euthanasia for one who does not wish to prolong death or continue to exist without quality of life.
“Secular” and “secularism” are words whose meaning has been determined in language and the public consciousness by their usage in everyday language, in the media and in politics. “Apikoros” and “apikorsut” still have negative connotations in the consciousness of all who believe that they merely denote apostasy and not belief in man’s sovereignty and aspiration to better her/his life and the lives of all members of the society in which s/he lives.
In this chapter I have stressed the positive meaning of apikorsut - the belief of secular Jews - explaining my preference for the term “believing apikoros” over “secular Jew”, due to the affinity between the non-humanistic beliefs shared by most Jews in the world, and the Epicurean beliefs incorporated in non-religious humanistic beliefs in the West, present and past.
Epicurean belief is non-religious, humanistic belief, that implies repudiation of the obligation to observe the halakhic precepts, criticism of sacred texts, and rejection of sacred practices and beliefs in Jewish tradition.
The description of the 9th century figure of Hiwi al-Balkhi, in the last part of the book, and based on the monograph by Moshe Gil, deals with the life of the first apikoros whose writings have been preserved in Jewish tradition. This is one of the earliest examples of the function that apikorsut and apikorsim have played in the development of Jewish thought in all eras, as an integral part of pluralistic Jewish culture, acting as a “functional harmony of contrasts” - as Ernst Cassirer characterised all living developing culture, employing Heraclitus’ metaphor regarding operative unity as a system of clashing forces.
Distribution:
Dr. Efraim Zadoff
E.D.Z. Nativ Ediciones
Fax: 972 2 5860829
P.O.Box 23526, Jerusalem 91234
zadoff@zahav.net.il
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