Most people hear one line about Spinoza— “God is Nature”—and assume they’ve gotten the point. In this session, we’ll see why that shortcut misses what’s most daring (and most useful) about Spinoza, and why he remains one of the most surprisingly modern thinkers in Jewish and Western intellectual history. Viewing him through the lens of his day job as an optician—someone who literally shaped how people saw—we’ll explore how his philosophy is less a slogan about pantheism and more a radical account of reality: a single infinite substance that can be understood in countless ways depending on the “lenses” we bring to it. The result is an eye-opening invitation to rethink perception, freedom, and the limits of what we think we know—Spinoza not as a dusty heretic, but as a guide to seeing the world differently.