68. MARTIN BUBER
In an article in The New Yorker magazine, Adam Kirsch offered insights from Jewish theologian, Martin Buber. These insights are clues to understanding how we must live to be the human beings we are ordained to be. I will highlight from the article what I view as relevant to this understanding.
“I and Thou, a short treatise by the Jewish theologian Martin Buber, was published in German in 1923; by the time it appeared in English, fourteen years later, the translator could already call it ‘one of the epoch-making books of our generation.’”
“Buber’s philosophy of dialogue had been enthusiastically embraced by such Protestant thinkers as Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich [two of my teachers]. Even today, I and Thou remains a staple of religion courses and bookstore spirituality sections, and inspirational quotes from it … circulate endlessly on social media.”
“The questions Buber was trying to answer were the most ineffable ones of human life: What is the meaning of our existence? How can we achieve the feeling of wholeness that we so painfully lack? Above all, Buber asked, how do we find our way to God, now that religious belief has become so challenging for modern, educated people? Anyone who believed it was possible to give crystal-clear answers to such questions would have to be a messiah or a charlatan, and Buber was neither.
“At the heart of Buber’s theology was his theory of dialogue — the idea that what matters is not understanding God in abstract, intellectual terms but, rather, entering into a relationship with him. Such a relationship, he believed, is possible only when we establish genuine relationships with one another.”
“We tend to treat the people and the world around us as things to be used for our benefit. Without this mind-set, which Buber called ‘I-It,’ there would be no science, economics, or politics. But, the more we engage in such thinking, the farther we drift from ‘I-You,’ his term for addressing other people directly as partners in dialogue and relationship.”
“Buber was born in 1878 in Vienna. The course of his life was changed when he was three years old, when his mother ran away with a Russian officer, leaving without saying goodbye to her son. Mendes-Flohr [author of a recent biography of Buber] emphasizes that this early loss left Buber with a lifelong feeling of abandonment, which in turn fed and shaped his religious longings. The God he describes in his work is neither a stern lawgiver nor a merciful redeemer but a close presence to whom we can always turn for intimacy.”
“Buber drew a distinction between religion — a body of received beliefs and rituals — and what he called ‘religiosity,’ the molten spiritual core from which religions are born. Traditional Judaism held that living according to law was itself a source and an expression of spiritual fervor. … ‘Once religious rites and dogmas have become so rigid that religiosity cannot move them or no longer wants to comply with them, religion becomes uncreative and therefore untrue,’ he wrote.”
“What twentieth-century Judaism needed, Buber believed, was to find inspiration in the moments of its history when the divine spoke directly to the people. In his view, three such moments were supremely important. One was the age of the Biblical prophets, who preached divine justice against the backsliding of the people and the arrogance of the powerful. Another was the birth of Hasidism, in the eighteenth century, which used a fervent democratic mysticism to wrest authority away from Judaism’s learned élite.”
“The third of Buber’s Jewish inspirations was the most surprising: the teachings of Jesus. Buber held that it was a mistake to see Jesus as the founder of a new Christian religion. He was, rather, a quintessentially Jewish teacher, whose moral passion and poetic creativity made him an heir to Isaiah and to Jeremiah. In Buber’s view, the core of Jesus’ teaching was that ‘God wants to be realized within the world and its worldliness through their purification and perfection.’”
Q: Do the insights of Martin Buber ring true for you?
