Introduction to New Perspectives on Martin Buber

Introduction: Martin Buber--New Perspectives The thought and writings of Martin Buber (1878-1965) are so widely known that they hardly seem to need any introduction. He was an original thinker, an intellectual who, over the course of a long and productive life, contributed to a wide array of disciplines, ranging from biblical studies to translation theory, from Jewish mysticism to comparative religion, from social philosophy to psychology, and from education to politics. There is hardly a better known Jewish philosopher than Buber, and he ranks among the foremost German language authors of the 20th century. It is precisely because Buber’s writings cover such a breathtaking array of subjects, however, that the longer-term appreciation of his legacy may have been rather muted. To be sure, Buber’s name continues to be widely known. But are his writings still accessible to our students or have they become too cryptic and antiquated in form and content? Are scholarly references to Buber more than polite nods and has his influence not long since been eclipsed by that of other, more contemporary names? And what about the substance of his philosophy of dialogue? While it cannot be denied that Buber’s I and Thou offered spiritual inspiration to many of his readers, does it really provide a sound description of how we relate to other beings, from stones to gods? How conversant was Buber really with the methods of social theory, psychology, education, or religious studies, and are his contributions to research in the fields of biblical studies, hasidism, and other areas still important today? Did he ever outgrow the expressionism of his early renarrations of Hasidic stories, as he asserted later on, and why is it that he is much better known for his problematic earlier writings than for his more carefully annotated later ones? When everything is said and done, was Buber simply a brilliant raconteur, an essayist infatuated with the sound of his own style, a speaker/performer with a knack for theatrical self-inscenation, or was he a scholar in any particular area where he truly mastered the relevant texts and secondary literature and contributed to the discourse of an established academic discipline? Finally, has his utopian or anarchist approach to Zionism any value in the ongoing debates on post-Zionism? Criticism and suspicions of this sort accompanied Buber’s prolific output throughout his long and productive life. His early writings inspired a Jewish renaissance, but eventually his mystical tone rang hollow. I and Thou, the first of his mature writings and the book for which he is world famous, may have appeared “as a Copernican revolution in theology vis-à-vis the scientific-realistic attitude” (J. Bloch) but it could also be chided for having espoused the “oracular tone of false prophets,” striking “a pose that is mitigated neither by wit nor irony” (W. Kaufmann). While Gershom Scholem, whose own waves of awakenings and disenchantments with things Jewish were deeply entangled with the figure and person of Buber, acknowledged that “we [viz. assimilated Jews] have all been Buber’s students” but he also stated that there was not a single one among Buber’s students who did not complain about him and that he was not popular among them. It thus sounds backhanded when Buber is called the “speaker of Judaism for the non-Jews” or “the un-crowned representative of Judaism” (J. Bloch and H. Gordon); for the non-Jews, but not for the Jews. When he negotiated for an appointment at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem--a pivotal cultural institution of the Zionist enterprise that Buber had helped to conceive and that he represented world wide as a member of its board of overseers--he was denied the positions in Bible or religious studies that he coveted since his approach was considered unfit for the treatment of Judaism and his writings were considered insufficiently scholarly for the treatment of religion in general. Buber’s commitment to a Jewish, i.e. biblical humanist ethos, torpedoed his tireless efforts to influence the Zionist movement toward a civilized, conciliatory, respectful, productive, and--as he saw it--realistic attitude toward the Arab natives of Palestine. For Chaim Weitzmann, Buber was a mere esthete who had kindled the fire of his imagination at the Zionist flame. Yet Buber left behind the harvest of a long and productive life. Letters, essays, writings, scholarship, translations, a mystery play, poems, articles, and a large number of people who are still alive who encountered Buber, who were touched by his ability to listen attentively. A man of many projects, of meticulous editorial skills, of the ability to focus on what was at hand, a fighter for biblical moral standards in Jewish political reality. A man of dialogue, insight, linguistic skills, education, erudition: himself his own most accomplished work of creativity and invention. ••• The purpose of this volume is to bring a range of new perspectives to bear on the writings and thought of Martin Buber. The authors include renowned Buber specialists who take a new look at Buber’s legacy as well as younger scholars who work in a variety of academic disciplines and contexts, including biblical studies, religious studies, philosophy, intellectual history, sociology, the study of education, and Jewish thought. Their task was to engage the legacy of Buber in relation to their own respective area of research. The idea was to allow each scholar to speak to an isssue of their own interest and relate it to Buber’s thought and writings. The overall purpose was to explore new perspectives both on Buber himself and on themes and issues on which he had something to say that continues to engage us. The result is intentionally diverse in character. Each author brings his or her particular expertise and perspective to bear. Each subject heading invites for further exploration of Buber’s contribution to the field in question but also raises questions about the discipline or approach as such. Contributions to scholarship on Buber stand next to essays focused on issues of interest to Buber rather than on Buber himself. In other words, this volume features both new perspectives on Buber and Buberian perspectives on a variety of issues of current interest. The fifteen essays are grouped in six parts that, beginning with Part II, roughly proceed in the chronological order of Buber’s work, reflecting shifts in his preoccupation and changes in his orientation, and culminating in contemporary retrospectives. The themes reflected in the six parts represent different approaches to, and perspectives on, Buber’s writings in general. Thus Buber’s early writings, for example, are in one case (ch. 3) subjected to analysis from an aesthetic perspective, in another case (ch. 5) they are subjected to an investigation of philosophical influences, and in yet another case (ch. 10) they are revisited from the perspective of an interest in the transformation of mystical/religious into political language. In keeping with the title, the organization of this volume thus highlights the variety of perspectives represented by the various contributors. Part I provides two preliminary things of a general sort: a biographical survey with a special emphasis on Buber’s Frankfurt years (1916-1937), i.e., on the two decades during which he wrote most of his mature works (Chapter 1: Martin Buber--Vergegenwärtigung seines Lebens), and an argument in favor of considering the academic study of religion as the proper disciplinary context for most of the mature work Buber produced in his Frankfurt years and beyond (Chapter 2: Buber als Religionswissenschaftler). The essays of Part II approach Buber from the perspective of æsthetics. The intellectual historian Asher D. Biemann places Buber’s early contributions to the nascent GermanJewish renaissance movement in the context of a broader debate among Germanspeaking intellectuals who were torn between renaissancism and humanism, the former being represented by Langbehn’s proto-Nazi veneration of Rembrandt and the latter by the magesterial Jacob Burckhardt (Chapter 3: Æsthetic Education in Martin Buber-- Jewish Renaissance and the Artist). Biemann shows Buber shifting from a Nietzscheinspired conception to a more classical conception of renaissance and humanism that he terms Biblical or Hebrew humanism. While Biemann’s essay provides a rich historical and literary context for Buber’s early writings on art, artist, and the Zionist movement as a renaissance of Judaism, Zachary J. Braiterman (Chapter 4: Martin Buber and the Art of Ritual) examines a wide array of Buber’s writings from the perspective of a philosopher of religion with a particular interest in the æsthetics of ritual. By reading Buber for signs of the æsthetic components and aspects of ritual he discovers a deep and sophisticated appreciation, on Buber’s part, of ritual notwithstanding his overt disavowal of the ceremonial laws. In Braiterman’s reading, Buber is able to engage the visible and audible elements of revelation and of religious experience in the form of speech. In the language of his writing on religion, in translation, formulation, expression of affective values Buber displays a sensitivity trained by attention to modernist art and theater. Braiterman traces this attention on Buber’s part from the art nouveaux theater-inspired dialogue Daniel (1913) to the expressionist I and Thou (1923) to the Neue Sachlichkeit of a 1929 essay on “Dialogue” to the dramaturgy employed in the wording utilized in the translation of the ritual parts of the Pentateuch. Biemann and Braiterman thus articulate different aspects of the æsthetic dimension of Buber’s thought and shed light on the peculiarity of the language especially of Buber’s early writings. Both, however, also speak to transitions and shifts in Buber’s language and his increasing preoccupation with Biblical/Hebrew humanism. Part III augments this approach by exploring some of the philosophical perspectives relevant to Buber’s work. Jules Simon takes us to an alternate starting point for an exploration of Buber’s origins, namely his teachers Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel and their impact on what Simon calls Buber’s “philosophy of history” (Chapter 5). While Buber’s attention to the social reality was sharpened by Simmel, his attention to the radically historical condition of human existence was transformed, under Dilthey’s influence, into a tool of comprehensive analysis of all human phenomena. Simon’s interest is not about establishing an influence but in reading Dilthey and Simmel backwards, as it were, from a Buberian perspective. -- The theme of Buberian historicism is further explored in the next chapter where Leora Batnitzky shows that historicism is the condition for Buber’s rejection of the authority of Jewish law and the well-spring of his tireless description of the self as constituted in the radical openness of the between rather than in a timeless essence of any sort. In order to sharpen our understanding of this view, however, Leora Batnitzky analyzes Buber’s position in a systematic juxtaposition with that of Rosenzweig (Chapter 6: Revelation and Neues Denken--Rethinking Buber and Rosenzweig on the Law). Both are committed to the recognition of a fundamental historicity of human existence, i.e., to the absence of a trans-historical truth. But while Buber is committed to an ontological historicism similar to Heidegger’s, Rosenzweig is committed to a hermeneutical historicism similar to Gadamer’s. Using a few suggestive hints offered by Leo Strauss, Batnitzky argues that the difference in their respective historicist commitments allows to determine the philosophical reason for their radically different attitude toward the law. Strauss saw that while Buber’s (and Heidegger’s) “negative anthropology” draws the self into a position of vulnerability and dependence on the other, Rosenzweig’s concept of revelation retrieves an absolute point of orientation which is not, contrary to common interpretations of Rosenzweig, revelation itself but rather the self in its hermeneutic relation to the commanding voice of the past. Batnitzky comes to the surprising conclusion that Buber is more thoroughly committed to the uncomfortable challenges of historicism than Rosenzweig who tends to obfuscate the difference between his own, modernist, retrieval of revelation and revelation in a premodern or classical sense. Last in Part III, but not least, Andrea Poma offers deliberations on Buber’s struggle with the problem of evil (Chapter 7: Unity of the Heart and Scattered Self: A Postmodern Reading of Buber's Doctrine of Evil). In order to appreciate the importance of the problem of evil in Buber’s thought, one need only recall that I and Thou had hardly been published when Buber disowned it because, as he wrote in a letter to Rosenzweig of March 22, 1923, he felt as remote from it as he did from his earlier writings when he wrote it. Instead of building on it and, as he had hitherto planned, making I and Thou the prolegomena of a multi-volume opus on religion, he dismissed it and began instead to immerse himself in what was to become one of his major preoccupations for the next two decades, namely, the problem of evil. His work on this issue coalesces in Gog and Magog, first published in Hebrew in 1941/42 (in installments in Davar, the newspaper of the Histadrut).1 Poma reminds us of the main features of Buber’s approach to evil which steers clear of two common possibilities that, to Buber, seem unacceptable: the hypostatization of evil and its opposite, i.e. its psychologization. In keeping with his commitment to historicism, but with full attention to its disconcerting implications, Buber denies that we have access to an absolute knowledge of Good or Evil. In Poma’s words, “According to Buber, only God may perceive the antithetical character of Good and Evil as an objective polarity.” From the human perspective (without access to the angelic view of apocalypticism), on the other hand, good and evil appear as opposites only in particular situations, i.e., as the contradictory impulses flooding us in moments of ethical decision making. The psychological difference between good and evil emerges from the effect of the decision on the soul and its unification: “While Evil cannot be accomplished with one’s entire soul, the Good can only be accomplished with one’s entire soul.” But such an effect can only be achieved by anticipating the good as affecting not just oneself or as being sought for one’s own sake but in its effect on others. This asserts the transcending of the good from the psychological to the ethical and the messianic. The unification of the soul, or the gathering of the scattered self, is the indication, not the goal of the Good, or else it were to turn evil. Poma shows how both Buber’s later renditions of hasidic stories and his translation of Scripture are permeated with the struggle for a “unity of the heart:” not as an actual accomplishment but as an absence, a desire, as something coming at us from the future. If Chapters 2 through 7 acquaint the reader with the aesthetic sensitivity and philosophically reflected historicism that Buber brought to bear on his early Zionist, Jewish, and philosophical writings, the essays of Part IV turn our attention to Buber’s mature work where his well-honed literary abilities found a new, perhaps their most important, sujet in Scripture. Scripture appears in Buber’s writings only after I and Thou, when Buber begins his famed collaboration with Rosenzweig on translating the Bible. Only then does he begin to delve into the details of biblical text and the possibilities of its interpretation. The resulting engagement takes place on several levels and in a number of ways, involving the sounds of the letters and syllables, the analysis of wording, the meanings generated by the canonical flow of narrative and poetry, and the resulting testimony to Israel’s lived and living historical experience. To render all this present, Buber had to raise the question how such rendering present could possibly be accomplished. Our section on “Biblical Perspectives” thus appropriately begins with an essay on Buber’s approach to the translation of Scripture (Chapter 8: The possibility of a Verdeutschung of Scripture). Ilaria Bertone knowledgeably reminds us of the equal attention Buber brought to the fundamental theoretical questions and to the detailed work of translation. His goal: the representation of miqra--the paradoxically oral Scripture--the making audible of its Hebrew voice in the target language. To make this encounter possible, Scripture must be deprived of its patina, it must appear in its very foreignness in order for the reader to be able to shed his or her false sense of familiarity. This “fundamentally unfulfillable task” Buber undertakes in the service of modern man who has been deprived of meaningful access to biblical faith. Bertone aptly concludes with the realization that the accomplishment is less in the resulting translation than in the performance of the act itself, and in the path it opens. -- While Ilaria Bertone engages Buber’s translation, Gesine Palmer turns to Buber as an interpreter of Scripture (Chapter 9: Some Thoughts on Surrender: Martin Buber and the Book of Job). In order to do so, Palmer offers her own reading, in critical conversation with Buber and others, of the well-known end of the Book of Job. The theme of suffering and its causes is at the center of the Book of Job, and here, too, evil is considered from the perspective of human response. In Palmer’s reading the Book of Job radicalizes this question by suggesting not one but four responses that culminate in a change not of the human attitude toward suffering but of the divine attitude toward the human. The human protagonist of the tale is forced to recognize the divine as the source of evil, surely a disconcerting perspective but not yet the end of the tale. While--after the Holocaust-- Buber interprets Job as someone who surrenders and holds out for a future of uncertain provenance, but nevertheless in faith, Palmer regards Job’s gesture as one not of faith but of resignation; by resting his case he resigns himself and turns away, leaving God, or the torturer, to himself. The realization of the fact that God himself is the author of the unjustified brutality suffered by Job is Palmer’s response to Buber’s flirtation with the concept of God as real. Part V turns to political perspectives. From his first appearance on the Zionist scene in the days of Herzl and Nordau to his engagement for a bi-national state in Palestine and his work for Jewish Arab cooperation in Israel, Buber was a political activist. Given the course of modern Jewish and Zionist history, one cannot but feel that, had Buber not existed, he would have had to be invented; not because he was always right but because he was big enough to recognize his mistakes and learn from them. Yossef Schwartz (Chapter 10: Martin Buber, Gustav Landauer, and the Politicization of the Mystical) revisits the political rhetoric of the early Buber and contextualizes it within the early 20th-century trend to infuse the political with religious overtones and to politicize the mystical. This blurring of the boundaries between secular concerns and sacred traditions colored not just the Jewish political renaissance but characterizes the entire youth movement, particularly in Germany. (Hence also the great ease with which the early Buber makes Jewish and non-Jewish concerns mutually translatable since everything is suffused in the same political spirituality, in expressions of the same lebensphilosophisch rhetoric.) In order to determine the specific profile of Buber’s politicization of the mystical, Schwartz contrasts it with similar expressions of political theology in Simmel and Landauer. Despite all changes in other respects, according to Schwartz, Buber’s Jewish political orientation is consistently fuelled by a “basic religious motivation.” Schwartz thus suggests that, from a theological political perspective, Buber’s work may be more unified than it has hitherto been considered. -- A similarly unified impression, but from a different perspective, is reflected in Paul Mendes-Flohr’s tour de force through the entire Buberian œuvre with a view to the meaning and function of the concept of utopian politics (Chapter 11: The Desert Within and Social Renewal--Martin Buber’s Vision of Utopia). True to Buber’s social-psychological perspective, MendesFlohr locates the need for utopia in the human heart, a “desert within,” yearning to emerge from its isolation. The conditions of modern urban life, diagnosed as far back as Ferdinand Tönnies, continue to make the fulfillment of the need for community difficult, allowing us to realize the perennial value and appeal of Buber’s utopian thought. In contrast to more recent forms of spiritual and therapeutical healing that focus on the individual Buber’s utopianism is driven by the desire for communion with others that he considers the ideal of all political cooperation. This emergence from solipsism and insistence on political action is driven by Buber’s insight into the sociality of the human being, the core insight of the philosophy of dialogue. Utopianism thus means that it matters in what kind of situations we live and whether we strive for their transformation. In this respect, Buber’s political thought appears as the attempt to rescue the concept of utopia from the “dung-heap to which the Marxists had sought to dispose of it.” -- Buber’s critique of Marx is further explored, and reaffirmed as valid, in Judith Buber Agassi’s lucid and concise contribution to this volume (Chapter 12). In Buber Agassi’s view, Martin Buber was and remained a religious socialist and a social theorist of communalism, a term coined by Landauer. In contrast to Marxist theory which Buber saw “as voiding the human ability to be a moral force” and in contrast to Marxist trust in state power to promote the common good Buber remained a committed anarchist in his distrust of the state and his focus, instead, on the development of communal and communitarian organization and cooperation. Looking forward to Chapter 13, one might add that Buber Agassi’s exploration of Buber’s critique of Marxism sheds considerable light on Buber’s critique of Zionist politics. It is trust in the state and its force that revealed the pursuit of a Jewish state as potentially destructive to the goals of Zionism as defined by Buber. Part VI offers three contemporary retrospectives on the legacy of Martin Buber. Joseph Agassi, speaking with the authority of someone who knew Buber personally during his final years, offers a retrospective of Buber’s Zionism in light of the current tensions inherent in Israeli society and in the self-definition of the Jewish State. He places Buber’s brand of spiritual Zionism within the range of Zionist philosophies and examines this utopian political position in its usefulness for today (Ch. 13: The Legacy of Martin Buber For an Israeli Society After Zionism). While politically as inopportune as ever, Buber’s thought does not seem to have lost any of its relevance and challenge. Agassi also points out some of the obstactles inherent in Buber’s communalist thought to their realization in Israeli society, such as his denial of the modern distinction between Jewish nationality and Jewish religious commitment in the Buberian sense of the phrase, a distinction that would be necessary to achieve Buber’s declared goal of equality of all citizens in a single, integrated state, a state driven by the communalist ethos Buber derived from Scripture. -In Micha Brumlik’s essay, the anthropological and theological dimensions of Buber’s thought are examined from the perspective of Adorno’s critique of Buber (Chapter 14). As Brumlik reminds us, Adorno thought little of Buber and less of his works. Cutting through the swath of witty invective Adorno heaped on Buber, Brumlik retrieves and examines the substantive charges concerning Buber’s theory of interhuman relations and concerning his religious thought. With regard to the former, Adorno believed that Buber’s social theory was irrational and that it unduly objectified certain relations into a “micro-sociology.” With regard to the latter he believed that Buber’s theory of religion was unduly “affirmative” and lost the main element of theology, i.e., the transcendent character of hope for redemption. With respect to the first (anthropological) charge, Brumlik tries to defend Buber by strengthening his case by means of references to contemporary interaction theory yet, in the end, he is compelled to concede that Buber unduly reifies and presupposes as real what interaction can only aim for. In this respect, Brumlik concludes, Adorno’s critique is valid. With respect to the second (theological) charge, Brumlik points out that Adorno indiscriminately levels it against all existentialists, including Buber, namely, that they derive their concept of existence from a Kierkegaardian Christological doctrine. In defense of Buber Brumlik points to Buber’s own critique of Kierkegaard and Existentialism--Buber’s Frage an den Einzelnen (1936) is a reckoning with Gogarten--which is virtually identical with Adorno’s. With respect to the overall theological difference between Buber and Adorno, Brumlik suggests that we are dealing with two fundamentally different types of theology: one materialist and negative, the other one language-based and positive, finding an experience of the divine in the “intersubjective interweaving of language.”-- Finally, Chapter 15 offers a comprehensive review of Buber’s legacy by Steven T. Katz. In this paper, Katz uses the occasion to revisit and revise some of his own highly influential earlier positions on Buber. Notes to the Introduction 1 Cf. Willy Schottroff, Martin Buber an der Universität Frankfurt am Main (1923-1933), in Dieter Stoodt (Hg.), Martin Buber - Erich Foerster - Paul Tillich: Evangelische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie an der Universität Frankfurt a. M. 1914 bis 1933, Frankfurt am Main, Bern, New York, Paris: Lang, 1990, 81-84 and notes 40-49 on pp. 113-14.