Turning to the Other. Donovan D. Johnson

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СКАЧАТЬ through the experiences of his watershed years.147 This was the completion of his initiation, his struggle to win “a relationship to being . . . only after long and diverse but always productive journeys through decisive personal experiences.”148 This process brought him “from a timeless and languageless sphere into the sphere of the moment,” the immediacy of dialogical existence, “where between one tick of the clock and the next everything depends on perceiving what is being said to one, now, in one of the innumerable languages of life, and on answering in a language appropriate to the situation.”149 This completion of his transformation brought forward the imperative to proclaim it: “I stood under the duty to insert the framework of the decisive experiences that I had at that time [1914–1919] into the human inheritance of thought.”150 Buber continues: “[M]y communication . . . had to relate the unique and particular to the ‘general,’ to what is discoverable by every man in his own existence. . . . I am convinced that it happened not otherwise with all the philosophers loved and honored by me . . . after they had completed the transformation [i.e., their spiritual initiation].”151 With these words Buber may have had Plato’s famous passage on initiation in mind:

There is no writing of mine about these matters, nor will there ever be. For this knowledge is not something that can be put into words like other studies. Acquaintance with it must come rather after a long-continued intercourse between teacher and student in joint pursuit of the subject, when, suddenly, like a blaze kindled by a leaping spark, it is born in the soul and at once nourishes itself.152

With Platonic initiation, as with Buber’s, the knowledge that is transmitted cannot be expressed in words. This knowing comes through long, focused effort and it manifests itself as “a leaping spark” which goes from master to initiate, a flame which becomes self-sustaining in the soul of the initiate. In this regard, Buber’s prescribed method of spiritual reading as the reader’s entering into dialogue with a master was autobiographical.153

The grounds of Buber’s initiation lay in the life of the Baal-Shem-Tov, the man whose life was a vehicle for transmitting the Hasidic teaching to his disciples so they could become his successors. Buber shows the moment of transmission in the story of Rabbi Susya and his disciples on a day between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur: “He raised his eyes and heart to heaven and freed himself from all corporeal bonds. Looking at him awakened in one of the disciples the impulse to the turning, and the tears rushed down his face; and as from a burning ember the neighboring coals begin to glow, so the flame of the turning came over one man after another.”154 The transmission occurred when the zaddik’s gesture awakened a spontaneous impulse to teshuvah, turning, and the flame jumped from the master to his disciples. Buber comments: “It is this kind of influence that I have pointed to as that handing on of the mystery that is above words.”155

According to Buber, the spiritual structure of the Hasidic movement “was founded upon the handing on of the kernel of the teaching from teacher to disciple, but not as if something not accessible to everyone was transmitted to him, but because in the atmosphere of the master, in the spontaneous working of his being, the inexpressible How descended swinging and creating.”156 This initiatory transmission of the depths of life in the spirit transcended words, yet words were Buber’s medium. His challenge was to turn the verbal medium into a vehicle for that which transcends it. The rhetorical tools that he found, invented, and applied were thus necessarily based on indirect communication. These tools are summed up in two metaphors: “bearing witness” and “pointing.” We now turn to consider Buber’s task to transmit his spiritual awakening to others and his very deliberate use of these tools to fulfill it.

      35. Grete Schaeder wrote of Buber’s emergence as a spiritual teacher as “his gradual initiation into the being-tradition of the zaddik.” See Schaeder, Hebrew Humanism, 300–9.

      36. Henderson, Thresholds of Initiation; see also Kirsch et al., Initiation.

      37. Toynbee and Myers, Study of History, 3:248–77.

      38. “Study of History,” 130.

      39. Ellenberger, Discovery of the Unconscious.

      40. Ellenberger, “Maladie Créatrice,” 330–32.

      41. Ellenberger, “Maladie Créatrice,” 329.

      42. Eliade, quoted in Wasserstrom, Religion after Religion, 42.

      43. Eliade, quoted in Wasserstrom, Religion After Religion, 41–42 (my translation).

      44. Teshuvah, which lies at the core of the vision of I and Thou, will be examined in detail in chapter 8 below, pages 194–208.

      45. Buber, “Postscript,” 128 (translation modified, emphasis added).

      46. Buber, I and Thou, §14.

      47. Buber, “How and Why,” 205–19.

      48. Buber, “How and Why,” 208.

      49. Buber, “How and Why,” 213, 212.

      50. Buber, “How and Why,” 215, quoting Rosenzweig, “Scripture and Luther,” 59.

      51. Buber, “Replies to My Critics,” 689.

      52. Buber, “Replies to My Critics,” 689.

      53. Buber, “Foreword,” xv.

      54. Buber, “Foreword,” xvi.

      55. Friedman, Martin Buber’s Life and Work, 1:61–62.

      56. Buber, “Autobiographical Fragments,” 16–19.

      57. Herzl died of heart disease less than a year after this event.

      58. Martin Buber to Paula Winkler, August 25, 1903, in Buber, Letters, 100 (emphasis added).

      59. СКАЧАТЬ