Turning to the Other. Donovan D. Johnson

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СКАЧАТЬ spirituality of the Baal-Shem-Tov in his 1928 introduction to the great zaddik’s testament. It is

a realistic and active mysticism, a mysticism for which the world is not an illusion from which man must turn away in order to reach true being, but the reality between God and him in which reciprocity manifests itself . . . . [This mysticism] preserves the immediacy of the relation, guards the concreteness of the absolute and demands the involvement of the whole being; one can . . . also call it religion for just the same reason. Its true English name is perhaps: presentness.10

      It is indisputable that Buber’s thinking evolved and was shaped in part by the historical events of his lifetime. Yet dividing a person’s lifetime of thinking into phases, like dividing history into periods, imposes a structure from outside a person’s actual lived experience and oversimplifies a complex process. It can obscure as much as it reveals. For an adequate interpretation, it is as important to see the continuities in a person’s ways of thinking as it is to see the discontinuities. From start to finish, the great nourishing ground of Buber’s thinking, the aquifer of culture that he drew on, was his dual German-Jewish heritage.

The degree to which I and Thou is a Jewish work has been a matter of debate. One interpreter even wrote a book to advance the thesis that I and Thou is a thoroughly Jewish work.11 Buber’s interpreters have often responded to his dual heritage by dividing his works between his European-based “universal” writings and his Jewish-biblical writings. Yet as a German Jew, Buber drew on both parts of his dual heritage, both from the Judaism of Eastern Europe’s Hasidic villages and from the philosophical discourse of the German-speaking universities. After pulling back from his early Zionist activism and undertaking a five-year period of intense immersion in Hasidic studies, Buber spent the years leading up to World War I contextualizing Judaism and defining its spirituality while developing his “universalistic,” that is, nonsectarian, “philosophy of realization.”12 In this period both aspects of his work, his Judaism and his universalism, played off each other in a creative ferment that would be reframed and deepened by the traumas of the war years.

      In a retrospective statement late in his life, Buber himself used the image of the threshold to stake out his position as liminal, as a stance existing in a space between the two cultures:

I have sought, in a lifelong work, to introduce the Hasidic life-teaching to present-day Western man. It has often been suggested to me that I should liberate this teaching from its “confessional limitations,” as people like to put it, and proclaim it as an unfettered teaching of mankind. Taking such a “universal” path would have been for me pure arbitrariness. In order to speak to the world what I have heard, I am not bound to step into the street. I may remain standing in the door of my ancestral house: here too the word that [the teaching] utters does not go astray.13

      Buber’s position is clear: he places his life work at the threshold between the “house” of his ancestral heritage and the “street” of global humanity. From this vantage, he can introduce Hasidic teaching to the modern world. Thus, we can imagine Buber occupying this liminal space, grounded in the riches of his tradition as his voice calls out to address us in our common humanity. In true dialogical fashion, he listens, he hears, and he speaks the word of this teaching to any and all who will listen.

      In a summative essay published near the end of his life, Buber explains that his life’s work is based on a central insight that is at once both Jewish and universal:

Since about 1910 [my understanding of] the central truth of Judaism and Hasidism . . .—on this point, no doubt has touched me during the whole time—has its origin in the immovable central existence of values that in the history of the human spirit and in the uniqueness of every great religion has again and again given rise to those basic attitudes concerning the authentic way of man. Since having reached the maturity of this insight, I have not made use of a filter; I became a filter.14

      To paraphrase Buber here, the central truth of Judaism has its origin in core values that have repeatedly given rise to the authentic way of human life, both throughout the history of the human spirit and in the particularities of every great religion. Buber’s appeal to the image of the center here is at once both Jewish and universal. Following this passage he specifically discusses the teaching stories of Zen Buddhism, Sufism, and Franciscan Christianity alongside those of Hasidism as expressions of this “authentic way of man.” This vision is at once both universal and particular, for it is built on the foundations of Judaism that are at the same time the foundations of authenticity in every great tradition. True to his notion of being, he did not manipulate the filter or nexus between this way and his audience—Martin Buber, the man himself, in his lived life, became that nexus. As he concluded, “I became a filter.”

      Regarding his stance within Judaism, Buber locates himself on the side of Aggadah, the side of stories and images and inspiration, as opposed to Halakha, the side of the law and its interpretation and application. He makes this clear in a passage in “The Holy Way” (1918) where, speaking across the divide between them, he addresses those on the side of Halakha whom he calls “the dogmatists of the law”:

Oh you who are safe and secure, you who take refuge behind the bulwark of the law in order to avoid looking into God’s abyss! Yes, you have solid, well-trodden ground under your feet, whereas we hang suspended over the infinite deep, looking about us. Oh, you heirs and heirs of heirs who have but to exchange the ancient golden coins into crisp new bills, while we, lonely beggars, sit at the street corner and wait for the coming of the One who will help us. Yet we would not want to exchange our giddy insecurity and our untrammeled poverty for your confidence and your riches. . . . To you God is Being who revealed Himself once and never again. But to us He speaks out of the burning bush of the present, and out of the Urim and Tummim of our innermost hearts.15

      In this dialogical passage Buber sets his spiritual thinking apart from that of the rabbis, the traditional systematic interpreters of Torah, identifying his position as an image-oriented, existential one. The foundational story of Moses’ encounter with YHWH becomes existential through being lifted into the burning present, just as the discernment once practiced as divination by means of the Urim and Tummim, the ancient Hebrew oracle objects, now takes place in the immediacy of our innermost hearts.

In a late essay that confirms the meaning of Buber’s Aggadic stance vis à vis the rabbis, he insists the purpose of the giving of the law on Mount Sinai was not to make the covenant people “good” but to lead them “beyond themselves into the sphere of the ‘holy.’ . . . Thus, every moral demand is set forth as one that shall raise the human people to the sphere . . . where the difference between the ethical and the religious is suspended in the breathing-space of the divine.”16 The absolute norm is actually relational; it is given to show the people how to “follow in His way,” that is, how to live “before the face of the Absolute.”17

      In sum, Buber’s complete enculturation in German academic life was part of his identity. Its counterpoint was his spiritual quickening, beginning with his early encounters with the Hasidim in their Central European villages and culminating in his spiritual initiation and his periods of intense study of Hasidic writings (1904–1909, 1919–1921). As a German-Jewish academic, Buber was perfectly equipped to bridge these two realms. Accordingly, the fact remains that one can choose to read I and Thou as a philosophical or sociological work and thus see it as the expression of a universal philosophy of dialogue. At the same time, one can choose to read the book as a theological work and thus see it as the expression of a Jewish religious philosophy.

I believe rather than dividing the development of Buber’s thinking into contrasting periods or categorizing I and Thou as either Jewish or German, it may be more helpful to see his thinking in terms of its continuities and in relation to the crisis periods he underwent. Two crises stand out: first, his response to his rupture with Herzl in 1903, and second, his response to the murder of Landauer in 1919 at the climax of the war period. We will look closely at these two crises in chapter 2 below.18

      2. СКАЧАТЬ