Turning to the Other. Donovan D. Johnson

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СКАЧАТЬ home to Berlin from the Congress, withdrew from his public involvements, and turned inward in order to more deeply pursue his spiritual roots. As he later explained: “At twenty-six, I withdrew myself for five years from activity in the Zionist party, from writing articles and giving speeches, and retired into the stillness; I gathered, not without difficulty, the scattered, partly missing [Hasidic] literature, and I immersed myself in it, discovering mysterious land after mysterious land.”62

This period of withdrawal and study was motivated by his desire to know Judaism with “the immediate knowing, the eye-to-eye knowing of the people in its creative primal hours.”63 Grete Schaeder observed that it was through these years of intensive focus and study that Buber “attained the personal ‘reality’ of a great Jewish teacher.”64

Thus, it was that in 1904, when he was twenty-six, Buber underwent a spontaneous spiritual initiation. It was the most intense spiritual encounter of his life, his supreme meeting with the eternal Thou. He wrote an account of this event in 1918, confirming its continuing significance for him at the end of the war years.65 According to this account, when he was a student and had been pulled in different directions by the lure of modern European culture, “I had neglected my Hebrew, which had become close to my heart as a boy.”66 Yet in his mid-twenties he returned to Hebrew afresh, penetrating to its deeper meaning, “which cannot be adequately translated, at least not into any Western language.”67 He spent time reading in Hebrew,

at first again and again repelled by the brittle, awkward, unshapely material. Gradually overcoming this strangeness, I began discovering its character and seeing its essence with growing reverence. Then one day I opened the Tzava’at Harivash, [The Testament of Rabbi Israel Baal-Shem, a collection of the sayings of Israel ben Eliezer, the founder of Hasidism] and these words flashed out at me: “May he completely grasp the nature of intentness [German Eifer, Hebrew zerizut]. May he raise himself up from his sleep in intentness, for he has become set apart and has become another person and is worthy to create/testify [zeugen] and has taken on the quality of the Holy One, blessed be He, when He created [erzeugte] His world.”68

      When Buber read these words that day, it was as if the voice of the master was calling out to Buber as his listener, inviting him to a life of transformation.

      Buber’s spiritual initiation in this encounter begins with an invitation. As part of this invitation, the master names the characteristics of the transformed life. In response to the master’s call, the person becomes his intentness, embodying teshuvah, the turning of one’s whole being to God. This moment is an awakening, a making holy, a “becoming another.” In this transformation, he takes on the nature of the Creator at the moment of creation: he becomes “worthy to create” as a co-creator, a partner with God the Creator, and to testify to the Presence. Both the nature and the power of the person are taken to a new level.

Buber later featured this passage written by the Baal-Shem-Tov in his translation of selections from the Testament which he published under the title “The Baal-Shem-Tov’s Instruction in Intercourse with God,”69 and he added this note on zerizut, “fervor,” or “the state of intentness”: “[It] is the divine attribute of ‘readiness,’ the power to effect what is allotted to one who is created in the image of God. One awakens each morning . . . in the pure state of likeness to God, and on each morning it is up to him, as it was in the primal time, whether he will realize or undercut what has been allotted to him.”70 This intentness, this “readiness to realize,” means standing like a hair trigger before the immediate circumstances one is allotted as a being in the image of God. This is teshuvah.

      In Buber’s account of his initiatory experience, he next describes the impact of this call, how the Baal-Shem-Tov’s words deeply engaged his whole being in that moment of reading:

Then it was that, overwhelmed in that instant, I experienced the Hasidic soul. The primally Jewish came upon me, in the darkness of exile flowering to new conscious expression: the image of God in man, grasped as action, as becoming, as task. And this primal Jewish reality was a primal human reality, the substance of human religiosity. Judaism as religiosity, as “piety,” as Hasidut opened to me then. The image out of my childhood, the memory of the zaddik and his community, rose up and illumined me: I understood the idea of the perfect man [der vollkommene Mensch, “the fully realized, whole person”]. And I became inwardly aware of the call to proclaim it to the world.71

With these words Buber explains what transpired with him: the transformation he was reading about widened to include him. In an instant he was overcome with the sense that his soul had become the Hasidic soul. His Jewish identity was quickened as that Hasidic soul, the primal essence of Judaism, came over him: he became conscious of the image of God in himself, not as an entity but as a dynamism: “as action, as becoming, as task.” Yet, he sensed this reality as at once both Jewish and universal, as the quiddity that he calls “religiosity.”72 He uses a series of synonyms which build as intensifiers, the last shifting into Hebrew: Hasidut. At this point, as he entered into the transformation spoken of by the master, he saw into the meaning of a vivid memory that arose for him from his childhood visits to Hasidic villages, that of the zaddik, the spiritual leader, in the midst of his community, as the fully realized, whole person. Buber’s sense of self was engulfed in the sense of Jewish spirituality that came over him. For him this reality became concrete in the figure of the zaddik. As a result, this visionary moment of encounter became his call to bear witness to the human encounter with the eternal Thou before the world.73

This account of Buber’s spiritual initiation shows two things: first, that his tradition-specific spiritual grounding in Hasidism is at one with the universal in his spiritual experience,74 and second, it shows that from the beginning he sensed an imperative to bear witness to the spiritual reality to which he at that moment first awakened.

The elements of this event became the seeds which bore fruit in his writing of I and Thou sixteen years later. First, he sensed himself as “created in the image of God” and he took this reality not as static ontology but as dynamic imperative—“as deed, as becoming, as task.” At the same time, he saw this reality as at once both specific to Judaism, “primal Jewish reality,” and universal, “a primal human reality, the substance of human religiousness.” As he writes it, the vision of the zaddik, the Hasidic master, as perfected or completed human being (or “central man,” the term Buber used in “The Teaching of the Tao”75) opened to him at that moment—both as a goal to attain and as a message to proclaim. Accordingly, this initiatory encounter set Buber on the path of the spiritual life; the imperative to proclaim to others the possibility of such an encounter would eventuate in the means to do so, the language that came to him to express it in I and Thou, in the years ahead. This event, and the language he used to express it in this account in 1918, is strongly echoed in a unique and striking first-person paragraph at the heart of I and Thou,76 and it became the foundation for a major passage expounding Buber’s concept of revelation at the climax of the book.77

Maurice Friedman makes it clear: this account of his spiritual initiation as a Hasid marks “one of the truly decisive moments in Buber’s life. . . . The combination of summons and sending, of revelation and mission, to which Buber later pointed in I and Thou, came for Buber as a single moment of meeting.”78 Buber surely has this moment in mind when he refers to the “supreme encounter” in I and Thou.79 From this time onward this moment stands as the spiritual reference point for Buber on the path that becomes his life of faithfulness.

In this event, reading has become a catalyst of spiritual awakening for Buber, a transforming moment of revelation. In “The Foundation Stone” (1943), his essay on the founding of Hasidism, he returns to this pivotal moment and explains its dynamics, beginning with an exhortation to his readers to “listen” to the text: “Only listen to a saying such as this which made me, over forty years ago, into a Hasid of the Baal-Shem-Tov: ‘He takes unto himself the quality of fervor. . . .’” Buber continues, “Who before the Baal-Shem-Tov . . . has spoken to us thus? I say: to us, for this is what is decisive: he who has heard him feels as though his speech were addressed to him.”80 Here Buber returns СКАЧАТЬ