Turning to the Other. Donovan D. Johnson

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СКАЧАТЬ just as when one person addresses another as Thou. He goes on to disavow that the master’s teaching is “a teaching enclosed in itself, high above our existence, [transmitting] only a ray from the higher worlds, nor is it merely an instruction that shows our soul the path of ascent.”81 Instead, the teaching, as the master’s voice coming by means of the text, “is a help for our concrete life—our life itself is uplifted through the speech directed to us if we listen to it. Reality calls forth reality; the reality of a man who has lived in intercourse [Umgang] with the reality of being in its fullness awakens the reality in us and helps us to live in intercourse with the reality of being in its fullness.”82 This is spiritual transmission, the passing of spiritual quickening from master to student.

This method of reading as turning to a text as Thou involves a kind of mental ascesis. In the introduction to his translation of selections from the Testament of Rabbi Israel Baal-Shem, Buber asserts, “If one really wishes to take in the words of the Baal-Shem in this text, one will do well to forget all that one knows of history and all that one imagines one knows of mysticism and, reading, hearken to a human voice that speaks here and now to those who here and now read.”83 With these words Buber expresses the turn from I-It to I-Thou, the opening of oneself to a text as to a voice that addresses one as Thou.

In an essay titled “Dialogue,” which Buber published in 1929 to clarify the central concepts of I and Thou, he presents a generic account of transformation that does not refer explicitly to his own initiation but yet applies to it. This passage refers to initiation, the initiation that breaks through stereotypes to open the initiate up to the immediacy of dialogue between the above and the below. This step in the process of initiation takes place as “that decisive hour of personal existence when we had to forget everything we imagined we knew of God, when we dared to keep nothing handed down or learned or self-contrived, no shred of knowledge, and were plunged into the night.”84 This forgetting, this letting go of perceptions, is the core of the stripping process the initiate must undergo in order to approach the Face. The plunge into the night is the death that is the prerequisite for the spiritual birth that follows. Buber’s next words mark this rebirth and suggest the subject of consciousness that comes with it: “When we rise out of [the night] into the new life and there begin to receive the signs, what can we know of that which—of him who gives the signs?”85 In the position of the twice-born we can know “only what we experience . . . from the signs themselves. If we name the speaker of this speech God, then it is always the God of a moment.”86 Yet through a process of learning to listen, to read, to interpret, “out of the givers of the signs, the speakers of the words in lived life, out of the moment Gods there arises for us with a single identity the Lord of the voice, the One.”87

In this process of learning to perceive the One, each event of lived experience can come to be taken as another moment in the divine-human dialogue. Such perceiving became the substance of Buber’s mature vision, which he voiced repeatedly as universally dialogical: “God speaks to man in the things and beings that He sends him in life; man answers through his actions in relation to just these things and beings.”88 Every moment of existence has become full as a divine message, calling for a full human response.

While Buber calls his spiritual encounter through reading a “conversion to Hasidism”—this encounter “made me . . . into a Hasid of the Baal-Shem-Tov”89—he makes clear, given his cultural orientation, he could not become a traditional Hasid:

I knew from the beginning that Hasidism was not a teaching which was realized by its adherents in this or that measure, but a way of life, to which the teaching provided the indispensable commentary. But . . . I could not become a Hasid. It would have been an impermissible masquerading had I taken on the Hasidic manner of life—I who had a wholly other relation to Jewish tradition. . . . It was necessary, rather, to take into my own existence as much as I actually could of what had been truly exemplified for me there, that is to say, of the realization of that dialogue with being whose possibility my thought had shown me.90

      As a result of the encounter, he fulfills his legacy in a new way. He reconstructs both the Hasidic tradition as it came down to him and his own life in response to it as a revelation of authentically relating to being.

      As part of the overall transformation taking place in the young Buber, he continued to focus on the intense study of Hasidism for the next five years, thus building a foundation for his lifelong work as an interpreter and disseminator of the spiritual world of the Hasidim. In all of this work he was inspired by his image of the zaddik as the completed person, as the ideal holy human being, the true helper of mankind.

      Thus, Buber’s sense of the summons to proclaim the spiritual life that began with his spiritual initiation is what he carried through to fullness in his writing of I and Thou, as he attests in his postscript:

When I drafted the first sketch of this book . . . I was impelled by an inward necessity. A vision which had come to me again and again since my youth, and which had been clouded over again and again, had now reached steady clarity. This clarity was so manifestly suprapersonal in its nature that I at once knew I had to bear witness to it. Some time after I had received the right word as well, and could write the book again in its final form.91

Beginning then and continuing through his second period of withdrawal, Buber’s vision came to steady clarity and he could present it in his book. The nature of this vision was such that “I knew at once that I had to bear witness to it.” Elsewhere he confirms the direct connection between the “openings” that came to him and the imperative to bear witness to them: “Where I may draw out of primal depths that have opened to me as he who I am, I must acknowledge it.”92 Moreover, the work of proclaiming the vision became central to his existence: “I have . . . let myself be led . . . again and again by the task that has overcome me in the midst of life and will no longer let me go. [My] ‘security’ stands in the command of the task alone.”93

      This first period of withdrawal was his spiritual initiation. It was the second, more profound, crisis of loss, the murder of Buber’s friend Gustav Landauer, that brought his spiritual development to its full expression ten years later. This second period of withdrawal was a creative struggle or “illness,” to use Ellenberger’s word, through which Buber forged the tools that were adequate to express his spiritual vision.

      3. Buber’s Second Period of Withdrawal: His “Creative Illness”

      Buber had his life-changing spiritual awakening in 1904 but, as we have seen, for a long time he lacked the language with which to carry out its mandate to bear witness to it in the world. His crisis of loss at the murder of Landauer and the resulting period of withdrawal completed his equipping for this task.

      I and Thou is the product of an intense period in Buber’s life, the period that capped off what Buber marked as the great watershed in his intellectual development. I see this period as the second, culminating phase in which Buber’s initiation into Hasidic spirituality comes to fruition in his work as a witness to it. Writing in retrospect near the end of his life, Buber summed up the transformative experience of the years around the First World War as having a single impact, one to which he sensed he had a responsibility to bear witness:

All the experiences of being that I had during the years 1912–1919 became present to me in growing measure as one great experience of faith. By this is meant an experience that transports a person in all his component parts, his capacity for thought certainly included, so that, all the doors springing open, the storm blows through all the chambers. . . . I have . . . no doctrine . . . to offer. I must only witness for that meeting in which all meetings with others are grounded . . . .94

      Like the biblical Job in his confrontation with the whirlwind, Buber withstood the stormy blast of those years, the blast that sifted his whole being. This blast reached its climax with the death of Landauer and the impact of this death on Buber. In the first years of grieving following his loss of Landauer, Buber was able to move through his initial shock and disorientation to a deeper sensitivity to dialogue СКАЧАТЬ