Buber’s Jewishness and Buber’s Judaism
Why do we ask the question of Buber’s Jewishness? His greatest preoccupation was the classic Jewish one: the encounter between man and God in the concrete human situation. The sources of his inspiration were the Bible and the literature of the Chassidim. To say that we ask because his influence has been more noticeable amongst non-Jewish than amongst Jewish thinkers itself forces us again to ask: why should this have been so?
In a brief article, we must give the simple and simplifying answer. In this case, at least there is a mitigating factor. We owe Buber the response that he consistently demanded and gave: the response of relationship, of subjectivity. And my own answer must be: that we fail to find in Buber what must be the heart of any Jewish writing that is to enter and animate the lived actuality of Jewish life – the Torah as law, the halakhah.
Gershom Scholem called Buber, a “religious anarchist.” And it was to this that he attributed the distance between Buber’s vision of Chassidism and the reality of Chassidic life: “His doctrine is religious anarchism, which does not acknowledge any teaching about what should be done but puts the whole emphasis on intensity, on how whatever one does is done. Therefore, references to the Torah and the Commandments, which to the Chassidim meant everything, become extremely nebulous in Buber’s presentation.”1Gershom Scholem, “Martin Buber’s Hasidism: A Critique,” in Judah Goldin (ed.), The Jewish Expression, New York: Bantam Books, 1970, 412.
It is a simplistic and yet perhaps enlightening comparison, to contrast the first and last great thinkers of post-emancipation German Jewry: Mendelssohn and Buber. For Mendelssohn, the content of revelation was law. Law constituted the particularity of Judaism. This proposition served for him as the decisive liberation of the Jewish mind from dogma, from the idea of revealed truth. It was less the apotheosis of the halakhah than the freeing of the speculative process from constraints of “orthodoxy” that motivated his formulation. But still: it stands. At the distance of a universe from Buber, for whom revelation hovers above and beyond the laws in which it was expressed, and the historical moment at which it took place. “Revelation is nothing else than the relation between giving and receiving.”2“The Faith of Judaism” in Martin Buber, Israel and the World: Essays in a Time of Crisis, New York: Schocken Books, 1965, 27. “The law is not thrust upon man; it rests deep within him, to waken when the call comes.”3“Teaching and Deed,” in Israel and the World, 142. Revelation has no content. It is a dimension. “My own belief in revelation…does not mean that I believe that finished statements about God were handed down from heaven to earth. Rather, it means that human substance is melted by the spiritual fire which visits it, and there now breaks forth from it a word, a statement, which is human in its meaning and form, human conception and human speech, and yet witness to Him who stimulated it and His will.”4“Reply to C.G. Jung” in Martin Buber, Eclipse of God, New York: Harper and Row, 1957, 135.
In a famous dialogue, Rosenzweig challenged him to reassess his view of the law, and at the same time gave a penetrating diagnosis of the source of Buber’s reaction against it:
Is it really Jewish law with which you try to come to terms? and, not succeeding, on which you turn your back? …Is that really Jewish law, the law of millennia, studied and lived, analysed and rhapsodised, the law of the everyday and of the day of death, petty and yet sublime, sober and yet woven with legend…? Is the Law you speak of not rather the Law of the Western orthodoxy of the past century?5Nahum N. Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, New York: Schocken Books, 1970, 237–238.
How – one is tempted to ask – could Buber seriously claim to be an interpreter of “Judaism” given the extremity of his stance? At what point does the Jewishness of his concern with the personal encounter between man and God, touch the Judaism of Mosaic Law?
In attempting an answer, this article takes three approaches: firstly, to set his thought against the background of his distant precursors; secondly, to explore the area of halakhic Judaism which is closest to Buber; and thirdly to see whether at this point of proximity there remains still an unbridgeable gap between them. It deliberately avoids the more familiar portraiture of Buber’s relationship with Chassidism, and chooses instead the seemingly incongruous backdrop of medieval Jewish philosophy, and what he himself once called, “that vexatious Talmud.”6Israel and the World, op. cit., 23.
Judah Halevi: Thou and I
Perhaps the most obvious progenitor of Buber’s thinking is not Chassidic thought, whose theoretical foundations he consistently derided as “gnosis,” but rather Judah Halevi. Time and again in the Kuzari we encounter formulations which, allowing for the cultural chasm between the twelfth and the twentieth centuries, bear an uncanny resemblance to Buber. For I-It and I-Thou, we must read the god of Aristotle and the God of Abraham.7Judah Halevi, Kuzari, 4:16. The one is reached by speculation and cognition, the other by love and faith. Even the two names of God stand, for Halevi, for this dichotomy, one to denote God as the collectivity of forces, the cause of causes, knowable but unknowing, incapable of relationship with man; the other, specifically the proper name of God, belonging to the vocabulary of dialogue and disclosure.8Ibid., 4:1–3, 16. The God of Judaism, known by name, is He who speaks to man, and He to whom man speaks.
Because relationship is central to Halevi, he cannot accept any explanation of the mitzvot in terms of means to an end, causes productive to effects. At least to this extent he would have assented to Buber’s remark that “I and Thou freely confront one another in mutual effect that is neither connected with nor coloured by any causality.” The law, at any rate in its specifically religious parts, is not to be understood in terms external to itself. Each religious act is an encounter with God. This and no other is its Divine meaning. In keeping the Sabbath: “You see what He has conferred on you, as if you had been invited to His table to enjoy His hospitality. You thank Him inwardly and outwardly, and if this joy carries you into singing and dancing, this too is worship and union with the Divine.”9Ibid., 2:50.
It is not as if, after Buber, we can reread Halevi and cast him in the role of religious existentialist. It is rather that the distinctions and emphases that Buber was to make his own are already fully there, explicit and central, in the Kuzari.
But it is precisely here, in the analysis of the religious act, that the two dramatically part company. For Halevi did not regard the Divine-human encounter as a possibility that had no boundaries. To the contrary, he felt that it could occur only given specific preconditions: a particular people, a particular land, and a particular law. He is perhaps the least universalist of all the medieval thinkers The Jewish people, the land of Israel, and the law of Moses – these were the three co-ordinates of the Divine Presence. And we can understand why he should have thought as he did. For him, the essential religious facts were the actual meetings of God and man in time and space. Theology is religious history. And therefore its focus must be Israel and the Jewish people: the stage and the actors of the biblical and messianic historical drama.
Correspondingly, Halevi attached greater significance than most other medieval Jewish philosophers to the precise details of the commands. Since they were not to be understood in human terms but as part of the Divine mystery every facet of the religious act had its immutable meaning. God in His wisdom knows exactly what to prescribe for man, to create in the individual, the community and the land, a balance between conflicting forces.10Ibid., 2:50, 3:5, 7, 11, 17. No act shaped by human judgement could reach out beyond the human. The paradigm of the religious act for Halevi – and it still takes us by surprise when we read it – is the offering of sacrifices.11Ibid., 1:99. Here, all the elements of his vision converge: the minutely ordered, unfathomable procedure, performed on behalf of the community, in the appointed place, with its consequence of “I will dwell in their midst.”
There is nothing gnostic or magical in his conception. It is simply that in the I-Thou of man’s religious life, Halevi takes the Thou more seriously than the I. Contrary to Buber’s idea that the law “is not thrust upon man; it rests deep within him, to waken when the call comes,” he writes about Moses that “his words were not creations of his own mind…prophecy did not (as philosophers assume) burst forth in a pure soul, become united with the Active Intellect…and then be inspired.”12Ibid., 1:87. In the religious dialogue, there is an asymmetry. It is true that “Divine Providence only gives man as much as he is prepared to receive.”13Ibid., 2:24. But man prepares; God speaks. In Halevi – in Judaism – God speaks and man answers. In Buber: “they speak the Thou and then they hear.”14Martin Buber, I and Thou, Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1966, 83.
This difference in order is not slight or insignificant. It is the source of what I am tempted to call Buber’s moral pantheism, the idea that God is immanent in every human act. If man initiates the dialogue, then he does indeed choose its context, the acts in which he is to discover meaning, relation, Thou. But if God is He who speaks, then the place of meeting is precisely defined by His commands.
In this stark contrast we can locate Buber’s point of departure from Judaism. He and Halevi share the same conception of the distinctive form of Jewish religious experience. But from it they derive antithetical conclusions. For Buber, it is an affirmation of the entire human situation in all its particularity; for Halevi, a celebration of the whole Divine Law, in its variegated uniqueness.
In All Thy Ways
How did Buber come to take this step? It may be, as Rosenzweig suggested, that he found the particular forms of nineteenth-century German orthodoxy uninviting. But he was after all steeped in, and to some extent influenced by Chassidism, and it seems impossible to suppose that he can have closed his eyes to the rejoicing in the life of the law that was so crucial to it. There is a passage in his writings that is highly revealing:
The Holy strives to include within itself the whole of life. The Law differentiates between the holy and the profane, but the Law desires to lead the way toward the messianic removal of the differentiation to the all-sanctification.15“The Two Foci of the Jewish Soul,” in Israel and the World, 34.
Did Buber, a master of ambiguity, choose this equivocation as the grounds for parting from Judaism while not seeming to – an axiom in one sense true, in another, Buber’s sense, false?
If we must focus on a point, this would be it. In one sense it is true that Judaism recognises itself as coextensive with the whole of life. The proposition which Buber places in the mouth of Chassidism is in fact far too ancient and universally accepted to be called “Chassidic” at all:
Everything physical, all drives and urges and desires, everything creaturely, is material for sanctification. From the very same passionate powers which, undirected give rise to evil, when they are turned toward God, the good arises.16Ibid., 34.
This is a doctrine recorded in the Mishnah, elaborated in the Talmud and Midrashim, and most notably associated with the names of Hillel and R. Akiva:
“You shall love the Lord with all your heart” – this means, with your two impulses, the evil as well as the good.17M. Berakhot 9:5. What short text is there on which all the essential principles of the Torah depend? “Know him in all thy ways.…”18Berakhot 63a. See also M. Avot 2:12, Avot de-Rabbi Nathan 17:13, Leviticus Rabbah 43:3, Beitzah 16a, Kiddushin 81b–82a, Pesachim 8b, Nazir 23 a–b.
Both the whole man and the whole circumstances of his existence are to be brought into the religious life.
On the other hand, the reference to the “messianic removal of the differentiation” between holy and profane is, in the sense in which the whole of Buber’s work leads us to understand it, no less than Pauline. In the ideal of a messianic transcending of the law and its differentiations, we hear the unmistakable echo of Paul’s:
After that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster.… There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female.…19Galatians 3:25, 28. See also Romans 10:12, I Corinthians ch. 12.
Buber rejects Paul on many grounds; but not on this. After all, did not Paul introduce a new dichotomy, between spirit and flesh, rejected by Judaism and certainly by Buber? Nonetheless, the drawing of Pauline conclusions from “Chassidic” premises is ingenious, incongruous, and ultimately fallacious.
Heschel pursued the logic of his Chassidic starting point further:
Judaism calls upon us to listen not only to the voice of the conscience but also to the norms of the heteronomous law. The good is not an abstract idea but a commandment, and the ultimate meaning of its fulfilment is in its being an answer to God.20“Religion and Law” in Fritz A. Rothschild (ed.), Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism, New York: The Free Press, 1965, 158.
This is the territory of the I-Thou meeting for the Jew, Buber found it too narrow a gate to enter. It was the Pauline rejection of the Law that marked the parting of Christianity from Judaism. Buber parts company at the same point. That he does so without saying so is due to two devices: the first, a piece of linguistic legerdemain, the second and more important, a theological misconception.
The first is his ability to speak at all of the “messianic removal of the differentiation,” the “all-sanctification.” Certainly there is in the Jewish mystical tradition an idea that the world is divided into the holy and the not-yet-holy; that each religious act liberates a spark of holiness hitherto buried in the shells of the material, God-concealing world; and that in the utopian fulfilment, all will be holy. Certainly this created a tension between the “Torah of the Exile” and the “Torah of Redemption” discernible in parts of the Zohar.21See, e.g., Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, New York: Schocken Books, 1972, especially pages 21–24. For what was to be the function of the Law in a fully redeemed world? “In a world in which the power of evil has been broken, all those differentiations also disappear which had been derived from it.”22Ibid., 23. But what is significant is that precisely this idea, dangerously anarchic in its messianic conception, is used to provide a new urgency and cosmic depth to halakhic action in this pre-messianic world. Lurianic mysticism, on which Chassidism is built, is a mysticism of the halakhic act.23Ibid., 37–48. Not any act can unlock holiness from its prison. Halakhah is the key, which the right act turns. If there are parts of the mystical literature which express an ambivalence to the Torah of the messianic age, there are none – except in the heresies surrounding and succeeding Shabbetai Zevi – which translate that ambivalence to the here-and-now. On the contrary, they elevate the halakhic act to a prominence which more rationalist expositions of Judaism had tended, perhaps, to subdue. Buber’s ambiguity at this point is fatal.
The second is a misconception which Buber may or may not have held, but which it is more charitable to suppose that he did. There is an open-ended element in the religious life – the element of “Know Him in all thy ways” – which is intrinsically ungeneralisable, irreducible to halakhic codification, because it is concerned with the particularity, the “Thou,” of the situation.
Might there be, then, in Judaism an area of religious significance beyond the scope of the halakhah: and might this be the area for which Buber could legitimately stand as theologian?
The answer must be a definite if delicate No. This area of Jewish values calls for careful analysis, and here is not the place for it.24For an excellent introduction to the subject, see Aharon Lichtenstein, “Does Jewish Tradition Recognise an Ethic Independent of Halakhah?” in Marvin Fox (ed.), Modern Jewish Ethics, Columbus: Ohio State, 1975, 62–88. However, reference to a few of the more notable sources should be sufficient for our purposes.
Nachmanides, in a famous passage, says this of the biblical command “And thou shalt do that which is right and good in the sight of the Lord”:
Our rabbis said, “This refers to compromise and lifnim mishurat ha-din (within or beyond the letter of the law).” The intent of this is that, initially, He had said that you should observe the laws and statutes which He had commanded you. Now He says that, with respect to what He has not commanded, you should likewise take heed to do the good and the right in His eyes.… For it is impossible to mention in the Torah all of a person’s actions towards his neighbours and acquaintances, all of his commercial activity, and all social and political institutions.25Nachmanides, Commentary to Deuteronomy 6:18.
The Bible in commanding the “right and the good” according to Nachmanides, lays down a general obligation to respond to the particularities of concrete human encounter in the spirit of the law, even or precisely where the law cannot offer precise guidelines. Lifnim mishurat ha-din does not here mean simply within the letter of the law (that is, forgoing one’s legal rights) or beyond it (giving the other more than his due), but rather applying the law with sensitivity to the particular human situation. It is not as if Nachmanides contemplated two distinct domains, the legal (din) and the extra-legal (lifnim mishurat ha-din). Instead he envisages two ways of applying the law, one legalistic, taking no account of the uniqueness of the particular case; the other, compassionate and situational, guided but not fully determined by universal halakhic norms. The latter does not transcend the law, and is indeed part of its essential functioning. We might go so far as to call it the I-Thou dimension of the law. The point is reinforced by one of Maimonides’ halakhic commentators:
Our perfect Torah sets forth general principles for the cultivation of human virtue and for ethical behaviour in the world, in the statement, “Ye shall be holy,” meaning, as the rabbis said, “Sanctify yourself with respect to that which is permitted to you”… Similarly the Torah says: “You shall do that which is right and good,” meaning that one should deal well and uprightly with men. It was not appropriate in all this to command details, for the commandments of the Torah are obligatory for every period and all time and in every circumstance, whereas man’s characteristics and his behaviour vary, depending on the time and the individual.26Maggid Mishneh to Maimonides, M.T. Shekhenim 14:5.
The point made here is that the law, specifically biblical law, constitutes the universal framework within which an ethic of situations must take place. Biblical law is self-limiting to this extent, that it does not legislate the unlegislatable cases. But this dimension does not exist in a void. It is framed and informed by the halakhah.
It is a fallacy to argue that because the halakhah does not uniquely determine a course of action in a particular situation, that it is inapplicable to that situation. It is a long way from such partial truths as “It is not as though any definite act of man could draw grace down from heaven” or “It is not as though man has to do this or that ‘to hasten’ the redemption”27Israel and the World, 37. to such unacceptable conclusions as “Man receives, and he receives not a specific ‘content’ but a Presence.”28I and Thou, 110.
Our hopes, then, of finding a limited area of Judaism beyond the scope of the halakhah where we could wholeheartedly apply Buber’s perceptions, must remain unfulfilled.
Two Kinds of Dialogue
With genuine sadness, and a full measure of respect for Buber’s outstanding gifts as theologian, poet, interpreter of the Bible, and communicator – albeit transmuter – of Chassidic literature, we must set Buber in another tradition than that of Judaism. He bears the legacy of Kant as well as of the existentialists; a deep reluctance to come to terms with the possibility of authentic inwardness within the framework of a heteronomous law. The most we could claim for him, and it may be the most he would claim for himself, would be that he was the theologian of Jewish secularism.
There is a danger in attempting to express the phenomenology of Judaism without the beliefs which give rise to it, the context in which it is set. In Buber’s own terms: it is through the “content” that we arrive at the “Presence”; not otherwise.
Buber was a man of dialogue. It is right, then, that he should be remembered by and have significance for those to whom he spoke, rather than those from amongst whom he spoke.
Perhaps ultimately he, who elevated the dialogue to such heights, forgot that there are two kinds of dialogue. The dialogue with the Other creates in its aftermath the dialogue with oneself; the dialogue with other faiths creates its own echo with one’s own. In the first phase of dialogue, in the attempt to bridge the chasm between two languages and cultures, it is sufficient to inspire, to give a glimpse of an alternative world. It is no criticism to say that the truths that cross the chasm are partial, fragmentary. But in the second phase of dialogue – the dialogue with oneself and one’s own religion – the truth must be complete, authentic, or it is nothing.
A midrash, famous for other reasons, embodies this perception precisely. A Roman challenged Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai with the claim that the ritual of the Red Heifer was meaningless magic. Yochanan answered him, translating it into an act – an act of exorcism – that was perfectly comprehensible to the Roman in his own terms. The first phase of dialogue was successfully achieved. But when the Roman had left, Rabban Yochanan’s students turned to him with that deeper question which dialogue creates: “Master, what will you answer us?”29Pesikta de-Rav Kahana (ed. Mandelkem), Parah, 44.
It was this second phase of dialogue to which Rosenzweig challenged him, and whose pressure we still feel. Buber has spoken to the world. But what will he answer us?