The Tragedy of the Messianic Dialectic: Buber's Novel Gog And

chapter 15 The Tragedy of the Messianic Dialectic: Buber’s Novel Gog and Magog

Fumio Ono

1 The Genuine Historian Proclaims the Universal

In the spring of 1936, Martin Buber published a collection of essays he authored together with the late Franz Rosenzweig on Bible translation, Die Schrift und ihre Verdeutschung. The volume was introduced by Buber’s essay “The Man of Today and the Jewish Bible.”1 Although the National Socialist government severely restricted the sphere of his teaching and public lectures, he nonethe- less played a major role in the “spiritual resistance” to the regime’s systematic program, which was designed not only to deprive the Jews of their civil rights but also to denigrate their cultural and spiritual integrity. The significance of the aforementioned essay is to be viewed in light of this context. The essay, however, was originally delivered as a public lecture in 1926 and, as the title indicates, it addressed the broader situation of the “man of today,” that is, the modern individual per se. Buber’s essay presents the Hebrew Bible as a lens through which to criti- cize contemporary attitudes toward history. According to Buber, one either contemplates history as a “freethinker” and “participates in it and accepts the shifting events” as “a promiscuous agglomeration of happenings” and “mean- ingless hodgepodge,” or one may “view history dogmatically, derive laws from past sequences of events and calculate future events, as though the “main lines” were already traced on some scroll that one needs merely to unroll.” But history, Buber explains, is “the vital living, growing of time, constantly mov- ing from decision to decision, time in which my time and my decision stream full force.”2

1 Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, Die Schrift und ihre Verdeutschung (Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1936). 2 Martin Buber, Werke, 3 vols. (München: Kösel-Verlag, 1962–1964), 2:854; English: Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, Scripture and Translation, trans. L. Rosenwald with E. Fox (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 8. With regard to my citations of English trans- lations throughout this paper, I have occasionally made slight modifications as necessary.

It is certainly possible to discern the echo of Nietzsche’s thought in this description, as David Biale appropriately pointed out.3 In his “On the Uses and Abuses of History for Life” (1874), Nietzsche criticized the Hegelian historicism which subordinated life to history and asserted that, on the contrary, history should serve life.4 Nietzsche clearly distinguished three approaches to history: monumental, which gives meaning to the present by granting authority to the past and valorizing great moments in the past; antiquarian, which does not acknowledge the value of the past for the contemporary generation, for it only preserves history indiscriminately as an antiquarian collector; and critical, which has the power to destroy and dismantle the past. With respect to Judaism, Biale identifies the monumental approach with traditional Rabbinic literature and the antiquarian approach with nineteenth-century Wissenschaft des Judentums. Thus, Biale identifies Buber’s interpretation of the Hebrew Bible as a critical approach to history. To be sure, in the sense of valuing legend and granting authority to the past, classical Rabbinic Judaism is indeed monumental, and Wissenschaft des Judentums is antiquarian, given its tendency to examine the accumulation of historical facts in within frameworks of historicism and empiricism. It is also true that Buber was critical of these approaches. However, at least for Nietzsche, all three approaches were equally necessary to serve life. And with Buber’s own interests in mind, the following statement by Nietzsche sheds light on Buber’s approach to history: “[T]he genuine historian must possess the power to re-mint the universally known into something never heard of before, and to proclaim the universal so simply and profoundly that simplicity is lost in profundity, and the profundity in simplicity.”5 Whether or not Buber was directly influenced by this statement, Nietzsche’s depiction of the “genuine historian” illuminates the core of Buber’s philosophy of dialogue. The I-Thou relationship is accordingly able to recover and renew the holy, ontological fulness of exis- tence that is fossilized in I-It relations. The fundamental principle of Hasidism, for Buber, consisted in the hallowing of everyday life. Buber’s Bible translation went beyond the principle of “textualism,” and sought rather to disclose “the universally known” in the history of Biblical exegesis. All these attempts were “to re-mint the universally known into something never heard of before,” and

3 David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History, 1st Edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 45–46. 4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen. Kröners Taschenausgabe, Bd.71 (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 1955); English: Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 5 Nietzsche, Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, 151; English: Untimely Meditations, 94. I have modi- fied the translation.