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ENCOUNTER: THE THOUGHT OF MARTIN BUBER February 8, 1978, marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Martin Buber, the Jewish thinker whose name has become synonymous with the terms “dialogue” and “I and Thou,” and whose central ideas—far from being truly understood—have become popularized if not bowdlerized in, or by, the minds of many. With Coffee Houses being called “I and Thou,” and Encounter Groups being featured attractions of Single Resorts, it seems especially important to give the thought of the foremost propounder of a philosophy of encounter its just due. The following pages constitute an attempt to trace the influences that led to the development of this philosophy, to present its premises and goals, and to give at least an indication of its validity by pointing out the principal areas to which it applies. Martin Buber was born in Vienna in 1878 and died in Jerusalem in 1965. Since his parents were divorced when he was a very young child, he was raised in the unusually cultured household of his paternal grandparents in Lemberg, then Austrian Galicia. In addition to being a rich merchant and landowner and a secularly widely educated man, Solomon Buber was a renowned Midrash scholar. His grandson was, therefore, from early childhood on, exposed to the learned discussions of famous visitors to the Buber household. And with German, Yiddish, Hebrew and Polish spoken at home and in school, the boy grew up equally steeped in Jewish and European culture. During his university studies in Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Austria, his wide-ranging fields of concentration included languages, art and literature, politics, sociology, psychology, education, mythology, philosophy, comparative religion, and theology. He was later to write and lecture on all of those subjects, and his output, spanning sixty years, was enormous. Yet he did not wish to __________________ Published in JUDAISM: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought, Vol. 27, No. 2, Spring Issue, 1978. Encounters in Modern Jewish Thought specialize in any one of these diverse fields, for he saw them all as interrelated. Actually, the term “interrelated” could almost serve as a one-word characterization of Buber’s entire thought. It epitomizes his foremost concern which determined all of his thinking and his every activity: to establish relations between two or more entities that may, on the surface, seem unrelated; to create a mutuality of interests, or a meeting of minds and a sense of communality where it had not seemed likely; to achieve unity out of diversity through an encounter of, and by, the different. What he wished, therefore, to do—and what he largely succeeded in doing—was to develop a philosophical anthropology (a term borrowed from his teachers, Wilhelm Dilthey and Max Scheler), by which he meant a view of man1 in his totality as a many-faceted yet entirely integrated human being. Along the way to creating such an anthropological philosophy, he became, among other things, a journalist, editor and publisher, an early Zionist ideologue, and a professor of Jewish philosophy and ethics as well as of the history of religions at the University of Frankfurt/Main. In the 1920s he started to translate the Bible from Hebrew into German, a labor of love which he shared first with Franz Rosenzweig, and then continued alone after the latter’s death in 1929. He completed the gigantic project thirty-two years later, in Jerusalem. With the coming of Hitler, Buber lost his position at the University in Frankfurt. But he soon became involved in reviving a singular institution that had been conceived of, and was for, a time, guided by Franz Rosenzweig, though it had not survived its founder’s death: the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus, a house of intensive Jewish studies where adults pursued learning for the sake of learning, not for the sake of earning. During this period, Buber also developed what might best be described as “consciousness-raising” resource material for adult Jewish studies, a task of immeasurable import for the shattered psyche of German Jewry, and he became instrumental in the training of teachers for Jewish schools which had to be hurriedly established after all “Aryan” schools were closed to Jewish students. He continued this spiritual rescue-work until 1938, when he emigrated to Palestine, where __________________ 1 To avoid stylistic awkwardness, “man” will be used throughout this article in generic sense and, as such encompasses woman. [E.J.] ~ xlvi ~ Encounter: The Thought of Martin Buber he once again became a professor, teaching social philosophy at the Hebrew University until a few years before his death. At the same time, he wrote much for publication and went on extended lecture tours in Europe and America. Though it was Judaism and its classical literature that nourished him throughout his life, he also synthesized in his own person and writings several other cultural sources. Both in content and style, much of his work reflects his early and profound interest in mysticism, though, in his later years, he emphatically denied being a mystic (partly because he refused, on principle, to be typecast, and partly because his personal development had taken a different direction). But he could not deny being a poet. In the Vienna of his youth, “to live meant to be immersed in art, and to think meant to be immersed in poetry” (Maringer). The effect of this total immersion stayed with him for life. Even in his most theoretical writings, Buber, the poet, occasionally gets in the way of Buber, the thinker. Moreover, his romantically complex style, at times creatively beautiful, at times badly overwritten, tends to obscure his message. The reader may become intoxicated with the mere sound of it all, or he may share the frustration of no less than a Socrates who once chided a poet for his inability to explain what he had said so beautifully. Yet, though Buber often chooses to be poetic rather than precise, and though he surely neither was, nor probably ever wished to be, a systematic thinker, he has created a philosophy of life, something that one might almost call a “how-to” blueprint for living. This blueprint is presented largely in phenomenological terms and not as an abstractly reasoned discourse. That is, the author tends to describe some personal experience instead of offering a logical argument in support of some philosophical assertion. He may well have derived his ad hoc, illustrative method from Rabbinic literature and from Ḥasidic sources. For Martin Buber all but “discovered” Ḥasidism. Observing its latter- day adherents and their way of life during his boyhood in Galicia, he was so enthralled with what he saw and heard that, years later, when he was in search of spiritual roots, he returned there to study the teachings of Ḥasidism in depth, and to collect, and later translate, its rich source material for publication in the West. His findings exerted a lasting influence upon his entire outlook upon life. ~ xlvii ~ Encounters in Modern Jewish Thought These Findings have been severely criticized by Buber’s erstwhile colleague at the Hebrew University, Gershom Scholem. Scholem, probably today’s world-authority on Jewish mysticism and its offspring, Ḥasidism, accuses Buber of arbitrariness (if not limited knowledge) in his selections of Ḥasidic source material, and of presenting these selections in a highly one-sided and idealized manner. Worse, Scholem feels that Buber, in a “strange mixture of oversimplification, error and truth,” has reshaped the Ḥasidic outlook upon life in general, and upon religious life in particular, so as to conform to his—Buber’s—own. This criticism cannot be dismissed lightly by any serious student of Ḥasidism. But for us, here, it is of no immediate significance, especially since Buber himself seems to have regarded it as rather irrelevant. This, it seems, is because these two men speak a basically different language, and take a basically different approach to their work. Scholem argues as a “pure” scholar, something Buber did not claim to be, at least not in the narrowly defined way that insists on objectivity and demands impeccable attention to detail. Buber’s mind reached for the stars, and was not really concerned with the tiny asterisks that must festoon the lower margin of any academically respectable page. For Scholem, Ḥasidism is a “historical phenomenon” and, as such, an object of his detached research. For Buber, Ḥasidism is “the greatest phenomenon we know in the history of the spirit … a society which lives by its faith” and, as such, it constitutes an answer to his own religious search.2 When he started out on this search as a young man, he was dissatisfied with the spiritlessness of formal religion as he knew it in the cities and among the intelligentsia of the West. At first, he was looking only for that meaning of Judaism which, he felt, lay buried somewhere in Eastern Europe, waiting to be unearthed—and to be unearthed by him. What he found surpassed his expectations. It nearly overwhelmed him in its creative richness of heart and mind, its profound insights into human nature, its emotional warmth—all indispensable elements for __________________ 2 Eventually, though, Buber came to display a more critical attitude toward this “greatest phenomenon in history,” particularly vis-à-vis the “Zaddikism” (exploitation by unscrupulous “leaders”) into which the movement had, in his view, here or there deteriorated. ~ xlviii ~ Encounter: The Thought of Martin Buber that renewal of Judaism which he fervently sought. But he saw in Ḥasidism a significance that transcends the limits of Judaism. “Ḥasidic truth,” he wrote, is, or must become, “vitally important” for all religion, and for all of life.

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