Theology Today - Vol 41, No. 3 - October 1984 - ARTICLE

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Buber: Biography as Dialogue
By Elena Malits

BY any measure, Martin Buber was a fascinating person, a provocative thinker, and a controversial Jew and Israeli. His range of interests and involvements boggles the imagination: philosophy, Zionism, theater, adult education, psychiatry, Palestinian refugees, mysticism, civil disobedience, comparative religion, youth movements. Thought and action were integrally related for Buber. He could not be intellectually interested in what did not demand some form of commitment from him, as it was impossible for him to become involved in practical activity unless he had probed it from every angle and understood the possible ramifications.

Buber was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949 by Hermann Hesse, and in 1961 for the Nobel Peace Prize by Dag Hammarskjold. T.S. Eliot said of him, "I only met Buber once, but I felt then I was in the presence of greatness" (p. 141 ). One might be inclined to regard Buber as great for no other reason than the greatness or the people whose friendship he shared, among whom were Albert Einstein, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Franz Rosenzweig, Leo Baeck, Reinhold Niebuhr, Albert Schweitzer, and Franz Kafka. Even Buber's sustained conflicts engaged great men such as Theodor Herzl, David Ben-Gurion, Carl Jung, and Gershom Scholem.

Neither his admirers nor his critics knew how to describe what Buber was or what he did; he defied all categories. Replying to those who complained he was religious where he should be philosophical or historical and philosophical when a political response was expected, Buber simply described himself as "an atypical man" who "had the duty to insert the framework of the decisive experiences that I had … into the human inheritance of thought, but not as 'my' experiences, rather as an insight valid and important for others and even for other kinds of men"

Elena Malits, C.S.C.. is Professor of Religious Studies at Saint Mary's College. Notre Dame. A graduate of Fordham University and Union Theological Seminary in New York. she is the author of The Solitary Explorer: Thomas Merions Transforming Journey ( 1980). She attended the Ecumenical Institute for Theological Studies in Jerusalem in 1981 and is presently working on a comparative study of the ways Jewish and Christian biographical writings embody different emphases. She is here reflecting on the life and influence of Martin Buber wkith special reference to Maurice Friedman's Martin Buber's Life and Work: The Later Years. 1945-1965 (New York, E.P. Dutton, illus.. 493 pp. $32.50). The page notations in her article refer to this volume.

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(p. 264). He bound himself to no one field of inquiry or academic discipline, though Buber strenuously declared himself "bound to the philosophical method indeed to a dialectic that has become unavoidable" (p. 265).

Martin Buber's creativity expressed itself in many. and quite different forms. Along with writing countless philosophical essays and many books, he collected, edited, and reworked Hasidic legendary anecdotes in The Tales of the Hasidim. These two volumes introduced the non-Jewish world-not to mention a good number of Jews-to the spirit and significance of the Hasidic masters. Buber's Hasidic novel, For the Sake of Heaven, embodied in narrative his concerns with messianism, tragedy, the Nazis, and the Second World War. A late mystery play, Elijah, dramatically articulated two themes "obedient listening" and "contending," motifs which characterize Buber's grasp of biblical Judaism as well as his own lived experience. He wrote poems, mostly for family and friends. He carried on a staggering correspondence. (There are 45,000 letters in the Buber Archives in Jerusalem.) He even produced handbooks for young Zionists. In 1916, he founded and edited Der Jude, an independent journal of opinion which served as a vehicle for the Jewish Renaissance in Germany. Die Kreatur in 1926 was begun by Buber, who chose as his co-editors a Protestant and a Catholic, at that time a daring ecumenical move meant to foster Jewish-Christian dialogue. For the wider public, I and Thou is surely Martin Buber's best known work, though his most monumental effort was the translation into German of the Hebrew Scriptures, a scholarly and religious task which engaged him for nearly forty, years. No mode of language, no literary genre, no style of thinking seemed alien to him. He has master of the written word and all the more of the spoken word, though he never would have used such terms. Buber saw himself as servant of the word, because for him the world is understood only as word, and human existence as address and response.

Dialogue was the pivotal idea of his thought, especially his philosophical anthropology. But dialogue was not just an idea; it constituted the very form of his experience. Martin Buber's life can be construed as an ongoing conversation with others he met-by chance or by choice. As Maurice Friedman puts it in the first volume of Martin Buber's Lift and Work: The Early Years 1878-1923. "More important than Buber's having developed a philosophy of the word is the fact that he became and remained a person of the word, of the lived word that is spoken. In Buber, thought constantly expresses itself purely and cleanly as speech … truth takes place as word" (p. 317).

Maurice Friedman is a reliable witness to the role of the word-and its active exchange in dialogue-in the life and thought of Buber. The

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appearance of the third volume of his biography completes a seventeen-year-long project. The Later Years 1945-1965 is the capstone of Friedman's diligent work on and with the Jewish philosopher, begun with Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue (1955), and including many translations of books by Buber, as well as editing the volume on him in Schlipp's Library of Living Philosophers. One can appreciate Friedman's exposition of what the "I-Thou" relationship meant for Buber, both conceptually and personally (dealt with in all three volumes, but more specifically in the first, pp. 328-37 l ), precisely because Friedman approaches it in context. The existential attitude of "I-Thou" is already an expression and manifestation of a more fundamental bearing of the self toward God, other persons, and the world, namely, trust.

Friedman ends the biography with this assessment of what is at the heart of Buber and what constitutes, therefore, his real legacy to us:

"Trust, trust in the world, because this human exists--that was Martin Buber's most precious gift to the persons or our age and the ages to come. Martin Buber was our comrade. He lived with us, won our trust through real-life relationship, and helped us to walk with him the way of the creature who accepts the creation. The innermost core of Buber's teaching and of his existence was the combination of this existential trust with the mystery of suffering-of our suffering for the sake of redemption and of God's suffering with us (p. 423).

Such an interpretation offers a healthy antidote to the popular trivializing of "I-Thou" into a cozy nuzzling between you and me (as the plethora of recent therapies would have it), and situates Buber's grasp of interpersonal relationship squarely within a theological framework, including God, mystery, creation , redemptive suffering. For Buber, the relationship of God and creature is. in fact. the paradigm instance of "I-Thou." Relationships between human beings are related to the "I-Thou" relationship between God and this unique person-related from both poles of the person-God duality.

God alone can address the person as "Thou" with full realization of and utter respect for this creature's otherness. But Buber insisted (against Will Herberg's misreading of him), that God is not always the "I" and the person always "Thou" (p. 200). As the Psalms bear witness, a human being can and does speak to God as "Thou," both trusting and contending with this Other or others. The lines of all "I-Thou" relationships "intersect in the eternal Thou" and are "grounded in the fact that the same man who says Thou ultimately means his eternal Thou" (pp. 276-7).

We are indebted to Friedman's elucidating the conception of "I-Thou" as profoundly religious, while he is careful to show that Buber himself both refused to acknowledge "theology's claim for exclusiveness" (p. 276), and argued it was only "in this sense of the concern for the wholeness of life" that he would allow "that his thought might be called religious but not as starting from a religion" (p. 277).

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Friedman is also enlightening on Buber's understanding of biblical Judaism, on why Hasidism was so crucial to his attitude toward religion in relation to the ordinary world, on his view of Jesus, on how he thought the faith of Jews and Christians was different, and on his concept of revelation. Perhaps we come away from The Later Years with the sharpest sense of Martin Buber as a religious thinker, when we consider Friedman's treatment of how he responded to social, political, and psychological issues of the day, such as the Jewish-Arab conflict, the destiny of the state of Israel, kibbutz socialism, adult education, the role of psychotherapy, the quest for peace in the nuclear age. In the chapters dealing with such matters, we meet a Buber utterly convinced that a distinction between the sacred and the profane is humanly disastrous, and that "ordinary life" is the proper, indeed, the only realm of redemption.

Buber had appropriated such a view from his understanding of Hasidism. From the beginning of his study, and still a half a century later, Buber saw the central message of the Hasidic sages this way: "Man cannot approach the divine by reaching beyond the human; he can approach Him through becoming human" (p. 282). To be human for Buber meant to seek justice, peace, openness, understanding, respect for otherness. To be Jewish meant to embrace the human as a religious demand. It means to recognize God speaking in events which requires a fully, human response.

Buber was consistently ruthless in his applications of what such an understanding implied for the individual and the nation. These views led him into bitter conflict with Theodor Herzl in the nineteenth century beginnings of Zionism over whether its purpose was political, or cultural and religious. Similar views led him into disagreement in the mid-twentieth century with David Ben-Gurion on the question of the Palestinian refugees. Buber's humanism and his Jewish ethos brought him to oppose, in principle, capital punishment for Eichmann (against the vast Israeli majority, and to refuse to take sides in the cold war and super-power struggle over nuclear arms, even with his close and respected American friends. In similar fashion, Buber's religious humanism forced him to quarrel with Jung, whose psychology transmuted faith into gnosis, in the Jewish philosopher's opinion.

Maurice Friedman's biography is clearly a labor of love. For him, Buber was the human model, sagacious mentor, spiritual master. and beloved father. The author's study has all the merits and limitations of a biography written close in time to the life of someone to whom the writer was personally close. Both features are significant. Friedman's advantages are evident: he had observed Buber personally, shared a certain filial intimacy with him, been able to question Buber at length about events and ideas. The disadvantages are just as obvious: the biography exhibits lack of critical distance and perspective, a constant tendency to eulogize, and an over-detailed narrative and analysis which become tedious at times.

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III

One wonders for what audience Friedman is writing. For the scholarly community, the non-technical treatment of the problems and the lack of footnotes (in favor of a listing of sources for each chapter at the end of the volume), would appear foolish. Yet this exhaustive, three-volume biography seems unnecessary for the general educated public. Friedman provides such luxuriant detail that in the end we come away surfeited. Often it is difficult to keep the thread of the narrative. One easily gets bogged down in close-grained precis of each book, even particular essays, which Buber wrote. Unfortunately, Friedman does not succeed in finding his way through the perennial biographical problem for prolific thinkers, namely, how to chart the events of a life and summarize the intellectual content of a writer's works in such a way that one does not obviate the other and so that both are organically related.

Friedman had to cope with problems regarding the inaccessibility of certain sources which account for some of the flaws in his work. Only his own 300 letters from Buber and one published volume of 1,500, of the 45,000 collection, were available to him. We are annoyed-especially women, I suspect-at the paucity of information concerning Martin 's relationship with his wife, Paula, which relationship Friedman keeps insisting was without doubt the most formative and significant of his life. But only in the third volume do we learn that Paula was an extremely private person and preferred that little about herself and her personal life would or could be known.

Finally, one can only wonder at the biographer's intrusion of himself and his relationship with Buber into the story. To be sure, Friedman makes clear in the preface of The Later Years that he interjects the episodes involving himself to make up for other primary sources which are lacking to him, and more importantly, Friedman introduces his own dialogue with Buber as a concrete case in point. He coins the term "dialography" to describe what he is up to in the three volumes of Martin Buber's Life and Work. Limited sources or not, conventional or original, this writing is still in the genre of biography, not dialogue. But it is by far the most comprehensive and insightful account of Buber available, and only exhaustion at its length could excuse anyone interested in the most important Jewish religious thinker of the century from pursuing this biography to its end.

Friedman informs us that he wanted to call the overall work Encounter on the Narrow Ridge, and the third volume A Dialogue with the World. (Publishers being notoriously unimaginative and thinking only in terms of immediate recognition of titles would not, of course, allow that.) Too bad-for in the biography, Friedman convinces us that "encounter" and "the narrow ridge" are, indeed, dominant metaphors for Buber. "Real life is meeting" (p. 187) was Buber's message as he picked his way on the narrow ridge between the dialectical polarities of

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thought, Israeli nationalism and the ethic of biblical Judaism, justice for displaced Arabs, and Zionist longings for the land. And the last volume of the work truly focuses on Buber's real and sustained dialogue with the world of the cold war, of unjust social structures, of depersonalization of manipulation and debasement of language, of isolation and alienation, of loss of trust among people and in reality.

The quotation which Maurice Friedman gives us in the inscription of The Later Years provides a clue to what the book shows us, Martin Buber making his way "precariously along a narrow ridge between abysses." Martin is met by Maurice on his own narrow ridge of biographical writing, and this encounter has the qualities of an "I" recounting the intriguing story of a uniquely unique "thou."