My Favorite Philosopher

It is probably not an accident that the philosopher of relationships came from a broken home. Martin Buber was born in Vienna on February 8, 1878. Three years later, his parents divorced. His mother disappeared completely from the child's life. He moved to the home of his grandparents on his father's side. These grandparents told the small boy nothing about his parents' divorce: the three-year-old child soon expected to see his mother again. When he was four, a babysitter finally explained to him the facts of the situation. Eighty years later Buber could still recall the moment. He wrote:

The house in which my grandmother lived had a great rectangular inner courtyard surrounded by a wooden balcony extending to the roof on which one could walk around the building at each floor . . . We both leaned on the railing. I cannot remember that I spoke of my mother to my older comrade. But I hear still how the big girl said to me: "No, she will never come back." I know that I remained silent, but also that I cherished no doubt of the truth of the spoken words . . . I suspect that all that I have learned about genuine meeting in the course of my life had its first origin in that hour on the balcony.⁽¹⁾

As Martin Buber was beginning to feel and understand the critical importance of relationships in human life, his grandparents were also immersing him in European languages and in Jewish culture. From his grandparents he learned to speak and read not only his native German but also Polish, French, Hebrew and Latin. At the prayer house he experienced the basic forms of religious community rooted in common reverence and common joy.

At the age of fourteen, Buber left his grandparents to live with his father and to enroll in high school in preparation for the University. Thus began a period of uprootedness and restlessness in Buber's life. He found himself caught between the conservative traditions of his childhood and the liberal intellectual life he found in school. He wrote:

So long as I lived with [grandfather] my roots were firm. Soon after I left his house the whirl of the age took me in . . . My spirit was in steady and multiple movement, in alternation of tension and release, determined by manifold influences, taking ever new shape, but without center and without growing substance.⁽²⁾

When he was fifteen, Buber found himself terrified by the images of infinite space and time. The teenager tried to imagine space extending forever beyond our small planet and time as going back forever into the past and forever into the future. In his imagination he saw himself as a tiny being caught up in a hostile and indifferent universe. He felt he was going mad and considered the possibility of suicide. It was the study of the writings of the philosopher Immanuel Kant that saved the fifteen-year-old. Buber discovered a small volume by Kant with the title A Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Ever Be Written. Kant said: What approaches us out of the world, hostile and terrifying, the mystery of space and time, is the mystery of our own comprehension of the world and the mystery of our own being. Space and time are not real, Kant said. They are the forms in which we experience reality.

Buber took university classes in Vienna, Leipzig, and Berlin. When he was nineteen his search for both a personal and a religious identity led him to join the small but growing Zionist movement. The goal of the Zionists was to obtain a homeland for the Jews in the Middle East. For five years Buber was an enthusiastic member, caught up in the vision of a spiritual renewal among the Jewish people. However, in 1902 Buber became a dissenter within Zionism. He felt that Zionism was primarily concerned with putting the needs of one group ahead of dedication to universal truth and justice.

In this same period, in the summer of 1899, Buber met a woman named Paula Winkler. She was a year older than Buber and came from a Roman Catholic background. They were married in 1901 when Buber was twenty-three. Paula converted to Judaism before the marriage.

After he completed his schooling, Buber took on the role of a university professor in Berlin, teaching and lecturing in philosophy. Paula gave birth to two children. In his late twenties and early thirties Buber's search for a personal and a religious identity led him to become involved with the emotional celebration of the Jewish religion. He began to enjoy what we today would call an emotional high. He became infatuated with the feelings that come with singing, chanting, praying and meditating together. Buber published books about the religious ecstasy he experienced. In these moments of ecstasy the young university professor found what he took to be oneness and unity with God.

However, in 1914 Buber's preoccupation with such emotional moments of religious excitement was decisively upset. After a morning of religious enthusiasm the thirty-six-year-old professor had a visit from an unknown young man who had sought him out for advice. However, the singing, praying and meditating Buber had just left was still on his mind. Therefore, he did not give the young man his full attention. Buber was friendly, and he chatted openly with the young man. Still he treated the conversation casually, without really being fully present.

Shortly after the conversation the young man committed suicide. That morning before the young man's visit, the singing and praying had filled Buber with a spiritual excitement, an emotional ecstasy. He had felt himself in tune with eternity and with God. Because of this, he had not been fully present with the young man, who had come to him with serious questions about life and death.

Since then [Buber wrote], I have given up the religious which is nothing but the exception, extraction, exaltation, ecstasy; or it has given me up. I possess nothing but the everyday out of which I am never taken . . . I know no fullness but each mortal hour's fullness of claim and responsibility . . . For me this is what I mean by religion--not removing yourself into another world, but responding to the call that comes into your everyday life. Above all, listening to both the silent and the spoken voices when one person speaks to another, so that together they can remove the barrier between two human beings.⁽³⁾

From this point onward Buber rejected vigorously all experience that encourages us to detach ourselves from day-to-day events. In 1922 he published the book that was to make him famous: I and Thou. It is both a philosophical statement and a poem. I and Thou can be difficult to read, but its basic ideas are simple. Buber wrote that we humans have two types of relations; I-It relations and I-Thou relations.

• A sales clerk at a store takes our money and gives us our purchase. We have had an I-It relationship.
• A small child screams in delight over the sight of a balloon. We look into the eyes of the parent of the child, and we smile. For an instant we share a silent understanding with this other person. We have had an I-Thou relationship.
• We call the information operator on the telephone and he gives us the phone number of a friend living in another state. We have had an I-It relationship.
• We go to the hospital to visit a sick friend and find our friend seriously ill. We start to cry. A nurse stops making the bed and comes over and rests her hand on our arm for a moment. We have had an I-Thou relationship.
• A car stops as we walk down the street and the driver asks us directions. We have had an I-It relationship.
• We are driving along the street one day and we are suddenly so aware of the beauty of a tree that we stop our car and get out to look at the tree for a moment. As we stand in the presence of that tree, we feel a unity with the earth. We have had an I-Thou relationship.

The use of the antiquated pronoun "thou" sounds strange to our ears. This strangeness is not intentional on Buber's part. It is a result of the limitations of the English language. In Germany, close friends commonly use the pronoun du, to refer to lovers and to refer to children. Therefore, in the original German Ich-Du is not as formal or unnatural as I-Thou is in English. When we hear Buber's words in English translation, we should remember that he intended the word pair I-Thou to suggest simple, unpretentious, familiar relationships.

Buber writes that an I-Thou relationship is "mutual contact, the genuinely reciprocal meeting of the fullness of life between one active existence and another."⁽⁴⁾ In contrast, an I-It relationship occurs whenever you treat a person or the earth as an object. Buber is not saying that I-It relationships are bad and that I-Thou relationships are good. I-It relationships -- buying something at a store, getting directions, getting information on a telephone -- are necessary parts of life. Buber does say, however, that I-It relationships can never give our lives any sense of purpose or unity. Only I-Thou relationships give us this sense of wholeness. I-It relationships establish the human situation and I-Thou relationships give meaning to the human situation. The fundamental choice that we are free to make is to turn away or to turn toward I-Thou relationships.

Buber believes that we meet God in I-Thou relationships. The wholeness we feel when we are in an I-Thou relationship with another person, or with the earth, or with a work of art is what Buber calls the Eternal Thou.

From 1922 onward the fame of Martin Buber grew because of the popularity of his book I and Thou. He gained respect from both Christians and Jews for his religious humanism. In the 1930s Ronald Smith translated the book into English and Buber's fame spread to the United States.

In March of 1933 Buber's home officials of the new Nazi government searched Buber's home. A national boycott against Jews began in Germany in April of 1933. As part of the boycott the Nazis required that all Jews place in their window a sign describing their profession. The Nazi official who came to Buber's home had no sign reading "Jewish philosopher." Therefore, when he saw Buber's personal library of 20,000 books, he placed in Buber's window the sign "Jewish Book Dealer." Local Nazis organized school children to stand outside Buber's home every morning at 6:00 a.m. and sing a song called "Only When a Jew's Blood Squirts from the Knife." In October of 1933 Buber resigned from his position as a professor in the German university system, instead of waiting for the official dismissal. He told friends that he was determined to remain in Germany for as long as he could and devote his energy to Jewish education and culture. Before 1933 Buber's influence on German Jews had been profound but not wide. After Hitler's rise to power, many who had not formerly concerned themselves with Buber, found in his teachings what they needed to withstand the cruel demands of that time. Buber organized a network of teachers who counseled, comforted and raised dejected spirits.

In 1934 the Nazis banned Buber from teaching and speaking in public. For four years a Quaker gave Buber the opportunity of continuing his lectures at closed sessions. Finally, in 1938, after urgent appeals from friends, Buber left for Jerusalem. In the years that followed a generation of liberal religious Jews in Europe who had learned their philosophy from the lectures and writings of Martin Buber was destroyed. Orthodox Jews and non-practicing secular Jews made up the Jewish community in Palestine. Both groups rejected Buber's liberal religious humanism. As a result, Buber found himself representing a minority position in his new home.

After moving to Jerusalem, Buber began to criticize the new Jewish community in the Middle East for group egoism, for extreme nationalism, and for feelings of superiority. After the partition of Palestine in 1948, Buber became active in an Arab-Jewish league. He supported the establishment of a government that would include both Jews and Arabs and would recognize Arab claims to land that Arabs had inhabited for centuries.

Because of his belief in the sacredness of life, he found himself constantly at odds with the Israeli government. In 1961 at the age of eighty-two Buber was a lonely voice in Israel protesting the execution of Eichmann. "I do not accept the state's right to take the life of any person," he said.

And so I must resolutely oppose a capital sentence on anyone, whoever he is. I remember expressing myself in public against it in 1928, in Germany. And I cannot agree to it now that it would be my own people who would carry out the sentence in my own country. This is an issue of principle. It is more than a question of Eichmann and what I think of his horrible crimes. Anyone who thinks that I wish us to be lenient to Eichmann does not understand my basic position.

When a student asked Buber what should be done with Eichmann he said:

He should be sentenced to life imprisonment. But we must remember always that he is a symbol of the Nazi holocaust and not an ordinary criminal. So he should not be kept in a cell in a prison, like other people under similar sentences. He should be made to feel that the Jewish people were not exterminated by the Nazis and that they live on here in Israel. Perhaps he should be put to work on the land, on a Kibbutz. Farming the soil of Israel. Seeing young people around him. And realizing every day that we have survived his plans for us. Would not this be the ultimate and most fitting punishment?

This is not easy. There are problems of security, of vengeance. It is not a simple matter to sentence a man to life imprisonment and yet not lock him up. But I believe a way could be found. We should apply justice tempered with imagination. And this would serve a far greater moral and historical purpose than killing him.⁽⁵⁾

For this statement many Israelis strongly attacked Buber.

In April 1965 Buber slipped in his bedroom and broke his leg. The eighty-seven-year-old man suffered considerable pain. >From time to time he lost consciousness. It was clear he was sinking and that the end was not far away.

As he lay dying, the members of the Jerusalem City Council debated whether to give him a special award that honored important members of the community. Buber had lived in Jerusalem for twenty-seven years. Yet he had never received any civic honor. Now as he neared death the Council argued about whether to acknowledge his accomplishments.

The debate was fierce and heated. The right wing members of the Council strongly opposed the recognition. They stated that Buber was not worthy of any honors because he had opposed Eichmann's execution. Local religious groups complained to the council that Buber was not an Orthodox Jew and did not attend a synagogue regularly.

Despite this opposition, there was finally a slight majority in favor of the resolution. The mayor rushed to Buber's deathbed to inform him of the decision.

A few days later, on June 13, 1965 Martin Buber died.

If today dialogue is replacing the cold war between the faiths of Christianity and Judaism, I give some credit to Martin Buber. His book I and Thou has had an enormous impact on two generations of religious thinkers; Christian, Jewish and humanist. Buber looked for the underlying unity between people. He sought the common ground, always bringing people together on the narrow ridge of mutuality. He sought to humanize the world so that individuals would emerge out of the shapeless throng.

It is a vision that has guided my own quest for a meaningful religion, free of exclusiveness, and superiority. It demands that I look for meaning, not in special emotional experiences, not in drugs, not in nationalism, not in power over others, but in relationships; moments of union that can occur every hour of every day, if only I will open my heart and my mind, my eyes and my ears. It is a vital vision that I find present in my soul today.

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