******* Buber was right (not Kahane) ******

I’m still trying to decide whether to get a t-shirt with Martin Buber’s humane face on it that reads: “Martin Buber, My kind of Zionist.” I put the following piece together two years ago and planned to send it as a mass mail to all my friends and family, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it, mostly because I didn’t want to admit to being so religious. So here it is, blogged instead, for a handful of individuals that I’ve probably never met. I hope it does you good. It was meant to.

A New Year’s wish for 2004

It is my New Year’s wish that this e-mail could transform magically into a meme-like globetrotting idea explosion, traveling as fast and far as a virus, chain letter, or cute piece of schmaltz while doing considerably more good. Having my New Year’s wish come true is improbable for several reasons: this e-mail is long, it reads more like a school assignment than an attention-arresting e-mail forward, and it records the autobiographical reflections of Martin Buber, a philosopher-theologian that no one talks about much anymore because his thought runs against the grain of the world’s “culture war” divide.

Still, I transcribed all 5,000 odd words of these reflections after happening on them New Year’s morning, because I want as many people as possible to read the words of this:

--pro-Palestinian Zionist

--man against “missionarizing” who regrets lost opportunities to teach the “God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”

--believer who disavows a God called “He” but reveres a God called “Thou”

--passionate wielder of that word—God—that he freely admits is broken under the abuse of history and soiled unjustly with innocent blood

--mystic inclined to prophesy who then trembles to wonder if his prophecy has actually added anything truer to the world

--seeker who seeks knowledge of God in the Bible first, but upon meeting God as “Thou” sees the Bible below God rather than above Him—and yet still will not allow himself to dismiss the Bible smugly, with a wave of breezily contemporary moral objection.

If those falling into line on one side of the culture war divide or the other were to read Buber, listen to him, and let the spirit of his words sink in deeper than the need to take sides, might the cultural divide become a friendlier one, offering genuine choices between worldviews and policies without those choices being tagged with hostile judgment and condemnation from either side?

Everything after the dashes is taken from Buber’s autobiographical records excerpted in a book, Genius In Their Own Words, edited by D.R. Steele.

-------------------------

Intro [written by editor]:

Martin Buber (1878 ­ 1965) was a truly outstanding religious philosopher, mystic, interpreter of Jewish scriptures, German prose stylist, and Zionist activist. Persecuted by the Nazis, he moved to Palestine in 1938. Within Zionism, he fought courageously and unsuccessfully, first for the institution of a bi-national Jewish-Palestinian state, then for a more just treatment of the Palestinians. By far his best-known book is I and Thou (1922). Other great works include Paths in Utopia (1949) and Two Types of Faith (1950).

[The rest is all from Martin Buber himself]

The School

My school was called ‘Franz Joseph’s Gymnasium’. The language of instruction and of social intercourse was Polish, but the atmosphere was that, now appearing almost unhistorical to us, which prevailed or seemed to prevail among the peoples of the Austro-Hungarian empire: mutual tolerance without mutual understanding. The pupils were for the largest part Poles, in addition to which there was a small Jewish minority (the Rutherian had their own schools). Personally the pupils got on well with one another, but the two groups as such knew almost nothing about each other.

Before 8 o’clock in the morning all the pupils had to be assembled. At 8 o’clock the signal bell sounded. One of the teachers entered and mounted the professor’s lecturing desk, above which on the wall rose a large crucifix. At the same moment all the pupils stood up in their benches. The teacher and the Polish students crossed themselves; he spoke the Trinity formula, and they prayed aloud together. Until one might sit down again, we Jews stood silent and unmoving, our eyes glued to the floor.

I have already indicated that in our school there was no perceptible hatred of the Jews; I can hardly remember a teacher who was not tolerant or did not wish to pass as tolerant. But the obligatory daily standing in the room resounding with the strange service affected me worse than an act of intolerance could have affected me. Compulsory guests, having to participate as a thing in a sacral event in which no dram of my person could or would take part, and this for eight long years, morning after morning: that stamped itself into the life-substance of a boy.

No attempt was ever made to convert any of us Jewish pupils; yet my antipathy to all missionary activity is rooted in that time. Not merely against the Christian mission to the Jews, but against all missionarizing among men who have a faith with roots of its own. In vain did Franz Rosenzweig try to win me for the idea of a Jewish mission among the non-Jews.

Question and Answer

It was in May of the year 1914 (my wife and I and our two children now had already lived some eight years in a suburb of Berlin) when Reverend Hechler, whom I had not seen for a long time, called me. He was just in Berlin and would like to visit me. Soon afterward he came.

I had become acquainted with Hechler in the autumn of 1899 in a railroad carriage. The much older man began a conversation with me in which we soon learned that we shared the same views. Through a real eschatological belief in the living Christ, he stood close to the Zionist movement to which I then had belonged for a short time. The return of the Jewish people to their homeland was to him the promised presupposition of the return of Christ. He journeyed just then to the Grand Duke of Baden to whom he had a short time before introduced Herzl. He had been an educator of princes and was highly esteemed in many European courts.

In the course of the conversation I handed to Hechler the manuscript of a ‘hymn’ to the awakening of the Jewish people which I had written shortly before. This hymn filled him with such enthusiasm (entirely without basis) that he declared that he must read it to the Grand Duke. Soon afterward he had not merely done this but had published the questionable little opus without my knowledge. When I opened the door of my Berlin dwelling to Hechler, I was struck by how aged, but also how upright he was. After the warm mutual greeting, he drew forth from one of the gigantic pockets of his havelock a bundle of papers wrapped in a blue-white cloth. Out of it, first of all, he pulled forth the manuscript together with the proofs of that poem of 1899, but then a large sheet that he slowly unfolded. It was a graphic representation of the prophecy of Daniel on which he indicated to me, as if on a map of a historical period, the exact point in which we just now found ourselves. Then he spoke somewhat as follows: “Dear friend. I come from Athens (he had earlier been the teacher of the Greek princes, among others). I have stood on the spot where Paul spoke to the Athenians of the unknown God. And now I come to you to say to you that in this year the world war will break out.”

The certainty which was expressed in this sentence stemmed, as I have only later understood, out of a peculiar fusion of spheres: the believing interpretation of Daniel had been mixed and concretized with material flowing to it from the courts of Europe, without an awareness of what took place thus in the depths of the soul having penetrated into that consciousness. But what struck me most forcibly in the sentence that he spoke was the word ‘world war’ which I heard then for the first time. What kind of a ‘war’ was that—so I asked myself although still by no means clearly enough—which embraced the ‘world’? Clearly something essentially different at any rate from what one had formerly called ‘war’! From that hour dates the presentiment that has from then on grown in me, that the historical time of ‘wars’ was over and something different, only seemingly of that same nature, but becoming ever more different and ever more monstrous, was getting ready to swallow history and with it men.

Hechler stayed a few hours with us. Then I accompanied him to the railway station. In order to get there, one first had to go to the end of the small street of the ‘colony’, in which we lived and then on a narrow path covered with coal-dust, the so-called ‘black path’ along the railroad tracks. When we had reached the corner where the colony street met this path, Hechler stood still, placed his hand on my shoulder and said: “Dear friend! We live in a great time. Tell me: Do you believe in God?” It was a while before I answered, then I reassured the old man as best I could: he need have no concern about me in this matter. Upon this I brought him to the railway station and installed him in his train.

When I now returned home, however, and again came to that corner where the black path issued into our street, I stood still. I had to ponder to the depths of the matter. Had I said the truth? Did I ‘believe’ in the God whom Hechler meant? What was the case with me? I stood a long time on the corner determined not to go further before I had found the right answer.

Suddenly, in my spirit, there where speech again and again forms itself, there arose without having been formulated by me, word for word distinct:

‘If to believe in God means to be able to talk about him in the third person, then I do not believe in God. If to believe in him means to be able to talk to him, then I believe in God.’ And after a while, further: ‘The God who gives Daniel such foreknowledge of this hour of human history, this hour before the “world war”, that its fixed place in the march of the ages can be foredetermined, is not my God and not God. The God to whom Daniel prays in his suffering is my God and the God of all.’

I remained standing for a long while on the corner of the black path and gave myself up to clarity, now beyond speech, that had begun.

A Conversion

In my earlier years the ‘religious’ was for me the exception. There were hours that were taken out of the course of things. From somewhere or other the firm crust of everyday was pierced. Then the reliable permanence of appearances broke down; the attack which took place burst its law asunder.

‘Religious experience’ was the experience of otherness which did not fit into the context of life. It could begin with something customary, with consideration of some familiar object, but which then became unexpectedly mysterious and uncanny, finally lighting a way into the lightning-pierced darkness of the mystery itself. But also, without any intermediate stage, time could be torn apart—first the firm world’s structure then the still firmer self-assurance flew apart and you were delivered to fullness. The ‘religious’ lifted you out. Over there now lay the accustomed existence with its affairs, but here illumination and ecstasy and rapture held without time or sequence. Thus your own being encompassed a life here and a life beyond, and there was no bond but the actual moment of transition.

The illegitimacy of such a division of the temporal life, which is streaming to death and eternity and which only in fulfilling it temporality can be fulfilled in face of these, was brought home to me by an everyday event, an event of judgment, judging with that sentence from closed lips and an unmoved glance such as the ongoing course of things loves to pronounce.

What happened was no more than that one forenoon, after a morning of ‘religious’ enthusiasm, I had a visit from an unknown young man, without being there in spirit. I certainly did not fail to let the meeting be friendly, I did not treat him any more remissly than all his contemporaries who were in the habit of seeking me out about this time of day as an oracle that is ready to listen to reason. I conversed attentively and openly with him—only I omitted to guess the questions which he did not put. Later, not long after, I learned from one of his friends—he himself was no longer alive—the essential content of these questions; I learned that he had come to me not casually, but borne by destiny, not for a chat but for a decision. He had come to me, he had come at this hour. What do we expect when we are in despair and yet go to a man? Surely a presence by means of which we are told that nevertheless there is meaning.

Since then 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. The mystery is no longer disclosed, it has escaped or it has made its dwelling here where everything happens as it happens. I know no fullness but each mortal hour’s fullness of claim and responsibility. Though far from being equal to it, yet I know that in the claim I am claimed and may respond in responsibility, and know who speaks and demand a response.

I do not know much more. If that is religion then it is just everything, simply all that is live in its possibility of dialogue. Here is space also for religion’s highest forms. As when you pray you do not thereby remove yourself from this life of yours but in your praying refer your thought to it, even though it may be in order to yield it; so too in the unprecedented and surprising, when you are called up on from above, required, chosen, empowered, sent, you with this your mortal bit of life are meant. This moment is not extracted from it, it rests on what has been and beckons to the remainder which has still to be lived. You are not swallowed up in a fullness without obligation, you are willed for the life of communion.

Report on Two Talks

I shall tell about two talks. One apparently came to a conclusion, as only occasionally a talk can come, and yet in reality remained unconcluded; the other was apparently broken off and yet found a completion such as rarely falls to the lot of discussions.

Both times it was a dispute about God, about the concept and the name of God, but each time of a very different nature.

On three successive evenings I spoke at the adult folk-school of a German industrial city on the subject ‘Religion as Reality.’ What I meant by that was the simple thesis that ‘faith’ is not a feeling in the soul of man but an entrance into reality, an entrance into the whole reality without reduction and curtailment. This thesis is simple but it contradicts the usual way of thinking. And so three evenings were necessary to make it clear, and not merely three lectures but also three discussions which followed the lectures. At these discussions I was struck by something which bothered me. A large part of the audience was evidently made up of workers but none of them spoke up. Those who spoke and raised questions, doubts, and reflections were for the most part students (for the city had a famous old university). But all kinds of other circles were also represented; the workers alone remained silent. Only at the conclusion of the third evening was this silence, which had by now become painful for me, explained. A young worker came up to me and said: “Do you know, we can’t speak in there, but if you would meet with us tomorrow, we could talk together the whole time.” Of course I agreed.

The next day was a Sunday. After dinner I came to the agreed place and now we talked together well into the evening. Among the workers was one, a man no longer young, whom I was drawn to look at again and again because he listened as one who really wished to hear. Real listening has become rare in our time. It is found most often among workers, who are not indeed concerned about the person speaking, as is so often the case with the bourgeois public, but about what he has to say. This man had a curious face. In an old Flemish altar picture representing the adoration of the shepherds one of them, who stretches out his palms toward the manger, has such a face. The man in front of me did not look as if he might have any desire to do the same; moreover, his face was not open like that in the picture. What was notable about him was that he heard and pondered, in a manner as slow as it was impressive. Finally, he opened his lips as well.

“I have had the experience,” he explained slowly and impressively, repeating a saying which the astronomer Laplace is supposed to have used in conversation with Napolean, “that I do not need this hypothesis ‘God’ in order to be quite at home in the world.” He pronounced the word ‘hypothesis’ as if he attended the lectures of the distinguished natural scientist who had taught in that industrial and university city and had died shortly before. Although he did not reject the designation ‘God’ for his idea of nature, that naturalist spoke in a similar manner whether he pursued zoology or Weltanschauung.

The brief speech of the man struck me; I felt myself more deeply challenged than by the others. Up till then we had certainly debated very seriously, but in a somewhat relaxed way; now everything had suddenly become severe and hard. How should I reply to the man? I pondered awhile in the now severe atmosphere. It came to me that I must shatter the security of his Weltanschauung, through which he thought of a ‘world’ in which one ‘felt at home.’ What sort of a world was it? What we were accustomed to call world was the world of the senses, the world in which there exists vermillion and grass green, C major and B minor, the taste of apple and of wormwood. Was this world anything other than the meeting of our own senses with those unapproachable events about whose essential definition physics always troubles itself in vain? The red that we saw was neither there in the ‘things’, nor here in the ‘soul’. It at time flamed up and glowed just so long as a red-perceiving eye and red-engendering ‘oscillation’ found themselves over against each other. Where then was the world and its security? The unknown ‘objects’ there, the apparently so well-known and yet not graspable ‘subjects’ here, and the actual and still so evanescent meeting of both, the ‘phenomena’—was that not already three worlds which could no longer be comprehended from one alone? How could we in our thinking place together these worlds so divorced from one another? What was the being that gave this ‘world’, which had become so questionable, its foundation?

When I was through a stern silence ruled in the now twilit room. Then the man with the shepherd’s face raised his heavy lids, which had been lowered the whole time, and said slowly and impressively, “you are right.”

I sat in front of him dismayed. What had I done? I had led the man to the threshold beyond which there sat enthroned the majestic image which the great physicist, the great man of faith, Pascal, called the God of the Philosophers. Had I wished for that? Had I not rather wished to lead him to the other, Him whom Pascal called the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Him to whom one can say Thou?

I grew dusk, it was late. On the next day I had to depart. I could not remain, as I now ought to do; I could not enter into the factory where the man worked, become his comrade, live with him, win his trust through real life-relationship, help him to walk with me the way of the creature who accepts the creation. I could only return his gaze.

Some time later I was the guest of a noble old thinker. I had once made his acquaintance at a conference where he gave a lecture on elementary folk-schools and I gave one on adult folk-schools. That bought us together, for we were united by the fact that the word ‘folk’ has to be understood in both cases in the all-embracing sense. At that time I was happily surprised at how the man with the steel-gray locks asked us at the beginning of his talk to forget all that we believed we knew about his philosophy from his books. In the last years, which had been war years, reality had been brought so close to him that he saw everything with new eyes and had to think in a new way. To be old is a glorious thing when one has not unlearned what it means to begin; this old man had even perhaps first learned it thoroughly in old age. He was not at all young, but he was old in a young way, knowing how to begin.

He lived in another university city situated in the west. When the theology students of that university invited me to speak about prophecy, I stayed with the old man. There was a good spirit in his house, the spirit that wills to enter life and does not prescribe to life where it shall let it in.

One morning I got up early in order to read proofs. The evening before I had received gallery proofs of the preface of a book of mine, and since this preface was a statement of faith [a foreword to Buber’s Talks on Judaism (1923)], I wished to read it once again quite carefully before it was printed. Now I took it into the study below that had been offered to me in case I should need it. But here the old man already sat at his writing-desk. Directly after greeting me he asked me what I had in my hand, and when I told him, he asked whether I would not read it aloud to him. I did so gladly. He listened in a friendly matter but clearly astonished, indeed with growing amazement. When I was through, he spoke hesitatingly, then, carried away by the importance of his subject, ever more passionately. “How can you bring yourself to say ‘God’ time after time? How can you expect that your reader will take the word in the sense in which you wish it to be taken? What you mean by the name of God is something above all human grasp and comprehension, but in speaking about it you have lowered it to human conceptualization. What word of human speech is so misused, so defiled, so desecrated as this! All the innocent blood that has been shed for it has robbed it of its radiance. All the injustice that it has been used to cover has effaced its features. When I hear the highest called ‘God’, it sometimes seems almost blasphemous.”

The kindly eyes flashed. The voice itself flared. Then we sat silent for awhile facing each other. The room lay in the flowing brightness of early morning. It seemed to me as if a power from the light entered into me.

What I now answered, I cannot today reproduce but only indicate.

“Yes,” I said, “it is the most heavy-laden of all human words. None has become so soiled, so mutilated. Just for this reason I may not abandon it.

Generations of men have laid the burden of their anxious lives upon this word and weighed it to the ground; it lies in the dust and bears their whole burden. The races of man with their religious factions have torn the word to pieces; they have killed for it and died for it, and it bears their finger-marks and their blood. Where might I find a word like it to describe the highest! If I took the purest, most sparkling concept from the inner treasure-chamber of the philosophers, I could only capture thereby an unbinding product of thought. I could not capture the presence of Him whom the generations of men have honored and degraded with their awesome living and dying. I do indeed mean Him whom the hell-tormented and heaven-storming generations of men mean. Certainly, they draw caricatures and write ‘God’ underneath; they murder one another and say ‘in God’s name.’ But when all madness and delusion fall to dust, when they stand over against Him in the loneliest darkness and no longer say “He, He’ but rather sigh ‘Thou,’ shout ‘Thou’, all of them the one word, and when they then add ‘God’, is it not the real God whom they all implore, the One Living God, the God of the children of man? Is it not He who hears them? And just for this reason is not the word ‘God’ the word of appeal, the word which has become a name, consecrated in all human tongues for all times? We must esteem those who interdict it because they rebel against the injustice and wrong which are so readily referred to ‘God’ for authorization. But we may not give it up.

How understandable it is that some suggest we should remain silent about the ‘last things’ for a time in order that the misused words may be redeemed!

But they are not to be redeemed thus. We cannot cleanse the word ‘God’ and we cannot make it whole; but, defiled and mutilated as it is, we can raise it from the ground and set it over an hour of great care.”

It had become very light in the room. It was no longer dawning, it was light. The old man stood up, came over to me, laid his hand on my shoulder and spoke: “Let us be friends.” The conversation was completed. For where two or three are truly together, they are together in the name of God.

Samuel and Agag

I once met on a journey a man whom I already knew through an earlier meeting. He was an observant Jew who followed the religious tradition in all the details of his life-pattern. But what was for me essential (as had already become unmistakably clear to me at this first meeting) was that this relationship to tradition had its origin and its constantly renewed confirmation in the relationship of the man to God.

When I now saw him again, it turned out that we fell into a discussion of biblical questions, and indeed not of peripheral questions but central ones, central questions of faith. I do not know exactly any longer in what connection we came to speak of that section of the Book of Samuel in which it is told how Samuel delivered to King Saul the message that his dynastic rule would be taken from him because he had spared the life of the conquered prince of the Amalekites. I reported to my partner in dialogue how dreadful it had already been to me when I was a boy to read this as the message of God (and my heart compelled me to read it over again or at least to think about the fact that this stood written in the Bible). I told him how already at that time it horrified me to read or to remember how the heathen king went up to the prophet with the words on his lips, “Surely the bitterness of death is past,” and was hewn to pieces by him. I said to my partner: “I have never been able to believe that this is a message of God.

I do not believe it.”

With wrinkled forehead and contracted brows, the man sat opposite me and his glance flamed into my eyes. He remained silent, began to speak, became silent again. “So?” he broke forth at last, “So? You do not believe it?” “No,” I answered, “I do not believe it.” “So? So?” he repeated almost threateningly. “You do not believe it?” And I once again: “No.” “What…what …”—he thrust the words before him one after the other—“what do you believe then?” “I believe,” I replied without reflecting, “that Samuel has misunderstood God.” And he, again slowly, but more softly than before: “So?

You believe that?” And I: “Yes.” Then we were both silent. But now something happened the like of which I have rarely seen before or since in this my long life. The angry countenance opposite me became transformed, as if a hand had passed over it soothing it. It lightened, cleared, was now turned toward me bright and clear. “Well,” said the man with a positively gentle tender clarity, “I think so too.” And again we became silent, for a good while.

There is in the end nothing astonishing in the fact that an observant Jew of this nature, when he has to choose between God and the Bible, chooses God: the God in whom he believes, Him in whom he can believe. And yet, it seemed to me at that time significant and still seems so to me today. The man later came to the land of Israel and here I met him once again, some time before his death. Naturally, I regarded him then as the speaker of that word of one time; but in our talk the problem of biblical belief was not touched on. It was, indeed, no longer necessary.

For me, however, in all the time since that early conversation the question has again and again arisen whether at that time I expressed in the right manner what I meant. And again and again I answered the question in the same way: Yes and No. Yes in so far as it concerns what had been spoken of in that conversation; for there it was right to answer my partner in his language and within the limits of his language in order that the dialogue might not come to naught and that the common insight into one truth at times afforded to two men might fulfill itself, in no matter how limited a way.

In so far as it concerns that, Yes. But no when it concerns both recognizing oneself and making known that man and the human race are inclined to misunderstand God. Man is so created that he can understand, but does not have to understand, what God says to him. God does not abandon the created man to his needs and anxieties; He provides him with the assistance of His word; with faithful ears to what is spoken to him.

Already in hearing he blends together command of heaven and statute of earth, revelation to the existing being and the orientations that he arranges himself. Even the holy scriptures of man are not excluded, not even the Bible. What is involved here is not ultimately the fact that this or that form of biblical historical narrative has misunderstood God; what is involved is the fact that in the work of throats and pens out of which the text of the Old Testament has arisen, misunderstanding has again and again attached itself to understanding, the manufactured has been mixed with the received. We have no objective criterion for the distinction; we have only faith—when we have it. Nothing can make me believe in a God who punishes Saul because he has not murdered his enemy. And yet even today I still cannot read the passage that tells this otherwise than with fear and trembling. But not it alone. Always when I have to translate or to interpret a biblical text, I do so with fear and trembling, in an inescapable tension between the word of God and the words of man.

-------------------------

[My own comments, mostly unchanged since 2004, follow]

After reading all that, there is still more.

I want to draw your attention to the rather frightening encounter between Buber and Hechler, the Zionist Christian who thinks the return of the Jews to Israel heralds Christ’s prophesied return. Meeting Hechler first at the turn of the 19th Century, Buber thinks that they agree (they’re both Zionist). Only later in 1914, when Hechler exudes creepy enthusiasm for the coming of a ‘world war’, does Buber suspect that their values are less perfectly matched. Hechler’s prescience about World War I is remarkable enough. Buber speculates that Hechler’s intimate connection with Europe’s powers-that-be clued him into its inevitability, but while Buber is horrified by the thought of a world war, Hechler waxes sanguine on the “great times” they live in. Hechler represents a peculiar subset of Christians—known as dispensationalists though I refer to them derogatorily as apocalypse fetishists—who set aside their horror at the miseries inflicted by war and oppression to applaud the fulfillment of the prophesies that the misery makes possible. There are still a lot of these apocalypse fetish “Christians” running around today, and today as then, several of them have tremendous wealth, influence and power. I also suspect that they keep tabs on cultural developments within Judaism, encouraging the developments they like (political Zionism, including the “greater Israel” fantasies of the most rabid settlers) and discouraging developments they don’t like (labor and civil rights activism, humanistic visions of a just world for all, etc). Buber notes how when he tossed off a mediocre Zionist poem, Hechler treated it like a work of Shakespearean genius, passed it on to the Grand Duke, and published it without Buber’s permission. Hechler presumably saw himself as helping along the fulfillment of prophecy.

Perhaps the same sentiment underlies Bush’s famous comment that Ariel Sharon is a “man of peace.” Perhaps the peace Bush refers to is the thousand year reign of Jesus Christ which will envelop the earth after Armageddon, when the returning Jesus, sword in mouth, dispatches the beast and the whore of Babylon, sending to hell the unrepentant Jews, as well as all others who will not intone with kindergarten sincerity, “Jesus Christ is my lord and savior” and “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.”

So there we have it: all the evil in the world is not the result of a Jewish conspiracy after all but rather a dispensationalist (apocalypse fetishist) Christian conspiracy. It’s the dispensationalist Christians who eat the babies at Lent. It’s the dispensationalist Christians who were cheerleading the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, feeling not horror at the cruel execution of a nonviolent man, but rather gladness at their chance to have eternal life when they eat his body and drink his blood. It’s the dispensationalist Christians who form the secret government that negotiates with the grey space aliens over performing experiments on children from trailer parks.

They did it. They are the evil ones. We must resist them at all costs, even to the extermination of their last man, woman and child. And their invidious leader is George Bush. George Bush is Hitler, Stalin and the antichrist all rolled into one stupid man.

Now before I take this sarcasm so far that I get nabbed by the irony-deficient wing of the NSA, I want to say something about “the They.” “The They” is a phrase that comes out of Heidegger, influential existentialist philosopher, Nazi, and improbable boyfriend of Hannah Arendt. I did not understand Heidegger when I read him in existentialism class years ago, and I still don’t understand him. It appears that by “the ‘they’” he meant some kind of crowd-derived inauthenticity with respect to our inevitable demise. This is an interesting topic to explore, but I think his phrase will have more potency in my essay if I misinterpret it: sometimes the misinterpretation of a phrase can do wonders for its relevance. I would prefer to use “the ‘they’” to label an attitude, the They attitude, which contrasts with the Thou attitude advocated by Buber.

The They attitude is third person; it picks out what is wrong with those who are not us, and blames them for every darkness that exists both outside and inside of our own soul, and the souls of those we consider “us”. To have the They attitude is to be uniquely skilled at what Carl Jung called projecting your shadow—seeing what is dark and chaotic in yourself as in fact located in someone else. It may indeed be part of the They attitude to also see God in the third person, as a He who, at some appointed time in the future, will violently dispatch the They with boatloads of blood and gore while you watch cheering with sexual excitement.

While enlightened you and I can easily escape inclusion in this grim caricature, it is unlikely that we can also escape the They attitude. The fact that we can brand people with this caricature or call them judgment-soaked names like “apocalypse fetishist” does not automatically make us followers of the Thou—quite the opposite.

Martin Buber did not judge the world war-enthusiast, Christian Zionist Hechler. At no point did he call him names or attribute the world’s evil to him. Rather, in his memory of Hechler, he took care to recall the similarity of their views, and even remarked on how “upright” he was. Certainly Buber rejected a third person attitude towards God, and perhaps this rejection was tainted with judgment; but we must read that judgment in by ourselves. It is not there screaming with anger for us to behold. Perhaps only our own screams of anger can illuminate it, and then we need to ask why, truly, we are so angry. Hopefully the answer will move our shadow back where it belongs.

Both the They and the Thou attitudes can be found within Christianity and Judaism, and presumably in many other worldviews whether religious, philosophical, ideological, or banal. Generally, the closer any worldview gets to a Thou approach, the more in common it will see with the Thou potential of other worldviews. The closer any worldview gets to a They approach, the more it will see other worldviews as simply incomplete or evil.

This issue is dear to my heart because I am a Christian, and Christians are infamous for seeing other religious views as incomplete or evil. This is indeed a way of seeing that is common within Christianity, and backed up in places by scripture, but it is a decidedly OPTIONAL position to take as a Christian, just as it is optional to gouge out your eyes every time you look with lust on a woman. It is an option that I and many other Christians choose to not choose. I am a Christian, but I consider it a potential loss of discipleship to convert someone from Thou Judaism to They Christianity.

Were Buber to abandon his understanding of the Jewish faith and follow instead Hechler’s ‘world war’ Christianity, I would be inclined to respond pessimistically. I see nothing magical in the publicly repeated words, “I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior” nor in the weekly appearance at a Christian church, in the public observance of Christian prayer, ritual and moral displays, or in enthusiasm for the gruesome fulfillment of what some imagine to be Christian prophecies.

I do, however, see something promising in recognizing God and one’s neighbor as “Thou”, the way you recognize as Thou those you love most because they are the most real to you. I see the achievement of this as the entrance to heaven and to life, and I credit anyone’s ability to do this to the Holy Spirit, the same spirit that led Jesus Christ. I am very reluctant to say that you need say the name “Jesus” to consistently invite the Holy Spirit into your life—the Good Samaritan never professed Jesus’ name either, but when he went to help his enemy Jew out of the ditch, the Holy Spirit was with him, as I believe it was with Martin Buber when he wrote many of the lines I have transcribed here. Though Buber never invokes the words “Jesus Christ” with religious reverence in his writings, I see the spirit of the Christ I know pumping through them. As I write this, I consider Buber the only philosopher who comes close to writing consistently in the Gospel spirit, closer even than Kierkegaard, though I wonder whether Kierkegaard influenced Buber’s use of the phrase “fear and trembling”, the title of Kierkegaard’s moving meditation on Abraham’s willingness to kill his son Isaac in faithful obedience to God’s command.

I would not say, however, that Buber is a “Thou” Jew, nor that I am a “Thou” Christian, nor that Hechler was a “They” Christian. This labeling itself is how a “They” attitude might slip in through the back door of an otherwise “Thou” orientation. Having never observed the full life stories of either Buber or Hechler, it is quite plausible to imagine that Buber regularly treated people as They (or, as he would put it in his theological idiom, “it”) and that Hechler treated almost everyone he encountered as Thou, and indeed that Hechler’s relationship with God was much closer to an I-Thou relationship than Buber’s. Indeed, with the story about the boy who came to Buber subtly seeking guidance on whether or not to commit suicide, Buber shows how indulgence in normality-transcending “religious experience” (presumably with a self-conscious “Thou” orientation) stood between him and his ability to hear and answer to the Thou in the boy. Had the boy gone to Hechler instead, perhaps he would have lived much longer. This would be ironic, since in general Hechler seems to be more sanguine about people dying en masse than Buber is. But having sporadically observed my own life and caught revealing glimpses of others’, I can say with quite a good deal of confidence that irony gets everybody.

Those who talk Thou often walk They and those who talk They often walk Thou. Those who succeed admirably in one moral domain often fail egregiously in another. Irony should not be overestimated, however. This is not Alice Through the Looking Glass, and if you wish to get to the mountain, walking away from it is a risky strategy. I do think it is best, when faced with a choice between Thou and They, to err as much as possible on the side of what looks to be Thou, for I believe God is more readily found in Thou than in They. But do not congratulate yourself for making this choice, or condemn others for not making it.

I said before that conversion from Thou Judaism (and by implication Thou anything-else) to They Christianity is a potential loss of discipleship.

The key word is “potential.” I have not seen from now to the end of the world, and I don’t know what surprising turns will come of the fecundity of Christian missionary activity. Certainly the bulk of this missionary activity is presently right wing and dogmatic, and I am politically inclined but theologically reluctant to label most exclusivist evangelical Christianity as They Christianity. As a Christian, however, I should be encouraged at the increasing number of people in the world that I have some principled common ground with, even if at present we disagree strongly on some key issues. Even with right wing Christians, I at least have recourse to the Bible, which is packed with Thou passages, and to God, to whom I can encourage a humble querying prayer in the hope that such prayer will water the seed of Thou (and if praying with those I encourage to pray, I may find it is my own Thou that is most in need of watering). With a right wing atheist, on the other hand, I have to seek out other more cumbersome patches of common ground.

But right wing ­ left wing are not markers of great God-knowing consequence anyway, no more so than publicly professed religion. As I stated, I am a Christian, but I would be tentatively dismayed by someone’s conversion from, say, Thou atheism to They Christianity. Likewise, I am liberal to the point of sympathy with socialism (of the libertarian democratic variety), but I would be equally dismayed by someone’s conversion from Thou conservative capitalism to They liberal socialism. Now admittedly, I’m temperamentally inclined to indulge regularly in They liberal socialism, because it’s fun and because I’m not always (rarely ever) trying to live out a Thou orientation. However, at the time of writing, I would recognize that a Thou conservative capitalist who genuinely seeks to bring life and flourishing to everyone her abstinence-promotion board game business touches (workers, consumers, suppliers, advertisers, etc) does a lot more good than I do when I invite people to have a chuckle of collaborative contempt at the expense of people across the culture war divide.

I wish in our war-loving world (whether wars of arms or wars of words) that more would see the wisdom in the exhortation to love your enemies. Many see such love as an irrational death wish, a betrayal of those you should really love (who are presumably oppressed by your enemies) or some other kind of sacrifice of good sense and intuitive moral decency for the sake of appearing pious. The point in loving one’s enemies, however, is that often our enemies reveal things about ourselves to us that our friends and authorities will not, and what they reveal, we usually need to know. If we do not listen to our enemies with an ear trained in loving discernment (the loving discernment that should grow with repeated attempts to listen to and obey God) we will miss essential lessons.

Moreover, if we cannot love our enemies, how can we say that we really love God? In everything evil our enemies do to us and to those we love, they are simply flawed human beings stumbling around in their self-created darkness like we are. When we are visited by an evil that can only reasonably be attributed to God (and many would claim that as Creator, God is responsible for all evils, from devastating earthquakes to the apparently chosen actions of all God’s creation) we cannot excuse this evil with a nod to His imperfections. Despite any full agency doubts we might have about human beings, God definitely knows what He does. If you can bring yourself to love God in His full disturbing enormity, then you can love anybody and everybody—including your neighbor, including your enemy, including yourself. If you cannot love your neighbor (enemies included), then you may take this as an indication that you do not yet properly love God. And if you will not love Thou on which your existence is predicated, then how can your life have the meaning and direction that you and I and all of us seek from life as surely as we seek air, water, food, shelter and companionship?

And, that, for the moment, is all I have to write.

Except, perhaps, thank you for reading all the way to the end, and I hope that what I’ve written brings you closer.

And perhaps give some thought to forwarding this behemoth along.

And that’s really it.

Really.