Buber: Mysticism Without Loss of Identity - philosopher Martin Buber

Judaism, Wntr, 2000 by Martin A. Bertman

I find in Buber an old Jewish sternness in respect to idolatry; he takes Paul, like the Gnostics, to be idolatrous by undermining the difference between God's uniqueness and humanity. This idolatry distorts the presence of God in all genuine relationships. Buber opposes the gnostic attitude to the Jewish I-Thou attitude; yet, I believe that two corrective notes are needed. For one, I think Buber's view of Paul as a Gnostic is too extreme, though some Christian theologians agree with Buber. Buber is not entirely wrong but he can be challenged by a more Jewish reading of Paul. Indeed Paul, unlike Buber himself, seems to have obeyed the laws of kaskruth, or Jewish ritual law.

Further, there is some Gnosticism in all neo-Platonic views from Paul's Jewish contemporary, Philo of Alexandria (20 BCE-40 CE) onward, including kabbalistic speculation, e.g., in the classic of Hassidism, the Tanya or Likkutei Amorim.

Nevertheless, however Paul ought to be considered, it would be unfair by implication if I did not mention Buber's own resilience as a dialogue partner even with Pauline Christianity. Consider his openness to such a dialogue, when he says, "The God of the Christian is both imageless and imaged; but imageless rather in the religious idea and imaged rather in actual experience. The image conceals the imageless one. A new kind of immediacy is to be surely obtained by this. It is that which can be compared with the immediacy to a beloved person who has just this and no other form and whom one has chosen precisely in this form. It is a Thou which determined as it is, as it were appertains to one. From this a concreteness of relationship arises, which craves sacramental incorporation of the Thou, but personally, can go further, to the merging of the self, to the self bearing this suffering, to a love for man that proceeds from him." [22]

From a traditional Jewish view Buber goes too far. The image of the Jew on a Cross may speak to some for an imageless God but it carries with it the danger of obliterating the distinction between man and God. And despite the Zelem Elohim--man made in the image of God--for the Jew, the possibility of a relation between man and God contains the Zelem [23] as a foundation of the relationship and not something about image to be taken more literally. Yet one must say that Buber is generous, whether or not that generosity is appropriate: "The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings." [24]

Buber's generosity, but from a firmness of spirit, is a fitting final word. Despite the Pauline vision which is in great opposition to his I-Thou, Buber is willing to listen and test himself against it. He is willing to have an I-Thou with a Pauline Christian; yet, characteristically, Buber refused to meet with Pope John XXIII because, despite his personal qualities, a Pope's institutional position destroys his openness to be transformed spiritually by a dialogue. Perhaps Buber again goes too far. Nevertheless, Buber's mysticism, as it is expressed through the dialogical situation, means Buber can love an opponent when they meet in the profound seriousness of the I-Thou encounter, where each stakes his destiny but, thereby, where each, no matter how he might not recognize it, also has God as his fundamental reality.