Buber Holocaust

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Agonism in Faith: Buber's Eternal Thou after the Holocaust Author(s): David Forman-Barzilai and Martin Buber Source: Modern Judaism, Vol. 23, No. 2 (May, 2003), pp. 156-179Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1396726Accessed: 02-09-2015 16:17 UTC

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David Forman-Barzilai

AGONISM IN FAITH: BUBER'S ETERNAL THOU AFTER THE HOLOCAUST

For the first time, I felt revolt rise up in me. Why should I bless His name? The Eternal, Lord of the Universe, the All- Powerful and Terrible, was silent. What I to thank Him for?

-Elie Wiesel, Night (1960)

He spoke to us and now he is silent. -Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations I (1947)

The Holocaust challenged the very foundation of Martin Buber's dia-

logical thought, especially his concept of God and his view of the human being as God's dialogical partner.' To still find value in his own

dialogical philosophy, Buber had to reconcile God's inaction and silence in the Holocaust with his well-known apodictic presuppositions that humanity and God are bound together by an eternal dialogue- and that the "I and Thou" relation among human beings originates from and culminates with the dialogue with the "Eternal Thou."2 For these reasons, investigating the collision between Buber and the Holo- caust is crucial for the evaluation of his oeuvre. No account of Buber's

thought can be complete without a serious inquiry into the impact of the Holocaust on his writings.3 This article's twofold goal is to do pre- cisely this-to provide an account of Buber's confrontation with the question of faith in God after the Holocaust and to use this account as a prism through which we can examine his attempts thereafter to sus- tain the dialogical principle. By taking on ourselves this double assign- ment, we are assured that the intrinsic improbability of providing a confident or comforting answer to the haunting question regarding faith in God after the Holocaust, will not render this inquiry futile. Alas, we will be able to give a critical account of the ways Buber strug- gled with the tensions between the Holocaust and his own dialogical philosophy. Moreover, extending the line beyond Buber's dialogical thought in general and his confrontation with the Holocaust in particular, I conclude that after the Holocaust we can no longer regard the realm of divine providence as remaining beyond human knowledge, as

DOI: 10.1093/mj/kjg011 Modern Judaism 23(2), ? Oxford University Press 2003; all rights reserved.



Agonism in Faith 157

the Bible often demands us to do. Therefore, in order to remain faith- ful to our humanity without losing faith-in God after the Holocaust, we must hold what we in our very limited human way have learned to believe is justice above what we experience and perceive as God's absolute injustice.4

Buber wrote very little about the Holocaust per se. Some would

argue that he wrote too little; some, on the other hand (and there are

signs that Buber would agree with them), regard all of his writings from the late 1930s forward as in one way or another confronting this event.5 Beyond the cognitive impenetrability of the Holocaust and the obvious inherent difficulties in comprehending it-its magnitude, our lack of

perspective, the unprecedented nature of what happened, and so on- Buber's unique methodological approach to human understanding pre- cludes a unified account of the Holocaust. Indeed, it is important to note that Buber's method of philosophical anthropology, which he

adopted and helped develop, is resistant to the notion of a "unified

theory" of man. He called instead for a continuous process of "reveal-

ing the unity within the multiplicity" of humankind and, through that, to unveil the multifaceted reality of the human condition. Therefore, Buber's methodological framework is at least partially responsible for the lack of a comprehensive account of the Holocaust in his writings. Rather than a unified account, he indeed touches on the Holocaust in various writings dedicated to peripheral and yet pertinent subjects such as history, politics, religion, andJudaism. Each of these encounters sheds

light on issues in a way that contributes to the whole picture. Examined

through the synthetic lens of Buber's lifelong vocation, these fragments culminate into an existentially unified whole that is far greater than its

parts. Another prefatory comment relates to the issue of Buber's audi-

ence-those to whom he directed his words. It is important to bear in mind that Buber had decided, from a very young age, to serve humanism and Judaism and, through that, to serve humanity and the Jewish people-and not vice versa.6 But while speaking to the world in general and to the Jewish people in particular, Buber was especially concerned with sharing his thoughts with those whom we might refer to today as an "endangered species"-the believers.7 Between the growing ten- dency to surrender to atheistic and nihilistic views or to adopt deistic ones-"the God of the philosophers," on one hand, and the apparent shortcoming of God culminating with the Holocaust, on the other- Buber recognized that the main challenge rested on the tormented believer facing the existential dilemma of how not merely to continue "to believe" but "to keep faith" in the living God. Adopting Pascal's note, Buber refers to "the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Him to



158 David Forman-Barzilai

whom one can say Thou."8 In the coming pages, I introduce evidence

suggesting that Buber was cognizant of a new existential mode of living and believing, distinguished by an entirely different quality of agony never experienced before: an existential agony shared in the realm of

being of all who were committed to holding to their belief in God after Auschwitz. I am calling this existential mode of living "agonism in faith."

There are two documents in which Buber considered the Holo- caust directly and explicitly from religious and philosophical points of view. The first is his essay "The Dialogue between Heaven and Earth," written in 1950.9 The second is an unpublished letter written in the same year (dated July 2, 1950) to a young Hungarian scholar by the name of Ernsz Szilagyi.'o I devote special attention to analyzing these two documents and to the elucidation of the concept of the "hidden God" that lies at their core. Along with Eclipse of God, which focuses on the notion of God's eclipse from "our side," and with reference to other relevant writings, I identify Buber's genuine attempts to answer the question of faith in God after the Holocaust within the framework and the language of dialogue and, consequently, therefore, to "save" the validity of his philosophy of dialogue." Eventually we will have to evaluate whether Buber convinces us that the Holocaust did not defini-

tively render his philosophy invalid and irrelevant. Disappointing as it

may be, yet not surprisingly, all signs point toward a real possibility that Buber himself, let alone his audience, was not sufficiently reas- sured. And yet his struggle provides a searchlight for us and perhaps even something to hold onto.

In order to stay methodologically and thematically focused, I dis-

tinguish two spheres in Buber's encounters with the Holocaust: the concrete realm of practical reality and the abstract realm of thought. In the latter, the philosophical and theoretical realm, as we shall see, Buber seems to move uneasily from one idea to another and his mes-

sage seems hesitant, inconsistent, and often self-contradictory. But in the political and practical realm, Buber's position remains unequivo- cally clear and coherent. It is not my intention here to focus on Buber's historical and political roles during and after the Holocaust, for they are well documented. Nonetheless, to present a more comprehensive picture, I would like to preface my discussion of the philosophical and theoretical realm with a few words about Buber's political and practical contributions, in the concrete realm of the "here and now."12

"HERE AND NOW"

Buber's immediate response to the Holocaust was to mobilize his power and influence to fight two battles: first, to amplify his call for




the world's attention to the vital need for dialogue in the unprecedented time of global crisis, and second, to fight against tendencies

among some in "our camp" to adopt the notion that "might is right."'3 When he spoke to the general public, Buber expressed his view

that, in the Holocaust, the conflict between representatives of the dia-

logical approach and those of the monological approach reached its decisive and crucial peak. He spoke also about the urgency of engaging in dialogue as a necessary and preliminary condition for reaching an

understanding among adversaries and ultimately achieving peace and reconciliation. "Hearkening to the human voice where it speaks unfalsi-

fled, and replying to it," he asserts, "this above all is needed today."'4 Buber traced back the origin of the dialogical crisis to World War I. The outbreak of World War I was, according to Buber, the beginning of "probably the biggest crisis the human race has ever experienced before."'5 During that war, he testifies,

it became clear to me that a process was going on which before then I had

only surmised. This was the growing difficulty of genuine dialogue, and most

especially of genuine dialogue between men of different kinds and convictions. ... I began to understand at that time, more than thirty years ago, that this is the central question for the fate of mankind. Since then I have continually pointed out that the future of man as man depends upon a rebirth of dia-

logue.16

The most dangerous consequence of this dialogical crisis was that the genuine confirmation among fellow human beings was exchanged with an illusory one." In the absence of dialogue, Buber argues, a vac- uum was created that was tragically filled by "devils in disguise," like Hitler.

Addressing the Jewish people of "Jerusalem," he calls on them not to give up "the eternal demand of the spirit" for a given compromising historical reality. It was for him the most important and urgent task to warn his devastated fellow brethren, having faced the unthinkable, not to adopt the false doctrine of the Nazi's brutal and "power-oriented" national chauvinism. Courageously, he voiced on every occasion that we should not surrender to the false idea that their way is the right way and to believe that it is negative only because it is directed against us.'8 He warned the Yishuv that adopting this approach would amount to acting in "the land of Israel like Hitler."'9

In short, against the dialectic power of force, Buber advocated the dialogical power of the spoken word. Against the monological reliance on one's physical might, Buber introduced a reliance on the strength of common human bonds and Humanistic values. Yet, according to Buber's philosophy of dialogue, the source of humanity as well as the human dialogical partnership is God. This brings us to the doorstep




of our main investigation-Buber's view on God and faith after the Holocaust.

THE CHALLENGE-GOD'S PLACE IN I AND THOU

Our point of departure is God's place in Buber's philosophy of

dialogue. Toward the end of his life, Buber attempted to conceptua- lize the epitome of his life's work: "To be a man means to be the being that is over against,"20 by which he meant that man is ontologically a

dialogical entity, that our anthro-phenomenon is our capacity of being a relational partner. Soon after, he added an additional component: "What concerns me fundamentally is that our relation to our fellow man and our relation to God belong together, that their basic character, that of the reciprocal I-Thou relation, joins them to each other."21

In I and Thou, Buber's magnum opus written as early as 1923, he writes, "Only one You never ceases, in accordance with its nature to be You for us," and he adds, "Only we are not always there."22 Later, in the concluding chapter dedicated to God, Buber spells out three

necessary elements present in a genuine dialogical encounter with God: first, "actual reciprocity"; second, "the inexpressible confrontation of meaning"; and third, that meaning touches our life in the here and now."2 Needless to say, these three conditions became problematic, if not

impossible, after the Holocaust. In a later attempt to clarify his insight, Buber describes our way of knowing God as a process through which

gradual exposure to fragmented bits of data brings the whole into focus, revealing God's image: "out of the moment Gods there arises for us a single identity of the Lord of the voice, the One."24 We cannot but wonder in what way the signs of God's silence/absence during the traumatic and unimaginable moments of the Holocaust affected Buber's knowledge of God and his perception of the relationship between man and God.

Again, late in his life, in a prologue to I and Thou written in 1957, Buber clarifies his views on the matter, which he defines as "the close association of the relation to God with the-relation to one's fellow- men." He then points toward a few necessary and crucial principles that characterize our dialogue with God: (1) that we cannot speak of God but only of our relationship to him and (2) that "our relationship to him is as supra-contradictory as it is because he is as supra-contradictory as he is."25 Buber also characterizes the relationship with God as (3) "mutuality of that kind that can be obtained only between persons" and says (4) that God is to us "the absolute person," (5) that "God's address to man penetrates the events in all our lives and all the events




in the world around us," (6) that everything biographical and everything historical carries an instruction and a demand that the human

person is called to answer in each and every situation of his everyday life, and (7) that, like the existence of God, the mutuality between God and man cannot be proved. Yet, enigmatically, he adds (8) that anyone who dares to speak of God "bears witness" to an encounter with His

presence. Further, Buber demands this from both "present and future witnesses."''26

No doubt, these assertions made in so many places and so late in his life suggest that Buber's faith in God never faded. Yet his assertions

gradually became vague, puzzling, and in many ways unconvincing. Especially puzzling is his later characterization of people who speak of God as bearing witness. Does everyone who dares to speak really bear witness? And witness of what? Shouldn't we be suspicious about such witnessing? How can we not doubt this "experience of faith" after untold numbers of people experienced God's silence and inaction in Auschwitz? Finally, we cannot but wonder if Buber really believed that he was providing us with a genuine answer or whether he was trying desperately to avert a dead end. In either case, finding answers to these intruding questions requires that we look beyond I and Thou.

ECLIPSE OF GOD IN HISTORY

In the Hebrew version of the essay entitled "The Dialogue between God and Man in the Bible," Buber asks openly, "Can one still, as an individual and as a people, enter at all into a dialogic relationship with Him?" (emphasis added)." In addition, he mentions together for the first time the notions of the "eclipse of God" and "the hidden God," in connection with the Holocaust.28 Friedman has noticed that this essay demonstrates "that the real heart of Buber's understanding of this hour as one of the 'eclipse of God' is laid bare"; moreover, he recognizes that in this essay Buber does not use the term eclipse "but rather the biblical language of God hiding his face.""29 Fackenheim points out that "to be sure, an eclipse of God may be due to our failure to listen to what there is to be heard; but it may be due to a divine silence which persists no matter how devoutly we listen." And he notes: "But it would appear that Buber has not wholly decided his stand on this last, and in the age of manifest 'eclipse of God,' most troubling question.""3 But I suggest beyond these interpretations that Buber did, in fact, spell out a fundamental distinction between these two forms of breakdown of dialogue between heaven and earth, as well as illuminate their tensions. To my mind, as we shall see, Buber's discussion of "the eclipse of God"




and "the hidden God" reveals two progressive efforts to overcome the tension between the dialogical concept of God and God's silence dur-

ing the Holocaust. There has been virtually no recognition in scholar-

ship of this linkage. Moreover, the 1950 letter to Szilagyi utilizes these two attempts again, without convincingly overcoming their limitations, and proposes yet a third attempt based on the experience of Abraham and Job. But this also proved to be too weak to carry the day. In the

following pages I address briefly each of these attempts. I would like to begin by providing a summary of the arguments

put forward in "The Dialogue between Heaven and Earth." It opens with Buber adopting biblical narrative and describing the relation between God and man as an ongoing dialogue, a dialogue between two

independent entities, in which the human being, as God's only creature endowed with free will, can choose or refuse to answer the call of heaven. Yet Buber acknowledges that the nature of revelation had

changed since biblical times. Direct revelation, the spoken words and deeds of the living God, addressed to individual and communities was

replaced by what some describe as times when "the holy spirit has been taken from us; heaven is silent to us." Consequently, some became atheists, and some resolved this tension by adopting a deistic "God

concept." But Buber points toward a broader view about the sphere of the Divine presence, a third quasi-pantheistic view that does not limit revelation to the life of individuals or the public: "Everything, being and becoming, nature and history, is essentially a divine pronouncement (Aussprache), an infinite context [chain] of signs meant to be perceived and understood by perceiving and understanding creatures."31 But unlike God's revelation in nature, which is constant and open to all with eyes to see, in history, Buber acknowledges, there are times when God is hidden or eclipsed from humankind.32

According to Buber, inspired again by biblical narrative, history, though a human phenomenon, is not "man made" but it is in its essence and quality the record in time of the dialogue between the human and the Divine, between the creature and its creator. Therefore, the qualitative difference between historical times corresponds to the extent to which the dialogue between heaven and earth is thriving. Buber ends I and Thou with a paragraph dedicated to distinguishing three historical periods. The periods differ according to the extent to which God's word is present in each. We might think of this in vertical terms, while the horizontal refers to humanity's engagement with the world. Buber distinguishes the historical times when God's words are a "living presence," other times when God's words become a guideline-active and effective as they may be but not actually heard and experienced-and, finally, times when it is reduced to a formulation. These three states correspond




with the horizontal state of dialogue between man and the world. In the first category of time, a living association between humanity and the world exists, and it is vital and renewed. In the second there is merely an agreement between the two; whereas in the third there is only alienation and eventually the nullification of reality, "until the great shudder

appears, the holding of breath in the dark, and the preparatory silence.""3 It is indeed within the context of this major theme in Buber's

writings-the qualitative difference between historical periods-that the

singularity of modem times in general, and the Holocaust and post- Holocaust times in particular, must be comprehended.

In "The Dialogue between Heaven and Earth," Buber refines these observations and asserts that the contact between God and man can be

disrupted in two ways. In the first case the hindrance comes from below, from the human side. In these times, which Buber calls times of

"eclipse of God," God's ways are unknown because they are not sought after or because mankind has lost its capability for "seeing" or relating to God. The human path to God becomes hidden. But the eclipse of the sun, Buber insists, "is an event that occurs between the sun and our eyes and not in the depths of our eyes only.""34 This argument about man sharing responsibility for the breakdown of communication with God is occasionally used by Buber to describe the crisis of modernity. But it seems to fall short with regard to the Holocaust and post- Holocaust times, for it does not provide any sort of convincing or com-

forting alibi for God's inaction. Our time, Buber recognizes, is a time of an "eclipse of God." This

erosion in our ability to "see" and relate to God is the culmination of the process that the Western world underwent in modern times and the result of a "Copernican Revolution" led by religious and philosophical thought. Creator and created changed places. God the creator and man the created are no more; rather, there is a total reverse. It is we, the human beings, argued modern philosophers from Kant to Nietz- sche, who created God in our image. Buber devotes his collection of essays Eclipse of God to offering an account of this process, which culmi- nated with Nietzsche's assertion that "God is dead." Yet, if we give up on God, argues Buber, we kill only the god of our creation. If an individual follows Nietzsche's assertion, he or she can kill only the "human God." "He who is denoted by the name lives in the light of His eter- nity," Buber concludes, "but we, 'the slayers,' remain dwellers in dark- ness, consigned to death.""35 Buber continued to emphasize, reiterating the biblical view on that matter, that man invariably bore primary responsibility for the eclipse of God, yet he moved gradually to consider the role of God in the breakdown of communication. For that purpose he adopted the prophetic notion of the "hidden face."




THE HIDDEN FACE

The second and most terrible way God's presence is missing, Buber continues in "The Dialogue between Heaven and Earth," occurs when God himself creates the distance, when he himself withholds the illumi- nation. Here there is no direct or exclusive correlation with humanity's capabilities, attitudes, or actions. Rather, it is God who removes himself from the earth and ignores totally his creation. These are the times when history is empty of divine signs-in fact, it seems as if the world is being abandoned. The most frightening element of this condition is not only the void that is left but also the agonizing sense of ignorance and impotency to restore God's presence. Indeed, Buber writes, in times of the first kind, when knowledge of God is lacking among the human race, humanity supposedly can struggle and by devoted effort achieve a renewal of the contact. This is not so in times when God is hiding his face, when it seems that humanity is incapable of bridging the abyss and renewing the contact."6 Indeed, beyond the notion of God's eclipse, and challenging our ability to relate to God as trustworthy of our faith, is the fact that during and since the Holocaust we cannot but recognize the responsibility of God himself in the breakdown of the dialogue between heaven and earth. As I mentioned above, this is an especially agonizing realization for those who, like Buber, still believe or want to believe in God.

On another occasion when Buber was conversing with young Kib- butz members, a person in the audience asked him a similar question about faith after the Holocaust. Buber mentioned in his reply that a young person had already asked him the question and that he had replied that if a person believes in God, then he accepts him as he is, like a person who falls in love accepts the person whom he or she loves as that person is.37 I believe this young person to whom Buber refers to be Ernsz Szilagyi. I offer below (in Appendix A) a verbatim translation of this important document.38

I would like to use the letter to Szilagyi to further navigate the labyrinth of Buber's various arguments on faith in and dialogue with God after the Holocaust. Buber opens his reply by spelling out for the first and only time what he saw as our complaint with God. He does so metaphorically but undeniably. God is like the friend we trusted and loved, but we come to realize by "all the signs" that he mislead us, and instead of the angel we believed him to be, we find him to be-or, rather, he appears to be-"a demonic entity." In face of this realization we are faced with an existential dilemma, which unresolved becomes the source of what I have coined an "agonism in f-aith." What is the truth? What are we to believe: "the signs" or the heart? Buber's point of departure is the apodictic assertion that God is a living entity and




not our creation. He is not a manmade idea or merely an ethical ideal."9 Buber suggests that this was indeed the way Abraham andJob accepted God. If someone accepts him otherwise, he argues, that person is ac-

cepting a statue, an idol crafted by his or her own hand, a "good" one that is easy to love. These words are echoed in Eclipse of God, when Buber argued that "Job despairs because God and the moral ideal seem diverse to him. But He who answered Job out of the tempest is more exalted even than the ideal sphere. He is not the archetype of ideal, but contains the archetype.... God desires that men should follow His revelation, yet at the same time He wishes to be accepted and loved in His deepest concealment."40

Nonetheless, examining the two cases of Abraham and Job reveals, beyond the obvious similarities, some essential differences between them and the Holocaust experience, not only in degrees but in quality. Abraham and Job believe in God's existence-Abraham, through direct revelation; and Job, through his just deeds. In the case of Abraham, as is the case throughout the five books of the Torah, the main issue is

getting to know who God is, who the speaker is. God spoke directly to Abraham and even debated with him on issues like justice and loyalty. He performed miracles and made promises and covenants. But still the

question remains: Who is God? Abraham did not need to believe in the existence of God but simply to believe him, meaning to put his trust in him and his ways. The uniqueness of God's demand of Abra- ham to sacrifice Isaac is to believe in him beyond reason and against what seems an unreasonable and unjust request: in short, to believe in "God's way" even when it seems absurd and cruel.41 The way trust is

supposedly restored is by a last-minute turn of events. But, as Buber notes, "the killing of the son happened in the heart."

As for Job, he initially believed that the justice of God's ways were revealed to him, for he prospered, and was successful, as a righteous person like him should. But then he was inflicted by the devil with disasters and sorrows. We do not hear, however, of any direct revelation to Job before his fall. We have only to assume that Job believed in God's ways because they made sense to him. Job did not doubt the existence of God but, rather, asked for a justification of his ways. In his revelation to Job, God directly told him that he could not and should not know "the why." As Buber writes, he did not say to Job that the world is just; he did not make a confession and did not reveal his secret of mercy. He was just there. Job "saw" him as the One that was there. Without anything further happening, Job uttered, "I am consoled." So here, as with the case of Abraham, God revealed himself while insisting that his ways should remain hidden. Indeed, God cannot erase the moment of horror that Abraham and Isaac went through and the damage that his trial of faith inflicted on them. By the same token,




he cannot erase the suffering that Job and his family endured. Abra- ham and Job wanted to know God's way but were instead "comforted"

by his voice. But, for Buber, the troubling issue remains: the authentic-

ity of the voice and what its message means. Abraham and Job did not ask to be consoled by a comforting voice but, rather, to gain reassur- ance that God's ways are just.42

BEYOND SILENCE

Buber was well aware of the qualitative uniqueness of God's role in the Holocaust, that heaven was silent as one and a half million children where cruelly murdered and, more importantly, that no angel was sent to Auschwitz to stop the burning chimneys. And all things considered, that is what matters. The fact that no one heard a comforting voice then, or since, is secondary. Still, there was no voice and no explanation, only a terrible surrendering silence. Buber tries to defend this silence in his discussion of Sartre's existential atheism. Again he refers to the biblical idea that "God is not only a self-revealing but also a self-

concealing God." Buber attached to the notion of "the perseverance of the religious" a dialogical phenomenological origin-in other words, a

primordial relation with the absolute other. But, Buber concludes, "if man is no longer able to attain this relation, if God is silent toward him and he toward God, then something has taken place, not in human

subjectivity but in Being itself."43 Buber rejects Sartre's call to overcome the "religious need," as well as Nietzsche's nihilistic conclusion. In- stead, Buber encourages us to keep living in this new existential mode, not as an awaiting mode, but rather as a mode which encompasses a sober confrontation with the silence along with a uncompromising yearning for the voice. In his "Replay to My Critics" first published in German in 1963, Buber contemplates in this spirit about "a revelation

through the hiding of the face, a speaking through the silence."44 Yet even here Buber focuses on the future and restricts his criti-

cism of God's past silence to the realm of appearance. Indeed, by add-

ing the comment that he could not conceive of any interruption of Divine revelation and that therefore the silence of God is only "a condition that works on us as a silence of God," he basically renders his previ- ous definition of the hidden face and the silence of God nothing short of meaningless, for he now rejects the very possibility of God hiding his face from man. But more critical is what he refrained from saying, for his interrogation overlooks the most important complaint toward God-his inaction. Buber recoiled from spelling out his complaint against God as the compliant bystander. The only way to resolve this allegation might have been to regard the Holocaust as the ultimate




proof of God's inability to intervene, of his limitation. If he was not there, comforting the victims until their last breath, then he was in

anguish too. In other words, the only resolution is to replace the prop- osition that God could intervene but did not with the assumption that God wanted to intervene but could not. Out of responsibility to our God and to the victims, this possibility should have been considered. But Buber refused to go so far.

Yet it is evident that Buber could not escape these thoughts. Their

impact on his worldview is evident. Indeed, Buber asserts something fundamentally unique in this regard when he writes in the letter, and echoes in the essay as well, "He, the God of our fathers, probably will not stop being the 'hidden God,' even when he reveals Himself anew." We can recognize in such statements that Buber was indeed contem-

plating and acknowledging that no direct revelation and no trace of his

ways in human history are plausible or possible anymore. This suggests literally an "epistemological break," for the logical conclusion from this is that the once confident message that everything is "God's address to us" can no longer ground Buber's dialogical principle. Buber found the courage to ask the question of our ability to enter at all into a

dialogic relationship with God after Auschwitz. But without the ability to justify it rationally, he answered in the affirmative. Holding to "the

knowing of the heart" that "he is indeed coming," he pleads with us to

keep the communication channels open and ready for God's possible reappearance.45 Yet, as Fackenheim realized, Buber was no longer wait- ing anymore for God's words but, rather, only for his appearance, even through silence.46 We end up with the need to address Buber's opening words in the essay pointing toward the dialogue between heaven and earth as the Bible's most important contribution "for all times" and the one that distinguishes it from all the other scripts. "The basic teaching that fills the Hebrew Bible," he asserts, "is that our life is a dialogue between the above and the below." That is why the question ofJudaism is so important, for all these questions of God's silence lead us to it.

THE JEWISH WAY

In the essay, Buber makes an important distinction between the possibility of "believing" and that of "speaking." In other words, the real challenge is to continue to believe in God in the Jewish way, meaning to "speak" to him. The focus must therefore be on what it means today for the believer in God to believe in a God to whom we attribute antidi- alogical features such as eclipse, a "hidden face," and silence. Indeed, the uniqueness of the Jewish faith lies not in its belief in God but, rather, in the kind of God that is being believed in and the way a




person lives with and relates to God. In the polytheistic cultures of

Mesopotamia, the gods were believed to have special powers; in the Hellenic world a pantheon of deities was believed to exist and even to communicate with humans through the oracles, yet these gods made no moral claims. In Judaism, however, as Buber spells out in Two Types of Faith, faith involves trust and confirmation of a moral demand, ab- sent of full understanding and without any decisive assurance. Buber

distinguishes two meanings of the Hebrew word emunah (faith) as belief that something is true and as trust in someone that commands

fidelity and loyalty. Judaism, Buber argues, puts the emphasis on the latter type of faith.47

In Eclipse of God Buber mentions, in reference to Whitehead's work, that the relation to God begins with fear and only later evolves into love. Whitehead attached the fear of God to Judaism and the love of God to Christianity. But Buber argues: "He who begins with the love of God without having previously experienced the fear of God, loves an idol which he himself has made, a god whom it is easy to love."

Immediately after that, Buber uses Whitehead's attempt to capture the

history of religion as a transformation from "God the Void" through "God the enemy" to "God the Companion."948 Obviously, Judaism em-

phasized the tensions between the fear of God and the love of God, but beyond that the notion of "God the companion" originated more than anywhere else from the prophetic teachings and dominated Jew- ish tradition from that time forward. No better illustration of this atti- tude can be found than in the famous words of the Psalm 23 that describe God as a trustworthy shepherd who provides humankind with

everything it needs, provoking human beings to therefore attest "even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil; for you are with me." Continuing the tradition of the Psalmist and

practically all of the Hebrew prophets, Buber calls on the Jewish people to continue to put their trust in God and his companionship, although these were put to test as never before by the Holocaust.49

Indeed, the fact that these questions of trust and companionship are intrinsically and fundamentally unanswered after the Holocaust

suggests that the issue of the "hidden God" could not be resolved. As far as the Holocaust itself is concerned this certainly seems to be the case, as we can no longer but ask about God's ways and demand a justification for his inaction. Moreover, and this is as crucial as it is painful to recognize, a revelation similar to those to Abraham and Job will not satisfy. And Buber indeed doubts if there is any way for us "to forgive." In other words, any rational argument that the Holocaust was part of "his ways" or claims that it had a divine justification that we are not supposed to know or understand, is more nihilistic and more in-




sulting to the God in whom we believe than the claim that there is no God at all.

Based on these realizations that we must reconsider the acknowl-

edgment in our prayers that God's ways are good and merciful, Buber rearticulates the abstract question about faith and God in more concrete terms. The question as he formulates it became, in essence, whether there is a place for Jewish faith in the living God after Ausch-

witz.50 Buber confesses that he no longer knew what Jewish life is and was not sure he would ever know in the future. Coming from the author of "The Three Lectures on Judaism" and the translator of the Bible, this is no minor pronouncement. Yet Buber does share some

insights about the future of Jewish faith, which do shed some light on the direction toward a possible answer.

For Buber, to be Jewish remains to be able to trust in the God who

spoke to Moses and the people of Israel on Mount Sinai, the very God that throughout Jewish history asked us to address him as "I am who I am." But is it possible to trust God after Auschwitz? Obviously the trivial answer-it is possible "because of" and "in spite of"-is tenuous. Yet, Buber argues, it is possible because for us it is impossible otherwise. And it is possible in spite of the fact that we are no longer assured of mutuality or reciprocity. It is possible because although we had to relinquish the notion that we are God's "Eternal You," we are deter- mined to continue to relate to God as our "Eternal Thou." Not out of fear of God but because of the human spirit. Not by the grace of God but by the fervor of our determination. Persevering in this state of "agonism in faith," is preserving our humanity. This is the new challenge in living a Jewish life after the Holocaust.

In a way, we can think of Buber's approach as loosely related, but going beyond, both Farkenheim's 614th commandment and Pascal's wa- ger. What I mean by this is that like Farkenheim, Buber demanded that the Jewish people keep Judaism alive, but not just as a means for the survival of the Jewish people but as an end in itself-for the survival of the Jewish faith. And, like Pascal, he argued that we have nothing left to lose if we give up on God, and everything to gain by keeping our faith in him. However, Buber was not concerned with the prospect of losing or gaining our place in Heaven, but of losing or gaining ourselves, our humanity here on earth. Losing the ultimate meaning of our life.

This is the new universal message of Judaism. Two key addressees given by Buber in the early 1950s voice this message clearly. Moreover, these speeches, given at that specific time, seem to symbolize the uni-

fied theme running through Buber's complex involvement with the Holocaust. In a speech given on the occasion of receiving the "Erasmus Prize," Buber defined his view of "Believing Humanism" as based on




the principle that humanity and faith are not two separate realms, with

separate laws and signs, but, rather, "are so centrally related to each other that we may say our faith has our humanity as its foundation, and our humanity has our faith as its foundation."51 In 1953, Martin Buber returned to Germany to accept the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. He spoke that day about "genuine dialogue and the possibilities of peace."52 The event took place in St. Paul's Church in Frank- furt, not far from the very location where Jewish books had been thrown into the fire and not long after the Jewish synagogue went down in flames. Buber, whose library was vandalized by the Nazis and whose books were probably among the ones burned, introduced on this occasion a distinction between what he called Homo humanus and Homo contrahumanus and defined the Third Reich as "the twelve-

year reign of homo contrahumanus."53 The battle between the two, Buber stressed, did not start then and did not end then either, for its front "is split into as many individual fronts as there are peoples." And it is in light of this ongoing "struggle of the human spirit against the

demonry of the subhuman and the antihuman" that Buber saw his personal role "as the Jew chosen as symbol" to deliver his message of soli-

darity with humanity and join the common battle "against the contra- human" and the struggle for the rise of "true humanity."54 To give up your faith as a human being is therefore to give up on your humanity. And to give up on the humanum is to surrender to the forces of contrahumanus. This, for Buber, is the Jewish way.

FROM HOMO DIALOGICUS TO HOMO AGONISTES

Buber continued to believe in, and live by, the premise that the human

being is a dialogical entity.55 Yet the very nature of dialogue changed fundamentally after the Holocaust. In terms of his philosophy of dialogue, Buber considered giving up basic notions like "reciprocity" and "mutuality." Maybe God does not address us personally anymore; maybe to him we are "no person." Regardless, in our inner dialogical constitution as well as our existential experience, we cannot live without speaking to an absolute, without relating to our absolute person- our "eternal Thou." In the concluding words of possibly his last written reflection on this subject Buber maintains that his thought did not "start from religion" but, rather, from "experience of faith." He characterizes this in existential terms, as living with the "discontinuity of es- sentiality and inessentiality," which he equates with "the I-Thou relation and the I-It relation to all being." In this regard, he reiterates, God belongs entirely to the concreteness experienced in the realm of the I-Thou relation. Finally, he defines religious life as "remaining




open" to "the grace that appears ever anew.""5 These words might be his last direct answer to the question asked in "The Dialogue between Heaven and Earth" and the letter to Szilagyi.

Agonism in faith marks a new stage in human religiosity. Beyond the acknowledgment in modern religious thought of the necessity of

incorporating human frailty within the experience of faith, thus seeing faith as an existential state of agonism of faith, post-Holocaust agonism in faith means the necessity and responsibility to incorporate God's

frailty. In other words, unlike Kierkegaard's existential agonism of faith, which is experienced with self doubt and inner struggle and lived in "fear and trembling" in the face of God's mysterious (read: unknown) ways, the agonism in faith that I speak of means that the very notion of faith itself is being lived in agony over the very visible and undoubtedly perplexing ways of God. The struggle is not with faith but in faith, not with one's own doubt but with the knowledge of God. In other words, "agonism in faith" is lived in the ontological realm of reality where faith coexists not only with fear of the mysterious unknown but with the agony of the horrifyingly known as well. The heroic act that led to what Buber calls, with regard to Abraham and Kierkegaard, "the

paradoxical movement of faith" is replaced after the Holocaust with the heroic agonism of living in a state of paradoxical faith. We might imagine that Abraham, Job, and an Auschwitz survivor shared this state after their experiences had subsided. It is an ongoing effort to find

meaning in life while being sharply aware of the truths that Abraham was asked by God to sacrifice his son, and that Job was tormented only to justify God's argument with the devil, and finally that in the Holo- caust God was guilty of crimes against humanity. To say it boldly, agonism in faith is experienced with God as a tragic figure experiencing agonism in faith as well. Agonism in faith provides a new basis and a new quality for Buber's "ontology of the between."57 It is a sphere of reality lived from moment to moment and from situation to situation, stubbornly holding onto God while persisting in the effort to hold onto the human image. The clearest manifestation of this very Jewish mode of living after the Holocaust is recalled by Elie Wiesel, who in his work and his persona is the epitome of Homo agonistes. Wiesel witnessed a rabbinical trial of God in Auschwitz. At dawn, after God was declared guilty of abandoning his world, it was time to pray, and the "court" prayed.

In sum, this article demonstrates that Buber made several attempts to explain the Holocaust within his philosophical system of dialogue. He spoke in this context about the eclipse and the hidden face of God, the biblical precedence about the inability to know his ways. And finally he introduced the notion of dialogue through silence, admitting that after the Holocaust, if there is any way to expect God's address, then




it is through his hiddenness or "through silence." But even these arguments, it seems Buber knew, are neither comforting to the soul nor

convincing to the mind when applied to the Holocaust. Parallel to this narrative, we observe signs that Buber abandoned the bold and secure foundational statements about God that had previously dwelled at the core of his philosophical system, that, instead of God the omnipresent One who is eternally calling us, he acknowledged historical times of total breakdown of all communication from both sides. He even recon- sidered whether the Jewish notion of faith as trust in God's ways is

possible after the Holocaust. Yet he refused to give up his faith or admit defeat, to admit that whatever he lived and believed, wrote and

fought for, was proven wrong by Hitler's satanic deeds. We can therefore conclude that Buber did not give us an overall

explanation of the Holocaust. He did not even convince us that there is a way to reconcile his philosophy of dialogue with the Holocaust. His works and actions with regard to the Holocaust end up having value only insofar as they warn us against endorsing the idea that

"might is right," or agreeing to the idea that "God is dead," and as a result surrendering our humanity altogether. Like many, he could not but continue to live and accept his "agonism in faith." It was to his fellow human beings who were struggling in the same condition that he directed his encouraging words by reminding them of "the why" from the human viewpoint.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO

APPENDIX A

A Response to a Letter from Ernsz Szilagyi, June 29, 1950

If all the signs show that the person I love is misleading me, and even if this was always the case, not in one particular aspect but in his whole

being. If all the signs show me that this individual is not an angel from heaven like I saw him and accepted him, not the image of an angel that I drew based on his deception, but a demonic entity: then what?

Two possibilities arise for me.

Perhaps I shall say, "The world of the signs is the true one," and then release myself from this world. The world, either releasing myself along with it, or living without meaning the rest of my life.

Or else I shall say: "The person I love is the true one." Perhaps not so since the use of the third person in this case is meaningless, but: "You are the truth." I accepted you as the truth. I accepted you the way you are and you cannot make me doubt it. All I want is that you will be what you are and that you are what you are. My faith in you is




not dependent on your doing what I see as just but in the fact that all

your deeds are the just, more so, the absolute justice. And if you are a devil, then the angel should be called devil and the devil angel.

It is clear that you cannot speak in this way to a human being. But a man can only speak this way to the Almighty 711sti~l. And I doubt if there is any other way. If Abram accepts Him, then he accepts Him as the one who once promised him a son, and later, when the son is

grown, demands that he kill him. If someone accepts him otherwise, he accepts a statue, an idol crafted by his own hand, a "good" one that is easy to love. Truly, Abram could not understand what he did when he accepted Him in chapter 22, verse 1, but only after he heard what he heard in the following verse chapter 22, verse 2. Only now when he understands his deeds, when Abram "went" the first time in chapter 12, verse 4, he "goes" anew. The ram that God sent is irrelevant: the

killing of the son happened in the heart. Otherwise Job: he protests. He said: then in my youth when the

same well-known encouragement was spread over my tent, I accepted Him as "the Justice"; but now when I got to know that his ways in the world are not just, He must reveal Himself to me to restore the situation. And God revealed Himself from the storm. He doesn't say to Job that the world is just, what Job and us will call just. He doesn't make a confession t111 and does not reveal his secret of mercy InnM1. He is just there, the One who calls Himself "I am who I am," the only one called Ja'i. And without anything further, Job said, "I am consoled 01V1=1r." And only when he is being proclaimed as the servant, the "friends," the ones who were protecting God, ask him to speak for them.

So it is also in our time after Auschwitz. We cannot expect God to make a confession '111 and explain his secrets like an idol that we make with our own hand. And we who accepted Him as the truth and learned that his creation is frightening and his deeds barbarous (Isaiah chapter 28, verse 21), it is not for us to imagine a state when we will be able to say ~nrthl1 (I forgive). Because He probably will not stop being 1nn=7rD (hidden God), when he reveals Himself anew. How will He reveal Himself? Like to Abram when He showed him the way, like to Abraham when he demanded from him the cruelest of all demands? Like to the young, perfect, and happy Job or to the old broken Job? We don't know. We know only Him and His coming and that He is indeed coming. 1n:

i =nK M mn*", How is a Jewish life after Auschwitz possible? Today I no longer know exactly what Jewish life is, and I am not sure it will be known to me in the future. But I know what it means to cling to Him. The ones who continue to cling to Him are pointing toward what could justly be called in the future Jewish life.

-Martin Buber




APPENDIX B59

But note that the Bible knows two kinds of time, which are different in every way but one: that the contact between heaven and earth appears to have stopped. About one of these kinds I spoke above. The second is described in the story of Samuel's youth in this language (Samuel A' 3, 1): "And the word of God was precious in those days; there was no open vision." Surely the hindrance here comes from below, from man: the generation's sin was so large, as if murky air sepa- rated between man's sight and heaven. Regarding the Cohanim

(priests) of these days, the sons of Belial, it was said (Ibid. 2, 13), that

"they knew not God" (the concept of knowledge in biblical Hebrew refers to contact between object and object without mediation), and this is how the distance between God and Israel was maintained, until a loyal servant, Samuel, was found, who "knows God" (Ibid. 3, 7), and to him the word was revealed.

Here man is the one from whom God's way is being hidden, and man is not permitted to be in touch with Him, because he does not deserve it. Not so in times of the hidden face: here the beginning of this awful alienation comes from God Himself, even though it comes as a response to human crimes. God completely ignores the earth and does not govern its existence. In times of the first kind, when the

knowledge of God was disrupted among people, man could struggle against the times and achieve through devoted work the renewal of contact. Not so in times of the hidden face, when 'history is full of hustle and bustle but empty of God's leadership. It seems that during these times man has no power to overcome. Is there any lingering hope for man in these times? Whoever believes in the living God, who knows and recognizes His existence, and is doomed to live in times of the hidden face-is his life worth living?

NOTES

I dedicate this article to my father, Itzhak Barzilai, on his eightieth birthday. My deepest gratitude goes to Paul Mendes-Flohr, my intellectual mentor; to Steven T. Katz, for his generous editorial assistance; and, above all, to my wife, colleague, and dialogical partner, Fonna Forman-Barzilai, for her comments and encouragement.

1. Buber defined God as "him that, whatever else he may be in addition, enters into direct relationship to us human beings through creative, revelatory, and redemptive acts, and thus makes it possible for us to enter into a direct relationship to him" (I and Thou [New York, 1970], pp. 180-182).




2. "Remarkably enough," Emil L. Fackenheim recognizes, "Buber's thought was, despite all, shaken by the Holocaust, and this not at its political periphery but rather at what may be called its religious center" (To Mend the World [New York, 1982], p. 196). Fackenheim's book is a pioneer in addressing the Holo- caust philosophically and makes a tremendous contribution to the understand-

ing of Buber's approach to the Holocaust. But Fackenheim overlooks the similarities between his own notion of the 614th commandment and Buber's

message. 3. We also should not ignore the potential contribution of a central figure

like Buber to our attempt, Sisyphean as it may be, to come to grips with the Holocaust.

4. Obviously this last conclusion entails a rejection of Kierkegaard's notion of "the teleological suspension of the ethical" with regard to God's will and action, as well as his dichotomy of 'either/or' " as characterizing our existential condition of being condemned to choose between two exhausting com- mitments to God and to humanity.

5. David Glantz writes, "It is surprising to realize how disrespectful is Buber of this subject" ("Buber's Concept of History and the Holocaust" [Heb.], Kivuniem, Vol. 2, p. 75 [my translation]); whereas Baruch Kurzweil, on the other end of the spectrum, writes: "Nothing could be further from the truth than the claim that the historical events of his time did not resonate in his books. Buber's writings are always an account of the inner struggle he had between himself and the events of his times" (Facing the Spiritual Perplexity of Our Time [Heb.] [Ramat-Gan, 1976], p. 90 [my translation]).

6. Buber saw himself primarily as a teacher and not a leader. A political leader is concerned with the immediate, the earthly and practical, the here and now. A teacher, a spiritual leader, is concerned with tensions between reality and what transcends it, the intersection of the eternal and universal. For Buber, the people who have no leader are unfortunate but "trice unfortunate is the people whose leader has no teacher." Indeed, Buber chose early in his life to continue the work of Ahad-Ha'am, the leader of cultural Zionism, and not Herzl, the leader of political Zionism. Moreover, Buber retired from political activities after a very short experience and never took office again, except for the leadership role during his stay in Nazi Germany.

7. When he was defending his dialogical principle in his 1932 essay "Dia-

logue," Buber directed his words to his opponent (adversarius); here his main audience would have been his fellow allies (amicus). See Martin Buber, "Dia-

logue," in Between Man and Man (New York, 1947), p. 53. 8. Martin Buber, Eclipse of God (New York, 1952), p. 6. 9. Martin Buber, "The Dialogue between Heaven and Earth," in OnJuda-

ism (New York, 1972), pp. 214-225. This essay was first published in 1950. 10. The original letter written in German is currently in the Buber Archive,

Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem, Ms. Var 350/801. I was first referred to this letter by my teacher Professor Emil Fackenheim. He addresses some of its content in his book To Mend the World (p. 197). Yet, because this letter has never been translated into English, and because it is a key document in the understanding of Buber's approach to the Holocaust, I have chosen to

provide a verbatim translation in Appendix A below.




11. Emil Fackenheim later formulated a similar idea with the 614th commandment whereby the "authentic Jew of today is forbidden to hand Hitler

yet another, posthumous, victory" (Judaism, Vol. 16, No. 3 [Summer 1967], pp. 269-273). Note that the focal point in Buber's address is not the danger of

giving the forces of Contrahumanus (Hitler and his executioners) a final victory over us by distorting our "human face" and "killing God," and not only "For the Sake of Heaven" but mostly for our own sake, for the sake of Homo humanus.

12. As far as the "historical Buber" and "Buber the historian" are concerned, we have a range of written responses and essays to draw on, starting with his address "Our Educational Task" and "The Children" from 1933; through his essay "The End of the Jewish-German Symbiosis," written shortly after the Kristallnacht; and ending with "Silence and Outcry," published in 1944. For historical accounts of this period in Buber's life and political involvement, see, among other things, Maurice Friedman's numerous biographical works, for example, Martin Buber's Life and Work (Detroit, 1988), Vol. 2, Part 2, Nazi Germany, pp. 157-325; and Ernst Simon's essays: "Jewish Adult Educa- tion in Nazi Germany as Spiritual Resistance," in Year Book of the Leo Beack Institute, Vol. 1 (London, 1956), pp. 68-105; and "Martin Buber and German

Jews," in Year Book of the Leo Beack Institute, Vol. 3 (London, 1958), pp. 3-39. 13. In a 1938 address in Hebrew entitled "On the Betraying," Buber writes

that "this I am saying to our camp, and not outwards," while sharply criticizing the voices in the Yishuv who had concluded that "if we could not protect ourselves from the wolves, Let us be the Wolves" ("Gegen die Untreue" [Against the Untruth], in DerJude und Seinjudentum [Cologne, 1963], pp. 527-530).

14. Martin Buber, "Genuine Dialogue and the Possibilities of Peace," in

Pointing the Way (New York, 1957), pp. 237-238, 232. 15. Martin Buber, Teuda V-jeud, Vol. 2 (Jerusalem, 1959), p. 75. 16. Martin Buber, "Hope for This Hour," in Pointing the Way (New York,

1957), p. 222. 17. Buber, "Hope for This Hour," p. 225. 18. Martin Buber, "Sie und Wir," in DerJude und Sein Judentum (Cologne,

1963), p. 653; or, in English, Martin Buber, "They and We," in Men of Dialogue, ed. William Rollins and Harry Zohn (New York, 1969), p. 241.

19. Buber, "They and We," p. 242. 20. Martin Buber, "Autobiographical Fragments," in The Philosophy of Mar-

tin Buber, ed. Paul Schilpp and Maurice Friedman (La Salle, 1967), p. 35. Else- where, Buber defines the Humanum, or "what is peculiar to man," as the capacity inborn in man to engage dialogically with other existing beings.

21. Sydney Rom and Beatrice Rom, "Interrogation of Martin Buber," in Philosophical Interrogations, conducted by Maurice Friedman (New York, 1970), p. 99.

22. Buber, I and Thou, p. 133. 23. Buber, I and Thou, pp. 158-159. 24. Buber, "Dialogue," p. 33. 25. To better understand what Buber meant, it is important to bear in

mind that, like Kant, he recognized the clear borders between faith and knowledge. But while Kant starts from reason to make place for faith, Buber starts




from the personal yet interhuman experience of faith (not religion)-and only then, and only as a means, turns toward reason. See Martin Buber, "Replies to

My Critics," in The Philosophy of Martin Buber, ed. Paul Schilpp and Maurice Friedman (La Salle, 1967), pp. 659, 741-742.

26. Buber, I and Thou, pp. 180-182. 27. In English this essay is named "The Dialogue between Heaven and

Earth" (pp. 214-225). It was first delivered as a lecture in French in Paris in November 1950.

28. In the English addition Buber chose to drop the word Bible from the title. More importantly, he omits in this version the two paragraphs dedicated to the distinction between the two types of eclipse. See Appendix B.

29. Friedman, Martin Buber's Life and Work, Vol. 3, pp. 145-147. 30. Paul Schilpp and Maurice Friedman, eds., The Philosophy of Martin Buber

(La Salle, 1967), p. 289. 31. Buber, "The Dialogue between Heaven and Earth," p. 221. 32. Buber believes in the religious assertion about God's revelation in his-

tory to individual human beings, such as prophets, as well as to communities, such as the people of Israel in Sinai. Yet he rejects wholeheartedly the notion of personal providence as well as the Hegelian and Kantian notions of a Divine revelation in the universal course of humankind and a Divine purpose or telos in history. For a critique of Hegel's concept of history, which Buber names

"history from above" and contrasts with his version of "history from below," see Martin Buber, "In the Midst of History," in Israel and the World (New York, 1948), pp. 78-82.

33. Buber, I and Thou, p. 168. In the opening words of his Eclipse of God Buber reformulates his distinction. He argues that the relationship between

religion and reality is the most accurate index to represent the true character of an era. He distinguishes two periods, one in which men believe in God "as

something absolutely independent" and one when it becomes a mere concept "which bears only faint traces of the original image" (Martin Buber, Eclipse of God [New York, 1999], p. 13).

34. Buber, Eclipse of God, pp. 23-24. 35. Ibid., p. 24. 36. Buber, "The Dialogue between Heaven and Earth," pp. 221-224. 37. Avraham Shapira, "Hester-Panim Vedor Ha-Soah," in Hadoar (New

York, 1977), pp. 408-409. 38. See note 7. 39. In Eclipse of God, Buber rejects the Kierkegaardian notion of "the sus-

pension of the ethical," with regard to the binding of Isaac, as well as Herman Cohen's idea of God as a moral ideal. See Buber, Eclipse of God, pp. 59-60, 115-120.

40. Buber, Eclipse of God, p. 60. 41. A clearer example of the problem of "who is speaking" could be ob-

served in the struggle between Jacob and the angel. When the angel asked at dawn to be released, Jacob demanded a "proof of authenticity" and even a compensation. A careful reading of Abraham's trial will reveal a few other settled issues, for example, that God addressed Abraham personally to ask for the binding of Isaac but only the angel of God stops him from carrying it out.




Moreover, Abraham, we learn, knew how to argue with God and even to question his words and deeds, as in the case of his promise to him and Sarah to bear a child in old age or with the destruction of Sodom. No word is heard here. In the entire chapter, Abraham does not ask a single question. He only answers one, to his son: "God will show us."

42. The difference between the two ways God's face is hidden is suggested by Buber implicitly by drawing on the words of the prophet Isaiah speaking of a time when God "hideth His face from the house of Jacob" and saying, soon after his assertion, "His deed is strange.., .his work foreign" (Isaiah 8:17, 28: 21). Clearly, the first correlates with the sense of the biblical notion of direct revelation, whereas the second corresponds to the inability to recognize and understand his ways.

43. Buber, Eclipse of God, pp. 67-68. 44. Buber, "Replies to My Critics," p. 716. 45. To illustrate what I think Buber means by that, I cannot but employ a

metaphor that, though it seems blasphemous, might help. I refer to speaking to a person who is in coma. We know he or she is there, but we do not know if he or she can hear us or respond; nevertheless, we know and believe that he or she might hear and that it might help, and even that this state could end

any minute and the person would address us. 46. Fackenheim notes that "Buber speaks of ausharren and not speech. In

the case of the 'philosopher of dialogue,' this can hardly be considered insignif- icant" (To Mend the World, p. 197).

47. Martin Buber, Two Types of Faith (New York, 1951), pp. 10, 29. On this issue, see Paul Mendes-Flohr, "Buber's Concept of God," in Teologia Filosofica e Filosofia Della Religione, ed. Albino Babolin (Perugia, 1986), pp. 185-186; and

Stephen Kepnes, The Text as Thou (Bloomington, 1992), pp. 129-133. 48. Buber, Eclipse of God, p. 37. Using these distinctions we might say that

Western civilization in general has gone the opposite way. No one more than the Jewish people experienced so intensely and so intimately the tensions between the two later forms of relations to God while struggling to resist the notion of "God the Void."

49. A good representation of this kind of relationship is a childhood friend-

ship that continues throughout one's life. This kind of friendship is carried with us all the time. Your life is not richer and more meaningful only when

you are in the presence of this person, but you carry him or her and the friend-

ship with you at all times, no matter the distance, no matter the time that has

passed since the last time you saw this person. Now let us say that you hear some accusatory information that this individual has done something terrible.

Say you hear that your best friend murdered his or her family, including small children, and then disappeared, never to be heard from again. In short, there is no possibility of an explanation. Then what? We might say that this friend that you love and trust cheated you by making you believe in a fake image of him- or herself. Or you might say to yourself, "I know this person. I trust this

person. I know that the deeds that are ascribed to this person could not be taken at face value and perceived as the truth and all the truth of what happened." In other words, even if the facts are undeniable, their interpretation




must be wrong. There must be another explanation, even though we may never know it or comprehend it.

50. Buber, Eclipse of God, pp. 224-225. 51. Martin Buber, A Believing Humanism (New York, 1969), pp. 117-118. 52. Buber, "Genuine Dialogue and the Possibilities of Peace," pp. 232-239.

The word Homo and likewise man should be understood here as gender neutral

(Schilpp and Friedman, The Philosophy of Martin Buber, p. 289) and as synony- mous to person or human being.

53. Buber, "Genuine Dialogue and the Possibilities of Peace," pp. 233-234. 54. Buber, "Genuine Dialogue and the Possibilities of Peace." Later in life,

Buber would argue that Hitler was not his antagonist or potential partner to

any dialogue, as with Hitler he felt that the possibility of dialogue was "power- less." Yet he felt he had to answer-"but not to him who had spoken" (Schilpp and Friedman, The Philosophy of Martin Buber, pp. 725-726). See also Fried- man, Martin Buber's Life and Work, Vol. 2, p. 107.

55. In order to present the centrality of dialogue in Buber's thought, I have coined the neologism Homo dialogicus; see my book in Hebrew, Homo dialogicus: Martin Buber's Contribution to Philosophy (Jerusalem, 2000); and my article, "Homo dialogicus, Martin Buber's Existential Phenomenology of the Human,"

Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, Vol. 8 (1998), pp. 53-66. Here I am

suggesting that after the Holocaust this definition should be qualified. 56. Buber, "Replies to My Critics," pp. 741-744. 57. The term the Between and its ontological nature are central in Buber's

dialogical philosophy. "The sphere of the Between," Buber writes in "What Is Man?" "is a primal category of human reality." It is "something ontic" "where the I and Thou meet," and, finally, "the dialogical situation can be adequately grasped only in ontological way" (Martin Buber, "What Is Man?" in Between Man and Man [New York, 1947], pp. 245-246).

58. !!.2.9 M•1 1V W1 *

'* 59. These two paragraphs, from "The Dialogue between Heaven and

Earth," are my translation. The Hebrew version is found in Martin Buber, "The

Dialogue between God and Man in the Bible," Te'udah ve-Ye'ud, Vol. 1 (Jerusa- lem, 1959), pp. 250-251.



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