What do romance, doing good business, and working for world peace have in common?  All require true dialogue – between lovers, between colleagues and competitors, and between groups of people or countries. More than accomplishments or ends, more than being right or wrong, more than what we own, relationships are the most important thing in life, according to Martin Buber. “When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.” As we strive to understand, reconcile, and preserve our world, we are grateful for Buber’s perspectives.

-- Margaret Wakeley

Martin Buber, a Jewish philosopher and theologian, was one of the great religious thinkers of the twentieth century.  Among Jewish thinkers he had a particular impact on many Christians, stimulating an appreciation for the Jewish origins of Christianity.  But on an even wider scale he came to embody the humanistic ideal of dialogue and understanding between peoples of different faiths and conflicting interests, thus suggesting the positive role that faith might play in promoting a more human world.

Buber was born in Vienna on February 8, 1878.  When he was three his parents were divorced, and he was sent to live with his grandparents, devout Jews, on their farm in the country.  Buber himself soon strayed from religious practice.  At the University of Vienna he studied philosophy and literature and married a German Catholic woman (who later converted to Judaism).  Nevertheless, in reacting to the anti-Semitic culture of central Europe Buber was attracted to the early Zionist movement.  It was thus that he began to explore and rediscover his religious roots.  In 1904 he took a leave from his teaching position and other responsibilities to undertake a serious study of Hasidism.  This period of withdrawal lasted five years and marked the great turning point in his life.

Hasidism, a movement of Jewish renewal initiated by the Baal Shem Tov in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century, emphasized the awareness and celebration of holiness in everyday life.  As Buber summarized its essential message:  “God is to be seen in every thing, and reached by every pure deed.”  Buber did not personally embrace the Hasidic life.  But he believed that Hasidism reflected an essential dimension of Judaism.  At the same time, he believed it presented a vital religious message for the modern world, precisely because it represented a “worldly holiness,” an attention to those sparks of the divine that lay hidden within the challenges and responsibilities of the present moment.  He wrote,

In 1909 Buber returned to teaching and at the same time undertook his lifelong project of collecting and popularizing the legends and orally transmitted stories of the Hasidim.  Through his friendship with the German anarchist Gustav Landauer, he further developed his commitment to communitarian socialism as the social expression of his religious convictions.  When Landauer was murdered during the Bavarian Revolution in 1919, it was for Buber a shattering blow that foreshadowed a season of even greater violence to come.

In 1923 Buber assumed a chair in Jewish religious history at the University of Frankfurt.  That year he also published his most influential book, I and Thou.  Its central theme was the relational nature of human existence, the fact that human beings are ultimately constituted as subjects by the quality of their relationships to others – whether nature, other people, or the Eternal Thou.  Thus, our own humanity, according to Buber, is diminished to the extent that we encounter others as objects rather than other subjects.  As popularized by countless interpreters, this work achieved almost instant recognition as a modern “classic.”  It was in many ways his most personal book, outlining the spirit that underlay his own commitment to the “life of dialogue.”

With the Nazi rise to power in 1933 Buber was dismissed from his job.  In the coming years he engaged in a courageous struggle to defend Jewish rights and culture.  But by 1938 he had been effectively silenced.  With luck he managed to escape Germany to accept a chair at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.  Though he was sixty at the time, he still had another quarter century of his most productive work ahead of him.

In settling in Palestine Buber had fulfilled the Zionist ideal of his youth.  Yet he expressed severe disagreements with much of the Zionist leadership. He believed it was a mistake to define the Zionist goal simply in terms of establishing a Jewish state.  He bitterly opposed “the disease of nationalism” and instead promoted what he termed a “Hebrew Humanism.”  On the basis of their common love for the land, he believed that a just and cooperative arrangement could be worked out between Jews and Palestinian Arabs.  Instead, the war that accompanied the establishment of Israel in 1948 came as a bitter fulfillment of his worst fears.

Among modern Jewish religious thinkers, none had so great an impact on Christian theology as Martin Buber.  This reflected not only the influence of I and Thou, but also the impact of his biblical reflections and his popularization of Jewish spirituality and mysticism.  Buber himself wrote extensively on Jesus and Christianity.  While of course rejecting Christian claims for the divinity of Christ, he extended affectionate recognition to the Jewishness of Jesus.  Jesus, he believed, had exemplified the highest ethical and spiritual ideals of Judaism.

Ultimately, he believed there were matters of irreconcilable difference between the beliefs of Jews and Christians.  But he remained a tireless believer in the virtue of dialogue.  “Whenever we both, Christian and Jew, care more for God Himself than for our images of God, we are united in the feeling that our Father’s house is differently constructed than our human models take it to be.”

Buber died in Jerusalem on June 13, 1965 at the age of eighty-seven.

Additional Resources
See:  Martin Buber, The Way of Response, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York:  Schoken, 1966); Stephen M. Panko, Martin Buber (Waco, Tex.:  Word, 1976).

For a pictorial biography of Martin Buber, please visit this website.