It is almost twenty-five years ago that I was writing a doctoral thesis on Martin Buber (1878-1965). There is little doubt that Buber was one of the most influential Jews of the 20th century. More than 2000 people turned up for his funeral. Buber was a leading Biblical scholar, philosopher, political theorist and activist.
Buber was a German Jew who argued strongly for the revival of cultural Zionism but opposed political Zionism. Buber challenged, in 1921, Chaim Weizmann (President of the Zionist Organization) for doing too little to foster good relations with the Arabs. Buber’s classic work, I and Thou, was published in 1922, and in many ways this wise missive anticipated the way the Nazis would treat the Jews (as objects to be exterminated) and the way Jews would treat the Palestinians. Buber fled Germany in 1938, and settled in Palestine where he was given a distinguished teaching position at the Hebrew University.
Buber’s book, The Prophetic Faith, was published in English in 1949, and in this work of probing exegetical insights, Buber highlighted how and why the classical Jewish prophets stood for an ethic that transcended an uncritical ethnic Jewish nationalism. The genius of the Jewish prophets was the way they stood, against much opposition, for justice, peace and compassion for the foreigner and outsider. Buber applied this way of thinking, again and again, to the Jewish treatment of the Palestinians.
Abraham Heschel (1907-1972), as an impressionable young Jewish man, was a student of Martin Buber in Germany. Heschel could not but be shaped and guided by Buber’s passion for the prophetic vision of the classical Jewish tradition. In fact, it was Heschel’s outstanding book, The Prophets, that went beyond Buber in exploring the inner nature and dynamic of prophetic theology.
Heschel, like Buber, had to flee the Germans, but Heschel traveled to the USA rather than Israel. The year was 1940 when Heschel arrived in his new homeland, but he, tragically so, heard about the deaths of both his mother and sister at the hands of the Germans when in the USA. He lamented the fact that many American Jews were slow to speak up for their people in the WW II years. The suffering that Heschel knew in his soul, blood and bones made him sensitive to the sufferings of others.
It was this ability to enter the pain of others that made it possible for Heschel to feel with the sufferings of the blacks in the USA. Heschel marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in the civil rights movement, and, like Buber, he urged his Jewish family to be kind, just and compassionate to the Palestinians.
The last few months in Israel a segment of the Jewish population have slipped into a dangerous form of hawkish ethnic Zionism. Needless to say, such a way of thinking stands in stark contrast to the classical prophetic vision of the Hebrew sacred text and the prophetic thinking of Martin Buber and Abraham Heschel.
I am more than grateful, almost twenty-five years ago, I had the opportunity to immerse myself in the life and writings of Martin Buber. He, and other Jews like him, stand as guardians and vanguards of what the Jewish Tradition means at its highest and prophetic best.
Ron Dart
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