It is 30 years ago this year I began a PHD thesis on Martin Buber at McMaster University. McMaster was a hub of Biblical Jewish-Christian Studies and, in a much more general sense, historic Jewish-Christian relationships (for good and ill). Needless to say, the Holocaust and post-Holocaust Studies was front and centre. Martin Buber was both a Biblical scholar and a creative thinker that thought deeply and widely about Jewish-Christian dialogue (or lack of it). It is 50 years this year (1965-2015) since Martin Buber died. Buber (1878-1965) lived through some of the most tumultuous phases of European and Middle East life, culture and politics of the 20th century and his thinking was shaped on such a hard and tragic anvil—he was, very much, tried in the fires of his time.
The publication of My Friendship with Martin Buber in 2013 by Maurice Friedman is, in many ways, a fit way to bring to a close Friedman’s life (1921-2012). I was fortunate, when doing my PHD on Buber to correspond with Friedman, and Friedman had done more than most in post-WW II America to bring the thought and life of Buber to the fore.
Friedman was the first American of worth and note to complete his PHD on Buber in the USA after WW II, and their richly textured friendship budded, blossomed and bore much fruit from the 1950s and afterwards. My Friendship with Martin Buber recounts and records, in intimate and personal detail and depth, the growing friendship of Buber and Friedman between 1950 when “My mother visited Martin Buber in Jerusalem….and brought him my doctoral dissertation on his thought” and Buber’s death in the summer of 1965.
Needless to say, there is quite a distinct difference between studying someone as an object of PHD research and meeting the living person. Freidman makes it quite clear that Buber was much more interested in him as a person (and his journey) than the PHD on Buber. The fact that at the centre and core of Buber’s religio-philosophical journey was a distinction between two types of relationships (I-Thou & I-It) does clarify much. Those who live from the I-Thou attitude are fully attentive and present to the depths and deeper presence of the Other that longs to emerge. I-It relationships are functional and lack a definite sense of intimacy, encounter, nearness and authenticity. Sadly so, much of the modern world has become reduced an I-It forms of relating. Buber saw this most clearly, and like and ancient Jewish prophet, called for a return of the I-Thou stance and attitude in four areas: Divine-Human encounter, Human-Human dialogue, Humanity-Nature and Inner Human journey.
My Friendship with Martin Buber is divided 13 readable chapters: 1) My Friendship with Martin Buber Begins, 2) The Cost of My Commitment, 3) On the Suspension of the Ethical, 4) Martin Buber’s First Visit to America, 5) Sartre, Heidegger, Jung, and Scholem, 6) The Life of Dialogue: Letters Following Buber’s First Visit, 7) Personal Direction: Letters, 1954-1957, 8) The Washington School of Psychiatry and the Buber-Rogers Dialogue, 9) Postscript to I and Thou: Letters Following Buber’s Second Visit, 10) Buber’s Last Visit to America, 11) Interrogations and Responses: Letters Following Buber’s Last Visit, 12) Our Stay in Jerusalem and Buber’s Last Years and 13) the Epilogue and Memorial Address by Friedman at the Park Avenue Synagogue.
Martin Buber was nominated for both the Nobel Prize for Peace and the Nobel Prize for Literature a variety of times. The fact he lived through some of the most tragic phases of the 20th century (and lived, as a Jew, in the eye of the storm of them) does need to be noted when pondering his literary significance. When Buber and his wife (Paula) fled to Palestine in 1938 after the German Anschluss into Austria, he remained a prophetic voice for Jewish-Palestinian (Christian and Muslim) peacemaking contra many of the Jewish hawkish nationalists from the Herzlian (who he once worked with in the late 1890s)-Jabotinsky, Ben-Gurion militant ethos—Buber was ever the wise owl and peacemaking dove in a context of addicted and aggressive hawks.
The fact the Friedman’s friendship with Buber began in 1950 and ended in 1965 means that significant aspects of Buber’s early life are not seriously dealt with in this confessional missive, but for those interested in the meaning, in a personal manner, of a genuine friendship and Abba like relationship between Buber and Friedman, My Friendship with Martin Buber is a must read.
Ron Dart