nothing more foreign to romanticism than that purely discursive way of conceiving and understanding the world; romanticism assumes, in fact, the fusion of man with the world, with nature, and with his fellow man, all things that the Jew, the extreme intellectual, is totally incapable of doing.7
By presenting a mystical romantic reading of the Jewish religion in his works, Buber broke this consensus and created a new image of Judaism, with which the rebellious generation at odds with bourgeois liberalism could identify.
One of the most significant aspects of Buber’s neo-romantic interpretation was the importance he attached to messianism. In the lectures he gave in Prague, Buber proclaimed that messianism was ‘Judaism’s most profoundly original idea’. It meant the yearning for ‘an absolute future that transcends all reality of past and present as the true and perfect life’, and the coming of the ‘world of unity’, in which the separation between good and evil would be overcome, as sin would forever be destroyed.8 As Gershom Scholem had showed so well, the theme of the messianic era as a world delivered from evil was potentially one of the religious foundations of anarchist utopia: the absence of evil makes restriction, coercion and sanctions superfluous. In Buber’s mind, the coming of the Messiah would take place not in the other world but in the world here below: it would not be a historical event, but it was ‘being prepared in history’. Seen from a utopian-restorative perspective, the arrival of the Messiah was a mystery ‘in which the past and future, the end of time and history are linked. … It takes the form of the absolute past and carries the seed of the absolute future.’9
It was from a romantic/messianic vision of history that Buber (like Rosenzweig, Landauer and Benjamin) questioned the concept of evolution, progress or improvement (Verbesserung): ‘For by “renewal”, I do not in any way mean something gradual, a sum total of minor changes. I mean something sudden and immense (Ungeheures) by no means a continuation or an improvement, but a return and transformation.’ Rather than hope for ordinary progress (Fortschritt), one should ‘desire the impossible’ (das Unmögliche). Buber found the paradigm for this complete renewal in the Jewish messianic tradition: ‘The last part of Isaiah has God say: “I create new heavens and a new earth.” (Isaiah 65:17)… This was not a metaphor but a direct experience.’10
Martin Buber, more than any other modern religious Jewish thinker, placed the active participation of men in redemption – as God’s partners – at the heart of his idea of messianism: ‘The central Jewish Theologumenon, which remains unformulated and undogmatic, but which forms the background and cohesion of all doctrine and prophecy, is the belief that human action will actively participate in the task of world redemption.’11 The message of Hasidism, according to Buber, was that man was not condemned to waiting and contemplation: redemption was his to act upon, by collecting and releasing the sparks of holy light dispersed throughout the world.12 Does this mean that God is not omnipotent – that He cannot save the world without man’s help? No, Buber responds, it means only that He does not will redemption without the participation of man: generations of men had been granted a ‘collaborative force’ (mitwirkende Kraft), an active messianic force (messianische Kraft).13
It was for this reason that Buber contrasted more and more categorically, messianic prophetism (Jewish eschatology proper) and Apocalyptics (an eschatological conception that originated in Iran): the former accorded the preparation of redemption to humanity, to the decision-making power of each human being so called upon; while the latter conceived redemption as an immutable future, predetermined in the smallest detail, which used human beings only as instruments.14 For Buber this active messianic hope, turned towards an open eschatological future, set Jewish religious thought apart from Christianity. In a letter he wrote in 1926, Buber formulated the thesis in terms that are not too dissimilar from Ernst Bloch’s utopia of Not-yet Being:
According to my belief, the Messiah did not come at a determinate point in history: his arrival can only be the end of history. According to my belief, world redemption did not take place nineteen centuries ago; we are living in an unsaved (unerlösten) world, and we are waiting for redemption, in which we have been called upon to participate in a most unfathomable way. Israel is the human community that bears this purely messianic expectation … this belief in the still-to-be-accomplished and must-be-accomplished Being (Noch-nicht-geschehn-sein und Geschehn-sollen) of world redemption.15
How did Buber articulate his messianic faith with his socialist/libertarian utopia? In 1914 he, like many German-Jewish intellectuals, was carried away by the ‘patriotic’ drive to war; but little by little, under the influence of events and the harsh criticisms of his friend, Gustav Landauer, he changed his position.
It was through a polemic in 1916–1917 with Hermann Cohen – the champion of ‘state consciousness’ (Staatsbewusstsein) – that Buber crystallized his own political-religious views. After having supported imperialist Germany at the beginning of the First World War (as Cohen himself had done), Buber now rejected the cult of German nation-statehood advocated by the neo-Kantian philosopher from Marburg: ‘Humanity – and to say that, Professor Cohen, is now more than ever the duty of every man living in God – is greater than the state.’ Buber summed up his differences in a biting sentence: ‘Cohen,… whether he is aware of it or not, wants the State to subjugate the Spirit; as for me, I want the Spirit to subjugate the State.’ This subjugation would be completed in the messianic era, which would ultimately make it possible for a higher form of society to supersede the state dialectically: the separation between the people (principle of creativity) and the state (principle of order) would be maintained only ‘until the Kingdom, the Malkhut Shamayim, is established on earth; until, through a messianic form of the human world, creativity and order, people and State, merge in a new unity, in the Gemeinschaft of salvation’.16
As the European revolution gathered momentum between 1917 and 1920, Buber clarified, radicalized and developed his vision. In ‘Die Revolution und Wir’, an article published in 1919 in his magazine Der Jude, he insisted on the necessity for Jews to contribute to the revolution of Mankind – that is, to the rebirth of society through a spirit of community. He voiced his solidarity with the revolutionary tide that was rising in Central Europe: ‘Situated in its camp … not as profiteers but as comrades in the struggle, we salute the revolution.’17 More than ever, there was an anti-State dimension in Buber’s writings: in the previously mentioned article ‘Gemeinschaft’, written in 1919, he appealed to Kropotkin, Tolstoy and Landauer in condemning State tyranny, that ‘homonculus which drinks blood from the veins of communities’, that clockwork puppet which seeks to replace organic life.18 In a homage to Gustav Landauer, published shortly after his assassination in April 1919, Buber wrote: ‘He rejected mechanical, centralist pseudo-socialism, because he longed for a communitarian, organic and federalist socialism.’19 From this perspective, Buber criticized Bolshevism and instead showed a sympathy for the neo-romantic ‘guild socialism’ developing in England at that time, and for the kibbutzim that were starting to be formed in Palestine.20
In a major essay published in 1919, ‘Der heilige Weg’ (‘The Holy Way’), which he dedicated to the memory of Landauer, the central axis was the unity between messianism and communitarian utopia. In Buber’s mind, community with God and community among human beings were inseparable from each other, so that ‘its [Judaism’s] waiting for the Messiah is a wait in expectation of the true community’. Their achievement would depend upon men:
So long as the Kingdom of God has not come, Judaism will not recognize any man as the true Messiah, yet it will never cease to expect redemption to come from man, for it is man’s task to lay the foundation for (begründen) God’s power on earth.
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