Later, this approach to text became the foundation for the theory behind Buber’s decades-long project of translating the Hebrew Bible into German, in which his goal was to convey the oral qualities of the original Hebrew in modern German. In “The How and Why of our Bible Translation,” an essay written in 1938 during the transitional period of his flight from Nazi Germany and settlement in Israel, Buber amplified his sense of this very reading process.47 Buber writes that he had an easy familiarity with the Hebrew Bible as a child. Then, exposure to German translations of Scripture during his youth and early adulthood alienated him from it for a number of years. A chance encounter with the Hebrew text got him back to reading it aloud, a practice through which he was freed from the text as writing and could take it as miqra, “calling,” “what is spoken.”48 Through this practice, “the book was melting in the voice.” Buber’s goal as reader was “by an experiment risking one’s entire being . . . to re-awaken the spoken word.”49 Buber quotes the words of Franz Rosenzweig to express the intended effect of this practice of reading:
Everywhere the human traits [of Scripture] can, in the light of a lived day, become transparent, so that suddenly they are written for this particular human being into the center of his own heart, and the divinity in what has been humanly written is, for the duration of this heartbeat, as clear and certain as a voice calling in this moment into his heart and being heard.50
Thus, Buber testifies to the power of a particular practice of reading to bring about the dialogical moment, and to teshuvah, “turning,” as its transformative essence, which had been the inner essence of his own initiation into spiritual life.
Buber’s spiritual initiation consisted of two intense periods when he withdrew from his active public life to turn inward and focus on his reading of Hasidic material in quest of his spiritual roots. Each of these phases was precipitated by a significant personal loss. The first of these two periods, from 1903 to 1909 (when Buber was twenty-five to thirty-one years old), was precipitated by Buber’s rupture with Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism who was eighteen years his senior and an early mentor figure. The second period came more than a decade later at the end of World War I, extending from 1919 to 1922 (when he was aged forty-one to forty-four).51 This latter period of withdrawal was precipitated by the brutal political murder of Gustav Landauer, Buber’s close friend from his student days.
Buber characterized this second phase of withdrawal as the time at the end of his watershed years when “all the experiences of being that I had . . . became present to me in growing measure as one great experience of faith.”52 Through this process he could “enter into an independent relationship with being.”53 The fully initiated Buber had come to the position which he characterized as that of the person who “stands in the dual basic attitude that is destined to him as a man: carrying being in his person, wishing to complete it, and ever-again going forth to meet worldly and above-worldly being over against him, wishing to be a helper to it. [In this stance,] being true to the being in which and before which I am placed is the one thing that is needful.”54
2. Buber’s First Period of Withdrawal: His Spiritual Initiation
Buber’s involvement in the Zionist movement and his subsequent withdrawal from it led to his first transformative breakthrough. His accounts of these events show how Theodor Herzl became a foil for his initiation: Buber’s relationship with Herzl, their disagreement which emerged over time, and their final parting of the ways spurred him toward his inner quest for his spiritual roots in Judaism. When Buber became active in the Zionist movement in 1898, he became a follower of Herzl. This involvement drew him back to his Jewish cultural roots after his having been immersed in secular academic life during his student years. In 1898–1899, Buber organized a Zionist student group in Leipzig, and in 1899–1900, another one in Berlin. Then, at the high point in their relationship, Herzl appointed him editor of the Zionist publication Die Welt. Yet differences between Buber’s vision of Zionism and Herzl’s became obvious to Buber when they reviewed a map of Palestine together in the spring of 1901.55 Through Buber’s work with Herzl as the leader of the Zionist movement, he saw Herzl both in public and up close. He came to know Herzl as a troubled man who had a narrow political focus and could not brook any disagreement within the movement. The rupture finally came when Herzl took autocratic action at the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basel in August 1903. Buber later wrote an account of their final meeting in which he could see that the man who had been his hero began to take on the proportions of a tragic figure.56 At the Congress Buber made his decisive break with Herzl.57
In a letter Buber wrote to Paula during the Congress, he described his rupture with Herzl as a terrible shock. Then, he introduced the focus that characterized his next six years: “The shock I have experienced is perhaps the worst in my life. . . . One thought dominates me: I want to bring absolute purity and greatness into my life at all costs.”58 Herzl’s leadership and their falling out had made Buber aware of the difference between a leader and a teacher: “Unhappy, certainly, is the people that has no leader, but three times as unhappy is the people whose leader has no teaching.”59 Through these events Buber was primed: he had become ready for the ultimate teacher who, it turned out for him, was Yisroel ben Eliezer, known as the Baal-Shem-Tov, the eighteenth-century zaddik who founded the Hasidic movement.
In an essay entitled “On Modern Initiation into the Spiritual,” Murray Stein discusses what he calls Buber’s “spontaneous spiritual initiation.”60 He suggests Buber’s recoil from Herzl led to his new openness which was necessary for his initiation because, as he put it, a positive outcome of such initiations “mainly depends on an inner openness to the ‘call.’ This readiness to receive the transcendent Other creatively may well increase amidst painful experiences of rupture and loss of significant others . . . . The crisis that ensues from such loss may open the way for the key transformation in a person’s life.”61 For Stein, Buber is a paradigmatic case of loss leading to the openness that is necessary for spiritual initiation.
Buber returned home to Berlin from the Congress, withdrew from his public involvements, and turned inward in order to more deeply pursue his spiritual roots. As he later explained: “At twenty-six, I withdrew myself for five years from activity in the Zionist party, from writing articles and giving speeches, and retired into the stillness; I gathered, not without difficulty, the scattered, partly missing [Hasidic] literature, and I immersed myself in it, discovering mysterious land after mysterious land.”62
This period of withdrawal and study was motivated by his desire to know Judaism with “the immediate knowing, the eye-to-eye knowing of the people in its creative primal hours.”63 Grete Schaeder observed that it was through these years of intensive focus and study that Buber “attained the personal ‘reality’ of a great Jewish teacher.”64
Thus, it was that in 1904, when he was twenty-six, Buber underwent a spontaneous spiritual initiation. It was the most intense spiritual encounter of his life, his supreme meeting with the eternal Thou. He wrote an account of this event in 1918, confirming its continuing significance for him at the end of the war years.65 According to this account, when he was a student and had been pulled in different directions by the lure of modern European culture, “I had neglected my Hebrew, which had become close to my heart as a boy.”66 Yet in his mid-twenties he returned to Hebrew afresh, penetrating to its deeper meaning, “which cannot be adequately translated, at least not into any Western language.”67 He spent time reading in Hebrew,
at first again and again repelled by the brittle, awkward, unshapely material. Gradually overcoming this strangeness, I began discovering its character and seeing its essence with growing reverence. Then one day I opened the Tzava’at Harivash, [The Testament of Rabbi Israel Baal-Shem, a collection of the sayings of Israel ben Eliezer, the founder of Hasidism] and these words flashed out at me: “May he completely grasp the nature of intentness [German Eifer, Hebrew zerizut]. May he raise himself up from his sleep in intentness, for he has become set apart and has become another person and is worthy to create/testify [zeugen] and has taken on the quality of the Holy One, blessed be He, when He created [erzeugte]