Part One: Modernity and Religion
Part Three: Heschel and Spirituality, Final Evaluation

V. Martin Buber In contrast to Abraham Heschel, Martin Buber grew up as a modern man. He was well-read, well-traveled, and influenced by Kierkegaard and the existentialist thought of his time. Buber had to go back to seek the roots with which Heschel already leaves Poland, himself coming to Berlin to become a "modern man": "When I left my home in Poland, I became a modern Western man."  And Buber cannot deny his roots in modern thought. In his writings - he preferred not to think of them as a theory - he combines terms such as revelation, divine spark, and mystic with terms such as freedom, choice, authenticity, and alienation. His marriage of traditional Jewish values with modern thought could only be possible because for Buber, religiosity meant "Erneuerung" , re-newal, re-creation, re-invention, or the existentialist 'turning'. In recreating and overcoming what was, Buber was very much a man of his time.
Buber’s anthropology But Buber's anthropology makes no claims to be in coherence with any ideological system - except maybe Judaism in so far as it is understood as the idea of man relating to the "Unbedingte", the 'unconditioned' or 'absolute'. Buber's image of man is, as we will see, descriptive and prescriptive all at the same time. His interpretations of the past transform into normative-ontological claims about the future. Is he more rooted in the Western existentialist mood of his time, or more anchored in the Jewish tradition? For matters of inner coherence, which perspective on his vocabulary would be most illuminating? For foundationalists, those who seek to firmly root one system of thought in one tradition or the other, this is hard to say. Buber's vocabulary, both modern and traditional, is a genuine and comprehensive one.

Where to start with Buber? It is a genuine vocabulary because Buber assumes a genuine perspective on Judaism and the world - I propose: from the position of dialogue. It is hard to say whether dialogue really is Buber's starting point or not - for the bulk of his average readers, it probably is. There has been speculation whether Hasidism was a starting point, and others claim it to be existentialism. It is also suggested that his mystic background and learning may have given him decisive insights . In this paper, I will first lay out Buber's understanding of the individual in relation to the Jewish religion, for this background is more comprehensive in terms of what sense Buber makes of the world. Understanding that, it will be easier to discuss how the moment of dialogue described in the famous "I and Thou" can serve as a bait, as a gate to Jewish spirituality, or, as Buber said, "religiosity".

Martin Buber and "The individual in relation" Man has no specific faculty except the faculty that he can relate to others, and to history and future. In a manner typical of his time, and not necessarily fully in accordance with traditional Judaism, Buber affirms the human individuality, individual existence, freedom and choice.  In that, one may choose to see him as an existentialist. Every one counts, and the experience of the people of Israel are but a reference frame. But his existentialism has Jewish footing. He cites the Gemara: "Everybody shall speak: 'For me the world has been created'", and asks, that everybody shall say: 'Upon me rests the world'' . Each individual, assures Buber, is unique, and each has a unique way to God. But each individual also has the unique responsibility to find this way to God. And the way to find God is through unconditioned deeds. These deeds take place in the inter-human encounter and the community it creates: "The real place of actualization is the community."
So, while at first, Buber's placement of the individual in the center of the world, and his use of terms such as freedom, choice and individuality reminds one of a vocabulary used to describe the liberal individual that dominates present Western thought (namely, the "unencumbered self"), he could not be farther from that position . Buber never loses sight that the individual is in need of community, and becomes in relation to an 'other'.
The reading of individuality couched in responsibility as a Jewish idea is just one of many Jewish ideas that fueled Buber, and that backed him. Other ones are his perception of the core of Jewish religiosity, of Jewish mysticism, and the role of prophets and Zionism.
Jewish religiosity, for Buber, is based on the act of choice as the realization of divine freedom and unconditionality. He cites Jewish wisdom: "The world has been created in the name of choice of those who choose."  In a first "layer" of the becoming of authentic Judaism (as in contrast to the official "Scheinjudentum", the inauthentic Judaism) choice is the realization of God through his imitation. God is the aim of human beings, the image that man aspires to become . It is important that human beings aspire to become, and not to be like God. A process has always priority over a static state for Buber. In a second 'layer' of the process of the becoming of authentic and genuine Judaism the choice is seen as making God more real by this choice in the sense that God is strong when he has many witnesses . Human beings, aspirators in imitation, now strengthen God as co-conspirators, as his fellow and helpers. God and man are in partnership. In the third 'layer' that revealed itself only through the Kabbalah, and is a late addition to Judaism, God becomes an indispensable helper of God. God now needs man to restore the Schechinah, he needs man for the Lurianic idea of breaking the vessel and restore the Schechinah, for tikkun olam.

Jewish mysticism The concept of the divine spark which has to be set free from all things, is a mystic concept of Judaism. But Buber, the modern man, has no problem with mysticism. Myth for him is the authentic, unmediated expression of the divine human encounter. The immediacy of mysticism, as of the divine encounter in general, is what enlivens one's life, and what Buber cherished in the Hasidic movement was not only the immediacy of belief and deed, but also the renewal of Jewish myths. Buber's effort to tell the Western world of Hasidism can be understood as one way of showing the flame of spiritual exaltation to those who have forgotten about the excitement of immediate encounter.

The absolute deed The idea of immediacy and unconditionality corresponds with the priority of the "absolute Menschentat", the absolute and unconditioned human deed.  Through the 'deed' man leaves the boundaries of his individuality, and creates community with others. The immediacy of the deed establishes immediacy between one human being and another. And here, in the "true community" of the "between" human beings is where the relationship established "in which the Divine comes to its actualization between person and person." The place of the encounter with the Divine is the inter-human relationship. In the encounter, the divine spark is freed. As man actualizes his uniqueness - that is, his own potential and qualities - as well as the uniqueness of the other by taking him seriously, he also actualizes the divine. "Having awakened to an awareness of their universal being, individual beings open themselves to one another, disclose themselves to one another, help one another."  "To become human is what we are created for", and approaching God is only possible by becoming human.

Buber’s synthesis We have just witnessed Buber's synthesis of the existential concern for the individual, the social concern with community, and the religious concern with the divine, with the two latter concerns adding up to a Jewish concern for the Covenant. For Buber's idea of cultural Zionism, it is also a political concern for the Jewish nation that it will establish a place with the state of Israel, where "geistige und seelische Erneuerung" , "spiritual and intellectual renewal of the soul" could take place, where living life religiously means living one's life in the relation to others. Israel was to be the place where human beings realize that what they do to fellow human beings is what they do to God. Buber's idea of cultural Zionism shows his excitement about his time's opportunity to break with old traditions, re-think our relationship with the divine, and re-create the community, the covenantal relationship with God. The existentialist 'turning', the Jewish teshuvah ("Umkehr") - it's all the same for Buber. Best of all, it is possible, and a command of the present.
In accordance with the idea of immediacy and the divine's revelation through man and in the midst of man, Buber recommends hallowing everyday life, and living all existence as in the face of God. The sphere of God is everywhere, because God reveals himself everywhere. "What is essential is lived in the presence", revelation is a dialogue between God and man. Modern man ought to feel God's call through the other, he ought to feel like the prophet, like Moses, "who listens to nothing but the voice, and acknowledges nothing but the deed."  In contrast to the priest Aaron who wants power, the prophet Moses seeks truth. "They are the eternal characters in the history of Judaism." This view of priests brings him in trouble with traditional Judaism - a trouble Buber seeks with fervor.

"Scheinjudentum" His ardent rejection of traditional, or "official" Judaism, of the rabbinic "law", the ritual observance especially, is rooted in his distinction between religiosity and religion. It has been argued that this distinction is the Neo-Kantian distinction developed by Georg Simmel. Kant rejected the "heteronomous obedience", the "self-incurred tutelage" of the autonomous individual. Buber, "in his early, so-called predialogical writings especially, (...) sought to promote Jewish 'religiosity' as a type of genuine spirituality unmediated by tradition."  Tradition prevented man from true dialogue, said Buber: hallowing according to the law prevented man from hallowing the everyday. Tradition stood in the way of immediacy, as it confined God to the sphere that was religiously prescribed in rituals, forms, and structures such as the Sabbath, festivals, the synagogue service. Official Judaism, the Judaism of the priests, was institutionalized practice, not genuine worship. Symbols, structures, dogmas objectified God, reified him in customs, had a tendency to stagnation - and stagnation was what Buber, the prophet of everyday "Erneuerung" (renewal) rebelled against. The Halakha, for him, stifled freedom, was a refuge from one's responsibility for choice - the choice so inherent in his perception of Jewish religiosity. The rabbinic religion was the dead form of Judaism, but religiosity its ever-present, ever-renewed, ever-lively content.

"Religiosity, I say, is the urge of man to live in commune with the unconditioned, and his will to bring this about through his deeds and into the world of man... True religiosity is doing... God's face rests invisibly in the stone of the world; it must be uncovered, and freed" , and for Buber, one of the greatest sins of our times has it been to reduce God to the sphere of the "Law", the religious realm . God, for him, was a living reality in everyday encounter. Hallow him everywhere, because "the idea of responsibility [in the face of the absolute, C.G.] is to be brought back from the province of specialized ethics, of an 'ought' that swings free in the air, into the lived life. Genuine responsibility exists where there is real responding."
So, that was Buber's reading of the Jewish narrative, and his according inner Jewish "wirken", a word that could be translated by "having an effect", or in the sense of make "wirklich" 'make real'. To know this makes easier to understand the bait Buber lays out for modern man in his I and Thou.

I and Thou: a bait In his I and Thou, Buber starts from the middle of life, from the situation of dialogue. Man relates himself to the world. "I and Thou" does not rely on Buber's Jewish view of the world - his acceptance of the concept of the divine spark in all of us. Nor does Buber make claims on choice or human freedom. Where he talks of the modern world as the world of it, it is a critique of modernity, but it can be entirely understood from within his perception of the situation of dialogue. While his tone in "I and Thou" may be taken as pregnant with mystic pathos, this can be attributed to his own highly individual language - a German full of self-created words. Buber's excitement and wonder about dialogue can also be understood by anyone who prepares to enter a dialogue un-conditioned.

From encounter to the divine I see this as the key to understand Buber: to give up any pre-demands, pre-conditions, any will to achieve something other than genuine dialogue, and then trying it out. Buber's "I and Thou"-relationship is one for the experience of which he prepares the reader, and it requires a first leap of faith, or courage, we shall say, to believe that it might be worth a try. In his I and Thou, Buber uncovers the precious aspects and moments of "meeting the other", he digs through the layers our materialistic perception of "it", the world. The treasure he finds is one that is, for matter of the first two parts of I and Thou, wholly untroubled by notions of the divine. It is only in Buber's self-understanding - a self-understanding that he starts explaining in the last part of I and Thou and that we have discussed above - that the idea of immediacy and the absolute, un-conditioned transforms into an idea of the divine which, in Buber's reading, eventually also assumes the face of the Jewish God.

This first leap of faith - or rather courage -, as required in Buber's philosophy, is not very big. It is essentially the one step one needs to take to enter dialogue with an "other" un-conditioned, immediate. The mystery, the un-explain-ability of that moment works for Buber  and plays into his following explanation that in these immediate moments we meet the absolute, which - for Buber - becomes God. Buber's exposure and exposé of the moment of dialogue is genuine. His explanation of the situation of dialogue is his reading of the Jewish tradition and understanding of God, his interpretation of the Jewish narrative as one big story of dialogue, and man choosing to relate to God. In so far as leading a life religiously is leading it in dialogue where ethics and the encounter with God fall together, and "where the moral Ought is located" , those who choose not to give back the treasure of relating to others in an immediate, un-conditioned manner, lead a religious, or for the Jewish matter, Jewish life. The Jew, in Buber's reading, is the quintessential man. His narrative is the quintessential reference frame for dialogue. While the moment of I and Thou reaches out to all people, "black men and white men, Jews and gentiles, Catholics and Protestants" , it's ultimate explanation is reveals it as an advertisement of Buber’s "genuine Jewish religiosity". And if accepting the explanation makes sense, then, all of a sudden - says Buber - God says hello.

VI Assessing Buber - criticism But is the step from the awareness of the Absolute to Buber’s Jewish God a logical or inner necessity? I would like to argue that this is the second, real leap of faith required. It means to read, with Buber, the Jewish condition, and the Jewish religiosity, as man’s  quintessential conditions. - I would like to assess Buber's appeal to modern man here, and I will start by dwelling on the different ideas of spirituality and religiosity. In the literature on Buber and Heschel, what was at stake was "Jewish spirituality". Yet, Buber talked more often of religiosity. Was it a fashion of time? I believe not. Buber opposed "Jewish religiosity" to religion, when he talked of what we normally perceive as "spirituality": concerning matters of the spirit or the soul as opposed from the body or material matters, supernatural, not corporal. The reason seems that he did that because he couched his spirituality in the terms of a religion, namely Judaism. I would then assume that spirituality, channeled by a religion, becomes religiosity. The dictionary is ambivalent when it suggests in one out of six meanings that spiritual means "of religion or the church; sacred, devotional, or ecclesiastical; not lay or temporal", and in one of four meanings for religious that it means "characterized by adherence to religion or a religion; devout; pious; godly". Yet, knowing what we will learn of Heschel, I would like to take the notion of "devout" to mean "revering", which in Heschel's theory is part of the vocabulary on pre-religious, pre-revelational spirituality. Surely, faith needs devotion and reverence, "the staking of a whole life", otherwise it becomes mere "belief", as Heschel warns.  I take it then that true religiosity is nothing but spirituality channeled through by a religion. General spirituality - which Buber misleadingly calls "Jewish religiosity"  precedes the specific form of religiosity. The importance of distinguishing the two forms may only have become relevant with Western man's disenchantment with the form of traditional religion - to which Buber and Heschel contributed their part.

Assessing Buber, then, I would say that he certainly awakens a sense for spirituality in a reader open enough to "dare immediate, un-conditioned dialogue." But religiosity? Why be Jewish? Why God? Why the Jewish God? Because it happens to be interpret-able for Buber's cause? Because his individualistic reading of Jewish tradition sees this as a natural reference frame? - Buber's idea can only work on somebody who already happens to be a Jew, much like Rosenzweig realized he didn't need Christ to come to God because as a Jew, he was already there with him. All other readers who don't already claim to be Jewish - and I myself was doubtful about the legitimacy of that claim -, can do without Buber's explanation. It may give them a better understanding of what religion may also be about - apart from the perceived bore of the practice of ritualized worship - and an appreciation of it. But they could lead an ethical life in dialogue with their fellow man, and ground their moral behavior largely on profane considerations, and on what they "feel" is right. They wouldn't need all the metaphysical superstructure talk as explanation and could just accept it.  Would Buber's mysticism lead them to more questions, to God at all, and even to Judaism above all? Maybe, maybe not. Mysticism can be found apart from Judaism. Why would they need religiosity when they have spirituality? And does spirituality need God - or can it be content with "cosmic laws" or something of the like? Religiosity must make itself relevant; and maybe that, more so than a lack of spiritual openness, is religion's problem today.

Buber’s success But why does Buber successfully speak to modern man, or post-modern man? Why did he speak to me, for example, for matters of a case-study?  First of all, his I and Thou moment speaks to me. The spark in the other's eye, her presence, the immediacy of meeting the other is some event that I was ready to, and did experience. It was Lévinas with his idea of reading the commandment "Thou shalt not kill" vis-a-vis the other, who first gave the moment a basic Jewish quality for me, to be sure. But Buber prepared the ground. True encounter amazes me, awes me in Heschel's sense. So much for growing a feeling for spirituality - the awareness of an incorporeal "spark" beyond the view of the other as a means.

Because I was interested in Judaism, not so much in Buber's idea of dialogue, I also read his Hasidic stories and became aware of the concept of the divine spark. I thought it was a neat idea. But why stake my life on it and have Jewish faith in it? - Also, Buber's social concern appealed to me. While I perceive myself as a humanistic liberal, I believe we have much to learn from the communitarian critique which Buber anticipated. So, Buber's social concern fit neatly into my own self-perception. - What I also liked was his rejection of the false piousness that I perceived as characteristic of organized religion. Buber assumed my side on the issue. - More over, his existential concern was mine at the time that I was shaken by the notion that I did not know the last about me as I thought I knew. I was ready to ask for a "whole" perception of my being, as well as open to Buber’s encouragement to "re-create" my own version of spirituality. - His emphasis on the individual relation to God, and the Jew's possible choice to reject God  was something that I could very much sympathize with - in opposition to the mediated encounter that took away so much responsibility from Christians. Indeed, his idea that God addresses us was what I felt was happening to me, in the sense that the Halakha, supposedly "His" law, forced the problem of God unto me. I was happy to know that I could make the choice of a covenant, in equal partnership with the absolute called God, and that, in any case, my positive answer could not be taken for granted by God - should he exists.
Appreciation for Judaism came of it, understanding. Not whole acceptance, but flirting, searching more, probing. Buber lured me in, but he had been too ambivalent about the structures and particularities of Jewish worship as to urge oneself to subscribe to the particular Jewish version of general spirituality , and assume membership in the people of Israel . It took reading Abraham Joshua Heschel later for the religious edge. Buber's and Lévinas "Jewish philosophy" were an intellectual way into the house of Judaism.

Part Three: Heschel and Spirituality, Final Evaluation