Martin Buber: a man who is hard to understand!

The claim with which Scripture has approached and still approaches every generation is the claim to be acknowledged as a document of the true history of the world—of the history, that is, in which the world has an origin and a goal…[intellectual and spiritual people] today know of no beginning—history eddies toward their feet from the whole of cosmically unchronicled time; they know of no ending—history foams past them into cosmically unchronicled time.  And what lies between has become so violent and trivial an interval!

                        From People Today and the Hebrew Bible by Martin Buber (1926)

There was a time when intelligent people used literature to think.

                                                            From Exit Ghost by Phillip Roth (2007)

Martin Buber (1878-1965) has inspired interest for over a century.  But it is also true that Buber’s face and the title of his little book, I and Thou, are much more well-known than any of his ideas or his actual writing, which remain primarily the province of graduate students in Protestant theology.

Do Buber’s passionate interests in narrative/aggadah, in cultural crisis, in dialogue, and in Jewish Renaissance, still address people today?

To reach a conclusion about whether Buber is really worth our time--and his often turgid prose does take time to try to crack--I believe we need to do some serious spade work.  Many an enthusiastic reader, interest piqued by some glancing encounter with the famous author's book,  I and Thou, has run headlong into the problem I am pointing to.  We--many of us--don't know what Buber is talking about; and, we don't know, because we don't understand what's bothering him, what's moving and motivating him to write.  

If we want to understand Buber, the problems he's worried about are the places to start.  Paradoxically, in order to identify these, I believe we do well to leave Buber aside for a time, and look to some of his contemporaries, artists and writers who meditated on themes of cultural crisis, spiritual perplexity, and personal despair.

I believe asking what kind of narrative people today inhabit will pay particularly large dividends as we explore the background to Martin Buber's career as a writer.  This interest--in the storied lives of fin de siecle people, especially urban people of European descent--permeates writers and artists like Ranier Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Leo Tolstoy, and Virginia Woolf.  It is evident in Rilke's Stories of the Good Lord and Others, Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and in less obvious ways, perhaps, in almost everything that Kafka wrote.

It is to these writers, and other writers like them, that I will turn in subsequent posts.