The Letters of Martin Buber: A Life of Dialogue.
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edited by Nahum N. Glatzer and Paul Mendes-Flohr
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translated by Richard and Clara Winston and Harry Zohn
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Schocken Books,722 pages, $45

If a poll were conducted today to ascertain who is regarded to be the
preeminent Jewish thinker of this century, Martin Buber (1878–1965)
would probably win, though Franz Rosenzweig might give him a run for the
money; among active Protestants, Buber would likely win by a landside.
Jews, to be sure, might well vote differently; many (including this
reviewer) prefer not only Rosenzweig but Hermann Cohen, Gershom Scholem,
and Leo Strauss. Almost everyone, however (again including this
reviewer), would agree that Buber has earned a significant place in the
history of the twentieth century's life of the mind; his long and
productive life merits pondering and appreciation.

This volume helps one do just that. Its philological cleanliness reminds
one of the standards set by the Wissenschaft des Judentums (the
science of Judaism), but it is above all a labor of love, translated
scrupulously by Richard and Clara Winston and Harry Zohn. The editors,
Nahum N. Glatzer, who died while the work was in progress, and Paul
Mendes-Flohr, based their selection on an earlier three-volume German
edition. The editor of that edition, Grete Schaeder, selected the
correspondence from more than forty thousand letters housed at the
Martin Buber Archives in Jerusalem. She consulted with the distinguished
scholar Ernst Simon; both provide invaluable editorial materials for the
book, which has all the earmarks of being at once a successful
distillation and a successful collaboration. Most felicitous is the
decision to include letters not only from Buber but also to him, so that
occasionally one can observe the philosopher of dialogue in actual
dialogue. The fact that on numerous occasions he does not exactly
overwhelm his correspondents attests to the intellectual integrity of
those connected with the book.

The correspondents are an illustrious lot, including as they do (I list
them alphabetically as is appropriate for such an all-star cast) S.Y.
Agnon, Walter Benjamin, Emil Brunner, Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi,
Dag Hammarskjold, Theodor Herzl, Herman Hesse, Franz Kafka, François
Mauriac, Eleanor Roosevelt, Franz Rosenzweig, Bertrand Russell, Gershom
Scholem, Chaim Weizmann, Franz Werfel, Israel Zangwill, and Stefan
Zweig.

Grete Schaeder's "Biographical Sketch" helps one to situate these
correspondents in Buber's rich and long life, which began in Vienna,
though he grew up in Austrian—later Polish—Galicia. The young Buber rose
to prominence in Zionist circles as the editor of the distinguished
journal Der Jude. I and Thou (1923) made him famous among
students of philosophy and theology, while his failure to emigrate from
Hitler's Germany to Palestine until 1938 caused commotion among a number
of Jews, especially the many young people who had heeded his prophet-like voice to the extent of mistaking him for a prophet. Thus it could
be, and was, said that he appealed much more to others than to "his
own," though by the time his eighty-fifth birthday came around he had
transcended controversy. Ben-Gurion wrote him on the occasion to declare
that Buber deserved "praise and glory in the history of our people and
our time." The two men had not always agreed, so that Ben-Gurion could
characterize himself as Buber's "friend, admirer, and opponent." Buber
replied with a characteristic bit of pomposity that alluded to the
complexity of "so-called interpersonal relationships."

The letters afford many glimpses of Martin Buber's character and
personality and almost coerce the open-minded to conclude that Buber was
not an altogether attractive human being. He was on an alarming number
of occasions given to stepping over the line that separates seriousness
from pretentiousness, which is to say that he took himself too
seriously; he was a vain man. The philosopher of dialogue often conveys
the disconcerting impression that he is none too good at really
listening to others; the exponent of authentic human encounters
sometimes strikes one as a bit of a poseur. One should, however, be
quick to add that impressions also abound of Buber's courage, of genuine
love and tenderness for his wife Paula, and of genuine kindness to those
who sought his advice or help. For example, he was an indefatigable
reader of manuscripts of others.

In any event, the emphasis of this volume is, as it ought to be, on the
public deeds and the thought of Buber; the private lives of people like
him usually give little sustenance to human prurience and nosiness.

As an actor in the public arena, Buber frequently generated
controversies and chalked up a mixed record. He should be given full
credit for his early realization that political Zionism was not enough
and needed to be supplemented by a cultural dimension. But history has
not dealt kindly with his flirtations with German aspirations in World
War I, and this for weightier reasons than that Germany lost the war.
Buber's sympathies were not free of unfortunate Enlightenment-bashing,
of unreasonable opposition to the Enlightenment's admittedly
insufficient notions of human reason.

One might be tempted to dismiss such excess as youthful enthusiasm, but
Buber was over thirty-five when the First World War broke out, and other
political positions advocated by him have not exactly been vindicated by
history. He greatly underestimated both Hitler's political support and
staying power in 1933. His hopes for a binational solution to the
relations between Jews and Arabs proved to be completely unrealistic.

Forever dovish, Buber seems to have indulged, and overindulged, the
illusion that if only Jews turned their swords into ploughshares the
Arabs would follow suit, whereas even as I write, only one Arab country
has acknowledged Israel's right to exist. This tendency toward political
softness differentiates Buber not only from Zionist revisionists like
Jabotinsky, who were right in thinking that Jews would have to fight for
their homeland, but also from prominent figures in the Labor Party like
Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir. The same softness bedeviled Buber's cultural
politics when he was tempted to forgive Heidegger for the latter's
Nazism, apparently oblivious of the fact that a prominent Jew should
leave such forgiveness to a Higher Authority.

But to leave it at that would be, once again, to perpetrate an injustice
to Buber, who was capable of repeatedly espousing unpopular causes later
vindicated. His letters to various anti-Semites are invariably
impressive, combining as they do high courage with high intelligence.
Never is Buber more impressive than in his long letter of February 24,
1939, to Gandhi, who had the gall—also known as chutzpah—to counsel
German Jews to continue to suffer quietly under Hitler, in part because
he was convinced that "Palestine belongs to the Arabs." Buber dealt
unflinchingly with all of Gandhi's dubious assertions, even taking on
his celebrated espousal of nonviolence: "[I]f there is no other way of
preventing the evil destroying the good, I trust I shall use force and
give myself up into God's hands." Gandhi was unwilling or unable to
reply to this letter.

However, most of the letters in this judicious selection do not center
on such controversies; quite properly they emphasize the life of the
mind as lived by Martin Buber. The most fascinating letters collected
here are those between Buber and Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), his
collaborator and friend who bore up heroically under the strains of a
crippling disease during the last seven years of his life. Together they
developed what Rosenzweig called "the new thinking," a kind of Jewish
postmodernism whose non-Jewish pagan equivalent was none other than the
philosophy of Martin Heidegger. They sought to take Judaism beyond the
confines of what they saw as a denuded and arid rationalism, and there
is no question that they performed a service in revitalizing the Jewish
faith by emphasizing its vitalism, though Gershom Scholem probably did
more enduring work in this area by his pathbreaking studies of
mysticism.

One must necessarily face the question of the price Buber paid for his
mental exertions in this enterprise, and this volume helps one do that.
Strange to say, Rosenzweig, in so many ways Buber's close ally, provides
some of the severest criticism of his friend. Thus Rosenzweig alludes
gently to Buber's temptations to indulge in Romantic mysticism, and
provides him with the most telling critique of I and Thou.
Buber could be quite testy when challenged, especially when Scholem
challenged his understanding of Hasidism, but he was, or at least seems,
quite sincere when he writes Rosenzweig on September 14, 1922, "I want
to thank you from the bottom of my heart for your thorough, magnificent
criticism," and when he asks his younger friend to keep up his "kindly
rigor and strongest candor."

Rosenzweig is especially telling in forcing Buber to confront the
latter's disdain for the Law and for goading him into stating boldly (on
June 3, 1925), "Revelation is not legislation. I hope I would be
prepared to die for this postulate if I were faced with a Jewish
universal church that had inquisitorial powers." He did not have to die
for his postulate, fortunately, but in living for it tenaciously he
estranged himself from the core of Judaism, according to which
revelation does take the form of Law. Buber never saw that for
the Jews Law could be more than a burden or a yoke, more than a
deadening of the spirit, but grace itself. By emphasizing the "prophetic
faith," a title of one of his books, he did, of course, draw closer to
Christianity—the Gospels, after all, engage in a good deal of criticism
of Jewish Law.

Buber's style of "new thinking," however, undermined not only vital
parts of Judaism, but all religious forms and institutions. He
distrusted form in all its forms, and put feeling ("religiosity") above
all, thus becoming the patron saint of those—and they are legion today—who go around saying, "I believe in God but not in organized religion."

Buber also paid for his forays into "new thinking" with a goodly amount
of clarity. I and Thou may be an important work but it is also
a murky one. Moreover, Buber's style, which at its frequent best is
poetic, at its not infrequent worst—also found in these letters—is
bombastic, mushy, woolly. One should, however, add not only that Buber
was bravely willing to pay the price for his brand of the new thinking,
but that the later books, especially The Kingship of God, are
better than I and Thou in almost every way.

The study of Buber tempts one to generalize that the closer he came to
the Bible the better became his style and his thought. Indeed, one can
maintain that his translation of the Bible—begun with Rosenzweig but
continued and completed by him after Rosenzweig's death—is his most
towering achievement. He brought enormous intelligence along with high
respect for the integrity of the text to his task. As a translator, he
was willing to court obscurity for the sake of literalness. The result
is not only a great translation but a profound commentary. Many have
noticed the tragic irony of this accomplishment: the intended
beneficiary of the arduous task, German Jewry, no longer existed by the
time the task was completed.

The letters illuminate Buber's genius as a translator whenever they
respond to queries about particular details. An even more attractive
side of the man emerges in that considerable part of the correspondence
connected with his editorship of Der Jude and with other
editorial enterprises. As an editor, he displayed an almost awesome
openmindedness and clarity. He solicited contributions from an amazing
variety of authors, concerned much more with their gifts than with their
particular viewpoints. He was not in the slightest worried about their
potential or actual disagreements with his own views, and thus could
encourage both Scholem and Strauss to express themselves. He wanted to
hear from Walter Benjamin as well as Franz Kafka, and he quite naturally
asked Lou Salome to write something on the erotic.

He elicited and earned great trust from the writers with whom he
corresponded, and there is little doubt that in these efforts he was
doing the Lord's work, as when he wrote the erratic young Franz Werfel
in 1914 to reassure him about his torments. He expressed his confidence
that Werfel's self-doubt would not cripple the young writer: "It is a
question merely of waiting for and accepting God's tempo." In his own
long and fruitful life Martin Buber learned to do just that.