How would you say that Martin Cooper relates to the British? The Christian mystery of the British. for example now i was just yeah that's that's good um in order to bring that out we go by at the maybe the old testament because that was the question of my mind how this part in google and this teaching yeah the old test okay This whole question is very interesting to me. I just finished a prologue with Nita O'Mara. The translation of her book is called Daniel. It's not about Daniel, but it's a dialogue. It's a very mystical text, and it's somewhere before I am thou, and I find there's more confusion in the subject of mysticism than any other. Like one girl came up to me, and she was a Catholic student, and she said, maybe my problem is that

[01:05]

difference between the mystical and the traditional. And I said, well, there's been a great deal of mysticism in the tradition. And, you see, Buber has spent a lifetime studying the Bible and translating it. And he has a level of this thought which I wouldn't call the mystical, but which finds the dialogue between man and God as the real essence of the Hebrew Bible. There is nothing that man may not say to God, and that transcendence speaks to man in the events of everyday life. He said that our answering, our silence, our not answering, is our answering for ourselves. exact sense of the term and this he says is the fundamental contribution of the even bible or existence in other words to move with the god of the bible is not allowed to be proved or attributes can be described rather the god that meets again and again in what he calls the big concrete he says because the biblical religion is beginning with the fear of god and he says by that not what can be known would be essentially unknowable

[02:17]

And the essentially unknowable, as he refers to, is the mystery which comes with the shattering of our security. And he says you go through this, you don't live in it, but you go through this and you come back to the world as directed and assigned. You understand your existence as given to you. And this is very basic in Bukhara's thought. He says if you don't do this, then you run into the danger of despair with the real God who crashes in on Job's tent. because you would form God in such and such an image as a living God, and you cannot then take the reality that is also there. And in terms of the covenant, Buber has a whole range of his thought centers in the belief that the covenant also is a dialogue between God and the individual, but also between God and the people. And to Buber and Mount Sinai, there is a reciprocity. that if no word else in the Hebrew Bible of the demand of the people become a people, a holy people, a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation, or this to what it means, that they make real the kingship of God in every aspect of human existence, really social, economic, international, as well as the personal.

[03:36]

In other words, not just a collection of well-meaning individuals, but become real community. Therefore, times he would say, for example, interpreting Jeremiah, God demands not religion, but community. And he sees the origin of the prophets as coming when the kings, instead of fulfilling the task of making real the kingship of God, turn it into a merely cultic allegiance to God that can be fulfilled simply by the temple and priesthood, but no longer, say, does King Solomon take this seriously in the his relation to other nations. And then the prophet, the man without power, arises and goes and speaks again and again the word of the covenant that calls the people, calls the king back to, to turn back to meeting with God in history. And the whole development of who proceeds from those terms, from the judges where Gideon says, I shall not rule over you, my son shall not, the Lord shall rule over you, to David who,

[04:40]

tries to be the trip king, to the kings who fall away, to the prophets who come one after the other and place the demands like Amos of justice, Hosea of loving kindness, and Isaiah of holiness. And we're constantly calling either to the present or even if they look to the future, it is still the hope of... A turning of the present, even what would be a fixed, what would seem like a fixed future that a prophet predicts, Weber says, it's not the prediction that's important. There is still the possibility of the turning. He uses the paradigm of Jonah as an example. Jonah says, 40 days to never that great city will be destroyed. And the king of Nineveh says, who knows, perhaps we turn back to God. And they do, and God repents of this. And Jeremiah says that I can this alternative, this demand of dialogue is always there. The Messiah also grows out of this, the whole origin of the Messianic concept.

[05:44]

And Israel grows out of the demand of the realization of the kingship, but also out of the repeated disappointment. So that, for example, Isaiah turns at one point to the Holy Remnant. We're the Holy Remnant, but they remain true to the covenant in the face of again and again, the turning away. And even if they look to the future, it's still in terms of the demand the future places in the present. Buber distinguishes between what he calls the prophetic and the apocalyptic. He says the true prophet calls really for people to speak to them, and he asks them to make decisions about the actual historical power. Or he says the apocalyptic first tends to be a writer who writes for a future and does not really demand historical decision. And he feels that the basic thing in the Hebrew Bible is the prophetic strain, that man's decision to shubah, turning back to God. And he sees, for example, the origin of the Messianic in Isaiah, two stages. In Isaiah proper, there's Emmanuel, who was going to be the true king from the line of David, and he is given the attributes of the king who willed.

[06:52]

justice and lead forth the prisoners from the dungeon of the blind. And then he speaks of Deutero-Isaiah, the anonymous disciple, whoever it was that took this forward. He speaks of him as becoming even disillusioned with the hope of the king, and instead looking to the Nabi, the prophet, and the suffering servant of the Lord in Deutero-Isaiah. He sees not as the king of the prophet and not as the the open to the hidden, even though he also quotes some of the things from Isaiah about that same fulfilling of the covenant, leading the blind forward and the prisoners. And he then speaks of what works in the depth here. The failure in history may nevertheless be the reality of it. And he says that we sort of in a lightning flash discover that God suffers with man in history. He emphasizes that phrase where it says, I who dwell in the... and have eternity and dwell in the high and holy places, and with him who was humble and contrite of heart.

[07:55]

So that Buber does not see the suffering servant either as Christ, as Christianity really interprets it, or as Israel as a whole, as has been often interpreted in Judaism, but as a figure that occurs again and again. Abraham, Job, and many are referred to as servants, perhaps Isaiah and Deuteronomy too. And the figure is hidden, he says, in the image of Isaiah. It's the arrow which is hidden in the quiver. And he says, I've spent my strength for naught. And a polished arrow hidden in the quiver, I have not been used. Buber says, but he cannot draw himself forth and shoot him. And then when, shoot himself, then when Deuteronomy says it's too light a thing that you should be a light for the house of Jacob alone, but for all nations. Buber speaks of this as the national universalism of the prophets. Instead of seeing like barracks on a contrast between a sort of closed society and open, he said the prophets. Again and again, we're saying to Israel, this is your responsibility to people, at the same time assuring them that they were not the only people to die.

[09:03]

As Amos said, they're Egypt, my people, and Assyria, the work of my hand, and Israel, my inheritance. or that I brought every nation up, and so on, or my house is a house of prayer for all peoples, and the covenant, as in Amos, is the place on all, but yet there is a special demand face in Israel, you only have I known of all the nations, known, that is, as the people, as a whole, and therefore the sins will be visible to you. So that Hoover then sees the suffering servant as the continuation of the messianic, but as a hidden suffering figure, and also those who stand with him. The red lip that turns back would also be this. And he doesn't see it as a divine figure, but rather as man's answer to God's disappointment, as his making the dialogue right. And therefore, while man himself cannot bring the Messiah, it must be completed from the standpoint of God, still he understands the Messianic as basically being this completion of the original demand of realizing the kingship of God in every aspect of human existence.

[10:07]

This is why, if people were asked the question, sometimes asked, why do not the Jews accept Christ as the Messiah? His answer would be, in part, that our understanding of the Messiah is, in fact, this total fulfillment, this total demand that every aspect of our existence be brought in relation to God. To Hoover, it's not monotheism, proclamation that there's one God that's important, but that man can say thou to God, that he can bring his whole life as a person and in relation to other persons in the community into relation to God. That saying of thou to God is to Hoover the real contribution of Israel and not just the numerical contribution one instead of 13 gods. Woodward believes that this task continues even in the diaspora. He speaks as those who suffer, when they suffer willingly, they somehow stand in the shadow of the suffering servant. And he was criticized because the Yehudi, the Hasidic hero of his chronicle novel, For the Sake of Heaven, had so many resemblances to Jesus.

[11:12]

And he was criticized for Christianizing tendency. He said, I have not altered anything in the tradition. He said he felt that both Yehudi, who was an actual Hasidic rabbi of the 19th century, both Yehudi and Jesus stood in the shadow of Deutero Isaiah, suffering servant of the Lord. There was an organic reason for these resemblances. So he sees the messianic task as always and never. does he he will he neither sees it as having been fulfilled or does he postpone it to an indefinite future where you say sort of the dawn of a new day there but rather and then hostage he wants what he calls the messianism of the everyday which holds the tension of the messianic without saying that any one moment or any one hour fulfills it this is um basically his approach, and it leads him in, interestingly enough, he's been a lifelong student of Christianity and a student in a very important dialogue with a great many of the reading theologians of our time.

[12:18]

Well, when he deals with Jesus in Poland, he tends to a distinction, which not many Polonians would agree with, but which follows from his sort of thinking. He sees Jesus, as for all the differences and inequalities with Schweitzer, that Jesus perhaps did think the kingdom was coming very speedily and placed it sort of demand of more of perfection. Now, but he sees Jesus nonetheless as standing in that emunah, the biblical unconditional trust in the relation with God. whereas he tends to see Paul and also John as being closer to the word pistis, which Buber interprets as the faith with a knowledge content. Now, he doesn't suggest that either of them is without the other. He is not suggesting that this is the difference between Judaism and Christianity. He says both strains are very important. The question, he feels, though, is basic, is which is the beginning one? I'm sure that no one could find a greater statement of trust than St.

[13:21]

Paul's statement, that neither things above nor below, nor qualities nor powers, I can't quote it exactly, but you know it, can separate me from the love of God. But Weber would say that the fact that he goes on to say, which is in Christ Jesus, he not only witnesses to his experience in faith, but in a sense also says that you must come through this way. we receive Jesus as 20 through the narrow door narrow way and he sees the Pharisees to a same man go through the door if you knock the answer but he said it's John says in effect you must believe in the door so that we were has set up this two types of faith in this book by that name of any not emphasis but the recognition of course that they become much interwoven and that you can have a trust that grows out of that sort of thing or the faith of knowledge content that grows out of the trust. Now, what about mysticism? I think that this is, to me anyway, it's a particularly important question, perhaps because I came to Luber through an interest in mysticism.

[14:28]

In fact, I came back to my own Judaism only at first to... an interest in Christian mysticism, also Hindu and Buddhist. I think the one reason Buber spoke to MacAdishu as a Quaker slave is that he was a man who went through all that. If you read his early writings, you find he's very much immersed in it. He wrote the first actual mystical anthology in 1909, The Ecstatic Confessions, in which he had a wide range all related to Sri Ramakrishna, but also a great many of the Christian mystics were included. Actually, Buber wrote his doctoral dissertation on the German mystics, from Meister Eckhart to Angelus Salacius. He was deeply influenced by Otto Blumme. His friend, Gustav Landauer, had introduced him to this whole world. Buber considers Meister Eckhart the greatest mystic of the Western world. As far as I know, his first published essay in 1900 was on Nietzsche, but his second one was on Blumme, and he deeply identified with him.

[15:31]

And I think that this whole trend of German mysticism went deeply into Buber's thought and has never left it. Out of it, he says, he got the feeling of the realization of God in man, the coming of God in man. Now, this is a position which he later rejected in favor of the meeting of man with the eternal vow. But I think it's important to understand Buber to know that when he rejects He rejects some of the conclusions he drew. He does not reject, I think, the experience itself. I've sometimes had the feeling that some of the many Protestant theologians who have taken up the I-Thou relationship from Buber, like Barth and Brunner and Philip and others, that precisely what they lack is that mystical something that remains Buber. It becomes a little more, I don't know how to put it, formalized and there's some something that has remained there so that what Buber says in the introduction of pointing the way I think it's very true that he had to go through mysticism to reach his independent relation to being he had to go beyond it now the criticism he makes of the mystic there is interesting he says the mystic tends to

[16:51]

to do two things which Buber now takes exception to. One of them is he tends to divide his world into the exalted hours, which are the uplifted ones, and then the sort of everyday hours. And the everyday hours he sees as a preparation for returning to the exalted ones or as an obstacle to it. And Buber tells this story, pretty well known by now, about how the young man came to visit him. just beginning the first world war with what later turned out to be a question of life and death and he said it was after a morning of mystic enthusiasm of this sort I answered his questions I was attended but I didn't I failed to guess the question he didn't put and only a month later when a friend came and told him that this young man had died in the war and that this was a real life decision for him when he came to see Buber did Buber understand he says what after all does a man who is in despair but nonetheless comes to what does he hope for but a presence that says that despite all there is meaning.

[17:54]

And Buber says, I experience that as a judgment, and since then I have given up the religious or it has given me up, and I know nothing but the everyday out of which I am never taken. I don't know the exception, the abstraction, the exaltation. I have no fullness, he said, but the everyday's fullness of claim and responsibility. And where Buber felt judged, I think, was not that he thought he should have been able necessarily to lift every young man out of despair, but rather because he wasn't present in the full sense. And this is where I think the Buber's mystical interest, which also, of course, is deeply informed by his lifelong work on Hasidism, the Neo-Jewish mysticism of the 18th and 19th century Europe, where this meets with the biblical trend. Buber says in the the foreword to the Baal Shem Tov, Baal Shem Tov is a counter-repository to the Baal Shem Tov's instruction in intercourse with God. He says, Baal Shem Tov will probably be exalted as a form of practical act of mysticism, a mysticism which does not deny the world, which does not deny the concrete, which tries to take everything into it.

[19:01]

But then he adds, but for the same reason, it could be called religion. general, or, he said, presentness. And this is where the element that remains, I think, of the genuinely mystical in Luberth Eidau philosophy. Because when he gets to Eidau, he speaks of these wonderful moments, and now he reinterprets them. He says, I really wasn't, as I thought, at one with the piece of Micah that I lifted up, and I felt, I realized, there was still something between me and it, the over-againstness, we will recall it, Because the second exception he makes to the mystical is that the mystic experiences unity in himself and then identifies that with the unity of the all. Hoover says that unity in the self is really only there in order that you may then go forth to the meeting, not that you may enjoy it. And he believes it's an error of mystical philosophy to go from that experience of a unity in the self to a philosophy which says this is the all. Rather, it

[20:02]

It fits you again and again to go forth to meet the thou. And that willingness to go and meet the thou, which is the unique, the concrete, this now characterizes Buber from now on. And he speaks of the types of union, for example, the statement in John that I have a father or one, but he still feels that this is really an elemental statement of relationship. The way in which Jesus says father and his son is just the most basic primal statement of the I-thou relation. It doesn't look on it as a mystical unity in the old sense of the term. But what he's really saying, I think, is not that he rejects the mystical experience that he had, but that he rejects two conclusions from it which do not necessarily follow one, that which leads one to turn one's life into a dualism in which the world that one comes back to is no longer important. I was told recently that one of the the leaders of the experiments on his mind-forming drugs, as they're called, suicide and LSD and so on.

[21:11]

And his attitude now is that the ordinary world is a world of play. For him, the only real thing is if he can keep going back to taking LSD. And this is one of the things Buber rejects very strongly. He says, in the words of Heraclitus, one should follow the common. And he tends to feel that some of the Hindu and the Taoist teaching, but in particular, Aldous Huxley's counsel to the use of masculine and so on, are the denial of the common. And he says, man, the true name of all these chemical paradises is situationlessness. He says, man can stay in a situation, he can withstand it, he can change it, but he says situationlessness is no true business of man. There is an ought there for Buber that is the ought of what it means to authenticate your human existence, so that mysticism cannot be used to Buber as a way of then dividing life into a sort of a hallowed sphere and an unhallowed sphere. On the contrary, he follows with Hasidism the notion of the hallowing of the everyday. The profane is simply that which has not yet been sanctified, that everything can be opened to the holy, and that this is an ever-ending task.

[22:17]

This is not at all, of course, the same thing as saying the evil is holy. The evil urge, as the tongue would say, or Hasidism says, the evil urge can be used to serve God. Not the evil, that's a Gnostic position, where you say the evil can. But the urge, namely the thing which is not evil in itself, but is the passion which goes into evil, which Buber understands as the undirected. When you do not become a whole person, when you do not respond with your whole being to the man of the moment. But this very thing, which then, when you do respond, can be brought into the full service of God. And without it, there could be no full service of God. This is a point he emphasizes again and again. And he says, to us, the experiences of the brink are perhaps not so important as the streak of sun on a twig of maple. He's talking about the notions where you get the essence of a man as opposed to his whole living existence. He moves sort of step by step. to be more and more what you would call a religious existentialist. But I think that he never leaves behind what he basically learned through the mystical, and as he puts it himself, and this is Daniel, but I just translated, that what he experienced in the depths could be confirmed in the world.

[23:31]

It guaranteed him that it could be out there in the hustle and bustle of the highway and so on. It could be made real. It's a wrong way if it leads you to simply turn away world but it can be a right way if it then leads you to bring unity as uh again and again into he calls it all polarity and so what he retained i believe is immediacy and presentness these two together just the full reality of the situation as he would call it living before the face but again and again in our lives that's all we can really say of it we are again and again living before the face each new situation there is a new face It demands nothing prepared. It demands you. It demands your response in a way that's never been before. Of course, you bring with you all sorts of plans and preparation, but you still have to bring, fuse all that into the new response, to the new point. And this is the real heart of Lucas' philosophy of dialogue, is that immediacy and presence, which gives you a concrete relation to the unique that you meet in this hour.

[24:35]

Now, I feel that this is essentially mystical, and yet I cannot say so in most places, because the word mystical is usually associated with one or another particular philosophical interpretation of mysticism. And then we have Emma's contusion, as Hoover says himself in an early essay with the monist, when the monist says you're a mystic, he says, no, I'm not a mystic. The mystic wishes to deny the senses all. I want to heighten reality. He says there is a passive side of everything, but there is a bestowing side of everything. And if I bend over with the shell of my fervor, it melts and it comes of itself to meet me. But as you know, of course, many of the world's mystics, in fact, have been exactly that way. Like Yacoub Duma, they have seen something far out, or St. Francis, or... St. John of the Cross, men who have lived in the greatest sort of immediacy. And Buber, for example, speaking of asceticism, says he does not believe in it for itself, and yet it may enable you to preserve the concreteness of the moment, which is forever being endangered by one or another technicizing, psychologizing, historicizing, philosophizing, or just simply the dissipation of yourself.

[25:47]

And insofar as it enables you to guard the concreteness, it can be reality. Can I stop there and maybe Father Benedict, some of you would like to... I'm sorry. Don't play 45 minutes, but... Yeah. Can you explain a little more of these two types of faiths? Well, if I could illustrate Emunah, there are some passages that come to mind. The 23rd Psalm says, Yea, though I have walked through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me. I don't think the psalmist is saying I have a guarantee against

[26:51]

death or the shadow of death but rather that being with god is realer to me than this and i fear no evil therefore in the same way in psalm 91 where it says the thousands who follow their right side tens of thousands that shall not come near thee the arrow that fly by day or the pestilence by night um it was this psalm which according to matthew satan quoted jesus when he took him on to the top of the temple and he said to him um catch yourself down the temple to show that you are he for it is said he shall not suffer your foot to stumble and jesus said thou shalt not tempt god and he was this in the words of of moses at the time of the people wanted to strike the rock and get water from well i understand that this he's saying It's one thing to trust in God. It's another to consider it a sort of an insurance policy where you can go ahead and throw yourself down when God is obliged to keep you intact.

[27:55]

It's a difference between religion and magic, almost. Magic, where you use the divine power for your purpose, and religion is the trust where you walk with God and where you do. I would see this very, very clearly in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus says, take no thought of the morrow, but the morrow should take thought of itself, consider the bullies of the field. Even the statement sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. I mean, since my life is always much overcrowded, I think of this sometimes in terms of the... My brother-in-law once told me I used to make up lists of things to do every day. He said, oh, if I did that, I'd shoot myself, because I had so much to do, so he just... clearly could. But the other part of it, I believe, is that we don't in fact know the resources we will have on the morrow to deal with it. And I've often observed the young people make themselves extremely unhappy when they think of what we must do, because they project their present low state into the months or days ahead.

[28:56]

I feel, how can I possibly do this? It seems to me, again, the trust is that I also receive myself back. the next day, for the next day's tasks. Insufficient to the day is the task that is demanded of me. You know, all these would be examples of Munan. I think that Job represents this too, insofar as he doesn't demand, he doesn't receive sort of answers in the form of theodicies. All he receives is that God speaks to him again, comes near to him, nothing more than that. To Buber, this is essential to this prophetic notion of history. God is basically an image-less God, and we cannot conjure him up, we cannot use him. For example, this is a rather interesting point, the phrase, which is when Moses asked God, who shall I say sent me? The Hebrew is again, and this is quite often translated, or usually translated, I am that I am, soon, be soon. And Hubert himself in I and Thou said, the word of revelation is nothing but I am that I am.

[30:03]

But in Moses, which is a later study of Hubert, he says, well, the real meaning of that, he thinks, is different. I shall be there as I shall be there. You cannot conjure me. You cannot, by my name, fix that I shall come in such and such a way or come for your success or this or that. The trust is not there. that I know we'll be able to use God to our purposes, but only that in another, in a new way, in a new situation, again to go forth to meet the reality. Hoover puts it at the end of the biblical dialogue between heaven and earth. He speaks of the Job of the gas chambers, the Job of Auschwitz. And he says, can we call to him to trust in the Lord for he is kind and his mercy endureth forever. And he contrasts the Greek tragic hero, where before faceless fate, with the man who will not get over what has happened, who does not put up with the existence, but contends with it, struggles with it. He says, we too, we struggle with it in order to meet in whatever form it comes, our cruel and kind Lord.

[31:05]

The man who makes God into an idol only of one sort is going to So the essence of trust there, here, therefore, is the essence of presence, presentness, immediacy. Now, what Buber feels has happened in Paul and John is that a sort of superstructure of faith with the knowledge content has tended to come in its place. For example, he speaks of Paul having seen an almost cosmic scheme where the law is given in Sinai and man becomes guilty before the law and then All the generations from Sinai to Golgotha are necessarily condemned, and then God propitiates his own breath in Christ, and then redemption takes place. But this, as Buber sees, swallows up these generations. It cuts them off from immediacy with God. What Buber feels that was never true in the Hebrew Bible, that is, it was never impossible for a man to turn back to God.

[32:09]

seems in Paul's scheme to be done. And he feels that Paul and he feels John too are in effect saying that first we must begin by accepting the proposition that God is made man in Christ and then you may go to the relationship. I don't know whether that was actually true in Paul's case, it's not for me to say, but my feeling about him was that he was a man who had a very deep religious an experience of an overwhelming immediacy, and then communicated it to others. And the question is, in a way, as he's saying to others, first you begin with where I ended, and then we get to where I began. This does not mean that we're a class of spies all that some people 50 years ago would have as merely an organizer. He recognizes his great genius and the depth of his faith and his trust. He only suggests that he is beginning there. When John says, no man has come unto the Father except by me, or the story of the sheepfold, where there's the robbers who try to break in another way, again, Buber would see this as limiting the imageless God in one image in such a way as to make the faith with the knowledge content the beginning, and then only proceeding to the trust and faith.

[33:34]

He feels that Jesus, for all of his differences from those immediately around him and some before him, really stands basically in the tradition of the... He doesn't say he's a prophet, but he stands in the tradition of the prophets, the Bible, of those who renew the immediacy. That's what he believes that Jesus was doing. He called... It's in the phrase. Not those who say, Lord, Lord, but those who do the will of God. But he calls man back to this trust. And he says... He deals with some complexity, the whole question of how was Jesus before Pontius Pilate, and did he think of himself as the Messiah, and was he influenced by the later apocalyptic texts which show the preexistence of the servant before. But he says, whatever may be the case with this question of his Messiahship, Huber believes that Jesus did not call his disciples to have faith in him, but to have faith in God. And this is... Why callest thou me good, when man is good unto me?

[34:38]

Thou dost good. This is, of course, an interpretation, but it is one that grows out of a careful, at least a faithful study. He says of Jesus that, Jesus is my great brother, and as I have grown older, it's become more and more important to me to try to hear what he says, understand the words. It's a strange statement, in a way. because in a seminar on biblical faith in Columbia, Hoover was remarking about something that just followed the text, where it says, since the days of John the Baptist, when they were taking the kingdom of heaven by violence, I forget if the text had followed, but I think Hoover said he didn't really hear that as the text itself. One of the people there said, well, why do you say that? He said, well, it's just a subjective thing. they insisted so he said well i i don't hear it the voice of jesus in this and at that uh uh james meilenberg who's a difficult scholar of note and in many ways very sympathetic got quite right in the face and said that sheer subjectivism

[35:45]

Would Martin Buber want his way to be popular? Would he want the common man to be able to go to God, the revealed God of the Old and New Testament, by his way of teaching? Or is it, so to speak, is it... You know, Martin Buber may be taken sort of as a prophet. I mean, he's a very exceptional person, as the prophets of the Old Testament were among the Jews. Well, I think that's a profound question. At least it touches on a Khrushchev paradox. And that is this impositism which Buber has spent a lifetime on. The movement had a uniqueness centering around each different rabbi, or tzaddik, or leader. And as Buber says, a whole galaxy have been shown to have sensed a mystic sprung up in a small area at a small time, really an unprecedented nature.

[36:59]

As long as the leaders of the Hasidic communities tried to bring the simple people who had tended to get cut off from direct relation to God by the emphasis on either economic hardship or the emphasis upon scholarship almost as an end in itself, then here was a great absurgence of devotion and immediacy of faith. And as long as they did that, then Hasidism was a great new movement of faith. But there came a time, the hereditary succession of tzaddikim, in other words, the son would follow the father, they would get some of the most splendid palaces and so on. There came a time when instead of doing that, they tended to take the place of. There's no clear one point where you could say this was so, and yet... who reveals that there has been a degeneration of Hasidism, not because of the institution of the Tzadik, but because it seems to be the way of bringing people back to the media scene. Now, Buber says, I could not become a Hasid. If I had lived in a time when men thought only about the word of God and not its character, perhaps I too would have left my father's home and become a Hasid.

[38:06]

He said it in our day, my relation to the law is such, he's not a sort of Jew, that it would be a masquerade for me to do this. And yet he has felt that almost against his will, Hasidism had a message for the West. For whom? Well, he would have spoken, of course, to a great many people, the Jews in Western Europe and so on. Oh, and again in this country and Israel. I believe that Buber would say very definitely that he wants to speak to every man, and because what he is pointing to is essentially quite simple. It's very interesting that toward the end of his life he wrote, I don't understand, it was back in 48, but he's 85 now, this was when he was, but he wrote a little book called The Way of Man, according to the teaching of the Hasidim, which was like a quintessence, where he just would take a Hasidic tale and then comment on it in terms of heart-searching and resolution and beginning with oneself, here where one stands. And it really speaks. It's not an abstruse philosophy at all. It really can and does speak.

[39:07]

But the paradox which is contained here is that not only is it not possible for Hoover to revive communism from within its original movement, but that to speak, he does speak to many, many people in our day, and within Judaism to many people. Yet in order to speak, there's always the paradox that he doesn't. stand where they stand. He's not a reformist, he's not a conservative, and he's not an orthodox, and he's not a reconstructionist. He doesn't fit their categories, and he's not an organized type, and he's not trying to start a popular movement. And I think he has great power to speak, and I think that he more and more will speak, and I have seen this growing, and yet... It will never be something which can easily be turned into a sort of a mass organized thing. And Buber says about the meeting with the eternal thou, which is his word for God, that you have to, you don't go to God to concern yourself with God, but you come back with the thou on your lips.

[40:09]

The world and each man must then confirm and verify this meeting in the single list of this being. It doesn't mean that you don't stand with other men, witness with them, but you have to do some of that And so if a particular rabbi would judge Buber only in terms of how easily could he interpret him to a congregation in such a way as to remake Buber in terms of their popular ideas, he might have to give up. Yet I want to remark to a student at the Hebrew Seminary, if you understand the thing, then you can communicate it in your situation. And the dissatisfaction with some of the thinner types of liberalism and rationalism and so on that has been growing in modern Judaism has made some people think it worked very well to wrestle to get a more deeper understanding and then to bring this back in their situation. Do we have any concept corresponding to the Christian idea of heaven or of the final age where everything is brought to progression in our relationship with God and with one another?

[41:25]

I don't really know. Because on the one hand, he refuses to speak about immortality. He said this is one of his, sticking to the concrete, will not say something that he doesn't know about, and he doesn't know about this, and he says that, and he's afraid that an emphasis on immortality might affect the seriousness of that. He feels it's a real thing. He speaks of God as the rock of the soul in the language of Psalm 73, but he questions whether it's a personal meaning to his own. At times, Buber is not a, usually doesn't seem to be concerned with last things. And yet there are times when he talks as if we don't know when in fact the transformation might come. Because he is not bound to an evolutionary condition view which says the possibilities are limited only to this and this and this and this. We may wake up and there may be transformation. He doesn't see that transformation as coming simply from God's side, crashing into history.

[42:30]

But still, he has this figure of things working in the depths of perhaps true history. is the failures and the work in the depths, not the successes, the political things. And one doesn't know what is being prepared there. He talks about the dominance in our age of the I-it relationship. It's not evil in itself, but evil when it dominates. And he speaks, it says, the idol is in the catacombs, but who knows where, tomorrow it may not emerge for it. And he's decided here, or he's at least to some extent, whether what was more humanistic than religious or not. I wouldn't say that. He's a religious humanist, whether he was an existentialist or an existential theologian. Wow. Looking back at the first one about the greatest humanist, you see there's a humanist association which it is based upon through, like, ethical culture.

[43:31]

Huber's not a humanist in that sense. He's not a humanist in the sense of limiting anything, but he is a... He's not a theologian. He's a philosophical anthropologist. He begins with man in relation to God. Once I wrote him and I said... I asked, does God have an I-Thou relation with man in creating him? And he wrote back to me and said, now you're speaking like theologians, how do we know? He stays aloof from that, as he does also, as I said last night, I find him consistent, but he is not a systematizer. He doesn't write great systematic work. Karl Barth may know that the Word of God is something wholly other and... completely transcendent, but he can explain that in 14 huge volumes of systematic church dogmatics, but Gilbert doesn't do that. He said rather, our knowledge of the two-fold nature stands silent before the paradox of the primal mystery of being and becoming.

[44:38]

So I would say he is certainly a humanist in the sense that it's man, again and again, that he's concerned with, but man open in relation to God, man walking with God. Very often it's the relation between man and man is the way in which man also meets God, but not only that. For Huber's idea that relation is also with nature, with heart. And so if one is careful, therefore, not to draw, to use humanism as a negative category, then I think it's a good association. than what they call materialism. As an existentialist, though, I think he is one. To my own extent, this is somewhat concerning. You don't think I'll read the particular... He's not an existentialist theologian. Paul Tillich says that existentialism gives you the questions and essentialism the tradition of the answers, whereas I feel that both questions and answers grow out of this lifelong dialogue with the tradition. and you couldn't split it up in that way. And he's not really a theologian.

[45:39]

And if, as most people seem to find necessary to do, existentialism begins and ends with Jean-Paul Sartre, then Buber is not existentialist at all. He stands in most points in complete contrast to Sartre. The case of both the word mystic and the word existentialist in my introduction to Pointing the Way paperback, I remarked that finally maybe it's better almost to discard both terms because of the way in which people use them as categories. Walter Kaufman writing on Buber's religious significance after he attacks all the existentialists that in other books he upholds. And as I said, finally, this perhaps ultimately there is only one existentialist, and he is no existentialist, he is Martin Buber. I wrote my doctoral dissertation, I call it Martin Buber, Mystic Existentialist, Social Prophet, and so on, it became a question of using part of this and My book on Buber later, Buber said, well, don't use his title. I'm none of those great things. As regards to your question about what's God captured and why our issue took place.

[46:47]

With man and creation. Yeah, with man and creation. He said, how do we know? How does he, what is the explanation of the covenant? See, the covenant is a historical revelation. Well, yes, but Gruber doesn't say that God does not direct himself to us. He says we cannot know what precedes our own existence. But my question was, in effect, before we are persons, does God have another relation with us? You see? That was really what I was saying. And for creation, we're just refused to do it. There are some mystics like Rupert, to speak of getting back to Rupert Wallace. He's not like Tillich in that he won't go to the ground of being under lies in our relation. It's just the I in relation to what he calls the absolute person, and he won't go beyond that paradigm. But how about the Jewish notion of the corporate person?

[47:52]

The corporate person, the collective community person. Or is that not the Jewish notion of the Jewish person? But I don't think... Not in those terms, I guess, but you mentioned the importance of the people as well. Yes, of course. But is he the... There's an island between the people. Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah. But Booker says that he responds to Simone Weil, who gives his miserable being sort of the great beast, that he says, this is a misunderstanding. the people as a people related to God, but also it says thou, not be you. In other words, God relates to man in his real existence, his real existence as a member of the people and community, but also as an individual, where she was making that an either or. Now Buber certainly believes that this is the meaning of the covenant, that precisely it wasn't just the individual revelation to Moses, but that somehow through this, the relationship to the people. In fact, they became a people. They were just thirteen tribes, and they became a people.

[48:54]

Precisely in responding to this, Buber would say that they only really remain a people, insofar as they respond to the covenant. Hosea puts this very precisely when he named what his children lo and meet, not by people, meaning if you turn away, you are not. Buber would never say that Judaism was defined by the things that is taken on in the course of ages is this or that, whether it's, in fact, even a national to lead to Zionism, but he believes in Zionism in terms of the task of the covenant. He says it has to be like Like, go. But you see, this is a revelation in history, which can speak to us in history. It doesn't get, for Hoover, back to a sort of pre-historical stage. It doesn't get back before creation. But in that case, the individual history, the individual I know, God, it's a historical matter. Well, the word organic made me want to make an important distinction there, because one notion of organic, such as T.S.

[49:58]

Eliot's traditional individual definition of culture, is almost as if it were a psychological or biological inheritance, whereas the Rupert's understanding of the organic community, in this case, is more dialectical. That is, there isn't a simple accountability to covenant, but the prophet arises in a situation where, like Amos, he goes and he speaks the word, and he's told by the priest, oh, there you speak in Beth-el, where it is the king's sanctuary, where Beth-el is the house of the Lord. So he's saying, in effect, that the king who was anointed by God in Beth-el, The house of the Lord uses that house as a sanctuary against the word of the Lord that Amos speaks. So that the organic continuity is only made possible because there are people like Amos who will say, I'm a prophet, I'm son of a prophet, and yet I'm with the land rowers who can't be a prophet.

[51:06]

And I think that your work should work. Good question. Does he feel that the essence of the responsibility of the Angus Parry Republic was to bring national morality, to make it a real thing everywhere? Yes, he believes, for example, that, bringing it to today, that he still sees the task of Israel as the beginning of the beginning of the kingship of God. It's a matter of building real community of justice and righteousness and loving kindness and entering into that sort of relationship with other communities. And he feels that this continues to be an important, a basic task. That's why he said to Gandhi... we must honor the claim opposed to ours that of the Arabs who has worked for 40 years but he said we also cannot give up the claim placed on us by mystery of the covenant well it says of course that to Jeremiah you know I have formed you in the womb like no do not well Hoover is not denying that in answering my question

[52:32]

And in fact, everything that he says really is about creation. He's saying that the basic paradox is that God somehow, that God creates man and gives him real freedom. And yet doesn't just cut that off, that he finds the meaning of his existence and bringing his created existence back into the dialogue with God again and again in each new situation. But that is a different thing from going back behind the creation, behind the essence that would underlie God and man and the world. Sometimes I feel that until it has drowned the being, it's doing that. Until it feels that there is not enough continuity in the I-Thou relation. Now, Buber agrees. He says there is no continuity. There's only the confirming of what is found in the stuff of everyday life so that finally it achieves a sort of shining... This is like a clear moon and a starlit night. It shines through.

[53:35]

It's the world of it. It never takes the place of it. And so that Buber would say, and this I think is a point in case here, Buber would say, he would agree with Tillich that you can't get complete certainty, but he would say that this is precisely what we as creatures cannot have. Back to the end of the book of Job, that where were you when I mean, creation is not just beating Job down by superior strength, but rather saying, you are a creature. You cannot, in fact, remove yourself to such a place where you may comprehend the whole of creation. And that is why Buber contrasts what he calls devotio with gnosis. Devotio, as he says again and again, is the way of both trust and faith. But gnosis is the attempt to comprehend the whole, the above. And he stands in it. opposition to Gnosis wherever he finds it, including, for example, the Kabbalah, which he feels fell into Gnosis and magic, where, as he said, Hasidism would power and stop short in terror, whereas the Kabbalah wanted to go ahead and schematize the mystery.

[54:44]

And this Buber can't accept, so that I really feel that this existential trust is really at the center of all Buber's thoughts, whether he's dealing with psychology or education or foreign relations. Well, he has many friends who are amongst his telling about the village, about the wonderful Benedictine monk named Father Caesarius Bower. Yeah, and it was very close to Hoover for years. And Robert Howard wrote a sentence at Hoover that was very important, where he says, the talk about dialogue grows on all sides. And it seemed to be the very thing of the hour. And yet, he said, it really gets dialectic. He said, people have yet to learn that, as he wrote once, that the way is there that one may walk on it.

[55:48]

you know, it's not real lived dialogue. My understanding of Hoover, aside from my knowledge of his friendships with people I've covered there, is that if I really understand him, I understand him well enough to know that I cannot, in fact, deduce from any general philosophy of his what he would say in a concrete situation. Because he does not deduce, he responds to a situation he's in. And it depends on, really, the situation. For example, you'd say he's a philosopher of religion, he must have the view of God. But once I was with Buber in a seminar at the Washington School of Psychiatry on eminent neuro-psychiatrists. I went in to fix him, and he said, ooh, the intermission of the last seminar, I'm going to ask him about God. Most of them were talking about the unconscious and greed. And so he said, Huber, at the beginning of the second half of the last, God, Huber, got up and walked over to the man and looked at him and he said, to speak of that here would simply be to divide this group.

[57:03]

We cannot speak of this here. And I know Niebuhr's wife, Lear, who's a friend of... This man-eater said that was the thing that impressed him most. He refused to answer his question. He thought he had, though, because he thought it was the obligation of a philosopher to give forth at any time, anywhere, with abstract general statements. But Buber really refuses to do that. So that if you were to ask him the question, if you were sitting here about the monastic life, I'm sure, of course, that it would make him think of Sister Trajan and many others that he's written about and deeply concerned with, and he would have general historical and intellectual knowledge, but I think he would also respond to this monastic group, and that his response might not be the same, as if in another situation, in another way, he had been asked that question.

[58:04]

I do know, I mean, I'm quite sure that the Ubers would have nothing to say of a general nature. It would depend, rather, upon the way in which a man entered who related to the monastic life. He tells the story of, he's very fond of, of a man who was fasting from one Sabbath to the other. It's a nice story because the young man just thought he was going to die if he didn't have a drink. and so he went to the well and reached him to take the water, and then he thought, you know, a whole week's work fasting fell into waste, and that was too much for him, and that helped him overcome the temptation to drink the water. And then he felt proud of having overcome it. And then he became aware that he was proud. He said, this is what I'll do. So he's going to make himself take the water anyway. And then somehow he overcame that temptation, too, and he finished the whole week without tasting. And he went over to join his rabbi for the Sabbath meal.

[59:10]

And as he walked over the threshold, the rabbi came out and greeted him with the word, patchwork time. And he said, as a young man that seemed to have a rather cruel... thing to say, because after all this, the old man of Zori had done his best, or better than his best, perhaps. And Buber decided, thinking about it later, that the real meaning of the story was that the way in which the man had done it was a shilligaling way. And that what we're really called, he says, there are some men who by nature or grace seem to have united souls, and some who by nature or grace seem to have complicated, contradictory, divided souls. Whenever I read that, I think of Dostoevsky's novel, The Brothers Karamazov, Aliosha, who seems to have the grace, the united soul, and Brother Ivan as the divided, complicated soul. Then Buber asks a very important question. Is what he's saying only for the man who is already the whole person, or is there any way for the man with the divided, complicated soul? Buber says, yes, there is. There can be an amalgamation in the depths

[60:12]

that comes and that works back on the soul. But he says the way in which this is done is by doing what you do all but at peace. Not trying to do the unusual, but by doing what you can't do at peace. And then this reflects back on you so that you proceed never to complete unity, but so that you have a steadier unity to look for. You can have a sort of relaxed vigilance. Now, insofar as the monastic life enables a person to do just that and helps him guard the concreteness of the moment, and insofar also as it fits what Buber says in the sixth little thing, the way a man should be known, that is, here where one stands, that is, insofar as instead of regarding the world as a place served to use to get beyond as quickly as possible, you have a quiet, devoted relationship to the things of the nearby life, to the tools, animals, people you deal with, then Buber would say this is your life.

[61:16]

Because what he says is that we look for real existence everywhere but where we are. But he says the environment we live in, ours, the situation, the people we work with, unless we have a relationship to all this, which does not turn them simply into means to ends, but we

[61:31]

@Transcribed_v005
@Text_v005
@Score_82.68