Martin Buber's zionism

 

Martin Buber, more than most European philosophers, made a substantial effort to think outside of the European tradition, at least as that tradition had been codified by the early 20^th century. He wrote about Chinese wisdom literature and Indian theology. In the book, Images of Good and Evil, he sought those images not just in the Hebrew tradition, but in the Iranian one too, finding in the Zend-Avesta one of the most powerful reflections on the two forces, as they are presented in myth.

"In the most archaic part of Avesta, which contains the hymn-like speeches and conversations of Zarathustra, we read of two primal moving causes [»Bewirkern«“]: the good, in meaning, word and act, and evil, in meaning, word and act. “Twins in sleep“ they had been, as is testified, that means, as sleeping partners in the primal body. But then they stand one against the other, and the holy one spoke to the bad one: neither our senses nor our judgment, neither our inclination nor the direction of our choices, neither our words nor our works, neither our selves nor our souls agree. And so they continued to stand in opposition, settling together life and death, for in the end, those who depend on deceit endure in evil, and on the contrary those who depend on the truth persist in the best sense. This is how the two causes chose: the deceitful chose to do the evilest thing, but the true chose to be the cause of the holiest, clothed in the hardest heaven.”

The image of good and evil, asleep in the primal belly, is a strange and estranging one.

Buber continues, using this text: "With his choice their Daena, his self, steps on his earthly way; but eve again he must divide and decide in the face of ever new mixtures of deception and truth. One must be helped from above: „because the better way does not stand open to choice”, says Zarathustra, “I come to you all, so that we can live according to the truth”; his task is to put human beings before the choice and point out to them the right way, so that they, as it is written at the ned of the verse, will act from the choice of the twins, out of their own decision go to the wise Lords  with acts of truth. To the one who does this, they will help him “to transfigure his Being.”

That evil and good come as twins, sleep as twins, is a more startling image than that of the tree of good and evil – but in both stories, there was a primal time in which good and evil were, as it were, muted.

I’ve been thinking about Buber as we are going through this horrific passage in our newspaper and real history: a passage that has converted the Holocaust itself into an excuse for mass murder.

Dominique Borel, in her essay, Buber and the Arab Question, gathers together some interesting remarks of Buber on the question of Zionism. Buber was a strong Zionist, one of the intellectual archons of Zionism in the early twentieth century. But he was also a strong proponent of a Jewish ethic, a liberal ethic, that came to expression in the I and Thou book.

Stefan Zweig, shortly after WWI, wrote about a question he posed to Buber in a letter.  »I wanted to talke to him in order to know how the national circle worked: whether as a confession of faith, or as the denial of the idea. Then I have clearly decided that the more the dream threatens to become a reality, the dangerous dream of a Jewish state with cannons, flags and orders, to instead love the painful idea of the diaspora, Jewish fate more than Jewish well being.”

Buber replied that he knew nothing about any „Jewish state with cannons, flags and order”, not even in the form of a dream. What will be depends on how we create it, and just because of this must those like me must build a community that is humane and human, in this time now that we can lay our human hands on.”

Buber did not like the way Zweig laid out the choices – Zweig’s way of looking at the sleeping twins, good and evil – because Buber wanted a community that included Arabs. Indeed, Buber campaigned for Arabic representatives at the Versailles conference, in which the great push for the identity of ethnicity and nationhood was codified. This, to Buber, was a great evil. Buber met the Zionists who were pushing for a majority rule that would drive out the Arabs – he spoke of his heaviness of heart, in a letter, upon talking to Victor Jacobson, who advocated a “majority” solution. Jacobson, it should be said, was a leader in Jewish-Arab dialogue, and no pre-Likudist. But what Buber feared was the contamination of the Zionist ideal with the European ideal:

“We must not fool ourselves: the great majority of the leading (and the led) Zionists of today are thoroughly limitless nationalists (after the European model), imperialists, unconscious mercantilists and worshippers of success. They speak of rebirth and mean free enterprise. If we don’t succeed in setting up an authoritative counterpower, the soul of the movement will be corrupted, perhaps forever. I have in any case decided to go into this as far as possible, even if my life-plans  are thereby wounded.”

Often the story of Israel is told in terms of the mass murder of the extermination and concentration camps, but this story ignores the fact that Zionism arose as a nationalist dream in the same crucible that all the nationalist dreams came from, in the aftermath of WWI.

Flags, cannons, orders, slaughter. In this choice lies every evil.