Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T23:53:52.863Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Tasting God: Martin Buber's Sweet Sacrament of Dialogue

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 March 2013

Kenneth P. Kramer
Affiliation:
San José (CA) State University

Abstract

Martin Buber (1878–1965) stands among the most significant philosophers of the twentieth century. While many studies have attempted to summarize the scope of Buber's writings, here I will highlight some key implications of Buber's basic insight that there exists a deeply reciprocal bond between genuine interhuman dialogue and the divine-human relationship. Buber characterized authentic dialogue as sacramental, and he suggested that it included four elemental aspects: turning, addressing, listening, and responding. Every genuine dialogue opens out toward transcendence insofar as God's presence can be glimpsed as “absolute Person,” can be tasted as the spirit of elemental togetherness. The fundamental result of engaging in sacramental dialogue, both with others and with God, both in public discourse and private prayer, is the renewal of the entire person. As Buber repeatedly described it, to become who we are created to be—dialogical partners with God—it is the responsibility of every person to participate in God's creative, revealing, and redemptive presence in that part of the world where we stand.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Buber, Martin, Between Man and Man, trans. Smith, Ronald Gregor (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1948), 17Google Scholar (translation modified).

2 Friedman, Maurice, Encounter on the Narrow Ridge: A Life of Martin Buber (New York: Paragon House, 1991), ix.Google Scholar

3 For a discussion of Buber's influence on Christian theologians, see Friedman, Maurice, Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1955), 268–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Buber, Martin, Meetings, trans. Friedman, Maurice (Chicago: Open Court, 1973), 46.Google Scholar

5 Mendes-Flohr, Paul, ed., Martin Buber: A Contemporary Perspective (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2002), 8.Google Scholar

6 Schilpp, Paul Arthur and Friedman, Maurice S., eds., The Philosophy of Martin Buber (London: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 693.Google Scholar

7 Philosophical Interrogations: Interrogations of Martin Buber, John Wild, Jean Wahl, Brand Blanshard, Paul Weiss, Charles Hartshorne, Paul Tillich, ed. Sydney, and Rome, Beatrice (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), 99.Google Scholar

8 Buber, Martin, At the Turning: Three Addresses on Judaism (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Young, 1952), 48.Google Scholar

9 Buber, , Between Man and Man, 17.Google Scholar

10 Ibid., 21.

11 Ibid., 5.

12 Ibid., 4.

13 Buber, Martin, The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism, ed. and trans. Friedman, Maurice (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1960), 166.Google Scholar

14 Ibid., 170.

15 Ibid., 166.

16 Buber, Martin, The Way of Man According to the Teaching of Hasidism (New York: Citadel Press, 1995), 38.Google Scholar

17 Schaeder, Grete, The Hebrew Humanism of Martin Buber, trans. Jacobs, Noah J. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973), 164.Google Scholar

18 Buber, , Between Man and Man, 19.Google Scholar

19 Buber, Martin, A Believing Humanism: My Testament 1902–1965, trans. Friedman, Maurice (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), 50.Google Scholar

20 Buber, Martin, The Knowledge of Man: Selected Essays, ed. and trans. Friedman, Maurice and Smith, Ronald Gregor (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 85.Google Scholar

21 Buber, , Between Man and Man, 17.Google Scholar

22 See Kasimow, Harold, The Search Will Make You Free: A Jewish Dialogue with World Religions (Krakow, Poland: Wydawnictwo WAM, 2006).Google Scholar In this book, Kasimow movingly describes his experience as a child of four, when he and his family lived in an underground hole in complete darkness for more than nineteen months while hiding from Nazis in Poland.

23 Buber, Martin, I and Thou, trans. Smith, Ronald Gregor, 2nd ed. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958), 75.Google Scholar All future quotations from I and Thou will refer to this edition.

24 Buber, Martin, Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation Between Religion and Philosophy, trans. Friedman, Maurice (New York: Harper Torch, 1957), 127.Google Scholar

25 Buber, , Meetings, 44.Google Scholar

26 Buber, , Eclipse of God, 9697.Google Scholar

27 Buber, , I and Thou, 79.Google Scholar

28 Ibid., 136–37. When asked if God as “absolute Person” has a separate center of consciousness, Buber replied “[t]o ascribe to God a ‘special and separate center of consciousness’ means to say at once too much and too little.” Buber, , Philosophical Interrogations, 88.Google Scholar

29 Mendes-Flohr, Paul R., Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 268.Google Scholar

30 Buber, , The Way of Man, 40.Google Scholar

31 Ibid., 41.

32 Friedman, Maurice, A Dialogue With Hasidic Tales: Hallowing the Everyday (New York: Human Sciences Press, 1988), 134.Google Scholar

33 Buber, , Eclipse of God, 126.Google Scholar Italics added. This presupposition, Buber added, is destroyed by over-consciousness that I am praying and that I am praying.

34 Buber, , Meetings, 46.Google Scholar

35 Buber, Philosophical Interrogations, 8586.Google Scholar

36 The Cloud of Unknowing, ed. Walsh, James (New York: Paulist, 1981), 122.Google Scholar

37 Buber, , I and Thou, 82, 83.Google Scholar

38 Buber's good friend, Abraham Joshua Heschel, spoke about prayer a bit differently: “We do not communicate with God. We only make ourselves communicable to Him. The purpose of prayer is to be brought to His attention, to be listened to, to be understood by Him; not to know Him, but to be known to Him.” Heschel, Abraham Joshua, Man's Quest for God: Studies in Prayer and Symbolism (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1954), 10.Google Scholar Agreeing with Heschel's point, which views prayer from God's perspective, Buber also views prayer through the perspective of the relationship between God and the one who prays.

39 Buber, Martin, On Judaism, ed. Glatzer, Nahum N. (New York: Schocken, 1967), 122.Google Scholar

40 Buber, , Origin and Meaning of Hasidism, 91.Google Scholar

42 Buber, Martin, Two Types of Faith, trans. Goldhawk, Norman P. (New York: Collier, 1986), 131.Google Scholar

43 Buber, , The Way of Man, 38.Google Scholar

44 Ibid., 29.

45 Ibid., 41.

46 Ibid., 44.

47 Friedman, , Encounter on the Narrow Ridge, 338.Google Scholar

48 Buber, , At the Turning, 4950.Google Scholar

49 Buber, , Between Man and Man, 17.Google Scholar

50 Ibid., 14–15. My translation.

51 Buber, , I and Thou, 136.Google Scholar

52 Buber, , Between Man and Man, 6.Google Scholar Speaking of Rang, Buber recalled what Rang once said about the most difficult time in his life: “‘I should not have survived if I had not had Christ.’ Christ, not God!” Buber's response indicates remarkable open-mindedness: “I see in all this an important testimony to the salvation which has come to the Gentiles through faith in Christ: they have found a God Who did not fail in times when their world collapsed” (Buber, , Two Types of Faith, 132Google Scholar).

53 Schaeder, , Hebrew Humanism, 365.Google Scholar