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Between Heschel and Buber. A Comparative

Study, with Alexander Even- Chen, Boston:
Academic Studies Press,....
Book · January 2012
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Contents
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .ix
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Chapter I
Aieka: Between Man and Man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Chapter II
The Approach to God . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Chapter III
The Bible and Its Interpretation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
Chapter IV
On the Commandments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
Chapter V
Different Views on Hasidism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
Chapter VI
Zionisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239
Chapter VII
On Jesus and Christianity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255
CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283
BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297
INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311
— vii —
--------------------------------------------------------------  A COMPARATIVE STUDY --------------------------------------------------------------
Acknowledgments
We wish to thank Professor Norbert M. Samuelson of the Harold and

Jean Grossman Chair in Jewish Studies at Arizona State University for
his financial contribution to the creation of this book. We further thank
Dr. Michal Michelson of Bar Ilan University for her editing work. Many
times during the process of writing, we felt the presence of Professor
Rivka Horwitz, of blessed memory. Although she did not live to see this
book, we think she would be glad for its appearance, since in so many
of our conversations with her, she discussed manifold details of Buber’s
and Heschel’s writings. She loved to teach Heschel and Buber and to
compare them. Professor Steven Kepnes, Professor Edward K. Kaplan,
and Professor Susannah Heschel encouraged us in our endeavors. We
wholeheartedly thank Professor Yehoyada Amir of Jerusalem’s Hebrew
Union College for his careful reading of the manuscript and for his
extensive constructive remarks. Finally, we are grateful to Professor
Harold Kasimow and Professor Kenneth Kramer, Heschel specialist and
Buber specialist, respectively, who generously provided us with helpful
suggestions, from which this work much profited.
— ix —
---------------------------------------------------------------------  Introduction ---------------------------------------------------------------------
Introduction
Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Buber are giant and committed
thinkers of the twentieth century who greatly contributed to the
understanding of religious consciousness, of the Bible, and of Judaism.
Heschel was an observant Jew and a scion of Hasidism, while Buber
was nonobservant and was immersed in a haskalah milieu. He visited
Sadagora in his youth, however, and was impressed by the Hasidic
life there. Heschel was familiar with Hasidism before he met Buber:
his paternal grandmother, Rachel Leah Friedman, had her home in
Sadagora. The two philosophers considered Hasidism to be an elevated
form of religious life, relevant for the world at large. Buber was more
interested in creating a meta-religion1 in which morality was central,
whereas Heschel was, rather, a modern prophet who saw himself as
destined to show his contemporaries the relevance of Judaism together
with the loftiness of its commandments and prayer.
The lives of Buber and Heschel are intertwined. In their spiritual
creations, they are close; nevertheless, they greatly differ. The present
study systematically compares the two thinkers, pointing to their
common ground and signaling where their paths diverge. Occasionally,
scholars have compared them on one point or another, but until today,
no systematic comparative study of the central themes in their thoughts
has been carried out. In this volume, we discuss a series of topics that
appear in their works. We successively treat their perception of human
existence as coexistence, consider their notion of the Divine and how
they interpret the relationship between man and God, and study their
1. For a discussion of this notion, see Martina Urban, “Deconstruction Anticipated:

Koigen and Buber on Self-corrective Religion,” Shofar 27, no. 1 (2009): 107–135.
— 11 —
---------------------------------------------------------------------  Introduction ---------------------------------------------------------------------
understanding of the Hebrew Bible as well as their views on the Divine

commandments, Hasidism, Zionism, Jesus, and Christianity. Heschel’s
thought was quite stable throughout his life, and we will show its
continuity from his early poetry, written in Yiddish, until his manifold
post-war scholarly writings. As for Buber, his vast thought underwent
more changes: he went through a mystic period that was followed
by a dialogical one, which found its crystallization in I and Thou, a
work that we consider to be the root of Buber’s further development.
Nevertheless, inter alia under the influence of his intense study of the
Bible, his philosophy underwent still more quite remarkable changes so
that references to his later works will also be found in the present work.
The encounters between Buber and Heschel were intense, and
they corresponded frequently. Buber greatly influenced Heschel, who,
however, went his own way. They first met in Berlin around 1929–1930.
At that time, Heschel was preparing his doctorate at the Friedrich
Wilhelm University.2 Buber, Heschel’s elder by twenty-nine years,
was already a known writer and an active Zionist. In an article that
presents a radiography of the correspondence between the two,3 E. K.
Kaplan opines that in 1929, Heschel may have published his Yiddish
poem “Ikh un Du” as a reaction to I and Thou.4 In 1935, Heschel asked
Buber to reexamine his dissertation on the prophets after Buber had
given a negative assessment to Salman Schocken, his good friend
and the publisher of his works, advising him not to accept Heschel’s
dissertation for publication. Heschel was profoundly hurt by Buber’s
censorious evaluation; he spoke of the “lasting pain” (unvergaenglicher
Schmerz)5 it caused, and wanted to discuss the issue. In a letter of July
18, 1935,6 Heschel once again checked Buber’s opinion on his book
2. According to his own testimony, Abraham Joshua Heschel sought for answers to his
existential questions at the Berlin University. His disillusion was great when he found out
that his questions were not the ones of his teachers. See Heschel, “Toward an Understanding
of Halacha,” Yearbook of the Central Council of American Rabbis 63 (1953): 127.
3. Edward K. Kaplan, “Sacred Versus Symbolic Religion: Abraham Joshua Heschel and
Martin Buber,” Modern Judaism 14 (1994): 225.
4. The poem was published in the New York Yiddish periodical Zukunft in 1929 and again
in 1931 in Berliner Bleter. See Kaplan, “Sacred,” 213–214.
5. Martin Buber Archive, Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem, 290: 2.
6. Buber Archive, 290: 1.
— 12 —
---------------------------------------------------------------------  Introduction ---------------------------------------------------------------------
on prophetology and Divine pathos. Buber answered Heschel’s letter

and included an offprint of his article “Symbolic and Sacramental
Existence in Judaism.”7 Heschel responded promptly in a letter on July
24,8 analyzing the article and objecting to Buber’s interpretation of
the prophets’ behavior as being symbolic.9 The Divine, the original, he
declared, was thus replaced by an image of it; symbols were a reduction
of Divine reality to philosophical anthropology. Clearly, Heschel did not
accept Buber’s view. Buber’s characterization of the prophet as “Zeichen,”
symbol, was “a generalization”: in this perspective, the prophet has no
value himself (Eigenwert), only a symbolic significance (Zeichenwert);
in such a rendering, the prophet merely illustrates, without possessing
meaning in itself (Sinn) — he is but a symbol (Sinnbild). Was the image
(Bild) more perfect than the essence (Wesen)? Following Buber’s logic,
and playing heavily on Jewish sensibilities, Heschel complained that
according to this rendition he could even materialize God and reduce
Him to a symbol (Warum soll man dann nicht Got selbst verleiblichen
und im Zeichen bringen?). The prophetic experience of God is a reality;
a symbol is nothing in comparison to the experienced reality of
actual history, Heschel declared. Later on, in his Man’s Quest for God,
published in 1954, Heschel returned to these polemics against a
symbolic interpretation of the prophetic existence. He wrote: “If God
is a symbol, He is a fiction.”10
Heschel and Buber differed substantially on their views on the
essence of prophetic existence. In the later version of his dissertation,
published as The Prophets, Heschel stressed the Divine initiative as
7. The article, republished in Die Chassidische Botschaft, is a collection of essays that

were written between 1927 and 1943. In the chapter “Sinnbildliche und Sakramentale
Existenz” (Buber, Werke, Dritter Band. Schriften zum Chassidismus [Munich and
Heidelberg: Koesel and Lambert Schneider, 1963], 829–849; hereafter cited as Werke
III), Buber distinguishes between a “symbol” and “sacrament.” A “symbol” is a mirror
of the invisible, and in it, meaning becomes transparent. In a “sacrament,” meaning
takes place; it is an occasion where God and man are linked without merging one into
the other (Werke III, 838). Previously, Heschel had sent his Maimonides biography to
Buber (Buber Archive, 290: 1).
9. Alexander Even-Chen, “On Symbols and Prayer in Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Thought,”
Iggud. Ma’amarim be-mada’e ha-yahadut alef (2008): 341–55.
10. Heschel, Man’s Quest for God (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1954), 144.
— 13 —
---------------------------------------------------------------------  Introduction ---------------------------------------------------------------------
well as the necessity of identifying with the prophets, leaving out the
option of an impartial approach to the prophets.11 Buber, from his side,
opposed Heschel’s theocentric approach in which the prophets foster
a sympathetic view toward God’s pathos in a kind of unio sympatica.12
For Buber, the prophets did not feel with God, as Heschel proposes in
his 1936 dissertation on the prophets.13 The correspondence of 1935
between Buber and Heschel reflects a debate, which was also the debate
between Buber and Rosenzweig, concerning the status of revelation
in Buber’s pre-dialogical, early thought. The debate was first initiated
by Rosenzweig in his “Atheistic Theology” that made the “orientation”
of revelation — understood as exterior, opposite, transcendent, or
jenseitig — central. Heschel continued this line of thought, one which
emphasized revelation as coming from the living God.
The 1935 correspondence between Heschel and Buber was the
beginning of a lifelong relationship between both men. After the thirties,
the relationship was dominantly epistolary,14 although the two also
met face-to-face after World War II. They differed but developed parallel
lines of thought. In the thirties, Buber frequently traveled to Berlin,
where he met Heschel and exchanged views. Heschel wanted to know,
11. In this context, Heschel also opposed Chancellor Louis Finkelstein’s “Judaism as
a System of Symbols,” in Essays in Judaism, Series I (New York: Jewish Theological
Seminary, 1954), 5–33.
12. In this, Heschel was influenced by Max Scheler’s thoughts on sympathy.
13. See Buber, The Prophetic Faith (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 96–109. In note 11, Buber
refers explicitly to Heschel’s dissertation Die Prophetie (1936).
14. For instance, in a letter from November 25, 1938, Heschel informed Buber that
he gave his first lecture at the Institute for Jewish Studies in Warsaw and that he
regretted not having followed his advice on the post-Kristallnacht tax levy on Jews
(the Judenabgabe), although Buber would have approved of his decision in the matter.
He also mentioned that it was difficult for him to work in Warsaw and that he had left
all his manuscripts in Frankfurt. See Nahum N. Glatzer and Paul Mendes-Flohr (eds.),
The Letters of Martin Buber: A Life of Dialogue, trans. by Richard and Clara Winston and
Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1991), 474–75. On November 22, 1939, he
wrote from London how pained he was about what had happened and that “hardly
a day passes when my thoughts are not with you.” He also updated Buber about his
new contract from Cincinnati as a teaching member of the Hebrew Union College and
asked Buber for permission to duplicate and disseminate his lecture about election
(Letters, 490).
— 14 —
---------------------------------------------------------------------  Introduction ---------------------------------------------------------------------
for instance, what Buber thought about the phenomenon of tradition.15

He praised Buber who, after an interchange, left the impression of
brightness (so etwas wie eine Helligkeit).16 Heschel moved to Frankfurt
on March 1, 1937,17 after Buber had invited him to work at the central
organization for Jewish adult education, the Mittelstelle fuer juedische
Erwachsenenbildung. In the same year, Buber even appointed Heschel
as his successor in the Mittelstelle as well as at the Lehrhaus, where
Rosenzweig functioned as the first director. The young Heschel was
appointed to these two important functions. Buber’s recommendation
is rather surprising, given that he had refused to recommend Heschel’s
doctorate on the prophets for publication in the Schocken publishing
house. Apparently, Buber trusted Heschel and presumed that the young
man would be the most fitting person for these tasks; he was Buber’s
tutor in modern Hebrew.
On March 12, 1938, one day after the annexation of Austria by
the Germans, Buber and his wife Paula left Frankfurt for Jerusalem.
Buber and Heschel continued their relationship by mail, as both
personalities felt linked to each other by much more than an academic
connection; there was a sense that they shared a common fate. In a
letter dated April 25, 1938, for instance, Heschel shared his anguish
with Buber, writing about the difficult times and the “epidemic of
despair” (Verzweiflungsseuche) in Poland.18 His letters to Buber were
frequent at this time, and when on October 28, 1938, Heschel was
expelled from Germany together with another 18,000 Jews, he gently
asked Buber what he could do for him. He also requested that Buber
help him in obtaining a position in Palestine.19 However, the American
Jewish institutions of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York
and Dropsie College in Philadelphia seemed to be a more realistic
15. Letters dated 24.1.1937 and 21.5.1938; Buber Archive, 290:4 and 290:13.
16. See letter from Berlin dated 24.1.1937; Buber Archive, 290: 4.
17. See letter of 2.3.1937; Buber Archive, 290: 6.
18. Kaplan and Samuel H. Dresner, Abraham Joshua Heschel — Prophetic Witness (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 266; Kaplan, “Sacred versus
Symbolic Religion: Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Buber,” Modern Judaism 14
(1994): 213-231.
19. Gewiss wuerde ich eine wissenschaftliche Arbeitsmoeglichkeit in Jerusalem als den Weg fuer
mich erblicken”; letter dated 22.5.1938; Buber Archive, 290: 14.
— 15 —
---------------------------------------------------------------------  Introduction ---------------------------------------------------------------------
option.20 At Heschel’s urging in June 1938,21 Buber wrote a letter

of recommendation for Heschel to Julian Morgenstern of Hebrew
Union College in Cincinnati. Heschel wrote to Buber from Warsaw
on November 9, 1938, the day of the Kristallnacht, that he had been
expelled from Germany together with many Jews from all over the
country. He wrote that people had bitter presentiments and that it
was of foremost importance to flee.22 He described the unrest and the
lack of direction, significantly utilizing the word Weisung, a word that
had been used by Buber in order to translate the word Torah. Heschel
worried about the fact that his manuscripts remained in Frankfurt.23
He was also concerned about the present and future of Jewish life in
Poland,24 where Buber had visited in 1939. Heschel traveled to Lvov
in order to meet Buber in Poland.25 Not once did his letters to Buber
mention Eduard Strauss, a biochemist, who was also lecturing on Bible
in the Frankfurt Lehrhaus and had emigrated in time to the United
States.26 Heschel communicated to Buber April 30, 1939, that he had
received a formal appointment as research fellow on Bible and Jewish
philosophy with relative good conditions from Julian Morgenstern.27
However, he did not immediately emigrate to the States, since he did
not yet possess the required visa for emigration. Consequently, he had
to remain in London for a while. He informed Buber that they had
approved a visa for London for him and that he appreciated Buber’s
“Answer to Gandhi.”28 Later, he told Buber about Morgenstern’s new
proposal of becoming a teaching member of the faculty — rather than
20. Letter dated 22.5.1938, Buber Archive, 290: 14; Kaplan and Dresner, Prophetic Witness,
269.
21. Letter dated 19.6.1938, Buber Archive, 290: 15.
23. Letter of 25.11.1938, Buber Archive, 290: 25; letter of 1.2.1939, Buber Archive, 206:
28.
24. Letter of 20.6.1929, Buber Archive, 290: 32.
25. Letter of 3 April 1939, Buber Archive, 290: 31.
26. E.g., 1.2.1939, Buber 290: 28; 16 April 1940, Buber Archive, 290: 38. Once in the
United States, Heschel visited Strauss in New York; letter of 1 March 1942, Buber
Archive, 290: 39.
28. Letter of 20.6.1939, Buber Archive, 290:32.
— 16 —
---------------------------------------------------------------------  Introduction ---------------------------------------------------------------------
being a research fellow29 — and that he had received a “non quota visum”

for Cincinnati.30 In the letters of the thirties, Heschel repeatedly
asked Buber if he could do something for the master. He longed to see
him and to talk with him.31 In the meantime, they kept in touch by
exchanging publications.
Before his trip to the United States, Heschel wrote that he was now
going to sail on the sea and that he would therefore think about the
“sea of suffering” in Poland.32 In a letter to Fritz A. Rothschild dated
November 21, 1943, Buber responded to Rothschild, who had asked
to be informed “whether Dr. Abraham Heschel is still alive and how
he is.” He wrote that “Heschel is a lecturer at Hebrew Union College
in Cincinnati, and he is doing all right. I have written him that you
inquired about him.”33 Heschel and Buber’s relationship lasted a long
time, and it seems that the two became more and more involved with
each other over the years. With time, Heschel felt more secure in this
relationship, which had started as the connection between a student
and his master, who was already an accomplished scholar at the time
of their initial acquaintance. In 1942, Heschel tried to get Buber’s
For the Sake of Heaven published in the Jewish Publication Society in
Philadelphia; he wrote an approval for it.34 He was also involved in the
attempt to publish an English version of Buber’s “Der Glaube Israels.”35

30. Letter of 7.2.1940; Buber Archive, 290: 37.
32. Letter of 7.2.1940, Buber Archive 290: 37.
33. Glatzer and Mendes-Flohr, 503.
34. Letter of 2 June 1942, Buber Archive, 290: 40; March 1, 1943, Buber Archive, 290: 41.
The chronicle was serially published in Davar, from October 23, 1941, until January
10, 1942; Lambert Schneider published a German version in 1949. On August 3, 1943,
Heschel wrote Buber that the decision of the Jewish Publication Society was positive,
and he added some criticism on the book. See Buber Archive, Jerusalem, 290: 42. The
book appeared in 1945 in the translation of Ludwig Lewisohn.
35. Letter of 2 June 1942, Buber Archive, 290: 40. “Der Glaube Israels” first appeared in
the Netherlands in Dutch translation as “Het geloof van Israel.” Buber rewrote this
work in Hebrew, and this version was published by Bialik under the title Torat haneviim
in 1942; an English version was published by Macmillan in New York in 1949; the
German “Der Glaube der Propheten” was published in 1950 by Manesse, Zuerich.
According to Heschel, Scribners liked the manuscript of “Der Glaube Israels,” but it
was finally Macmillan that published the work.
— 17 —
---------------------------------------------------------------------  Introduction ---------------------------------------------------------------------
This work formed the basis for Buber’s “Torat haneviim” that appeared
first in Hebrew in 1942 and was published in English in 1949.
As is well known, Heschel left the Hebrew Union College for the
Jewish Theological Seminary, where he joined the faculty in 1945. From
there, he wrote to Buber that he was reading “be-pardes ha-hasidut,”
a work that was published by Bialik in 1945, with pleasure.36 Buber’s
upcoming Tales of the Hasidim would become important, and his I and
Thou was now a much-read book in the USA.37 On August 14, 1946,
Heschel looked forward with great interest to reading Buber’s “big
history book on Hasidism” (grosses chassidisches Geschichtenbuch). He
regretted that his whole library remained in Warsaw and asked if Buber
had received his essay on Maimonides and prophetic inspiration that
had recently appeared in the Louis Ginzberg Jubilee volume, as well as
his Yiddish article on East European Jewry, which had been published in
the Yivo Bleter.38 An extended version of this last article, he mentions,
appeared in Schocken. He intended to publish three articles that he had
recently finished in the form of a book, together with four other articles
with which Buber was already familiar.
In 1951, Louis Finkelstein, the chancellor of JTS, invited Buber
to take a six-month lecture tour of the United States, during which
Buber would deliver about seventy lectures, including at JTS. Heschel
was not appointed as Buber’s host at JTS since — as Kaplan points
out — the chancellor thought that this was his own project and an
excellent opportunity for the seminary; in effect, “Heschel was put
aside, snubbed.”39 Kaplan further writes that Finkelstein envied
Heschel for his growing success among the gentiles.40 One may add
that Heschel’s attitude toward symbolism,41 as it came to the fore in
Man’s Quest for God, was totally different from and indeed opposed to
that of Finkelstein, who published an article with the title “Judaism as
36. Letter of June 13, 1946, Buber Archive 290: 43.

37. Ibid.
38. Both articles appeared in 1945.
39. Kaplan, Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America, 1940–1972 (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2007), 134.
40. Kaplan, Spiritual Radical, 130.
41. Even-Chen, Symbols.
— 18 —
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a System of Symbols” in the same year.42 Scholarly divergences between

the two learned men were already tangible in 1951.43 Upon arrival in
the United States, Buber had wanted to meet Heschel immediately,
and they had embraced warmly.44 In anticipation of Buber’s visit to
America, and after many months of silence on his part, Heschel had
assured Buber that he had many readers in the USA and that they would
certainly value his stay.45 Afterward, he wrote Buber that from time to
time he imagined having a discussion with him, and that he regretted
that in America their talk — he significantly used the word “Gespraech,”
conversation — had not been more extensive. He also mentioned
Maurice Friedman’s book on Buber.46 In 1957, Buber visited the USA
again, where he met Carl Rogers and gave a lecture in the School of
Psychiatry in Washington on the reality of guilt; Heschel was glad to
be able to see him once more.47 In 1958, Paula Buber passed away in
Venice, when she and her husband were in transit on their way back
from a trip to the United States and Europe, and Heschel expressed his
condolences to Buber.48
There are a few letters from 1958 in which Heschel writes about his
Heavenly Torah.49 He had sent Buber four chapters (without footnotes)
42. Finkelstein, “ System of Symbols.”

43. Seymour Siegel, “Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Contributions to Jewish Scholarship,”
Proceedings of the Rabbinical Assembly 32 (March 24–28, 1968): 72–85.
44. Kaplan, Spiritual Radical, 134.
45. 20.4. 1951, Buber Archive, 290: 45 and July 5, 1951, Buber Archive, 290: 46.
46. Letter of 23.5.1954, Buber Archive, 290: 47. Buber was enthusiast about Friedman’s
dissertation. He wrote to Friedman on August 20, 1950, that he did “very well to
concentrate [his] work around the problem of evil and its redemption, the central
human problem indeed.” Friedman would not only have gained a unifying center but
the best of all possible. Buber praised Friedman that he had given a comprehending
and systematic representation of his ideas and that he had shown their essential unity.
His work, Buber wrote, would be “the first successful attempt of this kind” (Glatzer
and Mendes-Flohr, 556). Additionally, he wrote a letter to University of Chicago Press
for Friedman. See Friedman’s letter to Buber, September 9, 1950 (Glatzer and Mendes-
Flohr, 557). Friedman’s book, Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue, was published in 1955.
47. Letter of 21.2.1957, Buber Archive 290: 48.
48. Letter of Buber Archive, 290: 50.
49. This book encountered harsh criticism as well as great praise. See L. Levin, “Heschel’s
Homage to the Rabbis — Torah min ha-shamayim as Historical Theology,” Conservative
Judaism 50 (1998): 56–66.
— 19 —
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of a book he had written on this subject. Buber had indeed asked him
to forward him a few chapters from the book and had advised him to
publish it with Bialik Press. Heschel wrote him that he had finished
Heavenly Torah, which in his letter he calls a book “on the problem of
revelation” (das Problem der Offenbarung); he was hoping to hear about
possible publication by Bialik.50 Heschel gained insights from Buber’s
postscript in the new 1957 edition of Ich und Du. 51 When in Jerusalem,
he of course visited Buber. 52 He told Buber about Cardinal Bea, to
whom he was the major Jewish consultant, for which purpose Bea
visited him in the USA. He further informed Buber about his endeavors
in the dialogue with the Catholic Church. 53 The letters from Heschel
to Buber testify to the permanent interest of these two personalities in
this issue, in both their work and their personal lives
In support of one of Heschel’s projects, Buber wrote a letter of
recommendation with words of praise noting that Heschel had “a
vast and authentic knowledge, a reliable intuition into phenomena
of religious life, the true scholarly spirit of text interpretation, and
independent thinking.”54 Heschel, in turn, called Buber “the most
erudite” man he had ever met.55 It is plausible to presume that Heschel’s
sentence came to defend Buber’s status as an academic scholar who
had mastered several academic disciplines. If this supposition is true,
it could be that at the same time he defended his own position as a
scholar with spiritual interests, a fragile position that in JTS was
cynically beleaguered by people such as Saul Lieberman.56 His positive
attitude vis-à-vis Buber did not prevent Heschel from criticizing him,
however. In an interview at Notre Dame that was published in 1967, he
proclaimed: “One of the weaknesses in Buber, who was an exceedingly
learned man, was that he was not at home in rabbinic literature. That
covers many years. A lot has happened between the Bible and Hasidism
50. Letter of 11.19.1958, Buber Archive, 290: 51; 3.6.1959, Buber Archive, 290: 53.
52. Letter of July 29, 1962, Buber Archive, 209: 55.
53. July 19, 1962, Buber Archive, 209: 55; 4.4.1963, Buber Archive, 290: 56.
54. Kaplan, Spiritual Radical, 161–162
55. Kaplan, Spiritual Radical, 403, note 42.
56. Kaplan, Spiritual Radical, 108–110, 209.
— 20 —
---------------------------------------------------------------------  Introduction ---------------------------------------------------------------------
that Buber did not pay attention to.” He added that the weakness of
Buber’s conception lay in his prioritizing Aggada over Halakha.57 He
nevertheless himself stresses the extraordinary significance of Aggada:
“Modern scholars have tended to the prejudice that the Sages were
concerned exclusively with the practical Halakha and there was not
to be found in aggadic teachings a basic, cohesive theology — that
the Talmudic Sages theologized in a sober, repressed way, that they
were never singed by the fires of doubt and fear, and that they never
explored the secrets or rationale of faith.”58 Heschel appreciated Buber
as “a profound thinker, a major surprise in the intellectual climate of
the twentieth century.”59 He praised his colleague for having presented
Hasidism to Western culture, to the non-Jews, as well as to Jews who
had no knowledge of it. Buber interpreted the Hasidic phenomenon in
philosophical terms. In addition, Heschel mentions Buber’s writings on
Zionism and his “creative” translation of the Bible in this context.60 As
noted, Heschel uncompromisingly distanced himself from Buber’s view
of revelation:
“A Jew cannot live by such a conception of revelation. Buber does not

do justice to the claims of the prophets. So I have to choose between
him and the Bible itself. The Bible says that God spoke to men — a
challenging, embarrassing, and overwhelming claim. I have trouble with
many of the things he [Buber] said, but I have to accept them. If I don’t
accept the claim that God spoke to the prophets, then I detach myself
from the biblical roots.”61
57. In one of his lectures, Heschel defined himself not as a man of Halakha but as a man
of Aggada. He reminded his audience also that there is no Aggada without Halakha
because there is no Jewish holiness without mitzvot (Dresner, “Heschel and Halakhah:
The Vital center,” Conservative Judaism 43, no. 4 (1991): 22).
58. Heschel, Heavenly Torah as Refracted through the Generations, eds. and trans. Gordon
Tucker and Leonard Levin (New York and London: Continuum, 2005), 7.
59. Heschel, Heavenly Torah, 384.
60. Ibid.
61. Heschel, “Carl Stern’s Interview with Dr. Heschel,” in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual
Audacity, ed. Susannah Heschel (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1996), 385. In Buber’s
writings, one may find early pantheistic-Spinozistic thoughts, as well as panentheistic
and theistic positions that accept Divine transcendence. As we will demonstrate, with
time, also under the influence of his focus on the Bible, Buber gave more weight to
revelation as coming from outside and not merely growing from within human beings,
— 21 —
---------------------------------------------------------------------  Introduction ---------------------------------------------------------------------
And yet, Heschel thought about Buber as “a person of depth and

greatness.”62
Heschel’s student Fritz A. Rothschild published a selection of
Heschel’s writings under the title Between God and Man. 63 This title
differs from the title of Buber’s book, Between Man and Man. In
Between Man and Man, there is a chapter “What is Man?”64 which is
the translation of “Das Problem des Menschen,”65 whereas the title
of another of Heschel’s books is Who Is Man? Buber’s title is more
philosophical; Heschel’s, more personal. Earlier, in 1933, Heschel
published a collection of Yiddish poems, Der Shem Ham’forash: Mentsh.
This title does not merely refer to man but introduces a qualification
of man: the term implies values such as confidence, truthfulness, and
sociality. The first poem in that volume is the already mentioned poem
“Ikh un Du,” bearing the same name as Buber’s book Ich und Du, which
was published in the same year that the poem appeared. Although
the titles are identical, Heschel’s poem conveys a completely different
meaning, highlighting the great intimacy between God and man. The
title of Heschel’s early collection of poems points to his vision of man
as closely connected to the Divine: “Am I not — you? Are you not — I?”66
From this verse, one could infer that there is a quasi-identity between
God and man, or at least a meeting between the Divine and the human
will. In Buber’s I and Thou, on the other hand, the emphasis is foremost
upon the interrelation between men, including a perspective upon
the connection with the eternal You. The foregoing exemplifies the
basis of some major differences between these two towering thinkers.
Comparing Heschel and Buber, we frequently focused upon Heschel’s
early Yiddish written poems and upon Buber’s I and Thou. Yet Buber
changed his views in the course of his long life; therefore, we had to
who strive for unity.

62. Ibid.
63. In Between God and Man. An Interpretation of Judaism, ed. Fritz A. Rothschild (New
York: Macmillan, 1959), Rothschild presents a collection of Heschel’s papers.
64. Buber, “What is Man?” in Between Man and Man, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith, intro.
Maurice Friedman (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 118–205.
65. Buber, Das Problem des Menschen (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1948).
66. Heschel, The Ineffable Name of God: Man, trans. Morton M. Leifman, with an
introduction by Edward K. Kaplan (New York: Continuum, 2005), 31.
— 22 —
---------------------------------------------------------------------  Introduction ---------------------------------------------------------------------
take into consideration the entire scope of his voluminous writing,

whereas Heschel in writing on Kotzk at the end of his life expressed
profound religious feelings that already were expressed in the poems
of the thirties.67
As the title of our own book we choose Between Heschel and Buber
because the two thinkers were closely related and had much in common,
but they also differed on substantial points. This title also points to the
fact that not only were both Buber and Heschel the authors of Between
Man and Man and Between God and Man, respectively, but that there
was an intense and fruitful interaction between them. Seventeen years
ago, Heschel’s biographer Edward Kaplan expressed his hope that
scholars would pursue a comparative analysis of Buber and Heschel
as two eminent interpreters of the Jewish tradition.68 We took upon
ourselves this challenge of monitoring their consents and dissents; to
compare Heschel and Buber is the purpose of the present volume.
67. Personal religious experiences are at the center of Heschel’s writings. In fact, his entire
oeuvre and not only his poetic work in the thirties is characterized by a poetic style that
aims at bringing the reader to identify with what is written (Kaplan, Holiness in Words
[New York: State University of New York Press, 1996], 19). Heschel’s way of writing was
criticized by, for example, Arthur Cohen, who blamed Heschel for adopting a rhetoric
style. See Arthur A. Cohen, “The Rhetoric of Faith: Abraham Joshua Heschel,” in The
Natural and Supernatural Jew (New York, Toronto, London: Mac Graw Hill Book, 1964),
258–259. For a response to Heschel’s opponents, see Lawrence Perlman, Abraham
Heschel’s Idea of Revelation (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1989), 8–11.
68. Kaplan, “Sacred,” 225.
— 23 —
----------------------------------------------------  Aieka: Between Man and Man  ----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------- Chapter I -----------------------------------
Aieka:
Between Man and Man1
For Buber as well as for Heschel, “to be” means to be with other human
beings. In their anthropology, they define existence as essentially
coexistence. They lived in a period that suffered from two kinds of
terrible totalitarianism: Stalinist communism and German nationalism.
Heschel highlighted the eclipse of man,2 and Buber spoke about the
eclipse of God, which could be caused by man being caught in merely
I-it relationships or by a God who veils his Divine countenance.3 Both
views originated in their reactions to the profound crisis of humanism.
In the following, we compare Buber’s dialogical thinking on what occurs
between people with Heschel’s view in which “the ultimate validity of
being human depends upon prophetic moments.”4 Buber approached
the I as ideally in relation, coining the almost biblical phrase “in the
beginning was relation,” whereas Heschel changed the known Cartesian
dictum on the ego as cogito into the phrase: “I am commanded, therefore
I am.”5 Heschel thought that “there is no man who is not shaken for an
instant by the eternal.”6 Human dignity depended upon “man’s sense
1. See Ephraim Meir, “Reading Buber’s ‘I and Thou’ as a Guide to Conflict Management
and Social Transformation,” in The Legacy of the German-Jewish Religious and Cultural
Heritage: A Basis for German-Israeli Dialogue? Proceedings of an International Conference
Held at Bar-Ilan University June 1, 2005, ed. Ben Mollov (Jerusalem: Yuval Press 2006),
119–131.
2. Alexander Even-Chen, “I-You-Other-God — Buber, Heschel and Levinas,” Hagut be-
chinukh ha-yehudi 9 (2010): 217-244.
3. Buber, “Replies to my Critics,” in The Philosophy of Martin Buber (The Library of Living
Philosophers, 12), eds. A. Schilpp and M. Friedman (Lasalle, IL: Open Court, 1967),
716.
4. Heschel, Who Is Man? (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1963), 111.
5. Ibid.
6. Heschel, Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion (New York: Farrar, Straus and
— 25 —
--------------------------------------------------------------------------   Chapter I --------------------------------------------------------------------------
of indebtedness being a response to transcendent requiredness.”7

Responsiveness was imperative in the anthropology of both thinkers.
They both cite the biblical Divine address to man: “Aieka,” “Where are
you?” (Gen.3:9) as defining Man, who therefore was a being who is
called upon to respond, to become an answerable person.8
In this chapter, we compare Heschel’s and Buber’s views on human
society and politics, which they constructed in answer to the crises
during which they lived. Neither thinker enclosed himself in a piety
that was estranged from and inimical to the world, for they were less
interested in discovering the mysteries of heaven; their common main
concern was man’s everyday life in his being situated in a concrete
social and political setting. They did not flee in a Gnostic way from a
sublunary, terrestrial reality, nor did they construct a theology that
deals with abstract metaphysical categories. Rather, they stood firmly in
an earthly reality that they strove to interpret as essentially dialogical.
I and Thou
Buber’s most influential philosophical work was I and Thou. In this

work, on the background of a world progressively augmenting the
“it,” Buber gave much weight to responsiveness and to the significance
of the sphere of the “I-you.” He developed a dialogical-relational
transformative model of thinking, in which the central ideas are not
the self, self-consciousness, or self-interest, but rather the orientation
of an I to a you. His intent was to create a dialogical “between-man,” a
Zwischenmensch. In his anthropology, a person becomes a person when
face-to-face with a fellow human being. Through the you, a person
becomes I. The Buberian I is thus not isolated but a related “I-you”; the
interhuman is as a primal category of human reality. Philosophy had
to break with the subject-object ontology; its task was to be a gateway
that indicated and pointed to meeting as being beyond philosophical
Giroux, 1951), 78.

7. Heschel, Who Is Man, 110.
8. Bondi writes that from Heschel’s perspective, the uniqueness of the Jewish people
lies in their answer to the Divine question. Dror Bondi, Where Art Thou (Jerusalem:
Merkaz Shalem, 2007), 176.
— 26 —
conceptualization. Its vocation would lie in witnessing to the primal act

of meeting and to the plenitude of presence.9
In Buber’s humanism, meeting and encounter come into being
through the address of an I to a you. In this address, an “it” turns into
a “you”: the object (Gegenstand) changes into a presence (Gegenwart).
Alienation from the other by an objectifying attitude and partial
approach toward him is replaced by the animation of the other. The
“you” jumps from an “it” but does not originate in that “it.” The I is
destined to meet the other, not to approach him in a purely cognitive
way or to use and manipulate him; it is basically an I-in-relation. The
relating I and the addressed you, which reveals itself, may meet, and
this mutual “relation” (Beziehung) is “encounter” (Begegnung).10 Buber
highlights that in the sphere of the “between” (zwischen) and its role
as the humanizing factor in human society, institutions are too much
“outside,” whereas feelings are too much “inside.” That is, institutions
are objective and feelings are subjective, whereas the meeting is
intersubjective. In I and Thou, Buber develops an ontology of presence
which asks for this reciprocity.11
In Buber’s perspective, the mutual relationship between I and
Thou is also the locus theologicus, the place where one meets God. The
I who says “you” addresses at the same time the eternal “You.” The
relationship to God occurs in the relationship with human beings, and it
is therefore nonsensical, if one wants to make present the eternal You,
to attempt to do so without creating a true dialogical society. In Buber’s
philosophy, the word and is central: I and Thou, God and man, and God
and involvement in the world. The animation of the world is the kernel
of real spirituality. In meeting the world and uttering the primary word
9. See Alan Udoff, introduction to The Knowledge of Man, by Martin Buber, ed. Maurice
Friedman (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1988), viii-xxii.
10. The opposite is what Buber calls “Vergegnung,” misencounter or failure of a real
meeting. See Buber, Begegnung: Autobiographische Fragmente (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer
Verlag, 1960), 6.
11. For Franz Fischer (1929–1070) too, reciprocity is essential in the relationship. See
Meir, “Fischer’s Essay ‘Love and Wisdom’ in Light of Jewish Dialogical Thought,” in
Die Bildung von Gewissen und Verantwortung — Zur Philosophie und Paedagogik Franz
Fischers (Franz Fischer Jahrbuecher). (Norderstedt and Leipzig: Anne Fischer Verlag
and Leipziger Universitaetsverlag, 2010), 226–245.
— 27 —
--------------------------------------------------------------------------   Chapter I --------------------------------------------------------------------------
I-you, we “gaze toward the train of the eternal You” (blicken wir an den
Saum des Ewigen Du hin) and “we perceive a breath of it [of the eternal
You]” (aus jedem vernehmen wir ein Wehen von ihm).12
In his panentheistic thought, which was influenced by Hasidism, the
intersubjective meeting conditions the contact with the eternal You. In
the process of a meeting of a particular “you,” one receives “a glimpse”
through to the eternal You (ein Durchblick zu ihm).13 The world does not
of itself lead to God, but neither does one find Him by leaving the world.
Man’s turn, his return (Umkehr) to the real ex-centric kernel of himself,
to his “inborn you” — in other words, his presence to the other — makes
the eternal You present. The human existence thus becomes a kind of
sacrament: in meeting and encounter, in contemplating the other,14 God
becomes present in the world. One can find in I and Thou an expression
as the “realization” of God because one makes God real in solidarity
with others.15 The eternal You, however, never becomes “it.” God is
called “the eternal presence” (die ewige Gegenwart)16 who is present for
human beings when they are present to each other.
Buber thus situated the conversation with God within the
conversation between human beings. Anthropology led to metaphysics.
Mainly in the third part of I and Thou, after having analyzed the
relationship between men and the situation of man in the social and
political world, he discusses the relationship of man with God. In
12. Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970),
57; Ich und Du: Um ein Nachwort erweiterte Neuausgabe (Heidelberg, Lambert Schneider:
1958), 12. The sentences are repeated in I and Thou, 150; Ich und Du, 90. Kramer draws
our attention to the fact that Kaufmann’s use of the pronoun “You” (and not the
uncommon “Thou”) as translation of “Du” prevents the reader from assuming that
Buber’s “Du” meant exclusively God. At the same time, Kaufmann’s “You” loses the
intimacy and commitment suggested by Buber’s “Du.” In Buber’s time, “Du” was only
used to address people toward whom one felt close and to whom one felt committed,
ready to be there for the other no matter what may happen. Our gratitude is extended
to Kenneth Kramer.
13. Buber, I and Thou, 123; Ich und Du, 69.
14. “Schauen,” contemplate, and “zublicken,” glance, are in contrast to “beobachten,”
observe (I and Thou, 90; Ich und Du, 39).
15. Buber, I and Thou, 161; Ich und Du, 100. Kaufmann translates “verwirklichen” by
“actualize,” Smith in his translation has the more literal “realize”; I and Thou, trans.
Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 114.
— 28 —
Heschel’s thought, in contrast, the relationship with the Divine comes

first and is of utmost importance in order to talk about the human
being. Significant in this respect is Heschel’s Yiddish poem “Ikh un Du,”
in which a direct, intimate relationship with God is described.17 Since
Heschel elaborated upon this position, detailing and developing it, later
on in his life, we offer here the entire poem in Yiddish, along with the
English translation:18
‫טראנסמיסיעס גייען פון דיין הארץ צו מיינעס‬ Transmissions flow from your heart to Mine
.‫ פארמישן מיין ליידן מיט דיינעם‬,‫פארטוישן‬ Trading, twining my pain with yours,
?‫בין איך נישט — דו? ביסטו נישט — איך‬ Am I not — you? Are you not — I?
‫עס זענען מיינע נערוון צונויפעגעקנוילט מיט דיינע‬ My nerves are clustered with Yours.
.‫עס האבן דיינע טרוימען געטראפן זיך מיט מיינע‬ Your dreams have met with mine.
?‫צי זענען מיר נישט איינער אין לייבער מיליאנען‬ Are we not one in the bodies of millions?
,‫אפט דערזע איך מיך אליין אין אלעמענס געשטאלטן‬ Often I glimpse Myself in everyone’s form,
,‫ רייד מיינס א ווייטע‬,‫דערהער אין מענטשנס ווינען‬ hear My own speech — a distant, quiet voice — in
,‫שטילע שטים‬ people’s weeping
‫גלייך אונטער מאסקעס מיליאנען ס’וואלט מיין פנים זיין‬ As if under millions of masks My face would lie
,‫באהאלטן‬ hidden
.‫כ’ לעב אין מיר און אין דיר‬ I live in Me and in you.
,‫דורך דיינע ליפן גייט א ווארט פון מיר צו מיר‬ Through your lips goes a word from Me to Me,
‫ וואס קוועלט אין מיר‬,‫פון דיינע אויגן טריפט א טרער‬ From your eyes drips a tear — its source in Me
!‫ווען א נויט דיך קוועלט –אלארמיר‬ When a need pains You, alarm me!
--‫ווען א מענטש דיר פעלט‬ When You miss a human being —
!‫רייס אויף מיין טיר‬ tear open my door!
.‫ דו לעבסט אין מיר‬,‫דו לעבסט אין דיר‬ You live in Yourself, You live in me.
As we mentioned in the foreword, the title of the poem is parallel to

the title of Buber’s book. But it refers here not to the relationship
between man and man, but to the intimate association between man
and God. Heschel almost obliterates the boundaries between man
17. According to Siegel, Heschel combined reason and mystery in his work. The deep
religious experience comes into expression in his thought and, of course, in social
activity. Yet, this experience contains more than what can be expressed. See Siegel,
“Scholarship,” 77; “Divine Pathos, Prophetic Sympathy,” Conservative Judaism 28, no.
1 (1973): 72.
18. Heschel, The Ineffable Name of God, 30–31.
— 29 —
--------------------------------------------------------------------------   Chapter I --------------------------------------------------------------------------
and the Divine. His poem expresses a kind of unio mystica, in which
the I is not absorbed in the Divine, but God and man are quasi-
identical: God’s ineffable name is “man.” In almost all of his poems,
Heschel meditates upon the relationship between God and man.19
The first part of his collection of poems is called “Der Mentsch iz hailiq”
(“Man Is Holy”), and the last part is called “Tiqqunim” (“Repairing the
World”). Although between the first and the last part we find love poems
and poems about the world, Heschel does not distinguish between the
religious and the secular songs because, in his view, holiness pervades
all of the poems.
In the specific poem “Ikh un Du,” Heschel writes about a pain that
is common to God and man. In the poem, which was first published
in 1929 in the journal Zukunft, Heschel gives expression to what lives
in his soul when he impatiently implores God to relate to man’s pain,
which is in fact God’s pain. There is an interdependence between man’s
pain and God’s pain, a certain tension, but also an expectation. This does
not mean that man’s existence is negated; on the contrary, it is elevated
to the level of God’s existence: God and man are mutually dependent.
Later on, Heschel develops this idea in his masterpiece “God in Search
of Man.” In this work, Husserl’s thought on intentionality with noesis
and noema is inversed: not man’s consciousness is characterized by
intentional acts, but rather the opposite — man is the object of God’s
intentionality and care.
Heschel’s address to God in “Ikh un Du” is full of pain and distress.
His God suffers, and Heschel comes to His rescue. The poem is far
from a theoretical treatise on the omnipotence or impotence of God.
Man has closed the doors of the world from beneath, and God is now
asked to open Heschel’s door from above. It is possible that the earthly
doors are closed, but Heschel implores God to open his door. God may
open Heschel’s private door through which He may enter again into
19. Arthur Green defines Heschel as a mystic, not as a kabbalist. Green describes the
common ground between three Warsaw thinkers: Rabbi Yehuda Loeb Alter of
Gur, Hillel Zeitlin, and Heschel. All three are post-kabbalist thinkers, who do not
characterize religious experience in kabbalistic terms such as sphirot, partsufim, or
mending. See Green, “Three Warsaw Mystics,” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought XIII
(Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1996), 5*; 51*.
— 30 —
the world. This is a prophetic call. Heschel is ready to fight in order to

enable God to enter into the world. His person is in the service of God.20
The verse “I live in me and in you” is contrasted to the final verse
“You live in Yourself, You live in me.” However, the contrast emphasizes
that Heschel’s life in God and God’s life in him are one and the same.
First, Heschel talks about himself and about his pain; at the end, he
demands from God, from the personal God who is more than simply
the Divine, to open his existential door: You live in me in my earthly
life down here, and You are responsible for my terrestrial life, just as I
am responsible for You. The verse “Through Your lips goes a word from
me to me” does not indicate that God speaks to man, but that His word
is in Heschel and resonates in his soul as the direct word of God. In
the verse “From Your eyes drips a tear — its source in me,” we read the
opposite: God drops a tear, but this tear originates in Heschel. The two
verses are complementary: it is as if Heschel and God are intermingled.
One cannot distinguish any more from whom the word comes or who
drops the tear. The empathy is clear and Heschel’s I and God’s I are
interwoven. Friedman notes: “‘I do not really mean,’ Heschel explained
to me, ‘that we have no right to say I. But we have the right to say I only
when we understand that the I is transcendence in disguise.’”21
On a parallel with his poetical-religious thought as it comes into
expression in “Ikh un Du,” Heschel writes on the last page of The
Prophets22 that the categorical imperative of the biblical man is “know
thy God” (1 Chron. 28:9) rather than “know thyself.”23 Yet in his
song “The Most Precious Word,” he writes about the ineffable Divine
20. Heschel’s prophet has the characteristic of the tsaddiq in Hasidism. As Moshe Idel
writes: “Hasidic masters would in most cases consider the mystical experience as
a stage on the way toward another goal, namely the return of the enriched mystic
who becomes even more powerful and effective in and for the group for which he
is responsible.” See Moshe Idel, Hasidism: Between Ecstasy and Magic (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1995), 209.
21. Maurice Friedman, “Divine Need and Human Wonder: The Philosophy of Abraham J.
Heschel,” Judaism 25 (1976): 74.
22. Heschel, The Prophets (New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, 1962), vol. II, 268.
23. Shaul Magid notes: “Self-discovery for Heschel is not the discovery of the unconscious
or one’s inner-self but the discovery of the mystery of God, the part of oneself that
is beyond the self.” See Magid, “Abraham Joshua Heschel and Thomas Merton,”
Conservative Judaism 50 (1998): 118.
— 31 —
--------------------------------------------------------------------------   Chapter I --------------------------------------------------------------------------
name: “Your name is already my home.” In writing this, Heschel nearly

identifies his own existence with that of the ineffable name, which for
him is the most precious word.24 Ineffable is not only God, but also the
deep experience of Heschel with God. By intermingling God’s existence
and his own human existence, Heschel substantially differs from Buber.
Another significant difference with Buber lies in Heschel’s definition
of the I, which is not constituted primarily by the non-I but rather
characterized, in the footsteps of his master the rebbe of Kotzk, by an
unalienable individuality. Heschel quotes the rather cryptic saying of
the Kotzker rebbe: “If I am I because I am I, and you are you because
you are you, then I am I and you are you. However, if I am I because
you are you, and you are you because I am I, then I am not I and you
are not you.”25 With this utterance, Heschel points to the importance
of the individual, not immediately in relation to the other, in contrast
to Buber’s philosophy, although in the footsteps of Israel Ba’al Shem
Tov, he considers the I as fundamentally related. A further difference
between Buber and Heschel is evident from the terminology: Buber’s
basic categories are meeting and encounter, while Heschel prefers the
word communion, 26 but he also says in what is a noticeably Buberian
mode: “To meet a human being is an opportunity to sense the image
of God, the presence of God.”27 Lastly, whereas in Buber’s thought there
may be a kind of mutuality between man and things, in Heschel’s biblical
theology, things do not speak to man, things speak to God: “Inanimate
objects are dead in relation to man; they are alive in relation to God.”28
To summarize: Buber’s I and Thou defined the I as an I in relation:
the I-it may became an I-you. Buber thinks foremost from one person
to another. In “Ikh un Du,” Heschel’s I is emotionally involved and
almost identical with the I of God: in his later thought, the I becomes an
object of God’s concern, although already in 1936 Heschel writes about

25. Heschel, A Passion for Truth (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 144.
26. See, for example, Heschel, Who Is Man, 87; Heschel, The Prophets, vol. I, 26.
27. Heschel, “No Religion Is an Island,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 21, 2 (1966): 121.
28. Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1976), 97.
— 32 —
the human being as an “object of God’s attention.”29 A human being

is more than being, it is a living being, looking for the transcendence
that is called the living God.30 Heschel approaches man from above,
from God’s perspective so to speak, and Buber from below, from the
interaction between man and man that reveals the Divine presence.
Revelation for Buber takes place in the interhuman relationship. For
Heschel, God reveals himself to man and man reveals himself to God.
Buber’s aim is to arrive at a self-understanding of the I as essentially
dialogical, Heschel’s purpose lies in coming to a self-understanding
which is only possible by means of God-understanding.
“I-you” and “I-it” versus the “I” as “It”
In I and Thou, Buber wants his readers to leave their individuality,

their ego (Eigenwesen) that differentiates them from other individuals
in favor of becoming a person (eine Person).31 Not like the individual,
the person shares in reality: the more contact one has with a you, the
more real one is, and the fuller one shares in reality. Buber thus felt
that the human being in confirming the other and being confirmed by
him or her was a fundamental feature of the human existence. Being
looked upon as an object is dehumanizing; living in relation to a real
community was the true aim of human existence.
One would wish that Buber would less separate the “I-you”
from “I-it” and that he would diminish the dualism or gap between
the rationality of relationship — the rationality of the heart — and
institutional rationality. Buber largely neglects the institutional sides
29. Hechel, “The Meaning of Repentance,” in Moral Grandeur, 69.

31. Buber, I and Thou, 113; Ich und Du, 58. Buber had a very early interest in the
individuation of man, already evident in his dissertation in 1904, “Zur Geschichte des
Individuationsproblems (Nikolaus von Cues und Jakob Böhme).” Against Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche, he evaluated the individuation positively and studied the metaphysical
individualism of Cusanus and Böhme. Whereas Jung dealt with the individuation as
the process of becoming conscious of subconscious content, the I in Buber’s thought
becomes I through a you. In his I and Thou, the individual or ego becomes a “person”
in the context of a relationship.
— 33 —
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of human existence in I and Thou.32 Economic, political, and scientific

structures are not necessarily evil, and strategic rationality is important.
Buber, however, wanted to highlight the rationality of the heart, and
as such, he protested against purely economic or political thoughts and
qualified them as partial approaches. He preferred the adventure of
the you over the security and continuity of the it. He pointed to the
possibility of walking on the narrow ridge of the “between,” avoiding
both subjectivism and objectivism. In his essay “Distance and relation,”
he developed an ontology in which distance and relation were two basic
movements: distance conditioned relation.33 In I and Thou, however, he
described the actual development of man, in which I-you came first.34
Relating and distancing belonged together in I and Thou, but were
frequently opposed in a dualistic manner. There was an alternation
between I-you and I-it, but often the world of it and the world of you
were in binary opposition. The preponderant I-it obstructed the I-you,
the world of ordered objectivity disturbed the confirmation of the
other. Reason was not the distinctive feature of man: man as a whole
had the extraordinary and unique capacity to enter into relation.
Although Buber starts his I and Thou with a remark on the “twofold”
nature of the primary words (Zwiefalt der Grundworte),35 as different
from the dichotomy between them; and although he confirms the
passage from “it” to “you,” the world of “I-it” and the world of “I-you”
largely remain separated realms. He writes on the “sublime melancholy
of our lot [die erhabene Schwermut unsres Loses] that every You must
32. In discussion with Levinas, he maintained that “If all were clothed and well-nourished,
then the real ethical problem would become wholly visible for the first time” (Buber,
“Replies to my Critics,” 723). Nevertheless, in his later work, the relationship
between I-you and I-it is much smoother and both realms are less contrasted and
more interrelated. Rivka Horwitz compares Buber’s thinking of 1922 with that of
Kierkegaard, as described and attacked by him in later years. See Horowitz, Buber’s
Way to “I and Thou”: The Development of Martin Buber’s Thought and His “Religion as
Presence” Lectures (Philadelphia-New York-Jerusalem: JPS, 1988), 213.
33. Buber, The Knowledge of Man, 49–61.
34. Sic Friedman, introduction to The Knowledge of Man, 11–13.
35. Buber, I and Thou, 53; Ich und Du, 9. For an analysis of various polar dualities such as
I-you and I-it or distance and relation in Buber’s work, see Avraham Shapira, Between
Spirit and Reality. Dual Structures in the Thought of M. M. Buber (Jerusalem: Bialik,
1994).
— 34 —
become an It.”36 The “melancholy” is sublime, but it nevertheless retains

its sadness: Buber regrets that one falls back into it. In moments that
are too rare, he connects the world of perception with the world of
realization, arenas that belong together in the “mystery of reciprocity”
(“Geheimnis der Wechselwirkung).37 He writes, for instance, that the spirit
penetrates and transforms the world of “it.” Living in God’s face is living
in the world of “it” and in the world of “you.” The double movement of
a turn toward “you” and of an estrangement from “you” are brought
together by grace in creation. He further writes that “the It is the
chrysalis, the You the butterfly.”38 There is a movement, a fluctuation or
oscillation (ein Schwingen) between you and it.39 One can always set foot
on the threshold of the sanctuary, but one has to leave the sanctuary
again and again, which is the meaning and destiny of life. In the unholy
and indigent land, one has to hold the spark;40 there is an alternation
between actuality and latency in the relationship.41 In “Replies to my
critics,” in answer to Gabriel Marcel, Buber writes poetically about the
little bird “whose wings are crippled in this moment” but that “secretly
seeks its soaring.”42 In the tension between causality and freedom,
one finds again the complex relationship between you and it: one may
“forget” causality in freedom and come to a decision; on the other
hand, man’s destiny does not limit freedom but complements it. 43 A bit
further in I and Thou, we again hear about the contrast that man must
sacrifice his little will and come to his great will, “that moves away from
being determined to find destiny.”44
Buber’s own hesitations concerning the relationship between the
“it”-world and the “you”-world explain such different interpretations as
those of Michael Theunissen and Jochanan Bloch, who both highlight

37. Ibid.
39. Buber, I and Thou, 62; Ich und Du, 16
40. Buber, I and Thou, 101–102; Ich und Du, 49.
42. Buber, “Replies to My Critics,” 705.
44. Buber, I and Thou, 109; Ich und Du, 55: “der vom Bestimmtsein weg und auf die
Bestimmung zu geht.”
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the Buberian contrast between “I-it” and “I-you.”45 Theunissen thinks

that Buber snatches “you” out of the world in his dialogical thinking that
tries to overcome idealism and Husserl’s intentionality, whereas Bloch
is of the opinion that “you” is not transcendent to the world but rather
rooted in it. Our own position in this debate is that Buber insists upon
the relationship between I-it and I-you since “you” must necessarily
become “it” because of the concrete situation of man, and an “it” may be
transformed into a “you” because of the dialogical possibilities of man.
There is some connection between the two worlds, but Buber separates
them too much. There is a tension between I-you and I-it, which in his
I and Thou evolves too quickly into opposition.
One may criticize Buber for not stressing the interrelation between
I-it and I-you enough, as the German philosopher Franz Fischer
does,46 but his spirituality does remain world-oriented, although
this is somewhat problematic. Buber basically loved the world, and
did not leave it in order to be in touch with the eternal You, as did
Søren Kierkegaard, against whom Buber reacted. Rosenzweig harshly
criticized Buber for being obsessed, “intoxicated” by I-you in revelation:
in Rosenzweig’s view, Buber did not give enough attention to I-It,
which typifies creation, and we-It, which characterizes redemption.47
This criticism was taken into account by Buber mainly after writing I
and Thou.
In contrast to the Buberian polar duality described above between
the approach of the I as I-you and as I-it, Heschel thinks that the “I” is
an “it,” as the object of God’s care.48 The I may be self-inflated and self-
45. Michael Theunissen, Der Andere. Sudien zur Sozialontologie der Gegenwart ( Berlin: de
Gruyter, 1965) and Jochanan Bloch, Die Aporie Die Aporie des Du. Probleme der Dialogik
Martin Bubers (Phronesis, Bd. 2) (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1977).
46. Fischer brought the two realms closer together and thought, for instance, that
objective knowledge and human tasks are intimately linked to each other. See Meir,
“Fischer’s Essay‚ ‘Love and Wisdom’ in Light of Jewish Dialogical Thought,” in Die
Bildung von Gewissen und Verantwortung — Zur Philosophie und Paedagogik Franz Fischers
(Franz Fischer Jahrbuecher) (Norderstedt and Leipzig: Anne Fischer Verlag and
Leipziger Universitaetsverlag, 2010), 226–245.
47. Horwitz, Buber’s Way to “I and Thou,” 226–229.
48. Heschel, God in Search of Man, 125–129. Friedman reports a conversation with Heschel
on this subject: “‘To say that the I is an ‘it’ to God does not mean that God regards us
as an ‘it’. The I is an ‘it’ in the light of our awareness of God.’ Therefore, Heschel felt
— 36 —
celebrating, but inversely, it may be receptive and undetached from the

sense of the ineffable. In the second case, Heschel declares, “We begin
to understand that what is an ‘I’ to our minds is an ‘it’ to God. This is
why object-consciousness rather than self-consciousness is the starting
point for our thoughts about Him. It is in our object-consciousness
that we first learn to understand that God is more than the Divine.”
Heschel’s vision of man is inseparable from what he sees as God’s vision
of man. Whereas Heschel conceives of the I as “something transcendent
in disguise,”49 Buber does not envision an I that is not I-it or I-you.
For Heschel, the I does not originate in itself — it is not a subject — but
rather an object of God.50 Buber, on the other hand, describes the
nature of I-you as an I-in-relation. Both, however, conceive of human
beings as sons of the King.51
The Divine vision of man is not Heschel’s invention. He takes it, in
fact, from the Bible: “It is an accepted fact that the Bible has given the
world a new concept of God. What is not realized is the fact that the
Bible has given the world a new vision of man. The Bible is not a book
about God; it is a book about man.” The Bible as a book about man
contains a vision of man from the point of view of God, he explains.
It testifies to the vertical dimension in the human existence. Man is
therefore defined as “a being in travail with God’s dreams and designs,
with God’s dream of a world redeemed, of reconciliation of heaven and
earth, of a mankind which is truly His image, reflecting His wisdom,
justice and compassion. God’s dream is not to be alone, to have mankind
as a partner in the drama of continuous creation. By whatever we do,
by every act we carry out, we either advance or obstruct the drama of
redemption; we either reduce or enhance the power of evil,” he writes.
52 In his description of the relationship between God and man, between
that my objection applied to what he said but not to what he meant.” See Friedman,
“Divine Need,” 74.
49. Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, 47.
51. “Das groesste Boese ist, wenn du vergisst, das du ein Koenigssohn bist” (Buber, Die
Legende des Ba’alschem [1908] [Frankfurt o.M.: Rütten & Loening, 1922], 32); compare
with Heschel, A Passion for Truth, 19.
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--------------------------------------------------------------------------   Chapter I --------------------------------------------------------------------------
heaven and earth, Heschel avoids the pitfall of Gnosticism. He contests

the contrast between earth and heaven and brings them together in an
attempt to reconcile the earthly and Divine realities. In this manner,
he comes close to Buber, who also fought against the postulation of
too great a rift between heaven and earth. On the other hand, in both
Heschel’s and in Buber’s view, this world is evil and separated from
God. Both thinkers recognized a great tension between heaven and
earth, God and man, I-you and I-it, realization and orientation, and a
self-inflated and a God-oriented I. At the same time, they endeavored
to close these gap by stressing the priority of I-you and of man in the
image of God over I-it and self-assertion.
The similarities between both thinkers should not make us blind
to the differences between them. Heschel writes that to our knowledge
the world and the I are separated as object and subject, but “within
our wonder the world and the ‘I’ are one in being, in eternity.”53 The
experience of wonder is therefore a fundamental religious and biblical
occurrence, the chief characteristic of religious man. In this experience
as a fundamental category, one does not regard events as the natural
course of things, one is not aware of the regularity and pattern of
events. In amazement, the world appears to be marvelous. “This is
the Lord’s doing, it is marvelous in our eyes” (Psalms 118:23).54 This
a priori of looking at the world in radical amazement and wonder is
absent in Buber. Heschel continues that when we see only objects,
we are alone. But through singing, we sing for everything: the world
becomes the partitur of an eternal music and we are the voice.55 Already
in his book on the Sabbath, published in the same year as Man Is Not
Alone (1951), Heschel depicts how the creation is God’s language. In his
poetical language, he writes that we sanctify time in singing with God
the vowels of His song and things as the consonants.56 Buber meets
nature in relationship and brings the I in contact with you but does not
contrast nature or the I as explorable, graspable, and decipherable with

54. Heschel, God in Search of Man, 45.
56. Heschel, The Sabbath (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), 101.
— 38 —
the ineffable that is “in search of a song.”57 In Heschel’s view, radical

amazement is the prerequisite for any elevated religiosity; such an
attitude colors one’s approach to the world.
We have noted that Buber distances himself from Kierkegaard.
Heschel brings the Kotzker rebbe and Kierkegaard together in their
common endeavor to liberate man from a routine life; self-criticism
is the condition for an authentic life in faith, for without criticism
there is no real faith. The Kotzker rebbe and Kierkegaard challenge
institutional religion. In this, Heschel is close to Buber, who shows the
incompatibility between the interpersonal and intersubjective relations
and sterile objective institutions that prevent real human interaction.
Heschel again comes close to Buber’s thought when he says that not “a
leap of faith” but “a leap of action” is what counts.58 Both relate to the
world, rather than fleeing it in order to reach an acosmic relationship
with God.
In modern philosophy, from Descartes until German idealism,
philosophy put the I at the center. Heschel protests against this world
vision, writing that not self-centeredness but the readiness to sacrifice
the problematic ego is what is demanded of humanity. “The most
preposterous falsehood is the most common, most cherished one: self-
centeredness. Man tends to act as if his ego were the hub of the world,
the source and purpose of existence. What a shameless affront to deny
that God is that source and purpose, the sap and the meaning. The twin
themes of the Kotzker — how to discard falsehood and how to overcome
self-regard — are essentially one.”59 In other words: Heschel, along with
the Kotzker rebbe and Kierkegaard, strove for an authentic life of faith,
in which self-centeredness has to be given up in the recognition of the
centrality of God in our lives. It is not Heschel’s intention to negate
or sacrifice the I but rather to sanctify life before the Creator and to
take one’s own life seriously as being called upon to answer the Divine
appeal, where God asks man to sacrifice his egoistic interests. Buber

58. Heschel of course alludes here to Kierkegaard’s leap of faith. See F. A. Rothschild,
“Varieties of Heschelian Thought,” in Abraham Joshua Heschel, ed. John C. Merkle
(New York and London: Macmillan and Collier Macmillan, 1985), 91.
59. Heschel, A Passion for Truth, 133.
— 39 —
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likewise did not ask man to abnegate his ego or to devaluate it, as in
German mysticism, not in interhuman relationships and not in the
relationship between man and God. In his view, a person had to hallow
the whole of life, as in Hasidism,60 and to strive for the dominance
of the domain of I-you above the domain of the I-it. For Heschel and
Buber, body and soul were interwoven and one had to sanctify one’s
entire life in all its concreteness.61 Neither Heschel nor Buber denied
the importance of this world; they affirmed the world and oriented it to
something that is above it and expresses itself into the world.
Antitotalitarian Dialogical Anthropology

and the Prophetic Struggle for a Righteous
Society
Further shaping his dialogical anthropology after I and Thou,

Buber accentuated more and more the importance of the authentic
community. He reflected deeply on the phenomenon of totalitarianism
and contributed to the creation of dialogical communities. The
twentieth century was the century of totalitarianism, and it was
precisely in Germany that a number of Jewish thinkers protested
against this phenomenon. One may easily detect anti-totalitarian
thoughts in the works of Rosenzweig, Buber, and Arendt. Some central
passages in Buber’s oeuvre after I and Thou manifest his firm position
against totalitarianism, the illness of the preceding century. In the
time of brown and red totalitarianism, Buber reminded his readers that
dialogue is the most elevated human activity and that real dialogue
prevents human beings from becoming absorbed in a totalizing,
dehumanizing system. With his politico-religious thoughts on dialogue
and fraternity, he tried to avoid violent conflicts and to heal situations
60. J. H. Schravesande, “Jichud,” Eenheid inhet Werk van Martin Buber (Zoetermeer:
Boekencentrum Academic, 2009), 103; 162. Buber distinguishes between the
“Entwerdung,” giving up one’s own individuality (the term “Entwerdung” was
borrowed from Eckhart) and “Entfaltung,” the growth and development of the soul in
hallowing everyday life.
61. In “Replies to My Critics,” 736, Buber refers to the Polnaer tradition, which compares
the relationship between flesh and spirit to that between husband and wife.
— 40 —
by going to the root of the problem, namely, the seeming incapacity of

the human being to create dialogical societies.
Parallel with Buber, Heschel is actively involved in the world. In
one of his Yiddish poems, entitled “God Follows Me Everywhere,”
published in 1933 in the collection Der Shem Hameforash: Mentsh. Lider
(The Ineffable Name of God: Man. Poems), 62 Heschel describes his own
inner prophetic struggle:
.‫גאט גייט מיר נאך ווי א שוידער אומעטום‬ God follows me like a shiver everywhere.
!‫קום‬-- :‫ עס מאנט אין מיר‬,‫עס גלוסט זיך מיר רו‬ My desire is for rest; the demand within me is: Rise up,
.‫קוק ווי זעונגען וואלגערן אויף גאסן זיך ארום‬ See how prophetic visions are scattered in the streets.63
63
The young Heschel felt that God followed him “in tramways, in cafés”
and urged Him to realize the prophetic vision that is only visible
“with the backs of the pupils of one’s eyes.” For him, the danger of
totalitarianism in all its ugliness came into expression foremost in
the Shoah. In Nietzsche, God is dead, yet Heschel thought that with
the Shoah, man died.64 In one of his famous antithetical formulations,
he writes: “In the Middle Ages thinkers were trying to discover proofs
for the existence of God. Today we seem to look for proof for the
existence of man.”65 After the Shoah, thinking itself was affected:
“Philosophy cannot be the same after Auschwitz and Hiroshima.”66 In a
manner similar to Buber’s dialogical thought, Heschel writes: “To know
others I must know myself, just as understanding others is a necessary
prerequisite for understanding myself.”67 Another sentence echoes
Buber’s dialogical thinking: “For man to be means to be with other
human beings. His existence is coexistence.”68 However, more than in
Buber’s I and Thou, Heschel stresses an asymmetry in the relationship:
man has to become a spiritual Atlas, supporting the other human being:
“Man achieves fullness of being in fellowship, in care for others. He
62. Heschel, The Ineffable Name of God, 57.

63 . Ibid.
64. For the death of man, see also Heschel, “What We Might Do Together,” in Moral
Grandeur, 290.
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expands his existence by ‘bearing his fellow-man’s burden.’ As we have

said, animals are concerned for their own needs; the degree of our being
human stands in direct proportion to the degree in which we care for
others.”69 He states: “Who is Man? is really, How is Man?”70 Alluding to
the theological eclipse of God and perhaps in reaction to Buber’s writing
about it, Heschel writes about “the eclipse of humanity.”71 He utters his
fear of a collapse of human society: “Auschwitz is in our veins… We,
the generation that witnessed the holocaust, should stand by calmly
while rulers proclaim their intention to bring about a new holocaust?”72
Writing on the Holocaust, Heschel was concerned not only with the
Jewish history but also with the fate of all human beings. One of his
ancestors, his great-great-grandfather, was called ohev Yisrael, lover of
Israel, and Heschel himself was named ohev adam, lover of humanity.
He was extremely conscious of the fragility of a just human society and
was anxious that man could destroy such a society. One of his articles in
The Insecurity of Freedom bears the significant title: “The White Man on
Trial.”73 His religious soul becomes visible in his courageous defense of
the rights of the black people in the United States, in his fight against
prejudices and apartheid, and in his call for social and legal change in
America. The problem of the Negro would be the problem of the white
man, he proclaimed. Implicitly comparing the white man in the US with
Pharaoh of Egypt, he writes: “The tragedy of Pharaoh was the failure
to realize that the exodus from slavery could have spelled redemption
for both Israel and Egypt. Would that Pharaoh and the Egyptians had
joined the Israelites in the desert and together stood at the foot of
Sinai.”74 With these words, Heschel actualized the biblical story about
the exodus of the children of Israel. He defined twentieth-century
black people as those who are in slavery and associated the oppressing
ruler of Egypt with the dominating white society in the US. The social

72. Heschel, Israel — an Echo of Eternity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), 206.
73. Heschel, “The White Man on Trial,” in The Insecurity of Freedom: Essays on Human
Existence (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 101–111.
74. Heschel, “White Man,” 103.
— 42 —
involvement of Heschel and Martin Luther King, Jr., was the result in
both cases of a religious commitment that united both personalities;
Heschel and Buber were both actively involved in social and political
action.
Individualism and Collectivism
Together with other German-Jewish thinkers such as Mendelssohn,

Hirsch, Cohen, and Rosenzweig, Buber fully took part in German
culture and invited Jews to live in the different cultures of the world in
a distinctive way. When discussing the complex relationship between
the same and the other, he emphasized the importance of the same,
without forgetting the other. The identity of the one, he asserted,
was dependent upon the recognition of the alterity of the other. His
dialogical thoughts provide the basis for what is known as conflict
management today, in which alertness for totalitarianism and action
against it, as well as the permanent effort of living a dialogical life, are
central.
At the end of his book on the problem of man, published in German
in 1948, Buber criticizes both individualism and collectivism.75 The first
phenomenon considers man only in relationship to himself, while the
latter does not see individuals at all and only thinks in terms of the
collective. Both phenomena have their roots in the feeling of an unease
in the world, of not being at home in society. Individualism, he felt,
isolates the human being as a monad. In order to escape the despair
and hopelessness inherent to this situation, one glorifies the isolation.
No real meeting is possible in this fictive mastering of the existential
situation, however. Collectivism, on the other hand, succeeds the
reaction of individualism and tries to escape loneliness by disappearing
in anonymous masses and their “general will,” without acknowledging
individual responsibility. This illusionary solution guarantees total
security, but in totality man is not man with others (der Mensch mit
dem Menschen); he even flees from contact with himself.
In Buber’s dialogical perspective, only the individual who meets the
75. Buber, Das Problem, 158–169.
— 43 —
--------------------------------------------------------------------------   Chapter I --------------------------------------------------------------------------
other (Mitmensch) in his otherness (in all seiner Anderheit) is capable

of vanquishing his loneliness and isolation. One does not have to
choose between an individualistic anthropology and a collectivistic
sociology. There is a third way. Man is not a mere isolated individual,
nor part of a whole. What is crucial in Buber’s integrative thought is
what happens between individuals (zwischen Wesen und Wesen). The
sphere of the “between” (die Sphaere des Zwischen) thus becomes a
fundamental category (Urkategorie) of human reality. The “between”
of the interhuman relationship (zwischenmenschliches Geschehen) is
not to be found in the interiority of the isolated being or in an all-
encompassing neutral totality but in the reality of a meeting that is not
reducible to one’s interiority or to an all-absorbing exteriority. While
not reducing religiosity to mere interhuman dialogue, Buber notes that
in real dialogue between people, something irreducible is present that
transcends both partners and cannot be neutralized.76 Dialogue that
connects people with the eternal permits touching the real individual
and the real community.
It comes as no surprise that Buber’s dialogical thinking creates a
distance from individualism and collectivism. However, in the passage
in the book under discussion, Buber gives more attention to the dangers
of collectivism since the obsession with and threat of collectivism
dominated the thirties and forties of the preceding century. The realistic
alertness for the danger of collectivism shows the impact of the tragic
Jewish experience in the Third Reich even upon Buber’s eminently
idealistic thought.
Buber’s resistance to totalitarianism and political violence is
rooted in his Hebrew humanism. Judaism at its best was understood
as dialogical pioneering and as harboring a suspicion of totalizing
thought. Buber criticized the political Messianism of the Nazis, who
wanted to overthrow universal human rights. The inspiration for his
critique of a society in which all values had collapsed stemmed from his
76. The metaphysical idea that in the pure relationship one receives a “more,” connected
to one’s being touched by the eternal, is already formulated in I and Thou, which was
first published in 1923 and then published again at the occasion of Buber’s eightieth
birthday with a postscriptum of Buber. See I and Thou, 158; Ich und Du, 96.
— 44 —
own Jewish tradition. Of course, dialogical behavior is not exclusively

Jewish, but it was something that Buber knew was eminently present
in the most brilliant periods of Jewish history.
The Problem of Man, first published in Hebrew in 1942, discusses
different philosophical anthropologies and constructs a dialogical view
of humanity. In this manner, the book constitutes a protest against
the inequality, submission, and enslavement inherent in the collectivist
enterprise of Hitlerism. Like Hannah Arendt, Buber knew about the
possible collapse of the political, which is the common ground and
binding connection between different people. He constructed a vision
in which not the will to power but the will to dialogue was central.
Like Buber, Heschel opposed man’s individualism and his
exaggerated concentration upon the satisfaction of his own needs.
He felt that the (Freudian) circle of a person’s need and satisfaction is
“too narrow for the fullness of his existence.”77 Heschel formulated his
religious anthropology as follows: “Shamed, shocked at the misery of
an overloaded ego, we seek to break out of the circle of the ego.” 78 Man’s
dignity, rather, lay in the power of reciprocity.79 Instead of a collection
of needs, man is God’s need. More specifically, the essence of Judaism
is the awareness of the reciprocity in the Divine-human relationship,
of the togetherness of God and man.80 Heschel considered Judaism as
“an attempt to prove that in order to be a man, you have to be more
than a man, that in order to be a people we have to be more than a
people.” Israel is called upon to be a “holy people.” For Jews, there is
no fellowship with God without the fellowship with Israel.81 In a larger
perspective, the relationship with God takes place in the relationship
with the human being. An anti-individualistic tendency characterizes
Heschel’s writings: man is essentially linked to other human beings.
It is our impression that Heschel had less interest in an analysis
of collectivism. Buber’s warning against collectivism and narrow
nationalism is not echoed in Heschel’s writings, where he focused

81. Heschel, God in Search of Man, 422–423.
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--------------------------------------------------------------------------   Chapter I --------------------------------------------------------------------------
more attention upon illnesses of the American society, such as the

war in Vietnam and the oppression of the black citizenry. Georg
Simmel, Buber’s teacher, had by this time already given a theoretical,
sociological explanation of the complex tension between the individual
and his society. In the fashion industry, for instance, one made a
compromise between equalizing functions and individualization: there
is individualization with distinguishing features, but there is also an
equalizing factor that makes those who belong to the same class socially
equal.82 A lifestyle was the result of a systematization of life as well as
of the individual formation of life.83 Simmel’s pupil, Buber, was also
aware of this creative tension, and he wanted to save the individual
from the suffocating grip of totality without losing the connection from
one person to another in society.
The Temptation of Nationalistic Egoism
As pointed out by Paul Mendes-Flohr, Buber developed a universalistic

vision after he himself was attracted to German patriotism, which he
forcefully defended during World War I.84 In the course of this war,
he became aware of the problem of collective egoism and constructed
a politico-religious vision in which all people are organically linked to
one other. The nation as the “extended ego” would not be the highest
instance, since the King of Kings is above every earthly ruler.85 Buber
now unmasked exaggerated nationalism as idolatry and advocated
a dialogical spirit that he proposed would be the spirit of Israel that
82. Simmel, “Zur Psychologie der Mode. Soziologische Studie,” [1895] in Aufsaetze 1894–
1900 (Frankfurt o.M.: Suhrkamp, 1992), 106–107.
83. Simmel, “Philosophie des Geldes,” in Aufsaetze, 689–690.
84. Mendes-Flohr, From Mysticism to Dialogue. Martin Buber’s Transformation of German
Social Thought (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 93–113. Typical for
Buber’s patriotic engagement is his “Die Tempelweihe,” a speech held December 1914
at the occasion of the festival of Chanuka: Jews, who now fight each other, would fight
for their Judaism, he declared, in a meaning that is still hidden. Jews would learn in
the war what community is; and in blood and tears the desire for unity would grow.
85. Buber, “Der Geist Israels und die Welt von heute” in An der Wende. Reden ueber das
Judentum (Cologne and Olten: Jakob Hegner, 1952), 13–16.
— 46 —
sought the realization of unity.86

Nazism, a political force in Germany, was a pagan patriotism,
totalitarian, racist, and anti-Semitic. Monologist propaganda and
racism replaced dialogic ethics and destroyed the public space where all
persons have rights. Slogans and lies became common. Instead of the
art of politics, a tyranny was installed. Confronted with and threatened
by such a pathological society, Buber highlighted the irreducibility of
personal relations and of answerability in the community. He wanted
to save human dignity by insisting upon the importance of human
relationship and meeting, which would constitute the kernel of any
healthy society. The will to dialogue in real communities had to replace
the will to power of the totalitarianism of the left and the right. A
dialogical community living organically in relation with other social and
political entities would stand opposed to chauvinistic ultranationalism.
Judaism, Newly Formulated
Buber rethought several central categories of the Jewish tradition, such

as God, faith, religion, religiosity, Zionism, holiness, and Judaism itself,
and took the radical step of linking them to his dialogical anthropology.
The existence of one God, the “King of kings and Master of the
world,”87 implied striving for a unified humanity. God is above men,
and substituting men for God is an idolatrous act, he contends. Against
the tribalism and tyranny of Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianism, he
writes about one universal God unifying mankind. “Faith” is redefined
as the development of a dialogical attitude that will lead to the
experience of the eternal You. “Religion” as system could in itself
become totalitarian, replacing God Himself by something human. Real
“religiosity,” to the contrary, would lead to the creation of a just society.
In Buber’s reformulation of Judaism, “Zionism” is less a normalizing
national movement than the invitation to a peaceful coexistence with
the Palestinians. “Holiness” does not lie in a land but in an ethical
relationship with other persons, which is always above the political.
86. Buber, “Der Geist Israels,” 18–19.

87. Buber, “Der Geist Israels,” 15.
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Finally, Judaism itself is reformulated as the pioneer of humanity, the

spiritual power that moves the human being toward the humanization
of economy, society, and politics. While Buber distinguished between
what Jews factually do and what they are required to do,88 at the same
time he believed in the dialogical power revealed in Jewish history.
Responsibility of the Individual versus

Totalitarianism
Already in 1936, in “The Question of the Single One” (Die Frage an den
Einzelnen), Buber related his dialogical thoughts to the political and
social situation of his time.89 Frequently one finds in the literature on
Buber the idea that his dialogical philosophy is irrelevant in the political
domain. A close reading of “The Question to the Single One,” however,
proves the contrary. In the essay, he discusses not only Kierkegaard’s
thought on the individual but also the sacrifice of the person and the
personal in a totalitarian system and finally the problem of an ideology
that is not interested in truth and so suffocates dialogical relationships.
The problematic of individualism and collectivism discussed in The
Problem of Man was therefore already anticipated in this essay.
Kierkegaard’s religious existentialism celebrated the ideal of
the single one before God, without community. Buber reacted to
this contention, positing that God and men are not rivals and that
God is in fact the God of people, of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He
blamed Kierkegaard for the imagined separation, since Kierkegaard
associated with God without relating to his beloved Regine Olsen. In
his concentration upon himself and God alone, Kierkegaard forgot his
relation to other human beings. His problem thus lies in his searching
for God in the margin of life rather than in the midst of life. Buber
quoted Kierkegaard, who wrote that the highest piety, when conceived
of as a separation from the world, could be, in fact, the highest egoism.
He remarked smilingly that there is no better argument against

89. Buber, Das dialogische Prinzip (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1962), 197–267; Buber,
Werke. Erster Band. Schriften zur Philosophie (Munich and Heidelberg: Koesel and
Lambert Schneider, 1962), 215–265. Hereafter referred to as Werke I.
— 48 —
Kierkegaard than Kierkegaard himself. The Danish existentialist

could have overcome his anguish concerning the world and women by
becoming related to God and his creatures, Buber contended. His polar,
dualistic thinking about God as opposed to the finite world prevented
him from experiencing salvation. For Buber, it is axiomatic that one
only reaches God through His creatures, the divine through the human,
the infinite through fulfilled finitude.
In Buber’s dialogical and social thought, the spirit wants to be
realized in the world and the finite human being desires a relationship
with God. In his essay of 1936, as in The Problem of Man,90 he unmasks
Kierkegaard’s philosophy as a spirituality estranged from the world.
True religiosity does not flee from the world, but rather embraces the
possibility of saying “you,” of living a dialogical existence in the midst
of life. Yet Buber’s real concern in the essay, as in The Problem of Man, is
the totalitarian society that suppresses even the relationship with God
in its narcissistic fixation upon itself. Starting with the discussion of
Kierkegaard’s single “one” before God, Buber therefore passes quickly
to the discussion of the unique one, who is responsible for and engaged
in the world and the political situation. The singular one does not leave
the world; on the contrary, he is engaged in it in order to realize the
spirit. In other words, spirit (i.e., dialogue) and politics are of necessity
connected.
According to Buber, a person should not be absorbed in the masses
that do not comprehend the significance of individuals and otherness.
In his eyes, the individual is not wrapped in a whole, but connected to
others. Kierkegaard’s individual was lonely, separated from the rest of
humanity. Buber’s individual, on the other hand, is related to others; he
connects to them as fellow human beings (Genosse). Buber’s critique of
Nazism is thus manifest in this essay of the thirties. He perceives the
individual and his decisions as not absorbable into or consistent with
a party system that decides for everyone. No program or command is
allowed to dictate what a man has to do. Responsibility, on the contrary,
works in “the consciousness of the spark” (das Gewissen des Fuenkleins),
and once one takes upon himself responsibility, there is no security,
90. Buber, Das Problem, 109.
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only being called upon and being designated. For Buber, all are called
and responsible and every individual challenges collectivity.
The anti-totalitarian thoughts of Buber become even more clear
and concrete in his discussion of the problematic theories of Oswald
Spengler (1880–1936), Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), and Friedrich
Gogarten (1887–1968). He is not wary of attacking these well-
known figures and speaks out loudly and clearly. Buber maintains, in
opposition to Spengler, that man is not to be comprehended from a
biologistic standpoint and that history is not purely allocation of power.
Man is rather a dialogical being, called upon for intercultural acts that
enrich and change the other. One should replace the exclusivist conflict
model of existence with the dialogical, inclusive mode. Carl Schmitt, a
theoretician of Nazism, advocated political homogeneity. He configured
the political framework in polar terms of friend or enemy. Dissimilar
to Schmitt, Buber does not conceive politics as a separate domain, with
antithetic groups of friends and enemies. Politics, linked to ethics,
is less ordained to separate than to bring together. Gogarten, finally,
defined as the theological companion of Schmitt, postulates that ethical
relevance is dependent upon politics. His theory forms the theological
basis for the concept of the old police state, in which power is wielded
as absolute. Buber, when it comes to political theory, for his part, is
adamant that the state cannot decide instead of the individual and
cannot usurp the responsibility of the individual, who is accountable
to a higher, dialogical order, the Ordnung Gottes.
He concludes his essay with some remarks on the Divine address to
the individual and on truth. Collectivity cannot absorb the individual,
who remains responsible for the world and for the other human being
as a consequence of the Divine address. Truth is not to be politicized.
One must realize the truth (Wahrheit), which is true (wahrhaft) if man
concretizes it (wenn er sie bewaehrt). Truth therefore does not belong to
me, or to us; it is linked to the responsibility of bringing the infinite into
the finite. One does not have the truth; it is given to us to be enacted. A
true community is only possible when individuals engage in public life
in responsibility. It is a small miracle that Die Frage an den Einzelnen
was published in 1936, because the article contained an unambiguous
protest against the Nazi regime. In this essay, Buber reveals himself not
— 50 —
only as a foremost expositor of dialogical thoughts but also as a fierce

opponent of any form of totalitarianism.
In the thirties, Heschel was likewise anxious over what was
happening in Germany. In the song “Millions of Eyes, Clogged,”
published in 1933, he states that millions suffer from calamities and
cry. In an explosion of emotions, he writes:
.‫מיליאנען אויגן שטיקן זיך מיט איין טרער‬ Millions of eyes are clogged with a common tear
.‫צוליב פארפלאנטערטע שיקזאלן – אומענדלעכע מאלער‬ Because of tangled fates — endless calamities
!‫ דערלאנג מיר דיין געווער‬,‫גאט‬ God, pass me Your weapons!
‫לאמיך דורכהאקן די גארדישע קנוילן‬ Let me slash through the Gordian knots
!‫אין געטלעכן וועבשטול פון אלעמענס מזלות‬ Of that idolatrous embroidery of people’s
star-shaped fate!
!‫ נישט וויל איך דיינע פויסטן טראגן‬,‫ניין‬ No, I don’t want to wear Your fists!
,‫איך פארלאנג און בעט פון דיר נאר‬ I only beg, demand of You
,‫דו זאלסט צו באצילן “לא תרצח!” זאגן‬ That You tell bacillae “Do not murder!”
,‫קאטאסטראפעס צו ווילדעווען פארזאגן‬ Avert catastrophe and rampage,
!‫ פון חיות פאריאגן‬,‫בלוטדארשט פון מענטשן‬ Chase away bloodthirst in man and beast! 91
91
It is highly plausible that the song, published in 1933, is to be read

as a protest against the great violence that was currently unfolding in
German society. Heschel asks God to intervene in order to stop the
viruses that destroy humanity. He is bewildered and wants to counter
this sick violence in man and beast.
Yet Heschel did not analyze the phenomenon of German
totalitarianism as did Buber, who saw in Kierkegaard’s Enkelte
a figure who did not engage with others. In his own relation to
Kierkegaard, Heschel also highlights the problem of Kierkegaard’s
dilemmatic thinking. But he, in turn, concentrates more upon the
gap between man and God than upon the gap between man and
man: “We are not told to decide between ‘Either-Or’, either God or
the world, either this world or the world to come,” he declares. “We
are told to accept Either and Or, God and the world. It is upon us to
strive for a share in the world to come, as well as to let God have a
share in this world.”92
91. Heschel, The Ineffable Name of God, 35.

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On a Suspension of the Ethical

and on the Blessings of Individualism
Another central text in Buber’s oeuvre that is relevant to his

antitotalitarian position concerns the suspension of the ethical. This
text was first published in 1952.93 The title “On a Suspension of the
Ethical” (Von einer Suspension des ethischen) is already suggestive. How
is it possible to put ethics into brackets?
As in “The Question to the Single One,” Buber explicitly discusses
Kierkegaard’s theory of obedience to a higher power, which brings the
human being into a religious sphere that surpasses the ethical one. In
the present text, he further debates real-life problems. But now, after the
Shoah, his views become more incisive. Kierkegaard qualified Abraham
as “knight of faith” because Abraham surpassed the boundary of ethics
and general rules in order to enter the realm of faith as a single one. In his
Christian reading of this story, Kierkegaard did not take into account that
God only “tempted” Abraham and that He was satisfied with Abraham’s
willingness to sacrifice his son. Ultimately, God prevented the act. Buber
writes that people imitate the Absolute, a phenomenon already attested to
in the Bible. False absolutes always command to sacrifice the thing that is
dearest, with the aim of achieving a different goal. One cannot but think
about what happened in Germany when Buber concludes his article with
the disturbing idea that one still sacrifices to Moloch in order to form and
unite societies, as if fratricide could pave the way to fraternity.
It would be easy to provide Hasidic parallels for what Buber writes on
the binding of Isaac and on the nonsacrifice as a religious act. Elsewhere,
Ephraim Meir has compared Buber’s thought with that of Elimelekh
of Lizansk and with that of Mordechai Joseph Leiner of Isbica.94 The
93. This text on Kierkegaard’s interpretation of the binding of Isaac appears in Eclipse of
God (Gottesfinsternis), which was first published in English in 1952 and in German in
1953. See Buber, Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation Between Religion and Philosophy
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1952); and Gottesfinsternis, in Werke I, 589–593.
94. Meir, “Buber’s Dialogical Interpretation of the Binding of Isaac — between Kierkegaard
and Hasidism” (Hebrew), in The Faith of Abraham. In the Light of Interpretation
throughout the Ages, M. Hallamish, H. Kasher, and Y. Silman, eds. (Ramat-Gan: Bar-
Ilan University Press, 2002), 281–293.
— 52 —
former wrote that Abraham as the “foundation of the world” with the
tremendous power of his prayer, knew that at the end Isaac would be
saved. The latter wrote that Abraham had to find out what God, Elohim,
revealed to him “in an unclear mirror,” meaning in a way that had to be
clarified. In order to understand the revelation, Abraham purified himself
from any outside interest, even that of being the father of his son, but
finally he acted according to his paternal feelings, which paradoxically
confirmed Divine will, that is, that he did not have to sacrifice his son.
Also, even disregarding possible Hasidic influences or parallels, Buber’s
protest against a religiosity devoid of humanism is loud and clear.
Sacrificing sons seems to be an eternal human temptation, which
according to Buber was already dealt with in the Bible as something
that is forbidden for every Jew after Abraham and, in fact, for every
human being. In the framework of his protest against totalitarianism,
the Binding of Isaac functioned as a prototypical story, which forbids
the sacrificing of our dear ones or the dearest in ourselves. Buber’s
dialogical teaching shows a different way: Abraham could only say to
God “Here I am” (Gen. 22:1) because he also said to his son “Here I
am” (Gen. 22:7). God and men are not opposed to each other, they are
rather partners. In Buber’s eyes, the eternal You is only approachable
in I-you relationships and in societies that respect plurality and create
a dialogue with other societies. No greater contrast could be imagined
than the ways of such societies and that of totalitarian regimes, which
separated politics and morality.
Buber’s focus on the interhuman relationship can be found in
Heschel too, who, more than Buber, paralleled this relationship with
the bond between man and God: “To be is to stand for, and what man
stands for is the great mystery of being His partner. God is in need of
man,” he writes.95 Both thinkers presented man as the partner of God,
yet, this partnership had a different theological connotation in Heschel:
man is, for Heschel, a need of God.
Heschel’s interpretation of Kierkegaard, in contrast to Buber,
positively evaluates Kierkegaard’s position: like the Kotzker rebbe,
Kierkegaard stresses the interiority of the soul. What interests the
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Kotzker rebbe and Kierkegaard is less the relationship to fellow man

but rather the individual face-to-face with the Absolute. Individualism
characterizes their positions; real religiosity would not exist in the
masses, in their vision, but instead in the souls of an elite.
Heschel learned from two masters: the Ba’al Shem Tov, who loved
every creature immensely, and the Kotzker rebbe, who searched out the
truth without compromise. The rebbe of Kotzk as well as Kierkegaard
developed an anti-institutional attitude in which they protested against
a frozen religiosity and the norms of the masses. Heschel’s appreciation
of the rebbe of Kotzk and consequently of Kierkegaard, who both lauded
the individuality of the religious person, is in contrast to Buber, who
did not appreciate Kierkegaard because he was afraid of the sacrifice of
the dearest in oneself, which could become a prototypical example in a
totalitarian society. For Buber, the individuality of man was immediately
linked to the fellow man. For Heschel, the individuality of man and even
the separation from the masses in loneliness was a necessity in order to
come to the truth: each individual had a special, relevant role toward
God.96 This does not imply that Heschel neglected the concern with
the other, an area in which one could surpass himself, but that focus
must be centered also on the individual, who does not merely negate
the other but is the source that gives man his unique quality. 97 True,
the existence of others is a prerequisite for the I to know itself, but in
order to know the others, one must, in turn, know oneself.98 From the
Ba’al Shem Tov, Heschel learned the anti-Kierkegaard lesson that one
had to be connected with others; from the Kotzker rebbe he inherited
the thought that man was an irreducible individual. Man is not alone
not only because he is the object of God’s care, but also because he is
situated in a social context.
In his personal life, Heschel considered loneliness as both a
burden and a blessing, indispensable for the stillness that he needed
to confront the perplexities in life. Three events changed his attitude.
96. Even-Chen, “Lonely Man of Faith? Loneliness in the Poetry of Abraham Joshua
Heschel as Background for His Later Thought” (Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Bet Morasha,
forthcoming).
— 54 —
There were first the numerous onslaughts upon his inner being, which
deprived him of his ability to remain in his stillness. The second event
was “the discovery that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself.”
The third event that changed his attitude toward social involvement
was his study of the prophets. He discerned that there is an immense
agony in the world, and that one has to give a voice to the poor in order
“to prevent the desecration of the soul and the violation of our dream
of honesty.”99
Nevertheless, although he talks about the loneliness that he
appreciates in Kierkegaard, Heschel joins Buber’s thoughts about the
problem of the sacrifice of Isaac. In Heschel’s account of the Binding
of Isaac, Abraham first enthusiastically followed the Divine will to
sacrifice his son, but the greatest sacrifice still had to take place: to hear
to the voice of the angel that prevented him from sacrificing his son.100
Abraham was ready to sacrifice his son, to follow God’s command,
but at the moment of the sacrifice itself he had to destroy the entire
vision he had erected. Returning to the world, however, his point
of view had changed forever. Abraham had had to leave everything
in order to become an individual before God, but at the same time,
he had to know that this is impossible without his son.101 After that
greatest temptation, Abraham returned to the world. Finally, Buber
and Heschel unite in their account of the Binding of Isaac, positing
that the most important thing is that Abraham embraced his son,
and with his son, he embraced the world.
The Spirit of Israel
Buber not only criticized totalitarianism but also wanted to shape reality
by permanently promoting the soft power of dialogue, through which
man can be transformed. The quintessence of his own socio-religious
vision on the relation between politics and ethics is to be found in a
99. Heschel, “The Reasons for My Involvement in the Peace Movement,” in Moral Grandeur,
224.
101. Even-Chen, The Binding of Isaac — Mystical and Philosophical Interpretations of the Bible
(Hebrew) (Tel-Aviv: Yediot Aharonot and Chemed, 2006), 201–226.
— 55 —
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speech made in Jerusalem in 1939, where he talks about “The spirit

of Israel and the world of today” (“Der Geist Israels und die Welt von
heute”).102 Buber dreamed about the creation of a dialogical society. He
brings together faith and political behavior, Sinai and society, Israel and
the Kingdom of God. He defines the spirit of Israel as a way of living in
which one does not confuse the nation, which constitutes an expanded
ego with the Kingdom of God itself. It is Israel’s destiny to bring the
Kingdom of God into the world and to fight the idolatrous idea of the
nation in its role as a godhead.
However, Buber warns his Jerusalem public that the Jewish people
do not “have” the spirit that unites human beings. This spirit has to be
attained and may, in fact, take possession of us. He explains the hatred
of the Jews as a consequence of the fact that nations want the God of
Israel, yet not His high demands. The only way to solve this problem
lies in the realization of God’s demands to come to unity and to create
an authentic society.
In an outline of a complicated history of ideas, Buber describes how
the horrible events of the thirties, which are for him the result of the
survival of Gnostic ideas, came into being. Jews always distinguished
between creation, revelation, and redemption. For Paul of Tarsus,
however, revelation and redemption became one in the person of
Christ. A few decades later, Marcion separated in a Gnostic way the
Old Testament from the New One: the redeeming God would have no
connection at all with the Creator. In Marcion’s theology, this world is
worthless, and only God’s grace is able to redeem men. Buber remarks
that the Church did not accept Marcionism, but in the twentieth century
Adolf von Harnack drew consequences from the Gnostic thesis when
he branded the “preservation” of the Old Testament in the Protestant
canon as “the consequence of religious and ecclesiastical paralysis.”103
102. Buber, “Der Geist Israels,” 13–33.

103. See A. von Scheliha on Adolf von Harnack. The liberal theologian von Harnack (1851–
1930) contrasted the light of the Jesus with the darkness of the Judaism at that
time. Jesus could not be understood without Judaism, for Jews had the prophets
and monotheism, but unfortunately they added much more (aber sie hatten leider noch
sehr viel anderes daneben). Their religion became like a complaint (beschwert), pale
(getruebt), distorted (verzerrt), and unefficient (unwirksam) (A. von Scheliha, “Adolf
— 56 —
Buber concludes his historico-theological survey with the perception

that, three years after Harnack’s death in 1930, his ideas became reality
through violence and terror.104 The dualistic separation of spirit and
world that started with Paul had therefore in Buber’s eyes catastrophic
consequences for Christianity and for Germany, in which the original
unity of the worldly order and the spiritual order was broken.
A genuine people, Buber concludes, is a nation of great peace.
Against the dualism of a redeemed soul in an unredeemed world
stands the reality that one has to live in the concrete world a life of
responsibility in the service of unity (das Leben der Verantwortung im
Dienst der Einheit). In his Jerusalem speech, Buber therefore explained
Hitlerism as a Gnostic way of thinking, in which Judaism is rejected
and condemned as too occupied with the reparation of the world,
whereas true “redemption” would lie in a racial and biologist phantasm,
detached from this world. In his own alternative, dialogical thought,
unity had to be achieved in the recognition that a national spirit is
never to be made absolute.
Buber promoted the dialogical man, whereas Heschel characterized
his own ideal of man, the prophet, as the “individual who said No to
his society, condemning its habits and assumptions, its complacency,
von Harnack und Leo Baeck. Zwei liberale Theologen, ein verpasster Dialog,” in S. von
Kortzfleisch, W. Gruenberg, T. Schramm, eds., Wende-Zeit im Verhaeltnis von Juden
und Christen [Berlin: EBVerlag, 2009], 176). Von Harnack perceived Judaism through
“Paulinian glasses” with focus upon critique on the Law and neglect of the perspective
of the history of salvation that gave an autonomous place to Judaism (182).
104. Already in “The Faith of Judaism,” which was first published in 1933, Buber notes (263)
that John (not Paul!) wove revelation and redemption into one and so substituted a
dyad for the traditional triad creation-revelation-redemption. Marcion tore the Creator
away from the redeeming God. He reduced the triad creation-revelation-redemption
to one moment: Jesus became both the revelator and redeemer, who freed humanity
from the bad material world that had been created by a demiurge. The Old Testament
with its Law was rejected. Buber notes that what started with John and then Marcion
continued in Adolf von Harnack’s theology (Buber, “The Faith of Judaism,” in The
Writings of Martin Buber, ed. W. Herberg [New York: Meridian Books, 1958], 263). In
his Jerusalem speech of 1939, he more directly defines Marcion’s Gnostic dualism as a
spiritual contribution to the destruction of Israel. Marcion’s spiritual gift to emperor
Hadrian was continued by Adolf von Harnack. His gift now changed hands, and this
Messianic thought that negated the world prepared the domain for Hitler’s actions
against the Jews. Buber, “Der Geist Israels,” 27–31.
— 57 —
--------------------------------------------------------------------------   Chapter I --------------------------------------------------------------------------
waywardness, and syncretism.”105 He thus rescued the individual from

the masses, who could never neutralize the prophetic task of reconciling
man and God. As Buber’s responsible individual, the prophet of Heschel
often swam against the stream. The prophetic “no” was and is necessary,
since “man’s true fulfillment depends upon communion with that
which transcends him.”106 In spite of all the parallels between Buber’s
individual and Heschel’s prophet, Buber’s social rescue of the individual
out of a totalitarian society is nevertheless different from Heschel’s view
on the social and political protests that will follow from the prophet’s
openness “to the presence and emotion of the transcendent Subject.”107
In his utopian thought, Buber considers the people of Israel to be the
antitotalitarian pioneering force in the world, who are able to unite the
world. Heschel also believed in the possibility of bringing salvation to
the world. In his poems, he attributed to himself, as a son of the Jewish
people who bore within them prophetic powers, a quasi-messianic
function.108 Although his family, especially his mother, expected him
to be a leader of a Hasidic community, Heschel felt an even greater task
was given to him: to be the savior of an entire generation.109
Jacob Teshima, the Japanese student of Heschel, asked him why he
did not accept the invitation of Abraham Joshua Heschel of Brooklyn,
the Kopicziniczer Rebbe, who urged Heschel to succeed him several
times.110 Heschel replied: “I thought that there were other people who
could take the leadership of the Kopicziniczer Hasidim […] So I decided
to leave the care of the Kopicziniczers to the hand of someone else. It is
my duty to care for the world outside of the Tabernacle.”111
The same spirit hovers in the poems of the young Heschel:
105. Heschel. The Prophet, vol. II, xvii.

107. Heschel, The Prophets, vol. II, 89.
108. Even-Chen, “On the Holiness of the People of Israel in the Thought of Abraham Joshua
Heschel,” in M. Poorthuis and J. Schwartz, eds., A Holy People: Jewish and Christian
Perspectives on Religious Communal Identity (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006), 361–377.
110. Jacob Y. Teshima, “My Teacher,” in No Religion Is an Island: Abraham Joshua Heschel
and Interreligious Dialogue in America, 1940–1972, eds. Harold Kasimow and Byron L.
Sherwin (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991), 65.
111. Ibid.
— 58 —
,‫דאך טיילמאל ווערט מיין פילן גרויס‬ Yet sometimes my feelings grow large,
,‫ איך בין די תיבה‬:‫אז מיר דאכט‬ And I think: I am the ark,
‫ווו אלע ברואימס תשוקה ווארט‬ Where every creature’s craving waits,
‫ שפארט‬,‫ איר קלאמקע ציטערט‬,‫און מיין הארץ‬ And my heart, its latch trembling,
pounds
.‫און בייגט זיך כסדר אויפצומאכן‬ and constantly bends to open itself.
‫כאטש כ’שטיי אליין גאר אונטער טיר‬ Though I stand alone behind the door
— ‫ביי די סודות פון מיין בענקשאפט‬ With the secrets of my longing —
.‫קלאפן אלע דאך ביי מיר‬ yet everyone raps at my door.
In another poem, called “People’s Eyes Wait,” he promised himself:
‫דרייסט‬-‫און איך האב צוגעזאגט פארעקשנט‬ And I, with stubborn boldness, have promised
— ‫אז כ’וועל די צארטקייט אויף דער וועלט פארמערן‬ that I will increase tenderness in this world —
‫ אז וועל נאך אומגיין אויף דער ערד‬,‫און מיר דאכט‬ And it seems to me that I will, in time
Move on through this earth
‫מיט ליכט פון אלע שטערן‬ With the brightness of all the stars
!‫אין מיינע אויגן‬ In my eyes! 112
112
In his poems, Heschel expresses loneliness, but he also mentions feeling

responsible and burdened with the enormous task of bringing salvation
to the world. Later on, he considered the entire Jewish nation as a
people who had a prophetic task. In his introduction of The Prophets, he
describes how he still thinks that the method of phenomenology used
in Die Prophetie is sound.113 Nevertheless, he adds:
I have long since become wary of impartiality, which is itself a way of

being partial. The prophet’s existence is either relevant or irrelevant. If
irrelevant, I cannot truly be involved in it; if relevant, then my impartiality
is but a pretense. Reflection may succeed in isolating an object; reflection
itself cannot be isolated. Reflection is part of a situation.
112. Heschel, The Ineffable Name of God, 119, 39.

113. Perlman argues that one cannot understand Heschel’s work without recognizing its link to
phenomenology (Perlman, Revelation, 1–2). Nathan Rotenstreich relates to Heschel’s doctoral
thesis “Die Prophetie” and notes: “We find in Heschel the awareness of his indebtedness to
phenomenology when he explicitly says that he is concerned with the description of the
essence of prophetic assertions and not with their truth” (Rotenstreich, “On Prophetic
Consciousness,” The Journal of Religion 54, no. 3 (1974): 186. In The Prophets, however,
Heschel goes beyond phenomenology. John C. Merkle remarks that Heschel only uses the
phenomenological method in a first stage. He is not merely interested in understanding a
phenomenon but also in clarifying its existence; and in this way, he goes beyond the borders
of the phenomenological method. See Merkle, The Genesis of Faith (New York and London:
Macmillan Publishing Company and Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1985), 32.
— 59 —
--------------------------------------------------------------------------   Chapter I --------------------------------------------------------------------------
The situation of a person immersed in the prophets’ words is one of

being exposed to a ceaseless shattering of indifference, and one needs a
skull of stone to remain callous to such blows.114
In his situational thinking, Heschel thus develops a sympathetic view

of the prophets that identify with God’s pathos: the people of Israel
have the task to realize God’s vision in the world.
In his 1935 correspondence with Buber, mentioned in the
foreword, Heschel criticizes him, for giving to the prophetic existence
a paradigmatic meaning instead of a real one. The prophet does not
merely illustrate something, Heschel declares, he is a partner of God,
and as such his existence has special significance. For Buber, the
unification of the world was the aim in society; for Heschel, the aim
was to realize God’s dream of the world as understood by the different
prophets and by prophetic people until today.
How to Be in the Land of Israel
Buber highlighted the necessity of a critical dimension in the notions

of the people and the land Israel. Leaving Germany for Zion in 1938,
he saw the land of Israel as a place where social justice could be realized
and where cooperation between different people could come into being.
Israel was for him destined not to assimilate into the nationalisms of
the nations. Buber was a critical, nonideological participant in the
Zionist movement. Socialism would replace a form of individualism
that praises a solitarian existence, and individual responsibility would
always contest collectivism.115. Is not also the gorilla an individual and
aren’t termites a collective? A third way was possible, however, a way
that leads to a real person and a real community.
In his utopian, dialogical thinking, Buber could not agree with group
collectivism or collective egoism. National life would have to take into
account supranational, Divine demands (see Judges 8:23). He expected
from Israel no less than that it would play a central function in the
114. Heschel, The Prophets, vol. I, xii.

115. Buber, Pfade in Utopia (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1950). Buber finished this
book in 1945; it wasn’t published until 1950.
— 60 —
creation of a new world.116 He believed that the spirit could influence

reality and pave the way to a vision in which politics and ethics are
interwoven.
The challenge of Buber’s social and political thinking remains
relevant until today, inter alia in the Middle East, as well as in the
European Union. At a public hearing in the European Parliament on
September 18, 2008, Mr. Pavel Zacek from the Prague-based Institute
for Totalitarian Studies stressed the idea that Europe as a whole has not
come to terms with its own past. The Nazi and Communist totalitarian
regimes, he said, are “the main disasters that blighted the 20th century.”
The plague and threat of totalitarianism has to be neutralized, not
only by hard power but also by the soft power of the creation of
dialogical situations. Buber resisted collectivism, which is today called
totalitarianism. The temptation of a total thought and organization
satisfying everybody and giving all men a feeling of grandiosity because
of their belonging to an all-absorbing matrix is attractive, especially in
religious fanatical movements. Buber’s antitotalitarian thought offers
an antidote for the addiction to a homogeneous society that suppresses
dialogue, which unites different people and groups.117
Buber did not have the last word on the renewal of societies, but he
contributed to the construction of civilization in his emphasis on the
irreplaceable responsibility of all in each and every period of history.
Since civilization is something that can be destroyed, progress is never
guaranteed and regression may take place. The idea of a civilization
as a process of creating and maintaining the link between people
is present in what one could call Buber’s “active memory.”118 Active
memory asks for alertness, and Buber was attentive to the possible
deterioration and decomposition of the social bond between people.
116. In this sense, Buber’s view is close to that of Heschel, who wrote that the meaning of
the State of Israel in prophetic terms lies in the redemption of the entire humanity. See
Heschel, Israel, 225.
117. Meir, Reading.
118. See Meir, Towards an Active Memory. Society, Man and God after Auschwitz (Hebrew)
(Tel-Aviv: Resling, 2006) and Meir, “On a New Age in Democracy as Part of the
Holocaust Memory,” Review of Shmuel Trigano, The Democratic Ideal and the Shoah,
trans. Gila Walker (Albany: Suny Press, 2009), in SPME, September 14, 2010.
— 61 —
--------------------------------------------------------------------------   Chapter I --------------------------------------------------------------------------
He was conscious that negative, destructive forces are real, and that
civilization might be destroyed. The kernel of an “active memory”
is correlative to the reflection on what makes a human being really
human. For Buber, the nearness and presence of one human being to
another, of one group to another, in other words, dialogical life, is the
theme of such a reflection. Courageous opposition to totalitarianism
is necessary in the creation of an active memory. The reaction against
discrimination, segregation, and collectivism, as it comes to the fore
in central texts in Buber’s oeuvre analyzed above, as well as in Buber’s
1939 response to Mahatma Gandhi,119 who proposed that the Jews
who wanted to flee Germany remain there and pursue an attitude of
radical nonviolence (satyagraha or soul force) to the Nazi atrocities, is
vital in an active memory. In an integrative, non-dilemmatic approach,
realistic and idealistic approaches are not opposed, but rather they
complement each other and are both necessary in navigating conflict
management efforts.120
Responsibility for God’s Kingdom
In the 1944 article “The Meaning of This War (World War II),” Heschel
writes about fascism, but he explicitly says that fascism cannot serve
“as an alibi for our conscience.” In a critical way, he looks upon our own
acts. All of mankind is involved, and all men are responsible:
We have failed to fight for right, for justice, for goodness; as a result we
must fight against wrong, against injustice, against evil. We have failed to
offer sacrifices on the altar of peace; now we must offer sacrifices on the
altar of war.121
119. Buber’s letter is dated February 24, 1939. It was sent together with a similar letter by
Judah L. Magnes, president of the Hebrew University on March 9, 1939. Gandhi did
not reply. Martin Buber and Judah Magnes, Two Letters to Ghandi (Jerusalem: Reuben
Mass, 1939); Glatzer and Mendes-Flohr, The Letters of Martin Buber, 476–486.
120. Meir, “An Integrated Strategy for Peacebuilding: Judaic Approaches” (together with
Ben Mollov and Chaim Lavie), Die Friedens-Warte. Journal of International Peace and
Organization, 82, 2–3 (2007): 137–158.
121. Heschel, “The Meaning of This War,” in Moral Grandeur, 210.
— 62 —
Buber too has a critical view of the Jewish people itself, and he
expresses his thought that the Jewish people had not fulfilled the task
he envisioned for them and that the life of the people did not become
a life of justice.122 Heschel was even more explicit in talking about the
responsibility of all for the terrible situation.
In 1936, Heschel published in Berlin “The Meaning of Repentance.”
The article deals with the Days of Awe. It begins: “When we pray we
fulfill a sacred function. At stake is the sovereignty and the judgment
of God.”123 These sentences surprise the reader because one is used
to seeing the praying individual as the one who stands trial. What is
Heschel’s intention? Does he mean to say that Divine rule and power
are at peril? Heschel answers this question by addressing the nature of
the relationship between the Creator and his creation. The eternal God
existed before creation, and indeed creation reflects His will:
Sovereignty can exist only in a relationship. Without subordinates this

honor remains abstract. God desired kingship and from that will creation
emerged. But now the kingly dignity of God depends upon us.124
God’s rule is dependent upon human recognition. Man may revolt and
“overthrow” God’s rule, in which case God shall no longer be “King.” In
reference to his own times, Heschel writes:
The establishment or destruction of the kingly dignity of God occurs now

and in the present, through and in us. In all that happens in the world, in
thought, conversation, actions, the kingdom of God is at stake.125
Heschel alludes to the immense power held by man. His is not an

abstract philosophical thought, for he writes his words in the midst of
an era of dire anti-Semitism which casts doubt over the reign of God.
In the rage of these terrible times, the people of Israel have to assume
the Divine rule. Although Heschel does not address the question of
God’s absolute power directly, it seems that in creating the world God

123. Heschel, “The Meaning of Repentance,” in Moral Grandeur, 68.
124. Ibid.
125. Ibid.
— 63 —
--------------------------------------------------------------------------   Chapter I --------------------------------------------------------------------------
willingly chose to minimize His own power. As a consequence, man is

responsible for God’s Kingdom.126
In the article of 1944, with the problematic title “Meaning of This
War,” Heschel writes that the Nietzschean will to power reigns and that
we worshipped force:
Good and evil, which were once as real as day and night, have become
a blurred mist. In our everyday life we worshipped force, despised
compassion, and obeyed no law but our unappeasable appetite. The
vision of the sacred has all but died in the soul of man. And when greed,
envy, and the reckless will to power, the serpents that were cherished in
the bosom of our civilization, came to maturity, they broke out of their
dens to fall upon the helpless nations.127
The remedy for the present situation lies therefore in Heschel’s eyes in
the human responsibility for the Kingdom of God upon earth.
Heschel wrote magnificent pages on the sublime value of freedom,
which is “an act of engagement of the self to the spirit, a spiritual event.” 128
Freedom, which has to be actualized again and again, is a great value that can
be trampled down in society. Heschel is aware of the danger of delegating
power to any human institution in order to make ultimate decisions. The
refusal to do so “derives its strength either from the awareness of one’s
mysterious dignity or from the awareness of one’s ultimate responsibility.”
The vulgarization of society could “deprive man of his ability to appreciate the
sublime burden of freedom. Like Esau he may be ready to sell his birthright
for a pot of lentils.”129 Against this enslaving of man in totalitarian systems,
Heschel endeavors to bring man to his freedom.
Heschel, as Buber, thought that all of life had to be sanctified, and
that religion is not limited to some spiritual realm in human culture.
126. Even-Chen, “God’s Omnipotence and Presence in Heschel’s Philosophy,” Shofar 26, no.
1 (2007): 41–71. This idea of the contraction of God’s power is also present in Hans
Jonas (1903–1993) who, however, considered the contraction to be more radical since
he did not count with any Divine intervention. See Jonas, “Der Gottesbegriff”; Meir,
Active Memory, 61–65.
127. Heschel, “The Meaning of This War,” in Moral Grandeur, 210.
128. Heschel, “Religion in a Free Society,” in The Insecurity of Freedom: Essays on Human
Existence (1958: reprint, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1966), 16.
129. Ibid.
— 64 —
Religiosity in that sense would have to take into account politics. The
weakness of many systems of moral philosophy for Heschel lies in their
isolationism, as if neutral acts were possible. One does not have to seek
morality in a certain region and to cut it off from the rest of life.130 It
should pervade all life. As Rosenzweig linked the Divine commandments
to the whole of Jewish life and as Buber linked religiosity to the whole
man in all his acts, Heschel linked morality to the entire life. To be or
not to be is not the question: how to be and how not to be is the essence
of the question.131
Like Buber, Heschel had a utopian vision of the return of the
Jews to the land of Israel. He thought that this return marked “a
major event within the mysterious history that began with a lonely
man — Abraham — whose destiny was to be a blessing to all nations.”
The present generation had “to assert that promise and that destiny:
to be a blessing to all nations.”132 Heschel saw the Zionist enterprise
as “a chapter of an encompassing, meaning-bestowing drama.” The
Bible would be “an unfinished drama,” and being in the land involved
“sharing the consciousness of the ancient biblical dwellers in the land,
a sense of carrying out the biblical legacy.”133 To be sure, Heschel did
not identify the State of Israel with the messianic promise, but for
him it did make the messianic promise plausible134 since the ultimate
meaning of being in the land had to be formulated in terms of the
vision of the prophets who had dreamed about the redemption of all
man. “The religious duty of the Jew is to participate in the process of
continuous redemption, in seeing that justice prevails over power, that
awareness of God penetrates human understanding.” 135 In our chapter
on Zionism, we will come back to the attitudes of Heschel and Buber
on the land of Israel. Meanwhile, it is clear that both thinkers did not
limit the scope of their visions to the importance of being in the land,
for how to be in the land was the deeper question.

131. Heschel, Israel, 225.
— 65 —
--------------------------------------------------------------------------   Chapter I --------------------------------------------------------------------------
Heschel and Buber both urged their readers to respond to the

Divine address “Where are you?” They approached the human being as
called upon. Buber in I and Thou proceeded from the human being to the
Divine presence, whereas Heschel started the other way around, with
the Divine vision of man. Buber considered the I as authentic when it
is in relation; Heschel wanted to save primarily a person’s individuality
and viewed the I as object of God’s care. In the thoughts of both men,
authentic religiosity had implications for society and politics, and the
people of Israel occupied a special place in establishing the kingdom of
God. Their standpoints on society and politics and on the role of the
people of Israel can be understood more particularly through depicting
the common ground and divergences in their approach to God, with
which the next chapter deals.
— 66 —
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Between Heschel and Buber. A Comparative

Book · January 2012

modern Jewish philosophy View project

Fischer research View project

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We wish to thank Professor Norbert M. Samuelson of the Harold and

1. For a discussion of this notion, see Martina Urban, “Deconstruction Anticipated:

understanding of the Hebrew Bible as well as their views on the Divine

on prophetology and Divine pathos. Buber answered Heschel’s letter

7. The article, republished in Die Chassidische Botschaft, is a collection of essays that

for instance, what Buber thought about the phenomenon of tradition.15

option.20 At Heschel’s urging in June 1938,21 Buber wrote a letter

being a research fellow29 — and that he had received a “non quota visum”

29. Letter of 22.11.1939, Buber Archive, 290: 35.

36. Letter of June 13, 1946, Buber Archive 290: 43.

a System of Symbols” in the same year.42 Scholarly divergences between

42. Finkelstein, “ System of Symbols.”

“A Jew cannot live by such a conception of revelation. Buber does not

And yet, Heschel thought about Buber as “a person of depth and

who strive for unity.

take into consideration the entire scope of his voluminous writing,

of indebtedness being a response to transcendent requiredness.”7

Buber’s most influential philosophical work was I and Thou. In this

Giroux, 1951), 78.

conceptualization. Its vocation would lie in witnessing to the primal act

Heschel’s thought, in contrast, the relationship with the Divine comes

As we mentioned in the foreword, the title of the poem is parallel to

the world. This is a prophetic call. Heschel is ready to fight in order to

name: “Your name is already my home.” In writing this, Heschel nearly

24. Heschel, The Ineffable Name of God, 58–59.

the human being as an “object of God’s attention.”29 A human being

“I-you” and “I-it” versus the “I” as “It”

In I and Thou, Buber wants his readers to leave their individuality,

29. Hechel, “The Meaning of Repentance,” in Moral Grandeur, 69.

of human existence in I and Thou.32 Economic, political, and scientific

become an It.”36 The “melancholy” is sublime, but it nevertheless retains

36. Buber, I and Thou, 68; Ich und Du, 20.

the Buberian contrast between “I-it” and “I-you.”45 Theunissen thinks

celebrating, but inversely, it may be receptive and undetached from the

heaven and earth, Heschel avoids the pitfall of Gnosticism. He contests

53. Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, 39.

the ineffable that is “in search of a song.”57 In Heschel’s view, radical

57. Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, 41.

Antitotalitarian Dialogical Anthropology

Further shaping his dialogical anthropology after I and Thou,

by going to the root of the problem, namely, the seeming incapacity of

62. Heschel, The Ineffable Name of God, 57.

expands his existence by ‘bearing his fellow-man’s burden.’ As we have

69. Heschel, Who Is Man, 47.

Individualism and Collectivism

Together with other German-Jewish thinkers such as Mendelssohn,

75. Buber, Das Problem, 158–169.

other (Mitmensch) in his otherness (in all seiner Anderheit) is capable

own Jewish tradition. Of course, dialogical behavior is not exclusively

77. Heschel, Who Is Man, 57.

more attention upon illnesses of the American society, such as the

The Temptation of Nationalistic Egoism

As pointed out by Paul Mendes-Flohr, Buber developed a universalistic

sought the realization of unity.86

Judaism, Newly Formulated

Buber rethought several central categories of the Jewish tradition, such

86. Buber, “Der Geist Israels,” 18–19.