Buber's Elijah as an Allegorical Play

Abstract

The play Elijah (1963), written by the philosopher Martin Buber in his twilight days, represents his diagnosis of the state of humanity at his time. I discuss this play as an allegorical drama, examining it against the background of Buber's rejection of allegory, and demonstrating its implementation of the specific sense Buber gave to the allegoric in "Symbolic and Sacramental Existence in Judaism" (1934). Dramatic, allegorical multilayered agon enables Buber to express the idea of crisis and struggle between the principles of form and formlessness and between decisiveness and hesitation as enabling decision, that is, creation; it enables a simultaneous exploration of the political and the existential, the individual and the collective, as well as the validation of the affinity that Buber identifies between the individual inner struggle and the struggle embodied in history. In the frame of a Biblical play, Buber thus expressed his thoughts about Jewish society in the nascent State of Israel and about post-war Germany, his interpretation of the Cold War. The play renders his philosophical and theological concerns and his interpretation of history, including his own role in it.