Buber, the Bible, and Hebrew Humanism: Finding a Usable Past

Abstract

In his recent book on American Judaism, Shaul Magid touches briefly on the phenomenon of ba’alei teshuva in the 1960s and 1970s as an example of the appeal of Hasidic teachings as a counter-cultural force. Baal teshuva, literally someone who returns or repents, is a term used to describe non-observant Jews who choose to take on a more traditional lifestyle. Central to the appeal of Hasidism in this era were not ultra-Orthodox Hasidim themselves but rather the worldview of Hasidism as it appeared in the writings of Martin Buber and Abraham Joshua Heschel. As Magid comments, Buber and Heschel “served as bridge figures between…. young, Jewishly illiterate but highly intelligent men and women and the ‘spirituality’ of ‘authentic’ Judaism.”1 The Judaism offered to Western Jews by Buber and Heschel was both foreign and familiar: in their most popular works, they combined the Hasidic texts and teachings of Eastern European Jewry with attention to the spiritual problems of the modern world. Buber, in particular, claimed that Hasidism represented one expression of an eternal essence of Judaism that was all too often absent from mainstream expressions of Jewish religion. In the Hasidic tales he published in German in the early twentieth century, and in his presentations of Hasidism in various essays and books over the rest of his life, he sought to distill that essence and then to re-present it in terms that would engage his modern audience. In 1957, he described the spiritual insights he found in Hasidism: “the kernel of this life is capable of working on men even today, when most of the powers of the Hasidic community itself have been given over to decay or destruction, and it is just on the present-day West that it is capable of working in an especial manner.… From here comes an answer to the crisis of Western man that has become fully manifest in our age.”2