Renewing the Jewish Past: Buber on History and Truth

Abstract

In his 1922 / and Thou Martin Buber presents himself in role of physician engaged in curing humanity's of sickness.1 Humanity is sick, Buber claims, because people have lost access to their fundamental state of being, their orientation, which he describes in this text as I-thou relation and later as dialogical situation. In his essay Renewal of Judaism published in his 1911 Drei Reden uber das Judentum Buber addressed what he called the danger to Jewish people: that it may lose life of spirit,2 a danger that anticipates his more general and not ethnically specific 1922 characterization of our times of sickness.3 The question that I'd like to address in this essay is: what is relation between Buber's view of a of specifically Jewish past and claims about ontological truth that he would develop more broadly in / and Thou as well as many of his later philosophical works (including first and foremost his most philosophical works Das Problem des Menschen and Gottesfinsternis)! In Renewal of Judaism Buber describes his view of Jewish renewal this way: