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1. The Concept of Spiritual Initiation

Buber’s spiritual initiation is the master key for understanding I and Thou.35 Initiation is particularly potent as a frame of reference for understanding Buber because it grounds the discourse of I and Thou in the concrete reality of Buber’s development in relation to the Hasidic tradition, rather than allowing it to simply float untethered as a nebulous set of philosophical generalizations. It grounds the discourse in the specificity of Buber’s humanity, his own inner struggle and development within his time, place, and circumstances. In I and Thou, Buber was not writing generalities to be reduced to platitudes; rather, he was presenting the process and outworking of his own hard-won spiritual development, his initiation into Hasidic spirituality in its white-hot immediacy.

The concept of initiation has been the subject of rich anthropological and psychological reflection for more than a century. Arnold Van Gennep’s Rites of Passage (1909) highlights a three-part pattern that applies to the modern understanding of initiation: according to this pattern, the initiate separates from society, undergoes a period of inner struggle leading to transformation, and then returns to be reincorporated back into society. Joseph Henderson developed this model by positing an archetype of initiation and seeing the work of analytical psychotherapy as a kind of initiation as it facilitates an individual’s move from one level of holistic self-understanding to another. In this work, the archetype of initiation gives the individual a framework, a reference point, and an impetus for the intentional work of self-development.36 Others, such as Arnold Toynbee and Henri Ellenberger, have written of this pattern of withdrawal, renewal, and return in terms that broaden our understanding of spiritual initiation and creative breakthrough, shedding further light on Buber’s own process.

Toynbee has described the pattern of withdrawal and return, of a turn inward for a period of deep grappling with one’s spiritual roots, followed by a shift back to the outer world and a sharing of the outcome of one’s inner work, to explain how creative innovation becomes a major force that shapes the course of history.37 Toynbee presents the “withdrawal-and-return” of creative individuals as a “non-social experience” that functions as “the very source and fountain-head of creation in social affairs.”38 He invokes a range of figures, including Moses and Confucius, even the hypothetical person who escapes from Plato’s allegorical cave, as examples of this pattern. Through this process of withdrawal and return, such creative personalities are able to cut through the cake of custom and, by confronting the mere imitation of past paradigms and practices, to advance a society to a new configuration of meaning in facing its emerging issues. With this sketch of what appears to be a global phenomenon, Toynbee seems to be conceptualizing at the archetypal level, outlining the process as a kind of transcultural hero’s journey.

Ellenberger brings the anthropological and the psychological discussions of initiation together in his historical study of the breakthroughs of Freud and Jung as the founders of depth psychology.39 Using language fitting for his clinical setting as a psychiatrist, Ellenberger developed this pattern of withdrawal, transformation, and return without reference to Van Gennep or Toynbee, calling it a “creative illness.” Such “creative illnesses,” according to Ellenberger’s analysis, echo the primal reality of shamanic initiation into the spiritual world.40 Where Toynbee emphasized the cultural-historical impact of the phenomenon, Ellenberger, focusing on the inner development of Freud and Jung in particular in the gestation of their theories, builds on its transformative impact for the creative individual. The concept of creative illness is Ellenberger’s answer to the question he poses: “Why could not illness disappear through a transformation into an idea?”41

From the beginning, spiritual initiation has been practiced across the world’s great religious traditions. For example, initiation as practiced during the early centuries of Christianity has a largely forgotten history, yet it is still carried forward in attenuated form in the process of the catechumenate, culminating in baptism as the rite of entry into the community of faith. Spiritual initiation is also carried forward today as the process of entering into diverse spiritual communities, whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist.

Spiritual initiation as a passing from one role in society to another begins with withdrawal from society, followed by a period of inner work and struggle on the part of the initiate that changes or transforms the initiate’s inner, as well as outer, identity. The means of transformation may include an ordeal, a trial of the character of the initiate, as well as a shift within the person often characterized by the symbols of death and rebirth. This shift may be seen as a letting go, surrender, renunciation, or sacrifice of the initiate’s self or self-understanding, and the entry into a new state of being. It is enacted in the transmission of spiritual power from the master to the initiate. Following the three-part pattern, the person who has undergone this transformation returns to society with a new sense of relation to the ultimate as well as a new sense of standing and vocation in the world.

Essentially, spiritual initiation is the participation in spiritual reality that is directly transmitted from a master to an initiate. Traditionally this has been brought about as the culmination of a period set apart for teaching and learning, a process of working toward spiritual realization to which both master and initiate commit themselves. The rite that often marks the culmination of this process is the initiate’s entry into a new standing both in his inner life and in his relation to the spiritual community.

Mircea Eliade presents reading as a necessary modern mode of the initiatory process, because in this, as he puts it, “‘crepuscular age’ . . . we are condemned to learn about the life of the spirit and be awakened to it through books. Erudition is ‘baptism by intellect’.”42 Accordingly, “From the perspective of this new model of initiation, the transmission of secret doctrines no longer implies an unbroken chain of initiatory transmission; the sacred text may be forgotten over the centuries—all that is necessary is that it is rediscovered by a competent reader in order that its message becomes once again intelligible and present.”43

In his 1957 postscript to I and Thou, Buber prescribes just such a practice of initiatory reading to his readers. Through repeated effort with a passage of spiritual writing, the reader moves from the distanciation of reading it as a text from another era to the immediacy of encounter in the present moment. The reader begins to hear the voice of the master in the text and to be present to its presence through the text. The central dynamism of this practice is teshuvah, “turning.”44 Buber gives specific instructions for this practice:

Let [the reader] make present to himself one of the traditional sayings of a master . . . and let him try, as best he can, to take and receive this saying with his ears—as if the speaker had said it in his presence, even spoken it to him. In addition, he must turn with his whole being toward the speaker, who is not at hand, of the saying, which is at hand. This means that he must adopt the attitude which I call the saying of Thou toward the one who is dead and yet living. If he succeeds—and of course his will and his effort are not sufficient for this, but he can undertake it again and again—he will hear a voice, perhaps only indistinctly at first, which is identical with the voice he hears coming to him through other genuine sayings of the same master. Now he will no longer be able to do what he did as long as he treated the saying as an object—that is, he will not be able to separate out of the saying any content or rhythm: he simply receives the indivisible wholeness of what is spoken.45

There are a few crucial elements of this practice: Buber bases it all on a “making present” of the master through his words, as did Eliade; the initiate’s work in this making present involves teshuvah, “turning with one’s whole being toward the speaker”; it involves “repeated effort”: the receiver “tries, as best he can to take and receive this saying with his ears—as if the speaker had spoken it [directly] to him,” addressed him with it; the receiver “simply receives” it in its “spokenness.” There is a risk involved in this effortful practice, for the seeker may or may not succeed (“if he succeeds”) at hearing the voice. Elsewhere, Buber makes clear that the working of “grace” is the decisive factor determining whether or not the transmission takes place.46 This very practice was initiatory for Buber; as we shall see from his own testimony, early on he so read the testament of the great zaddik and founder of the Hasidic movement, the Baal-Shem-Tov, until he knew he was directly addressed by the master. This awareness was the entrée to his original spiritual awakening.

Later, this approach to text became the foundation for the theory behind Buber’s decades-long project of translating the Hebrew Bible into German, in which his goal was to convey the oral qualities of the original Hebrew in modern German. In “The How and Why of our Bible Translation,” an essay written in 1938 during the transitional period of his flight from Nazi Germany and settlement in Israel, Buber amplified his sense of this very reading process.47 Buber writes that he had an easy familiarity with the Hebrew Bible as a child. Then, exposure to German translations of Scripture during his youth and early adulthood alienated him from it for a number of years. A chance encounter with the Hebrew text got him back to reading it aloud, a practice through which he was freed from the text as writing and could take it as miqra, “calling,” “what is spoken.”48 Through this practice, “the book was melting in the voice.” Buber’s goal as reader was “by an experiment risking one’s entire being . . . to re-awaken the spoken word.”49 Buber quotes the words of Franz Rosenzweig to express the intended effect of this practice of reading:

Everywhere the human traits [of Scripture] can, in the light of a lived day, become transparent, so that suddenly they are written for this particular human being into the center of his own heart, and the divinity in what has been humanly written is, for the duration of this heartbeat, as clear and certain as a voice calling in this moment into his heart and being heard.50

Thus, Buber testifies to the power of a particular practice of reading to bring about the dialogical moment, and to teshuvah, “turning,” as its transformative essence, which had been the inner essence of his own initiation into spiritual life.

Buber’s spiritual initiation consisted of two intense periods when he withdrew from his active public life to turn inward and focus on his reading of Hasidic material in quest of his spiritual roots. Each of these phases was precipitated by a significant personal loss. The first of these two periods, from 1903 to 1909 (when Buber was twenty-five to thirty-one years old), was precipitated by Buber’s rupture with Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism who was eighteen years his senior and an early mentor figure. The second period came more than a decade later at the end of World War I, extending from 1919 to 1922 (when he was aged forty-one to forty-four).51 This latter period of withdrawal was precipitated by the brutal political murder of Gustav Landauer, Buber’s close friend from his student days.

Buber characterized this second phase of withdrawal as the time at the end of his watershed years when “all the experiences of being that I had . . . became present to me in growing measure as one great experience of faith.”52 Through this process he could “enter into an independent relationship with being.”53 The fully initiated Buber had come to the position which he characterized as that of the person who “stands in the dual basic attitude that is destined to him as a man: carrying being in his person, wishing to complete it, and ever-again going forth to meet worldly and above-worldly being over against him, wishing to be a helper to it. [In this stance,] being true to the being in which and before which I am placed is the one thing that is needful.”54

2. Buber’s First Period of Withdrawal: His Spiritual Initiation

Buber’s involvement in the Zionist movement and his subsequent withdrawal from it led to his first transformative breakthrough. His accounts of these events show how Theodor Herzl became a foil for his initiation: Buber’s relationship with Herzl, their disagreement which emerged over time, and their final parting of the ways spurred him toward his inner quest for his spiritual roots in Judaism. When Buber became active in the Zionist movement in 1898, he became a follower of Herzl. This involvement drew him back to his Jewish cultural roots after his having been immersed in secular academic life during his student years. In 1898–1899, Buber organized a Zionist student group in Leipzig, and in 1899–1900, another one in Berlin. Then, at the high point in their relationship, Herzl appointed him editor of the Zionist publication Die Welt. Yet differences between Buber’s vision of Zionism and Herzl’s became obvious to Buber when they reviewed a map of Palestine together in the spring of 1901.55 Through Buber’s work with Herzl as the leader of the Zionist movement, he saw Herzl both in public and up close. He came to know Herzl as a troubled man who had a narrow political focus and could not brook any disagreement within the movement. The rupture finally came when Herzl took autocratic action at the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basel in August 1903. Buber later wrote an account of their final meeting in which he could see that the man who had been his hero began to take on the proportions of a tragic figure.56 At the Congress Buber made his decisive break with Herzl.57

In a letter Buber wrote to Paula during the Congress, he described his rupture with Herzl as a terrible shock. Then, he introduced the focus that characterized his next six years: “The shock I have experienced is perhaps the worst in my life. . . . One thought dominates me: I want to bring absolute purity and greatness into my life at all costs.”58 Herzl’s leadership and their falling out had made Buber aware of the difference between a leader and a teacher: “Unhappy, certainly, is the people that has no leader, but three times as unhappy is the people whose leader has no teaching.”59 Through these events Buber was primed: he had become ready for the ultimate teacher who, it turned out for him, was Yisroel ben Eliezer, known as the Baal-Shem-Tov, the eighteenth-century zaddik who founded the Hasidic movement.

In an essay entitled “On Modern Initiation into the Spiritual,” Murray Stein discusses what he calls Buber’s “spontaneous spiritual initiation.”60 He suggests Buber’s recoil from Herzl led to his new openness which was necessary for his initiation because, as he put it, a positive outcome of such initiations “mainly depends on an inner openness to the ‘call.’ This readiness to receive the transcendent Other creatively may well increase amidst painful experiences of rupture and loss of significant others . . . . The crisis that ensues from such loss may open the way for the key transformation in a person’s life.”61 For Stein, Buber is a paradigmatic case of loss leading to the openness that is necessary for spiritual initiation.

Buber returned home to Berlin from the Congress, withdrew from his public involvements, and turned inward in order to more deeply pursue his spiritual roots. As he later explained: “At twenty-six, I withdrew myself for five years from activity in the Zionist party, from writing articles and giving speeches, and retired into the stillness; I gathered, not without difficulty, the scattered, partly missing [Hasidic] literature, and I immersed myself in it, discovering mysterious land after mysterious land.”62

This period of withdrawal and study was motivated by his desire to know Judaism with “the immediate knowing, the eye-to-eye knowing of the people in its creative primal hours.”63 Grete Schaeder observed that it was through these years of intensive focus and study that Buber “attained the personal ‘reality’ of a great Jewish teacher.”64

Thus, it was that in 1904, when he was twenty-six, Buber underwent a spontaneous spiritual initiation. It was the most intense spiritual encounter of his life, his supreme meeting with the eternal Thou. He wrote an account of this event in 1918, confirming its continuing significance for him at the end of the war years.65 According to this account, when he was a student and had been pulled in different directions by the lure of modern European culture, “I had neglected my Hebrew, which had become close to my heart as a boy.”66 Yet in his mid-twenties he returned to Hebrew afresh, penetrating to its deeper meaning, “which cannot be adequately translated, at least not into any Western language.”67 He spent time reading in Hebrew,

at first again and again repelled by the brittle, awkward, unshapely material. Gradually overcoming this strangeness, I began discovering its character and seeing its essence with growing reverence. Then one day I opened the Tzava’at Harivash, [The Testament of Rabbi Israel Baal-Shem, a collection of the sayings of Israel ben Eliezer, the founder of Hasidism] and these words flashed out at me: “May he completely grasp the nature of intentness [German Eifer, Hebrew zerizut]. May he raise himself up from his sleep in intentness, for he has become set apart and has become another person and is worthy to create/testify [zeugen] and has taken on the quality of the Holy One, blessed be He, when He created [erzeugte] His world.”68

When Buber read these words that day, it was as if the voice of the master was calling out to Buber as his listener, inviting him to a life of transformation.

Buber’s spiritual initiation in this encounter begins with an invitation. As part of this invitation, the master names the characteristics of the transformed life. In response to the master’s call, the person becomes his intentness, embodying teshuvah, the turning of one’s whole being to God. This moment is an awakening, a making holy, a “becoming another.” In this transformation, he takes on the nature of the Creator at the moment of creation: he becomes “worthy to create” as a co-creator, a partner with God the Creator, and to testify to the Presence. Both the nature and the power of the person are taken to a new level.

Buber later featured this passage written by the Baal-Shem-Tov in his translation of selections from the Testament which he published under the title “The Baal-Shem-Tov’s Instruction in Intercourse with God,”69 and he added this note on zerizut, “fervor,” or “the state of intentness”: “[It] is the divine attribute of ‘readiness,’ the power to effect what is allotted to one who is created in the image of God. One awakens each morning . . . in the pure state of likeness to God, and on each morning it is up to him, as it was in the primal time, whether he will realize or undercut what has been allotted to him.”70 This intentness, this “readiness to realize,” means standing like a hair trigger before the immediate circumstances one is allotted as a being in the image of God. This is teshuvah.

In Buber’s account of his initiatory experience, he next describes the impact of this call, how the Baal-Shem-Tov’s words deeply engaged his whole being in that moment of reading:

Then it was that, overwhelmed in that instant, I experienced the Hasidic soul. The primally Jewish came upon me, in the darkness of exile flowering to new conscious expression: the image of God in man, grasped as action, as becoming, as task. And this primal Jewish reality was a primal human reality, the substance of human religiosity. Judaism as religiosity, as “piety,” as Hasidut opened to me then. The image out of my childhood, the memory of the zaddik and his community, rose up and illumined me: I understood the idea of the perfect man [der vollkommene Mensch, “the fully realized, whole person”]. And I became inwardly aware of the call to proclaim it to the world.71

With these words Buber explains what transpired with him: the transformation he was reading about widened to include him. In an instant he was overcome with the sense that his soul had become the Hasidic soul. His Jewish identity was quickened as that Hasidic soul, the primal essence of Judaism, came over him: he became conscious of the image of God in himself, not as an entity but as a dynamism: “as action, as becoming, as task.” Yet, he sensed this reality as at once both Jewish and universal, as the quiddity that he calls “religiosity.”72 He uses a series of synonyms which build as intensifiers, the last shifting into Hebrew: Hasidut. At this point, as he entered into the transformation spoken of by the master, he saw into the meaning of a vivid memory that arose for him from his childhood visits to Hasidic villages, that of the zaddik, the spiritual leader, in the midst of his community, as the fully realized, whole person. Buber’s sense of self was engulfed in the sense of Jewish spirituality that came over him. For him this reality became concrete in the figure of the zaddik. As a result, this visionary moment of encounter became his call to bear witness to the human encounter with the eternal Thou before the world.73

This account of Buber’s spiritual initiation shows two things: first, that his tradition-specific spiritual grounding in Hasidism is at one with the universal in his spiritual experience,74 and second, it shows that from the beginning he sensed an imperative to bear witness to the spiritual reality to which he at that moment first awakened.

The elements of this event became the seeds which bore fruit in his writing of I and Thou sixteen years later. First, he sensed himself as “created in the image of God” and he took this reality not as static ontology but as dynamic imperative—“as deed, as becoming, as task.” At the same time, he saw this reality as at once both specific to Judaism, “primal Jewish reality,” and universal, “a primal human reality, the substance of human religiousness.” As he writes it, the vision of the zaddik, the Hasidic master, as perfected or completed human being (or “central man,” the term Buber used in “The Teaching of the Tao”75) opened to him at that moment—both as a goal to attain and as a message to proclaim. Accordingly, this initiatory encounter set Buber on the path of the spiritual life; the imperative to proclaim to others the possibility of such an encounter would eventuate in the means to do so, the language that came to him to express it in I and Thou, in the years ahead. This event, and the language he used to express it in this account in 1918, is strongly echoed in a unique and striking first-person paragraph at the heart of I and Thou,76 and it became the foundation for a major passage expounding Buber’s concept of revelation at the climax of the book.77

Maurice Friedman makes it clear: this account of his spiritual initiation as a Hasid marks “one of the truly decisive moments in Buber’s life. . . . The combination of summons and sending, of revelation and mission, to which Buber later pointed in I and Thou, came for Buber as a single moment of meeting.”78 Buber surely has this moment in mind when he refers to the “supreme encounter” in I and Thou.79 From this time onward this moment stands as the spiritual reference point for Buber on the path that becomes his life of faithfulness.

In this event, reading has become a catalyst of spiritual awakening for Buber, a transforming moment of revelation. In “The Foundation Stone” (1943), his essay on the founding of Hasidism, he returns to this pivotal moment and explains its dynamics, beginning with an exhortation to his readers to “listen” to the text: “Only listen to a saying such as this which made me, over forty years ago, into a Hasid of the Baal-Shem-Tov: ‘He takes unto himself the quality of fervor. . . .’” Buber continues, “Who before the Baal-Shem-Tov . . . has spoken to us thus? I say: to us, for this is what is decisive: he who has heard him feels as though his speech were addressed to him.”80 Here Buber returns to his own experience of initiation to underscore the power of a text to address its readers directly, just as when one person addresses another as Thou. He goes on to disavow that the master’s teaching is “a teaching enclosed in itself, high above our existence, [transmitting] only a ray from the higher worlds, nor is it merely an instruction that shows our soul the path of ascent.”81 Instead, the teaching, as the master’s voice coming by means of the text, “is a help for our concrete life—our life itself is uplifted through the speech directed to us if we listen to it. Reality calls forth reality; the reality of a man who has lived in intercourse [Umgang] with the reality of being in its fullness awakens the reality in us and helps us to live in intercourse with the reality of being in its fullness.”82 This is spiritual transmission, the passing of spiritual quickening from master to student.

This method of reading as turning to a text as Thou involves a kind of mental ascesis. In the introduction to his translation of selections from the Testament of Rabbi Israel Baal-Shem, Buber asserts, “If one really wishes to take in the words of the Baal-Shem in this text, one will do well to forget all that one knows of history and all that one imagines one knows of mysticism and, reading, hearken to a human voice that speaks here and now to those who here and now read.”83 With these words Buber expresses the turn from I-It to I-Thou, the opening of oneself to a text as to a voice that addresses one as Thou.

In an essay titled “Dialogue,” which Buber published in 1929 to clarify the central concepts of I and Thou, he presents a generic account of transformation that does not refer explicitly to his own initiation but yet applies to it. This passage refers to initiation, the initiation that breaks through stereotypes to open the initiate up to the immediacy of dialogue between the above and the below. This step in the process of initiation takes place as “that decisive hour of personal existence when we had to forget everything we imagined we knew of God, when we dared to keep nothing handed down or learned or self-contrived, no shred of knowledge, and were plunged into the night.”84 This forgetting, this letting go of perceptions, is the core of the stripping process the initiate must undergo in order to approach the Face. The plunge into the night is the death that is the prerequisite for the spiritual birth that follows. Buber’s next words mark this rebirth and suggest the subject of consciousness that comes with it: “When we rise out of [the night] into the new life and there begin to receive the signs, what can we know of that which—of him who gives the signs?”85 In the position of the twice-born we can know “only what we experience . . . from the signs themselves. If we name the speaker of this speech God, then it is always the God of a moment.”86 Yet through a process of learning to listen, to read, to interpret, “out of the givers of the signs, the speakers of the words in lived life, out of the moment Gods there arises for us with a single identity the Lord of the voice, the One.”87

In this process of learning to perceive the One, each event of lived experience can come to be taken as another moment in the divine-human dialogue. Such perceiving became the substance of Buber’s mature vision, which he voiced repeatedly as universally dialogical: “God speaks to man in the things and beings that He sends him in life; man answers through his actions in relation to just these things and beings.”88 Every moment of existence has become full as a divine message, calling for a full human response.

While Buber calls his spiritual encounter through reading a “conversion to Hasidism”—this encounter “made me . . . into a Hasid of the Baal-Shem-Tov”89—he makes clear, given his cultural orientation, he could not become a traditional Hasid:

I knew from the beginning that Hasidism was not a teaching which was realized by its adherents in this or that measure, but a way of life, to which the teaching provided the indispensable commentary. But . . . I could not become a Hasid. It would have been an impermissible masquerading had I taken on the Hasidic manner of life—I who had a wholly other relation to Jewish tradition. . . . It was necessary, rather, to take into my own existence as much as I actually could of what had been truly exemplified for me there, that is to say, of the realization of that dialogue with being whose possibility my thought had shown me.90

As a result of the encounter, he fulfills his legacy in a new way. He reconstructs both the Hasidic tradition as it came down to him and his own life in response to it as a revelation of authentically relating to being.

As part of the overall transformation taking place in the young Buber, he continued to focus on the intense study of Hasidism for the next five years, thus building a foundation for his lifelong work as an interpreter and disseminator of the spiritual world of the Hasidim. In all of this work he was inspired by his image of the zaddik as the completed person, as the ideal holy human being, the true helper of mankind.

Thus, Buber’s sense of the summons to proclaim the spiritual life that began with his spiritual initiation is what he carried through to fullness in his writing of I and Thou, as he attests in his postscript:

When I drafted the first sketch of this book . . . I was impelled by an inward necessity. A vision which had come to me again and again since my youth, and which had been clouded over again and again, had now reached steady clarity. This clarity was so manifestly suprapersonal in its nature that I at once knew I had to bear witness to it. Some time after I had received the right word as well, and could write the book again in its final form.91

Beginning then and continuing through his second period of withdrawal, Buber’s vision came to steady clarity and he could present it in his book. The nature of this vision was such that “I knew at once that I had to bear witness to it.” Elsewhere he confirms the direct connection between the “openings” that came to him and the imperative to bear witness to them: “Where I may draw out of primal depths that have opened to me as he who I am, I must acknowledge it.”92 Moreover, the work of proclaiming the vision became central to his existence: “I have . . . let myself be led . . . again and again by the task that has overcome me in the midst of life and will no longer let me go. [My] ‘security’ stands in the command of the task alone.”93

This first period of withdrawal was his spiritual initiation. It was the second, more profound, crisis of loss, the murder of Buber’s friend Gustav Landauer, that brought his spiritual development to its full expression ten years later. This second period of withdrawal was a creative struggle or “illness,” to use Ellenberger’s word, through which Buber forged the tools that were adequate to express his spiritual vision.

3. Buber’s Second Period of Withdrawal: His “Creative Illness”

Buber had his life-changing spiritual awakening in 1904 but, as we have seen, for a long time he lacked the language with which to carry out its mandate to bear witness to it in the world. His crisis of loss at the murder of Landauer and the resulting period of withdrawal completed his equipping for this task.

I and Thou is the product of an intense period in Buber’s life, the period that capped off what Buber marked as the great watershed in his intellectual development. I see this period as the second, culminating phase in which Buber’s initiation into Hasidic spirituality comes to fruition in his work as a witness to it. Writing in retrospect near the end of his life, Buber summed up the transformative experience of the years around the First World War as having a single impact, one to which he sensed he had a responsibility to bear witness:

All the experiences of being that I had during the years 1912–1919 became present to me in growing measure as one great experience of faith. By this is meant an experience that transports a person in all his component parts, his capacity for thought certainly included, so that, all the doors springing open, the storm blows through all the chambers. . . . I have . . . no doctrine . . . to offer. I must only witness for that meeting in which all meetings with others are grounded . . . .94

Like the biblical Job in his confrontation with the whirlwind, Buber withstood the stormy blast of those years, the blast that sifted his whole being. This blast reached its climax with the death of Landauer and the impact of this death on Buber. In the first years of grieving following his loss of Landauer, Buber was able to move through his initial shock and disorientation to a deeper sensitivity to dialogue and to his expression of it as a total orientation in I and Thou. As a result, it is to this blast and its aftermath, taken together as divine-human dialogue, that Buber subsequently stands as witness.

Buber’s deep grief over the loss of Landauer and over the brutality of his murder precipitated his second period of withdrawal from May 1919 to early 1922. Landauer’s brutal murder meant not only the loss of a friend and mentor in whom Buber had confided over the course of their twenty-year friendship; it was also a trauma that deeply impacted Buber because of his capacity to “imagine the real.”95 Stricken with grief, Buber turned inward. Three years later, he had produced I and Thou.

Friedman makes clear that I and Thou was forged in the white heat of Buber’s response to Landauer’s death: “We cannot understand the road to I and Thou adequately without examining the . . . terrible events of [the war] period. The most important of these, not just for I and Thou but, one suspects, for the whole of Buber’s life to come, was the murder of Gustav Landauer.”96 Buber’s grief in response to this loss threw him into a period of creative withdrawal like that outlined by Toynbee and delineated by Ellenberger.

The events of 1918 and 1919 which led to Landauer’s demise were stark. Germany was in political chaos after being defeated in the war. The new revolutionary republic of Bavaria that arose at the end of the war was made very unstable by the in-fighting of political factions on the left, the socialists and the communists, who were vying for control. In November 1918, Landauer went to Munich to serve as an official in the new revolutionary republic. At Landauer’s behest Buber went to Munich for a week the following February. There he participated in intense deliberations among the leftist factions in their struggle over the control of Bavaria.97 Landauer served as a minister of state for a week that April. When the regime he served was then overthrown by the Communists, concerned friends across Germany arranged a safe exit from Bavaria for him, but at the last minute he refused to leave.

By May 7, Buber had not heard from Landauer. He wrote to their friend Fritz Mauthner expressing his deep concern about the lack of news from Landauer. At that point Buber had run out of hope. He and Paula stood ready to go to Meersberg to tend to Landauer’s children if that would be helpful. He ended his letter by expressing his agitation over Landauer’s perilous situation: “During these days and nights I myself have been wandering through sheol.”98 Buber’s use of “Sheol,” the biblical term for the realm of the dead, captures the intensity of his distress at the mere thought of a mishap to his friend Landauer.

It was later disclosed that when the German army swept in on May 1 and retook Bavaria, Landauer had been imprisoned and then brutally bludgeoned to death by right-wing troopers the next day in the prison courtyard.99 He was forty-nine years old.

For many years Buber was silent about the brutal murder of his friend and the weight of grief that he bore in response to it. Friedman stresses the intense impact this loss had on Buber:

Buber’s response to the news of Landauer’s death was probably, next to his ‘conversion’ and the early separation from his mother, the most important single event in his life. Yet this is one “autobiographical fragment” that Buber could not write. [Even forty years later] in 1960 he was still too close to this event to be able to write about it.100

Yet, there were moments in the long years after Landauer’s death when Buber let his guard down. These moments suggest the immense power of this loss and its impact on Buber’s life. Near the end of his life, he confided to Grete Schaeder the deep meaning of this loss for him: “I experienced his death as my own,” revealing that this loss had a lifelong impact.101

In the spontaneity of a dialogue with Carl Rogers at the University of Michigan in 1957, Buber linked his loss of Landauer to the deepening of his sensitivities in interpersonal encounter. Rogers asked Buber, “How have you lived so deeply in interpersonal relationships and gained such an understanding of the human individual?” Buber responded:

In 1918 I felt . . . that I had been strongly influenced by . . . the First World War . . . because I could not resist what went on, and I was compelled . . . to live it. . . . You may call this imagining the real. . . . This imagining [reached its climax in] a certain episode in May 1919 when a friend of mine, a great friend, a great man, was killed by the antirevolutionary soldiers in a very barbaric way, and now again once more—and this was the last time—I was compelled to imagine just this killing, but not in a [visual] way alone, but . . . with my body. And this was the decisive moment, after which, after some days and nights in this state, I felt, ‘Oh, something has been done to me.’ And from then on, meetings with people, particularly with young people, became . . . different. [From then] on, I had to give something more than just my inclination to exchange thoughts and feelings . . . . I had to give the fruit of an experience.102

Here Buber links the brutality of the war with that of Landauer’s murder. He makes clear that the impact of this violence was visceral—Buber “had to feel in his own body every blow that Landauer suffered in that courtyard where he was beaten to death.”103 He relates this experience to his concept of “imagining the real,” which he elsewhere defined as “the capacity to hold before one’s soul . . . what another man is at this very moment wishing, feeling, perceiving, thinking, and not as detached content but in his very reality, that is, as a living process in this man.”104 The image of a major loss as a “deep wounding” was more than a mere metaphor for Buber. Clearly the shock was something he had to live with for quite some time. The immediate kinetic impact of this active imagining of the violence inflicted on his closest friend led to a deepening of Buber’s outlook. This experience of mortality intensified his sense of the deep urgency of each interpersonal encounter and of the great responsibility to address the other in terms of his meeting with destiny. This long-term effect is the product of Buber’s work of mourning, distilled during his years of withdrawal following the murder.

Buber spoke at Landauer’s memorial service shortly after the murder.105 Later that year he gave a talk in Frankfurt called “Landauer and the Revolution” that concludes with an image of Landauer as crucified: “In a church in Brescia I saw a mural whose whole surface was covered with crucified men. The field of crosses stretched to the horizon, and on all of them hung men of all different shapes and faces. There it seemed to me was the true form of Jesus Christ. On one of those crosses I see Gustav Landauer hanging.”106 Buber is most likely referring to the painting entitled I Martiri dell’Ararat in the San Giovanni Evangelista Church that he may have encountered during his year-long sojourn in Italy in 1907–1908. Here his memory of the image of his friend overlaid this work of art. He fuses Landauer with Jesus, whom Buber regarded primarily as a prototypical Jew. Both Jesus and Landauer had been brutally killed for putting their values into action. When Buber spoke at the funeral of Landauer’s daughter Charlotte, eight years later (in 1927), he referred to Landauer’s murder. To him it was an image of the modern era as a low point in history. He connected her life to the “barely graspable meaning of Gustav Landauer’s death. . . . a death in which the monstrous, sheerly apocalyptic horror, the inhumanity of our time has been delineated and portrayed.”107 Buber’s intense characterization of Landauer’s death as a symptom of the spiritual abasement of modernity, expressed here in a heartfelt aside, adds depth to his critique of modernity, a major element of the central section of I and Thou.

Buber later summed up the overall impact of his twenty years of friendship with Landauer in this imperative drawn from Landauer: “Thou shalt not hold thyself back” [Du sollst dich nicht vorenthalten].108 Just as Landauer had not held himself back as a political activist, so Buber learned not to hold himself back in giving voice to his dialogical vision.

The utopian vision Buber and Landauer shared, and which evolved over the course of their friendship, found expression in “The Holy Way,” an essay Buber wrote in 1918. He dedicated it to Landauer’s memory when it was published after his death in 1919. He identified the audience for it in its subtitle: “A Word to the Jews and to the Nations.” Here Buber writes that the task of Jews is to overcome the most fateful assimilation: “the assimilation to the Occidental dualism that sanctions the splitting of man’s being into two realms, . . . the truth of the spirit and the reality of life.”109 The goal of this overcoming is “the realization of the Divine on earth . . . not within man but between man and man. . . . Though it does indeed have its beginning in the life of individual man, it is consummated only in the life of true community.”110 The development from individual to community expressed here is the distinctive mark of the vision of social renewal Buber had shared with his closest friend. This vision bore fruit in I and Thou, which Paul Mendes-Flohr characterized as primarily a book of social theory, “a grammar for the ethical regeneration of Gemeinschaft [community].”111

Grief theory confirms the authenticity of Buber’s response to his loss. Following a loss, the bereaved person tends “to continue in an ongoing and meaningful, but intangible, relationship with the deceased individual.”112 This relationship “often remains a focal point for the rest of the survivor’s lifetime.”113 This continuing bond requires a reworking of the relationship for the sake of maintaining a continuing sense of connection with the deceased loved one. Buber, true to this dynamic of grieving, had a lifelong response to Landauer’s death. As we have seen, he first spoke at Landauer’s memorial service and then at that of Landauer’s daughter eight years later. He also took up his role as Landauer’s literary executor and editor over the course of the ten years following Landauer’s death, editing Landauer’s works as well as his correspondence. These included Landauer’s translation of Meister Eckhart’s Mystical Writings into Modern German (1920), Landauer’s Man Becoming (1921), and Gustav Landauer: His Life in Letters (1929). He also published and wrote works of his own—“The Holy Way” was dedicated to Landauer when it was published in late 1919, and Paths in Utopia (1947), inspired by Landauer, celebrated their shared socialist vision—in fidelity to the values he and Landauer shared. In all of these ways, Buber was a conscious bearer of Landauer’s legacy.

Thus, Buber’s work of mourning in the months and years following Landauer’s death deepened his sense of the tragic in life and of the urgency, the call to decisiveness, and the destiny-shaping power of each present moment. His withdrawal and immersion in the study of Hasidism for a second time was a natural early response to the loss. It deepened his encounter with the nurturing and healing roots of his spiritual heritage that had precipitated his spiritual awakening in 1904. Given this grounding in his spiritual heritage, the road to recovery then opened up an intense period of breakthrough and productivity, and the result was the manuscript of I and Thou as a pivotal book, the testament to his own spiritual emergence, and the foundational expression of his mature philosophy of dialogue.

4. Buber’s Experience and Ellenberger’s Concept of Creative Illness

Buber’s period of withdrawal in grief after Landauer’s death remarkably epitomizes what Ellenberger describes as a “creative illness.” To consider Buber’s grief as an instance of Ellenberger’s concept helps to form a more complete picture of the process that led to I and Thou.

Recalling Stein’s observation that one’s “readiness to receive the transcendent Other creatively may well increase amidst the painful experiences of rupture and loss,”114 we can see how Buber’s withdrawal following Landauer’s death in 1919 occasioned the transformation that resulted in I and Thou.

Further, the use of Ellenberger’s illness metaphor to characterize this culminating phase of Buber’s inner development coheres with the nature of grief. Studies of loss and grief show that a person’s grief is like an illness or “deep wound.”115 As we have seen, Buber’s description of the initial impact of Landauer’s death shows this wounding was for him a bodily reality that involved a deep inner wounding as well.116 As with any wounding, there is a natural, sometimes lengthy healing process. Yet the person is forever changed by the wound: the scarring that remains permanently marks the survivor.

Buber’s largely autobiographical essay, “Afterword: The History of the Dialogical Principle,” links his own inner process with the broader historical context as he construes it.117 The story he lays out in this short account includes a number of elements that connect his sense of his own process with Ellenberger’s phenomenon of “creative illness.” In what follows we will trace Buber’s account in conjunction with Ellenberger’s analysis.

According to Ellenberger, a period of creative withdrawal begins when an individual turns inward for an extended period of time to address and resolve a major issue that he has devoted himself to fathoming.118 At that point, the person’s inner search “can take the shape of depression, even neurosis.”119 In Buber’s case, it was not depression or neurosis but grief which served to throw off his psychic equilibrium.

Buber states he withdrew for a period of time. He specifies he had a two-year period from late 1919 to late 1921 in which he did not work on anything but Hasidic material. This focus was part of a process of his “spiritual ascesis,” as he called it, a narrowing down which he imposed on himself as part of his turn inward.120 In his account Buber uses the Greek word askēse (the root of the word “asceticism”), originally meaning “training” or discipline, to explicitly denote this period as one of withdrawal and disciplined narrow focus for “spiritual purposes.”

Ellenberger points out that an extended time of intense preoccupation with an idea or issue can lead up to and even precipitate a period of creative withdrawal.121 In Buber’s “History,” he specifies the focus for this intense inner work, that which had become his lifelong issue: “the question of the possibility and reality of a dialogical relationship between the human being and God . . . of a free partnership in a conversation between heaven and earth whose speech in address and answer is the happening itself, the happening from above and the happening from below.”122 This vision first seized him in his youth, but by about 1904, the time of his original spiritual awakening, it became the supporting ground and driver of his thinking. In short, “This question became my innermost passion.”123 Buber continues his story, laying out the steps that led to I and Thou. He states he mentioned “the myth of I and Thou” as early as the introduction to his second book on Hasidism, The Legends of the Baal-Shem, in 1907. From this early envisioning of I and Thou, his thinking led him “ever more seriously toward the common, that which is accessible to all.”124 That is, he was searching for the universal language that would present the truth of his encounter with the Presence so all could understand it. As he put it, “Since I have received no message which might be passed on . . . but only had the experiences and attained the insights, my communication had to be a philosophical one. It had to relate the unique and particular to the ‘general,’ to what is discoverable by every man in his own existence.”125 With these words, Buber denotes the existential dimension as the locus of his discourse.

Buber began to clarify his thinking through his work at interpreting Hasidism in the fall of 1919: when he was writing his book The Great Maggid and His Followers, he developed his key concept of “encounter.”126 After finishing this pivotal work on Hasidism, he wrote a rough first draft of I and Thou. He initially envisioned it as the first of five volumes laying out a systematic anthropology of religion—yet over time he shifted away from this larger project.127

In the postscript to I and Thou he makes clear how the vision he was grappling with when drafting I and Thou in late 1919 was the fruit of a long incubation and that this vision came with an impelling need to proclaim it: “When I sketched the first draft of this book, an inner necessity was driving me. A vision that pursued me from my youth onward, although at first repeatedly growing dim, had then attained a constant clarity. This vision was so blatantly of a transpersonal nature that I knew at once that I had to bear witness to it.”128 These words echo the original sense of mission that came to Buber at the time of his spiritual awakening: “And I became inwardly aware of the call to proclaim it to the world.”129 The time had come for him to realize that mission. Significantly, he uses the word “vision” and presents the vision as pursuing him over the decades.

According to grief theory, in the process of responding to loss, grieving individuals oscillate between a loss-oriented focus where acute, active grieving is prominent, and a restoration-oriented focus where they take up the ongoing responsibilities of their everyday lives.130 In Ellenberger’s analysis, this pattern is a major characteristic of creative withdrawal as well. The person may adjust his life circumstances to allow the time for this withdrawal, which can last for up to three years or more. During this period the person may maintain his normal professional activity and family life while at the same time suffering from inner feelings of utter isolation, even abandonment—such as Buber did following the loss of Landauer.131 At this time in his life, Buber did almost all of his work as a scholar and editor in the solitude of his study in his home in Heppenheim. Thus, his circumstances fostered the isolation which Ellenberger describes; yet at the same time, he continued to be engaged in the household with his wife Paula and their two children.

Winokuer and Harris characterize the impact of loss in a way that fits the phases of the process of creative illness, which Ellenberger outlines thusly:

The trauma, shock, and anguish of a major loss assault an individual’s fundamental assumptions about the world. Meaning-making can result through reinterpretation of the negative events as opportunities to learn . . . about one’s self or life in general, as a means of helping others, or contributing to society in some way that is related to the experience that occurred.132

In relation to the survivor’s world view, the loss is an “assault on an individual’s fundamental assumptions.” This challenge to one’s basic assumptions necessitates the extremely difficult task of reworking one’s inner models of reality. It precipitates a new departure in the person’s search for meaning. According to Ellenberger, because the person struggles “in utter spiritual isolation and has the feeling that nobody can help him,” he must plunge into the unknown and figure out how to fathom the depths of the issue that grips him. Yet, throughout this process, he relentlessly pursues the thread of his dominant concern.133 In this way, Landauer’s death, coming when it did, shook Buber until it provoked him to deepen and reorient his thinking. Buber worked through the abyss that opened under him with his loss until he was able to reinterpret and reconstruct the blow into his emerging sense of dialogical reality. Thus, he struggled with his loss until he could make the loss into his opportunity to learn, and he thereby developed a deeper sense of the nature of dialogue. The drafting of I and Thou became the screen upon which he worked this out. In this way, the book became for him a means of helping others and contributing to society while giving him a new standing as a survivor of Landauer’s death.

According to Ellenberger, when a grieving person breaks through to a new level of understanding, he may experience this as his “liberation from a long period of suffering”; however, it is also an illumination. He becomes possessed by a new idea which he regards as a revelation.134 The breakthrough to a new level of insight becomes the turning point in the process and opens up a rapid return to involvement in the outer world.135

In late 1921, Buber struck up a friendship with Franz Rosenzweig, who was his equal as a German-Jewish thinker, although eight years his junior. Rosenzweig invited Buber to deliver a series of lectures at the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus, the Independent Jewish Study Center, in Frankfurt, and Buber surprised himself by accepting the opportunity. Accordingly, Buber prepared and delivered eight lectures on “Religion as Presence” in the winter of 1922. The focus and coherence required for this effort gave him the necessary language that catapulted him into composing the final version of I and Thou that spring. As Buber stated in the postscript to I and Thou, “Then when I achieved the appropriate language with which to express the vision, I was free to write it down in its final form.”136 Buber later claimed he was in an exalted state of mind when he wrote the final draft of I and Thou: “At that time I wrote what I wrote in an overpowering inspiration. And what such inspiration delivers to one, one may no longer change, not even for the sake of exactness.”137

Ellenberger points out that because the person has undergone such an intense spiritual adventure, he “attributes a universal value to his own personal experience”: he takes what he has learned through his own lived experience as a great truth of universal value which must be proclaimed to mankind.138 Like others who have undergone a period of creative withdrawal, Buber claims that the principle of dialogue as ontological is universal by nature:

In all ages, it has clearly been intuited that the reciprocal essential relation between two beings signifies a primal opening of Being. . . . And it has repeatedly been intuited that when one steps into essential reciprocity, the human being becomes revealed as human. That is, in this way he arrives at the authentic participation in Being that lies in store for him and that therefore the saying of Thou by the I stands at the origin of all individual human becoming.139

Only when he was finishing the third and last part of I and Thou in the spring of 1922 was Buber able to break out of his constricted focus, his “ascesis of reading.” It was then he began to see “the almost uncanny similarity with which people of the time, in spite of diverse styles and traditions, had set off on comparable quests for the buried treasure of dialogical thinking.”140 His own “quest for the buried treasure” had been his period of withdrawal and ascesis which made possible his book, I and Thou.

I had known precursors such as Feuerbach and Kierke­gaard in my student days . . . Now a growing number of people in the present generation surrounded me who to varying degrees were focused on the one thing that had ever more become my “life-theme.” I already had a sense of this in the distinction between a reifying stance and a making present in Daniel in 1913 which was the seed of the distinction between I-It and I-Thou in I and Thou. The latter was no longer grounded in the realm of subjectivity but in “the between.” This is the decisive transformation that came to fullness for a number of thinkers during the period around the First World War. The commonality of our thinking emerged out of the fundamental shift in the human situation of that era.141

With this account, Buber put his own transformation in the context of a larger, emerging cultural pattern, that brought about by the universal change of circumstances resulting from the First World War.

Ellenberger points out that, as a result of the person’s solitary struggle to understand, he has won a boon to share with humanity: he “is convinced that he has gained access to a new spiritual world, or that he has attained a new spiritual truth . . . a universal truth . . . that he will reveal to the world.”142 In the process he has been transformed through a deep-reaching metamorphosis: he has become the person who can and must do the work of disseminating the gift, the key concept he has uncovered. The discovery becomes the basis of his life’s work, for his task becomes to explain and elaborate the vision that has come to him.143 Like others who had undergone a period of creative withdrawal, Buber returned from it with a new book, I and Thou, and a new basis for his further work, the work of elaborating his hard-won vision. Some time after completing I and Thou, Buber stated “it became clear that much was needed to complete the picture but that that work had to find its own place and form. As a result, I wrote a number of shorter pieces” to clarify and develop the breakthrough vision expressed in I and Thou. “Later, further material, whether anthropological foundations or sociological consequences, came to me as well.”144

In Ellenberger’s history of the unconscious, Freud and Jung were two of those who, as the outcome of such a process, produced the breakthrough books that became the foundations of their mature theories and made possible their contributions to human advancement. As persons who have undergone a creative illness, an initiatory period without a guide or mentor, such persons become pathfinders who lay down means for others to pursue a similar path.145

For a time Buber considered making the following words the motto of I and Thou, showing that he saw the book as the distillation and manifesto of his newly emerging vision and as the foundation for his continuing work: “This book presents the beginning of a way that I intend to continue in and in which I intend to lead others.”146 Buber’s use of the word “Weg,” way or path, here emphasizes the existential, concrete, lived quality of his work as witness, as opposed to the abstractness of a merely conceptual-discursive philosophical construct.

Thus, Buber underwent a period of creative withdrawal, characterized by both the preoccupation and the breakthrough Ellenberger described, which was the process that led to I and Thou. For Buber, the death of his closest friend, Gustav Landauer, precipitated this period.

5. Spiritual Initiation: Transmission of the Transcendent

In a late summative statement Buber shows how he was ready to transmit his spiritual awakening to others at mid-life. He writes of his having “matured to a life” through the experiences of his watershed years.147 This was the completion of his initiation, his struggle to win “a relationship to being . . . only after long and diverse but always productive journeys through decisive personal experiences.”148 This process brought him “from a timeless and languageless sphere into the sphere of the moment,” the immediacy of dialogical existence, “where between one tick of the clock and the next everything depends on perceiving what is being said to one, now, in one of the innumerable languages of life, and on answering in a language appropriate to the situation.”149 This completion of his transformation brought forward the imperative to proclaim it: “I stood under the duty to insert the framework of the decisive experiences that I had at that time [1914–1919] into the human inheritance of thought.”150 Buber continues: “[M]y communication . . . had to relate the unique and particular to the ‘general,’ to what is discoverable by every man in his own existence. . . . I am convinced that it happened not otherwise with all the philosophers loved and honored by me . . . after they had completed the transformation [i.e., their spiritual initiation].”151 With these words Buber may have had Plato’s famous passage on initiation in mind:

There is no writing of mine about these matters, nor will there ever be. For this knowledge is not something that can be put into words like other studies. Acquaintance with it must come rather after a long-continued intercourse between teacher and student in joint pursuit of the subject, when, suddenly, like a blaze kindled by a leaping spark, it is born in the soul and at once nourishes itself.152

With Platonic initiation, as with Buber’s, the knowledge that is transmitted cannot be expressed in words. This knowing comes through long, focused effort and it manifests itself as “a leaping spark” which goes from master to initiate, a flame which becomes self-sustaining in the soul of the initiate. In this regard, Buber’s prescribed method of spiritual reading as the reader’s entering into dialogue with a master was autobiographical.153

The grounds of Buber’s initiation lay in the life of the Baal-Shem-Tov, the man whose life was a vehicle for transmitting the Hasidic teaching to his disciples so they could become his successors. Buber shows the moment of transmission in the story of Rabbi Susya and his disciples on a day between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur: “He raised his eyes and heart to heaven and freed himself from all corporeal bonds. Looking at him awakened in one of the disciples the impulse to the turning, and the tears rushed down his face; and as from a burning ember the neighboring coals begin to glow, so the flame of the turning came over one man after another.”154 The transmission occurred when the zaddik’s gesture awakened a spontaneous impulse to teshuvah, turning, and the flame jumped from the master to his disciples. Buber comments: “It is this kind of influence that I have pointed to as that handing on of the mystery that is above words.”155

According to Buber, the spiritual structure of the Hasidic movement “was founded upon the handing on of the kernel of the teaching from teacher to disciple, but not as if something not accessible to everyone was transmitted to him, but because in the atmosphere of the master, in the spontaneous working of his being, the inexpressible How descended swinging and creating.”156 This initiatory transmission of the depths of life in the spirit transcended words, yet words were Buber’s medium. His challenge was to turn the verbal medium into a vehicle for that which transcends it. The rhetorical tools that he found, invented, and applied were thus necessarily based on indirect communication. These tools are summed up in two metaphors: “bearing witness” and “pointing.” We now turn to consider Buber’s task to transmit his spiritual awakening to others and his very deliberate use of these tools to fulfill it.

35. Grete Schaeder wrote of Buber’s emergence as a spiritual teacher as “his gradual initiation into the being-tradition of the zaddik.” See Schaeder, Hebrew Humanism, 300–9.

36. Henderson, Thresholds of Initiation; see also Kirsch et al., Initiation.

37. Toynbee and Myers, Study of History, 3:248–77.

38. “Study of History,” 130.

39. Ellenberger, Discovery of the Unconscious.

40. Ellenberger, “Maladie Créatrice,” 330–32.

41. Ellenberger, “Maladie Créatrice,” 329.

42. Eliade, quoted in Wasserstrom, Religion after Religion, 42.

43. Eliade, quoted in Wasserstrom, Religion After Religion, 41–42 (my translation).

44. Teshuvah, which lies at the core of the vision of I and Thou, will be examined in detail in chapter 8 below, pages 194–208.

45. Buber, “Postscript,” 128 (translation modified, emphasis added).

46. Buber, I and Thou, §14.

47. Buber, “How and Why,” 205–19.

48. Buber, “How and Why,” 208.

49. Buber, “How and Why,” 213, 212.

50. Buber, “How and Why,” 215, quoting Rosenzweig, “Scripture and Luther,” 59.

51. Buber, “Replies to My Critics,” 689.

52. Buber, “Replies to My Critics,” 689.

53. Buber, “Foreword,” xv.

54. Buber, “Foreword,” xvi.

55. Friedman, Martin Buber’s Life and Work, 1:61–62.

56. Buber, “Autobiographical Fragments,” 16–19.

57. Herzl died of heart disease less than a year after this event.

58. Martin Buber to Paula Winkler, August 25, 1903, in Buber, Letters, 100 (emphasis added).

59. Buber, in Friedman, Martin Buber’s Life and Work, 1:73.

60. Stein, “On Modern Initiation,” 96–99.

61. Stein, “On Modern Initiation,” 99.

62. Buber, “My Way to Hasidism,” 59–60.

63. Buber, “My Way to Hasidism,” 58.

64. Schaeder, Hebrew Humanism, 238.

65. Buber, “My Way to Hasidism,” 58.

66. Buber, “My Way to Hasidism,” 58 (translation modified).

67. Buber, “My Way to Hasidism,” 58 (translation modified).

68. Buber (my translation), quoting from Ba’al Shem Tov, Tzva’at HaRivash 1:20.

69. Buber, “Baal-Shem-Tov’s Instruction,” 185.

70. Buber, “Baal-Shem-Tov’s Instruction,” 214n1 (translation modified).

71. Buber, “My Way to Hasidism,” 59 (my translation). Bracketed words present Dan Avnon’s helpful amplifications of this passage (Avnon, Martin Buber, 82–83, 237n4).

72. Buber later asserted the centrality of “religiosity” (Religiosität) in his 1913 lecture, “Jewish Religiosity,” 79–94.

73. Avnon comments: “The perfect man” is the one “whose life is oriented to the task of translating ‘the Adam as created in the image of Elohim’ into actual, realized human life” (Martin Buber, 83).

74. Buber, “My Way to Hasidism,” 58–60.

75. Buber, “Commentary,” 72–73, 76–77. See chapter 6 below [x-ref].

76. Buber, I and Thou, §36c.

77. Buber, I and Thou, §60.

78. Friedman, Martin Buber’s Life and Work, 1:97.

79. Buber, I and Thou, §46e, §60a, §61h.

80. Buber, “Foundation Stone,” 70–71.

81. Buber, “Foundation Stone,” 71.

82. Buber, “Foundation Stone,” 71.

83. Buber, “Baal-Shem-Tov’s Instruction,” 181 (my translation).

84. Buber, “Dialogue,” 14–15.

85. Buber, “Dialogue,” 15.

86. Buber, “Dialogue,” 15.

87. Buber, “Dialogue,” 15.

88. Buber, “Spinoza,” 94; see Buber’s other references to human life as divine-human dialogue: “Dialogue between Heaven and Earth,” 221; “Replies to My Critics,” 710; “Prejudices of Youth,” 51.

89. Buber, “Foundation Stone,” 70.

90. Buber, “Hasidism and Modern Man,” 24.

91. Buber, “Postscript,” 123.

92. Buber, “Replies to My Critics,” 703.

93. Buber, “Replies to My Critics,” 702.

94. Buber, “Replies to My Critics,” 689–90, 691 (emphasis his); compare this first-person account with Buber’s more general statement on the impact of the unconditional in “Herut,” 153: “The unconditional affects a person when he lets his whole being be gripped by it, be utterly shaken and transformed by it, and when he responds to it with his whole being . . .”

95. Buber and Rogers, “Dialogue between Martin Buber and Carl R. Rogers,” 168; see also, Buber, “Elements of the Interhuman,” 81.

96. Friedman, Martin Buber’s Life and Work, 1:245. It is important to note that Friedman’s claim and my thesis are exactly the same here. Yet Friedman does not develop the connections and implications of this trauma. These connections and implications are the core of my argument here.

97. Friedman, Martin Buber’s Life and Work, 1:249.

98. Martin Buber to Fritz Mauthner, May 7, 1919, in Buber, Letters, 244 (translation modified).

99. Lunn, Prophet of Community, 338–39.

100. Friedman, Martin Buber’s Life and Work, 1:257. Each of these three major events referred to by Friedman precipitated a crisis of loss for Buber. According to Buber’s “Autobiographical Fragments,” discussed in chapter 4 below, pages 55–59, 73–75, his mother’s disappearance when he was a young child precipitated Buber’s lifelong sense of a great void. This sense of abandonment at the loss of his mother shaped his turn to dialogue and relation as core values. His sense of guilt and his soul-searching in response to his mismeeting with the young Mehe and Mehe’s subsequent death on the front at the beginning of the war led to his “conversion,” his shift from an otherworldly to a this-worldly spirituality. And his loss of Landauer was the final blow in this series of losses. It provoked the process that led to I and Thou.

101. Buber, quoted in Schaeder, “Martin Buber,” 24.

102. Buber and Rogers, “Dialogue between Martin Buber and Carl R. Rogers,” 168 (emphasis Buber’s).

103. Friedman, Martin Buber’s Life and Work, 1:257.

104. Buber, “Distance and Relation,” 70.

105. This talk is excerpted in Friedman, Martin Buber’s Life and Work, 1:247.

106. Buber, cited in Friedman, Martin Buber’s Life and Work, 1:255; see also Buber, “Landauer und die Revolution.”

107. Buber, cited in Friedman, Martin Buber’s Life and Work, 1:256.

108. Buber, quoted in Schaeder, “Martin Buber,” 28. This imperative becomes a refrain in Buber, “What is to be Done?,” 109–11.

109. Buber, “Holy Way,” 108–9.

110. Buber, “Holy Way,” 113.

111. Mendes-Flohr, From Mysticism to Dialogue, 19.

112. Winokuer and Harris, Principles and Practice, 31.

113. Winokuer and Harris, Principles and Practice, 34.

114. Stein, “On Modern Initiation,” 99.

115. Winokuer and Harris, Principles and Practice, 26.

116. Buber and Rogers, “Dialogue between Martin Buber and Carl R. Rogers,” 168.

117. Buber, “Afterword,” 209–24.

118. Ellenberger, Discovery of the Unconscious, 447–48.

119. Ellenberger, Discovery of the Unconscious, 447.

120. Buber, “Afterword,” 215.

121. Ellenberger, Discovery of the Unconscious, 447, 889.

122. Buber, “Afterword,” 213.

123. Buber, “Afterword,” 213 (translation mine).

124. Buber, “Afterword,” 214 (translation mine).

125. Buber, “Replies to My Critics,” 689.

126. Buber, “Afterword,” 215; see “Spirit and Body,” 122–23.

127. Buber, “Nachwort,” 308: this statement was omitted in the English translation; see “Afterword,” 215.

128. Buber, “Postscript,” 123 (translation mine).

129. Buber, “My Way to Hasidism,” 59 (translation modified).

130. Winokuer and Harris, Principles and Practice, 29–32.

131. Ellenberger, Discovery of the Unconscious, 447–48.

132. Winokuer and Harris, Principles and Practice, 36.

133. Ellenberger, Discovery of the Unconscious, 889.

134. Ellenberger, “Maladie Créatrice,” 330.

135. Ellenberger, Discovery of the Unconscious, 448, 889.

136. Buber, “Postscript,” 123.

137. Buber, “Replies to My Critics,” 706.

138. Ellenberger, Discovery of the Unconscious, 673; 450.

139. Buber, “Afterword,” 209 (my translation).

140. Buber, “Afterword,” 215–16 (my translation).

141. Buber, “Afterword,” 216 (my translation).

142. Ellenberger, Discovery of the Unconscious, 889–90.

143. Ellenberger, Discovery of the Unconscious, 448–50, 673.

144. Buber, “Postscript,” 123–24 (my translation).

145. Ellenberger, Discovery of the Unconscious, 890.

146. Buber, unpublished motto of Ich und Du, quoted in Horwitz, Buber’s Way, 55.

147. Buber, “Replies to My Critics,” 689.

148. Buber, “How and Why,” 211.

149. Buber, “How and Why,” 211.

150. Buber, “Replies to My Critics,” 689.

151. Buber, “Replies to My Critics,” 689.

152. Plato, Letters 341c (translation modified). Friedman points out that this passage was a repeated reference point for Buber, Martin Buber’s Life and Work, 1:311. See Buber, “Religion and Philosophy,” 41.

153. Buber, “Postscript,” 128.

154. Buber, “Spirit and Body,” 146.

155. Buber, “Spirit and Body,” 147.

156. Buber, “Spirit and Body,” 148.