ביקורת יהודית על הגותו של מרטין בובר, ג. המפגש התנ"כיA Jewish Critique of the Philosophy of Martin Buber, III The Biblical Encounter

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1Our final conclusion is indeed surprising. From Buber’s writings one might easily gain the impression that he is interpreting basic Biblical ideas. Is it not the case that Biblical religion is not grounded on conceptual meditations on the nature of God, but on the actual confrontation between man and God? Every page of the Bible seems to tell the same story: God addresses man and man answers God. Is this not the relation of mutuality and the dialogical situation?

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2Creature and Creator

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3There can be little doubt that the foundation of Biblical religion is indeed the encounter between God and man. The God whom Adam and Eve knew was the one who spoke to them in the Garden of Eden. The history of the patriarchs begins with God’s call to Abraham. The revelation at Sinai is the manifestation of an actual relation between God and the people. The prophets’ message to Israel normally commences with the words, Thus says the Lord. All this is true, but is it the I-Thou relation of Buber? In order to understand the nature of the Biblical encounter, it is not enough to read the story of the confrontation. One of the encounters in the Bible that comes closest to Buber’s I-Thou is Abraham’s struggle with God for the preservation of Sodom and Gemorrha. There is meeting there; the Present One is present and so is Abraham and between the two a genuine dialogue seems to be conducted. There is, however, nothing in the record to inform us of the How of the encounter. We are not told how the relation comes about and thus, we cannot judge the nature of the dialogue. To say, as Buber would have to, that out of some natural event of his everyday experience Abraham heard a voice addressing him and realized that he was challenged to plead the cause of justice and mercy with the Presence seems extremely far-fetched. Moreover, whether such an interpretation was justified or not, could hardly be decided on the basis of the record of the story itself. In order to catch a glimpse of the nature of the Biblical encounter, we have to see how the confrontation is described by those who actually experienced it. When God reveals himself at Sinai, the people are overwhelmed with terror and trembling. This need not be attributed to the phenomena of the thunder and the lightening. It is the experience of the actual encounter itself that threatens to crush them. Only part of the revelation is addressed to them directly; the people cannot endure the full power of the divine word. Buber occasionally indicates that the encounter has to be endured. However, what he means by it is something quite different from the Bibilcal significance of the idea. Buber maintains that “to endure the revelation is to endure this moment full of possible decisions, to respond and to be responsible for every moment.”⁸⁴In a note to the Postscript, I and Thou, reference is made to a work, We: Studies in Philosophy Anthropology. At the time of the writing of this study, June, 1961, this volume does not seem to have been published as yet. However, careful consideration has been given to Buber’s Das Problem des Menschen, described by him as a prelude to his philosophical anthropology, as well as to the short essays, Urdistanz und Beziehung, and Elemente des Zwischenmenschlichen, which are to be included in the above-mentioned work. On the basis of these available writings, it would seem to us that Buber is not at all aware of the seriousness of the problem. His I-Thou just does not yield a We in the sense of a community. We shall quote only one passage to illustrate what we mean. In Das Problem des Menschen, Buber says: “The special character of the We is shown in the essential relation existing, or arising temporarily, between its members; that is, in the holding sway within the We of an ontic directness which is the decisive pressupposition of the I-Thou relation.” (Between Man and Man, 175-6) The “essential relation” and the “ontic directness” are the foundation of all I-Thou relation. They indicate the unreserved encounter in the wholeness of personal existence between being and being. Buber has not gone one iota beyond his thesis in Ich und Du. The problem is still the same. Since the essential relation, as well as the ontic directness, are of necessity exclusive, how can a multitude of people stand in such a relation to each other at the same time? How can there ever be a true community? Undoubtedly, an entirely different kind of a test is implied in a Biblical revelation whose quality is reflected, for instance, in these words of Deuteronomy: “Behold, the Lord our God hath shown us His glory and His greatness, and we have heard His voice out of the midst of the fire; we have seen this day that God doth speak with man, and he liveth. Now therefore, why should we die? for this great fire will consume us; if we hear the voice of the Lord our God any more, we shall die …”⁸⁵Israel, 95. There is no reciprocity here, no mutuality. On the contrary the Thou is so overwhelming that it threatens to extinguish the reality of the I completely. All other Biblical testimonies as to the nature of the experience are of a similar kind. About his encounters with the Divine, Ezekiel reports: “I fell upon my face, and I heard a voice of one that spoke.”⁸⁶Deuteronomy, V, 21-22. The context shows that this falling upon the face is due to human weakness. The force of the vision saps the strength of the prophet. He cannot stand up and confront the Divine. Most impressively is the nature of the experience described by Danial when he says: “So I was left alone and saw this great vision, and there remained no strength in me; for my comeliness was turned in me into corruption, and I retained no strength. Yet heard I the voice of his words; and when I heard the voice of his words, then I was fallen into a deep sleep on my face, with my face toward the ground.”⁸⁷Ezekiel I, 28; cf. also other related passages ib. Far from entering into a relation of mutuality in the encounter with the Divine, man becomes aware of his utter helplessness in the presence of God.

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4It is true, the I is nevertheless not extinguished. He is sustained, but by the mercy of God alone. When the Voice orders the prostrate Ezekiel to stand up and listen, he is still unable to move. He has to be brought back into life, as it were. “And spirit entered into me, reports Ezekiel, when He spoke unto me, and set me upon my feet; and I heard Him that spoke unto me.”⁸⁸Daniel, X, 8-9. How movingly is the same experience described by Daniel! After relating the condition of utter helplessness from which he passed into a deep sleep, he continues: “And, behold, a hand touched me, which set me tottering upon my knees and upon the palms of my hands, And he said unto me …”⁸⁹Ezekiel, II, 2. Even as he is upheld by the kindness of God, his condition of creaturely powerlessness has not left him completely. He is still shaky, resting on his knees and, in the position of an animal supporting himself on the palms of his hands.

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5The Rabbis in the Talmud and Midrash had the right appreciation of the nature of the Biblical encounter. We read, for instance, in the Talmud that Rabbi Joshua, the son of Levi, explained: “At the impact of each word at Sinai, their souls left the Israelites. For so we read, ‘My soul failed me when he spoke.’⁹⁰Daniel, X, 10-11. But if their souls departed at the first Word, how could they receive the next one? — God brought down on them the dew with which he will quicken the dead and thus, revived them. For so does the Psalmist declare, ‘A bounteous rain didst Thou pour down, O God; when Thine inheritance was weary, Thou didst confirm it.’ ”⁹¹Song of Songs, V, 6. According to the Bible, and to Biblical tradition, man can indeed not endure the encounter with God. It is true, as Buber says, that in revelation man is revealed to himself; but in the exact opposite sense in which Buber understands it. It is man’s nothingness that is first of all revealed to him in the presence of God. He cannot but realize that, in his own right, he is indeed but “dust and ashes.” He is not annihilated, but he is at the brink of nothingness. He is brought back into existence by the love of God. His I is returned to him as a gift of God.

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6We saw how Buber, in opposition to Schleiermacher, affirmed that in the pure relation one experiences freedom as well as dependence and knows oneself as creature as well as creator. He cannot be speaking of the immediacy of the Biblical relation. There is no trace of freedom or creatorship for man in the Biblical encounter. The essential experience there is human worthlessness and powerlessness that, nevertheless, is redeemed by the love of God. Man may stand upright in the encounter because he is held up; he may hear because the spirit from God sustains him; he can speak because the dew from God revives him. The situation is not a dialogical one. Man is not a partner of God in the actuality of the I-Thou. He is altogether a creature, if ever there was one. As long as the actuality of the revelation lasts, man has no freedom. He cannot deny his Thou, he cannot disobey him. Only when the encounter has passed, is he dismissed into a measure of selfhood and independence; only then can he deny and disobey.

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7There are two opposing ways of misunderstanding the nature of the Biblical encounter. The one is reflected in Rudolph Otto’s work, Das Heilige; the other is the one pursued by Buber. Otto, because of his Christological bias, could only perceive the “mysterium tremendum” in the encounter of the Hebrew Bible and stubbornly closed his eyes to the redeeming presence of God that in the same encounter raises man from “dust and ashes” to creaturely dignity. Buber, on the other hand, overemphasizes the reality of the I in the relation, establishing man as a partner of the Thou who responds to God’s address in the freedom of selfhood. Contrary to Buber, the Biblical encounter is not a dialogical I-Thou relation. It is God’s relation to his creature who is established by God and sustained by him. The I in the relation is altogether God’s possession. He lives with life lent to him by his Creator; he stands with His strength; he listens and answers sustained by His love. Man is never as unfree as he is in the actuality of the Biblical encounter. However, confronted with the nothingness that he is in his own right and experiencing his selfhood as wholly granted, he stands in the light of God and knows no desire for freedom. Contrary to Otto, the encounter is an encounter; it is a relation. God’s creature is not just “dust and ashes.” In spite of the “mysterium tremendum,” he hears the words that Daniel heard, “O Daniel, thou man greatly beloved,” and lives. He stands in the relation because he is called into the relation by God.

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8Rather characteristically Buber remarks: “You know always in your heart that you need God more than everything; but do you know too that God needs you — in the fulness of His eternity needs you? How would man be, how would you be if God did not need him, did not need you? You need God, in order to be — and God needs you, for the very meaning of your life.”⁹²Psalms LXVIII, 10; for the entire quotation see T. B., Shabbat, 88b, cf. also Sh’mot Rabba, Ch. 29.
93. I and Thou, 82. In other places Buber has softened his proud “God needs you” to “God wants to need man.” This is the culminating significance of his statement that man is God’s partner, that in the relation man knows himself not only as creature but also as creator. Notwithstanding Buber’s repeated assurance that he only testifies but does not demonstrate — the nature of his truth being undemonstrable — this is obviously no testimony. It is the result of speculation. It is reasonable to say that if God did not want man to be, he would not exist. Ergo, God wants man. But to go on from there and conclude, since God wants man, He needs him, or wants to need him, is poor theology. One thing is certain: that God needs man can never be a religious experience. Man may know in his heart that he “needs God more than everything.” He may believe in his mind, as apparently Buber does, that God needs him. But he can never know in his heart that God needs him. The need in the Biblical encounter is all man’s. It is of the very essence of that encounter that man experiences his entire being as one great need that can only be satisfied by the One who is infinitely needless. The idea that in the pure relation man experiences himself as a creaturely creator needed by God is so foreign to the Biblical encounter that it starts one wondering whether Buber’s I-Thou is indeed a genuine confrontation between man and his Creator.

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9Revelation and Its Contents

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10This leads us to the consideration of the important question of the contents of revelation. Buber, as we saw, does not allow any contents in revelation. This of course follows from his interpretation of the relation as reciprocal. Of necessity, in the dialogical freedom of the encounter meaning and contents can emerge only dialogically as the result of the human response. The revelation of a contents, in the form of teaching or command, would violate the nature of the dialogical situation. A teaching or a law revealed by God would be an imposition from without and an interference with human freedom and responsibility. As a result, we saw how Buber was obliged to solve the problem of ethical heteronomy versus autonomy by the tortuous mental construction of a free human response that reveals man’s true nature unto himself as being in confromity with the divine law “resting deep within him.” Since the Biblical encounter is the very opposite of the dialogical situation, the reasoning of Buber as to the contents of revelation does not apply to it. As we saw earlier, in the Biblical pure relation the question of freedom does not arise. It is not that man is denied freedom, but everything he is, he owes. In this knowledge he is wishless, for in it he finds his greatest affirmation. To assert that in this situation the explicit revelation of a divine law would interfere with man’s responsibility to choose and to decide in freedom would be as meaningless as it would be dogmatic. In the Biblical encounter all meaning is due to divine interference. In it, man left to himself could only discover his nothingness. Within the context of Biblical tradition, there is certainly no necessity for excluding the possibility of a contents in revelation. Indeed, the plain meaning of the tradition affirms that God reveals explicitly his Torah and his law. Buber’s dialogical revelation is altogether foreign to the spirit of the Bible.

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11However, beyond the possibility of revelational contents, it is not difficult to show that there is a religious need for such a contents. Nothing may illustrate the point better than Buber’s own predilections. We have found that Buber’s I-Thou cannot serve either as the basis of a true community nor as the foundation of a holy people. Buber’s dialogical encounter is only conceivable between an individual person and his Thou; and the meaning which is revealed in the individual response is valid only in the single life of the single responding soul. We could find no way from there to a religious community or a holy people. An entirely different picture presents itself to us, if we investigate the possibility of a true community from the point of view of the Biblical encounter. It is not correct to say of this encounter that “the forms in which the mystery approaches us are nothing but our personal experiences,” that God reveals his presence to man “in the variety of things and events” of our everyday experience. It would be presumptuous on our part to attempt to describe how the encounter comes about. One thing, however, seems to be certain: it is not in the natural events that man meets God in the Bible. The Biblical encounter is always a supernatural occurrence, “something happening alongside or above the everyday.”⁹⁴Cf. Postscript, I and Thou. He who rejects the supernatural no longer stands on Biblical grounds. Because Biblical revelation is much more than the “voice addressing man from the midst of his concrete situation,” it does not have to be limited to the individual alone. Because it is not “the verbal trace of a natural event,” but manifestly and overwhelmingly a supernatural approach of the divine Presence, can it be directed not only to individual souls but also to the full assemblage of an entire people; only because of that may it be a public event and not a mere individual experience. Only an individual may testify to Buber’s pure relation; it is a whole people to whom God says, “Ye are my witnesses.”

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12If, as we pointed out, the nature of the Biblical encounter does not exclude the possibility of a contents in revelation, when the encounter occurs between God and a people, all possibility for a dialogically revealed meaning is indeed excluded. It is not conceivable that a people should ever respond in unison as one people in dialogical freedom and should then, as a result of its response, conclude the revelation with one meaning for the entire people. In the encounter with an entire people meaning must be revealed explicitly, it must be communicated in the act of revelation. If after the conclusion of the encounter, the meaning should remain with the people as significant for their existence as a people, then they must come out of the encounter with a meaning that has objective validity, that can be formulated as teaching, that can be transmitted or engraved on tablets “to be held above their heads.” The encounter itself may indeed be complete without any contents revealed. The assurance of the divine Presence and the experience of God’s sustaining mercy, are abundantly satisfying in themselves. No man may hope for more; no man needs more. But alas, the actual encounters with the Divine are few and of extremely short duration. What would happen to a people that after the supreme moment of the confrontation with God, would leave the pure relation with only the memory of their awareness of the Presence once experienced? What would happen to it in the dry wastelands of history during the long stretches of divine silence? Not even the memory of the experience could be a national one. After the encounter, in the actual concreteness of the historic situation, the people would no longer stand in any relation to God as a people. Whatever the individuals would do with the memory, it would have only individual significance. At best, we might get an “inchoate mass” of believing individuals, but not a people who as a people would be committed to living in the presence of God. Only the objective contents of the revelation, explicitly revealed to the people in the encounter, preserves them as God’s people after the encounter. The teaching and the law with which they come out of the encounter is the bond that unites them as a holy people of history. The joint commitment to the law of God alone makes of a people the people of God. Without the teaching and the law, communicated in the encounter, the religious community cannot arise. Buber is right in saying that the individualism of Christian piety leaves the public realm of national life open to intrusion by the secular norm. What he does not seem to see is that this is the direct result of dispensing with the explicit contents of revelation that, after the encounter, confronts man as the law of God. Without the law, there can only be individual piety. Buber’s revelation without contents places him in the Pauline tradition.

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13Ethical Obligation and Revelation

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14In this connection we should like to take up once again the question of the ethical absolute. We have shown earlier that the absoluteness of the ethical obligation cannot be established dialogically. In addition to what has already been said on this account, let it be also noted that Buber labors here under a fundamental misconception as regards the nature of ethical obligation. In his discussion with Sartre, he says: “One can believe in and accept a meaning or value, one can set it as a guiding light over one’s life if one has discovered it, not if one has invented it.”⁹⁵Eclipse, 93. It would seem that Buber is of the opinion that values or meanings exist by themselves, not unlike Platonic ideas. One has to discover them (whether dialogically or in any other way need not concern us at the moment). One must perceive them first as values and only then may one believe in them and accept them. We agree fully with him that to discover a value is not the same as setting it up “as a guiding light over one’s life.” We would say that the difference between these two is paralleled by the distinction between what constitutes a value and what is the source of obligation for accepting it as a guiding light for one’s life. It is possible to acknowledge that a certain course of action is inherently good and yet refuse to accept the obligation to pursue it. The question, what is the essence of the good, is altogether different from the one why is one obligated to do the good. One does not have to do the good because it is good; one has got to do it, because one is obligated to practice that which is good and not that which is evil. But what is the source of the obligation for doing the good, after one has discovered the good? An obligation is an Ought; it is well expressed in the form of Thou Shalt. A desire that the good shall be is always the source of the obligation. Desiring a good perceived, a man may obligate himself; or society, the state, the family, recognizing a good and wanting it, may obligate its members. Only in this sense can one say that one may accept a value or believe in it after one has discovered it. One discovers a value by grasping its intrinsic meaningfulness; one believes in it by wanting its realization in life. The discovery is accomplished by the intellect; the belief in the value stems from the will. The source of an obligation is always in a will that desires the end to be achieved. What Buber does not seem to realize is that even if a person were able to perceive the absolute character of a value, he would still not have the absoluteness of a moral obligation. The quality of the obligation would depend on the will that desires the value in question. If a man would discover such a value of essential meaningfulness, if he would then proceed and “set it as a guiding light over his life,” it would still be his own decision that woud render the acceptance of the value obligatory. It might be an absolutely meaningful value, but the quality of obligation attached to it would be relative to the human desire that “set it up.” The absoluteness in an obligation depends on the absoluteness of the will that desires the end in mind. The absolute will is the will of the Absolute. Unless it is explicitly stated to man, it desires nothing from him. The absoluteness of ethical obligation has its source in the absolute will of God revealed to man as His law. Without contents in revelation, all ethical obligation is relative.

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15Law and Continuity

ט״ז

16The divine law, or the contents of revelation, has its significance for the specifically religious experience of man’s relation to God. The relation is never as intimate as Buber wants us to believe; it is never mutual and reciprocal. Most important of all, the moments of the Biblical encounter are the rarest in human experience. Buber is aware of the melancholy lot of man that determines that every Thou should, almost immediately, turn into an It. At the same time he maintains that God is the eternal Thou. When the pure relation does not materialize, it is because man is not present. According to him, man may at any time enter into relation or leave it. Thus the pure relation is presented as the coordinate of solidity and continuity of the entire I-Thou realm. Man and mankind live and prove themselves in the relation or fail outside it. In this sense, Buber may say that all history is a dialogue between God and man. It means that the I-Thou relation between God and man is expected to be a continuous one. This, of course, is so naive that once again one wonders whether Buber means by the I-Thou relation what the phrase would normally indicate. Even if we agreed that the encounter was a dialogical situation, history could still not be described as a dialogue between man and God, for the simple reason that history endures whereas the encounter does not. People and nations live and act in history, but it is in the rarest moments of their existence that they may pass through the encounter. It is just not true to say that man may enter at any time into the pure relation. Only of Moses is such a statement made in the Bible; and even he is not called a partner of God, but “God’s slave.” Most people all the time of their lives and all people most of the time of their lives must stay outside the relation with the divine Thou. How, then, is continuity to be established between the basic religious reality of the encounter and the wordly reality of human existence? In Biblical teaching, the coordinates of such continuity are the contents of revealtion with which people leave the encounter. After the departure of the manifestation of God’s presence, as a pawn for God’s continued concern and love, his law and will for man, remain with man. God is not man’s eternal Thou; He is not always accessible. Most of the time He is indeed silent. But His word and His will, once uttered, eternally confront man. Neither man nor nations can stand in living mutual relation with God and enact history; but they can relate themselves in commitment to the word of God and His revealed will, and living in that commitment, they may sanctify life in all its manifestations. One should, however, not mistake the divine word for an It, in the sense in which Buber at times refers to Platonic ideas. The word of God is not only an object of thought. It is a word by which God actually communicates with man; it is a will, actually expressed and made manifest to man. Even though the encounter has long passed, the word remains forever God’s word for the human being. There is no I-Thou relation, but there is contact with God by hearing His word and doing His will.

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17The Biblical Dialogue

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18Is then there no dialogue and no freedom in the context of the religious reality based on the Biblical encounter? It is the most dangerously misleading aspect of Buber’s philosophy. that it uses Biblical and Jewish concepts but interprets them in such a manner that they lose their Biblical and Jewish signifiance. That the original religious experience is an encounter between God and man is the foundation of Biblical religion; Buber’s interpretation of it as an I-Thou relation of reciprocity is its falsification. A vital aspect of the Biblical encounter is revelation; Buber’s insistence that revelation has no contents is its distortion. We may note the same discrepancy between Biblical ideas and Buberian interpretation in the case of the dialogue. That the whole of life is, in a sense sign language addressed to man, that the concrete situation is given to man by God in order to challenge and to test him, that man is thus addressed by God in every event of his life and has to answer in the human freedom of responsible choice and decision is of course good Biblical teaching. What is more, that is exactly how Jews through the ages understood life and history. The authentic Jew approaches every situation of his life with a question in his heart: what is it, my God, you desire of me here and now. But does it mean that he stands all the time in living mutual relation to God? Is he really all the time existentialy aware of the divine Presence confronting him as his Thou? It is indeed true that every event of human life contains a challenge to man. But how do I know that the challenge is from God, meant by Him for me? The problem could not be solved on the basis of Buber’s dialogical situation. It is not from the concrete situation itself that the Jew derives his knowledge of the challenge, but from what he has learned from the Biblical encounter and from what has been revealed to him in that encounter. In the encounter God reveals Himself as the giver of life and its sustainer by giving life to the human being who otherwise could not endure; He also makes known to man that it does matter to Him how man lives and what he does with his life by revealing to man His word, teaching and command. In the light of this knowledge alone can man approach the concrete situation and know that it is given to him by the Giver, that it addresses him and challenges him on behalf of the Giver, and that the Giver is indeed God. That I am not my own creator, that life is given to me and, therefore, there must be a giver is of course logical. But such reasoning itself cannot identify the giver. It certainly does not show the nature of the giver’s interest in human existence in general or in one’s own personal life in particular. Standing by themselves, nature as well as history are indeed a mystery, but they do not speak for God. Only after God encounters man and makes known to him His will do nature and history become God’s messengers to man. They may speak for God because at first God spoke for Himself in the encounter. Only because of Sinai does a Jew know that every event of his life is God’s challenge to him. The confrontation is between man and the Word of God. The concrete situation is not, as Buber maintains, God’s voice in disguise. The concrete situation has nothing to say. It is the once revealed law of God that addresses man all the time regarding each concrete situation. It is God’s word — without the actual experience of his Presence — speaking to all generations, not from the concrete situation, but from the heights of Sinai.

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19Faith and Freedom

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20What are we, however, to say about the question of human freedom and responsibility? When Buber asserts that man stands in dialogical freedom in the I-Thou relation with God, he offers us another circumstantial evidence that he does not speak either of the genuine encounter or of the true relation. In the presence of God, there is no freedom. No one who stands in God’s presence can deny Him. Of the Decalogue Buber says: “The word does not enforce its own hearing. Whoever does not respond to the Thou addressed to him can apparently go about his business unimpeded. Though He who speaks the word has the power … he has renounced this power of his sufficiently to let every individual actually decide for himself whether he wants to open or close his ears to the voice, and that means whether he wants to choose or reject the I of ‘I am.’ He who rejects Him is not struck down by lightening; he who elects Him does not find hidden treasures. Everything seems to remain just as it was. Obviously, God does not wish to dispense either medals or prison sentences.”⁹⁶Israel, 85. This too is one of those typically equivocal statements of Buber which are so misleading because they are altogether right and altogether wrong. They are right in their Jewish context and wrong in the Buberian sense. If we change the phrase, “Though He who speaks the word has the power” to “Though He who spoke the word has the power,” we stand on Jewish grounds. The freedom and the human responsibility which are thus affirmed are at the core of Jewish faith as it is formed after the encounter. During the act of revelation itself, He who speaks must be heard. He who indeed hears himself addressed by God cannot reject the I of “I am.”

כ״א

21Man’s freedom is returned to him after the encounter. And since encounters are not everyday occurences, and since most people never really enter into actual living relation with God, most people are most of the time of their lives free to accept or reject God. After the encounter, as well as for all those who never experience the divine Presence as living reality actually confronting them, religion is essentially a matter of faith. For a Jew this means that he commits himself to the implications that follow for his life from the Biblical record of God’s encounter with men and with Israel. To have faith for him means to believe that God is present all the time even though man hardly ever is able to experience His presence in actuality; that He is concerned about every living creature, even though His concern is most of the time not convincingly made manifest to men; that His law and his will were made known to men and to Israel in His revelations, even though God is silent now and here for me; that the ultimate fulfillment of life is to be found in becoming aware of His presence in living actuality, even though this ultimate experience may never be granted us on this earth. The foundation of religion is the encounter and the revelation; the life and the history of religion is the life and history of faith. The encounter and the revelation are indeed imposed upon man, no less imposed upon him than is life itself. They are given to him, as is life itself. But after the act of giving is completed, man may refuse to accept. Not only is faith not imposed on man, but man’s historic experience outside the encounter urges him on to reject all the implications of the encounter. Only in the utmost affirmation of his spiritual independence and responsibility can man commit himself in faith.

כ״ב

22Of faith, Buber says that it is the “entrance into this reciprocity (of mutual contact and meeting) as binding oneself in relationship with an undemonstrable and unprovable, yet even so, in relationship knowable Being …”⁹⁷Eclipse, 46. Now, had Buber been satisfied with stating that faith “does not mean professing what we hold true in a ready-made formula,”⁹⁸Israel, 49. one could easily go along with him. However, it makes little sense to say that faith is entrance into reciprocity “between one active existence and another.” One cannot enter into the mutuality of such a meeting by means of faith. Either such contact is real, then there is no need for faith; or else the contact is not real, in which case it will not become real by entering into it with all the power of faith. One cannot enter into a non-existent relation. Biblical faith is commitment to the proposition that “my Redeemer liveth,” that He is present all the time, that He watches man and is concerned about him and that, because of it, man has a responsibility on earth. The man of faith affirms that God is accessible, that He hears when man calls and that He answers in His own way, even though the answer may never be heard by human ears or perceived by the senses. Even if God remained forever silent for him, the man of faith would call again and again and would know that he was heard. Biblical and Jewish commitment in faith is essentially a non-dialogical situation. It is living in the divine Presence, even though the Presence is hidden and, most of the time, inaccessible.⁹⁹Nor is faith the only area where freedom and responsibility are vital. They have their appropriate function within the realm of the revealed law itself. The will of God for man, as expressed in his law, is established; but it is for man to implement the law in the concrete situation of his life. We fully agree with Buber that “in spite of all similarities every living situation has, like a newborn child, a new face, that has never been before and will never come again. It demands of you a reaction which cannot be prepared beforehand.” (Between Man and Man, 114.) Buber, of course, cannot show how a situation may make demands on man that have to be met in responsibility. Once, however, the law is established, the demand is made to apply the law to the living situation. This is a demand to the human conscience which one can answer only in freedom and responsibility. Because every situation is indeed unique, one has to go back continually anew to the law and inquire of its meaning again and again. The meaning is then revealed afresh, in relationship to the new situation, for the one who inquires in responsibility and decides in the freedom of his conscience. It is indeed in this spirit that the great Rabbinical teachers of the oral tradition have taught the applicatoin of the law to every new situation. Whoever is familiar with their teaching and their method knows well that the law often reveals unsuspected levels of meaning as it is being applied to a new situation. In keeping with prophetic tradition, the Rabbis insisted that one should approach the contents of God’s revelation as if it had been revealed to man every day anew. (See T. B. Berakot, 63b.) In the task of applying the law to every specific situation man’s responsibility is tested. Of course, he has the law before him; but it is man who interprets, it is he who makes the decision and is responsible for his action. As is well known, the Rabbis, on one occasion, went as far in their affirmation of their responsibility to interpret and to decide in the freedom of their conscience that they defied heavenly signs which demanded a different decision. (See T. B. Baba Metsia, 59b.)