My Friendship with Martin Buber

12. Our Stay in Jerusalem and Buber’s Last Years

142 12 Our Stay in Jerusalem and Buber’s LastYears In January 1960, a long-standing dream of Eugenia’s and mine was fulfilled when we went for four months to stay in Jerusalem. Buber’s granddaughter Barbara (the sister of Judith, whom I had met in Michigan) found an apartment for us. She was generally helpful in other ways, such as taking us to Abu Tor to show us the house in the Arab section of Jerusalem where the Bubers had formerly lived. She lived with her husband in a house in Talbiyeh where Martin and Paula had lived since the inception of the State of Israel. Twice a week during our stay we spent a long evening with Martin Buber in his house. There, on several occasions, Buber and Eugenia read together from the koine Greek of the New Testament , Greek being Buber’s favorite language after Hebrew. We also spent some time with a Sarah Lawrence student’s uncle who was a lawyer but also ambassador to Israel from two small South American countries. He told us of his love of Greek and his translation of Plato into Hebrew. Since he was so much into Greek I told him that I had translated fairly recently Buber’s essay “What Is Common to All,” which takes off from some sayings of the great pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus. “Buber does not know enough Greek to write about Heraclitus,” he asserted. I did not tell him that Greek was Buber’s second-favorite language, BUBER’S LAST YEARS • 143 which he had studied and read since he was small. But, the Sarah Lawrence student’s uncle added, “It was all right for Nietzsche, who also did not really know Greek, since Nietzsche was a philosopher .” “Is then Buber not a philosopher?” I asked him. “Why, he has lived around the corner from me for fourteen years!” he exclaimed. At about midnight on our visits, Buber would still be going strong while Eugenia and I would begin fading on the vine. Buber and I got a lot of work done together during this period, and I was able to ask him most of the questions that had arisen for me from his writings. At one point, he took me into his study and showed me, in the Hebrew, the section of the Book of Job that he had interpreted for the American philosopher Walter Kaufmann at the latter ’s request. A few years later, I published an article in response titled “Walter Kaufmann’s Mismeeting with Buber.”1 During our visit, Buber renewed his pressure on me to get the Buber volume of the Library of Living Philosophers as well as his section of the Philosophical Interrogations published. I could not do anything about the former since the Buber volume had to wait till after a volume on Carnap was published. (“If I had a following like Carnap, I should want my volume published soon too!” Buber exclaimed.) In 1964, however, a year before Buber’s death, I succeeded in finding a publisher for the Interrogations. Originally , they were to be published as a whole issue of The Review of Metaphysics. Since this was no longer the plan, I approached my old friend Arthur Cohen, now an editor at Holt, Rinehart & Winston, and he agreed to bring out the Philosophical Interrogations as a book. But about the Living Philosophers volume I could do nothing . Kohlhammer Verlag brought out the German edition of the Buber volume in 1965. But the English edition did not appear in America and Great Britain until 1966, a year after Buber’s death. I can very well understand how Buber felt about this volume not 144 • MY FRIENDSHIP WITH MARTIN BUBER getting published in English in his lifetime, particularly given the many friends of his who wanted to see his “Replies to My Critics” in print. I also understand how he felt about me, a young man who could not, as he said repeatedly, understand an old one. He felt this way partly because he did not believe I had an adequate understanding of the exigencies of time, which was particularly poignant for him in the light of his sentence in “Guilt and Guilt Feelings”: “Time is like a torrent leading us to the starkest of all human perspectives—one’s individual death.” I do not think Buber was afraid of death, but I do...