My Friendship with Martin Buber

Prologue

xvii Prologue Iwas with Martin Buber in his three visits to America as well as during my four months with him in Jerusalem in 1960. My friendship with him begins in the summer of 1950 and ends with his death in 1965. The chapters that contain my selections from my fifteen years of correspondence with him retain the form of dialogue that was close to Buber’s heart. I claim, nonetheless, that this book is more than just a personal memoir. It is a part of living history. Although I never studied formally with Buber, he was, along with Abraham Joshua Heschel, my most important mentor. Through him I have come to a deep concern with Hasidism, biblical Judaism (the Hebrew Bible), psychotherapy, education, social philosophy and social problems, existentialism, and the life of dialogue—all of which I have given expression to in my books and my many articles. Despite the disagreements in their interpretation of the prophets and of Hasidism, Heschel strongly protested Gershom Scholem’s harsh critique of Buber’s teaching of Hasidism. “Where do we have anyone else like him in world Judaism?” Heschel exclaimed to me. It is not surprising that Heschel, who happened to be in Jerusalem when Buber lay dying, tried repeatedly to get in to see him and that he often said to me that the man Buber was more important than his books! I was able to sustain my simultaneous friendship and loyalty with Heschel and Buber for a great many years without feeling xviii • PROLOGUE that I had to accept one and reject the other. This dual loyalty has meant living with the tension of the differences between the two men, such as their attitudes toward observance of the Jewish law. My Friendship with Martin Buber is composed of prose narration; of anecdotes from my personal contacts with Buber in his three visits to America and in the four months that my then wife Eugenia and I spent with him in Jerusalem, seeing him twice a week for long evenings; and several chapters of selections from Martin Buber’s letters to me and my own letters to Buber. I want to give the reader a sense for both sides of the dialogue between Buber and myself. I hope that readers will find this exchange of letters rich and meaningful, as I do. People often asked me if Buber really lived his philosophy. To this I can and will testify. He “walked his talk,” as people like to say today. He really lived the life of dialogue, and to him it was really “the only life worth living,” as Irving Howe, the editor of Dissent, said of Buber’s friend Albert Camus. Sixty years ago, my close friend Philip Griggs—who had brought me into his own dedication to Sri Ramakrishna and the Hindu Vedanta, who visited Swami Yatiswarananda with me once a week in Philadelphia, and who is now himself Swami Yogeshananda, director of the Atlanta Vedanta Center, wrote to me that I would one day find my guru. I have since left the path of the Vedanta. Nor have I ever related to any person as my guru in the traditional Hindu sense of the chela, following the guru with absolute obedience. But I have had the good fortune to have had an incomparable mentor in Martin Buber. Despite my slight estrangement from Buber, much of which might be attributed to his age and ailing health, since Buber’s death my loyalty to him has continued through countless lectures , seminars, and courses in this country and abroad. That this has included, on my part, some distancing from and contending PROLOGUE • xix with Buber has never dimmed my gratitude and love for Buber, both when he was alive and in the years since. Maurice Friedman Solana Beach, California 2009 My Friendship with MartinBuber ...