My Friendship with Martin Buber

1. My Friendship with Martin Buber Begins

1 1 My Friendship with Martin Buber Begins Martin Buber’s grandfather Solomon Buber was one of the great scholars and expositors in his day of the aggadic (nonlegal) portions of the Talmud. Although Martin Buber knew the Talmud , he did not draw heavily from those wellsprings. Martin Buber had a quality, which I inherited from him, of deeply caring about responding to one’s unique personal call with a wholeness of the being that includes genuine decision and what the Hasidim called kavana—deep inner intention. Buber gave magnificent expression to this concern in his philosophy of dialogue for which he is known the world over, particularly through its classic formulation in I and Thou. Buber had a lifelong devotion to gathering and retelling Hasidic tales, most of which were transmitted orally from generation to generation. The tales were not written down until a half century after the original transmission, when European Jews were afraid of losing them. To Buber, these tales, and not formal kabbalistic theories such as those of the Lurianic Kabbalah on which so much of formal Hasidic doctrines are based, were the real heart of the Hasidic community. Abraham Joshua Heschel once said to me that he saw Buber as an exception in that he mastered two fields—studies of the Hebrew Bible and of Hasidism— whereas most scholars of Judaism can master only one. 2 • MY FRIENDSHIP WITH MARTIN BUBER I was with Martin Buber during his three visits to America and I spent four months with him in Jerusalem in 1960. My friendship with him began in the summer of 1950 and ended with his death in 1965. Although I never studied formally with Buber, he was, along with 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 nearly two hundred articles. I was brought up as a Reform Jew, but Reform Judaism had little hold on me emotionally or intellectually. During high school and college, my ideals centered on peace and social reform. After college, during World War II, I spent three years in camps and units for conscientious objectors, and it was during that time that I realized the inadequacy of my social idealism. I discovered that though I wanted to help others, my own life had neither meaning nor wholeness. I became deeply interested in mysticism at this time, and through mysticism I found a belief in God and a meaning for my own life, but not for a religious way of life that seemed right for me. Vedanta appealed to me intellectually and Christianity emotionally, but I was not able to make either of these religions my own. I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a pleasant and not too provincial southwestern city with a population at the time of 150,000. My parents both came from Europe: my father was from a Mitnagdic family in Poland and my mother from a Hasidic family in Lithuania. According to my great uncles, both of my maternal great-grandfathers belonged to the Lubavitcher dynasty. My mother’s father spent most of his time in prayer and study, leaving the support and care of his family to his wife. I believe that it was partially in reaction to this that my mother turned to Reform Judaism, Zionism, and active organizational work of other sorts. MY FRIENDSHIP WITH MARTIN BUBER BEGINS • 3 My home life was a chaotic and unhappy one. My mother dominated the family while my father largely withdrew from responsibility for the children. My mother was highly excitable and emotional as I grew up, and there were daily violent quarrels between my mother and father or some other member of the family (mostly me) that left me little inner peace. In my fights with my two-years-older sister Roberta, my mother usually sided with Roberta without asking any questions. I would mock or laugh at my mother when she got angry with me, which would infuriate her to the point that she would strike me with brooms, slippers, or anything else that came to hand. Before I was nine, I used to cry because my feelings were hurt, but after that I never cried. In high school, I tended to draw...