Martin Buber: Prophet of Religious Secularism.

Donald Moore's book on Buber is an updated version of a work he first published in 1974 which, in turn, was a reworking of a doctoral dissertation written for the University of Strasbourg and inspired by work he did on Buber with Maurice Friedman in the 1960s. I note this long genealogy to illustrate how long the author has engaged the life and thought of one of the most fecund religious philosophers of this century.

Buber was not universally loved by his fellow religionists in his adopted land of Israel (he moved there in the late 1930s), both because of his passionate support for a binational state and his lifelong unwillingness to participate in synagogue life or accept the imperatives of Orthodox observance. Furthermore, he was often in the midst of heated debates about his scholarship (most famously with Gershon Sholem with respect to his understanding of Hasidism). That being said, who would argue with the judgment that he made original contributions to religious thought?

Apart from Buber's work as a biblical translator, commentator, and meditator on the riches of Hasidism, it seems to me that nobody in the modern world has better understood in depth and lived more deeply the conviction that life is dialogue in the deepest sense of that term. Nor is it always appreciated that Buber's insistence on the I/Thou relationship is rooted in one of the most profound aspects of the Bible: that the covenant between God and Israel is essentially cast as a dialogue: I will be your God/You will be my people. The covenant is only a covenant when the "I" of God is answered by the "Thou" of people. That conviction gives rise to Buber's famous assertion that God cannot be expressed but only addressed.

The implications of that insight (as Moore so well says) compelled Buber to engage issues of human sociology, education, communications, and so on. I found myself jotting down in my notebooks lines and words of Buber quoted by Moore that shed light on any number of issues that concern me. In his final (new) chapter, Moore writes about Buber in relation to some strands of Catholic theology (especially in Karl Rahner), but I think he makes too much of the links between the apophatic strain in Buber and Rahner. I did keep thinking about how this material would affect the way we think about prayer, and how Buber's dialogical thought might help us positively to critique recent thinking about liturgy.

Moore is deeply involved in Jewish/Christian relations (he has also done a book on Abraham Heschel) and, as such, is a loving and gentle reader of Buber. This work is not a substitute for the biographical studies of Maurice Friedman, but it is a solid, well-researched, and sympathetic reading of one of the truly crucial spiritual masters of our age. Reading Moore might well spur a person to go back and read Buber.