from this first lecture, Buber’s originality is evident as one of the great renewers of communitarian thought in the twentieth century. In Buber’s opinion, it was neither possible nor desirable to return to the traditional community. Rather, he spoke of the struggle for a new community, not pre-social (like the one described by Tönnies) but post-social. The most crucial difference between the old and the new community organization was that the former was based upon blood relations (Blutverwandtschaft), while the latter was the outcome of elective affinities (Wahlverwandtschaft) – in other words, it expressed a free choice. This community was not to be bound by religious, regional or national borders: to use Gustav Landauer’s cosmopolitan and mystical formulation, which Buber quoted, the community leaned towards ‘the oldest and most universal community: that of the human species and the cosmos’. In spite of the fact that he rejected all ‘retrogressive’ utopias, neo-romantic references to the traditional community remained alive in Buber’s mind: first, in his dream of deserting ‘the swarming of the cities’ in order to build the new world on the ‘powerful and virginal soil’ of the countryside, closer to nature and the land; and second, in the idea that the new community meant the return (Wiederkehren), albeit in a different form and on a higher level, of ‘the vital unity of primeval man’ (Lebenseinheit des Urmenschen) – shattered and torn by the serfdom of modern ‘society’ (Gesellschaft).1
Buber took up and developed these themes again in ‘Gemein-schaft’, an article published in 1919. Like Tönnies, to whom he directly referred, Buber contrasted the organic, natural community of the past with the modern, artificial and mechanical Gesellschaft. However, he did not advocate a restoration of the past: ‘Certainly we cannot turn back the clock on our mechanized society, but we can go beyond, towards a new organicity (einer neuen Organik).’ By that he meant a community that resulted not from primal growth but rather from conscious action (bewussten Wirkens) to establish the principle of community; the goal of such action would be to construct a socialist society through an alliance of autonomous communes (Gemeinden).2 Buber no longer believed that a return to the land was an alternative to modern industrial cities; in a lecture he gave in Zurich in 1923, he said:
We cannot leave the city to take refuge in the village. The village is still close to the primitive community. The city is the form that corresponds to differentiation. We can no longer turn back the clock on the city, we must overcome (überwinden) the city itself.
The solution would be a third form of communal life, as distinct from the rural village as it was from the big city, which could arise from a new organization of labour.3
It was in this context that Buber rediscovered the tradition of Hasidism as a Jewish mystical current equivalent to a Böhme or a Meister Eckhart, and as the religious manifestation of an organic community, united and welded by its spirituality and culture. As he wrote several years later, what gave Hasidism its particularity and its grandeur was not a doctrine but an attitude of life (Lebenshaltung), a mode of behaviour, that was ‘community-forming’ (gemeindebildend) in its very essence.4
According to Gershom Scholem, Buber’s interpretation of Hasidism was inspired by his ‘religious anarchism’ – that is, by his refusal to grant a place to restrictive commandments in the world of the living relationship between the I and the Thou.5 In fact, in his famous Ich und Du (1923), Buber used the paradigm of dialogue and encounter (Begegnung) to define the true relationship between man and man, and between man and God – a model as deeply subversive of the rigid and ritualistic forms of institutional religion (which Hasidism questioned) as it was of political and state institutions.
The success of Buber’s books on the masters of Hasidism (Baal Schem and Rabbi Nachmann) was due to the fact that they expressed the subterranean current of religious rebirth flowing within the Jewish intelligentsia of romantic cultural origins. Like himself, the members of that intelligentsia re-discovered, in the eighteenth-century Jewish-Polish legends, something ancient (Uraltes) and original (Urkünftiges), a lost past (Verlorenes), an object of longing (Ersehntes).6 The interpretation of Judaism as an essentially rationalist religion was common to the Wissenschaft des Judentums, Jewish liberalism and academic sociology (Max Weber, Sombart). For example, according to Sombart, ‘Jewish mysticism along the lines of Jakob Böhme is very hard for us to imagine’; as for the cabbala, there was
nothing more foreign to romanticism than that purely discursive way of conceiving and understanding the world; romanticism assumes, in fact, the fusion of man with the world, with nature, and with his fellow man, all things that the Jew, the extreme intellectual, is totally incapable of doing.7
By presenting a mystical romantic reading of the Jewish religion in his works, Buber broke this consensus and created a new image of Judaism, with which the rebellious generation at odds with bourgeois liberalism could identify.
One of the most significant aspects of Buber’s neo-romantic interpretation was the importance he attached to messianism. In the lectures he gave in Prague, Buber proclaimed that messianism was ‘Judaism’s most profoundly original idea’. It meant the yearning for ‘an absolute future that transcends all reality of past and present as the true and perfect life’, and the coming of the ‘world of unity’, in which the separation between good and evil would be overcome, as sin would forever be destroyed.8 As Gershom Scholem had showed so well, the theme of the messianic era as a world delivered from evil was potentially one of the religious foundations of anarchist utopia: the absence of evil makes restriction, coercion and sanctions superfluous. In Buber’s mind, the coming of the Messiah would take place not in the other world but in the world here below: it would not be a historical event, but it was ‘being prepared in history’. Seen from a utopian-restorative perspective, the arrival of the Messiah was a mystery ‘in which the past and future, the end of time and history are linked. … It takes the form of the absolute past and carries the seed of the absolute future.’9
It was from a romantic/messianic vision of history that Buber (like Rosenzweig, Landauer and Benjamin) questioned the concept of evolution, progress or improvement (Verbesserung): ‘For by “renewal”, I do not in any way mean something gradual, a sum total of minor changes. I mean something sudden and immense (Ungeheures) by no means a continuation or an improvement, but a return and transformation.’ Rather than hope for ordinary progress (Fortschritt), one should ‘desire the impossible’ (das Unmögliche). Buber found the paradigm for this complete renewal in the Jewish messianic tradition: ‘The last part of Isaiah has God say: “I create new heavens and a new earth.” (Isaiah 65:17)… This was not a metaphor but a direct experience.’10
Martin Buber, more than any other modern religious Jewish thinker, placed the active participation of men in redemption – as God’s partners – at the heart of his idea of messianism: ‘The central Jewish Theologumenon, which remains unformulated and undogmatic, but which forms the background and cohesion of all doctrine and prophecy, is the belief that human action will actively participate in the task of world redemption.’11 The message of Hasidism, according to Buber, was that man was not condemned to waiting and contemplation: redemption was his to act upon, by collecting and releasing the sparks of holy light dispersed throughout the world.12 Does this mean that God is not omnipotent – that He cannot save the world without man’s help? No, Buber responds, it means only that He does not will redemption without the participation of man: generations of men had been granted a ‘collaborative force’ (mitwirkende Kraft), an active messianic force (messianische Kraft).13
It was for this reason that Buber contrasted more and more categorically, messianic prophetism (Jewish eschatology proper) and Apocalyptics (an eschatological conception that originated in Iran): the former accorded the preparation of redemption to humanity, to the decision-making power of each human being so called upon; while the latter conceived redemption as an
