At the time when a proposal for a “nuclear freeze”—that is, a cessation of the construction of nuclear weapons by the United States and the Soviet Union—had appeared as a ballot referendum in several states, including New Jersey, the Home News of New Brunswick, New Jersey requested statements on the question, “What is the meaning of ‘peace on earth’ today?” The replies were published on Christmas Day, 1983. Here is mine:

 

The phrase “peace on earth” occurs in the New Testament. In the Gospel According to (2:14), angels sing to shepherds of the Christ’s birth:
Glory to God in the highest,
And on earth peace among men with whom
He is pleased.

There is no utopianism, here. The angels do not herald peace on earth among all men—only peace on earth among those with whom God is pleased. The New Testament famously insists that only those who sincerely worship the Christ please God.

In Christian terms, then, there can be no general peace on earth today because genuine Christians do not rule all the nations. Nor will they ever rule on this earth, according to Scripture. Only the Christ can bring peace on earth, and only after He returns to earth, eventually creating a new heaven and a new earth. Centuries earlier, Jews also understood that divine intervention alone can bring peace to the nations. The prophet Isaiah foresaw swords beaten into plowshares after, not before the coming of the Messiah.

Today, many people at “peace on earth,” believing that peace-loving human beings can themselves fashion perpetual and universal peace. There is no evidence for this belief either in history or in Scripture. Such persons transform Judaism and Christianity into a kind of politics called ‘pacifism.’ They confused themselves with the Messiah, forgetting both the realism of the political man and the humility of the religious one. Their utopian worldly ambitions are too spiritual, their proud spirituality too worldly. They invite martyrdom without redemption.

Review of Maurice Friedmann: Martin Buber’s Life and Work. Volume I. The Early Years: 1878-1923. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1982.

Earlier version published in Chronicles of Culture, October 1982.
Republished with permission.

 

Education defines political life more fully than brute power does. Admit that “Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can.” The real questions remain: Which gods? Which men? Ruling for what purpose? The kind of education they propose for their regime will tell us.

Education reveals purpose not only in subject matter and in doctrine but also in the tension between teacher and student. In tyrannies this tension consists mostly of fear; in democracies, it often consists of egoism and un-platonic eros; the best regime would encourage the loving tension between a genuine teacher and a genuine student. And the genuine teacher, remaining also a genuine student, will feel this tension within himself, too.

Martin Buber seeks knowledge of a personal sort, and he seeks to impart it–or, more accurately, to inspire his readers to seek it. “Going forth” to seek the truth is “unteachable in the sense of prescriptions” although he quickly goes on to prescribe the giving-up of the “false drive for self-affirmation” as a preliminary to this quest. The celebrated and succinct way he puts this is to celebrate the “I-Thou” relationship, not the “I-It” relationship. He regards the impersonal, “I-It” relationship as foundational to the corrupt and lethal utopias that had arisen a century before his birth and flourished virally in his own century. In Paths in Utopia, Buber observes that the decline of religion, the traditional frame of education, did not eliminate dreams of paradise: “the whole force of dispossessed eschatology was converted into utopia at the time of the French revolution,” a utopia Marxists tried to win by conquest–by treating their enemies as things, not as persons. Thus education, religion, and politics each reveals the same problem in a different way. The problem of subject and object confronts teachers and students, gods and men, rulers and ruled, would-be conquerors and supposed slaves.

Maurice Friedmann narrates Buber’s life and work leading to the publication of his best-known book, I and Thou. Although labeled a mystic, Buber was no such thing; Friedmann shows that Buber never undertook mysticism’s project, transcending the world by uniting with God. He respected but finally rejected Hasidism. Buber regarded this world as the place to encounter God. The “I-Thou” means refusing to regard nature, men, and spirit as objects to be owned or used, which is the “I-It” relation. “I-Thou” means the kind of participation with the other that a sentence cannot state but which lovers know. Buber equally rejects Hegel’s idea of the Absolute Spirit, the dialectical unfolding of freedom conceived as ever-increasing human control over the congealed Absolute Spirit that is matter. Such control is a matter of mastery, not reciprocity. But “we live in the currents of universal reciprocity” and not dominance, not any `overcoming’ by means of conflict followed by synthesis. Unlike Hegel or any non-philosophic pantheist, Buber regards God’s immanence not as a fact but as a task yet to be accomplished and perhaps never to be fully accomplished but always to be striven for. This striving must not be erotic/desiring or thumotic/ambitious but patient, a matter of attentive readiness to enter into relations of reciprocity with others, whether they are fellow humans or any other natural beings.

In describing this, Friedmann refuses to let us imagine that Buber’s love partook of sentimentality, let alone eroticism. Sentimental love idealizes its object; erotic love desires to possess it. “I-Thou” love thinks and feels with the other, wants the best for it. It is the love translated as `compassion’ in many English-language versions of the Bible: agape in the Greek, Chesed in Hebrew. Love is not a feeling but a cosmic force, “a responsibility of an I for a Thou.” To be animated by that love inoculated Buber from certain temptations. Friedmann quotes Buber’s recollection of Lou Salomé, the veteran seductress who claimed numerous intellectuals: “Every man fell in love with her, but I didn’t.” If every man does something but I do not, does this make me more than a man? Or less? Buber sanely, wisely, understood the limits of “I-Thou” love as well as its strength: “even love cannot persist in direct relation: it endures but only in the alternation of actuality and latency.” God sustains this love steadily, but Buber never made that claim for himself.

Despite his intellectual prowess, Buber ruled out the love philosophers know, the love of wisdom. He goes so far as to call intellect a “parasite” of nature, contending that reason’s law, the law of non-contradiction, requires the separation that makes the “I-It” inevitable. As Friedmann puts it, “Plato’s logical categories of the same and the other and Aristotle’s logic of A and not-A can never comprehend the simultaneous reality of distancing and relating, separateness and togetherness, arrows going apart and arrows coming together, concrete situation and free response, which make up the meeting of I and thou.” And to those who would reply that that is what the Socratic dialogue, as a conversation between persons, must be intended to illustrate, Buber would say he admires that dialogue but it remains nonetheless dialectical, a dual of `points of view’ and not “an interaction between persons.” Crucially, he admits that he never experienced Plato’s eros for ideas, any more than he lusted for Miss Salomé. This presents a problem. Without the principle of non-contradiction, no one could distinguish the “I-Thou” from the “I-It.” Buber makes that distinction very clearly, but he may have failed to distinguish between the nature of Platonic eros, which longs for wisdom not merely to possess it but to incorporate it into oneself, to become wiser, indeed to participate in what truly is, and the modern or Machiavellian call to (as we continue to say) grasp reality, to possess, control, manipulate, caress or annihilate it.

If Buber often sounds as much Christian as Jewish, it is because in a way he was. “From my youth onward,” he wrote, “I have found in Jesus my great brother.” The “communal immediacy” of early Christianity superseded the legalism of the Judaism that Jesus encountered. Buber never flirted with conversion, however, as he considered true Christianity a revival of true Judaism, and never believed Jesus to be divine. To Buber, the “I-Thou” love forms the core of both religions, and I think he is right about that. The real distinction between Buber and the Bible–both Testaments–and Plato is not so much their manner of loving as the beings loved. For Plato the final reality is nature; except for human nature, nature is not a person. Knowledge therefore mostly aims at intimacy with an `It’ or with many`Its,’ not at intimacy with a Person (or, in polytheism, Persons). Human beings, nature in the form of persons, want to know their place within that natural cosmos. Hence the indispensable value of ideas, of abstractions from the concrete manifestations of reality, abstractions that enable us to see the relations among things of a kind, and among the various kinds of things. The Bible reveals that the ultimate reality is a Person. To know the most important `thing’ is not to know a thing, and therefore not to abstract or generalize among things, but to know this Person, with love.

Friedmann offers a lucid explanation of why Buber expected Biblical love to prevail, why the Word would become flesh in society at large, and not only in the persons of God’s prophets. “Buber’s statement in I and Thou, `In the beginning is the relation,’ is not an alternative to the Johannine `In the beginning was the Word’ but a restoration to it of the biblical dynamic and mutuality of the words as `between.'” By this Friedman means that “the true beginning of relationship is the speech of God which creates the world and addresses man. The world really becomes through God’s word, and the world takes place and becomes real for man in the word. Speech is thus the face-to-face existence of the creatures, and pure creation coincides with pure speaking. That we can Thou is to be understood from the fact that Thou is said to us.” God love us first, Person to person. This is why the Logos of Jerusalem surpasses the logos of Athens, philosophic speech. Buber mistakenly supposes that Socrates wanted his regime-in-speech to come to fruition in practice, but even and perhaps especially if he had seen that Socrates likely intends no such consummation he would prefer God’s kind of speech all the more.

Intensely private, love translates into the realities of public life only with difficulty. Buber rejected the secular-political Zionism of Theodore Herzl because he thought Herzl wanted to `Americanize’ Palestine, make it into a state that defended rights that were human-all-too-human; Herzl was “a whole man, but not a whole Jew.” Buber wanted the land of Israel to become again the land of Judaism. Buber had the courage to try to the translation of love into politics not only `on paper,’ in his writings, but in political practice.  I and Thou does not ignore economic and political reality: “Man’s will to profit and will to power are natural and legitimate as long as they are tied to the will to human relations and carried by it…. The statesman or businessman who serves the spirit is no dilettante,” as he tries to define the limits of spirit and will “every day anew, according to the right and measure of that day.” This seems to indicate Buber’s interest in what Plato and the other classical philosophers called phronesis, usually translated in English as `prudence,’ although without the connotation of self-serving calculation it has sometimes acquired.

The thought deserves an example that Buber never gives. But Friedmann steps up to the biographer’s rightful task by supplying one. After World War I, he recounts, Buber resumed the Zionist activities that had involved him (and would continue to involve him) for most of his life. He hoped that Palestinian Jews, practicing the “I-Thou” way of living, could live harmoniously with Palestinian Arabs instead of “turn[ing] them into sworn enemies.” Friedmann sees this as prophetic, for “the situation had not yet polarized… into Zionism and anti-Zionism.”

Given the characteristics of Islam, one may doubt that this polarity was avoidable. Islam forthrightly assigns the status of subordination, dhimmitude, to non-Muslims. Islamic law builds the “I-It” relation into the Muslim’s soul. (Does this follow from the Islamic emphasis on God-as-will, not God-as-love? It might.) Evidently, Buber’s colleagues also had their doubts. At the Twelfth Zionist Congress in 1921, Buber wrote a resolution calling for Arab-Jewish unity in Palestine. It was amended into innocuousness. Friedmann quotes Buber: “My role as a `politician,’ i.e. as a man who takes part in the political activity of a group was finished…. [H]enceforth I would not start anything where I had to choose between the truth as I saw it and what was actually being achieved.” That is exactly the choice that statesmen and businessmen make every day. It requires the prudence that Buber seems to esteem but finally cannot practice. In Buber’s defense, it is true that at some point compromise might go too far; withdrawal might be the only decent recourse, as the American founders thought in declaring their independence.

For Buber, though, withdrawal to what, where? Paths in Utopia ends with praise for the kibbutzim. To what extent could communalists defend themselves against large armies?  Buber evidently formed what Tocqueville would have called a civil-social strategy to achieve communalist self-defense. Rather than approaching the problem of peace politically (as, for example, U. S. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson envisioned when he encouraged the proliferation of commercial-republic regimes in the New World), Buber wanted to “deprive the political principle of its supremacy over the social principle” by encouraging “the resolute will of all peoples to cultivate the territories and raw materials of our planet and govern its inhabitants, together.” But of course if the social principle is to achieve “supremacy” over the political principle, the social principle rules, and thus becomes effectively a new political principle. It can do so, Buber surmises, because politics as ordinarily understood consists of putting things in order, but the fundamental order of the cosmos cannot be put in order because it is already orderly. Communalism would (so to speak) tap into the loving order of reality–align human life with the dynamic and permanent I-Thou. This seems to mean the gradual establishment of kibbutzim under the protective carapaces of actual states, worldwide. And this would require those states to have regimes sympathetic to, or at least very tolerant of, such communes. This difficulty notwithstanding, the “I-Thou” did save Buber from state socialism, the only practicing `communism’ that has actually achieved the status of sovereign rule in the modern world, but which yields community only by uniting workers against the self-described `workers’ state.’ Among socialists, Buber’s sober and decent view can only serve the cause of sanity, if not prudence. And among socialists, sanity must always be a cause, the object of longing, for it is surely not a given.

Review of Elie Wiesel: The Testament. New York: Summit Books, 1981.

Published November 1981 in Chronicles of Culture.
Republished with permission.

 

Solzhenitsyn speaks for the Russia crushed but could not kill: the Russia of czarism and the Orthodox Church. He does not, cannot, speak for the old Russian underground. Solzhenitsyn’s master, Dostoyevsky, speaks of, if not for, part of that underground, the pat that dreamed of democracy, or socialism. Neither can speak for the other part of the underground, the only international nation: the Jews.

For years some Jews allied themselves with the secular underground. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, they were taught, and enemies were never scarce. Still, an unusually large number of Jews not only allied themselves with socialism particularly communism but–to use apt religious language–converted to it. Why?

Stalin took the precaution of murdering anyone who could have answered. Elie Wiesel, one of the best Jewish writers alive (there are reasons why he will not regard that designation as condescending), undertakes to speak for the dead, to re-member the Russian Jewishness that Stalin tried to dismember.

The Testament begins in Israel. Wiesel, himself a minor character in the novel, watches Soviet Jews arrive at Lod Airport in July, 1972. From “the realm of silence and fear” they enter Israel silently and fearfully. But memory, memory of lovers, family, and (true) comrades fast overcomes silence and fear. Soon they can laugh and weep, toast life, the future, peace–perhaps their first free expression of feeling in a lifetime of enforced guardedness.

Wiesel sees a young man who does not participate. He is a mute, the son of Paltiel Gershonovich Kossover, a poet `liquidated’ by Stalin some twenty years before. Taken back to Wiesel’s apartment, he insists on staying awake all night; it will transpire that he wants to write his father’s memoir, his testament, from memory.

Soviet communism, Judaism travel (or, as is said of Jews, wandering), silence fear, memory, reunion, love, family,, friendship, laughter, life, the future, peace, freedom, poetry: Wiesel presents his themes in the brief prologue. In Paltiel Kossover’s letter to his son, which follows the prologue, we learn the poet’s teachings on some of these themes. “[T]he very essence of the noble tradition of Judaism” consists of a kind of universal memory system, the Book of Creation wherein “all our actions re inscribed.” Memory serves Creation, life (and therefore the future) because without it there is only oblivion. And although Paltiel Kossover does “not know what life is” and will “die without knowing,” he knows that communism, in exacting selective amnesia, does not serve life. “Don’t follow the path I took,” he tells his son, “it doesn’t lead to truth.” “Truth, for a Jew, is to dwell among his brothers. Link your destiny to that of your people, otherwise you will surely reach an impasse.” Although “I lived a Communist… I die a Jew”; having lived, inadvertently, for death, he dies for life–a theme on which Christians have no monopoly.

The novel explore the subtleties of these themes, the gaining of these teachings. Wiesel juxtaposes short chapters concerning Paltiel Kossoer’s son–especially his recovery of his father’s memoir–with sections of the Testament, the story of a Jew wandering from his native city in Russia and the faith he learned there to Romania during the First World War, Berlin in the 20’s, Paris in the 30’s, briefly to Palestine and then to Spain during the civil war, to Moscow during the Second World War and finally back to his native city, the prison there and to Jewishness.

All Jews “were victims of fear” during Paltiel Kossover’s childhood in Russia. There was fear of stern teachers–a fear that led to knowledge something to love–and fear of Christians and their pogroms, which led neither to knowledge nor to love. His mother’s songs (the source of his poetic nature?) soothed the fear of teachers, but the only immediate remedy for the fear of death at Christian hands was silence; the Kossover family hid beneath the door of the barn while murdering toughs shrieked “Death to the Jews!” Throughout The Testament, silence means both the babbling of false prophets and the poetry of true ones.

The move to Romania brought no real uprooting, for “Jews remain Jews wherever they are: united, charitable, hospitable,” part of “a timeless community” without geographical boundaries. Yet these aspects of Judaism led Paltiel Kossover away from Judaism, as he saw the suffering of the poor and wanted to relieve it. Jewish messianism fascinated him; it also prepared him for communism. Fortune intervened in the shape of a fellow student, “a master at the seduction and corruption of the mind,” who introduced him to Marxist political action and thought, not only as an expression of the will to justice but as a vehicle of the friendship Paltiel craved.

Wiesel’s best writing arises from his perception that most human beings, even intelligent ones, enact contradictory ideas and feelings while remaining quite decent and only a bit guilt-ridden. Despite his partial conversion to Marxism, on the eve of his departure for Berlin (he wanted to evade Romanian conscription), Paltiel sincerely and doubtfully promised his father to remain a Jew. And in Berlin, further seduced by a nubile young communist who lectured him in bed, on Darwin and historical materialism, h continued to pray, albeit surreptitiously. Only after intense action–a street fight with Nazis–and his girlfriend’s ensuring care did he forget his observances for the first time. Forgetting: few of the great modern anti-religious philosophers believed they could induce men to reject God, but they knew that a certain kind of life, a life of activity in and for this world, might induce men to forget God.

The triumph of Nazism in 1932, a triumph Berlin’s communist prophets failed to predict, eventually led Paltiel Kossover to Paris. He met two remarkable men: the mysterious David Aboulesia, a wanderer searching for the Messiah, and Paul Hamburger, a brilliant Jewish communist intellectual and organizer. Hamburger saw, as Paltiel did not, that the Moscow trials must involve a grotesque betrayal of the revolution. Before he obeyed Stalin’s order to return to Moscow, he told Paltiel to get out of Paris, to go to Spain.

Describing the brutality of both sides in the civil war, Paltiel reflects that the Jews fighting there did not share in it. “If he Spaniards massacred one another, if they set their country on fire and bled it, it is because, in1492, they burned or drove away their Jews,” leaving no moderating sense of humaneness in Spain. Jews who were engaged in the internecine struggles on the left developed split personalities; when Paltiel inquired after a friend who had disappeared, a Jewish communist who worked for the security forces offered the Party line in French, sympathy in Yiddish.

Despite such incidents, Paltiel Kossover returned not to his family in Romania but to the Soviet Union, which he still believed was the messianic country. Upon his arrival, another security man warned him no to talk too much because “a past is only cumbersome.” Memory, Jewishness, speech: “You’re not at the yeshiva here, young man,” a member of the Jewish Writer’s Club in Moscow told him. “Don’t force us to listen to things that must not be heard.” Hitler invaded before the authorities got around to silencing the annoying poet. During the war, Paltiel revealed himself as one of those persons, uncommon but not rare, whose timidity in ordinary life gives way to courage when it matters. Unfit for military service, he displayed heroism as a stretcher-bearer–typically, he seems not to see his own heroism even as he writes about himself years later.

It is easy to forget in Moscow. Paltiel married the woman who would give him his only son, and he stayed in Stalin’s Russia, ally of the new Israel, after the war. Wiesel depicts neither evil nor stupidity here–simply life, ordinary life with its conveniences and compromises, overcoming memory.

Stalin, however, preferred extraordinary life for his subjects. The Party line changed, and “a new-style pogrom” began, directed against Jewish writers. “I could not accept that the Party could condemn an entire culture, annihilate an entire literature…. Why attack a language? Why would anyone wish to exterminate Yiddish?” Returning to his native city, Paltiel Kossover also returned to Judaism before his inevitable arrest and torture. Sustained by his memory of family (particularly his father and his son) and friends, he overcame the fear that began in childhood in this city with some, if not all, of the faith he learned there and was punished for there, at the beginning and the end of his life. He answered his own question of the Party in words he spoke before his executioner’s bullet could silence him: “You must understand,” he told a jailer, “the language of a people is its memory.” Totalitarianism, as Orwell knew, as Solzhenitsyn knows, finds memory radically inconvenient. It therefore permits only its own constantly manipulated anti-language.

What could Solzhenitsyn say to Paltiel Kossover? For the most part he is silent on the Jews. His Russia mistreated Jews before Stalin did–less systematically, it is true, but the fact remains. The wanderer David Aboulesia tells Paltiel, “if hou believe you must forsake your brothers to save mankind, you will save nobody, you will not even save yourself.” He speaks against the communists, of course. But what of the Christ Solzhenitsyn reveres? Beyond the dialogue between international Judaism and international communism, we hear the dialogue between the Jewish nation and the Christian nations. And beyond it we hear another dialogue: the dialogue between Jesus and his fellow Jews. Is there a writer today who can renew it?

 

2016 NOTE: Although this was not known in the West at the time, Solzhenitsyn–at times unjustly tarred with anti-Jewishness–did not at all remain silent on Jews and Judaism. He wrote a two-volume study of Russian-Jewish relations, Two Hundred Years Together, published in 2002. For an excellent account of this book, see Daniel J. Mahoney: The Other Solzhenitsyn: Telling the Truth about a Misunderstood Wrier and Thinker (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2014).