"All Life Is a Meeting"

"If you wish to believe, love." What Martin Buber taught, he also lived. A lifelong Zionist, the century's greatest Jewish thinker nonetheless preached friendship for the Arabs of Palestine. He was Judaism's first ecumenist, who revered Jesus as much as a Jew might, and gently, unpolemically defined the gap that only God could bridge between the two types of Biblical faith. A leader of German Judaism until he went to Palestine in 1938, Buber fought Nazism with patriarchal dignity; yet he accepted an award from a German university a few years after the war and begged Israel not to execute Adolf Eichmann. Thus last week when this man of belief and love died in Jerusalem at the age of 87, he was mourned by men of his own faith, and of other faiths, and of no faith at all.

l-Thou, not l-lt. Frail and paunchy, with a majestic beard and "penetrating, incorruptible eyes," Buber was once described by Swiss Novelist Hermann Hesse, an eclectic Christian, as "one of the few wise men on earth." Buber's wisdom was reflected in many fields -- his poetic translation of the Hebrew Bible into German, his retelling of the long-forgotten legends of the joyous, mystical Hasidim, his vision of a Jewish education for the modern world, his defense of kibbutz socialism and the spiritual meaning of Zionism.

All this he left as heritage for his fellow Jews. But Buber, recalls his friend Rabbi Abraham Heschel of Manhattan, also said: "I'm not a Jewish philosopher. I'm a universal philosopher." From his roots in Judaism, Buber spoke to the world at large, propounding a philosophy of dialogue whose central theme was, "All real life is a meeting." To Buber, man achieved his authentic existence only in loving encounter with God and his fellow man. He called this relationship I-Thou, in contrast to I-It, where individuals deal with one another as objects. For many Christian thinkers, Buber's personalism was a vital corrective to the existentialist stress on man, and the roster of those who acknowledge their debt to his thinking reads like the honor role of 20th century theology: Tillich, Niebuhr, Maritain, Berdiaev, Barth.

Two Pockets. Two decades ago Buber was almost unknown outside Jewish seminaries; today, paperback editions of his work are staples of college bookstores, and "I-Thou" is as familiar a spiritual catchphrase as Kierkegaard's "leap of faith," or Tillich's "ultimate concern." Deeply rooted in tradition, Buber spoke with an unmistakably contemporary voice. His stress on authentic human relations is a timely warning for a depersonalized world. His vision of man living on "a narrow ridge" of "holy insecurity" rings true for many concerned about the shadow of holocaust. But like many another phrasemaking prophet, suggests Dr. Ernst Simon of Jerusalem's Hebrew University, Buber may well pay for the triumph of a vivid concept with anonymity and be forgotten as a man while his ideas live on in the consciousness of the West.

For Buber, however, spirit was always more important than slogan; what mattered was that men should live in dialogue. He cared little for earthly honor, and often cited the advice of the Hasidic master who said that man should always have two pockets to reach into according to need. In his right pocket should be the words: "For my sake the world was created"; in his left: "I am dust and ashes."

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