Word: buber
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...Martin Buber, quoting Rabbi Mendel of Kosov...
...world's greatest Jewish philosopher and a pioneer Zionist, Martin Buber has lived in Jerusalem since 1938, when he fled the Nazis. Often opposed to Israel's policies (example: he advocates greater efforts to make peace with the Arabs), Buber is now in conflict with Premier David Ben-Gurion on a bitter issue: the fate of Adolf Eichmann...
...truly repugnant aspect of this article is that it reveals the author's mental chaos so candidly. It is all very well to follow Martin Buber in advocating free and untrammeled dialogue between human beings; nevertheless, no one ought to have the right to use a public forum for raving mistakenly (and without any solid basis) about other men's religion or to foist his own halfbaked and embarrassingly intimate worldview on strangers. The University provides, at great expense, an outlet for students who need this kind of audience...
...this last point, Leifer and I disagree, as you might expect. Gordon's nationalism is no different from that German madness against which Buber warned the Jews in 1933. Universalist Christians (I use the adjective to weed Hegel out) have always maintained that the nation-state is a necessary evil, and that one's higher loyalties are to God and mankind. Leifer swallows Gordon's odd Germanic idea that the nation is the locus of man's creativity, that there are "no human ideals which are not national ideals." Gordon, it must be said, did tend to think of Israel...
...antinomian facet of Gordon's thought, which Leifer rejects as being alien to the Jewish tradition. Maybe that's why I like it (some of my best friends work for Mosaic, don't forget.) The antinomian (existentialist is the current word, I suppose) bias of thinkers like Gordon and Buber clearly do clash with law-centered traditional Judaism. But the absence of an absolute ground for morality in these two writers is not, as Leifer says, evidence that Judaism today lacks vigor. Rather, it is a token that Gordon and Buber are groping for a truer, more relativistic truth than...