"The Best 32 Pages in My Library"
The Best 32 Pages in My Library
The Way of Man - Buber
Rev. Robert Doss
November
14, 1971(?)
Several
years ago, when we started the Small Group program in the church for
the purpose of having a few members and friends at the time gather at
regular intervals to share their genuine and intimate feelings and
concerns with each other, I had in mind that these might be attempts
to promote personal growth – being truly oneself – and I-Thou
relationships between individuals as I understood Martin Buber to be
describing such relationships and the dialogue that furthered them.
It was difficult to arrive at a name for the small groups as numbers of us talked about it. We might have used the word Thou not I-Thou, but it seemed a bit too lofty as Buber applied it not only to persons but to the Eternal Thou, to God. I even suggested that the groups be called Mudpie Groups, or Mudpies from a statement by J. M. Thornburn, which reflected a Buber-like sensitivity. Thornburn had said, “All the genuine deep delight of life is in showing people the mudpies you have made; and life is at its best when we confidingly recommend our mudpies to each other’s sympathetic consideration.”
Small groups will be sharing the mudpies of their private and tender feelings.
In addition, I toss the name “Zusya Groups” into the hopper, the name coming from something Buber was fond of quoting in various situations. Rabbi Zusya, of Hanipol, had said a short while before his death, “In the world to come I shall not be asked, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ I shall be asked, ‘Why were you not Zusya?’”
In a small group each person is unique with his own contributions to make. In other words, the idea was, let us be ourselves, but let us share candidly and sympathetically those unique selves with others in an atmosphere of trust.
We never did arrive at a name for the small groups, so we called them, friendly and simple, Small Groups, which was not bad at that since the idea was contained there as well, small groups of caring persons seeking to the honest, to grow personally, and to create little communities of acceptance.
Well, through the years both before and since the small groups were begun, I have found myself going back often, when thinking about sermons, in situations of crisis in families, as well as in my own attempts to fulfill existence in a better way then each failure to do so seemed to indicate going back to the writings and sayings to the spirit of Martin Buber but especially back to one little booklet he wrote many years ago, the 32-pages of The Way of Man in which the quotation from Zusya appears.
Thinking of it again in recent weeks, and realizing how many times I have quoted from it, how many times little statements or anecdotes or admonitions from it have insinuated themselves into my consciousness, I came to see that in fact for me it comprises the best 32 pages of my library; Martin Buber’s The Way of Man.
It is not so much a practical guide for living as it is a compelling “pointing of the way,” another of Buber’s titles.
And, like the Bible, I doubt that one can claim to live up to the best in it, certainly not I but it may be held with veneration of its worth, which is a rather humanistic way of saying to read it carefully and with open understanding is to worship.
I should say a little about the man behind these 32 pages. Martin Buber, who died in 1965, was a non-observant Jew, an early socialist, a teacher, writer, humanistic mystic and social activist, who believed that “spiritual energy must overflow into social action.”
Just as Paul Tillich was ostensibly a Lutheran, but we might more accurately call him a Tillichian, Buber, though immersed in Judaism, his grandfather was a famous Talmudic scholar, Buber has to be called “more than Jewish,” indeed Buberian.
Buber
could only be his own man, but not for his own sake, always for the
sake of others and for a larger work he was to accomplish in the
world.
His ideas were simple and available, though they seemed
obscure to some because they were, it appeared, so very lofty. His
I-Thou relationship, familiar as an idea world-wide even to countless
people who do not know of, nor have they read Buber. I and Thou is first an intense, genuine, honest relationship between persons. An I relates to a Thou as a familiar person. On some level of intimate acceptance. I relates to You in honesty and with full recognition of your personhood.
I can relate to another human being as an It, I-It relationship, which reduces the other to a thing.
For example, if the word “dear” as used in marriage, becomes a mere wife or a mere husband, then it is an I-It word, not one used between and I and a Thou. Buber made the expression I and Thou necessary to intelligent conversation, but, more important, necessary in human interchange if people were to be more than things.
I-Thou relationships are the stuff of divinity. The Thou is also the Eternal Thou, of God, though Buber rarely said God, preferring more often in speech to say the Eternal Thou. But the only way to the Eternal Thou was through persons, between man and man. I and Thou human relationships tell us all we need to know, all we can know about the divine.
I have said he was a social activist, but with a difference. He did not thunder like a Hebrew prophet. He did not call down the wrath of Yahweh upon the sinners on the opposite side of his convictions.
He shunned personal publicity. It interfered with true dialogue, he believed. He would see and talk with individuals and people in trouble. That was his major social action effort. Action is social when one other person is involved. One of his biographers, before he even met him the famous Buber, called him for an experiment, because he was distressed about a relative in an asylum for the mentally ill near Jerusalem. Aubrey Hodes was the biographer, who met with Buber then and from time to time for 12 years thereafter until Buber died. Apparently, in part through the spirit of Buber and his I-Thou relationship with Hodes, the younger man, was able to convey something of this same loving concern and understanding to his sick relative who subsequently recovered.
Buber, who was for social action, was against mass demonstrations. He disliked slogans and believed they oversimplified complex issues. He was less interested in ideas than in people. If someone wanted to discuss ideas, that was all right, but Buber wanted to know, What are you personally going to do to put your ideas into practice? If you do not intend to live them and yourself then why talk about them?
Buber made a distinction between religion and politics. “Religion,” he said, “means goal and way, politics imply end and means.”
Success is the way the world recognizes a political end. But a religious goal, even in the highest experiences of mankind, remains “that which simply provides direction.”
This is what I believe Martin Buber does in the splendid 32 pages of the Way of Man. It is a religious book. It provides direction. He does not lay it out as I would describe it, but it seems to me that in this little book the wise and saintly man is talking about three things: 1. overcoming conflict; 2. discovering and hallowing ourselves in our own particularity; and 3. moving out of ourselves to work with holy intent in creating relationships of devotion and dialogue.
What about conflict? Conflict between a man and others is the result of conflict situations within the man himself. Each man is called upon to straighten himself out. For example, Rabbi Yitzhak, when he was a younger man, had a great deal of trouble with his wife. He put up with her as best he could, as far as he was concerned , but he was sorry for others to whom she related so poorly, so he went to Rabbi David and asked him whether he should oppose his wife or not. All Rabbi David said was, “Why do you speak to me? Speak to yourself”
Rabbi Yitzhak came to see that everything depended on himself; that is, if things were going to be better with his wife, he could only do something about himself and the part he played in the conflict. Anything beyond that was her problem, not his.
To Buber, each person in conflict should turn his attention inward first to the conflict within his own soul. Each could begin with himself.
The origin of conflict is as he says, “I do not say what I mean and I do not do what I say.”
“By our contradiction, our lie,” said Buber, “we foster conflict situations and give them power over us until they enslave us. From here there is no way out but by the crucial realization. Everything depends on myself and the crucial decisions, I will straighten myself out.”
One thing we have to overcome in order to straighten ourselves out is the pride that brings us to compare ourselves with others. There is, indeed a unique value in each of us, we are worth, but our worth is not for comparison.
The Hasidic Master said, “Everyone should have two pockets. In his right pocket he should keep the words ‘for my sake was the world created’ and in the left the words, ‘I am dust and ashes.’”
The truth is paradoxical. Each person is of supreme worth and each person is nothing. Suppose one has pride in his superiority. That pride will cut him off from others. It may lead to power but not to understanding. It may gain grudging respect, but not love. It builds walls between the proud and other people and the proud one is the loser.
Or consider self-pity, which is really another form of pride, that I am too special to have this dreadful thing happen to me; therefore, “poor me.” But self-pity is destructive and who is hurt by it. Is the one we envy hurt or does someone we resent feel the pain of our resentment. No, we do or we suffer if we are envious and resentful. So let us not compare ourselves with others. It is only a source of conflict within ourselves.
“I must make the decisions,” said Buber, “I will straighten myself out.”
But if I am going to do that I have to know who “myself” is. Who am I and what ought I am to be doing? How serve God or man or my highest ideals? Once has to choose his own way. He cannot be told what it is. Rabbi Baer once asked his teacher, “Show me one general way to the service of God.”
The Zaddik replied, “It is impossible to tell men what way they should take. For one way to serve God is through learning, another through prayer, another through fasting, and still another through eating. Everyone should carefully observe what way his heart draws him to and then choose this way with all his strength.
In other words, they will not ask Zusya why he wasn’t Moses, they will ask him why was he not Zusya? Why was he not himself, making his contribution in the way that he was uniquely called upon to fulfill?
We do not have to be Socrates, or Jefferson, or William Ellery Channing, or Theodore Parker, or Martin Buber. All we have to be is ourselves. It’s okay.
“Everyone has in him something precious that is in no one else but,” says Buber, “this precious something in a man is revealed to him only if he truly perceives his strongest feeling, his central wish, that in him which stirs his innermost being.”
Anything we are or do, any trait, any natural act can become hallowed. One can act with holy intent, “holy,” which means to become whole, all of a piece, healthy!
It is here that Buber tells of his student, and I have told the story before, who was fasting and who became so thirsty he went to the well when he had only one more hour of fasting to go. Realizing this, he was ashamed and left the well and did not drink. Then he started back to the well, knowing that his pride in not drinking was endangering his soul’s progress.
Better to drink, he thought, and break the fast than be filled with pride at not drinking. But then, as he bent down to drink, the desire to do so left him and he completed the period of the fast without failure.
His teacher, having watched his spiritual struggle, merely said to him, “Patchwork.”
This harsh statement had nothing to do with fasting or not fasting, nothing to do with the students’ noble motives at deciding not to drink, then to drink rather than be proud.
What was condemned was his shilly-shallying character. We are called upon to decide on our work and do it without might and cut out vacillating all over the map. We are called upon to do, as best we can, work all of a piece.
One has to pull himself together, unify himself, and unify body, mind and spirit. And though the work of unifying one’s soul is never finished, one can make beginnings again, one can turn from what he was and what he was doing and make another start.
People do have to overcome confusion, mixed-upness, illness, escapism and guilt before undertaking any unified work. The work on the self becomes the first priority in a life at some time in that life or even many times. So we begin with ourselves.
We try to get honest with ourselves. Again, we straighten ourselves out. We begin to say what we mean and do what we say we are going to do.
Rabbi Eliezer, knowing the purpose of all this work on the self – this self-involvement – was not to exalt the self, said, “Do not keep worrying about what you have done wrong, but apply the soul-power you are not wasting on self-reproach, to such active relationship to the world as you are destined for. You should not be occupied with yourself but with the world.”
Continuing to castigate the self for the things we have said and done for which we are sorry, which we feel were wrong or small, or which made us feel guilty: self-castigation is finally a form of conceit.
It is to dwell on what a poor crumby-dumb jerk I have been as if to say dwelling on that is worth one’s time or that the poor crumby jerk would have his jerkiness blessed somehow, since he brings it up for forgiveness so often.
But the rabbi of Ger warned against self-torture. What happens when you wallow in your baseness? “Rake the muck this way, rake the muck that way, it will always be muck. You have done wrong. Then counteract it by doing right.”
To Buber, again, the individual is of supreme worth, and he has his own gifts to give and they do not have to be someone else's gifts in anyone else's way. Be yourself. Create your own life.
Numbers of times in the ministry it has been necessary for me to find some way of helping people cope with news of tragedy or defeat or scandal, some most unpleasant facts as they might be viewed on the surface. Perhaps one cannot understand why someone they love did something which to them seemed unforgivable or unacceptable.
Again, in Buber’s little Way of Man, I have found a Hasidic saying, as interpreted by Buber, which seems most true and helpful.
Out of tragedy, Hasid Rabbi Mendel once said to his congregation, “What, after all, do I demand of you. Only three things; 1. not to look furtively outside yourselves; 2. not to look furtively into others; and 3. not to aim at yourselves.
“That is to say,” interpreted Buber, “first, everyone should preserve and hallow his own soul in its own particularity and in its own place, and not envy the particularity and place of others; secondly, everyone should respect the secret in the soul of his fellow man, and not, with brazen curiosity, intrude upon it and take advantage of it; and thirdly, everyone in his relationship to the world, should be careful not to set himself as his aim”
We may judge ourselves but not others as to their growth by spiritual standards and even when we judge ourselves, we can turn to hallow in ourselves what brought us grief earlier. And we can put our understanding to work, not as self-aim but for others.
Suppose we have been through some great trial. Suppose even the troubles we have had have sometimes been ones that we contributed to. They came about through things we did that we now regret.
Suppose we have suffered some great evil and are embittered. Whatever it is or was, we are called upon to straighten ourselves out, not to envy others, not to dwell on our shortcomings and our failures, and not to furtively into the souls of others to find where and they might have been worse persons than ourselves.
What we can do is hallow the very evil we suffered by using it to understand the plight, the failure, the tragedy, the suffering, the loneliness, the fear behind arrogance, the illness, the death, the terrors of life someone else is suffering, hallow our understanding, the gift of our pain, and use it, not to aim at ourselves, not to pry the secrets out of people, but to stand by them, to accept them, to offer them aid, to offer them loyalty.
We take our stand where we stand.
Rabbi Eisik, son of Rabbi Yekel of Cracow, after many years of poverty which had not shaken his faith, dreamed someone bade him to go to Prague to seek a treasure under the bridge which led to the king’s palace. When he had the dream three times, he set out for Prague. But there he found the bridge guarded day and night and did not dare start digging. Still, he went to the bridge every morning and kept walking around it till evening. The captain of the guards had been watching him and finally asked in a kindly way whether he was looking for something or waiting for someone.
Rabbi Eisik told him of the dream which had brought him to Prague from a faraway country.
The captain laughed, “And so to please the dream, you poor fellow wore out your shoes to come here! As for having faith in dreams, if I had had it, I should have had to get going when a dream once told me to go to Cracow and dig for treasure under the stove in a room of a Jew – Eisik, son of Yekel, that was the name, Eisik, son of Yekel! I can just imagine what it would be like, how I should have to try every house over there, where one-half of the Jews are named Eisik and the other Yekel.”
And he laughed again.
Rabbi Eisik bowed, travelled home, dug up the treasure from under the stove, and built the House of Prayer which is called “Reb Eisik Reb Yekel Shul.”
The story is like the famous sermon, “Acres of Diamonds.” They are to be found, if at all, in your backyard. Take the story to heart, we are advised, “There is something you cannot find anywhere in the world and there is, nevertheless, a place where you can.
And Buber said, “There is something that can only be found in one place. It is a great treasure, which may be called the fulfillment of existence. The place where this treasure can be found is the place on which one stands.”
Our task is to discover ourselves, fulfill ourselves, render our unique service from the temperament, the skill, the weakness, the failure, the strength, the success, whatever it is that we are and have been, to give of ourselves from what we truly are, and turn to what it is that we are called upon to do as our work in the world.
Or, the great nonconformist Jewish spirit, Martin Buber, explained it this way, “The environment which I feel to be the natural one, the situation which has been assigned to me as my fate, the things that happen to me day after day, the things that claim me day after day these contain my essential tasks and such fulfillment of existence as is open to me.
If we had power over the ends of the earth, it would not give us that fulfillment of existence which a quiet devoted relationship to nearby life can give us, if we knew the secrets of the upper worlds they would not allow us so much actual participation in true existence as we can achieve by performing, with holy intent, a task belonging to our daily duties. Our treasure is hidden beneath the hearth of our own home.”
How is it with us? In the Way of Man we read of a man, once, who was very stupid.
“When he got up in the morning, it was so hard for him to find his clothes that at night he almost hesitated to go to bed for thinking of the trouble he would have on waking. One evening he finally made a great effort, took paper and pencil and as he undressed, noted down exactly where he put everything he had on. The next morning, very well pleased with himself, he took the slip of paper in his hand and read, ‘cap,’ there it was, he set it on his head; ‘pants’ there they lay, he got into them and so it went until he was fully dressed.
“'That’s all very well,' he said, ' but now, where am I myself?' he asked in consternation. 'Where in the world am I?' He looked and looked, but it was a vain search.
No matter how hard he looked he could not find himself. And that is how it is with us."
But at least Buber points a way ... it is a religious way, transcending sect, denomination, origin. We are not likely to follow it to perfection, even if we try. But, we can find some filfillment of existence where he suggests we look – in the place where we stand and know where it is we stand with any and every
quiet devoted relationship
to nearby life.
If God IS, this is where any one of us can find
evidence of the Eternal Thou.
The reading is taken from a book out this year entitled Martin Buber, an Intimate Portrait by Aubrey Hobes.
This passage might be titled “Buber’s use of the word ‘God.’”
In his book, Eclipse of God, Buber relates his conversation with an “unnamed old thinker.” Buber had been reading the proofs of a preface of a new book and since it was a statement of faith he wished to read it carefully once again before it was printed. The old man, at whose house he happened to be staying, asked him what he had in his hand. When Buber told him he asked him to read it aloud to him. The old thinker listened in a friendly manner but clearly in growing amazement.
When
Buber had finished reading, his listener said, first hesitatingly,
then ever more passionately,
“How can you bring yourself to say God time after time? How can you expect that your readers will take the word in the sense in which you wish it to be taken? What you mean by the name of God is something above all human grasp and comprehension, but in speaking about it you have lowered it to human conceptualization. What word in human speech is so misused, so defiled, so desecrated as this? All the innocent blood that has been shed for it has robbed it of its radiance. When I hear the Highest called ‘God,’ it sometimes seems almost blasphemous.”
In writing of it, Buber says that he cannot remember exactly but can only indicate in a general way the answer he gave:
“Yes, it is the most heavy-laden of all human words. None has become so soiled, so mutilated. Just for this reason I may not abandon it. Generations of men have laid the burden of their anxious lives upon this word and weighed it to the ground. It lies in the dust and bears their whole burden. We cannot cleanse the word ‘God’ and we cannot make it whole, but defiled and mutilated as it is, we can raise it from the ground and set it over an hour of great care.”
We
still need words, Buber is telling us.
We still need them as symbols for what we cannot comprehend.
