90 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
its demand, as afterward in the Samuelic crisis it found the discordant expres-
sion of its defensive fight and its resignation.”^28 Buber emphasizes that he means
only a will toward constitution; as the rest of the book of Judges demonstrates,
Gideon’s proud declaration of direct theocracy does not hold sway for long. What
matters, nonetheless, is simply the existence of that will, the “real, struggling,
religious-political will to fulfillment, wresting ever and again from the chang-
ing resistance of the times a fragment of realization, however altered; a will not
just late-prophetic, but inseparable from the historical Israel.” In other words, in
accordance with the principle that antiquity confers legitimacy, Buber seeks con-
tinuity between the theocratic aspect of the late prophetic spirit and the earliest
existence of the people.
But perhaps we should not overemphasize the concern for origins and begin-
nings. As Buber concludes his discussion of the Gideon passage, he proclaims the
following:
The kingship of God is a paradox, but an historical one: it consists in the histor-
ical conflict of the subjected person against the resisting one, a conflict which,
without its naïve, but on that very account most important, original form,
cannot be grasped. It is the most visible appearance of that kingdom- dialectic
[Reichsdialektik] which educated the Israelitish people to know history as the
dialectic [Zwiegespräch] of an asking divinity and an answer-refusing, but
nevertheless an answer-attempting humanity, the dialogue [Zwiegespräch]
whose demand is an eschaton.^29Buber claims to have isolated the essential dynamic of God’s relationship with
the Jewish people, in purity and clarity, in its “original form,” in the Gideon pas-
sage. It demonstrates a dialectic that is constant, from the point of view of the
Israelite view of history, in its most visible form. Buber proposes the seemingly
paradoxical idea of an “original constant” at the end of the chapter:
That this dialectic [Dialektik] has its quite earthly form, that it embodies itself
not on theological heights, but in the midst of the whirl of political actualities,
and that, robbed of these, the constant historical consciousness of a people,
Israel, as bearer of the kingdom-message could not be understood—all this
allows, yes commands, us to recognize the will toward constitution (that is,
to actualization) as an original constant [ursprünglichen Bestand] in the dy-
namic of this folk life, which functions in the historiography because it has
functioned in history.^30Many of Buber’s philosophical and political preoccupations enter into this ar-
gument: the emphasis on the concrete, indeed the “earthly,” as opposed to the
imposing heights; the theme of realization or actualization (Verwirklichung); the
idea of “folk life.” The key, however, is the idea of a historical dynamic conceived
as a kingdom-dialectic (Reichsdialektik). One side of this dialectic consists of a