134 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
in its naturalism; Buber wants simultaneously to dismiss the simplistic notion
of supernatural intervention while preserving the possibility that Exodus 15:21
reflects a real historical memory: “Sing to YHVH for He has raised Himself high,
horse and charioteer He flung into the sea.”^39 But this is not the core of the dis-
cussion. Far more important than what happened is how the people perceived it.
This perception “had a decisive influence... on the development of the element
‘Israel’ in the religious history of humanity.” An event in history is perceived as
an act of God; it inspires an abiding astonishment, which cannot be neutralized
by any knowledge or explanation of the event’s causal chain. “Any causal expla-
nation only deepens the wonder.” In fact, Buber argues, the miracle can be “fully
included in the objective, scientific nexus of nature and history”; however, at the
same time, the meaning of the event destroys that very nexus for the one who
experiences it, “and explodes the fixity of the fields of experience named ‘Nature’
and ‘History.’ Miracle is simply what happens; in so far as it meets people who
are capable of receiving it, or prepared to receive it, as miracle.” The attribution
of the miracle to God is not an “explanation” in the fashion of scientific cause
and effect, because unlike scientific explanation it does not do away with wonder.
Rather, the entire cause-and-effect system is revealed in its ordinary operation to
be the sphere of this same power, and the one who recognizes this must recognize
that power at work on every occasion, in every time and every place. “That is the
religion of Moses, the man who experienced the futility of magic, who learned
to recognize the demonic as one of the forms by which the divine functions, and
who saw how all the gods of Egypt vanished at the blows of the One, and that
is religion generally, as far as it is reality.” Buber deduces a final theopolitical
conclusion from this account of miracle: “Whoever recognizes the one effective
power on every given occasion must desire that the whole life of the community
should be made subject to that power.” Here, the melekh is revealed as leader of
the people and the world at the same time, and the Song of the Sea closes with the
proclamation that YHVH yimlokh, “will reign,” for all time.^40
Moreover, the miracle is an event in time, not an object in space. It is pre-
served in memory and later in text, but not in physical form as a mummy. By
its very nature, then, it opposes Egyptian staticism. Thus, the Enlightenment
thinkers, whom Assmann praises for attempting to substitute “natural religion”
for the Mosaic distinction, were wrong when they suggested that miracles were
merely a condescending, magical “accommodation” offered by Moses to a people
too primitive to understand his true message.^41 Buber adheres to the distinction
between nature religions and history religions; Judaism for him is without doubt
a history religion. YHVH is melekh of both nature and history, but the two are
not of equal importance. It is the liberatory and emancipatory action of YHVH,
taught as miracle by Moses and received as such by the people Israel, that creates
this people for the first time and brings it together as the people of YHVH. Thus