142 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
Naturally God rules through men who have been gripped and filled by His
spirit, and who on occasion carry out His will not merely by means of in-
stantaneous decisions but also through lasting justice and law [überdauerndes
Recht und Gesetz/לחוק ומשפט מתמיד]. If their authority as the chosen ones is dis-
puted and extended to all, then the actual dominion is taken away from God;
for without law [Gesetz/חוק], that is, without any clear-cut and transmissible
line of demarcation between that which is pleasing to God and that which is
displeasing to Him, there can be no historical continuity of divine rule upon
earth.^62How can Buber, after painstakingly taking so much care to elucidate and demon-
strate the errors of Egyptian staticism, now aver the necessity of “lasting justice
and law”?
The answer harks back to one of Buber’s oldest ideas: renewal. Structures do
become shackles, and institutions continue to claim their original justification
and authority long after the spirit has left them. Thus, the argument of a true ver-
sion of Korach’s rebellion would be that “the law must again and again immerse
itself in the consuming and purifying fire of the spirit, in order to renew itself
and anew refine the genuine substance out of the dross of what has become false.”
Renewal in the context of the law is another instance of Buber’s narrow ridge:
one neither upholds the law as eternally fixed nor abandons it for some notion
of absolute freedom; instead, one constantly renews the law, one inspirits it. And
this is, according to Buber, a “Mosaic principle... a ‘Mosaic’ attitude,” believing
in the future of a “holy people” and preparing for it within history.
Here eschatology enters into the discussion in an interesting way. As long
as the eschatological expectation is maintained, which imagines “the coming of
the direct and complete rule of God over all creatures, or more correctly of His
presence in all creatures that no longer requires law and representation,” it is
impossible to perceive the necessity of the Mosaic solution, namely renewal. The
slackening of the eschatological belief, however, results in the restriction of God’s
rule to the purely “religious” sphere, following which “everything that is left over
is rendered unto Caesar and the rift which runs through the whole being of the
human world receives its sanction.” Thus eschatology appears as the inverse of
the narrow ridge of law. It is certainly true that if the eschaton were realized,
there would be no need for law because God would be immediately present to the
hearts and minds of all creatures. Living too far inside this expectation, however,
leads to the kind of enthusiasm that wants to dispense with the law now, while
forsaking the expectation abandons the world to the rule of force—a betrayal of
the law in the name of the law. Understanding this narrow ridge is what differen-
tiates the partisans of the anarcho-theocracy, whose eschatological expectation
takes the form of wishing that they no longer had to wage a battle against their
countrymen for the kingship of God, from the messianists—who paradoxically
form the other side of the coin from realist politicians.