Martin Buber's Theopolitics

146 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics

prophet, law-giver; yet in the sphere of the word he remains insurmountably
lonely; alone in the last resort with the word of heaven which forces itself through
inflexible soul into inflexible throat.” And when Moses’ relationship to Aaron, his
brother who speaks for him, is characterized in Exodus 4:16 as analogous to the
relationship between God and Moses (“you shall be as god to him”), the point is
hammered home: “The tragedy of Moses becomes the tragedy inherent in Revela-
tion. It is laid upon the stammering to bring the voice of Heaven to Earth.”
Despite these emphases, neither Buber nor Buber’s Moses possesses a vision
of Israel that is ultimately tragic. An appreciation of tragedy is necessary, per-
haps, for hope and optimism to be warranted, to avoid the traps of sunny naïveté.
Hope cannot survive if it flies in the face of all evidence. Turning, then, to Moses’
legacies, Buber notes first that Moses writes: “What Moses says may be clumsy,
but not what he writes; that is suitable for his time and for the later times in which
the stone will testify.”^74 And when the stone passes out of memory, when the ark
and tent are lost, the Word endures. Second, Moses promises. He relays to the
people a promise from God:

At times he would send the people a prophet like to Moses, in whose mouth

he would place His words like Moses, and to whom they would have to hear-

ken. This, going far beyond the problem associated with the succession, is an

admission of a higher continuity resulting from the ever-repeated renewal out

of the spirit. We are entitled to regard this as containing, at its core, a genuine

hope on the part of Moses.^75

The leadership, of course, does not return; the later prophets do not have the same
political function that Moses had, which is why there was never another prophet
like him. But what does return is sufficient for renewal, if the people hearken to
the prophetic voice. The prophets carry on the work of Moses, striving to bring
Israel into being.

Notes

1. As late as 1950, Buber still referred to an “as yet unpublished book” titled Hamoshiach;
   Torat Ha-Nevi’ im (Tel Aviv: Mossad Bialik, 1950), 6. The choice of Hamoshiach to render Der
   Gesalbte in Hebrew creates an interesting translation problem. It is a literal rendering, but the
   connotations of “the anointed” and “the messiah” differ in both German and English, which
   cannot be captured in Hebrew where they are the same word.


2. Originally published in Hebrew as Moshe (Tel Aviv: Schocken Press, 1945); shortly fol-
   lowed by the first English edition in 1946, and then the German Moses (Zürich: Gregor Müller,
   1948). Because the language of the original composition is unclear, I provide Hebrew and Ger-
   man alternatives when necessary. German citations are to WZB 11–230.


3. “That a scholar of so much importance in his own field as Sigmund Freud could permit
   himself to issue so unscientific a work, based on groundless hypotheses, as his ‘Moses and
   Monotheism’ (1939), is regrettable”; MRC vii. Although this is the only reference to Freud in
   Moses, Buber repeatedly cites Ernest Sellin, the source of Freud’s claim that Moses was an
   Egyptian.