188 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
to stand up between the members of the people through the growing social
division. The torah combats these corruptions by means of a rhythmic social
restoration, by means of a renewed leveling of the ownership of the soil and
the re-establishment of common freedom. And now the revealing, lawgiving
God litigates with Israel.... The people, whom God desired to become his first
fruits, has not derived anything from the holy destiny laid upon them except
the summons to a historical provision, for which they thought to pay with a
well-equipped cult, with abundance of offerings, and with instrumental music
of rich artistry (5:22ff ); whereas their whole politico-communal life they had
withdrawn from the divine leading.^58What we have here is a version of the “ethical monotheist” picture common in
modern Jewish thought, wherein the election of Israel is an intermediate step in
God’s plan for universal salvation.^59 Israel (the “first fruits”) receives from God its
teaching, which it then in turn shares with the rest of humankind (the full “har-
vest”). The specifics of this teaching, and of Israel’s passing it on to the nations,
vary from one ethical-monotheist thinker to another. For Buber, this teaching is
the path to true peoplehood, to “the living unity of the many and the diverse,”
the Gemeinschaft der Gemeinschaften. The failure to take it seriously by splitting
communal life into pieces—subjugating “the political” to monarchy and “the re-
ligious” to priesthood—incurs the prophetic wrath.^60
Amos demands that “justice roll down like waters, and righteousness as a
mighty stream” (5:24)—a demand Buber characterizes as “not ethical nor social,
but religious... the unity of justice and righteousness is in Israelite thought one
of the basic concepts of the divine-human relationship.”^61 YHVH wills that the
divine righteousness operate on earth through human righteousness. A water
metaphor represents the duality of righteousness. Righteousness flows, meets ob-
stacles, but keeps sweeping forward, whereas the humans who try to dam the flow
(to “turn justice into hemlock, and righteousness into wormwood”; 6:12) only
ensure that what was once a potential source of life must force its way through
the dam, its frustrated momentum transforming it into a destructive source of
judgment and punishment.
We also recognize here the theme that Buber associated with the rebellion of
Korach: the presumption that the people are already holy and that their election
conferred not responsibility but honor. “Seek good and not evil, that you may
live, and so shall the God of hosts be with you, as you are accustomed to say”
(Amos 5:14). Buber adds: “This is the saying familiar to the careless: God is with
us!”^62 This point marks the first step in the turning to the future: after twice inter-
ceding with God to spare the people (7:1–6, “probably the only account written
by [Amos] himself ” in Buber’s estimation), Amos no longer expects this people
to repent when it has enslaved the poor for a debt on shoes, kicking dust on them
(2:6–7). This pessimism allows for scholars to read Amos as a “prophet of doom.”
Unlike Elijah, who chose seven thousand from those who had already refused