196 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
like a pious statement, but in this context it means that he is unwilling to give
up his original plans—which the acceptance of a sign would force him to do. “He
wishes to give to religion that which appertains to it; but it must be far removed
from the sphere of politics, that is from the sphere of real decisions.”^93 Thus he
cloaks his power play in piety, and Buber suggests that Ahaz expects Isaiah, son
of a prominent family “and who can therefore be expected to adapt himself to the
benefit of the state,” to close the conversation there. Instead, Isaiah responds with
the prophecy of the birth of Immanuel. By rejecting the first sign, Ahaz has called
forth the second. Both are promises of salvation, and Isaiah sees that these harden
the heart even more than his previous prophesies of judgment. Ahaz hears that
his enemies will be destroyed and takes confidence from this without assuming
the attendant obligation. In Buber’s view, only a message of salvation—and not of
disaster—could have fulfilled the demand laid upon Isaiah to fatten the hearts of
the people, yet to do so with the truth: “A sound so new, so strong and clear, that
it silences all prophecy of disaster in the ears of the many, who only long for the
securing of the people’s existence, for the quieting of their soul’s unrest, and for
the confirmation of their illusions.”^94 And this is when Isaiah “chooses his way,”
saying “no more to Ahaz than he must hear.”^95 Any further revelations of mes-
sianic hope, without orders to reveal them to specific audiences, Isaiah resolves
to conceal within the “circle of the faithful, which has begun to gather around
him as the original community of the holy remnant.” He does this because he
sees that the heart-hardening effects of the prophecy of salvation are even greater
than those of the prophecy of destruction. Because he wants the people to turn, he
hides what he knows, hoping that they will do God’s will on their own.
Buber does not specify what makes this choice “the beginning of the tragic
conflict in the prophetic way of the man, whose prophecy was itself the starting
point of the special ‘Messianic’ hope of the people of Israel.” Perhaps it is the par-
adox just mentioned; or perhaps it is the anticipated unsealing of the testimony,
after the destruction, when the people are hungry and desperate, in a world of
total darkness (8:22), and finally turn to Isaiah, his sons and disciples, despite the
fact that they might perhaps have prevented the destruction (9:1–4). The decision
to reveal the truth comes when the people “will come running to you who are pa-
tiently waiting, to you recognized now as the knowing ones.” But the people still
don’t understand exactly what they expect these knowers to know, as they en-
treat them to engage in necromancy and to seek the truth from the spirits of the
dead.^96 And the disciples are to answer: “What? On behalf of the living the dead?”
and point the way instead to the testimony (teudah) and the teaching (torah).^97
The tragedy, which Buber sees but Isaiah does not, is that neither revelation nor
concealment is guaranteed to turn the free people to YHVH. Future prophets
experience an ever-increasing despair accompanied by ever more sweeping vi-
sions of destruction, and seek to assuage their despondency in exile by moving
ever closer to apocalypse.