204 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
Conclusion
Deutero-Isaiah concludes the messianic transformations that had been ongoing
since the days of Samuel and reveals a parallel transformation in the role of the
prophet. The charismatic representation of YHVH’s kingship through the per-
formance of specific and limited tasks was sundered into many when the king
assumed military command as well as the responsibility for public sacrifices. Yet
the process of the anointing binds prophet and king, one watching over and di-
recting the other. By turns ignored, reviled, and assaulted, prophets struggle to
claim leadership, reminding the people and kings of their first leader, a liberator
whom all recalled as a navi, a prophet. They promise a king who is to fulfill his
task, who never comes. Yet after the destruction, in exile, it becomes possible
once again to conceive of a kingless kingdom. In the guise of the suffering ser-
vant, Deutero-Isaiah reclaims leadership for the prophets, this time not just for
Israel but for the entire world. “The suffering nabi is the antecedent type of the
acting Messiah.”^129 This messiah is not sent to Israel from an other-worldly divine
realm but emerges from within Israel itself as its remnant. The struggle that be-
gan in the anarcho-theocracy continues:
There is a nucleus of Israel, preserved through the generations, that does not
betray the election, that belongs to God and remains His. Through this nu-
cleus the living connection between God and the people is upheld, in spite of
the very great guilt: not alone by interposing on behalf of Israel, but far more
by being the true Israel. God’s purpose for Israel has put on skin and flesh in
these powerless combatants. They are the small beginning of the kingdom of
God before Israel becomes a beginning of it; they are the beginning before the
beginning. The anointing of the kings was unfulfilled, and Deutero-Isaiah no
longer awaits a king in whom this anointing should be fulfilled; the anointing
of the nebiim has been fulfilled, and therefore it is from their midst that the
figure of the perfected one will rise.^130For Buber, the first messiah is the only one who ever really came, and his com-
ing must be understood as an occasion of much grief, no matter how gladly the
people perceived it at the time. The second messiah was mere prophetic fantasy,
and the third messiah recasts that fantasy into a revised form of the premessianic
Israelite faith. The suffering servant assumes the role of Israel among the nations,
taking upon himself the role that Moses had intended for the entire people.^131
And where Deutero-Isaiah himself may have viewed the identity of the coming
servants as a mystery, Buber provides a simple formula for their identification:
“As far as the great suffering of Israel’s dispersion was not compulsory suffering
only, but suffering in truth willingly borne, not passive but active, it is interpreted
in the image of the servant. Whosoever accomplishes in Israel the active suffering
of Israel, he is the servant, and he is Israel, in whom YHVH ‘glorifies Himself.’”