Palestinian Rain | 233State of Israel was a fait accompli, he focused on the problems of Palestinian refu-
gees, both external (in Lebanon, Jordan, and elsewhere) and internal (displaced
families within Israel’s borders). Buber had not decided, suddenly, that a nation-
state founded on the principle of ethnic majority was an excellent form of social
organization. Rather, like Samuel hearkening to the people’s voice, he adapted
to new circumstances the same basic theopolitical orientation, one that received
paradigmatic expression for its time in the 1944 lectures collected in Ben Am Le-
Artzo (hereafter On Zion).
The Third Commonwealth: On Zion
On Zion justifies reading Buber’s biblical studies as expressions of his own theo-
political views. This may not seem to require demonstration—we have already
seen Buber adopt the prophetic stance articulated in these writings in his own
voice, in texts like “And If Not Now, When?” and the letter to Gandhi. However,
two factors complicate matters. First is the “scientific” form of his biblical studies,
repeated even in the section of On Zion dealing with the Bible, which contains
ten times as many footnotes as the rest of the book. Second is Buber’s tendency,
found in all his intellectual-historical surveys, to write sympathetically about
whatever he reads. Frequently, Buber will passionately present a subject’s point
of view, and then move to another, different point of view just as passionately, so
that one has to derive his own position either from the argument’s teleological
structure (assuming that he presents the “most correct” position last) or from
implicit subtext.
The first factor may be mitigated by some general considerations. Buber’s lack
of interest in Wissenschaft for its own sake and his consistent philosophical pref-
erence for the original and primordial over the secondary and belated both sug-
gest that his biblical-critical writing may serve his own theopolitical convictions.
On Zion, however, makes the connections explicit. The second factor remains
problematic, for it must be decided on a case-by-case basis whether and how Bu-
ber adopts the positions of the classical sources he discusses. For example, when
Buber discusses a rabbinic source that seeks to account for drought by pointing
the finger at “the robbers, the slanderers, the insolent, those who support alms-
giving in public but do not contribute themselves, [and] those who do not want
to study the Torah,” we may assume that Buber does not straightforwardly adopt
the view that rainfall in fact depends on Torah students outnumbering the rob-
bers.^132 Buber rarely bothers to disavow such ideas, although he may reject their
explanatory value, as when he discusses Isaiah’s reference to an earth-devouring
curse: “An interpretation based merely on the punishment of a people by the
reduction in the yield of its land or something of that kind is quite inadequate to
explain such utterances.”^133 The best guide to Buber’s position on the individual
views he discusses is their larger context. In a preface to the 1950 edition of On