Palestinian Rain | 235land the task is set afresh, but every time it is rooted in the historical situation
and its problems. If it is not mastered, what has already been achieved will fall
into ruin. Once it is really mastered this may be the beginning of a new kind of
human society.”^138 But the level of difficulty seems to rise with each encounter.
After the Exodus, the Israelites were relatively free to create their own way of life;
they failed because of weakness and fear, internal corruption rendering them
unable to deal with external military threats. Returning from the Babylonian
Exile, they faced the obstacle of rule by a foreign power. With the return from the
two-thousand-year exile, they face an even greater challenge: “One has to reckon
with the coexistence of another people in the same country, of cognate origin and
language but mainly foreign in tradition, structure, and outlook, and... this vital
fact has to be regarded as an essential part of the problem.”
The Arab “question” in Palestine follows and diverges from the “Jewish ques-
tion” in Europe. Europe asked the Jews: “What are you going to do to become
like us, to prove that you belong here, to prove that we should accept you, that
you should have equal rights with us, the true people of these lands?” Similarly,
for many Zionists the Palestinian Arabs were a question because they obstructed
the way toward a Jewish state with a Jewish majority. Discussions of the Arab
question focused on neutralizing their threat, achieving the “victorious peace”
that Kohn described. The Jewish question, however, was also an internal Chris-
tian question, a theological problem in the self-definition of Christianity and its
relationship to Judaism. Does Christianity require anti-Judaism, or is it in fact
antithetical to Christianity? In retrospect, Christendom apparently failed the test
posed to it by the Jews of Europe.^139 In this sense, Buber regards “the coexistence
of another people in the same country... as an essential part of the problem”; at
stake is the internal self-definition of Judaism. This challenge to Judaism must
be met with urgency, for what happens in a small, rugged part of the earth to
an insignificant, despised people can have cardinal importance for the future of
hu ma nit y.
On Zion’s four parts cover thousands of years of Jewish history in fewer than
two hundred pages. The first part discusses the Bible, the second rabbinic lit-
erature, the third “the voice of the Exile,” and the last modern Zionist thinkers.
The first two sections stand out in Buber’s oeuvre in that the section on rabbinic
literature segues seamlessly from the section on the Bible, without the usual sug-
gestion that the rabbis represent decline and rupture. Buber had come to be-
lieve that “as long as a nucleus of the people lives in the land” there is value in
the “authoritative” sources and not only in the “underground” ones.^140 He even
speaks, uncharacteristically, of the wisdom of the “later Babylonian masters of
the Talmud,” of the “intimate connection between Halakha and Haggada, be-
tween those passages which discuss the ‘course,’ the right course of life, the right
fulfillment of the demands of life, and those which, whether they link up directly