238 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
day on which the Torah was given at Mount Sinai, because the care of Palestine
is central to God’s salvation of the whole world. But as always, this ever-renewed
mercy depends on a movement toward God on the part of the people. The inter-
action between the people’s turning to God and God’s turning toward the people
is hidden; it is neither a matter of merit being rewarded nor of arbitrary grace
being dispensed. Rather “the grace of God tries... to find some human merit
to which it can relate itself, not necessarily a display of lifelong virtue but some-
times the spontaneous sacrificial action of someone otherwise very much bound
up with the lower things of this world, some action by which the doer himself is
more surprised than anyone else.”^150 God rewards this kind of action because he
loves it and for no other reason; he loves Israel and sends rain on it because he
loves it; he loves the whole earth and demonstrates this love through the medium
of Israel. “Just as there is valid Halakha in spite of all the Halakhian controver-
sies,” writes Buber, “so there is also an authoritative Haggada.”^151
Here Buber raises a biblical contrast between Israel and Egypt that went un-
mentioned in Moses: Egypt is nourished by its great river, the Nile, while Israel is
dependent on God’s mercy. “The land is insecure, ‘it drinketh water of the rain
of heaven’” (Deuteronomy 11:11).^152 This does not mean that God abandons other
countries to causal nature, like the Deist God who winds the stopwatch once
and lets it run down, but it does mean that the Israelites are especially conscious
of their constant dependence on Heaven: “The Israelite praying for rain for his
thirsty land is the man who will be praying later on for redemption.... [T]he
great prophets... establish a close relationship between the thirst for water and
the thirst for the Word of God, between the outpouring of the water and the out-
pouring of God’s spirit.”^153 Buber suggests that this contrast may stem from an
actual Egyptian belief in the special independence of their land from the whims
of Providence; he cites a passage of Herodotus in which Egyptian priests extol the
security of Egypt in comparison with Greece, which is subject to the arbitrariness
of Zeus. Yet this arbitrariness also hints at the difference between YHVH and
Zeus, or any other rain god: his direct leadership of his people, his faithfulness to
his promise. Again, Israel lies between two extremes, the false security of Egypt
and the arbitrary terror of Greece. This distinct theological security, manifested
in the constant renewal of divine mercy through rain, manifests theopolitically
in the prophecy of Isaiah (19:24–25): “In that day shall Israel be the third with
Egypt and Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth, for YHVH has blessed
him, saying, ‘Blessed be Egypt my people and Assyria the work of my hands, and
Israel my inheritance.”
Buber interprets this prophecy as referring to Israel’s elevation as a third
great power in the midst of the two warring ones, a power whose unique mode of
polity ends the war and blesses all three. Deutero-Isaiah expands the importance
of Isaiah’s theopolitical event even further by placing it at the center of a cosmic
redemption, one that heals the ills of nature itself. There is a hint here of Buber’s