242 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
religious-anarchist Gahelet, but no such group existed and the aftermath of the
Holocaust and the state’s creation would have been an inauspicious time for one
to form. Nonetheless, the new circumstances did not deter Buber from his basic
stance, even if he could no longer advance binationalist proposals. “I doubt if
there is anything more important today,” Buber wrote in 1956, “than the choice
between two types of socialism.” The opposition of these two types is a familiar
one. Buber may have viewed the Labor Party, which dominated Israeli politics
until 1977, as the Israeli equivalent of the German Social-Democratic Party:
One is a so-called socialism that is imposed from above... the other is a
socialism from below, a socialism of spontaneity arising out of the real life of
society... the coming stage of humanity that will emerge from this great crisis
of man depends in great measure on just this decision. It depends on whether
it will be possible to set up over against Moscow another, spontaneous type of
socialism, and I venture even today to call it Jerusalem.^163The privatization of Israeli industry, the transformation of Israel into a free-
market society, and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza did not loom
large on Buber’s horizon. Already in 1956 there were those who claimed, as Bu-
ber noted, that “the socialist impetus and the faith in the kibbutzim are largely
exhausted.” But he saw such claims as “a boundless exaggeration of a crisis that
really exists and that must be recognized and overcome as such. Such crises are
part of the life of man and the life of society.” The direction and the path remain
the same, even if one is pushed ever further back upon it. It is a matter of com-
mand: to push forward again on the path, however littered it may be with incor-
rect predictions, failed projects, and outdated formulas.
Notes
- Buber, “Jewish Religiosity,” in On Judaism, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken,
1995), 93. - Buber, “Zionism True and False,” in Unease in Zion, ed. Ehud Ben-Ezer (New York:
Quadrangle, 1974), 104. - Two exceptions to Buber’s valorization of “Doing” are his consideration of Chinese
“Non-Doing” and his interpretation of Isaiah’s prophecy in the “theopolitical hour.” In both
cases the decision to “Not Do” takes on some of the positive qualities of Doing itself. - Buber, בין עם לארצו [Ben ‘am le’artzo] (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1945). Cf. Buber, Israel und
Palästina: Zur Geschichte einer Idee (Zürich: Artemis-Verlag, 1950); and Buber, On Zion: The
History of an Idea, trans. Stanley Godman (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997). The first
English edition (1952) was titled Israel and Palestine: The History of an Idea. The language of
composition is uncertain. - FMD 120.
- Buber, Judah Magnes, and Moshe Smilansky, Palestine, a Bi-National State (New York:
Ihud, 1946), 32–36. - Buber, On Zion, xxi.
- Martina Urban, Aesthetics of Renewal: Martin Buber’s Early Representation of Hasidism
as Kulturkritik (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 71.