8 This Pathless Hour

Theopolitics in the Present

We know absolutely no details about our immediate way; it may lead over Russia, it

may lead over India. The only thing we know is that our way does not lead through

the movements and struggles of the day, but over things unknown, deeply buried,

and sudden.

—Gustav Landauer

Even those communities which call the spirit their master and salvation their

Promised Land, the “religious” communities, are community only if they serve

their lord and master in the midst of simple, unexalted, unselected reality, a reality

not so much chosen by them as sent to them just as it is; they are community only

if they prepare the way to the Promised Land through the thickets of this pathless

hour.

—Martin Buber

Introduction: Community Still Coming

We have traced the roots of Buber’s theopolitics in his friendship with Gustav
Landauer, its development in his biblical writings, and its application in his Zi-
onism. In this final chapter we connect it with urgent themes of contemporary
thought.
Buber wrote at a time when the world seemed to be a battlefield between
ideological titans. Political conflicts were consistently and plausibly portrayed as
clashes between alternative ways of life, even alternative conceptions of the hu-
man. In the decades following his death, no doubt in reaction to the perception
that these ideological battles had endangered human life on an unprecedented
scale, theorists began to suspect such “grand narratives” and sought to keep
“comprehensive conceptions of the good” out of politics.^1 Francis Fukuyama’s
notorious proclamation of “the end of history,” however, was soon belied by the
global resurgence of religiously identified conflicts, dubbed the “clash of civiliza-
tions” by Samuel Huntington.^2 And after 9/11, neoconservatives portrayed the
War on Terror as successor to World War II and the Cold War, in scale and ideo-
logical freight.^3 The spectacular violence in the media drew popular attention to