284 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
what one preaches and fails oneself to follow this precept. But if hypocrisy can be
praised as the lip service vice pays to virtue, then mere failure should be treated
more generously.
Zionism may have been a largely secular movement, but except in its most
extreme Revisionist forms, it always tried to point beyond itself. Herzl himself
expressed this in his liberal universalist way; he too saw Zionism as aiming at
more than national survival. The Jewish state was meant to “redound mightily
and beneficially to the good of all mankind.”^170 In his utopian novel Old-New
Land he has a character tell the farmers of a small settlement that without “toler-
ance,” “your cultivation is worthless and your fields will revert to barrenness.”^171
For both the Labor Zionists and the Brit Shalom circle, Zionism was about not
merely saving Jewish bodies but also altering the Jewish soul. Both stressed im-
migration and settlement, but the commitment to an overarching moral impera-
tive meant different things to Brit Shalom and to the Labor Zionists. Here is the
criterion by which to distinguish liberal-socialist Zionism from Buber’s position:
where a conflict of interest was unavoidable, the former defended recourse to vio-
lence and the assertion of Zionist interests as tragic but necessary. Buber was not
a pacifist, but he did hold that if recourse to violence seemed necessary, then the
path that led to that decision was morally faulty in some way. Immediate correc-
tion was required to foreclose similar “tragically necessary” choices in the future.
It seems to me that this is the test that Buber never failed; this is the difference
tested in the theopolitical hour.
Notes
- Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff
Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); John
Rawls, Political Liberalism: Expanded Edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). - Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992);
Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1996). - David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror (New
York: Ballantine, 2004), 35. - The secularization thesis has been defined as the idea that “modernization necessarily
leads to a decline of religion, both in society and in the minds of individuals”; Peter L. Berger,
ed., The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Grand Rapids,
MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1999), 2. Cf. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity,
Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). - Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge,
trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (New York: Harvest, 1936); Karl Löwith, Meaning in His-
tory: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1957). - Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). - Eric L. Santner, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sov-
ereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 31. David Nirenberg has urged caution