Martin Buber's Theopolitics

Conclusion | 295

Finally, there is the question of reintegrating Buber’s theopolitics with his
philosophical anthropology. Having bracketed the philosophy of dialogue for
the purposes of elaborating the theopolitics, it remains to be seen what might
result from a thorough and conscientious remelding of the two. Such a remelding
might admit that Buber’s general thinking about the human being and about the
nature of relationship per se plays an important role in his thinking about the
lives people live together in community, without using this insight to convert
the specificities of Buber’s theopolitical exegeses into mere “applications” of the
principle of dialogue. Creative thought on Buber and politics continues to be
done through the prism of his dialogical philosophy; bringing that together with
his theopolitics will certainly bear fruit for the future.^12

The Constitution and the Jubilee

Gustav Landauer echoed and amplified Thomas Jefferson’s call for a rebellion
every twenty years: he called for revolution as the cornerstone of a constitution.
Under the influence of his friend Martin Buber, he invoked the biblical institu-
tions of the Sabbatical and the Jubilee:

Let him who has ears, hear. You shall sound the trumpet through all your

land! The voice of the spirit is the trumpet that will sound again and again

and again, as long as men are together. Injustice will always seek to perpetu-

ate itself; and always as long as men are truly alive, revolt against it will break

out. Revolt as constitution; transformation and revolution as a rule established

once and for all; order through the spirit as intention; that was the great and

sacred heart of the Mosaic social order. We need that again: a new rule and

transformation by the spirit, which will not establish things and institutions

in a final form, but will declare itself as permanently at work in them. Revo-

lution must be a part of our social order, must become the basic rule of our

constitution.^13

This is the underlying impulse of Buber’s theopolitics, both in his interpreta-
tion of the biblical history of Israel and in his Zionism. For many years, barriers
between the left and religion, communism and anarchism, postcolonialism and
Zionism, and apocalyptic messianism and prophetic eschatology have prevented
Buber’s theopolitics from coming into clear view.
Now that Buber’s theopolitics has been elucidated, what can we expect from
it? It may be that theopolitics will be completely ignored. That would not be sur-
prising. Or perhaps it will be seen as an antipolitics. The defenders of the tradi-
tional conception of politics as necessarily dependent on statehood and violence
may consider theopolitics irrelevant. Or it may happen that contemporary apoc-
alyptists, confronted by the renewed possibility of severing the Kingdom of God
from the eschaton, will realize that they are political “realists” after all.