296 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
It is true that theopolitics does not promise security. Like Israel itself, both
land and people, it is dependent on mercy from elsewhere. It may not be seized
on by those grasping for a way out of chaos, since it offers only the narrow ridge
between abysses. And even that narrow ridge is itself perilous to walk on; the nar-
row ridge is also the razor’s edge. “Failures” are therefore inevitable. Nonetheless,
even these failures may compare well with what today is usually called “success”
in politics and economics.
While this book was being written, the Occupy Wall Street movement flared
up, dominated the headlines, and then disappeared. In the short period of its
prominence it confused many by refusing to “make demands” on the political
system. Now that it seems to have died down, many shake their heads and mar-
vel, as Max Weber did at his poor, Weltfremde friend, Ernst Toller, at the “ideal-
ism” of those who pursue social change outside the pragmatic path of reform
through the major political parties. Without concrete goals, after all, how is one
to measure one’s progress or success? The question is not unreasonable.
Theopolitics severs the Final Judgment and the Last Day from the Kingdom
of God. It proposes that a decent society is within the realm of possibility, and
that even if the contours of such a society are hard to imagine, it should not
be consigned to the far side of the messianic advent. The liberation of the hu-
man being and the redemptive healing of Creation are two different matters, and
only the deepest despair could have given rise to their conflation. This after all is
the lesson of the Exodus, which freed the Israelites and instituted the kingship
of God, without thereby transforming the human being into something other
than human. The demand for setting and achieving certain political goals is fair,
which is why Buber set one political goal after another. The fact that none of these
goals was met may suggest his failings as a politician, but not that the goals were
inherently impossible. In this spirit, the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber,
at the end of a book found in many Occupy encampment libraries, makes the
following statement:
I have largely avoided making concrete proposals, but let me end with one. It
seems to me that we are long overdue for some kind of Biblical-style Jubilee:
one that would affect both international debt and consumer debt. It would be
salutary not just because it would relieve so much genuine human suffering,
but also because it would be our way of reminding ourselves that money is not
ineffable, that paying one’s debts is not the essence of morality, that all these
things are human arrangements and that if democracy is to mean anything, it
is the ability to all agree to arrange things in a different way.^14What Graeber says about debt holds just as true for the seemingly intractable
Israeli-Palestinian Hundred Years’ War. Buber, who had once compared himself
to Cassandra in the context of the Bavarian Revolution, did so again in 1947,
speaking now of the Ichud: