Conclusion | 297Does this Cassandra act? She, too, only speaks. She does not act because she is
not authorized to do so and because at this juncture action without authoriza-
tion would be madness. But her speeches are as many deeds—because they
point to the path. The history of the present and the coming generations will
prove that her speech was action and the road indicated, the only one leading
to Jewish renewal in Palestine.^15In nonapocalyptic politics it is possible to conduct experiments and to test their
results. Before “redemption” implied the healing of creation, it meant the ran-
soming of captives. Thus it does not contradict Buber’s basic prophetic stance
when he argues that an attuned understanding of history will eventually, and not
only at the End, reveal what condemns and what redeems.
Notes
- See, e.g., Judith Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear,” in Political Thought and Political
Thinkers, ed. Stanley Hoffmann, 3–20 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). - Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2004); Christopher Eberle, Religious Conviction in Liberal Politics (New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2002). Habermas has engaged intensely in these conversations himself; Jürgen
Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Malden, MA: Polity Press,
2008); cf. Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West, The Power of Re-
ligion in the Public Sphere, ed. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan Vanantwerpen (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2011). - Rashkover, untitled paper presented at “Martin Buber: Philosopher of Dialogue,” a
conference held at the Spertus Institute and University of Chicago, October 18–19, 2015. Rash-
kover’s primary reference for Buberian theopolitics, however, is his essay “Symbolic and Sac-
ramental Existence,” from On the Origin and Meaning of Hasidism, ed. and trans. Maurice
Friedman (New York: Horizon Press, 1960), 152–181—a text I do not address in this book. - SM 313.
- Jeffrey Stout, Blessed are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 94, 134, 289. - Cathleen Kaveny, Prophecy without Contempt: Religious Discourse in the Public Square
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). - Buber also opens doors to engagements between Judaism and Chinese traditions,
though not with the consistency and determination he devotes to Christianity or Islam. See
Irene Eber, “Martin Buber and Taoism,” Monumenta Serica 42 (1994): 445–464. - Patricia Crone, “Ninth-Century Muslim Anarchists,” Past and Present, no. 167 (May
2000): 3–28. - David Novak, Covenantal Rights: A Study in Jewish Political Theory (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2000); David Novak, The Jewish Social Contract: An Essay in Po-
litical Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). - Novak embraces many social policies that are small-c conservative; nonetheless, it
seems fair to characterize his overall stance as small-l liberal insofar as it justifies and supports
the institutions of liberal democracy on Jewish theological grounds. - He would say the same thing, of course, to any misguided advocates of a revived Jewish
monarchy. And one does not have to be a monarchist to think that Buber undervalues the role
of the king and the Temple in biblical religion; Jon D. Levenson, “Introduction to the 2016 Edi-
tion,” in PF xxi.