74 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
ca l l.”^52 However, he has not yet developed the sophisticated distinctions he will
later introduce between the types that he here groups together under the singular
banner of “leadership”: Father, Leader, Judge, King, and Prophet. All exemplify
biblical leadership in being chosen against the laws of nature and history: against
nature because they are typically weak and humble instead of strong and impres-
sive, to demonstrate that God achieves not by might or power but “by my Spirit”;
against history, because world history records importance according to the scale
of conquest and success, whereas when the Bible “announces a successful deed, it
is duty-bound to announce in complete detail the failure involved in the success.”
Moses is frustrated and thwarted by the people and does not enter the Promised
Land. David fails ethically and politically over and over again. The narratives
of the prophets amount to a veritable “glorification of failure.” This experience
of repeated failure begets messianism, an expectant hope that nonfailure will
somehow emerge from failure, which must mean the overcoming of “history”
understood as a record of successes: “The way, the real way, from the Creation to
the Kingdom is trod not on the surface of success, but in the deep of failure. The
real work, from the biblical point of view, is the late-recorded, the unrecorded,
the anonymous work. The real work is done in the shadow.... Official leadership
fails more and more, leadership devolves more and more upon the secret.”^53 Ye t
although Buber is highly attracted to this position, and never fully abandons it,
he also articulates an alternative view of the prophetic standing in tension with
this one, namely that the prophetic depends on a confidence in the possibility of
fulfillment in the present or near-future. Too much delay into the future risks
despair, and with despair comes the transformation of the prophetic into the
apocalyptic (for Buber, these are opposites). But this idea of the messianic trans-
mutation of failure into success persists, perhaps because of the powerful ser-
vice it performs as consolation for present political failures, such as that of Lan-
dauer in the Bavarian Revolution and Buber’s own efforts at the Twelfth Zionist
Congress.^54
In 1928, Buber also published “Three Theses on Religious Socialism.” Only
three pages long, this is a dense and rich text that represents much of Buber’s ma-
ture theopolitical position. First, it continues Buber’s argument that while neither
religion nor politics may be permitted existence as a separate sphere, religion suf-
fers more under contemporary circumstances from the attempt to carve out such
a sphere: “Religion without socialism is disembodied spirit, therefore not genuine
spirit; socialism without religion is body emptied of spirit, hence also not genuine
body. But—socialism without religion does not hear the divine address, it does
not aim at a response, still it happens that it responds; religion without socialism
hears the call but does not respond.”^55 Second, it notes that both Religio and Soci-
alitas have real and fictitious forms, and that the false forms may not only fail to
achieve their stated goals but actually work against the real responsibilities of the