200 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
Individualizing the Remnant: Ezekiel and Deutero-Isaiah
What is only a moment of weakness in Jeremiah becomes something closer to a
doctrine in Ezekiel, whom Buber views as “the man on the borderland of proph-
ecy, between prophecy and priesthood, between prophecy and theological con-
struction, between prophecy and apocalypse.”^108 Jeremiah “has nothing to say
about the future of the temple... the future of the priesthood... the future order
of the relationship between God and man.”^109 The prophecy of the new covenant
does not come with any details about the future Israelite society. By contrast,
Jeremiah’s younger contemporary Ezekiel, who prophesies from the Babylonian
exile in circumstances in which “the new acting force is nothing less than the
force of extreme despair,” describes the future Temple in all its details.^110 Eze-
kiel’s prophecy is “becoming problematic” for Buber, because it “peeps into a
future which... is already at hand and so describes it... the pure prophet is not
imaginative or, more precisely, he has no other imagination than the full grasp-
ing of the present, actual and potential.”^111 Ezekiel’s tendency to speculate has a
complex and paradoxical relationship with his most famous feature, his doctrine
of individuality.
In Buber’s reading, Ezekiel is less a religious or ethical genius than one who
shares in the dominant trends of his time: “In the atmosphere of the catastrophe
the old idea of solidarity has broken down; men rise up against the very sugges-
tion that they should suffer and perish for the guilt of others.”^112 This partially
results from the people’s failure to understand the prophetic: they perceive that
Manasseh rose and Josiah fell, but they do not understand how Judah’s present
vulnerability stems from the “anti-prophetic covenant politics of the kings.” They
incorrectly supposed that the cult reform was another way of giving to YHVH
that which belonged to him, and this increases their shock at the disastrous after-
math. Thus the notion of the remnant undergoes another transformation: Ezekiel
individualizes it. Formerly a concept of a surviving community that represented
in microcosm what Israel as a whole should have been, the remnant becomes “a
sum of individuals: pious ones and penitents.”^113 Now no one has to answer for
the deeds of his fellow, but only, fully, for himself. In a sense, Ezekiel responds to
the apparent destruction of the covenant by eliminating the people as covenant
partner, and replacing the collective with individuals, each of whom stands be-
fore God alone. “For this hour and in reply to the doubts of the despondent, he
establishes the concept of a God in Whose justice it is possible to believe, a God
Whose recompense of the individual is objectively comprehensible.”^114 The con-
fident, near-apocalyptic visions of Ezekiel see a community restored, but their
apocalyptic cast comes from the fact that he cannot imagine a way leading from
his situation to theirs. Instead, he allows each individual to feel that he himself
is justified. Buber sees this vision of a God whose justice is legible by rational
standards as rejected by the authors of Job and Psalm 73, as well as by later gen-