Martin Buber's Theopolitics

The Battle for YHVH | 205

The Second Commonwealth failed to realize the dreams of Deutero-Isaiah.
The people went into a second exile, so long it seemed permanent. Prophecy
ceased, and the people awaited their messiah as one who would end both the
exile and the world. The “great scattering, which followed the splitting up of the
state and became the essential form of the people, is endowed with the mystery
of suffering as with the promise of the God of sufferers,” until, in Buber’s own
time, a movement arose that sought to end this suffering by ending the exile.
Buber’s relationship to this movement cannot be fully understood without an
understanding of his theopolitical history of Israel.

Notes

1. The text was published first in Hebrew as Torat Ha-Nevi’ im (literally “Torah/Teach-
   ing of the Prophets”). As with Moshe, the language of composition is unclear; I therefore cite
   both Hebrew and German. Hebrew citations are to the second edition of Torat Ha-Nevi’ im
   (Tel Aviv: Mossad Bialik, 1950). German citations are to Der Glaube der Propheten, in WZB
   233–484.


2. Bloom, introduction to On the Bible, by Martin Buber, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (Syracuse,
   NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), xxx; Scholem, “Martin Buber’s Conception of Judaism,”
   in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, 159.


3. See the introduction, notes 12 and 20.


4. Two Types of Faith is the great exception to the rule that Buber plays down the Second
   Commonwealth. Buber named chapter 10 of Two Types of Faith (a discussion of Jesus and Isa-
   iah 53’s image of the suffering servant) as containing additional material related to the planned
   third part of Das Kommende.


5. PF 216.


6. MRC has 300 footnotes; PF has 200 by my count. KG in its latest edition has 468. Nearly
   half (89) of the notes in PF appear in the first sixty pages.


7. Buber cites Deuteronomy 18:21 and Jeremiah 6:14, 14:13, 23:17, and 28:8–9.


8. PF 221.


9. Ibid., 219. Here Buber adapts his passage on idolatry from KG.


10. Buber’s reading of Elijah, for example, interprets his defeat of the prophets of Baal
    through direct divine intervention as a kind of metaphorical representation of a popular
    memory that the historical Elijah was successful in his polemics against those prophets.


11. Ibid., 220–223.


12. Ibid., 204–205.


13. Buber’s special regard for the Song of Deborah was discussed in chapter 3, especially
    note 85.


14. These “parts” correspond to a textual division concerned with the relationship of theo-
    logical change to economic and political change: “According to the nature of things a change
    takes place here as in the second part: there through the formation of the state, and here, in the
    middle of the third and last part, through the... destruction of this state”; PF 3 (my italics).
    Since the final table of contents does not reflect a division into three parts, this language may
    survive from the original plan for part three of Das Kommende.


15. Dreyfus, “M. Buber: Messianic Mystery,” Da’at: A Journal of Jewish Philosophy and Kab-
    balah 5 (Summer 1980): 117–133 [Hebrew]. Cf. Buber, “Das messianische Mysterium (Jesaja 53),”
    in SM 37–45.