Concepts of Scripture in Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig 181address from the Unconditional — brooking no conditions. For both Bu-
ber and Rosenzweig, it was of supreme importance that human beings
make a constant eff ort to attune themselves to the possibility of revelatory
moments such as these — to commands that “speak” in and through the
unique circumstances of individual and collective life. Buber, however, felt
that an ostensibly “religious” orientation that sanctifi es a corpus of received
and fi xed law as the unchangeable word of God desensitizes the individual
and the collective to God’s direct command resonating in and through the
very tissue of lived life. One becomes deaf to the “command of the hour”
if one fi lls one’s time and space observing a comprehensive, humanly con-
structed legal system, believing that in so doing one has followed God’s
timeless will. From a religious point of view, then, Buber could not see
his way clear even to the selective appropriation of traditional Jewish law.
Rosenzweig also distinguished between what he called “commandment”
(direct address in the moment) and “law” (the regularization of obser-
vances undertaken by human beings in response to moments of revelatory
encounter). He believed, however, that traditional practices had been, and
could become again, invitations to encounter rather than obstructions to
religious immediacy. For him, responsible love turns into marriage, a rela-
tionship that rekindles its intimacy constantly by way of recurring rituals
and anniversaries.
Despite these important diff erences, Buber and Rosenzweig collabo-
rated on a most ambitious project, a new translation of the Hebrew Bible
into German, begun together in 1925 and continued by Buber aft er Rosen-
zweig’s death until 1961. Th is translation was theologically and education-
ally inspired.7 Buber and Rosenzweig did not seek to “Germanize” biblical
Hebrew such that it would transmit a clear message to the masses who are
supposedly in need of a predigested religious instruction. It rather sought
to Hebraize the German rendition of the Bible so that the spoken quality of
the commanding biblical address could be recovered by way of the literary
stimuli inscribed in the original Hebrew. In their theologies of the Bible
and in their theological hermeneutics and aesthetics of Bible reading and
interpretation, the thought of Buber and Rosenzweig overlapped greatly.
What Kind of a Book Is the Bible?
In discussions of the character of the Hebrew Bible, scholars oft en set forth
univocal theses that bespeak an either-or approach. Th e Bible is regarded