A Hasidic tale retold as fiction
What the Work Is
Gog a Magog is a work of fiction by Martin Buber, first published in 1996. It belongs to the body of Buber’s writing concerned with Hasidism, the Jewish pietist movement whose tales he collected, retold, and interpreted throughout his career. The work is catalogued under the subjects of Hasidim and fiction, identifying it as a narrative treatment of Hasidic material rather than a philosophical or scholarly study.
Buber (1878–1965) was an Austrian-Israeli philosopher and a scholar, interpreter, and translator of Hasidic lore, best known for his philosophy of dialogue and his 1923 essay I and Thou. His engagement with Hasidism ran alongside and informed that philosophy: he regarded Hasidism as a source of cultural renewal for Judaism and drew on its tradition to emphasize community, interpersonal life, and meaning in everyday activity.
What the Book Is About
The title refers to Gog and Magog, the names associated with the eschatological conflict of the Hebrew Bible and later tradition. Beyond this, the available source material does not describe the book’s plot, characters, or specific narrative content, and no summary of its story can be responsibly given here. What can be said is that the work stands within Buber’s lifelong project of transmitting Hasidic material — a project in which he retold the tales of Hasidic figures in a Neo-Hasidic fashion, as he did with the stories of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov in Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman (1906) and the tales of the Baal Shem Tov in Die Legende des Baalschem (1908).
Key Ideas and Themes
The themes that animate Buber’s Hasidic writing are documented in the sources, even where the specific contents of Gog a Magog are not. Central among them is the Hasidic ideal as Buber understood it: a life lived in the unconditional presence of God, with no distinct separation between daily habits and religious experience. Buber frequently cited examples from the Hasidic tradition that stressed community, interpersonal life, and meaning in everyday activities — the relation of a worker to his tools being one such example. This ideal was a major influence on his philosophical anthropology, which holds that the basis of human existence is dialogical.
That dialogical principle is the heart of Buber’s thought. He distinguished two fundamental modes of relating: the I–Thou relationship, a concrete encounter in which two beings meet in their authentic existence without objectifying one another, and the I–It relationship, in which a being is confronted as an object, a mental representation to be used and experienced. Buber argued that human life oscillates between these two modes, and that I–Thou encounters are comparatively rare. He identified the relationship between a human being and God as a key I–Thou relation, holding that an I–Thou relationship with anything or anyone connects in some way with the eternal relation to God.
Buber’s broader intellectual concerns — religious consciousness, modernity, the concept of evil, ethics, education, and Biblical hermeneutics — form the context in which his Hasidic retellings sit. His writing style was evocative and sometimes poetic, and the retelling of Hasidic and Chinese tales was one of the major themes marking his work.
Significance and Influence
Buber’s influence extends across the humanities, particularly in social psychology, social philosophy, and religious existentialism. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature ten times and the Nobel Peace Prize seven times, and received the Goethe award of the University of Hamburg (1951), the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (1953), the Israel Prize in the humanities (1958), the Bialik Prize for Jewish thought (1961), and the Erasmus Prize (1963). His Hasidic work forms part of a career that also included his philosophy of dialogue, his translation of the Hebrew Bible into German begun in 1925 with Franz Rosenzweig, and his political advocacy for a binational Jewish-Arab state.
The sources do not record the reception, critical assessment, or influence specific to Gog a Magog itself.
Buber was born in Vienna to an Orthodox Jewish family and was a direct descendant of the 16th-century rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen, known as the Maharam, of Padua; Karl Marx is another notable relative. After his parents divorced when he was three years old, he was raised by his grandfather in Lemberg (now Lviv in Ukraine). His grandfather, Solomon Buber, was a scholar of Midrash and Rabbinic Literature. At home, Buber spoke Yiddish and German. In 1892, he returned to his father’s house in Lemberg.
Despite his putative connection to the Davidic line as a descendant of Katzenellenbogen, a personal religious crisis led him to break with Jewish religious customs. He began reading Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Nietzsche; the latter two in particular inspired him to pursue studies in philosophy. In 1896, he went to study in Vienna (philosophy, art history, German studies, philology). In 1898, he joined the Zionist movement, participating in congresses and organizational work. In 1899, while studying in Zürich, he met his future wife, Paula Winkler, a Catholic writer from a Bavarian peasant family who in 1901 left the Catholic Church and in 1907 converted to Judaism. They had two children, a son, Rafael Buber, and a daughter, Eva Strauss-Steinitz, and helped raise their granddaughters Barbara Goldschmidt (1921–2013) and Judith Buber Agassi (1924–2018), born by their son Rafael’s marriage to Margarete Buber-Neumann. Paula Winkler died in 1958 in Venice; Buber died at his home in the Talbiya neighborhood of Jerusalem on 13 June 1965.
Zionist Engagement
Approaching Zionism from his own personal viewpoint, a young Buber disagreed with Theodor Herzl about their respective positions on Zionism. Herzl did not envision Zionism as a movement with religious objectives; in contrast, Buber believed the potential of Zionism was for social and spiritual enrichment. Herzl and Buber continued, in mutual respect and disagreement, to work towards their respective goals for the rest of their lives. In 1902, Buber became the editor of the weekly Die Welt, the central organ of the Zionist movement. However, a year later he became involved with the Jewish Hasidic movement, admiring how the Hasidic communities actualized their religion in daily life and culture; in stark contrast to the busy Zionist organizations, which were always mulling political concerns, the Hasidim were focused on the values Buber had long advocated for Zionism to adopt. In 1904, he withdrew from much of his Zionist organizational work and devoted himself to study and writing, publishing that year his thesis, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Individuationsproblems, on Jakob Böhme and Nikolaus Cusanus.
In a 1910 essay entitled “He and We”, Buber established himself and Herzl (who had died in 1904) as diametrically opposed in their perspectives on Zionism. Buber described Herzl by saying, “The impulse of the elementally active person (Elementaraktiver) to act is so strong that it prevents him from acquiring knowledge for the sake of knowledge,” and, according to Buber, when a person like Herzl is aware of his Jewishness, “In him awakens the will to help the Jews to whom he belongs, to lead them where they can experience freedom and security. Now he does what his will tells him. He does not see anything else.” In that same essay, Buber drew a parallel between Herzl and Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, arguing that both seek to reinstate the Jewish people, the difference coming in their approaches; Herzl affecting change indirectly via history whereas Baal Shem Tov sought to achieve improvement directly through religion.
In light of the outbreak of World War I, Buber engaged in debates with fellow German philosopher Hermann Cohen in 1915 on the nature of nationalism and Zionism. Whereas Cohen, whose argument was based in messianic principles, believed that a Jewish minority was essential to a broader German national identity, Buber argued that, “Judaism may well be taken up in messianic humanity, to be melted into it; we do not, however, consider that the Jewish people must disappear among contemporary humanity so that a messianic humanity might arise.” In a 1916 letter to a professor entitled “Concepts and Reality”, Buber addressed the issues of nationalism, Messianism, and Hebrew within the Zionist movement of the period, arguing that nationalism is not a natural phenomenon and that Zionism is a movement centered around religiosity, not nationalism. According to Buber, the messianic movement within Zionism is obscured by those in liberal Jewish and anti-Zionist circles, who argue that Messianism necessitates a diaspora. On the importance of the Hebrew language, Buber believed, “Hebrew is not first and foremost a vernacular but the single language that can fully absorb and express the sublime values of Judaism.”
In the early 1920s, Buber started advocating a binational Jewish-Arab state, stating that the Jewish people should proclaim “its desire to live in peace and brotherhood with the Arab people, and to develop the common homeland into a republic in which both peoples will have the possibility of free development.” He rejected the idea of Zionism as just another national movement, and wanted instead to see the creation of an exemplary society, one not characterized by Jewish domination of the Arabs. He was influenced by cultural Zionist Ahad Ha’am and believed it was necessary for the Zionist movement to reach a consensus with the Arabs even at the cost of the Jews remaining a minority in the country. In 1925, he, alongside his friend Judah Magnes, was involved in the creation of the organization Brit Shalom (Covenant of Peace), which advocated the creation of a binational state, and throughout the rest of his life he hoped and believed that Jews and Arabs one day would live in peace in a joint nation.
In a 1929 essay entitled “The National Home and National Policy in Palestine,” Buber explores the Jewish right to the land of Israel before engaging with the question of Jewish-Arab relations. According to Buber, the Zionist right to establish a country in Israel originates from their ancient, ancestral connection to the land, the fact that Jews have worked to cultivate the land in recent years, and the future prospect that a Jewish state offers as both a cultural center for Judaism and a model for creating a new social organization, referencing the emergence of kibbutzim. Buber goes on to discuss, broadly, the necessity for injustice in order to survive, and focuses it to the Zionist perspective by writing, “It is indeed true that there can be no life without injustice. The fact that there is no living creature that can live and thrive without destroying another existing organism has a symbolic significance as regards our human life. But the human aspect of life begins the moment we say to ourselves: We will not do more injustice to others than we are forced to do to exist.” Buber then uses this perspective to argue in favor of Binationalism as a means to establish a combination of potential coexistence and national independence.
Living and writing in Jerusalem, Buber increased his political involvement and continued to develop his ideas on Zionism. In 1942, he co-founded the Ihud party, which advocated a bi-nationalist program. Nevertheless, he was connected with decades of friendship to Zionists and philosophers such as Chaim Weizmann, Max Brod, Hugo Bergmann, and Felix Weltsch, who were close friends of his from old European times in Prague, Berlin, and Vienna to the Jerusalem of the 1940s through the 1960s. Buber evaluated the competing strains of cultural and political Zionism from a somewhat teleological perspective in a 1948 piece “Zionism and Zionism”. He summarizes these two competing perspectives as, on the one hand, “returning and restoring the true Israel, whose spirit and life would once again no longer exist beside each other,” and, on the other hand, as a process of “normalization,” and that to be “normal,” a “nation needs a land, a language, and independence. Thus, one must only go and acquire those commodities, and the rest will take care of itself.” According to Buber, as Jews and Israel succeed at being a “normal nation,” the drive for a spiritual and cultural rebirth is lost, and the war being waged over political structure threatens to become a war for survival. After the establishment of Israel in 1948, Buber advocated Israel’s participation in a federation of “Near East” states wider than just Palestine. For Buber, Israel has the potential to serve as an example for the “Near East” as, in his Binationalist perspective, two independent nations could each maintain their own cultural identity, “but both united in the enterprise of developing their common homeland and in the federal management of shared matters. On the strength of that covenant we wish to return once more to the union of Near Eastern nations, to build an economy integrated in that of the Near East, to carry out policies in the framework of the life of the Near East, and, God willing, to send the ‘living idea’ forth to the world from the Near East once again.” During this same time period Buber remained critical of many policies and leaders of the new Israeli government. He was particularly vocal about the treatment of Arab refugees, and was unafraid to criticize top leadership like David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister.
Literary and Academic Career
From 1905 Buber worked for the publishing house Rütten & Loening as a lecturer; there he initiated and supervised the completion of the social psychological monograph series Die Gesellschaft. From 1906 until 1914, he published editions of Hasidic, mystical, and mythic texts from Jewish and world sources. In 1916, he moved from Berlin to Heppenheim. During World War I, he helped establish the Jewish National Committee to improve the condition of Eastern European Jews. During that period he became the editor of Der Jude (German for “The Jew”), a Jewish monthly (until 1924). In 1921, Buber began his close relationship with Franz Rosenzweig. In 1922, he and Rosenzweig co-operated in Rosenzweig’s House of Jewish Learning, known in Germany as Lehrhaus. Though he edited I and Thou later in his life, he refused to make substantial changes. In 1925, he began, in conjunction with Franz Rosenzweig, translating the Hebrew Bible into German (Die Schrift). He himself called this translation Verdeutschung (“Germanification”), since it does not always use literary German language, but instead attempts to find new dynamic (often newly invented) equivalent phrasing to respect the multivalent Hebrew original. Between 1926 and 1930, Buber co-edited the quarterly Die Kreatur (“The Creature”).
In 1930, Buber became an honorary professor at the University of Frankfurt am Main. He resigned in protest from his professorship immediately after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. On October 4, 1933, the Nazi authorities forbade him to lecture. In 1935, he was expelled from the Reich Chamber of Literature. He then founded the Central Office for Jewish Adult Education, which became an increasingly important body, as the German government forbade Jews to attend public education; the Nazi administration increasingly obstructed this body. Finally, in 1938, Buber left Germany and settled in Jerusalem, then capital of Mandate Palestine. He received a professorship at Hebrew University, there lecturing in anthropology and introductory sociology. The lectures he gave during the first semester were published in the book The Problem of Man (Das Problem des Menschen); in these lectures he discusses how the question “What is Man?” became the central one in philosophical anthropology. He participated in the discussion of the Jews’ problems in Palestine and of the Arab question — working out of his Biblical, philosophic, and Hasidic work. He became a member of the group Ihud, which aimed at a bi-national state for Arabs and Jews in Palestine; such a binational confederation was viewed by Buber as a more proper fulfillment of Zionism than a solely Jewish state. In 1949, he published his work Paths in Utopia, in which he detailed his communitarian socialist views and his theory of the “dialogical community” founded upon interpersonal “dialogical relationships”. After World War II, Buber began lecture tours in Europe and the United States. In 1952, he argued with Jung over the existence of God.
Philosophy
Buber is famous for his thesis of dialogical existence, as he described in the book I and Thou. However, his work dealt with a range of issues including religious consciousness, modernity, the concept of evil, ethics, education, and Biblical hermeneutics. Buber rejected the label of “philosopher” or “theologian”, claiming he was not interested in ideas, only personal experience, and could not discuss God, but only relationships to God. Politically, Buber’s social philosophy on points of prefiguration aligns with that of anarchism, though Buber explicitly disavowed the affiliation in his lifetime and justified the existence of a state under limited conditions.
In I and Thou, Buber introduced his thesis on human existence. Inspired by Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity and Kierkegaard’s Single One, Buber worked upon the premise of existence as encounter. He explained this philosophy using the word pairs of Ich-Du and Ich-Es to categorize the modes of consciousness, interaction, and being through which an individual engages with other individuals, inanimate objects, and all reality in general. Philosophically, these word pairs express complex ideas about modes of being—particularly how a person exists and actualizes that existence. As Buber argues in I and Thou, a person is at all times engaged with the world in one of these modes. The generic motif Buber employs to describe the dual modes of being is one of dialogue (Ich-Du) and monologue (Ich-Es). The concept of communication, particularly language-oriented communication, is used both in describing dialogue/monologue through metaphors and expressing the interpersonal nature of human existence.
Ich-Du (“I-Thou” or “I-You” — ‘you’ in a very personal, connected sense; ‘Du’ in German means ‘you’, but is generally only used to a closely-connected person, such as a close relative) is a relationship that stresses the mutual, holistic existence of two beings. It is a concrete encounter, because these beings meet one another in their authentic existence, without any qualification or objectification of one another. Even imagination and ideas do not play a role in this relation. In an I–Thou encounter, infinity and universality are made actual (rather than being merely concepts). Buber stressed that an Ich-Du relationship lacks any composition (e.g., structure) and communicates no content (e.g., information). Despite the fact that Ich-Du cannot be proven to happen as an event (e.g., it cannot be measured), Buber stressed that it is real and perceivable. A variety of examples are used to illustrate Ich-Du relationships in daily life—two lovers, an observer and a cat, the author and a tree, and two strangers on a train. Common English words used to describe the Ich-Du relationship include encounter, meeting, dialogue, mutuality, and exchange.
One key Ich-Du relationship Buber identified was that which can exist between a human being and God. Buber argued that this is the only way in which it is possible to interact with God, and that an Ich-Du relationship with anything or anyone connects in some way with the eternal relation to God. To create this I–Thou relationship with God, a person has to be open to the idea of such a relationship, but not actively pursue it. The pursuit of such a relation creates qualities associated with It-ness, and so would prevent an I-You relation, limiting it to I-It. Buber claims that if we are open to the I–Thou, God eventually comes to us in response to our welcome. Also, because the God Buber describes is completely devoid of qualities, this I–Thou relationship lasts as long as the individual wills it. When the individual finally returns to the I-It way of relating, this acts as a barrier to deeper relationship and community.
The Ich-Es (“I-It”) relationship is nearly the opposite of Ich-Du. Whereas in Ich-Du the two beings encounter one another, in an Ich-Es relationship the beings do not actually meet. Instead, the “I” confronts and qualifies an idea, or conceptualization, of the being in its presence and treats that being as an object. All such objects are considered merely mental representations, created and sustained by the individual mind. This is based partly on Kant’s theory of phenomenon, in that these objects reside in the cognitive agent’s mind, existing only as thoughts. Therefore, the Ich-Es relationship is in fact a relationship with oneself; it is not a dialogue, but a monologue. In the Ich-Es relationship, an individual treats other things, people, etc., as objects to be used and experienced. Essentially, this form of objectivity relates to the world in terms of the self – how an object can serve the individual’s interest. Buber argued that human life consists of an oscillation between Ich-Du and Ich-Es, and that in fact Ich-Du experiences are rather few and far between. In diagnosing the various perceived ills of modernity (e.g., isolation, dehumanization, etc.), Buber believed that the expansion of a purely analytic, material view of existence was at heart an advocation of Ich-Es relations — even between human beings. Buber argued that this paradigm devalued not only existents, but the meaning of all existence.
Students and Colleagues
Buber was a sort of mentor figure in the lives of Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin, the ‘Kabbalist of the Holy City’ and the ‘Marxist Rabbi’ of Berlin during the era leading up to, overlapping with proceeding after the Holocaust (Benjamin died during his escape from Europe, but Buber retained contact with Scholem after the war). While his relationship with these two was sometimes unilaterally contentious (with the students occasionally attacking or critiquing their patron somewhat viciously) Buber acted as an impresario, publisher and by various means as one of the great sponsors of their careers and growing reputations. Scholem was to be amongst the friends and interested parties who helped attend to and orchestrate Buber’s eventual emigration to Palestine from the very beginning stages of that discussion during the rise of Hitler. They corresponded also in regards to their work with Brit Shalom, an early think-tank that was tasked with figuring out the dynamics of two-state solution to be brokered between Israel and Palestine more than twenty years before Israel became a nation state—and also about a great many issues regarding their shared interest in ancient, sacred and often mystical Jewish literature whilst keeping tabs likewise on mutual acquaintances and important publications in their fields of interest. Scholem dedicated his bibliography of the Zohar to Buber.
Published Works
Among Buber’s works published in English are I and Thou (1937, translated by Ronald Gregor Smith; a new translation with a prologue “I and you” and notes by Walter Kaufmann appeared in 1970), Eclipse of God (1952), Good & Evil (1952), Pointing the Way (1957, translated by Maurice Friedman), The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism (1960, translated by M. Friedman), Daniel: Dialogues on Realization (1964), The Knowledge of Man (1965, translated by Ronald Gregor Smith and Maurice Friedman), The Way of Response: Martin Buber; Selections from his Writings (1966, edited by N. N. Glatzer), A Believing Humanism: My Testament (1967, translation of Nachlese by M. Friedman), On Judaism (1967, edited by Nahum Glatzer), On the Bible: Eighteen Studies (1968, edited by Nahum Glatzer), Mamre: Essays in Religion (1970, translated by Greta Hort), Martin Buber and the Theater, Including Martin Buber’s “Mystery Play” Elijah (1970, edited and translated with three introductory essays by Maurice Friedman), Encounter: Autobiographical Fragments (1972), On Zion: the History of an Idea (1973, with a new foreword by Nahum N. Glatzer, translated from the German by Stanley Godman), Meetings (1973, edited with an introduction and bibliography by Maurice Friedman), A Land of Two Peoples: Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs (1983, edited with commentary by Paul R. Mendes-Flohr), Ecstatic Confessions (1985, edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr, translated by Esther Cameron), Chinese Tales: Zhuangzi, Sayings and Parables and Chinese Ghost and Love stories (1991, translated by Alex Page, with an introduction by Irene Eber), Tales of the Hasidim (1991, foreword by Chaim Potok), On Intersubjectivity and Cultural Creativity (1992, edited and with an introduction by S.N. Eisenstadt), Scripture and Translation (1994, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, translated by Lawrence Rosenwald with Everett Fox), Paths in Utopia (1996, translated by R.F. Hull), The First Buber: Youthful Zionist Writings of Martin Buber (1999, edited and translated from the German by Gilya G. Schmidt), and Martin Buber on Psychology and Psychotherapy: Essays, Letters, and Dialogue (1999, edited by Judith Buber Agassi).
