Martin Buber, On Judaism.
One of the great intellectuals and religious thinkers of the 20th century, Martin Buber, best known for his work, “I and Thou,” said:
“When I was a child I read on old Jewish tale I could not understand. It said no more than this: “Outside the gates of Rome there sits a leprous beggar, waiting. He is the Messiah.” Then I came upon an old man whom I asked: “What is he waiting for?” And the old man gave me an answer I did not understand at the time, an answer I learned to understand only much later. He said: “He waits for you.”
In On Judaism, a collection of addresses delivered by Buber between 1909-1951, we learn that “the idea of the deed” is a recurrent one in Jewish religiosity which considers “doing more essential than experiencing.” Deeds, even the most seemingly insignificant, have the power to transform us ever more closely into God’s image. Choosing what to do, however, must arise not from the conditionality of circumstance, but from a desire to be made whole by a creative use of our freedom.
In the Jewish faith tradition a central belief according to Buber is that things and events are revelations of the divine spirit and will —manifestations of the absolute in time-space. As such, each of us is confronted daily with a question that asks, how are we responding to this spirit through our decision-making freedom?
God is not an idea to be contemplated, nor the dispenser of a set of ethical precepts to be scrupulously observed, says Buber, but “an elementally present spiritual reality,” the ineffable glory of which is known in the immediacy between persons. True community with God and true human community are one.
When we begin to see that we belong to one another, and the desire to honor that truth takes shape through our choices, we begin to identify “what should have supremacy” in our lives. Responding to the world not as a set of competing claims on our time and resources to be strategically out-maneuvered, or as something to be released from in the million-and-one ways our culture offers escape, but rather as a goodness to be affirmed and therefore celebrated stimulates the will to make hard choices for wholeness—decisions that ultimately put us on the side of human solidarity and the preservation of all life.
“The world was created for the sake of the choice of him who chooses,” says the Jewish sage. Indeed, the Messiah waits for you.
