Part Four -- The Nature and Redemption of Evil
Chapter 17: The Redemption of Evil
Man’s turning from evil and taking the direction toward God is the beginning of his own redemption and that of the world. God ‘wishes to redeem us -- but only by our own acceptance of His redemption with the turning of the whole being.’ Our turning is only the beginning, however, for man’s action must be answered by God’s grace for redemption to be complete. When we go forth to meet God, He comes to meet us, and this meeting is our salvation. ‘It is not as though any definite act of man could draw grace down from heaven; yet grace answers deed in
unpredictable ways, grace unattainable, yet not self-withholding.’ It is senseless, therefore, to try to divide redemption into a part that is dependent on man and a part that is dependent on God. Man must be concerned with his action alone before he brings it about, with God’s grace alone after the action is successfully done. ‘The one is no less real than the other, and neither is a part-cause . . . man’s action is enclosed in God’s action, but it is still real action.’ When man breaks through, he has an immediate experience of his freedom; after his decision has been made, he has an immediate experience that God’s hand has carried him.
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(The Prophetic Faith, op. cit., pp. 104, 124; Hasidism, op. cit.,
‘Spinoza,’ pp. 108-111; Israel and the World, op. cit., ‘The Faith of Judaism,’ p. 18, ‘The Two Foci of the Jewish Soul,’ p. 32 f.) Man’s action and God’s grace are subsumed under the greater reality of the meeting between God and man.
The decisive turning is not merely an attitude of the soul but something effective in the whole corporeality of life. It is not to be identified with repentance, for repentance is something psychological and purely inward which shows itself outwardly only in its ‘consequences’ and
‘effects.’ The turning is something which happens in the immediacy of the reality between man and God.’ It ‘is as little a "psychic" event as is a man’s birth or death.’ Repentance is at best only an incentive to this turning, and it may even stand in the way of it if a man tortures himself with the idea that his acts of penance are not sufficient and thereby withholds his best energies from the work of reversal. (Two Types of Faith, op. cit., p. 26; Israel and the World, ‘The Faith of Judaism,’ p.
20; The Way of Man, op. cit., p. 35 f.)
The teshavah, or turning to God, is born in the depths of the soul out of
‘the despair which shatters the prison of our latent energies’ and out of the suffering which purifies the soul. In his darkest hours man feels the hand of God reaching down to him. If he has ‘the incredible courage’ to take the hand and let it draw him up out of the darkness, he tastes the essence of redemption -- the knowledge that his ‘redeemer liveth’ (Job xix, 18) and wishes to redeem him. But he must accept this redemption with the turning of his whole being, for only thus can he extricate
himself from the maze of selfishness where he has always set himself as his goal and find a way to God and to the fulfillment of the particular task for which he is intended. (For the Sake of Heaven, op. cit., pp. 113, 116, 202; Israel and the World, ‘The Man of Today and the Jewish Bible,’ p. 101 f.; The Way of Man, p. 36.)
To turn to God with the whole of one’s being means to turn with all of one’s passion. Passion is the element without which no deed can succeed, the element which needs only direction in order that out of it the kingdom of God can be built. According to Hasidism, it is the yearning of the divine sparks to be redeemed that brings the ‘alien thoughts,’ or impure impulses, to man. The alien thoughts of which the Baal-Shem speaks are in our language fantasy, says Buber. The
transformation of these impulses, accordingly, can only take place in our imaginative faculty. We must not reject the abundance of this fantasy
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but transform it and turn it into actuality. ‘We must convert the element that seeks to take possession of us into the substance of real life.’ The contradictions which distress us exist only that we may discover their intrinsic significance. (Israel and the World, ‘The Faith of Judaism, p.
17 f., Hasidism, ‘The Foundation Stone,’ p. 53 f., ‘The Beginnings of Hasidism,’ p. 30 f.; Kampf um Israel, op. cit. p. 399 f.; Martin Buber, Ten Rungs, Hasidic Sayings, trans. by Olga Marx [New York: Schocken Books, 1947], p. 94 f.; Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, The Early Masters, trans. by Olga Marx [New York: Schocken Books, 1947], pp. 4 11-14, 29; Hasidism and Modern Man, ‘The Baal-Shem-Tor’s
Instruction in Intercourse with God.’)
The very qualities which make us what we are constitute our special approach to God and our potential use for Him. Each man is created for the fulfillment of a unique purpose. His foremost task, therefore, ‘is the actualization of his unique, unprecedented and never-recurring
potentialities, and not the repetition of something that another, and be it even the greatest, has already achieved.’ We can revere the service of others and learn from it, but we cannot imitate it. Neither ought we envy another’s particularity and place nor attempt to impose our own
particular way on him. (Tales of the Hasidim, The Early Masters, p.29;
The Way of Man, p.17 ff.) The way by which a man can reach God is revealed to him only through the knowledge of his essential quality and inclination. Man discovers this essential quality through perceiving his
‘central wish,’ the strongest feeling which stirs his inmost being. In many cases he knows this central wish only in the form of the particular passion which seeks to lead him astray. To preserve and direct this passion he must divert it from the casual to the essential, from the relative to the absolute. He must prevent it from rushing at the objects which lie across his path, yet he must not turn away from these objects but establish genuine relationship with them. ‘Man’s task, therefore, is not to extirpate the evil urge, but to reunite it with the good.’ If man lends his will to the direction of his passions, he begins the movement of holiness which God completes. In the hallowing which results, ‘the total man is accepted, confirmed, and fulfilled. This is the true integration of man.’ (For the Sake of Heaven, p. 117; The Way of Man, p. I9 f.; Images of Good and Evil, op. cit., pp. 39-42; Israel and the World, ‘The Power of the Spirit,’ p. 181 f.)
The belief in the redemption of evil does not mean any security of salvation. The prophets of Israel, writes Buber, ‘always aimed to shatter all security and to proclaim in the opened abyss of the final insecurity
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the unwished-for God who demands that His human creatures become real . . . and confounds all who imagine that they can take refuge in the certainty that the temple of God is in their midst.’ There is no other path for the responsible modern man than this ‘holy insecurity.’ In an age in which ‘God is dead,’ the truly religious man sets forth across the God- deprived reality to a new meeting with the nameless God and on his way destroys the images that no longer do justice to God. ‘Holy insecurity’ is life lived in the Face of God. It is the life in which one learns to speak the truth ‘no matter whether a whole people is listening, or only a few individuals,’ and learns to speak it quietly and clearly through having been in hell and having returned to the light of day again. (Eclipse of God, ‘Religion and Modern Thinking,’ p. 97 f., ‘Religion and
Philosophy,’ p. 63; Kampf um Israel, p. 198; Martin Buber, ‘Our Reply,’
Towards Union in Palestine, Essays on Zionism and Jewish-Arab Cooperation, ed. by Martin Buber, Judah L. Magnes, and Ernst Simon [Jerusalem: Ihud Association, September 1945], p. 34.)
If a man tries to get rid of his insecurity by constructing a defensive armour to protect himself from the world, he has added to the
exposedness which is the state of all men the hysteria which makes him run blindly from the thing he fears rather than face and accept it.
Conversely, if he accepts his exposed condition and remains open to those things which meet him, he has turned his exposedness into ‘holy insecurity.’ He has overcome his blind fear and has put in its place the faith which is born out of the relation with the Thou. The defensive man becomes literally rigid with fear. He sets between himself and the world a rigid religious dogma, a rigid system of philosophy, a rigid political belief and commitment to a group, and a rigid wall of personal values and habits. The open man, on the other hand, accepts his fear and relaxes into it. He substitutes the realism of despair, if need be, for the tension of hysteria. He meets every new situation with quiet and
sureness out of the depths of his being, yet he meets it with the fear and trembling of one who has no ready-made answer to life.
The religious essence of every religion, writes Buber, ‘is the certainty that the meaning of existence is open and accessible in the actual lived concreteness.’ This does not mean that meaning is to be won through any analytical or synthetic reflection upon the lived concrete but through
‘living action and suffering itself, in the unreduced immediacy of the moment.’ Neither can one aim at experiencing the experience, for one thereby destroys the spontaneity of the mystery and thus misses the meaning. ‘Only he reaches the meaning who stands firm, without
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holding back or reservation, before the whole might of reality and
answers it in a living way.’ No meeting with God can take place entirely outside of this lived concrete. Even asceticism is essentially a reduction for the sake of preserving the concreteness of the moment when this no longer seems attainable in the fullness of life. Prayer too is not
spirituality floating above concrete reality but lived concreteness. Prayer is the very essence of the immediacy between man and God, and
praying is, above all words, the action of turning directly to God. In true prayer, no matter what else the individual asks for, he ‘ultimately asks for the manifestation of the divine Presence, for this Presence’s
becoming dialogically perceivable.’ The presupposition of a genuine state of prayer is not religious words, pious feelings, or techniques of spiritual concentration but ‘the readiness of the whole man for this Presence, simple turned-towardness, unreserved spontaneity.’ (Eclipse of God, ‘Religion and Philosophy,’ pp. 49 f., 52 f., ‘God and the Spirit of Man,’ p. 163; Between Man and Man, ‘Dialogue,’ p. 15; Des Baal- Schem-Tow Unterweisung im Umgang mit Gott, p. 12 f.; The Way of Man, p. 21; Two Types of Faith, pp. 28,157,161.)
All religious reality begins with the acceptance of the concrete situation as given one by the Giver, and it is this which Biblical religion calls the
‘fear of God.’ The ‘fear of God’ is the essence of ‘holy insecurity,’ for
‘it comes when our existence becomes incomprehensible and uncanny, when all security is shattered through the mystery.’ By ‘the mystery’
Buber does not mean the as yet undiscovered but the essentially unknowable -- ‘the undefinable and unfathomable,’ whose
inscrutableness belongs to its very nature. The believing man who passes through this shattering of security returns to the everyday as the henceforth hallowed place in which he has to live with the mystery. ‘He steps forth directed and assigned to the concrete, contextual situations of his existence.’ This does not mean that he accepts everything that meets him as ‘God-given’ in its pure factuality.
He may, rather, declare the extremist enmity toward this happening and treat its ‘givenness’ as only intended to draw forth his own opposing force. But he will not remove himself from the concrete situation as it actually is.... Whether field of work or field of battle, he accepts the place in which he is placed. (Eclipse of God, ‘Religion and Philosophy,’ p. 50 ff.)
One should not willingly accept evil in one’s life but should will to
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penetrate the impure with the pure. The result may well be an interpenetration of both elements, but it may not be anticipated by
saying ‘yes’ to the evil in advance. (From a conversation between Buber and Max Brod quoted in Max Brod, ‘Zur Problematik des Bösen und des Rituals,’ Der Jude, ‘Sonderheft zu Martin Bubers fünfzigstem Geburtstag,’ X, 5 [March 1928], ed. by Robert Weltsch, p. 109.) Fear of God is the indispensable gate to the love of God. That love of God which does not comprehend fear is really idolatry, the adoration of a god whom one has constructed oneself. Such a god is easy enough to love, but it is not easy to love ‘the real God, who is, to begin with,
dreadful and incomprehensible.’ (Eclipse of God, p. 50 f.; Martin Buber, Israel and Palestine, The History of an Idea [London: East & West Library; New York: Farrar, Straus & Young, 1952], p. 89.)
He who wishes to avoid passing through this gate, he who begins to provide himself with a comprehensible God, constructed thus and not otherwise, runs the risk of having to despair of God in view of the actualities of history and life, or of falling into inner falsehood. Only through the fear of God does man enter so deep into the love of God that he cannot again be cast out of it. (Israel and the World, ‘The Two Foci of the Jewish Soul,’ p. 31 f. Cf.
ibid., ‘Imitatio Dei,’ p. 76 f.; For the Sake of Heaven, p.
46.)
The fear of God is only a gate, however, and not, as some theologians believe, a dwelling in which man can settle down. When man
encounters the demonic, he must not rest in it but must penetrate behind it to find the meaning of his meeting with it. The fear of God must flow into the love of God and be comprehended by it before one is ready to endure in the face of God the whole reality of lived life. (Israel and the World, ‘The Two Foci of the Jewish Soul,’ p. 32; Eclipse of God,
‘Religion and Philosophy,’ p. 50 ff.; Two Types of Faith, pp. 137, 154.) Contrary to the teachings of many religious men, the love of God does not mean the submission of one’s will in obedience to God. ‘When and so far as the loving man loves he does not need to bend his will, for he lives in the Divine Will.’ God commands that man love Him, but it is not God, but the soul itself, in the original mystery of its spontaneity, that loves Him. Man can be commanded to love God since this means nothing other than the actualization of the existing relationship of faith
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to Him. ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself,’ in contrast, does not mean loving feeling but loving action. One cannot command that one feel love for a person but only that one deal lovingly with him. Re-ah, or
‘neighbour,’ means, in the Old Testament, anyone with whom one stands in an immediate and reciprocal relationship. "’Love thy re-ah"
therefore means in our language: be lovingly disposed towards men with whom thou has to do at anytime in the course of thy life.’ This
lovingkindness will also ultimately come to include the feeling of love, for if a person really loves God, he loves every man whom God loves as he becomes aware that God does love him. To find meaning in existence one must begin oneself and penetrate into it with active love: ‘Meet the world with the fullness of your being and you shall meet Him.... If you wish to believe, love!’ (Two Types of Faith, pp. 69 ff., At the Turning, pp. 37, 42 ff.)
The love of the Creator and of that which He has created are finally one and the same. ‘Imitatio Dei’ does not mean becoming like God as He is in Himself but only the following in His way in relation to justice and love -- the divine attributes which are turned toward man. The true meaning of the ethical, writes Buber, is ‘to help God by loving His creation in his creatures, by loving it towards Him.’ ‘People who love each other with holy love bring each other towards the love with which God loves His world.’ (At the Turning, p. 37 ff.; Between Man and Man,
‘The Question to the Single One,’ pp. 51 f., 56 f.; Eclipse of God,
‘Religion and Ethics,’ p. 137 f., Hasidism, ‘God and the Soul,’ p. 158.) The true love of man is not a general love for all humanity but a quite concrete, direct, and effective love for particular individuals. Only because one loves specific men can one elevate to love one’s relation to man in general. (Hasidism, ‘Spirit and Body of the Hasidic Movement,’
p. 86; Introduction by Buber to Hermann Cohen, Der Nächste [Berlin:
Schocken Verlag, 1935], p. 6 Martin Buber, ‘Kraft und Richtung, Klugheit und Weisheit’ [From a letter], Das werdende Zeitalter, VII [1928], 97; Eclipse of God, ‘The Love of God and the Idea of Deity,’ p.
77 ff.) ‘"Togetherness,"’ says David of Lelov in For the Sake of Heaven,
"’means that each is intimate with the other and each feels
lovingkindness for the other."’ The Yehudi extends this togetherness even to the sons of Satan, whom God has made us capable of loving:
‘Does not redemption primarily mean the redeeming of the evil from the evil ones that make them so? If the world is to be forevermore divided between God and Satan, how dare we say that it is God’s world? . . . Are we
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to establish a little realm of the righteous and leave the rest to the Lord? Is it for this that He gave us a mouth which can convey the truth of our heart to an alien heart and a hand which can communicate to the hand of our recalcitrant brother something of the warmth of our very blood?’ (For the Sake of Heaven, pp. 121, 125)
In between the self-righteous avoidance of the evil of others and the acceptance and willing of evil lies the difficult path of taking evil upon oneself without being corrupted by it and transforming it into love. This can be done only by the person who has himself reached maturity and quiet of soul. It cannot extend to removing another person’s
responsibility before God, but it can help him to escape the whirl into which the evil impulse has plunged him. (Ibid,. p. 56 Tales of Hasidim, The Early Masters, p.4 ff.)
Through genuine dialogical existence the real person takes part in the unfinished process of creation. ‘It is only by way of true intercourse with things and beings that man achieves true life, but also it is by this way only that he can take an active part in the redemption of the world.’
Redemption does not take place within the individual soul but in the world through the real meeting of God and man. Everything is waiting to be hallowed by man, for there is nothing so crass or base that it cannot become material for sanctification. ‘The profane,’ for Hasidism, is only a designation for the not yet sanctified. ‘Any natural act, if hallowed, leads to God.’ The things that happen to one day after day contain one’s essential task, for true fulfilled existence depends on our developing a genuine relationship to the people with whom we live and work, the animals that help us, the soil we till, the materials we shape, the tools we use. ‘The most formidable power is intrinsically
powerlessness unless it maintains a secret covenant with these contacts, both humble and helpful, with strange, and yet near being.’ (The Way of Man, pp. 21 f., 42-46; Hasidism, ‘The Foundation Stone,’ p. 58,
‘Spinoza,’ p.111 Israel and the World, ‘The Two Foci of the Jewish Soul,’ p. 34.)
No renunciation of the object of desire is commanded: it is only
necessary that man’s relation to the object be hallowed in his life with nature, his work, his friendship, his marriage, and his solidarity with the community. Hence serving God with the ‘evil impulse’ and ‘hallowing the everyday’ are essentially the same. ‘Hallowing transforms the urges by confronting them with holiness and making them responsible toward
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