Skip to main content

Pursued by Buber

I cannot remember when I have lingered over a book more but Maurice Friedmann's intellectual biography of Martin Buber has continually detained me. This is partly because I am reminded and, as a result, need to think about many of Buber's texts that I have read and am struck by their continued topicality.

So, for example, I have reached the point in Buber's narrative when he arrives in Palestine to take up a position as a professor at the Hebrew University in 1938. He is both a refugee from Nazi persecution and a new entrant into a deeply felt project - that of building a Land that can be a home both for the Jewish people and for the Arab.

It is a project that to date has failed. Virtually every sentence in the text stands in judgement over both Jew and Arab in the current context. The choice between forging genuine community and settling into the antagonistic realties of political identity and conflict has been settled towards the latter, depressing, reality. Is Buber, you might ask, too idealistic? No, I think, I answer from the depths of my own intuition of what is possible for us as human beings, no.

We must continue to hope and strive for a different outcome where people can recognise each other's commonality even when we are necessarily different.

It too speaks to me in relation to today's launch of the IF campaign on hunger. If the world has enough food, why is it that many go to bed this night hungry? It is a deeply legitimate question, and the campaign ought to gather support.

And yet I realise I am deeply ambivalent about it because it does not ask anything of us - what is it, apart from protesting at our politicians and multi-national companies, what does it require us to be and do? Nothing. Where is the claim upon us of a positive witness to a world of shared meaning and work that yields a radically different outcome? It is not there.

Buber would say that we have sacrificed the opportunity to build community from the bottom up for politics and, I fear, I would agree. There is nothing of positive vision of how the world ought to be in IF that is rooted in the particular realities of diverse, concrete situations; and, thus, I fear, its impact will only be felt at the margins.

Marginalization is the curse of the current world - no doubt the assembled company at the World Economic Forum at Davos imagine themselves at the centre of something, at the 'wheel' of things and in a superficial sense they are, for the moment, but the arrogance of that particular position is being unpicked by the world - a finance system that is wholly dysfunctional, a world of resource constraint, of climate change etc etc...

There remains only the possibility of rebuilding from the place where all of us ultimately sit - our responsibility to one another that is experienced only here and now, where we happen to stand, in a diverse set of concrete particulars - here and here and here.

In reforging those linkages is our hope.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age

Searching for paradise in the hidden Himalayas

At moments of dislocation and intense social uncertainty people will appear offering the possibility of another land where people will be blessed, liberated and genuinely at home. In this case, it was not 'Brexit' but a hidden land of actual immortality, enfolded within the mountain ranges around Mt Kanchenjunga on the Nepalese/Sikkim border. Unlike Shangri-la, Beyul Demoshong was not simply a physical space, carefully hidden (as imagined in Hilton's Lost Horizon) but an occulted place spiritually hidden. The person offering this journey and opening the way to it was the 'crazy lama', Tulshuk Lingpa. Lingpa was a 'terton' a finder of 'terma' which were texts magically hidden until discovered at the right moment for them to be of maximum usefulness to people's spiritual development. They were often hidden by Padmasambhava, the robust wonder-working bringer of Buddhism to Tibet; and, Tibetan Buddhism is alive with such discoveries (though und

Parzival and the neutral angels

Fresh from contemplating 'Lost Christianity', I read Lindsay Clarke's fabulous re-telling of Wolfram von Eschenbach's poem, 'Parzival and the Stone from Heaven' from which 'Christendom' is lost! Von Eschenbach was a sacred poet but one of ecumenical sympathies where not only is Parzival's final battle (unknowingly) with his brother, the piebald Saracen, Feirefiz, essential to his self-discovery but the two of them enter the Grail castle together and are granted together a vision of the 'stone' that is the Grail. When Feirefiz asks whether it is permitted to see this Christian  mystery, Parzival answers (in Clarke's version) yes for, "all Nature's increase is there, so I think that this stone from Heaven must be a living emblem of the earth itself, which is mother and father to us all." There are knights, ladies, sorcerers, hermits and wise old hags abounding in Eschenbach's world but interestingly for a mediev