I. A Child Waiting

When Buber was three, his mother left.

After his parents separated, his mother was no longer part of his daily life. To a child, the complexity of adult relationships first appears as an empty place.

He went to his grandparents in Lemberg, then in Galicia. Solomon Buber was a Jewish scholar of Midrash; his grandmother Adele also profoundly shaped his life with books and language. Their household gave him care, reading, and an upbringing between cultures.

But.

The boy was waiting.

In his autobiographical fragments, the elderly Buber remembered a balcony at his grandparents’ house. He was still a small child. Adults did not discuss his parents in front of him; he did not ask. He continued to hope his mother would return.

An older girl looking after him told him that his mother would not return.

Buber said later that this was one of the most important moments of his life.

He did not answer. Later he coined a word for a meeting that fails to happen: Vergegnung, mismeeting.

When he saw his mother again many years later, the word for mismeeting returned. Her presence could not make the years of waiting unhappen. A person may return without a missed encounter being repaired simply by entering the same room.

The memory did not close neatly. Where the child had waited, a gap remained.

Buber thought about this for the rest of his life.

What does it mean for two people really to meet? Someone is present, yet a relation may fail to happen. The polite sentence ends; perhaps neither person has been heard. How can we be so close and so far apart?

Later, I–Thou—Ich–Du—became the best-known word pair in his thinking. The child waiting for his mother was not the sole cause of an entire philosophy. But encounter was never merely a question found in a book.

Some questions begin with the person who did not come.

II. Hasidism

In his twenties, Buber began returning to the Hasidic tradition.

He was born in Vienna and grew up with his grandparents in Lemberg. Jewish learning and German culture both entered his childhood. Later he studied in Vienna, Leipzig, Zurich, and Berlin, encountering philosophy, literature, and art.

But the older he got, the more he was drawn to another kind of Judaism in Eastern Europe.

Hasidism.

The Jewish religious movement arose in eighteenth-century Eastern Europe and is generally traced to the Baal Shem Tov. Buber was especially drawn to its capacity to locate holiness not only in study or faraway places, but in ordinary actions: prayer, work, meals, conversation. This did not mean that the tradition abandoned law, learning, or communal life.

Not by leaving daily life for some sacred place. By making daily life itself sacred.

Hasidism had many old rabbis. Each rabbi had his own small community (called a court). Around each old rabbi, stories circulated — what he had done, what he had said, how he had treated those who came to see him.

Buber spent decades collecting these stories.

The material did not chiefly come from a Buber traveling from village to village with a notebook. Many tales already existed in books and documents. He collected, selected, and retold them for German readers. He was not a recording instrument without an interpretation of its own.

The Tales of Rabbi Nachman appeared in 1906, The Legend of the Baal-Shem in 1908. Over the following decades he continued the work, eventually assembling larger collections of Hasidic tales. This labor ran alongside his philosophy.

Why did he do this?

He wanted more than the preservation of curiosities. He wanted readers to see a way of living: how someone responds to a visitor seeking help, how an ordinary action answers another’s presence. His choices drew criticism, notably from Gershom Scholem, who argued that his own philosophy reshaped Hasidism too heavily. The stories offer a way in, not an uncontested portrait of the whole tradition.

Buber included a story like this:

In a tale about Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sassov, the rabbi learns how to love from peasants.

He overhears two peasants drinking. One asks whether the other loves him; the answer is yes. Then comes a further question: does his friend know what he lacks, what hurts him? The friend cannot answer. A declaration of love has not yet reached the actual circumstances of the person being loved.

The story stops there.

This does not require the loving person to know everything. Quite the reverse: if I do not know, I can ask and listen. Of course I love you cannot finish the other person’s sentence for them. The feeling may be real without being the whole response.

The tale makes the Thou particular: not a lovable image inside my mind, but someone having a difficulty now.

Buber did not himself belong to a Hasidic court. He kept his own distance from the tradition while drawing questions from it into modern life. Affinity need not require pretending there were never any cracks.

He brought stories into thought and thought back into stories. A concept directs attention; a story shows how the question can live inside such a small exchange.

Storytelling and philosophy were never very far apart in his work.

III. I and Thou

In 1923, at forty-five, Buber published a short book.

The German title was Ich und Du.

In English, I and Thou.

The small book would profoundly influence twentieth-century discussions of relation, education, and dialogue.

Its central claim is simple. Buber said: a person does not first have an "I" and then enter into relations with the world. A person has an "I" only within relation.

And there are two basic kinds of relation.

Buber called them basic words — Grundworte. Each basic word is not a single word but a hyphenated pair:

The first: I-It — Ich-Es. The second: I-Thou — Ich-Du.

These two "I"s are not the same I.

The "I" in I-It is observer, user, classifier, predictor. It faces an object — something it can analyze, something it can use, something it can absorb into its concept system. Most of daily life is I-It relation. I look at the clock ("it shows three"); I drink water ("it quenches"); I drive a car ("it goes fast"); I greet a colleague ("she's on that project"). All of these are I-It.

I-It is not bad. It is necessary. Without I-It we could not survive — we have to predict the motions of objects, use tools, sort the things of the world. I-It is the larger part of human life.

But I-It is not all.

Sometimes — only sometimes — something else happens.

You face a person, or the tree in Buber’s example. Usually you identify its species and calculate its uses. At another moment it stands before you as a whole, not merely as a collection of data. His discussion reaches beyond human encounter into nature and art; it is not an assertion that trees have exactly the same legal standing as people.

In that instant you, too, are no longer the observer. You, too, are no longer the user. In that instant you stand as yourself before the existence that faces you.

That instant is I-Thou.

For Buber, the I in such a relation responds with its whole being.

This describes a way of being and responding, not a test of human eligibility. Someone who has not entered such an encounter, an infant unable to answer, a gravely ill person unable to respond: none has less human dignity for that reason.

But I–Thou cannot be stored like a possession.

This is the most difficult and most important point of Buber's philosophy.

You can prepare for encounter, listen, and give someone time. You cannot press a button and guarantee it. If meeting becomes a controllable, repeatable experience, the Thou may again be reduced to an effect I wish to obtain.

A finite Thou reenters the world of It: after meeting, we remember, analyze, and arrange schedules. Reflection does not automatically betray encounter, nor can a relationship last only a second. The point is that no finite person can be permanently possessed by me as a pure Thou.

Buber said: what a person can do is not "maintain" I-Thou; it is to re-enter I-Thou. Again and again. Always going to see again the one in front of you as Thou, rather than as It.

This is hard.

Familiarity makes it easy to believe we already know: what a spouse will say, why a child is upset again, what a colleague probably wants. Then, over dinner, in an argument, at bedtime, someone says something we did not expect. Will we listen anew? The choice of a third- or second-person pronoun is no shortcut for judging the relation.

The possibility of I–Thou lies in that renewed response.

The encounter passes. Life continues: cooking, appointments, work, care.

Returning to these things need not deny that a meeting really happened. Nor need we live only for a luminous second and discount the long daily work of sustaining a relationship.

IV. The Eternal Thou

The deepest layer of Buber's philosophy comes at the end.

He said: every concrete Thou is a window onto an eternal Thou — das ewige Du.

What is the eternal Thou?

For Buber, this is not a vague direction invented to avoid saying God. He explicitly means God. But God cannot be installed as merely the largest or strongest object among other objects.

The decisive issue is relation, not an inventory of attributes.

In that direction stands a Thou that can never become an It.

That Thou which can never become an It he called das ewige Du — the eternal Thou.

We can speak about God and possess doctrines and concepts. These do not amount to addressing God as Thou. Just as a dossier is not a meeting with a person, knowledge about God is not automatically a relation with God.

That distinction makes the eternal Thou more than a theoretical conclusion.

Approaching it need not mean escaping the world. Responding to particular life can open a relation toward it. One cannot claim intimacy with God while treating everyone nearby as an instrument of one’s own salvation.

This is not a matter of accumulating encounters until one advances a place closer to God. Encounter is not a points system.

It connects with what Buber found in Hasidic tales: everyday life is not empty time spent waiting for the holy. His philosophical recasting does not replace the whole content of Hasidic faith.

The final part of I and Thou therefore goes beyond advice to talk well with other people. It reaches prayer, revelation, and the relation to God. A nonbelieving reader can learn from its account of relations without pretending that this religious commitment is absent.

Different people follow different paths and speak different religious languages. Buber’s search for the depth of encounter does not mean that all doctrines and faiths have ceased to differ.

We need not rush to combine those differences.

We can first keep the question: am I responding to a Thou, or only guarding the idea of that Thou I already possess? The question can accompany a person a long way.

V. Translating Scripture

In 1925, Buber was forty-seven.

In a project initiated by publisher Lambert Schneider, Buber worked with Franz Rosenzweig, eight years his junior. Rosenzweig had ALS; movement and speech became increasingly difficult. With his wife’s help and methods of communication, he remained an exacting participant in the textual work, not a fading spectator to it.

Translate the Hebrew Bible into German.

A new German translation.

Why a new one?

The German-speaking world had Luther’s Bible and other translations, including Jewish ones. Luther had shaped how readers heard scripture. Buber and Rosenzweig had not discovered an untranslated text. They were trying to reopen hearing within a powerful familiarity.

They wanted that familiarity to pause.

They wanted German readers to feel the strangeness of the Hebrew.

A recurring root creates echoes across passages. Where a sentence breaks changes the breath. Some expressions stay close to body and action instead of becoming abstract terms. Translating each occurrence into the most immediately idiomatic phrase can quietly erase connections.

They particularly wanted to preserve those echoes and rhythms. That does not mean Luther was deaf to Hebrew. It means another translation can lead attention elsewhere.

Repeated key words, carefully chosen German formations, lines shaped for breath and recitation: translation works in specific sentences. Hearing a word return may let you hear one story answering another.

This was a philosophy of translation — translation is not making another language into your own; it is letting your language be changed a little by another.

Rosenzweig died in 1929. Their collaboration had already moved beyond the Pentateuch into the prophetic books. Buber continued, completing the translation in 1961, with the complete revised edition following. Germany changed; Europe changed; readers of these words were expelled and murdered. He too left Germany, continuing in Jerusalem.

He kept translating.

From his forties into his eighties.

Why spend so long here on translation?

Because translation is itself one of the most concrete practices of leaving a place for the other.

Each language has habits, rhythms, things it cannot exhaust. Two needs pull at a translator: allowing readers in, and keeping the source from becoming merely another mirror of what they already know.

Smooth away every unfamiliar feature and readers may move easily through the text without discovering that another world is meeting them.

Make every sentence awkward and fidelity is not guaranteed either. Readers may be left outside a glass case, looking at a foreign specimen. The Thou still has not been heard.

The difficulty is to write a language readers can enter while preserving the source’s power to change them.

His Hasidic retellings often involve substantial literary reshaping; his biblical work with Rosenzweig attends closely to verbal echoes. A rule of never domesticating cannot make these projects identical. Both involve choices, and both remain open to scrutiny.

What we can read here is a direction in which I–Thou may reach the work of language, not an automatic formula for judging every translation.

Every language is a Thou for every other language. You can treat it as It — an object from which you extract information. You can treat it as Thou — an existence that deserves to change your own language a little.

Sometimes making room comes down to whether a word should be too readily replaced.

VI. Jerusalem

In 1938, Buber was sixty.

He left Germany.

After the Nazis came to power in 1933, he stayed in Germany for several years and worked in Jewish adult education. Amid increasing exclusion, keeping a place where people could learn and talk was concrete work.

He left in the spring of 1938, before the November pogrom known as Kristallnacht.

He reached Jerusalem. Life had changed its location; its questions had not automatically become easier.

The Hebrew University appointed him to teach social philosophy. The Hebrew he had encountered in childhood now entered new classrooms, among new listeners. Teaching in another city also meant establishing a life anew. He taught until retiring in 1951.

This city had Jews and Arabs.

Judah Magnes at the university shared important commitments with him. They faced not an abstract dialogue partner but the lives, fears, and political claims of two peoples on the same land.

Since the 1920s, Brit Shalom had worked toward Jewish–Arab understanding. Buber was long associated with that direction.

In Hebrew, Brit Shalom means "Covenant of Peace."

Founded in 1925, it sought political arrangements in which one people would not dominate the other. In 1942, Buber, Magnes, and others helped establish Ihud, continuing work for binational cooperation and equality.

These proposals did not become the dominant position. Land, security, national self-determination, and actual power cannot be resolved merely by saying we should talk. Here was a setting in which his philosophy was especially difficult to realize.

Buber was one of the central figures of this minority.

He wrote, spoke, and organized, trying to keep the other side’s life from disappearing beneath his own side’s political objectives. His language and proposals were not exempt from criticism. Whether a dialogue really hears the other side is also for that side to answer.

1948.

Through fire, the State of Israel declared its founding.

Before statehood, Buber opposed turning the aspiration for a Jewish homeland directly into an exclusive national sovereignty; he favored binational arrangements. After Israel’s establishment, he accepted its existence while continuing to criticize domination and exclusion of Arabs. Supporting a homeland, opposing a form of statehood, and responding to an existing state are not interchangeable positions.

A warning recurs through his work—

A people cannot build itself by reducing another people to an object.

A people’s need for security cannot answer on behalf of those across from them how they wish to live.

Through Ihud and other platforms he continued speaking, protesting and making demands concerning the treatment of Arabs. The group was small. Articles, meetings, public appeals: their power was limited.

He was not a politician. He had no political power. He did what he could — speak, write, sign.

His work did not change the direction of the government. He knew this. He kept doing it.

Why?

Because he had spent his life teaching I-Thou.

If you really teach I-Thou, you cannot make an exception for one Thou outside your own people. Either you really teach I-Thou or you do not. You cannot teach I-Thou for your own people and I-It for another people. That would not be I-Thou philosophy. That would be philosophy in service of one's own people.

His philosophy therefore also tested him.

This meant teaching I-Thou even toward the people who were politically the other.

This meant that — when his own people had acquired the power to reduce another people to an object — he had to warn his own people not to do this.

Not because he did not love his own people. Because he did.

Institutions that treat others only as obstacles also damage their own shared life. But an entire people must not be described as a faceless collective: there are always different people, judgments, and actions within it. Buber’s work took place among those particular differences.

He kept speaking. To the end of his life.

June 13, 1965.

Buber died in Jerusalem. Eighty-seven years old.

He did not leave behind an accomplished binational peace.

He left a demand that failure had not made him withdraw: the lives across from us must count too.

VII. He and Levinas

Set Buber beside Levinas and it is easy to suppose they offer the same philosophy.

They did engage intellectually: Levinas wrote assessments, Buber replied, and they corresponded. In these writings, neighboring concerns did not make distinct voices disappear.

Twenty-eight years separated them. Levinas learned deeply from Buber and refused to stop questioning after expressing admiration.

Sometimes respecting a thinker means telling them seriously: here I cannot follow the same road.

But their philosophies were not the same.

Buber emphasizes mutual relation: I open toward you; you are not something I merely inspect from one side. Yet mutuality does not require symmetry in every respect. His discussions of education and therapy recognize that the participants occupy different positions.

Levinas places the asymmetry of responsibility in the foreground: my response cannot depend on your first accepting an equivalent obligation. The demand is not an agreement that becomes effective only after negotiation.

Levinas worries that encounter understood as exchange will lose the prior challenge addressed to me by the other.

But Buber’s mutuality is not I will give back only what you give me. Treating it as a transaction misses his I–Thou.

A daily question lets us hear the difference: what do I still owe someone who cannot respond to me now? Levinas gives great weight to that still owe. Buber reminds us that the other does not occupy only the place of someone needing my aid; they may speak to me and change me.

This is not a contest settled by one thinker persuading the other.

Buber wants to preserve both participants in relation. Levinas refuses to reinstall my self-sufficiency at the center. We need to hear both questions before judging their conflict, rather than treating Buber as an unfinished first edition of Levinas.

Neither of them persuaded the other.

Their disagreement does not require us to remove either person’s question from the table.

Their philosophies were different. Their languages were different. Their emphases were different. Both spoke of the other, but they did not speak of the same kind of other. Buber spoke of the other in the moment of meeting. Levinas spoke of the other in the ethical command.

Two ways of speaking about the other.

When we read these two figures, we can see what each saw, and we can see what each did not see.

If I stress only mutual response, I may exclude those unable to respond. If I stress only my infinite responsibility, I may forget that the responsible person must not be swallowed either. Neither difficulty is solved by a beautiful sentence.

Reading them together can keep both difficulties present.

That is why one essay considers Levinas and this one Buber. We do not add two philosophies to obtain an all-inclusive final answer. We let one person’s blind spot be illuminated by another’s question.

A movement concerned with the other should also make room for different philosophies of otherness. Sharing a place need not mean saying the same thing.

Buber's other is the Thou in meeting. Levinas's other is the face in command.

The next essay will be another. The one after that, another.

Neither exhausts human relations. Reading them together does not exhaust them either.

Unanswered things remain in the distance.

Kant’s kingdom of ends, Buber’s eternal Thou, and Levinas’s infinity have distinct philosophical and religious settings. They are not interchangeable. The bridge of this series lets them illuminate one another around the question of not using another person up.

Different languages. Neighboring concerns. A distance that has not been canceled.

VIII. The Bridge

Back on the imagined bridge, Buber approached as an old man.

He looked to be in his eighties. Not tall. His beard was long, gray-white, falling several inches from his chin. His eyes were large and gentle. He wore a dark robe — neither a suit nor Hasidic dress, something of his own.

He walked unhurriedly, but steadily.

He reached the middle of the bridge.

Hypatia was there, her astrolabe in hand. Aquinas stood opposite, empty-handed. Bergson leaned on his stick and nodded. Levinas was in the middle too. They exchanged a smile. Questions left unfinished on the page had come here with them.

"Shall we continue from where we left off?" Levinas said in French. "Perhaps this time we can hear each other a little better." Buber answered in German.

The two laughed.

They did not immediately draw closer for a long conversation. Each stood where he was, aware of the other. Difference did not first have to disappear before they could share a place.

At the far end of the bridge, Kant was standing. Tonight Kant was a little clearer than before — you could see the color of his clothing. He still did not come over.

Across from the bridge, on that road, the sky had darkened. Lightning.

There were people on that road, walking. The ones farthest along were no longer visible. Closer in — that man in the professor's robe, Heidegger — had walked further than last time. He no longer turned to look back at the bridge.

Buber glanced once over toward that road.

Buber thought of the teaching, articles, and meetings of his Jerusalem years. Again and again he had tried to make something heard: we need a home, but that cannot make another person’s home cease to count. He had wanted things to change and lived with their failure to change as he hoped.

He knew he had not stopped them.

He knew the storm was falling on that road.

He did not call failure unimportant. The road was not a private matter for anyone to choose without consequence: its actions fell upon others. What he could do was limited; limitation was not a reason to stop responding.

He turned back. The astrolabe in Hypatia's hand caught the moonlight in the wind. The moonlight was mild.

He said something to Hypatia — neither Greek nor Hebrew, but German. Hypatia did not understand the words, but she could tell from his tone that what he had said was friendly. She smiled at him.

Aquinas, on the other side, said something quietly in Latin. Bergson, who heard it, translated for Buber into French. Buber laughed.

Hypatia, Aquinas, Bergson, Levinas, Buber — five names. But the middle of the bridge was not just five people. The bridge held people accumulated from generation to generation. A field of figures. Some drawing equations. Some watching corn. Some writing poems. Some reading star charts. Some writing novels. Some sketching diagrams. Some crouching off to one side taking notes. Some sitting and looking into the distance. Some speaking quietly with their neighbors. Each had a different language. Each came from a different time. Each had done different specific work. But they had all done the same kind of work — leaving a place for the other in their own time.

Across from the bridge — on that road, in the storm — Heidegger was walking further away. At the far end of the bridge — at Kant's place — the wind blew mildly. On the bridge in the middle — many people, mild moonlight.

The figure who had always been looking into the distance, the one at the far end of the bridge, looked at Hypatia, at Aquinas, at Bergson, at Levinas.

This time he looked at Buber.

Buber lifted his head. His eyes met the eyes of the one who had always been looking into the distance, very briefly.

Buber smiled. Not a smile of thanks. A smile that said I know you are there.

The other smiled lightly back.

Then both of them turned to their own directions.

Buber stood in the middle of the bridge. He had died in Jerusalem at eighty-seven. While he was alive, he had done what he could do — he had written I and Thou, he had translated Hasidic stories, he had translated Scripture, he had, in his own city, left a place for another people.

His work was finite. Encounter was not completed by him. He left the Thou before him and did not claim the final word.^[1][2][3]

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · Great Lives