Turning to the Other. Donovan D. Johnson

      Turning to the Other

      Martin Buber’s Call to Dialogue in I and Thou

      Copyright © 2020 Donovan D. Johnson. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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      paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-9913-9

      hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-9914-6

      ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-9915-3

      Excerpt from THE LETTERS OF MARTIN BUBER by Martin Buber, edited and selected by Nahum N. Glatzer and Paul Mendes-Flohr, translated by Richard and Clara Winston and Harry Zohn, copyright © 1991 by Schocken Books, a division of Random House, Inc.. Used by permission of Schocken Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

      New Testament quotations are from New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org/

      Manufactured in the U.S.A. 08/31/20

      To Wanda and Briana, dialogical partners along the way

      It all comes down to the one thing—utter openness to presence.

      —I and Thou §46f

      Acknowledgments

      This book would not have been possible without two professors of dialogical reading, Otto Michel (1903–1993), Professor of the Evangelisch-theologische Fakultät and founder of the Institutum Judaicum at the Eberhard-Karls-Universität, Tübingen, Germany, who taught me to read the texts of the Johannine tradition in dialogical interaction with its Hebraic substrate, the Hebrew Bible; and Allan W. Anderson (1922–2013), Professor of Religion at San Diego State University, who taught me to read the Bible in dialogical interaction with the Hindu Scriptures.

      On October 14, 2012, I participated in a discussion of I and Thou which became my call to engage with it more deeply and to turn to engage with Martin Buber. The text, the voice, and the person stand together as one in witness to dialogue, to encounter with others and with the eternal Thou.

      Seven years with Buber—a project has become a lifestyle. Here there is no veil: Laban cannot exact another seven years from me as a Jacob before this consummation.

      If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a community to write a book. Taking up the task of writing that book is the means of discovering that community of support, finding the matrix in which the vision can find its legs and wings. Those who stand out in this community of grace and dialogue:

      Long-term supporters: Wanda Johnson, Briana Johnson, Eido Frances Carney, Joseph Hickey-Tiernan, Samuel Torvend, and Florence Sandler.

      Dialogical readers: David Chamberlain, Kathleen Byrd, Ted Johnstone, Bruce Johnson, MaryAnn Johnson, Doug Oakman, Jane Maynard, and John Petersen.

      The Conventions Used in This Book

      I have kept translator Smith’s Thou rather than going with translator Kaufmann’s “You.” When I, Thou, or It is used as one of the technical terms in Buber’s discourse, I have used italics to distinguish such usage. Following Wood, one of Buber’s major interpreters, I have numbered the sixty-one sections of I and Thou and assigned a lowercase letter to each paragraph in sequence within each section. Accordingly, a parenthetical reference such as (§60d) uses a section symbol and refers to the fourth paragraph of section 60. This convention makes the location cited definitive regardless of whether one has Smith’s version, or Kaufmann’s, or the original German at hand. Most other material from Buber that is quoted comes from published English translations; exceptions—my translations and modifications are noted in the footnotes. Begegnung, one of the key words in Buber’s dialogical vocabulary, can be translated either as “encounter” or as “meeting.” Contra Maurice Friedman, when I translate this word I use the word “encounter.”

      This book is a study of Martin Buber’s I and Thou. Quotations from the text of I and Thou are my translations from Buber’s original German unless otherwise noted. I have consulted the two published English translations of I and Thou in my work with the German text. It is worth noting the differences between these two translations.

      The first, that by Ronald Gregor Smith, was published in 1937, fourteen years after Ich und Du was first published in Germany. Smith was a Scottish Protestant theologian who had studied and lived in Germany and he worked closely with Buber on this translation of Ich und Du. As Buber’s major early translator into English, Smith undertook translating a number of Buber’s major early works up until his untimely death in 1968 at the age of fifty-five. Smith’s precision as a twentieth-century British theologian brings a crispness to the language that first introduced I and Thou to the English-speaking world.

      Walter Kaufmann, the second translator, was a German by birth and a Jew by conversion. Kaufmann migrated to the US for his undergraduate studies. He completed his career as a Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. His primary allegiance was to the discipline of philosophy, which made him critical of Buber and Buber’s language at times. In 1969, Buber’s son Rafael invited Kaufmann to undertake a new translation of Ich und Du into English. Kaufmann’s native German served him well for this task, largely because of his ease with literally translating Buber’s phrasing. Kaufmann chose to use capitalized “You” and “It” rather than Smith’s italicized “Thou” and “It.”

      Key Linking the Sixty-One Sections of I and Thou with the German, Smith, and Kaufmann Pages