Turning to the Other. Donovan D. Johnson
to Buber as his listener, inviting him to a life of transformation.
Buber’s spiritual initiation in this encounter begins with an invitation. As part of this invitation, the master names the characteristics of the transformed life. In response to the master’s call, the person becomes his intentness, embodying teshuvah, the turning of one’s whole being to God. This moment is an awakening, a making holy, a “becoming another.” In this transformation, he takes on the nature of the Creator at the moment of creation: he becomes “worthy to create” as a co-creator, a partner with God the Creator, and to testify to the Presence. Both the nature and the power of the person are taken to a new level.
Buber later featured this passage written by the Baal-Shem-Tov in his translation of selections from the Testament which he published under the title “The Baal-Shem-Tov’s Instruction in Intercourse with God,”69 and he added this note on zerizut, “fervor,” or “the state of intentness”: “[It] is the divine attribute of ‘readiness,’ the power to effect what is allotted to one who is created in the image of God. One awakens each morning . . . in the pure state of likeness to God, and on each morning it is up to him, as it was in the primal time, whether he will realize or undercut what has been allotted to him.”70 This intentness, this “readiness to realize,” means standing like a hair trigger before the immediate circumstances one is allotted as a being in the image of God. This is teshuvah.
In Buber’s account of his initiatory experience, he next describes the impact of this call, how the Baal-Shem-Tov’s words deeply engaged his whole being in that moment of reading:
Then it was that, overwhelmed in that instant, I experienced the Hasidic soul. The primally Jewish came upon me, in the darkness of exile flowering to new conscious expression: the image of God in man, grasped as action, as becoming, as task. And this primal Jewish reality was a primal human reality, the substance of human religiosity. Judaism as religiosity, as “piety,” as Hasidut opened to me then. The image out of my childhood, the memory of the zaddik and his community, rose up and illumined me: I understood the idea of the perfect man [der vollkommene Mensch, “the fully realized, whole person”]. And I became inwardly aware of the call to proclaim it to the world.71
With these words Buber explains what transpired with him: the transformation he was reading about widened to include him. In an instant he was overcome with the sense that his soul had become the Hasidic soul. His Jewish identity was quickened as that Hasidic soul, the primal essence of Judaism, came over him: he became conscious of the image of God in himself, not as an entity but as a dynamism: “as action, as becoming, as task.” Yet, he sensed this reality as at once both Jewish and universal, as the quiddity that he calls “religiosity.”72 He uses a series of synonyms which build as intensifiers, the last shifting into Hebrew: Hasidut. At this point, as he entered into the transformation spoken of by the master, he saw into the meaning of a vivid memory that arose for him from his childhood visits to Hasidic villages, that of the zaddik, the spiritual leader, in the midst of his community, as the fully realized, whole person. Buber’s sense of self was engulfed in the sense of Jewish spirituality that came over him. For him this reality became concrete in the figure of the zaddik. As a result, this visionary moment of encounter became his call to bear witness to the human encounter with the eternal Thou before the world.73
This account of Buber’s spiritual initiation shows two things: first, that his tradition-specific spiritual grounding in Hasidism is at one with the universal in his spiritual experience,74 and second, it shows that from the beginning he sensed an imperative to bear witness to the spiritual reality to which he at that moment first awakened.
The elements of this event became the seeds which bore fruit in his writing of I and Thou sixteen years later. First, he sensed himself as “created in the image of God” and he took this reality not as static ontology but as dynamic imperative—“as deed, as becoming, as task.” At the same time, he saw this reality as at once both specific to Judaism, “primal Jewish reality,” and universal, “a primal human reality, the substance of human religiousness.” As he writes it, the vision of the zaddik, the Hasidic master, as perfected or completed human being (or “central man,” the term Buber used in “The Teaching of the Tao”75) opened to him at that moment—both as a goal to attain and as a message to proclaim. Accordingly, this initiatory encounter set Buber on the path of the spiritual life; the imperative to proclaim to others the possibility of such an encounter would eventuate in the means to do so, the language that came to him to express it in I and Thou, in the years ahead. This event, and the language he used to express it in this account in 1918, is strongly echoed in a unique and striking first-person paragraph at the heart of I and Thou,76 and it became the foundation for a major passage expounding Buber’s concept of revelation at the climax of the book.77
Maurice Friedman makes it clear: this account of his spiritual initiation as a Hasid marks “one of the truly decisive moments in Buber’s life. . . . The combination of summons and sending, of revelation and mission, to which Buber later pointed in I and Thou, came for Buber as a single moment of meeting.”78 Buber surely has this moment in mind when he refers to the “supreme encounter” in I and Thou.79 From this time onward this moment stands as the spiritual reference point for Buber on the path that becomes his life of faithfulness.
In this event, reading has become a catalyst of spiritual awakening for Buber, a transforming moment of revelation. In “The Foundation Stone” (1943), his essay on the founding of Hasidism, he returns to this pivotal moment and explains its dynamics, beginning with an exhortation to his readers to “listen” to the text: “Only listen to a saying such as this which made me, over forty years ago, into a Hasid of the Baal-Shem-Tov: ‘He takes unto himself the quality of fervor. . . .’” Buber continues, “Who before the Baal-Shem-Tov . . . has spoken to us thus? I say: to us, for this is what is decisive: he who has heard him feels as though his speech were addressed to him.”80 Here Buber returns to his own experience of initiation to underscore the power of a text to address its readers directly, just as when one person addresses another as Thou. He goes on to disavow that the master’s teaching is “a teaching enclosed in itself, high above our existence, [transmitting] only a ray from the higher worlds, nor is it merely an instruction that shows our soul the path of ascent.”81 Instead, the teaching, as the master’s voice coming by means of the text, “is a help for our concrete life—our life itself is uplifted through the speech directed to us if we listen to it. Reality calls forth reality; the reality of a man who has lived in intercourse [Umgang] with the reality of being in its fullness awakens the reality in us and helps us to live in intercourse with the reality of being in its fullness.”82 This is spiritual transmission, the passing of spiritual quickening from master to student.
This method of reading as turning to a text as Thou involves a kind of mental ascesis. In the introduction to his translation of selections from the Testament of Rabbi Israel Baal-Shem, Buber asserts, “If one really wishes to take in the words of the Baal-Shem in this text, one will do well to forget all that one knows of history and all that one imagines one knows of mysticism and, reading, hearken to a human voice that speaks here and now to those who here and now read.”83 With these words Buber expresses the turn from I-It to I-Thou, the opening of oneself to a text as to a voice that addresses one as Thou.
In an essay titled “Dialogue,” which Buber published in 1929 to clarify the central concepts of I and Thou, he presents a generic account of transformation that does not refer explicitly to his own initiation but yet applies to it. This passage refers to initiation, the initiation that breaks through stereotypes to open the initiate up to the immediacy of dialogue between the above and the below. This step in the process of initiation takes place as “that decisive hour of personal existence when we had to forget everything we imagined we knew of God, when we dared to keep nothing handed down or learned or self-contrived, no shred of knowledge, and were plunged into the night.”84 This forgetting, this letting go of perceptions, is the core of the stripping process the initiate must undergo in order to approach the Face. The plunge into the night is the death that is the prerequisite for the spiritual birth that follows. Buber’s next words mark this rebirth and suggest the subject of consciousness that comes with it: “When we rise out of [the