Michael Oppenheim_The Meaning of Hasidut Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem

American Academy of Religion

The Meaning of Hasidut: Martin Buber and Gershom ScholemAuthor(s): Michael OppenheimSource: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 49, No. 3 (Sep., 1981), pp. 409-423Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1462381 .

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The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, XLIX/3

The Meaning of Hasidut: Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem

Michael Oppenheim

he effort to maintain or to reestablish continuity with the religious life and values of the Jewish past has permeated the writings of modern Jewish thinkers. Many modern Jews have

understood that the dramatic changes and challenges that were ushered in during the period of the Emancipation resulted in a radical gap between the past and present. Two of the most influential Jewish thinkers, Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem, held that the barrier between past and present demanded a radical reexamination of Jewish history. They held that continuity could be established only by looking at those areas of the Jewish past that were dismissed or rejected by earlier scholars. They ultimately concluded that Jewish mysticism em- bodies the most creative elements of Jewish religious experience and is the most accessible of all past expressions of Jewish life. Yet, despite these common conclusions, Buber's and Scholem's understandings of the nature and meaning of Jewish mysticism are quite divergent. These differences are particularly acute when their views of Hasidut, the latest phase of Jewish mysticism, are examined. In light of the central role given to Jewish mysticism by both these scholars, their conflicting portraits of Hasidut have great significance for understanding the efforts of modern Jewish thinkers to understand and to appropriate their past.

In the following pages it will be demonstrated that one way of interpreting the disagreement about Hasidut is to focus on Buber's and Scholem's conflicting views about the concept of God that activated that movement./1/ Buber holds that the power of Hasidic life emerged from the relationship between man and the God who is both Creator of the universe and partner in dialogue. Hasidut revealed the redemptive

Michael Oppenheim (Ph.D., University of California at Santa Barbara) is associate professor and director of the graduate program in Judaic Studies in the Department of Religion at Concordia University, Montreal. His articles have appeared in Judaism and Studies in Religion.



410 Michael Oppenheim

quality given to human life once it is touched by the I and Thou of God and man, and Buber sees this as the treasured heritage that Hasidut offers to the modern Jew as well as to mankind in general. In contrast, Scholem affirms that it is precisely Hasidut's pantheistic or acosmic view of God that permits it to speak to the Jewish-and the broader human-situation in the modern world.

I

In exploring the conflicting portraits of Hasidut presented by Buber and Scholem, the question of the influence of Kabbalah (the "tradition" of Jewish mysticism that traces its origins to the thirteenth century in Provence and Spain) on Hasidut is of major importance. For Buber, Hasidut is a "protest against Kabbalah," which "pursues Kabbalah" only "peripherally" (1960:178). However, Scholem accentuates the continuity between Kabbalah and this latest phase of Jewish mysticism. He writes that "the mystical ideology of the movement [Hasidut] is derived from the Kabbalistic heritage, but its ideas are popularized, with an inevitable tendency towards terminological inexactitude" (1941:344). Even the hotly debated problem of which literary sources provide the most accurate picture of Hasidut can be reduced to the more general question of the relationship between Kabbalah and Hasidut. Both Buber and Scholem seem to agree that the "theoretical writings" of the movement, i.e., sermons, commentaries on biblical literature, and tracts on particular areas of religious life, share significant terminological similarities with Kabbalistic writings (Buber, 1960:173-74; Scholem, 1971:233-35). Yet Buber claims that one can penetrate to the inner life of Hasidut only by way of its extensive collections of legends about its zaddikim or "masters" (1947a:v-vii). In working his way through these legends Buber found that they do not speak with the voice of Kabbalah.

Buber's attitude toward Kabbalah, which pervades his later writings,/2/ is shaped by his recognition of its gnostic character. He believes that Kabbalah, which is described as an "anti-dualistic" gnosis, destroys the lived dialogue of I and Thou between man and God. According to Buber, the gnostic nature of Kabbalah, and gnosticism in general, stresses man's "knowing relationship to the divine" rather than the relationship of call and response between God and man. Consequently, God is no longer regarded as an actor in the human world. God becomes a mere object, the "object of an ecstatic contemplation and action" (1967:734). The "Kabbalistic-gnostic schemata" and "gnostic theologema," which are essential expressions of Kabbalah, reinforce the importance that Kabbalah attaches both to speculations about the interior mysteries of God and to the efforts of practitioners to travel up through these spheres to the highest levels of the divine (1960:173-81, 253)./3/



Meaning of Hasidut 411

While it is difficult to present an exact accounting of Buber's view of the Kabbalistic conception of God, the matter is central to our overall concern. Buber does not explicitly state that the Kabbalah repudiates the concept of the personal God which he found so powerfully portrayed in the Bible. Yet he certainly realized that Kabbalah had tendencies to replace the biblical conception of God with a more acosmic one. In his later work there are passages that suggest that Kabbalism remained true to the concept of the personal God. Buber writes, for example, that, despite the prima facie similarities between Kabbalism and other traditions of mysticism that dissolve the "Person" of God into a "super- personal, inactive Godhead" (1960:194), Kabbalah retains the "limit- less, the absolute Person," that is, the "Godhead" or "Being" which "speaks the 'I' of revelation" (1960:196). However, Buber's affirmation is not very convincing. One has the feeling that Buber refuses to acknowledge something that he all but concludes on many other occasions, that is, that on the whole the Kabbalah is not concerned with the God who turns toward man with the "I" of revelation./4/ In this vein Buber writes that gnosticism-and in this context it appears that Kabbalah represents gnosticism for him-offers an ultimate portrait of the self in which nothing is allowed to remain over against it, including the "I" of God: "The gnostic redemption comes from the liberation of the world-soul in the self. In the manifold variants is hidden the same primal motif of the knowing majesty of the self in the all. It also has a love: which pretends to sleep with the universe" (1960:244). Thus, as a result of Buber's recognition of the gnostic dimension of Kabbalah, he sees in it the danger that, at the very least, the "Person" of God is swallowed up into a universal, impersonal principle that is immanent both in the self and the world. In turning to Buber's presentation of Hasidut, we will see that Hasidut's greatness lies in its ability to overcome the gnosis of Kabbalah with its attendant danger.

The Hasidic "protest against," "break" with, or "transformation" of Kabbalism occurs precisely at the place where Kabbalism is inclined to lose the "I" of God within the "knowing majesty of the self." Stated in another way, Buber regarded the protest of Hasidut as the protest of "devotio" against "gnosis." He writes: "In Hasidism devotio has ab- sorbed and overcome gnosis. This must happen ever again if the bridge over the chasm of being is not to fall in" (1960:254). Hasidut guards against the tendency to break down the distinction between the living God and his human partner by praising the simple man rather than enshrining the "knower." The simple man lives fully in the world and dialogues with God in the lived everyday. This individual recognizes that at every moment he is called by God to help him in the task of redeeming the world. Thus, for Buber there is a great distance between Kabbalah and Hasidut, because only the latter leaves in all of its purity




"the greatest of all values: the reciprocal relationship between the human and the divine, the reality of the I and the You which does not cease at the rim of eternity" (1947a:3).

In contrast to Buber, Scholem does not hesitate to describe the concept of God that is peculiar to Kabbalah. He agrees with Buber's description of the gnostic character of Kabbalah,/5/ but goes on to affirm that its conception of the hidden God, the En-Sof, has a definite "impersonal" stamp. Scholem writes, "It is clear that with this postulate of an impersonal basic reality in God. . . Kabbalism abandons the personalistic basis of the Biblical conception of God" (1941:12).

Against the backdrop of Scholem's understanding of the basic continuity between Kabbalah and Hasidut, one is not surprised to see that he breaks radically with Buber concerning Hasidut's conception of God. In Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism he writes that, since Hasidut simply popularized the earlier Kabbalistic doctrines, it reaffirmed "the old idea of the immanence of God in all that exists" (336) and "ideas of a mystical life with God and in God" (339). According to Scholem, the boldness and enthusiasm that accompany the "pantheistic, or rather acosmistic, interpretation of the universe," which is especially distinctive of one of the schools of Hasidut, Habad, is also common to the movement as a whole (341). He writes of Habad that "the secrets of the divine realm are presented in the guise of mystical psychology," and that "it is by descending into the depths of his own self that man ... discovers that God is 'all in all' and there is 'nothing but Him"' (341).

The foregoing discussion of Buber's and Scholem's presentations of Hasidut disclosed their radical disagreement about the concept of God that characterized the movement. This disagreement, in turn, reflects a wider dispute, one that goes beyond the question of the nature of Hasidut. The differing portraits of this mystical movement parallel divergent philosophical approaches to the dynamics of man's religious consciousness.

Buber's life-long interest in Hasidut did not confine itself to the effort to reconstruct the movement historically. In fact, he has written that he had "not aimed at presenting a historically or hermeneutically comprehensive presentation of Hasidism" (1967:731). From the beginning of Buber's fascination with Hasidut his studies were tightly inter- twined with his attempt to formulate a more general philosophy of religion. Stated more precisely, his philosophy of religion, which underwent considerable change at first, acted as a "filter" through which Hasidut was made to pass./6/ By the time he had developed his basic insights about the relationship between man and God-insights which were unfolded in his famous work I and Thou-he had come to see Hasidut as the greatest example of this philosophy. In this light, Buber wrote that Hasidut was "solely concerned with the happenings between




man and God" (1960:62). Hasidut confirmed his belief that the deepest dimensions of the religious life are opened to man when he allows himself to be addressed by, and in turn responds to, the "I" of the revealing God. Further, in I and Thou Buber found it imperative to point out the error of any mystic vision of God that culminates in a pantheistic or other type of theory of divine immanence (131-43). In turn, he wrote that Hasidut "had nothing to do with pantheism which destroys or stunts the greatest of all values: the reciprocal relationship between the human and the divine" (1947a:3).

Scholem's study of Hasidut is deeply motivated by the hope of reconstructing a historically accurate picture of the theology and life of the movement. Yet it is wrong to suppose that Scholem's concerns are fully satisfied with this goal. His interest in Hasidut is tied to his work in all areas of Jewish mysticism and to his quest to understand the phenomenon of mysticism in general. While it would be rash, and probably erroneous as well, to suggest that his own conceptions of the nature of religious life act as a filter for his study of Hasidut, there certainly are parallels between his conclusions about the character of Hasidic teachings and his views about the essential features of mystical thought in general.

In Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism Scholem elucidates a theory of "the conditions and circumstances under which mysticism arises in the historical development of religion and particularly in that of the great monotheistic systems" (6). The historical development of religion is sketched by way of a three-stage dialectic of "the religious consciousness" (7). At the first stage, the "mythical epoch," the world is pictured as "being full of gods whom man encounters at every step and whose presence can be experienced without recourse to ecstatic meditation" (7). As religious consciousness passes beyond "childhood" to its "classical form," monotheistic religions emerge which are founded on the realization that there is a gulf between man and God. Here "religion signifies the creation of a vast abyss, conceived as absolute, between God, the infinite and transcendental Being, and Man, the finite crea- ture" (7). At the third, mystic stage, a way is found beyond the earlier gulf. Scholem writes: "Mysticism does not deny or overlook the abyss; on the contrary, it begins by realizing its existence, but from there it proceeds to a quest for the secret that will close it in, the hidden path that will span it. .... Thus the soul becomes its scene and the soul's path through the abysmal multiplicity of things to the experience of the Divine Reality, now conceived as the primordial unity of all things, becomes its main preoccupation" (8).

The movement of religious consciousness in Scholem's philosophic sketch is depicted as both progressive and dialectical./7/ The final stage brings together all of the elements of the earlier, superseded periods




and unites these in a higher synthesis. Thus, with the last stage, the "world of mythology and that of revelation meet in the soul of man" (8). Since mystic consciousness supplants the classical understanding, Scholem is proposing that the particular view of God embodied in mysticism is the fulfillment, as it were, of the more primitive concept of God that has as its presupposition the absolute distinction between God and man. Consequently, with the rise of Jewish mysticism the idea of the hidden God, or En-Sof, replaces the earlier view that God is an "I" who stands apart from man and yet who addresses man. Mystic consciousness, which recognizes that the soul of man can experience "the primordial unity of all things," therefore represents a higher grasp of ultimate reality than the classical monotheistic belief in a personal God. Finally, as we have seen, Hasidut gives full expression to this mystical conception of God.

The status of the concept of a personal God has been traced in three areas of the dispute between Buber and Scholem. First, the question of the acceptance or rejection by Hasidut of the Kabbalistic view of God was the core of their disagreement about the extent of Kabbalistic influence on Hasidut. Second, these two scholars' recon- structions of the nature of Hasidic teachings focused on the understanding of God that characterized this movement. For Buber, Hasidut gives pure expression to the belief that God is both an "I" who is distinct from man and a "Thou" who is man's partner in dialogue. On the other hand, after studying the theoretical writings of the early Hasidic leaders, Scholem confidently affirmed that the pantheistic or acosmic view of God that developed in Kabbalah found an enthusiastic reception in Hasidut. Third, the question of the nature of God was also at the forefront of these thinkers' conflicting philosophical judgments about the development of man's religious consciousness. Buber asserted that it is erroneous to believe that one can go "beyond" an understanding of God as Person. In fundamental contrast to this, Scholem has presented a diagram of the three-stage development of religious consciousness. Within the diagram, the way of life which is built upon the belief in the personal God is not the ultimate expression of the religious life of man. With the third, mystic stage, the earlier separation of God and man is overcome and incorporated into the experience of "the primordial unity of all things."

II

The disagreement between Buber and Scholem extended to their views about the appropriate or relevant forms that Jewish faith will take in the future. They both held that Jewish mysticism was one of the highest expressions of Jewish religious life and that it still contains some




of the most powerful forces of Jewish spirituality. However, their divergent portraits of the nature of modern Jewish belief mirror their opposing understandings of the concept of God that animated Hasidut.

Buber often displays his annoyance with those who seek to criticize his portrait of Hasidut by referring to texts that he seems to have significantly transformed or entirely ignored. As stated previously, Bu- ber readily admits that a full historical reconstruction of the movement is not his intent. His annoyance stems from his limited interest in the historical question, in contrast to his overwhelming preoccupation with the present obstacles to, and future possibilities of, Jewish life. From the beginning of his studies of Hasidut, he recognized that the movement had a profound grasp of the perennial core of Jewish faith. In an essay of 1918, "My Way to Hasidism," Buber wrote that with his first contact with the teachings of the founder of Hasidut, Rabbi Israel Baal- Shem, he "experienced the Hasidic soul," which he identified with "the primally Jewish" (1958:59). Although Buber's understanding of this "primally Jewish" essence in Hasidut underwent some changes early in his studies, his latest formulation, which we have already detailed, was reaffirmed by him over many decades. Buber declared that Hasidut gave fundamental expression to the life of dialogue between God and man. The individual who lives in this manner finds fulfillment not through an escape from the world and a merging with the impersonal One, but through responding to the personal God who is encountered in the world. For Buber this is also the basic teaching of Judaism itself: "The great deed of Israel is not that it taught the one real God, who is the origin and goal of all being, but that it pointed out that this God can be addressed by man in reality, that man can say Thou to Him, that he can stand face to face with Him, that he can have intercourse with Him" (1960:91).

Many of Buber's writings on Hasidut reflect his belief that Hasidut is a key to the possibility of a renewal of Judaism. He asserted that "no renewal of Judaism is possible that does not bear in itself the elements of Hasidism" (1955:xiii). Three considerations brought Buber to this conclusion. First, as we have seen, he identified Hasidut with the essence of Jewish faith. Second, he believed that it was a dynamic voice of the Jewish spirit in the past. Buber wrote in this connection that Hasidut was "the last great flowering of the Jewish will to serve God in this world and to consecrate everyday life to him" (1947a:11). Third, although the movement lost its energy after the first decades of its explosive vision, Buber held that its spirit and message are still accessible to the Jew of today. These aspects of Hasidut are summarized in the following statement: "In fact, nowhere in the last centuries has the soulforce of Judaism so manifested itself as in Hasidism. The old power lives in it .... Still bound to the medieval in its outward appearance,




Hasidic Judaism is already open to regeneration in its inner truth, and the degeneration of this great religious movement can only halt but not stop entirely the process in the history of the spirit that began with it" (1958:48-49).

There are hints in the above quotation that Buber believed that the significance of Hasidut extended beyond its relationship to Judaism's future renaissance. Although there are many dimensions to Hasidut's connection with mankind's spiritual history according to Buber, he most often accentuates its teaching of the "hallowing of the everyday" (1958:27). He means by this that the Hasidim, the followers of Hasidut, were able to bring a fervor and a religious intensity to all of their actions. They felt no absolute barrier between the sacred and the profane act, for they knew that at every moment the individual has the potentiality of liberating "the sparks of God that glimmer in all beings and all things" (1947a:3). Buber explains Hasidut's message of man's power to participate in God's redemption of the world as follows: "If you direct the undiminished power of your fervor to God's world-destiny, if you do what you must do at this moment-no matter what it may be! -with your whole strength and with kavvanah, with holy intent, you will bring about the union between God and Shekhinah ["the Divine Presence which resides in this world"], eternity and time" (1947a:4).

Buber has diagnosed the spiritual malaise of Western man as stem- ming from the mistaken belief that there is a "radical separation between the sacred and the profane," coupled with the fact that "the sacred has become in many cases a concept empty of reality" (1958:39). Modern man limited the sphere of the sacred to a very small part of his life and then he spiritualized the sacred until it became synonymous with "the spiritual," that is, with the possession of lofty ideas. In the end, "one no longer knows the holy face to face" (1958:39). However, Buber believes that the crisis of modern life can begin to be remedied by reintroducing the inner message of Hasidut to the world. Hasidut portrayed a way of life in which the individual had full "intercourse with God in the lived everyday, [through] the accepting and dedicating of what is happening here and now" (1967:736).

While Scholem's theological reflections are not as well known as those of Buber, they represent an equally important dimension of modern Jewish thought. Scholem does not specifically treat Hasidut's relationship to the central features of Jewish spirituality. Although stating that "there is no single positive element of Jewish religion which is altogether lacking in Hasidism" (1941:329-30), Scholem's understanding of it is apparent only in the wider context of his interest in the history of Kabbalah.

Scholem's study of Kabbalah (again, Hasidut is a stage of Kabbalah for him) first sprang out of his concern to understand what had "kept




Judaism alive" in the past (1976:20)./8/ While doubting whether "tradi- tional Jewish forms" would survive as they had come from the past (1976:22), he believed that Kabbalah had a "living center" which could give expression to new forms in the future (1976:46-47). Scholem recognized that there might be other avenues of Jewish survival, but he continued to believe that Kabbalah presented at least part of the answer.

Scholem justified Kabbalah's claim upon Judaism's future by point- ing to three aspects of its relationship to the core of Jewish life in the past. First, as we have seen, Kabbalah represents the third stage in the development of Jewish religious consciousness. It is the dialectical culmination of the earlier mythic and classical expressions in Judaism. Second, the Kabbalah disclosed the full implications of spiritual insights that were only partially revealed in biblical and rabbinic literature. In an essay that examined the Jewish concepts of revelation and tradition, Scholem wrote the following: "The Kabbalists were in no sense of the word heretics. Rather they strove to penetrate, more deeply than their predecessors, into the meaning of Jewish concepts .... The Kabbalists sought to unlock the innermost core of the Torah, to decode the text, so to speak .... In a way, they have merely drawn the final conse- quence from the assumption of the Talmudists concerning revelation and tradition as religious categories" (1971:292-93). Third, Kabbalah sought to satisfy some of the fundamental needs of man's spiritual life which had been ignored by the other streams of Judaism. Scholem praised Kabbalah for reintroducing into Judaism the mythical and pantheistic dimensions of the life of the spirit (1941:8,22,38). Further, Scholem states that, unlike Jewish philosophy, the mystical tradition "did not turn its back upon the primitive side of life, that all-important region where mortals are afraid of life and in fear of death" (1941:35).

According to Scholem, Kabbalah is able to stand up to the transformation from medieval to modern times in virtue of its unique grasp of the world. Kabbalah presented a world that is a "corpus symbolicum" (1941:28). It was able to indicate through symbols that there is a divine depth that lies in the midst of the everyday. Scholem suggests that "the kabbalists were symbolists" who "had a fundamental feeling that there is a mystery-a secret-in the world" (1976:48). Their attempt to refer to the sanctity and mystery of life can still be appropriated today as a foundation from which future Jewish expressions may emerge. Scholem writes:

The particular forms of symbolical thought in which the fundamental attitude of the Kabbalah found its expression, may mean little or nothing to us (though even today we cannot escape, at times, from their powerful appeal). But the attempt to discover the hidden life beneath the external shapes of reality and to make visible that abyss in which the symbolic nature of all that exists reveals itself: this attempt is as important for us




today as it was for those ancient mystics. For as long as nature and man are conceived as His creations, and that is the indispensable condition of highly developed religious life, the quest for the hidden life of the transcendent element in such creation will always form one of the most important preoccupations of the human mind. (1941:38-39)

Scholem's conception of Kabbalah, both its nature and its role in the past and future of Judaism, has important implications for the conception of God that was and is to be the basis of Jewish life. In declaring that Kabbalah is central to the problem of Judaism's continuity with its past, he has found that the idea of a personal God is nothing less than archaic. Just as the latest expressions of Jewish mysticism do not refer to this understanding of God, so the modern Jew need not. Scholem wrote, for example, that the modern Jew can no longer believe in the biblical conception of a God who creates the world, directs history, and speaks with man (1976:281). This is not meant to suggest that Judaism should espouse some type of crass atheism, but that the God-concept should be treated as a symbol that points to, among other things, the sanctity of life and the importance of man's moral strivings. Scholem finds that any attempt to go beyond this symbolic understanding of God, that is, the attempt to invest "God with human attributes," leads to a sterile paradox (1976:281).

Finally, in addition to the judgment that depicts "kabbalah as one of the possibilities for Jewish survival in history" (1976:47), Scholem sees the prospect that Kabbalah might play an important role in modern life as a whole. Kabbalah has a message for modern man, even if its particular forms are not fully accessible today. The Kabbalists' attitude toward the world can be viewed as a corrective to modern man's fragmentary life of private symbols, on the one hand, and public rationalism and shallow technology, on the other hand. In contrast to the desperate attempt to find meaning through private, incommunicable symbols, the Kabbalists "displayed a symbolic dimension to the whole world" (1976:48), and thus brought man to experience something other than his own lonely, subjective world. Further, while technology seems to eradicate any spiritual depth from man or the universe, the Kabba- lists proclaim that there is "mystery-a secret-in the world" (1976:48) and thus that there is a sacred dimension to all that exists.

III

The line of argument of this inquiry has illuminated the serious ramifications of the controversy between Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem that takes its point of departure from the question of the Kabbalistic influence on Hasidut and quickly leads to their conflicting portraits of the understanding of God that underlies this Jewish mystical




movement. The disagreement about Hasidut reflected the more fundamental differences about the development and expression of man's religious consciousness and about the role of belief in a personal God in the future development of both Jewish faith and Western man's spiritual life.

For Buber, the future of Judaism as well as the authenticity of modern man's life in the world depend upon the ability of man to listen and to respond to the God who is both "the boundless and nameless as well as the father who teaches His children to address Him" (1960:92- 93). Buber believed that the highest development of man's religious life was embodied in the stance of the simple man who relates to God, with "biblical immediacy," "the purely personal being of the praying man to the being of God, which is not purely personal but which stands personally over against the praying man" (1967:734). It was the "deed" of Israel to teach of this possibility, and, even though Kabbalah was inclined to replace the life of dialogue with meditational exercises of the self looking into itself, Hasidut was once again to state Judaism's message in all of its power and purity.

Scholem contested at every level these views of Buber. He held that Hasidut had not repudiated the Kabbalistic understanding of the impersonal God that dwells both beyond and within all that exists. Hasidut, in fact, espoused this acosmic conception of God with an intensity that went beyond earlier Kabbalistic formulations. In this way Hasidut revealed itself as a legitimate heir of Kabbalah. For Scholem, Kabbalah is both an original source within Judaism and the culmination of the more naive and classical expressions of the Jewish spirit, expressions found in the Bible and in rabbinic literature. Finally, Scholem held that Kabbalah's teachings may contain the seeds of the next flowering of Jewish life. As the Jew entered the stream of modern life he had to leave much behind. The challenges of science, of historical criticism, and of modern philosophy have unalterably cut him off from the immediacy of biblical and rabbinic faith. Yet the Kabbalistic portrait of the world is still translatable today. Its message is that there is a depth dimension to human life in the world, a dimension that will forever elude all purely rational attempts to know and control life. Thus, while Kabbalah has the power to speak to the modern Jew and to modern civilization, it stands radically opposed to the secularism that knows only rational needs and powers. Scholem stated that, if the Kabbalah's vision of the symbolic nature of existence were ever lost, man would be spiritually at an end. However, he felt that mankind would never totally abandon the "mystery" that dwells in the midst of life (1976:47-48).

As a final note to the present inquiry, in the essay "Reflections On Jewish Theology" (1976:261-97) Scholem seems to recognize that there is at least a prima facie conflict between his understanding of the




modern Jew's conception of God and the position taken by that "existentialist" stream of modern Jewish philosophy which includes such thinkers as Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Abraham Heschel. However, Scholem argues that this existentialist tradition has also repudiated the naive realism of the biblical concept of the God who speaks to man and who directs history. He observes, for example, that all of these thinkers have taken over mystical terminology in order to describe revelation. In appropriating mystical concepts they have, according to Scholem, tacitly acknowledged that the naive biblical understanding of God could not withstand the onslaughts of scientific and historical criticism (1976:270-74).

While Scholem's critique of modern Jewish theology is insightful, the conflict between himself and those who belong to the stream of Jewish existentialism is still a real one. Scholem is correct in suggesting that, by utilizing the mystical conception of revelation, many modern thinkers have escaped from having to affirm that there are real acts of revelation in history. However, at least some of the existentialists have continued to struggle with the meaning of belief in a personal God who acts in history. The best example of this is Emil Fackenheim's recent works. In such writings as God's Presence in History and The Jewish Return Into History, Fackenheim has endeavored to explore the events of the Holocaust and the establishment of the modern state of Israel in terms of God's acting and revealing himself in history./9/ Thus, despite Scholem's statements to the contrary, the debate continues over the significance of the concept of a personal God in modern Jewish thought and life.

NOTES

/1/ An analysis of the differences between Buber's and Scholem's understandings of the relationship between language and mysticism is presented in David Biale: 81-92. Biale does not explore Scholem's views about the conception of God as person nor the controversy between Buber and Scholem from this point of departure.

/2/ Buber's attitude toward Kabbalah, and mysticism in general, undergoes an important change in the second decade of the present century. Scholem notes Buber's older and more positive evaluation of Kabbalah in his essay on Buber in The Messianic Idea in Judaism: 231-32.

/3/ A short analysis and critique of Buber's attitude toward Gnosticism is given by Hugo Bergman, "Martin Buber and Mysticism," in Paul Arthur Schilpp and Maurice Friedman, eds., pp. 306-8.




/4/ As stated above, it is difficult to present Buber's understanding of the Kabbalistic conception of God. The difficulty for our study results from ambigu- ities in Buber's later work, rather than from the changes his writings undergo over the decades. It seems that when he discusses the relationship between Kabbalah and Hasidut, he acknowledges the impersonal character of the Kabba- listic conception of God. For him, Hasidut radically breaks with Kabbalah precisely at this point! However, when he turns to elucidate the Kabbalistic view of the Godhead without reference to Hasidut, he is not willing to admit that the "I" of revelation is missing. It is as if Buber refuses to state, even if he suspects it, that a phase of Judaism could abandon the life of dialogue. See Martin Buber, 1960:176-81, 190-99, 252-54.

/5/ A discussion of Scholem's understanding of Gnosticism is presented in the chapter "Myth" in Biale: 129-47.

/6/ Buber writes of himself as the "filter" in "Replies to My Critics," in Schilpp and Friedman, eds.: 731.

/7/ The influence of Hegel's treatment of the history of religious consciousness on Scholem's diagram is very clear. In both discussions there is a three- stage dialectic: Hegel-religion of nature, religions of spiritual individuality, absolute religion; Scholem -mythological stage, classical (monotheistic) stage, mysticism. Of special interest is the correspondence between the last two stages in Hegel's and Scholem's schemes. The second stage presents a God who is separated from man by an abyss, while the culminating stage reveals the harmony, if not the full identity, between the spirit of man and the spirit of God. Scholem diverges from Hegel in setting out these stages as part of the inner development that occurs within some religious traditions. For Hegel, the stages bring all religions into a single hierarchical system. Scholem is thus part of a whole tradition of Jewish scholars and philosophers who were influenced by this German Idealist. The parallels between Hegel and Scholem were first brought to my attention by the work of Nathan Rotenstreich: 69-70.

/8/ An autobiographical account of Scholem's early studies in Kabbalah is given in Gershom Scholem, 1980.

/9/ Fackenheim's endeavor to understand the Holocaust and the founding of the modern state of Israel in terms of God's action in history is briefly analyzed in my review of his book The Jewish Return Into History: Reflections in the Age of Auschwitz and a New Jerusalem (1979).




WORKS CONSULTED

Biale, David 1979 Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Buber, Martin 1947a Tales of the Hasidim: The Early Masters. New York:

Schocken.

1947b Between Man and Man. Translated by Ronald Gregor Smith. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

1952 Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation Between Religion and Philosophy. New York: Harper and Row.

1955 The Legend of the Baal-Shem. Translated by Maurice S. Friedman. New York: Harper and Brothers.

1958 Hasidism and Modern Man. Edited and translated by Maurice S. Friedman. New York: Harper and Row.

1960 The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism. Edited and translated by Maurice S. Friedman. New York: Har- per and Row.

1967 "Replies to My Critics." In Schilpp and Friedman, eds.

1970 I and Thou. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

1972 On Judaism. Edited by Nahum N. Glatzer. New York: Schocken.

Fackenheim, Emil L. 1967 The Religious Dimension in Hegel's Thought. Boston:

Beacon Press.

1970 God's Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Phil- osophical Reflections. New York: Harper and Row.

1978 The Jewish Return Into History: Reflections in the Age of Auschwitz and a New Jerusalem. New York: Schocken.

Friedman, Maurice S. 1955 Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue. Chicago: Univer-

sity of Chicago Press.




Kohn, Hans 1930 Martin Buber, sein Werk and seine Zeit: Ein Versuch

iiber Religion und Politik. Hellerau: Jakob Hegner Verlag.

Oppenheim, Michael 1979 Review of The Jewish Return into History, by Emil L.

Fackenheim. Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 8:202-3.

1980 "Sons Against Their Fathers." Judaism 29:340-52.

Rotenstreich, Nathan 1963 The Recurring Pattern: Studies in Anti-Judaism in Mod-

ern Thought. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Schaeder, Grete 1973 The Hebrew Humanism of Martin Buber. Translated by

Noah J. Jacobs. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Schilpp, Paul Arthur, and Friedman, Maurice, eds. 1967 The Philosophy of Martin Buber. La Salle, IL: Open

Court.

Scholem, Gershom 1941 Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. New York: Schock-

en.

1971 The Messianic Idea in Judaism: And Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality. Translated by Michael A. Meyer et al. New York: Schocken.

1973 Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah 1626-1676. Translated by R. J. Zwi Werblowsky. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

1974 Kabbalah. Jerusalem: Keter.

1976 On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays. Edited by Werner J. Dannhauser. New York: Schocken.

1980 "How I Came to the Kabbalah." Commentary 69:39- 53.

Schweid, Eliezer 1974 Judaism and the Solitary Jew (Hebrew). Tel Aviv: Am

Oved.



Michael Oppenheim_The Meaning of Hasidut Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem

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