Buber: Mysticism Without Loss of Identity - philosopher Martin Buber

Moreover, the creator God is considered by the Gnostics as imperfect and therefore evil. This is diametrically opposed to Buber's orientation: not only is God uniquely perfect but creation itself necessitates a separation between man and God. The concept of separation, havdala, is central to Jewish thought, it is both necessary for creation and for concrete responsibilities: the sacred is separated from the profane (perhaps for the sake of indirectly making the profane sacred), men from women, parents from children, etc., but all are relationally unified by God's presence in the world. Essentially, Paul and the Gnostics oppose such separation, which is basic to the very concepts of creation and law.

Buber best explains his own basic position in I and Thou. Near the end of his life, in 1957, Buber wrote a postscript for the second English edition. There he rhetorically asks, "Is there not a danger here [in] distinguishing what is of nature and what is of spirit by the response of the Thou which makes the mutuality of the I-thou a problematic 'mysticism,' blurring the boundaries which are drawn, and which must be drawn for all rational knowledge?" And Buber continues, presenting his opposition to the obliteration of reason and the world of human experience through the traditional mystic's separation of the spiritual from the natural: "The clear and firm structure of the I-Thou relationship, familiar to everyone with a candid heart and the courage to pledge it, has not a mystical nature. From time to time we must come out of our habits of thought in order to understand it: but we do not have to leave the primal norms which determine human thinking about reality. As in the realm of nature, so in the realm of spirit, the spirit that lives in the word and work, that is affected upon us may be understood as something affected by the ongoing course of being." [8]

It now should be clearer that Buber has often been misunderstood by those who call him a mystic and mean by that someone whose foundational reality negates reason and the ordinary world. To emphasize the accessibility of his foundational I-Thou, he calls it an "attitude." No doubt, this is to move the I-Thou, though grounded in God, into the concrete experience of our human reality. Notwithstanding this being in the world, Buber, by emphasizing that every I-Thou relationship is grounded in a relationship with God, understands that there is always with the dialogical relationship a reverberation of the awesome: a thunderclap of reality. This is the voice of the holiness of the ordinary.

The Siddur, the Jewish Daily Prayerbook, speaks of the ma'ase bereshit, "the work of the beginning": this is a mysterious conception of the penetration of God's intentions for man in even quotidian tasks. Indeed, the kabbalist notion of "breaking the shells" to free the "holy sparks" they contain, which is the point of many of the hasidic stories told by Buber, has the intention to find and to liberate in the stolid ordinary the awesomeness of the Creation that God wrought and sustains by continuing it. Walter Kaufmann, in the "Prologue" to his 1970 retranslation of I-Thou, writes, "Buber taught me that mysticism need not lead outside the world. Or if mysticism does by definition, so much the worse for it." [9]