No attempt at a rationale of Judaism in contemporary times can be adequate without an evaluation of the philosophy of Martin Buber. His concepts and imagery have become part of the intellectual currency of the age in which we live.
Moreover, Buber’s concern with the challenges to religious pre-suppositions is presented in the context and vocabulary of contemporary philosophic and theological thought. As a Jewish existentialist, Buber belongs to the religious wing of the movement which in Judaism has become identified as neo-Hasidism.
Now while the subjectivism and irrationalism of the first representative of religious existentialism Kierkegaard, may be absent in Buber, the latter’s main position with regard to the encounter requires elucidation from a Torah point of view. Inasmuch as Buber maintains that the most authentic source for the dialogical I-Thou relation is the Jewish Bible, it is important to inquire into Buber’s attitude toward the Bible, Revelation, and Jewish law.
This study of Dr. Berkovits is accordingly devoted to a critique of Buber’s position on revelation, and at the same time presents for the first time a thoroughgoing analysis in the light of Torah Judaism of one of the basic philosophic currents of our day.
This essay constitutes the third in our series of Studies in Torah Judaism and is authored by a most penetrating thinker in the field of Jewish thought. Dr. Eliezer Berkovits is chairman of the Department of Jewish Philosophy of the Hebrew Theological College at Skokie, Illinois, and author of “God and Man in History,” and “Judaism — Fossil or Ferment.”
DR. LEON D. STITSKIN, Editor Special Publications, Yeshiva University