"The Narrow Ridge" -- Part 2

 Buber used "the narrow ridge" as a key term in his inaugural lectures at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1938. There he described the maturing of his thinking using a geological analogy, contrasting two land formations, a “broad upland” and a “narrow ridge”:

Since my own thoughts regarding ultimate things took a decisive turn during the first world war, I have at times described my standpoint to my friends as the “narrow ridge.” By this I wanted to express that I do not dwell on the broad upland of a system that encompasses a series of sure statements about the absolute, but rather on a narrow mountain ridge between abysses where there is absolutely no sureness of expressible knowledge but only the certainty of meeting with the hidden Enduring One.   

          (“What is Man?” 184; see Turning to the Other, 70-71, 98-100, 209-11}

A broad upland is a large plane at a high elevation. Grand Park in Mount Rainier National Park illustrates this.It is a flat tableland two square kilometers in size atop a mountain formation at 1700 meters above sea level. 

Grand Park, MRNP,a broad upland at ground level

Grand Park as seen from nearby Skyscraper Peak

 A narrow ridge at Mildred Point on the other side of Mount Rainier provides the contrast Buber had in mind:

 A ridge near Mildred Point at 1800 meters above sea level, Mount Rainier National Park

This precarious ridge presents the trekker with unforeseeable uncertainties at every footstep and with the abysses on either side the trekker is confronted with the mortal cost of a single misstep.

In his lecture Buber is talking about “ultimate things,” the deepest matters of faith. He uses this contrast of terrain to illustrate the change that came over him through his experience of World War I and the brutal murder of his close friend, Gustav Landauer. His thinking shifted from “a system that encompasses a series of sure statements about the absolute,” to a standing “where there is absolutely no sureness of expressible knowledge but only the certainty of meeting with the hidden Enduring One.” For Buber, the former provided the safety and security that come with an ordered and rational system of thought where the absolute is one entity among others. By contrast, the latter involves total uncertainty and insecurity—with one exception: “the certainty of meeting with the hidden Enduring One.” The “hidden Enduring One” is the “eternal Thou,” with whom every person must come to terms in this mortal life. (Ronald Gregor Smith, Buber’s Scottish translator, missed the point here. He mistranslated the phrase as “the certainty of meeting what remains, undisclosed” BMM 184). My translation reflects the way that Buber had characterized his life vis à vis God in a confessional moment at the end of the war: “I am truly . . . a man endangered before God, a man wrestling ever anew for God’s light, ever anew engulfed in God’s abysses . . . .” (“My Way to Hasidism,” 67). His encounter with tragic violence had put him on a different footing than that of a system which one could hold at arm’s length. He had entered the realm of uncertainty and danger and continual risk in the spiritual quest. This new footing was his radically new and different standpoint for understanding God.