Martin Buber -- The Movie

 

        Martin Buber: Itinerary of a Humanist is a film that documents the life and thought of Martin Buber. It presents him as the third most famous Jewish thinker of the twentieth century along with Freud and Einstein. [Elsewhere, Buber has been regarded along with the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas as the greatest Jewish philosophical thinker since Maimonides in the twelfth century (Levinas and Buber: Dialogue and Difference, 2004).]

        The film uses a rich array of archival photographs and short clips from interviews with Buber experts across Europe and Israel to present Buber’s story. It traces his life journey, beginning with his birth in Vienna, the heart of the Hapsburg Empire, in 1878. Then we see the events in his personal life as well as his responses to the major events of his era, from the Zionist movement to World War I, to the Hitler period, to the founding of the State of Israel. Such events are the contexts within which his thinking evolved. Over the course of his life he interacted with a wide range of people in his correspondence if not face to face—Herzl, Kafka, Jung, Barth, Gandhi, and Hammarskjöld stand out.  In these relations and more broadly, the film shows how Buber courageously brought dialogue to concrete situations: to Jewish-Christian relations, to Arab-Israeli relations, and to the quest for world peace.

        The subtitle of the film—“Itinerary of a Humanist”—is of interest. In what sense was Buber a humanist? He wrote essays on “Biblical Humanism” and “Hebrew Humanism” and titled the lecture he gave on receiving the Erasmus Prize in Amsterdam in 1963 “Believing Humanism.” As he stated in that lecture, his concept of humanism was his vision of our humanity and our faith as fully interpenetrating. For this interpenetration, Buber referred to the Italian Renaissance as a European reference point in order to reach beyond it to the foundational expressions of faith within community enshrined in the Hebrew Bible. The film makes clear that Buber’s fidelity to Judaism was inseparable from his fidelity to the commonality of universal human reality. (For further discussion of this hybridity of the tradition-specific and the universal in Buber’s thought, see my Turning to the Other, pages 4-5 and 289-92.)

        Buber expressed the duality of tradition-specific truth and universal truth in a summative statement of his lifelong understanding:

The central truth of Judaism and Hasidism . . . has its origin in the immovable central existence of values that in the history of the human spirit and in the uniqueness of every great religion has again and again given rise to the basic attitudes concerning the authentic way of man.   (“Interpreting Hasidism” (1963) 221.)

        The film does a masterful job of presenting the spirit of a great man, a great thinker, in the context of his tumultuous times.

        Martin Buber: Itinerary of a Humanist [54 minutes] was produced in France in 1915 and is available for streaming on Amazon Prime Video.