Buber -- Dialogical Silence

         Our bias—we too easily assume that dialogue is a verbal exchange. This is due in part to the use of the word to refer to a script for a theatrical play. Or we see it as a synonym for “conversation,” which specifically refers to the oral exchange of thoughts and sentiments between persons. “Dialogue” as Buber uses it has an important non-verbal dimension and it is broad enough to include interactions that are not verbal; in fact, for him, dialogue can take place in silence between two persons or creatures. In fact, for him dialogue has a crucial non-verbal component.

        Buber makes clear that to present dialogue through discursive reasoning is impossible, so he uses anecdotes to disclose it:

The true nature of dialogue cannot be conveyed to readers by simply using ideas. It can best be presented only in narrative accounts that embody the opening up of dialogue, thereby revealing dialogue as a genuine transformation from communication to communion. That is, it is most adequately conveyed through examples— provided that we do not shrink from drawing such examples from the inmost recesses of personal life. For where else could such a thing be found?  (“Dialogue,” 5)

        In I and Thou and in Dialogue, its contemporaneous companion piece, Buber gives three striking examples of dialogical silence. We begin with Buber’s discussion of the gaze of his cat, which he presents as an example of how the eyes of an animal can silently address a person as Thou (I and Thou §52). “Independently, without sounds or gestures, most forcibly when they rely wholly on their glance, the eyes express the mystery” of being. “No speech will ever convey what that stammering gaze knows and can proclaim.” When Buber looks into his cat’s eyes, although “the world of It surrounds the animal and myself, for the space of a glance the world of Thou shines out from the depths, only to at once be extinguished and put back into the world of It.” Thus Buber presents the depths of a dialogical encounter, the moment that reveals mutuality-in-being, in its naked immediacy, stripped of words.

        In a passage in “Dialogue” Buber creates a scenario to convey the power of silent dialogue. Two people are seated on a park bench alongside each other after a morning of hiking. They are strangers and do not talk to each other. The one is calm, present in the moment, and rests in postures that communicate ease, non-reactivity, and an openness to whatever happens. The other is reserved, restricted, closed to even his own experience. Yet something happens between them. Buber:

And now – let us imagine that this is one of those moments that manages to break through the seven iron bands around the heart† – imperceptibly the spell is lifted. Even now the man doesn't say a word, doesn't move a finger. Yet something happens. The letting go came upon him without his doing, the release of a reserve over which only he himself had had control. This shift freely flows from him, and the silence carries it to his neighbor and his neighbor receives it unreservedly like all genuine destiny that comes to him. He will not be able to tell anyone, even himself, what he has experienced. What does he "know" about the other? It is no longer a matter of knowledge. For where unreserved openness has prevailed between persons, even when wordless, the dialogical word has happened sacramentally. (“Dialogue,” 4)

† Here Buber alludes to the fairy tale “The Frog King” where Faithful Heinrich had to place iron bands around his heart like barrel hoops to keep it from bursting in grief and sorrow. These bands broke apart and fell off once a turn of events restored his hopes.

Buber tells this story to highlight a tacit exchange, one that is completely without words: the self-enclosed person has come to know a new way of being in the world and it is not coincidental that the open person is present. Here the sense of relief, release from constriction or restriction, is part of a dialogical encounter that completely lacks a verbal component. Yet in it both persons have come to a new, non-cognitive knowing. Both have been changed in a way that is only possible in the mutuality of dialogical encounter.

        In another passage in “Dialogue” Buber gives a first-person anecdote that shows how a dialogue that begins as a verbal interchange can culminate as an I-Thou moment shared in the silence of a non-verbal gesture:

My friendship with [Florens Christian Rang] arose in an incident that may be described as a broken-off conversation. The date is Easter 1914. Some people from across Europe had met in an undefined presentiment of the [outbreak of World War I] in order to make preparations for an attempt to establish a supra-national authority. The conversations were marked by a lack of reserve, whose substance and fruitfulness I have scarcely ever experienced so strongly. It had such an effect on all who took part that the fictitious fell away and every word was an actuality. As we discussed the com­position of a larger circle from which a public initiative should proceed, one of us, [Rang,]a man of passionate concentration and the judicial power of love, said that too many Jews had been nominated for this. . . .

Obstinate Jew that I am, I protested against this protest. I no longer know how from that I came to speak of Jesus and to say that we Jews knew him from within, in the impulses and stirrings of his Jewish being, in a way that remains inaccessible to the peoples submissive to him. ". . . In a way that remains inaccessible to you"—so I directly addressed Rang. He stood up; I too stood. We looked into the heart of one another's eyes. "It is gone," he said, and before everyone we gave one another the kiss of brotherhood. The discussion of the situation between Jews and Christians had been transformed into a bond between the Christian and the Jew. In this transformation dialogue was fulfilled. Opinions were gone, in a bodily way the factual took place. (“Dialogue,” 5-6)

        Dialogue was fulfilled because the interaction had been transformed from mere contentious opinions to the “factual” concreteness of mutual affirmation. From that moment Buber and Rang became lifelong friends.

        These three examples show how silence as attentive, receptive openness to the other is an essential component of the fabric of dialogue, often the pivotal moment at which I-Thou blazes forth.

Buber and a Modern Inability

 

Buber, Berlin, 1902

Once in about 1910 Martin Buber gave a lecture on Judaism in Czernowitz [in present-day Ukraine]; afterward, as he was continuing the discussion over a meal in a restaurant with a few members of his audience, a middle-aged Jew came and joined in. He introduced himself, and then sat down and followed the abstract discussion, which must have been unusual to his ears, with great interest. He declined every invitation to advance a comment, but at the close of the discussion he addressed Buber and said, "I want to ask you something. I have a daughter and she knows a young man who has been studying law. He passed all his examinations with honors. What I would like to know is this: would he be a reliable man?"

Buber was taken by surprise by this question, and answered, "I assume from your words that he is industrious and able."

Apparently this was not what the man really meant to ask, for he proceeded, "But could you tell me? I would like to know this particularly--would he be clever?"

"That is rather more difficult to answer," Buber said, "but I presume that merely with diligence he could not have achieved what he did."

The man was still not satisfied, and finally the question he really meant to ask came out. "Herr Doctor, should he become a judge or should he become a lawyer?"

"That I cannot tell you," answered Buber, "for I do not know your future son-in-law, and even if I did know him, I would not be able to give you advice in this matter." The other man thanked him and left, obviously disappointed.

›

In this conversation an ancient certainty—the certainty that wise men are men who know—was shattered by a modem inability. Buber ought to have said, "He should become a solicitor," or, "He should become a barrister," "How could he know?" cries out Buber as a modern contemporary, as if action were founded on knowledge. Of course Buber could not know. But nobody asked him to know. What he had been asked for was advice—judgment, not knowledge. Advice and judgment, of course, fitting the occasion, and applicable to this man: someone who entered in this particular way, who asked his question in this particular manner, and who looked like him; a man who presumably had such-and-such kind of a daughter; advice which fit this vague, very vague, totality, but primarily advice, a certainty, a wise word, a word that would have brought structure to this vague totality; an answer which would have erected a beacon, so that the sailing would no longer be dangerous.

"He should become a barrister." These words, if spoken by Buber, by a sage, by a man who looked and spoke like one, a man who apparently knew, these words would have been the strongest foundation for the future son-in-law's choice of profession. How could he have gone wrong if his career had been initiated by such advice? The answer would have created its own rightness; it would have created truth. Is not truth, truth in the relation between man and man, basically the effect of a fearlessness toward the other person? Is not truth, above all, a result, a made up thing, a creation of the sage? The person who knows creates the future by speaking.

But Buber is a modern man. To the sudden question--a question which, as he himself confessed later on, could have opened his eyes because of its suddenness—to the sudden question, "Is my daughter's friend a reliable man?" he replies (as if he had studied psychology), "According to your own words he must be industrious and able." He could have added, "Don't you think so yourself?" Imagine, however, the consternation that would have been caused by this answer. It would have seemed inconceivable that Buber would throw back the question—the sage must be joking. Another attempt is made: "Is he clever?" which is met by the inevitable, though not less shocking, answer: "Merely with diligence—the diligence, dear questioner, which you yourself mentioned in your description of your future son-in-law and to which I can refer—merely with diligence he could not have achieved what you, yourself, dear questioner, indicated when you said that he had passed all his examinations with honors—merely with diligence he could not have achieved all that, don't you think so yourself?"

"Leave me alone," says Buber, "don't tempt me. For—being a modem man—I don't know; or rather I firmly believe that all inter-human actions should be based on knowledge, and as I don't possess this particular knowledge, I am not permitted to make a guess." And so his final answer is quite understandable: "I don't know," he says, "I don't know him. But even if I knew him, I still would not know."

                —  J. H. Van Den Berg, The Changing Nature of Man, after Buber, “My Way to Hasidism,” 63-66. 

Buber: The Bible as Testament to Divine-Human Dialogue

        

        Martin Buber spent a significant portion of his life working with the Hebrew Bible. He wrote four major studies of the Bible: The Kingdom of God (1932), The Teaching of the Prophets (translated as The Prophetic Faith) (1942), Moses (1945), and Two Types of Faith (1950). The last of these included his most extensive interpretation of the Christian New Testament. (Ancient Greek was one of the strongest of Buber’s many languages.) He spent more than twenty years (1925-1938, 1954-1962) translating the Bible into a form of modern German that conveys the oral qualities of the original Hebrew. He regarded this project as one of his greatest accomplishments.

        In a number of essays Buber teaches us how to read the Bible as the testament of divine-human dialogue, most notably in his short 1951 lecture in New York, “The Dialogue Between Heaven and Earth” (On Judaism, 214-25).

        Buber approvingly quotes words of Franz Rosenzweig his co-translator to express the intimacy of the divine-human dialogue that the Scriptures can evoke in the hearts in the hearts of readers:

Everywhere the human traits [of the Scriptures] can, in the light of a lived day, become transparent, so that suddenly they are written for this particular human being into the center of his own heart, and the divinity in what has been humanly written is, for the duration of this heartbeat, as clear and certain as a voice calling in this moment into his heart and being heard.  (Martin Buber, “The How and Why of our Bible Translation,” 215)

         Maurice Friedman eloquently sums up Buber’s view of the Bible as an instrument of divine-human dialogue with these words:

For Buber, the writtenness of the Bible lies on it like a light garment. In the moment when the psalms are prayed, the laws obeyed, the prophecies believed, they at once lose their monological muteness, find voice, and call the eternal Partner to dialogue. But the human partner, too, is constantly summoned to dialogue. Continually, the psalms awaken men to prayer, the laws awaken men to obey, the prophecies awaken men to belief. Even the epic is secret dialogue which, under the husks of its epic past, is carried over into full anecdotal presentness and what is awakened to deed, hope, love, becomes knowledge, teaching, revelation.  (Martin Buber’s Life and Work, 2.262)

 See my book Turning to the Other where Buber and the Bible is further discussed, especially on pages 17, 92, and 279-82.