REDUCTION IS FORBIDDEN — November 3, 2020

Reduction is Forbidden — Martin Buber

Reduction is forbidden...the whole cruel hour is at stake...and you must answer Him (God as Mystery)...
 
 
Historical Context — November 3, 2020
 
The year 2020 —will be marked as an historical and critical time in America. One must wonder what side of history we'll come down on and how this generation will be judged as a nation. Truly, how will historians see this moment in time? 
 
So, I am remembering the powerful words and work from the 20th century Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. Even though Buber's words and thoughts by today's 21st century standard, are not gender neutral, they are still worth remembering and sharing now. 

​Buber describes totalitarian leaders as persons — who take over the organs of state through “negative charisma,” stripping real freedom and judgement from the ruled, and who are totally immersed in the political ends of attaining and retaining power. 1
 
—Such leaders are so thoroughly egotistical and narcissistic, they are devoid of any real connection to others, to the people, to themselves, and to the divine. They simply do not see themselves as being answerable to a higher power. They see themselves as the ultimate subject, covered in an armor of self-perpetuating clusters of thoughts and self-adulating fantasies that cannot be open to the “hidden light” of the divine. 1

—Such leaders recognize no one as being, so that everything around them becomes an object and subservient to their cause. 1
 
Martin Buber in his book Between Man and Man – talks about The Unique One (God) and The Single One (You, I, Us as individuals) — the relationship between the I and Thou.  In the forward to his book, Martin Buber offers us an important and critical historical insight on --The Question to the Single One. 2
 
“The Question to the Single One, which contains some political inferences, is the elaboration of an address which I gave to the students of the three German-Swiss Universities at the close of 1933. The book appeared in Germany in 1936—astonishingly, since it attacks the life-basis of totalitarianism. The fact that it could be published with impunity is certainly to be explained from its not having been understood by the appropriate authorities.” 2
 
And this it seems is the conundrum we face today across American as a people of faith, any faith or faith simply in humanity, and the forces at play now in the present and within history.  Is this a parallel moment in history, where humankind is being tested once more?  How will we as human beings answer?
 

Speaking of The Single One in Responsibility Martin Buber writes:
 
 
“It cannot be that the relation of the human person to God is established by the subtraction of the world. The single one must therefore take his world, what of the world is extended and entrusted to him in his life, without any reduction into his life's devotion; he must let his world partake unabated of its essentiality.
 
It cannot be that the Single One finds God's hands when he stretches his hands out and away beyond creation. He must put his arms round the vexatious world, whose true name is creation; only then do his fingers reach the realm of lighting and grace.
 
It cannot be that the spirit of reduction reigns in the relation of faith as well. The Single One who lives in his relation of faith must wish to have it fulfilled in the uncurtailed measure of the life he lives.
 
— He must face the hour which approaches him, the biographical and historical hour, just as it is, in its whole world content and apparently senseless contradiction, without weakening the impact of otherness in it. He must hear the message, stark and un-transfigured, which is delivered to him out of this hour, presented by this situation as it arrives.
 
— Nor must he translate for himself its wild and crude profaneness into the chastely religious: he must recognize that the question put to him, with which the speech of the situation is fraught—whether it sounds with angels’ or with devils’ tongues—remains God’s question to him, of course without the devils thereby being turned into angels. It is a question wondrously tuned in the wild crude sound.
 
— And he, the Single One, must answer, by what he does and does not do, he must accept and answer for the hour, the hour of the world, of all the world, as that which is given to him, entrusted to him. Reduction is forbidden; you are not at liberty to select what suits you, the whole cruel hour is at stake, the whole claims you, and you must answer — Him.
 
You must hear the claim, however unharmoniously it strikes your ear—and let no-one interfere; give the answer from the depths, where a breath of what has been breathed in still hovers—and let no-one prompt you.
 
This arch-command, for whose sake the Bible makes its God speak from the very time of creation, defines anew, when it is heard, the relation of the Single One to his community.
 
The human person belongs, whether he wants to acknowledge it and take it seriously or not, to the community in which he is born or which he has happened to get into. But he who has realized what destiny means, even if it looks like doom, and what being placed there means, even if it looks like being misplaced, knows too that he must acknowledge it and take it seriously. 
 
But then, precisely then, he notes that true membership of a community includes the experience, which changes in many ways, and which can never be definitively formulated, of the boundary of this membership. 
 
If the Single One, true to the historico–biographical hour, perceives the word, if he grasps the situation of his people, his own situation, as a sign and demand upon him, if he does not spare himself and his community before God, then he experiences the boundary. He experiences it in such agony as if the boundary-post had pierced his soul.

The Single One, the man living in responsibility, can carry out his political actions as well—and of course omissions are also actions—only from that ground of his being to which the claim of the fearful and kind God, the Lord of history and our Lord, wishes to penetrate.” 2
 

Reduction is forbidden...the whole cruel hour is at stake...and you must answer Him (God as Mystery)...
 
 
 
 
 
 
1. Martin Buber: The Hidden Dialogue by Dan Avon 
Twentieth Century Political Thinkers — 20th Century Political Thinkers
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. (May 19, 1998)
Page 161
 
 
 
2. Between Man and Man by Martin Buber
​Publisher: The MacMillan Co. (1964, 1978) 
Routledge Classics eBook (2003)
Pages 76 – 83
 
 

Between Man and Man by Martin Buber