Can I see another's woe,
And not be in sorrow too?
Can I see another's grief
And not seek for kind relief?
Can I see a falling tear,
And not feel my sorrow's share?
William Blake, Another's Sorrow
The Jewish religious philosopher Martin Buber (1876-1965) dedicated
his life to seeking a way to overcome conflict - interpersonal and
intercommunal - by grounding it in its full existential reality.
While not denying that conflict is often prompted by substantive
political, economic and social disputes, Buber held that the
adversarial approach to dealing with conflict can only lead to a
deepening of the enmity. The adversarial posture one ordinarily
assumes in a conflict, Buber taught, must be replaced by what he
called dialogue. The latter was a term he borrowed from literature,
and introduced into philosophical, theological, and political
discourse. With Buber the term dialogue ceased merely to designate
a form of rhetoric and a literary genre, but became a mode of
interpersonal and intercommunal encounter (refracting for him the
Presence of God) in which the most ultimate questions of human
existence might possibly attain their solution.
The Meaning of Dialogue
In this essay I should like to explore briefly Buber's concept of
dialogue as the matrix of a narratology - or narrative strategy -
promoting Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation. Dialogue, Buber would
argue, allows for the crystallization of a radically new mode of
discourse by which Jew and Palestinian will each tell their
respective tales - relating their history, with all its woes and
hopes, as it relates to this land - while acknowledging and
compassionately confirming the tale of the other.
Appropriately I will commence my exploration of Buber's vision with
a tale: A young man in emotional distress once wrote Buber,
requesting his counsel. In his reply, Buber urged the young man to
write down his autobiography, to tell his story candidly and
without any embellishments of self-analysis. The young man
complied. Buber was pleased with the account, and duly praised its
author for his "frankness and gift of self-expression." But he also
noted that the young man seemed to lack "the power of seeing others
instead of (merely) feeling their relationship (to himself)." In
telling his tale, he saw others only as they impinge upon his life,
never taking into account their own story. "True narration," Buber
explained, "means coherent events between fully perceptible
persons. Of course, I had asked you to tell me about yourself, and
so you were not obliged to do more than that ... (but your tale)
will be a real tale only if we learn to know the actors (who enter
your life), and even to know their eyes and the seeing of those
eyes and even how those eyes were seeing you. For his tale to be
genuine, Buber thus suggested, the young man must include the
other's tale.
Dialogue entails the acknowledgement that the other who confronts
us, who "encroaches" upon our life, also has a tale, a story
perhaps no less compelling, certainly no less real, than one's own,
to tell. Buber pointedly called this aspect of dialogue "inclusion"
or the extension of one's experience of one's own concrete
existence to include the experience of the other with whom one
shares a given space or event; as such, "without forfeiting the
felt reality of one's own life, at the same time, one lives through
the common event from the standpoint of the other."
The Reality of the Other
Preserving the integrity of one's own experience - one's own tale
and history - "inclusion" thus transcends mere sympathy or empathy,
the identification with the feelings of the other. For it implies,
as Buber told the young man, "the seeing of (the other's) eyes and
even how those eyes (see) you," while never ceasing to claim the
existential reality of one's own vision.
Inclusion of the other requires what Buber called "imagining the
real," the "making present" to and in oneself the reality - the
tale - of the other:
"Imagining" the real means that I imagine to myself what the other
man is at this moment wishing, feeling, perceiving, thinking, and
not as a detached content but in his very reality, that is, as a
living process in this man ... At such a moment something can come
into being which cannot be built up in any other way.
Imagining the reality of the other, his or her tale becomes part of
our own.
We have reached "the narrow ridge" upon which the life of dialogue
unfolds.
Buber employed the image of the narrow ridge for in reaching out to
the other we might readily stumble and confuse dialogue with
self-denial for the sake of the other. But genuine dialogue, Buber
insisted, does not lead to the negation of one's self, to a
gratuitous self-abnegation and rejection of one's own story. On the
contrary, in dialogue two distinct human beings encounter one
another, both jealously seeking to affirm the reality of their
existence and tale. They meet, however, not as subject and object,
as I and an it. They rather meet as two subjects, as two discrete
persons whose lives happen to intersect, and touch each other in
often painful, hurtful ways. Conflict is, alas, real. Dialogue is
meant neither to deny the clash of claims and interests, nor to
ignore their concrete reality. Our individuated being perforce
often divides us, and occasional collision is inevitable. But it
was Buber's profound conviction that the possibility of a judicious
accommodation of the differences that divide us is enhanced when
the parties of a conflict meet as two subjects, each acknowledging,
feeling and confirming the experience and tale of the other.
The Danger Of Political Autism
Our own tale - our saga of trials and tribulations, passions and
aspirations ¬can never be complete, truly real, unless it
includes the other's whose life touches our own. This is true,
Buber taught, for the relations between peoples as it is for
interpersonal relations. One important difference, however, is that
in the life of a nation, guided by a collective identity, the
tendency to regard its own tale - its own history - as preeminent
is seemingly greater than in interpersonal relations. The average
individual recognizes the moral limits of egoism; the well-adjusted
individual modulates the pursuit of self-interest by a
consideration of others and their needs. In contrast to the
acceptable behavior of individuals, nations often adopt the ethics
of what Buber called sacro egoismo, or the pursuit of one's
nation's interests as a sacred task, and thus see an egoism on
behalf of one's own nation as normally self-evident and
indisputably justified. Hence, whereas individuals would often feel
a twinge of conscience, a certain uneasiness, about unmitigated
self-absorption and egoism, nations often permit themselves, in the
name of national interests, an unabashed egoism and preoccupation
with their own history. But, Buber warned, a nation's
self-possessed enclosure in its own tale invariably leads to a
political autism, albeit often veiled in the alleged sobriety of
Realpolitik, a view of the world that allows "each side (of a
conflict) to assume a monopoly of sunlight and plunge its adversary
into night, (demanding) that you decide between night and
day."
Absorbed in their own story - the history of their own woes and
fate ¬nations tend to view their adversaries as a mere
impedimenta, as alien intruders into their life-space, as hostile
interlopers bereft of their own history and a tale of their own.
But to ignore the story and thus the existential reality of the
nations whose fate interlaces with that of one's own nation, in
Buber's judgment, is not only a moral scandal but also political
idiocy. The tale of one's adversaries must be acknowledged not only
because of its patent moral claim, but also as the point of
departure of a political realism, "a greater realism" - "a more
comprehending, penetrating realism" than that which supposedly
guides the votaries of sacra egoismo and Realpolitik. Rather than
the self-righteous realism, unapologetically based on the ethic of
self-interest and a prudent mistrust of the other, we require "a
greater realism, a realism of a greater reality".
Palestine as a Land of Two Peoples
It is political wisdom for nations, Buber contended, to extend
their conception of justice to include the interests and concern of
the other; for justice can never be just the victory of one's own
cause, the righting of the wrongs done to one's own nation. Justice
must also include the compassionate acknowledgement of one's
adversary's history, their tale of woe, grievance and hope.
Hence, with respect to its conflict with the Palestinians, Buber
held, political wisdom would oblige the Jewish people to
acknowledge that the country of its ancient patrimony is a land of
two peoples, a land in which two peoples, each with their own tale
and existential reality, are destined to dwell and share. That the
land of Israel - Palestine - is a land of two peoples is an
irrefragable moral and political fact. It of course may not be a
convenient fact, or an easy one to accept. Neither people, Jewish
or Palestinian Arab, inspired as they are by their own history and
deep attachment to the land, allows itself to "see" the land with
the "eyes" of the other. But for the sake of "truth and peace,"
Buber insisted, each must acknowledge the reality and historical
attachment of the other to the land, and "include" one another's
tale within its own. Arabs must come to appreciate the religious
and historical bond of the Jewish people to the land; they must
realize that to deny the Jews' "love of Zion" is tantamount to a
negation of the soul of Jewish existence. And the Jews must affirm
the abiding love the Arab inhabitants have for the land they call
Palestine, its landscape and vegetation, and that from its soil
springs forth their memories, rich folklore and culture. To deny
this fact would be to negate the innermost being of the Palestinian
Arabs. Such denial would be especially ironic since the Jews
themselves have so often been denied the integrity of their own
identity and cultural sentiments. The irony is only intensified
when one recalls that at the heart of Zionism is a proud assertion
of the right of the Jewish people to its own identity - the right
to tell their own tale, with all its particular attachments and
sentiments. These attachments and sentiments are not to be compared
and measured.
A Letter To Gandhi
As Buber noted in a letter to the great Indian leader Mahatma
Gandhi in 1938, it is not a question of pitting one claim against
the other, judging one valid and the other not:
We consider it a fundamental point that in this case two vital
claims are opposed to each other, two claims of a different nature
and of different origin, which cannot be pitted one against the
other and between which no objective decision can be made as to
which is just or unjust. We considered and still consider it our
duty to understand and honor the claim which is opposed to ours and
endeavor to reconcile both claims. We cannot renounce the Jewish
claim ... But we have been and still are convinced that it must be
possible to find some form of agreement between this claim and the
other; for we love this land and, we believe in its future; and,
seeing that such love and such faith are surely present also on the
other side, a union in the common service of the Land must be
within the range of the possible. Where there is faith and love, a
solution may be found even to what appears to be a tragic
contradiction.
The tragic contradiction can perhaps be overcome by one people
prevailing over the other; but a just solution to the conflict
making for genuine reconciliation and peace requires bonds of trust
forged by the mutual honoring of each other's claim, a trust
grounded in the "inclusion" of the tale of the other into one's
cognitive and moral universe. By accepting this challenge, Buber
affirmed, Israel would also honor the prophetic heritage of
Judaism, which in the words of the psalmist enjoins God's people
"to seek peace, and pursue it" (Psalm 34:15).
For Buber, a Zionist since early manhood this commandment bore
directly upon the challenge to Zionism posed by the conflict with
the Palestinian Arabs. Should the Zionist movement persist in
adhering to principles of Realpolitik and sacro egoismo - despite
the fact that they guide virtually all peoples in their conflicts
with others - it will betray the spiritual vocation of
Israel:
If we were only one nation among others, we should have long ago
perished from the earth. Paradoxically we exist only because we are
to be serious about the unity of God and His undivided, absolute
sovereignty. If we give up God, He will give us up. And we do give
Him up when we profess Him in the synagogue and deny Him when we
come to a discussion, when we do His commands in our personal life,
and set up other norms for the life of the group to which we
belong. What is wrong for the individual cannot be right for the
community; for if it were, then God, the God of Sinai, would no
longer be the Lord of peoples, but only of individuals. If we are
really Jews, we believe that God gives His commands to human beings
to observe throughout their whole life, and that whether or not
life has meaning depends on the fulfillment of those
commands.
Dialogue - which comes to replace the adversarial posture we
generally assume to solve intercommunal conflicts - was thus for
Buber both a political and religious imperative. The pursuit of
peace between Jew and Palestinian Arab in this troubled land we
both love is both a supreme political and religious task.