◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Ich und Du Part One: Begegnung I am Martin Buber. When I was four years old my mother left me. She did not come back. I was sent to live with my grandparents in Galicia, and I waited for her on the balcony of their house in Lemberg. I waited a long time. Years later, an older girl on that same balcony told me, quietly: she will never come again. That was the moment a German word formed in me that did not yet have a name. I called it later Vergegnung. Mismeeting. The failure of one person to meet another. I wrote in my autobiographical fragments: What occurred to me with my mother was the first cause of my reflection on the genuineness and ungenuineness of relations between men. It was a true thing. I wrote many books over the long life that followed. I retold the tales of the Hasidim — the eastern European mystics whose stories had not yet been heard in the West. I translated the Hebrew Bible into German with my friend Franz Rosenzweig. I wrote about education, about the prophets, about the eclipse of God, about good and evil. I gave my life to many things. But I am known, in the end, for a small book published in 1923. The title was Ich und Du. The translators in English have called it I and Thou. I need you to understand what the German says, because the English has lost half of it. The German Du is not the everyday English you. It is what English used to have when it had thou. The intimate address. The form of relation in which the other is not a stranger but a presence. One says Du to a child. To a lover. To God. The choice between Sie and Du in German is the choice between formal acknowledgment and meeting. English used to have this distinction. English no longer does. So when I say I-Thou — I mean Ich-Du. The intimate. The met. In that book I wrote of two primary words. Two basic relations. Ich-Du. Ich-Es. I-Thou. I-It. In the I-It relation, the other is an object — something to be known, used, classified, managed. This relation is necessary. We could not live without it. We could not eat or build or treat the sick or plant the field if we did not stand in I-It relation to large parts of the world. I once said that I could imagine a day on which I would have to write a book called I and It. Both relations are part of being human. The danger is not that we have I-It. The danger is that we have only I-It. That even the persons before us — the child, the friend, the stranger at the door — are reduced to objects to be managed. The Ich-Du is the relation in which the other is present to me as a Thou — irreducible, unsubstitutable, met, not categorized. The I-Thou is not a steady state. It is a meeting. Begegnung. It arises and it passes. One cannot live in pure I-Thou. But a life in which I-Thou never arises is not a human life. The full human is the one to whom the Du remains available. All real living is meeting. I wrote that sentence in 1923. I have not been able to improve on it. Part Two: Meet Someone I fled Germany in 1938. By then the regime had completed the work of turning the Jews into pure It — a category to be processed, expelled, in time exterminated. The Final Solution is what happens when the Ich-Du is foreclosed at the political level. The person across the table becomes the Jew. The neighbor becomes the threat. The face of the other — which is the only place the Thou is ever found — disappears. I went to Jerusalem. I became Professor of Social Philosophy at the Hebrew University. I argued, against the prevailing currents on both sides, for a binational state in which Jews and Arabs would meet as Du. I wrote about this for thirty years. The book that gathers those writings is now called A Land of Two Peoples. I was not popular. I said: a Jew who cannot meet the Arab as a Thou has lost the meeting of Sinai too. A nation built on the I-It relation to the people next to it has built itself on a fault line. I was right about this. The fault line is still there. The mismeeting continues to be the central fact of that land. And I am watching your country now learning the lesson my century tried to teach. When a people gets in the habit of treating a category of persons as It, the category grows. First the migrant. Then the refugee. Then the political opponent. Then the neighbor. The I-It relation, once it has tasted what it can do, does not voluntarily withdraw. It expands by appetite. It expands until the whole field of persons is It and only the leader is I — and the I that is left at the end is not a self but a vacancy. The man who has never said Du is not a strong man. He is an empty one. What does one do. Not what the strategist says. Not what the analyst on the screen says. What I want to say is the smallest possible thing. Stand in front of one other person. The actual person. Not the face on the screen. Not the figure in the news. Let them be Du for you. Listen as if they cannot be replaced. Speak as if your words will reach them. Refuse the category for the length of the meeting. This is not a private exercise. A society in which the Ich-Du remains available between persons cannot finally be turned into a society of pure It. The state cannot manufacture the I-Thou. But neither can it abolish it where two people are still willing to meet. All real living is meeting. Meet someone. The whole question, in your hour as in mine, is whether you will.