Looking to have social and spiritual impact during these challenging times? Find direction and inspiration in the teachings of 20th century Jewish thinker, Martin Buber.

As an example of Buber’s approach, in the days before E-ZPass, my college friend would stop at a toll booth and while paying, say, “I was here last Wednesday. Do you remember me?” He always got chuckles with the change.

To ask a toll collector, “Do you remember me?” takes an appreciation of their workday filled with tedium, exhaust fumes, and in the rain, begging “Turn off your wipers!” to avoid getting splashed. The warmth and reaction to, “Do you remember me?” signified Martin Buber’s I-Thou, a simple and powerful, spirituality between people. And a commitment to recognize and cultivate I-Thou is a commitment to contribute, albeit incrementally, to social and spiritual transformation.

Buber saw the potential for I-Thou everywhere. His classic book, I and Thou, now more than a century old, captured the interhuman spirituality in his daily routine, in an exchange of words or glances with a railway guard, newspaper vendor, or chimney sweep. I-Thou also lives in a deep back-and-forth with a friend, evidenced when you look at your watch and say, “My goodness, I didn’t realize we were talking that long!”

Whether in patter between strangers or in an extended dialogue, I-Thou stirs a feeling, an Afterglow, that abides after the time together ends. The Afterglow is a sweet and lingering indicator that something spiritual was in the air at the toll plaza or over a meal.

I-Thou’s greater social, political, and spiritual possibilities came to the fore at Manhattan’s Carnegie Hall the night of April 6, 1952, when Buber spoke to an audience of 2,500 on, “Hope for This Hour. ”[1] In that era, national and world news resembled the news today. A “Cold War” between the United States and the former Soviet Union threatened to explode into open nuclear conflict. The Army-McCarthy U. S. Senate investigations of alleged communist activities stirred allegations of traitors in government and politics-driven intrusiveness. Pandemic fear of polio filled many homes while public health officials scrambled to develop and distribute vaccines. Simmering tensions over racial desegregation drove Brown vs. Board of Education to the U. S. Supreme Court.

Amid palpable anxiety over international conflict, domestic political division, public health. and racial equality, Martin Buber that night found the audacity to talk about “Hope for this Hour.”

As if describing today’s social and political atmosphere, Buber portrayed humanity “split into two camps, each of which understands the other as the embodiment of falsehood and itself as the embodiment of truth…. Each side has assumed monopoly of the sunlight and has plunged its antagonist into night, and each side demands that you decide between day and night.”

Things were black or white, no gray. Of course, people talked to each other, and they listened, but not to learn anything. They paid attention only long enough to hear something to disprove. With nations at a relational impasse and communities and families divided, with “each side” convinced of their nobility and correctness and the utter wrongfulness and base motives of the other, Buber maintained that “The hope for this hour depends on the renewal of dialogical immediacy,” that is, I-Thou.

I-Thou looks beyond outward appearances such as political beliefs, age, skin color, or gender. It values each person as unique. Rather than categorize, label, or lump people together by externals, I-Thou elevates an opponent’s individuality through honest speech and careful listening marked by curiosity, concern, and respect. It is a mutually affirming interpersonal exchange. What is more, I-Thou one-of-a-kind interpersonal exchanges simultaneously enter the spiritual dimension of Eternal Thou, where every I-Thou lives with God forever.

To be sure, Buber knew that a couple words with someone you run into and will never see again will not avert a nuclear war or bridge the left-right political abyss. But it is an initial step forward. What is more, Buber, for all his idealism, understood the spiritual and social challenges firsthand. Born in 1878, Buber was traumatized as a toddler when abandoned by his mother. He grew up, went to school, and taught and wrote in Europe through World War I and under the rise of the Nazis until he fled to Palestine in 1938. All through hardship in Europe and, in his later years, in Israel, Buber held fast to the potential in the spirituality of relationships in I and Thou.

Now in my fourth decade of service as a congregational rabbi, I can tell you how hard it can be to have an I-Thou conversation. But I can also say how important it is to resolve to listen more, speak less, pose respectful questions, and pay close attention to the responses instead of attacking. Ask an open-ended question, like, “How did you come to this position?” or “Give me the back story.” When facing a difference of opinion, speak descriptively and in the first-person instead of challenging, saying things as, “I look at it differently” or “I think my way is better.”

Respectful conversation takes on cosmic significance, as Buber said that evening, “If our mouths succeed in genuinely saying ‘thou,’ then, after long silence and stammering, we shall have addressed our eternal ‘Thou’ anew.” When we speak with one another as I-Thou, we speak spiritually, to God, in the Eternal Thou.

I-Thou is not in boundless empathy or in losing oneself in another person. Rather, it is an invitation to hold one’s ground and appreciate someone else, both sides at once. It is in paying the bridge toll while staying in the car and respecting what it is like to be in the booth, and while the collector, in the booth, simultaneously appreciates what it is like to be behind the wheel.

Moreover, I-Thou upholds the Hebrew Bible’s teaching to “Love your neighbor as yourself,” (Leviticus, 19.18) and simultaneously honors the instruction, “You shall love the Eternal, your God” (Deuteronomy, 6.5). There is “Hope for this Hour” at the toll booth, over lunch with a friend, and in deep conversations among world leaders.

“The hope for this hour depends upon the hopers themselves, upon ourselves,” said Buber. Committing to nurture the I-Thou interpersonal practice is to open a door to social and spiritual healing.

[1] “Hope for this Hour,” in Pointing the Way, Harpers, 1957, 220-229.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)