Martin Buber Library – serie

In this work, Buber expounds upon and defends the Zionist experiment - a federal system of communities on a co-operative basis. He looks to the anarchists Proudhon, Kropotkin and Gustav Landauer, but selects only that part of their doctrines appropriate to his case.

Beginning with Buber's seminal essay on mysticism, this book offers texts down the centuries from oriental, pagan, Gnostic, Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, Jewish and Muslim sources. It aims to convey some quality of an experience that is essentially beyond the power of words to capture.

Written over 40 years, this text seeks to: clarify the relation of certain aspects of Jewish thinking and Jewish living to contemporary intellectual movements; and to analyze those trends within Jewish life, which, surrendering to many ideologies, tend to weaken the teachings of Israel.

This volume grew out of a series of lectures by the author in 1944. He analyzes the centrality of Zion to biblical and Talmudic thought, how it inspired medieval thinkers and mystics, and how it moved modern Jews from Moses Hess to Ray Kook and A.D. Gordon.

As a college student Martin Buber was a leader in the early Zionist movement. During the period between 1898 and 1902 he published a series of Zionist writings that were clearly meant to be confrontational and challenge those who embraced traditional Judaism. These essays, poems and speeches have been translated and collected here in this text. For Buber Zionism was not primarily a political issue. it implied a reorientation of the entire being, on overcoming of a Diaspora mentality, a catharsis and a readiness to build in the land of Israel a new, just, free and creative community.

Originally titled For the Sake of Heaven, Gog and Magog is a fictional religious chronicle in which the heroes are Hasidic rabbis. The setting for the novel is Poland and Hungary during the Napoleonic wars at the end of the eighteenth century. Although magic and superstition play their parts in the story, it is really Martin Buber's effort to articulate two approaches to the question: May men use evil to accomplish good? May men take power into their own hands - even to do the work of redemption - without submitting first to the will of God? More particularly, Buber unfolds the inner world of messianic longing and expectations that characterized Judaism then and continues to characterize it to the present day.

This volume covers Martin Buber's views on psychology and psychotherapy, exploring the work of practitioners such as Freud and Jung. Contents include: distance and relation; healing through meeting; Buber and Jung; elements of the interhuman; and guilt and guilt feelings.

Better than any other single work, Daniel enables us to understand the significance of the transition Buber made from his early mysticism to the philosophy of dialogue. The book is written in the form of five dialogues, in each of which Daniel and his friends explore a crucial philosophical problem the nature of interconnection of unity, creativity, action, form, and realization as these illuminate the relations of man to God and the world. Daniel occupies a central position in Buber's life work.

This text acquaints the reader with Martin Buber's works on scripture and with his endeavour to elucidate the meanings of biblical ideas in ages past and in our own time.