I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the philosophy of peace. A famous philosopher who died in 1965 was named Martin Buber. Throughout his life, he was well known in many religious circles, especially in Europe, and he had a large impact on Catholic and Protestant theologians for a long time. Before he died in 1965, he also became interested in beginning a dialogue with Islam. One of the things I like to point out is that, even though he was a philosopher, Buber had very specific and concrete ideas. I would just like to mention some of them, in terms of how to begin a process of healing or redemption, which we all so sorely need.
In discussing Buber, however, there is one distinction that we have to make. Buber was known as the philosopher of dialogue. He created a sort of philosophical system called the dialogical philosophy. One thing that it is important to understand is the distinction between conversations and dialogues. Institutions, such as religious institutions, have had many, many conversations over the years but have not arrived at a level of true dialogue. And the distinction is not just semantic.
Buber was once characterized as a religious anarchist, because, from his perspective, religious institutions, or institutionalized religion, used expressions frozen in time, frozen in the spirit of what had once been a genuine and original religious encounter. From his perspective, an institution is an obstacle to achieving dialogue – an obstacle between the human person, the self, and God, or the Buddha, or any other spiritual path that a person wants to follow. From Buber’s point of view, joining an institution for religious purposes was simply taking a shortcut leading to nowhere. But he came from the Jewish tradition and Judaic insights, and he used to say, “I speak to the world standing in front of my home. My home is the tradition of Israel, and I am speaking to the world from it”.
He was very radical, in the sense of rejecting anything that could be understood as an institutional type of religion. Therefore, when we talk about religions getting together and discussing the issues that are important to us, there is an issue as to whether institutions can indeed engage in dialogue with each other. Dialogue should always occur on an equal plane, an equal level. It is “I and thou”, as he used to say. But oftentimes institutions see each other not as thous, or equal subjects, but as objects. That’s the other dichotomy that Buber presented: the “I and it”.
One of the things that Buber was known for was presenting radical proposals for peace, especially when it came to the issue of Israel and Palestine. Buber was one of the very few who suggested the creation of a binational State. As an anarchist – and whenever I refer to him as an anarchist, I mean mostly in the tradition of the pacifist anarchism that existed in Germany in the 1910s and 1920s – he felt that, if the Jews were to create a State, that State, as an institution, would be a negative, a step backwards. Rather, he believed, what needed to be created was a Jewish commonwealth in which Jewish culture, Jewish tradition, would experience a renaissance, and that State institutions were not needed. So he proposed the creation of a binational State in which Palestinian Arabs, Jews, Christians and everyone else would be equal citizens.
In proposing that idea, Buber was drawing on the ideas of some of the most important Jewish intellectuals of the time, especially those in Germany and the United States. But he did not have much of an impact in terms of real policy. In fact, we can say his group was marginalized to a great extent, although he was famous around the world. But his idea of creating a binational State is a very specific and concrete concept of how to bring about peace between institutions. If every institution claims the right to have its own format, its own structure, then we can never have true dialogue; what we will probably have is tolerance for one another. But a significant element of tolerance is emotional strength, which sometimes fails us.
One of the things that I would like to discuss is the following concept. We, as people of faith, may have faith in God or faith in humanity. But if we have faith in God, the idea is that we must love everything that God loves. That means people, and it also means nature, the ecology. We can never accept the idea that we love, yet hate someone who lives in this world or don’t care about the ecology of the world.
This is something that is very important. We cannot ascribe the emotion of hatred to God. Even though God is infinite, one thing God doesn’t have is hatred, because the supernatural being that has hatred is called the devil. We cannot ask God to tell us whom to hate, whom to kill, whom to eliminate, whom to discriminate against, because that’s not something that God will agree to tell us – at least I don’t think so. I haven’t spoken to God, but I know that we can talk to God in some way or other, because, as Buber used to say, I don’t know anything about God. We can say nothing about God. In fact, if you think about it clearly, we say that God is not a thing. If you put those words together, God is nothing. But that means that God is everything. Buber used to say we can know nothing about God, but we know we can address him. We can speak to God; we can have a dialogue.
The other thing I would like to discuss, in following up on what Bob Thurman just spoke about, is the idea of conversion. That’s a very important idea, because it has a good meaning behind it, but historically, it has poisoned the hearts of believers around the world. It’s okay to believe that the path to salvation passes through Christ or belief in the true Prophet. But let’s have faith in God and allow God to decide who’s going to be saved and who’s not going to be saved. It’s not our job or the job of the clergy to go around the world and tell people that they have to convert, because, to some extent, that means that we are taking away their right to have their own relationship with God. If we believe that God is all-merciful – and at least the theistic religions believe that God is all-merciful and all-good – we should let God decide whether a Jew, who doesn’t believe in Christ, or a Christian, who doesn’t believe that Mohammed is the Prophet, is going to be saved. It’s not up to us to decide.
Therefore, as a last sort of concrete idea, I would like to propose that we work to establish a new liturgy, a new prayer book, that all people can use, regardless of their religion. And it would be very important to find a space within that prayer book to pray for the salvation of those who are not part of our religion – particularly those whom we hate because they’re not part of our religion. That means praying for our enemies. No one would be able to take a weapon and kill someone, oppress someone or discriminate against someone if, every morning, we prayed that that person would be saved. And we would be asking God to do it.
After the mass murderer Eichmann was captured in the country where I was born, Argentina, he was brought to Israel for a trial and then put to death. For over 1,500 years, rabbis had interpreted the Jewish tradition as saying that the death penalty was not allowed. There was a death penalty on the books, but the way in which the rabbis implemented it made it very difficult indeed to apply it, in addition to the prohibition against having more than one person killed in 50 years, for instance, by a court.
In the end, Eichmann was hanged; he is the only person in the history of the State to have been killed by a court. But when he was brought to Israel, the question was whether or not to apply to him the same rule that the rabbis had always applied: that a person could actually be put to death by a court. They decided that Eichmann did not really belong to the category of human beings and that therefore God could not apply to him. But Martin Buber was the only one who came up and said, let’s apply mercy and compassion – mercy and compassion specifically – to this. Here’s an opportunity to apply great compassion, great mercy; let’s not kill him.
What he was asking for was a pact for the creation of a sacred space of peace among us – a peace so sacred that it cannot be violated or profaned. Dialogue creates a space in between. If we can create such a space and have a pact that it is sacred, holy, and therefore that none of us can violate it in any possible way, then perhaps we might be on the way to having religions begin to engage in dialogue on the path towards peace.