|
|
|
Home : News : The Bible on Stage |
Back |
|
|
Martin Buber's Mystery Play Elijah By Maurice Friedman |
|||||||||||||||||||
Maurice Friedman is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, Philosophy, and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University. He has translated, edited, and introduced many of Martin Buber's works and is the author, among many other books, of Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue, Martin Buber's Life and Work (3 vols., 1981 ff.), and Martin Buber and the Eternal (1986). Although Martin Buber's "mystery play" Elijah was not written until 1956 and was not published in German until 1963, Buber's active interest in writing a play on Elijah dates back to 1901 and the Jewish Renaissance Movement, which he saw as the central thrust of the cultural Zionism which he espoused. Two of the poems which he published on Elijah in that period seemed to Buber of sufficient lasting worth to be taken up into his Nachlese, or "gleanings," prepared just before his death.[ 1] Both poems transcend the realm of culture in the direction of genuine religious intimations, through intimations informed by the Nietzschean vitalism and the immanentist, becoming-of-God mysticism that permeated Buber's being at that period. Elijah entered again into Buber's thought in the second period of his interpretation of Judaism, the three "Speeches on Judaism" that he gave for the Prague Bar Kochba Society in the years 1909 - 1911. The distinguished Israeli philosopher Hugo Bergman was at that time one of the leaders of that society and sought in a Hebrew article to introduce the Hebrew reader into the thought world of the "Three Speeches." The three leading ideas of Judaism that Buber set forth in these speeches were unity, the future, and the deed. In his article Bergman pointed out the relation between Buber's demand for unity and the words of the prophet Elijah about "hopping on two twigs" (1 Kings 18:21). On September 12, 1912, Buber wrote Bergman a card from Riccione in Italy in which he said: "I have read your essay with great joy and found therein many valuable supplements. What was most welcome to me was the citation from the Elijah story for the sake of which alone your expositions will remain unforgettable to me." [2 ] In his second three "Speeches on Judaism" (1916) Buber incorporated this very passage to which Bergman pointed into the heart of his presentation of the struggle within the Orient and particularly within Judaism "of creative minds, of leaders and redeemers, against the aimlessness of the people's drives." The argument here is already a direct precursor of the central motif of Buber's play Elijah, composed forty years later: The cognizance of inner duality and the immanent demand for decision--that is, of the soul's unification--divided the people into two psychologically distinct factions: one consisted of persons who choose, who make decisions, who are impelled toward unconditionality and are dedicated to their goal; the other of laissez-faire men, decisionless persons, persons who remain indolently inert in their conditionality, and whose aim is self-aggrandizement and self-satisfaction--or, in biblical terms, persons who are servants of God, and persons who are servants of Baal. It should be remembered, however that those persons do not by any means decide for Baal and against God, but that, as stated by Elijah, they "hobble along on two tree-limbs" (1 Kings 18:21). [3] The act that Judaism has always considered the essence and foundation of all religiosity is the act of decision as realization of divine freedom and unconditionality on earth. . . . Just as the sequence of Sinaitic laws opens with the call to an exclusive and unconditional decision for the One, so do Moses' greatest words serve to support the same demand: "Thou shalt be whole-hearted with the Lord thy God" (Deut. 18:13) and ". . . serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul" (Deut. 11:13). The prophets proclaim the same, beginning with Elijah, who speaks to the people: "How long will you continue to hobble along on two tree limbs?" [ 4 ] It is striking that this passage exactly anticipates Buber's later teaching of the first stage of evil as decisionlessness and the second as the crystallizing of this course of failures to decide into a refusal to allow oneself to be called to account by anything. "What I say is true because I say it; what I do is good because I do it." [ 5] Toward the end of his life Buber himself explicitly linked Elijah's demand not to be like the bird that hops on two trees at once with his own anthropological understanding of evil: In "Images of Good and Evil" I have pointed out that evil proper is the affirmation and strengthening of one's own decisionlessness against the God who demands decision, hence as Yes and No at the same time. But the Yes in it is in no way a Yes of decision. One does not decide for Baal, one falls to him; in other words, one does not decide for the Having (Baal is the "possessor" who grants the Having) against the Being, one is swallowed by the Having. . . . Adolf Hitler, the Baalish man, is precisely the exemplary living being with whom a dialogue is no longer possible. [6] At the heart of Buber's Elijah is his lifelong concern with the Hebrew Bible and the biblical covenant which it carries forward. The biblical dialogue finds its most significant expression, in Buber's opinion, in the concept of the kingship of God. Israel must make real God's kingship through becoming a holy people, a people that brings all spheres of life under God's rule. There can be no split here between the "religious" and the "social," wrote Buber, for Israel cannot become the people of YHVH without faith between human beings. The people of Israel recognize YHVH as their King, and they recognize themselves as chosen by him. This does not mean that he is their God in the sense that he belongs to them or that they in any way possess him. It means, rather, that their very existence as a people is inseparably tied up with the task of making real the kingship of God. God's demand that Israel become "a holy people" means the spontaneous and ever-renewed act whereby the people dedicate themselves to YHVH with their corporeal national existence, their legal forms and institutions, their internal and external relationships, the whole factuality of worldly life. It was in faithfulness to this covenant that the prophets rejected any merely symbolic fulfillment of the divine commission and fought the division of community life into a "religious" realm of myth and cult and a "political" realm of civic and economic laws. YHVH demands righteousness and justice of the people for the sake of the completion of his work. He seeks not "religion" but community. The way of the kingship of God, writes Buber, is the way from failure to failure in the dialogue between the people and God. As the failure of the judge leads to the king and the failure of the king to the prophet, so the failure of the prophet in his opposition to the king leads to the conception of two types of messianic leaders who will set the dialogue aright--the Immanuel of Isaiah and the "suffering servant" of Deutero-Isaiah. Isaiah's Immanuel is the king of the remnant, from which the people will renew itself. The Messiah of Isaiah is not a divine figure who takes the place of human turning or brings about a redemption which the human has merely to accept and enter into. The belief in the coming of a messianic leader is the belief that at last person and people will speak with their whole being the word that answers God's word. "The zaddik, the man justified by God, suffers for the sake of God and of his work of salvation and God is with him in his suffering," wrote Buber. Deutero-Isaiah's "suffering servant of the Lord" voluntarily takes on himself all the griefs and sicknesses of the people's iniquities in order to bring them to turn back to God. The servant is promised a great future work reaching all nations and, sustained by this promise, is willing to bear an immense affliction for God's sake. The second stage is the acting of the affliction. But in the final stage it is laid on the servant to inaugurate God's new order of peace and justice for the world. The servant thus completes the work of the judges and the prophets, the work of making real God's kingship over the people, which now signifies in reality all the human world. 7 Buber's mystery-play Elijah (1956) contains in dramatic form all these central motifs in Buber's understanding of biblical and Jewish existence: the demand that the covenant with Israel places on the people and the king to make real the kingship of God through justice, righteousness, and lovingkindness; the task of building the covenant of peace with other nations and of building true community; the attack on all forms of dualism that relegate religion to the cultic and the "spiritual" and place no demand on everyday life; the biblical emunah, or unconditional trust in the relation to the imageless God who offers no security or success yet who will be with us as he will be with us; the summons and sending of the prophet to whom God calls but whom he does not compel; the call of the prophet for real decision in the present--the people's turning back to God with the whole of their existence--rather than the apocalyptic prediction of a fixed future; evil as the failure to make real decision; the king as the viceroy of God who is anointed to realize God's kingship but who has no "divine right" to rule in God's stead; the "suffering servant" as the messianic figure who will lead the "holy remnant" of those who remain faithful to the covenant to set the dialogue right through free and wholehearted response. This freedom includes the contending with God that has been at the heart of Israel's way from the beginning--from Abraham who demanded that the Lord of Justice act justly toward Sodom and Jacob who wrestled till dawn with the nameless messenger till he blessed him with the name "Israel"--he who contends with God. Elijah speaks to the people out of his own dialogue with God and into the concrete historical moment. He does not submit to a superior divine force which uses him as a mere instrument. He responds to what calls him forth from the depths of his being. And God is with him, the righteous man who suffers for the sake of redemption. But God is also with the people in the midst of their uncleanness, even with King Ahab who falls to Baal--the emptiness of dream-wishes--rather than decides for him. Elijah has disguised himself as King Ahab's shield bearer on the field of battle. When he reveals himself to the mortally wounded Ahab, the latter exclaims, "It is you, my enemy. Here too you have found me," to which Elijah responds: Lean on me, brother Ahab. I am not your enemy. God too is not your enemy. Lay aside all wrath! The Lord has always wanted to rescue you from yourself. If you must die now, His grace has inclined itself toward you. Shelter yourself in the eternal arms! [ 8 ] When Elijah takes final leave of Elisha, the man who carries on his work, he tells him that no one ripens into a prophet who does not learn to bear loneliness. Elisha asks for the blessing of Elijah's spirit, but Elijah [End Page 138] replies that he has never possessed the spirit, that it has come and gone. He blesses him rather with obedience to the spirit and that he withstand the Lord. These two together--"obedient listening" and withstanding--make up the very heart of Elijah, as of Buber's philosophy of dialogue which teaches us to meet others and to hold our ground when we meet them. Elijah not only resumes the motifs of Buber's thought. It speaks to us of the concerns that lay closest to Buber's heart and of the attitudes that were embodied in his life. At the very opening of the play, Elijah answers the Lord's call by repeatedly saying "No!" Later he says to the Lord, "You cannot compel me," to which the Voice answers, "I cannot compel you." When Elijah meets with the mother and boy whom he brings back to life, Elijah exclaims (just before the "miracle" of the full bushel of wheat and the full oil jug), "I have ever loved you, Lord. Why do you make it so hard for us to love you?" All your lives you have had God on your lips and have served Baal. He who desires to be serves the God who is, but he who wants to have and have more and have yet more, serves Baal. Rightly is he called Baal, the possessor, for he is nothing else than vain nothingness that fills the empty belly with possessions. So when a woman is given in marriage to one of you, he calls himself the Baal of the woman; he wants only to possess her and to enjoy his possession. [10 ] It is the mystery of God's nearness in the very pit of suffering that the Voice bids Elijah impart to men when, instead of entering into the radiance of God's heaven, he asks and is allowed to be the Lord's "runner" on earth. ELIJAH: I shall dwell with the blessed in radiance, and yet I can never forget the wretched! As a nimble runner I have served you all my days. Let me remain your runner! Let me run over the earth as your messenger! In Jewish tradition Elijah is this runner, and he is also the forerunner of the Messiah who is still to come. Thus the play ends on the note of the suffering servant of the Lord that also characterizes the Yehudi in Buber's Hasidic chronicle novel For the Sake of Heaven, and in both works of literature this note carries with it messianic overtones. In Elijah Buber has mixed in biblical sayings that were not connected with the Elijah story. Thus the final speeches of the Voice in the last scene of Elijah recall Isaiah 40:3031 in which those who wait for the Lord receive new strength in exchange for their exhaustion, and Malachi 4:5 with its promise: "Behold I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers." Buber has also mixed in mythical and popular elements that have attached themselves to the Elijah legend down through the centuries. It is this recognition of difference which explains the polarity and overagainstness and the tragic conflict arising because, in Buber's words, "each is as he is." When the dramatic entanglement which arises from the difference between persons is woven with the unfathomableness of destiny, it appears, wrote Buber, as "tragedy." Theater can take part in a great work of teaching only when it recognizes the supremacy of drama and submits itself to the command of the word. But to do this does not mean to move back from the spoken [End Page 141] word to the written. Rather it means to preserve in all faithfulness the tension of agreement and disagreement, the mutual affirmation of otherness that lies at the heart of the meeting between I and Thou. The word that convulses through the whole body of the speaker, the word that serves all gestures in order that the plasticity of the stage construct and reconstruct itself as a frame, the stern over-againstness of I and Thou, overarched by the wonder of speech, that governs all the play of transformation, weaving the mystery of the spirit into every element--it alone can determine the legitimate relation between drama and theatre. [14 ] In 1929 Buber wrote an essay on the Hebrew theater that had successfully established itself first in Europe and later in Tel Aviv. In this essay "Reach for the World, Ha-Bimah!" Buber brought his understanding of the relationship between drama and theater to a new depth that prepared him for the writing of his own mature biblical play Elijah. Recognizing that it is always the theater that summons drama into being and not vice-versa, Buber also recognized that drama and the theater entail that suspension of "being in the right" that he learned, when, at the age of twenty-four, he "first set foot on the soil of tragedy." It is this that Buber meant by the unfamiliar note that he sounded at the end of this essay, namely that the Jew can extricate from the dramatic reality of world existence what he has to add to it: the annunciation of the Shekinah. The Shekinah in the Talmud is the indwelling Glory of God, and in Jewish mysticism--the Kabbala and Hasidism--it is the very form in which God's presence is exiled in the world. The task of the human, according to the Hasidism of the Baal Shem Tov, is not to escape from the world but to redeem it, not to fly from the exiled presence of God to the En Sof, or infinite, but to reunite God with his exiled Shekinah through the very kavana (or intention) of one's daily life. In this lies the deep opposition of this form of Judaism to any kind of Gnostic dualism, and in this lies the final merging of Buber's understanding of drama and the theater with his deepest understanding of the biblical covenant: What saved Judaism is not, as the Marcionites imagine, the fact that it failed to experience "the tragedy," the contradiction in the world's [End Page 142] process, deeply enough; but rather that it experienced that "tragedy" in the dialogical situation, . . . it experienced the contradiction as theophany. This very world, this very contradiction, unabridged, unmitigated, unsmoothed, unsimplified, unreduced, this world shall be--not overcome--but consummated. It is redemption not from the evil, but of the evil, as the power, which God created for this service and for the performance of his work.[ 15 ] Neither Werner Kraft nor Buber's friend and disciple Ernst Simon were able to confirm Buber's Elijah. Buber's first response to Kraft's long letter where he complained of the lack of any majestic language on the part of Baal and of any kingly language on the part of Ahab and Jezebel was an unqualified concurrence with what Kraft had written. Yet Buber not only initiated a separate publication of Elijah with his German publisher but also, as Kraft himself told me, began thinking in terms of a German production of it! On March 3, 1963, Buber wrote Kraft a long letter explaining his actions: A "poetic" Baal could and should, to be sure, "speak majestically," but the authentic Phoenician Baal--known to us to some extent from the Ugaritic texts--did not know how to say anything other than to praise his palace and the like. He is quite simply the anti-dialogical god, the enemy of speech, the enemy of all contact that was not possession. It would be counterfeit work if I wanted to recast him into a new poetic mold.[ 16 ] Though agreeing with Kraft about the nature of Buber's language in Elijah, the German writer Hans Fischer-Barnicol has a radically different estimate of its value: "What is surprising in this work is the renunciation of all dramatic willfulness, even of all linguistic surprise. The biblical story is presented simply and without any adornment--an elemental, sacramental event that takes place beyond all psychology, all literary possibility." "One must perhaps be a true poet," Fischer-Barnicol wrote, "in order in this fashion to withstand every poetic temptation, in order to add nothing at all, in order only to establish the example." [ 17 ] Though by no means so eminent a dramatic critic as Werner Kraft, Fischer-Barnicol understood something which the latter, with his more classical notions of the demands of drama, missed, namely the way in which Buber found in Elijah the only possible right form for what had to be said there--the very form which in forty years of earnest wrestling he found for the Hebrew Bible itself. It took Buber a lifetime, indeed, to become what his father, by his own testimony, was: "an elemental story-teller" who always reported only the simple events without any embroidery, "nothing further than the existence of human creatures and what took place between them." [18] One may object that such elemental story-telling has its place in Hasidic tales, but not in drama and the theater. Yet the very core of drama and the theater, as Buber understood them, was the dialogical event--the tension between person and person, between understanding and misunderstanding, in the concrete situation. The 1957 Jerusalem Ideological Conference titled "Israel's Mission and Zion" was like a modern reenactment of the encounter between King Ahab and Elijah in the persons of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Martin Buber. Ben-Gurion proclaimed the State of Israel as the only common asset of the Jewish people, divided in values and disintegrated in structure. Addressing Buber directly, Ben-Gurion said that the State of Israel is not merely an instrument but the beginning of the redemption, a small part of it. In Bubers' reply to Ben-Gurion the classic opposition between king and prophet in ancient Israel was given a modern context: "On no account are the prophets to be regarded apart from their historic mission which sent them to those men who had seized the reins of power in order to summon them to stand in judgment before their God who had made them king provisionally." The destiny of Israel depends upon the fulfillment of the demand that Israel "make an exemplary beginning in the actual work of realization, that it be a nation which establishes justice and truth in its institutions and activities." In particular Buber saw Ben-Gurion as representative of an exaggerated "politicization" which strikes at the very spirit itself so that it descends and becomes a function of politics. This phenomenon, "which is supreme in the whole world at present," has roots which reach back, Buber pointed out, to the biblical times in which some kings in Israel (King Ahab for one) "employed false prophets whose prophesying was merely a function of state policy." A Messianic idea without the yearning for the redemption of mankind and without the desire to take part in its realization, is no longer identical with the Messianic visions of the prophets of Israel, nor can that prophetic vision be identified with a Messianic ideal emptied of the belief in the coming of the kingdom of God. [19] The way in which Buber portrayed the opposition between King Ahab and the prophet Elijah in his play is itself an essential part of the understanding of dialogue as a way to peace. Ahab is not pictured as a "wicked king," as Melville puts it in Moby Dick, but as someone who, even in his failure to decide, remains bound up in dialogue with God, from whom he has turned. Elijah does not see himself as Ahab's enemy, nor does Elijah's God. For this reason, too, Elijah is a great statement of existential trust, precisely where it departs from the Hebrew Bible with its starker story of Elijah killing the four hundred priests of Baal after they are defeated on Mount Carmel. [1]. The German originals of these poems as well as the translations are published in Martin Buber, A Believing Humanism, trans. with introduction and explanatory comments by Maurice Friedman (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1990), pp. 3639.
Related Links:
|
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||
