BOOKS: On Judaism by Martin Buber

On Judaism by Martin Buber

My rating: 2 of 5 stars







MY FAVORITE IDEAS:

1. We are most spiritual when we are involved with the real world. We meet God through our encounters with other people, not from seeking out private ecstatic experiences. This idea is awesome! It's so different from stuff I'd been taught in the past. One of the things I really love about Judaism is the emphasis on our relationships with other people.

2. (pg. 93) "[Spiritual] renewal comes from a religious inner shock." Buber is actually talking about Jewish renewal in this quote, but I applied it to a more generalized spiritual renewal. The wording struck me because it took huge religious shock for me to even begin questioning some of my former beliefs. But, since my former religious foundation was shattered beyond repair, it left me free to explore all sorts of different pathways to God. Anyway, even though it felt pretty traumatic at the time, it ended up being one of the best things that ever happened to me. It seems like severe spiritual inner shocks lead to either of two paths: renewal or destruction. I guess that's about the same as any severe traumatic event. A serious event changes you so much that you can't return to your previous state of normality. So, you're either destroyed by it or built up into something better.

SOMETHING I STRUGGLED TO UNDERSTAND

1. The I/Thou thing (pg. 210). I'm really confused on this part. I think the book was saying that in the Torah, God doesn't talk to us as individuals standing alone, but He talks to us as individuals who are part of a community. But, I have to admit, I'm a bit fuzzy on what that really means. There seems to be a really cool core idea here, but I'm not getting it.

SOMETHING NEW I LEARNED

1. (pg. 21) "What matters for the Jew is not his credo, nor his declared adherence to an idea or movement, but that he absorb his own truth, that he live it, that he purify himself from the dross of foreign rule, and that he find his way from division to unity." There is a lot of stuff in this little quote! 1. Actions over beliefs. 2. Searching out our truths. 3. going from division to unity.

2. (pg. 93) "Genuine religiosity, therefore, has nothing in common with the fancies of romantic hearts, or with the self-pleasure of aestheticizing souls, or with the clever mental exercises of a practiced intellectuality. Genuine religiosity is doing. That's so cool! Real spirituality is focused on doing stuff in the community, not on isolating oneself from humanity.




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