Part One: Modernity and Religion
Part Two: Martin Buber
Part Three: Abraham J. Heschel, and Final Evaluation

Final paper Assignement Four Modern Masters of Judaism, Prof. Soltes, Georgetown
Fall 1997

I. The issue: Why spirituality, why religiosity today? Have not post-modernism and it's philosophers taught us that the age of metaphysics is over? Have we not become aware of the historicity and contingency of our traditions and culture? - Because it re-enchants man. It makes his existence more authentic, deeper.
To reconnect modern man with spirituality or religiosity is a monumental task for religious thinkers. This paper on the reconnection of modern man to God as attempted by Martin Buber and Abraham Joshua Heschel focuses on this open question of modernity to religion, and on the answer that Buber and Heschel, each in his own way, have given in regard to the eternal; God; spirituality; and above all, religiosity and faith. Both authors have attempted to give a general, as well as a Jewish answer.

II. My personal concern for the question: The choice of the overarching theme of "Modern Man and Jewish Spirituality" is a deeply personal one. I take the freedom to explain my personal concerns at the outset of this paper, because if I am to enter a dialogue with Buber and Heschel, I should have learned from them that I should do so as a whole person, and not only with the faculty of reason characteristic of scientific endeavor. After explaining myself as a (post-)modern Jewish man (III), I will present a short independent assessment of the problem religion faces in modern times (IV). I will then attempt to present first Buber (V), then Heschel (VII) with their account of religion and spirituality and it's place in modernity, their locating of the divine, and how to meet it, and what consequences to draw. After each account, I will attempt to assess what a modern man (such as myself) could find appealing about Buber (VI) and Heschel (VIII). I will conclude with a short assessment of how Buber and Heschel answered the problem of religion as presented in IV.

III. About me, a post-modern case: I am a German Jew, but I have not always seen myself as one. A mile off the Jordan river, just south of the sea Kinneret, at a place which popular belief holds as the original site of Paradise, I learned on the eve of Yom Kippur at the age of twenty, that according to Halakhic law, I was Jewish. I had not known that before; the Holocaust, and life in the Stalinistic era of the German Democratic Republic had inclined my grandmother's German Jewish family to such extreme assimilation that my mom, the daughter of a Jewess, did not conceive of herself as Jewish any longer. Accordingly, I was brought up without religion. At the age of twenty, I was a young atheistic Western man with firm beliefs in the value of liberal political thought, and the rational heritage of the Enlightenment. I was a modern man, a faithful product of my upbringing and school curriculum that knew nothing of the storms of post-modernism I was to encounter in university.
Coincidentally, I learned of post-modern doubts when my modern rational self-understanding received the blow of the Halakhic question as to in how far I should perceive myself as a Jew or not. To answer this question was a question of intellectual honesty with myself; and I was too familiar with the history of Jewish assimilation as not to be aware of the larger picture of Judaism of which I found myself so suddenly a mosaic (pun not intended, but taken) piece. My undisturbed modern identity was put into question at a time when Jewish religion laid it's hand on my shoulders, and when the critical ideas of post-modernity crept into my intellect. So I found myself in the situation that Nietzsche aspired: a "camel" man who transforms into a lion when breaking out of the constraints of his traditionally rendered identity (as a modern rational enlightened man) , as someone who leaves the education of his parents behind in a Platonian sense.
When tracing Heschel's and Buber's views of the modern man, and their ideas on spirituality, I do it with the understanding that a person like me was a prime address for their concerns. The hopefully somewhat objective discussion of my previous subjective perceptions of both authors is a case study. And if I dare to apply their ideas of religion and the modern man to the age of post-modernism, I do this with the understanding that in procedure, Buber and Heschel do the same as the post-modern philosophers: they de-construct modern man. However, their aim is different: Heschel and Buber offer re-enchantment with the world, all the post-modern philosophers have to offer is, in their better cases, irony.  So it doesn't really matter whether they address modern man and make him aware of the spiritual disenchantment of the world, or post-modern man who is already aware of the world's intellectual disenchantment that comes from the recognition of historicity of all the grand meta-narratives of the West.

IV. About modernity and religion: the task. How, in this age that has been called the "beginning of the planetary stage of human development" , is then religion in general perceived? What is spirituality, and what has happened to it? The past few hundred years have brought about a "multiplicity of critical events" such as "scientific, ecclesiastical, philosophical, technological, political, industrial, economic and social revolutions." "Perhaps the latest revolution is the historical revolution. Man has become aware of historicity", especially the historicity of "human consciousness, and, in particular... of intellectual investigation, that is the historicity of man's conscious attempt to heighten his consciousness, as in scientific and philosophical thought." So modern man asks himself: "Can religious belief remain essentially unaffected by human evolution?" And religious thinkers have to ponder the question in how far faith, as a form of "human consciousness", and "religious belief as an intrinsic part of human experience" can still play their traditional role as "the centre of meaningfulness for human life."  These questions informed by post-modern insight from 1969 were already anticipated by Professor Rudolf Eucken in 1922  when he observed that in "earlier times, the world of faith... stood in the nearest relationship to the soul of man. At the height of the period of medieval scholasticism, the world with which religion deals was constantly called the 'true native land', the patria of mankind." But "the leaders of Enlightenment" have lead man out of this Eden, and "man was left to his own faculties and estranged from the thought of religion. Metaphysics became psychology, and reason became merely a human testimony instead of Divine revelation." - The attempt was increasingly made to relinquish all inner human relation to the Universe and to satisfy one's self within the sphere of sense experience.  Such has been the conviction of positivism, which regards religion as just one stage in historical evolution... a stage... (which) now, in consequence of the progress of science, is recognized to be an error."
This is the time when Buber and Heschel learn and write. The choice is this: reject the modern ideas that pervade the time and make religion seemingly oblivious? Or reject the tradition of religion and Judaism? As we will see, Buber and Heschel remain not untouched by modernity and it's new existentialist vocabulary. But with that new vocabulary, they both undertake to re-describe religion and Judaism in a language that speaks to modern man.
V. Martin Buber
VII. Abraham Heschel