The one or two people who know me best know that the two people who unlock for me what is most right in the human experience are Martin Buber and John Macmurray. They lived in the same era. Both were nurtured in the biblical narrative. One was an Austrian drinking from the well of Hasidic Judaism, the other a Scot, drinking from the well of Calvinism.
As early as 1932 Buber recognized the danger of Hitler. In his active resistance, he even founded a Jewish school IN GERMANY in the mid-1930s when Hitler forbid Jewish people access to German schools.
Buber only survived the 20th Century because he immigrated to Palestine in 1938. At that time Israel did not exist. As a Hasidic Jew, he was a Zionist to be sure. But his vision for Palestine was for a shared Jewish-Arab state. He envisioned a Jewish-Arab unity based on his understanding of relationship as the basis of identity. If a Jew cannot love a Moslem, one cannot be a Jew. Sadly, Israel chose another way.
Central to both Buber and Macmurray was the notion that a person is constituted by relationship. When one asserts oneself to the exclusion of others, one disappears, becomes a nonperson, a Gollum. It is only in receptive listening and in humble response that an individual becomes a person.
Those who reject receptive listening and humble response undermine our national identity. All they know is the violence of the assertion of self and the exclusion of the other of whom they are afraid. (This, of course, is how the White Nationalist is diminished by his racism.)
What we saw in Trump's visit to Europe, and in his rejection of any possible relationship of dignity with European leaders, was the assertion of Trump-Self. It is all he knows.
He is diminished when he does this, as he was in his violent conversation with Billy Bush in his celebration of misogyny captured on the Access Hollywood video in 2005.
The United States risks loosing E Pluribus Unum, and becoming Trump-Self.
If we do not actively resist this American slide into nonbeing under the leadership of Trump and the GOP, we are lost. To grow weary of resistance is to embrace annihilation of what makes a human being matter. What makes a human being matter, is our mutual respect for one another.
Something Buber wrote long ago is more relevant to us in the United States today than perhaps any time in our history.
“The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda.”
Education, for Buber and Macmurray, did not just involve reading, writing, and arithmetic. It involved the education of the heart. The human heart is the seat of motivation after all. When it grows dull of greed and envy, what is left?
With this more complete perspective of education, Buber embraced with enthusiasm the lesson of another Jewish Rabbi. It is a lesson the world needs to learn.
"A new commandment I give to you. That you love one another, even as I have loved you."