Martin Buber

And that's his uncle.

And he was talking about a famous philosopher, Martin Buber, who had said, very tough times ahead.

And he, that's his, his soundbite in the film.

And, um, he did not leave.

But the main thing is people will meet others and make the possibility for deep connection.

In fact, our first name for the synagogue was after Martin Buber and then after Franz Rosenzweig.

Martin Buber Cultural Center.

And we got rid of those names.

And then one person said, Oratora.

We got to come up with a name somehow.

So that's what drove us.

But the secret name of Oratora was Martin Buber, I and Thou, A Life of Dialogue, A Life of Being Present, So while we definitely wanted to teach Torah and we definitely wanted to preserve the tradition, at the core of it was people developing authentic relationships that can sustain them at this time in life and maybe throughout their lives.

And I went to Israel as a 16 year old in 1974.

And I went with a lot of ideas about Zionism, very idealistic ideas based on my readings of Buber.

and what we would call cultural Zionism, but not political Zionism.

When I was in Israel that first time, I just was struck by things that didn't seem right to me, mostly as an American, and also honestly as a woman.

And neither option seemed feasible to me.

So I came back to the United States and decided I was going to become a scholar.

and carry on the tradition of Ahad Ha'am and Martin Buber.

And I started to study a lot of intellectuals, among them Hannah Arendt.

It is often mutually transactional.

But this question of how we relate to other people, how we use other people to fulfill our needs, and whether there is an alternative way of being is the heart of the philosopher Martin Buber's teachings.

You may be familiar with him.

He wrote the book I and Thou.

But this article, I mean, what you just read kind of answered my question really well.

Thus, when Martin Buber called for a state for the Jews, it was so they could serve humanity.

For it is only by fulfilling his messianic dream of a national home, he said, that the Jewish religion can lead humanity towards the messianic age.

Psychopathy.

You know, you end up with the Bay of Pigs crisis or the Ford Pinto, you know, because people didn't speak up and say, wait, I think this is wrong.

But in the same way that I think we have to challenge that, you know, when we were talking about listening before, I was thinking of the work of the philosopher Martin Buber, who focuses specifically on human life as not just me and you, but about the realm of the between, the inter-human.

And he talks about listening in a deep way of really imagining the real, as he put it, what's going on even before someone speaks and what underlies what they say.

But Bloomberg also had another interesting challenge to the idea of infusing a community with a mere collective.