Why Did Martin Buber Abandon Mysticism? ft. Paul Mendes-Flohr

Martin Buber is a name that will forever be associated with mysticism and philosophy. His book, I and Thou, continues to touch the lives of thousands. There is perhaps no person who has done more to preserve and present his work than world-renown Buber scholar, Paul Mendes-Flohr. In this conversation we explore Buber's transition from Mysticism to Dialogue.

Professor Paul Mendes-Flohr is a leading scholar of modern Jewish thought.

He has written some thirty books, edited another forty-five, and authored some 300 articles on modern Jewish intellectual history, philosophy and religious thought, with a focus on the lives and ideas of the leading German-Jewish intellectuals of the 19th and 20th-centuries: Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem and Leo Strauss.

Paul is Professor Emeritus of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Professor Emeritus of Modern Jewish History and Thought at the University of Chicago, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Senior Research Fellow at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, was the director of the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center and is the editor in chief of the twenty-two volume German edition of the collected works of Martin Buber, as well as a series on German-Jewish literature and Cultural History.

Some of his recent works include:

Gustav Landauer. Anarchist and Jew (2014).

Dialogue as a Trans-Disciplinary Concept (2015).

Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent (2019).

Cultural Disjunctions: Post-Traditional Jewish Identities (2021).

00:00 Excerpt

00:54 Introducing Paul Mendes-Flohr

02:41 Why Mysticism?

3:39 Buber and Mysticism

6:25 Ecstatic Confessions

07:28 Story time

08:27 Escapist Mysticism & Hasidism

10:25 Buber, Do you believe in God?

11:19 Buber philosophy of Dialogue

15:14 The Eternal Thou

17:13 Shalom

19:29 Judaism isn’t a political identity

22:11 How did you come to Buber?

26:43 Translating I and Thou

29:22 Buber vs Gnosticism

34:18 Hearing vs Listening

36:33 I _&_ Thou

38:01 Where is Buber today?

39:29 The Academy

41:12 Buber and Palestine

44:28 From Mysticism to Dialogue

50:24 The Reluctant Prophet

56:47 A Positive formulation of Judaism

1:03:47 To be a Child

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