Martin Buber

God, Buber felt, could not be discussed but only addressed—and that in the second person as “you.”...

Rather, the use of the word God, in the context of address, absorbs one in a way of life that touches on the real. All that we can really say of God is what we can say to God. --Alan Mittleman, Asking the Wrong Question, First Things, January 2009



Recommended reading:
by Martin Buber at Reading Rat


Criticism (articles, essays, reviews):

I and Thou is a sort of Rochester in reverse. As Rochester’s poems are typical seventeenth-century hymns in which the name of the Deity has been replaced by the name of his mistress, Buber’s wonder and excitement at the discovery of love in a loveless world, his astonishment that there is another “out there,” mount steadily to such a pitch that by the second half of the book no human object can contain the burden of awe and ecstasy. Love is essentially a relationship — it and its parties are relative, contingent, it is this which gives it its pathos. --Kenneth Rexroth, The Hasidism of Martin Buber, Bureau of Public Secrets, first published in Bird in the Bush (1959) and reprinted in World Outside the Window: Selected Essays of Kenneth Rexroth (1987)

Buber’s Middle Way, by Leora Batnitzky, review of The Martin Buber Reader: Essential Writings, edited by Asher Biemann, First Things, February 2003

Buber Without Tears, by Werner J. Dannhauser, First Things, March 1994, review of The Letters of Martin Buber: A Life of Dialogue, edited by Nahum N. Glatzer and Paul Mendes-Flohr, translated by Richard and Clara Winston and Harry Zohn