The following essay by Martin Buber, here translated into English for the first time, represents an early stage in the development of his thought. First published in German in 1913, it expresses Buber’s enthusiasm for the mystical and Hasidic strains in Jewish history, and his hostility to the rabbinic element, which he tended to equate with rationalism.

When Buber granted permission for COMMENTARY to publish this translation by Ralph Manheim, he asked that the article be prefaced by the following remarks: “When the editor of COMMENTARY suggested that a translation of this essay be published, I re-read it for the first time in many years. (It was the fourth of my seven Speeches on Judaism and dates from 1913; my last reading of it was in preparation for the issuing of a collected edition of the Speeches in 1923.) Upon re-reading, I have the impression that it may be of some importance even today for those wanting to know about the spiritual history of Israel, and so I willingly agreed. But I should like to inform the reader that had I written the essay some years later, I would have made it clearer that real myth is the expression, not of an imaginative state of mind or of mere feeling, but of a real meeting of two Realities.”—Ed.

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There is perhaps no better way of clarifying our own sense of the myth, than to ask how Plato understood the meaning of this word. For Plato, myth consists in a record of divine events as a reality directly experienced through the senses. Accordingly, any attempt to describe divine happenings as a transcendant process, or as an experience of the soul, should not be called myth. A lecture on theology, even though it has evangelical simplicity and grandeur, a record of ecstatic visions, however impressive and convincing, both stand outside the sphere of myth proper.

So profound and deep-rooted is this ancient tradition, as to what myth is, that it is not. hard to see how it came to be supposed that the power to create myths was peculiar to those peoples for whom the divine was an objective substance, capable of being seen, heard, and felt, and who consequently conceived of divine actions and sufferings as a series of purely material events. Some thinkers have gone farther and set up an opposition between the polytheistic peoples as myth-making, and the monotheistic peoples as non-myth-making. The Jewish people were numbered among the mythless peoples, and as such glorified or despised; glorified, if the appraiser looked upon the myth as an inferior stage, preliminary to religion; despised, if he looked upon myth as the summit of humanity, the natural and eternal metaphysic of the soul, and as such superior to all religions.

Such attempts—and some of them have gained wide influence—to reckon the value of a people rather than to understand the people, are always absurd and useless; most of all when they are based on an ignorance or distortion of historical reality. Ignorance and distortion are the main pillars of the modern attempt to understand the Jews through race psychology; the [German] race psychologist, for example, will discover a rationalistic or utilitarian trait in certain utterances or habits of official Judaism, and then claim to have demonstrated the essential superficial rationalism or utilitarianism of the Jews; he will not suspect or wish to suspect that such manifestations amount to no more than insignificant, if conspicuous, stoppages in the great but humble flow of ardent, devoted, disinterested Jewish popular religiosity. And the Jewish apologists, in turn, who direct their pitiful zeal to demonstrating that Judaism has no distinctive quality but is an expression of pure humanity, do the same thing in their way, being themselves imprisoned in the corruption of rationalism and utilitarianism.

Thus for a long time both sides—the racist, myth-admiring anti-Semite, and the Jewish nationalist apologist—have denied the existence of myths among the Jews. This was not difficult. Post-Biblical Jewish literature was long misunderstood. The Aggada was regarded as gratuitous fantasy, or as a collection of banal parables, the Midrash as barren and legalistic commentary, the Cabala as a senseless and grotesque juggling with numbers, Hasidism, where it was more than a mere name, was disparaged as pathological religious frenzy. And as for the Bible, even scholars of integrity could reasonably find it devoid of mythology; for it was put into its present form by a body of men inspired by the spirit of the official, late Jewish priesthood, who looked upon the inspiring source of all true religiosity, that is, upon myth, as the natural enemy of religion as they conceived it, and accordingly removed everything of a mythical nature from the abundance of written records that had come down to them.

Fortunately, the knowledge of this priesthood was limited, and certain elements of whose original character they were unaware, were allowed to slip through. And thus we find scattered through every book of the Bible veins of pure ore. Once they were uncovered by modern research, the existence of the Jewish myth could no longer be denied. But now its independence was questioned. Wherever a related mythical motif was found in another Near Eastern people, that was proclaimed as the original, the Jewish version as a copy; and where none was found, it was simply assumed that the original had been lost.

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We need not go into detail about these trivial endeavors (arising from the deep-rooted but hopeless desire of the modern European to cut loose his Christianity, which is indispensable to him, from its Jewish base); for the whole conception of history that makes these efforts possible (and it is far more important to understand this than to refute such theories one by one) is a monstrous blunder. It is entirely perverse and presumptuous to consider a phenomenon so vast as the mythology of a people from the miserably ephemeral standpoint of “originality.” Where the spirit confronts us, what matters is not originality, but reality. The works of the spirit do not exist in order that we may analyze them and then examine the products of our analysis to see whether they occur here for the first time—this whole conception of “for the first time” can govern only a petty, near-sighted mind with no notion of how the human spirit, in its history, brings forth something eternally new from material eternally the same.

And such a reality is the mythology of the Jews, as we are able to reconstruct it, despite all Jewish and non-Jewish efforts to the contrary. Jewish mythology may have all manner of “motifs” in common with the mythologies of other peoples, and it will seldom be possible to tell for sure which of these merely passed from people to people—as happens in a process of give and take among all peoples, those who are allegedly “productive” and those who are said to be “receptive”—and which of them result from a past or present kinship between the Jews and other peoples: from kindred ways of experience and kindred ways of expressing experience, and also from kindred destinies. This, I say, we shall never fully know. But that is not what is essential for us late-comers; what is essential is the purity and grandeur of creative humanity, which casts all experience into the smelting furnace, as Cellini did with his household utensils, and creates an immortal figure.

Along with the Bible, post-Biblical literature has become the object of modern research, though not in the same degree. And although here, as in the Bible, elements hostile to the myth—legalistic rigorism and rabbinical dialectic—are evident, and although these elements restricted the expression of myth, nevertheless an abundance of mythical material has been discovered. What had been taken for arbitrary comment on Biblical passages turned out to be the living re-creation of an ancient popular heritage; legendary traditions which the theologians had endeavored to stifle in preparing the canon bloomed again in their pristine richness; holy secrets that had passed from mouth to mouth through the centuries, forever being rejuvenated, culminated in the great works of Jewish mysticism.

Rationalistic Jewish apologists could now, after the disclosure of the mythical elements in the post-Biblical literature, no longer sustain the fiction that there was no Jewish myth. Hence they tried a new tack: they now distinguished between a negative, mythological Judaism and a positive, monotheistic Judaism. They condemned the former as a barrier, a screen against the light, and upheld the latter as the true doctrine. They sanctioned the struggle of Rabbinism to destroy the myth, called it the progressive purification of the idea, and themselves joined in the struggle. David Neumark, an outstanding Jewish scholar affiliated with this trend, although he set himself higher aims than do the apologists, formulated this attitude as follows: “The history of the development of the Jewish religion is in truth the history of the struggles for liberation from Jewish and alien, old and new, mythology.”

These words contain a truth, but obscure it by their partisanship. Let us attempt to clarify the truth by formulating the thought more fairly: “The history of the development of the Jewish religion is the history of the struggles between the natural mythical-monotheistic popular religion and the intellectual-monotheistic religion of the rabbis.”

I have said: the mythical-monotheistic popular religion; for it is by no means true that monotheism and myth exclude one another, or that a people of monotheistic feeling must necessarily be lacking in the power to create myth. Any living monotheism is, on the contrary, replete with the mythical element, and only so long as this is so, can it truly be called living. It is true that Rabbinism, in its blind striving for the “fencing off” of Judaism, sought to create a monotheistic faith “purified” of myth; but what it created in this way was a wretched homunculus. And this homunculus became the Exilarch; he ruled over the generations of the Galuth; under his tyranny, the living force of the Jewish experience of God, i.e., the myth, was compelled to lock itself up in the tower of the Cabala, or take refuge close to the spinning wheels of women, or quit the ghetto for the outside world: it was tolerated only as esoteric doctrine, or despised as superstition, or condemned as heresy—until Hasidism placed it upon a short-lived throne, from which it was thrust down, to wander in the guise of a beggar through our melancholy dreams.

And yet it was to myth that Judaism owed its innermost strength in times of danger. It was not Josef Caro but Isaac Luria in the 16th century, not the Gaon of Vilna but the Baal Shem, who truly reinforced Judaism and built a hedge around it; for they raised up the popular religion to be a power in Israel and renewed the national personality via the roots of its myth. And if it is so hard for the emancipated Jews of our generation to fuse their human religiosity with their Judaism, it is the fault of Rabbinism, which emasculated the Jewish ideal. But if nevertheless the road to unity still stands open before us; if it remains possible that by reverencing the divine according to our individual feeling, we may still hear the wing-beats of the Jewish spirit, it is the sublime power of our myth that we have to thank for it.

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In order to know the essence of the monotheistic Jewish myth, and thereby to achieve a profounder conception of myth as such, we must study the genesis of Jewish monotheism as it is revealed in the Bible. We then discover three stages of development that can be clearly differentiated. The first of these historical stages—which must not be confused with the different documentary sources as distinguished by modern Bible criticism—bears the name of Elohim, the second of Yahweh, the third bears both names in order to designate a divine being, who is in truth nameless, in his twofold manifestation as universal God and national God. Each of these three stages has its specific mythology; it is the three together that constitute the structure of the Jewish myth.

In the Bible the name Elohim usually occurs as a singular, but there is no doubt that it was originally a plural, and that its approximate meaning was “the powers.” We find many traces of this multiple divinity, which is not differentiated into diverse figures with individual personalities and lives, but is, as it were, an aggregate of cosmic forces diversified in essence but fused in action, a sum of creating, preserving, and destructive powers, a strange and incomparable cloud of gods, moving over the earth, taking counsel with itself, and deriving decisions from its counsels.¹ Related manifestations can be found among other peoples; but these are all secondary, auxiliary deities—there is nothing comparable to the monumental mono-pluralism of the Elohim myth.

Unique also is its further development. Within the multiplicity of the Elohim, a dominant power takes form, a principal being which bears a name; he draws to himself more and more power, and finally, adorned with the mythical insignia of an old tribal god, detaches himself as an independent ruler: Yahweh. . . . Still the people sing: Who is like unto Yahweh among the sons of the gods? But soon the powers that were formerly his companions become his servants, hosts which follow in his train and augment his name: Yahweh of the army of powers, Yahweh Tzebaoth. Finally, Elohim sinks to the level of a mere attribute: the only God is named Yahweh Elohim.

Yahweh is the divine hero of his people, and the age-old hymns that have come down to us as though from an early geological epoch, scattered through the Prophets, Job, the Psalms, praise his victories and acts of prowess, each an authentic myth; and tell us how he shattered the monster of chaos, and how he laid the foundations of the earth as the morning stars sang together.

And now we encounter that supreme striving in Judaism which did not content itself with a formal unity but advances to a higher, perfect unity, amplifying this cosmic-national Yahweh into the God of the universe, the God of mankind, the God of the soul. But the God of the universe may no longer walk in the evening beneath the trees of his paradise, and the God of mankind may no longer wrestle with Jacob until dawn, and the God of the soul may no longer burn in the bush that is not consumed. The Yahweh of the prophets is no longer a sensory reality; and the old mythical images in which he is glorified are now nothing more than metaphors for his ineffability. At this point, the rationalists would seem to have been proved right, the Jewish myth appears to be ended. But that is not true. Thousands of years later, the people had not yet really accepted the idea of a God who could not be sensibly experienced, And, moreover, the rationalists make their concept of the myth too narrow and too small.

We have called myth the recording of divine events as sensory reality. But this does not mean that only the narrative of the acts or sufferings of a god represented as material substance deserve the name of myth. Its meaning is rather: that we must call myth any narrative of a sensibly real event in which this event is felt and represented as divine.

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The “civilized” man’s knowledge of the world is built upon the basis of causality, upon the contemplation of events in an empirical context of cause and effect. Only through this are we enabled to orient ourselves, to find our way in an endless flux of happenings; but at the same time our sense of the particular event is weakened, because it is apprehended only in its relation to other events, and not in itself. In primitive man, the notion of causality is still very rudimentary. It is almost excluded in his dealings with phenomena such as dreams or death, which it is beyond his power to familiarize himself with by questioning, repetition, re-examination; or in his attitude toward men who affect the course of his life through a dominating demonism that he cannot understand by analogy with his own faculties—such men as the magician and the hero. He does not fit these phenomena into patterns of causality as he does the trivial happenings of his day, he does not assimilate the acts of such men into a chain of events similar to his own deeds and those of his familiars. Unchecked by casuality, he seizes upon their concreteness with all the tension and passion of his soul, and relates them, not to cause and effect, but to their own content, to their own meaning as manifestations of the ineffable world, a meaning that is manifested only in them. From this results the inadequate empirical insight of primitive man into some elemental experiences, but also his exalted feeling for the irrational in the particular experience, for that element in it which cannot be understood on the basis of other events, but can only be seen in itself as the symbol of a secret, supra-causal context, the tangible sign of the absolute. He installs these events in the world of the absolute, of the divine: he mythicizes them.

This faculty for mythicizing, for creating myths, survives in later man despite the development of the causal faculty. In times of great tension and intensity of experience, the fetters of causality fall away from man: he experiences the world process as something meaningful beyond causality, as the manifestation of a central meaning that cannot, however, be apprehended by thought, but only by an alertness of the senses, a vibrance of one’s whole being, and then it becomes a visible reality, present in all multiplicity. Even today, any man who is truly alive stands in approximately this relation to the man he regards as his hero; he can fit him into a chain of causality, but nevertheless he mythicizes him, because mythical contemplation opens up a deeper, fuller truth than any consideration of causality.

Thus the myth is an eternal function of the soul.

It is a source both of wonder and illumination to observe how this function makes contact with the fundamental attitude of Jewish religiosity and yet encounters in it a heterogeneous, transforming element; how, as though by nature, the Jewish myth is part of a historical continuity and yet at the same time possesses its own special imprint.

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The fundamental attitude of Jewish religiosity and the core of that Jewish monotheism which has been so vastly misunderstood, so cruelly rationalized, is to regard all things as manifestations of God, all events as a revelation of the Absolute. Whereas for the other great monotheist of the Orient—the Indian thinker as we see him in the Upanishads—sensory reality is an illusion to be sloughed off in order to enter into the world of truth, for the Jew sensory reality is a revelation of the divine spirit and will. Hence for the Indian, as later for the Platonist, all myth is metaphor, while for the Jew it is an authentic record of God’s revelation on earth. The ancient Jew could narrate only mythically, because for him an event was worth telling only when it had been apprehended in its divine meaning. All the narrative books of the Bible have one content: the story of Yahweh’s encounters with his people. And later, when from being visible in the pillar of fire and audible in the thunder over Mt. Sinai, God recedes to the silence and darkness of transcendence, this continuity of the mythical narrative is not broken off; true, Yahweh can no longer be perceived, but all his manifestations in nature and history are still within the sensory sphere. These manifestations form the infinite subject-matter of post-Biblical myth.

The nature of what I have called the distinctive character of the Jewish myth follows from what I have said. It does not suspend causality, but merely replaces empirical causality by a metaphysical causality, a causal connection between experienced events and God’s being. And this is not meant merely in the sense that the events are brought about by God; it is the more fertile and profound reverse movement that becomes more and more clearly defined: the conception of the influence of man and his works upon the destiny of God. This conception, which very early found both a naive and a mystical expression, and which attains its highest expression in Hasidism, teaches that the divine in things lies dormant and can be awakened only by him who approaches things with dedication and sanctifies himself in them. Sensory reality is divine, but it must be realized in its divinity through the man who authentically experiences it. The glory of God is banished into concealment, it lies fettered in the fundament of each thing, and in each thing it is released by the man who through vision or action sets free the soul of this thing. And thus to each man it is given to affect God’s destinies by his own life; thus each living man is rooted in living myth.

To these two conceptions correspond the two basic forms in which the Jewish myth has developed: the saga of the deeds of Yahweh, and the legend of the central man who perfectly fulfills. The one follows the course of the Bible, so that around the canonical Scripture a kind of parallel, legendary Bible has formed, scattered through innumerable books; but to it have been added a good many episodes of later history, and stories not fixed in time. The second form of myth starts out with certain Biblical characters, particularly those mysterious figures which the canonical text has neglected, such as Enoch, who was transformed from flesh into fire and from a mortal man into Metatron, the prince of the divine countenance; it narrates in cosmic breadth the life of the holy men who ruled over the inner world, from Yeshua of Nazareth to Israel son of Eliezer, the Baal Shem. The first form represents as it were the eternal context, the second the eternal renewal. The first teaches us that we are contingent, the second that we can become absolute. The first is the myth of world preservation, the second of world redemption.

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¹ Here I can present only the results of research; hut anyone who consults the Bible text without prejudice and with an understanding for the meanings of Hebrew words will find examples of this.