Thirty-two years before the Baal-Shem-Tov was born, there died within a short space of time two remarkable Jews. Both no longer belonged to the Jewish community, the one, the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, through the excommunication of the synagogue, the other, the “Messiah” Sabbatai Zvi, through conversion to Islam. These two men mark a late-exilic catastrophe of Judaism, Spinoza a catastrophe in spirit and in the influence on the Gentile nations, Sabbatai Zvi in life and in the inner structure. Spinoza has certainly remained without important historical influence on Judaism, but still he belongs in its course of history, and in an essential manner; for as Sabbatai’s apostasy signified the historical placing in question of Jewish Messianism, so Spinoza’s teaching signified the historical placing in question of the Jewish belief in God. Both thereby conducted to its conclusion a process which had begun with a single historical manifestation, with Jesus. To both a new process provided the reply and the correction, a process which also began with a single historical manifestation, with that of the Baal-Shem-Tov.--Martin Buber (1960) The Origin And Meaning of Hasidism, Chapter 3.
Paul Lodge renewed my attention to Buber's text. In it, Buber creates a historical dialectic in which the founder of the Hassidic movement, the Baal-Shem-Tov, is the sublating synthesis of the historical interaction (well, co-presence in Judaism) of Spinoza and Sabbatai-Zvi. Some other time I contest Buber's interpretation of Spinoza and Buber's understanding of the Hassidic relationship to Spinoza and Spinozism (short version: the Hassidic praxis he characterizes and praises as a response to Spinoza just is a species of Spinozism).* Rather, what caught my attention is his interpretation of Sabbatai-Zvi, the messianic figure:
To it undoubtedly also belongs the fact that the last in this series—that Sabbatai Zvi who died in the same year as Spinoza—sank into the deepest problematic, slid over from an honest self-assurance into a pretended one, and ended in apostasy. And it was not a small band that clung to him, like the followers of the earlier men in the series. Rather Jewry itself adhered to him and accepted his statements as legitimate proclamations, statements which they once would have found intolerable and would have taken as evidence against any divine summons. It was, to be sure, a Jewry distraught in an abyss of suffering, but it was still the bearer of a real crisis: the self-dissolution of automessianism. Always before, the people had resisted the proclamations of the “meshihim” and its own thirst for redemption. Now that it gave up its resistance this one time, the catastrophe prepared the end not merely of this one event, but of the whole form of the event: the meeting of a man who had taken the fateful step from the hiddenness of the servants of the Lord to Messianic self-consciousness, with a group who took it upon themselves to begin the kingdom of God.
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The Hasidic message of redemption stands in opposition to the Messianic self-differentiation of one man from other men, of one time from other times, of one act from other actions. All mankind is accorded the co-working power, all time is directly redemptive, all action for the sake of God may be Messianic action. But only unpremeditated action can be action for the sake of God. The self-differentiation, the reflexion of man to a Messianic superiority of this person, of this hour, of this action, destroys the unpremeditated quality of the act.
According to Buber if a person is thought literally the Messiah, then (s)he stands against a fundamentally egalitarian conception of mankind. That is to say, viewing oneself or another as a Messiah introduces hierarchy where there should be none. It also violates a kind of egalitarian conception of time: there is no special historical moment. (There is a kind of historical PSR lurking in the background here.) From the vantage point of eternity, all moments are created equally and all actions are meaningful, and there are no actions that have extra-special meaning. As an aside, it strikes me that Buber denies here the chosen-ness of the Jewish people and treats them/us -- mediated by Hassidic praxis -- as exemplars for the world.
One striking feature of of Buber's language is the invocation of catastrophe and "real crisis" in his evaluation of the response to Sabbatai-Zvi. Given that Buber is writing in the shadow of the Holocaust it is worth reflecting on his evaluation. His condemnation of Sabbatai-Zvi is, as it were, ethical, but his condemnation of the Jewish response to Sabbatai-Zvi is political. For, he discusses the followers of Sabbatai-Zvi not as deluded and despairing individuals, but he treats them in toto as "the people" and "Jewry." That is to say, in Buber's treatment Sabbatai-Zvi is treated as a (false) political authority whose "statements are" taken as "legitimate proclamations."
Buber's way of characterizing this is that the seventeenth century Jews mistakenly attempted to "begin the kingdom of God." Now, there is a lot to be said about that, especially because the idea of a 'kingdom of God' is (in my opinion) more Christian than Jewish. And that's to say that Buber treats them as way-ward Christians (of the sort who cannot leave to Ceasar what is properly Ceasar's). But the more important point is that Buber is suggesting that any people can embrace a charismatic, demagogical leader--and that it is the people's choice to resist doing so.
*There is also another problem with Buber's claim in that he ignores how reform Judaism is a product of Spinozism.
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