Nationalism and Education

National education almost inevitably transforms itself into indoctrination. This claim, of course, demands qualification. The term “national” modifies the term “education.” It suggests that whatever education might be it serves the needs and desires of a national body. The very idea of a “nation” is a mythic construction that demands implanting into those to be considered “citizens” (See Anderson 1983; Hobsbawm 1983; Hobsbawm 1990). A national education, then, means an education designed to inculcate a story intended to create a sense of nationality. It refers to that type of education dedicated to producing civic mindedness, civil identity, and acceptance of a vision of a certain civil order.

What is meant by “education?” Martin Buber, whose pedagogical views form the substance of this essay, defined education as “the selection of an effective world” by and in a person in response to the “constructive forces of the world” that the educator has weighed, “rejected and confirmed” and offers as a tool to the student who is making the selection of such a world (Buber 1965, p. 129). Following Buber, as used here the word refers to all situations in which one or more individuals seek to guide, motivate, inform, or in some other way enter into the space of another individual or individuals. That definition embraces formal education and informal learning, it includes the education of children and adults, it extends to both intentional and unintentional interactions. The definition is general because both nations and groups within them use a variety of means to shape and influence their constituents. It aims to produce citizens of a certain type. The “effective world” that students select has, in fact, been chosen for them by the national myth and those who control such myth-making.

National education defined in that way, as Gur-Ze’ev notes, involves either agents or victims of the system. It fails to educate for the challenges of this post-modern world through a process of normalization into a specific social context. In place of this education that “normalizes” those in the system, Gur-Ze’ev offers a “counter-education.” This model intentionally denies the story of national identities by offering what might be called either a “global” identity or, perhaps more accurately, an identity that defies categorization. Gur-Ze’ev advocates a modern “nomadism,” best symbolized by the orcha or desert caravan. Rather than creating a homeward looking myth of return, he advocates a “Diasporic” or exilic position of homelessness (Gur-Ze’ev 2001b, p. 255, compare as well Gur-Ze’ev 2011 and Gur-Ze’ev and Roth 2007).

The rejection of all national education, however, may be too extreme. Certainly the “aggressive and exclusive ideology which has blighted much of our own century” continues through the present unabated. The question of whether it can have its “sting” removed remains an important one to answer (See Mosse, p. 158). Perhaps only an educational system predicated on different principles can save nationalism from failure. The Zionism of Martin Buber might well illustrate a nationalism without its sting of aggressive ideology (ibid., p. 167). That approach to a Zionist education seems more like the “counter-education” that Gur-Ze’ev proposes than to the national education against which many protest. Buber’s dialogical model, however, differs significantly from Gur-Ze’ev’s approach.

Martin Buber, in the middle of the twentieth century, already understood the problem of nationalism and its mythic foundations. He saw in it a symptom of disease, the awareness that the community suffered a lack, that it was in crisis (1963, p. 219). His response, however, differed from Gur-Zeev’s. He sought a similar end—a nationalism that would transcend any defined or definite goal. His metaphor, however, was not homelessness but rather a reinterpretation of the Jewish ideal of Zion, of the home toward which Jews have yearned but—even now—have not attained. Buber accepted the concept of nationalism as a point of departure, but he inculcated a new mythic vision. His embracing of myth marked his thought in all its aspects, and his pedagogy reflected this (on Buber and myth more generally see Breslauer). Although Buber considered national education an essential part of any human community, he sought to transform learning into a path toward a flexible, indeterminate, and always changing selfhood.  Leon Putman summarizes Buber's idea that “genuine education is education of character” and advocates this lesson as essential for all pedagogy (Putnam 1969, p. 230).

Ideology often presents itself as the spirit of a nation. Buber accepts that claim only so long as the ideology does not make the nation itself its ultimate goal (1948, p. 260). The contemporary situation, Buber avers, displays a degenerate nationalism—one that presents individuals as representatives of a specific type. People encounter one another not as human beings but as symbols of a national ideology. Buber claims that we have “reduced the man who holds opinion and formulates judgments to the ideological,” and thereby lost the ability to encounter the other openly and willing to discover a surprise in that encounter (1948, p. 174). Despite these misgivings Buber insists on the primacy of a national education based on what he considered Jewish values.

Martin Buber’s Perspective

Buber views national education through the prism of his understanding of humanity. Teaching, he suggests, consists less in the transmission of a specific message or content than in the transformation of lives, a transformation that creates what he calls “apostles” who through their life experiences transmit “immediacy” by expressing the “essence” of the teacher (Buber 1963, p. 7). This view of education accepts all learning situations—whether formal or informal, experimental or classic, individualistic or group. Understanding Buber’s use of myth as a mode of national education requires study not only of his explicit statements on learning and teaching but also of the way his myth of Zion informs and is informed by the entire corpus of his work. His perspective on Zionist education arises in conjunction with his entire corpus of writing and thinking.

This essay examines his thought both in the context of his time and as it applies to education in Israel today. Theology informs his thinking in such a way that even his pedagogy requires an investigation of his understanding of God. Buber takes the idea of the divine very seriously, but he does not take it literally. He may be one of those humanistic “killers of God” whom Gur-Ze’ev considered in exile in the modern times (2010, p. 31), but he still uses and privileges that word. Buber, unlike traditional religionists, does not locate the divine in any specific place but rather as a presence discovered in dialogue with others. Education seemed to him just such a locality. He insisted that an educator by focusing on his task as a teacher actually enables a person to encounter the divinity. He claimed “The educator who helps to bring man back to his own unity will help to put him again face to face with God” (Buber 1965a, p. 117). Such an educator does not aim toward either a religious or political ideology but rather toward the human being faced in the pedagogic setting.

Understanding this conviction means first discerning why Buber thought that education could translate Judaism into a modern language that would give rise to true dialogue. Buber’s pedagogical method grows out of that belief and needs more complete examination. Buber depended on this pedagogy to realize his vision of Zionism, and an analysis shows that this Zionism failed to become a reality. Finally it entails looking at what Buber meant by “myth” and how Buber’s myth of Zion might create a possible strategy as an alternative to what Gur-Ze’ev calls “counter-education.” After these investigations Buber’s advocacy for teaching a positive myth of Zion becomes more clearly a basis for a more open and responsive national education. National education understood in Buber’s terms loses its quality of indoctrination and becomes a vehicle for human development.

Translating Judaism into Modernity

Martin Buber’s view of education plays an important role in his general agenda for translating Judaism into the language of the modern world. While his aim resembled that of Moses Mendelssohn who translated Jewish sources into a modern mode so as to bring his audience closer to modernity, Buber used modernity to bring his audience closer to Judaism. This distinction shows itself in the way each translated the Hebrew Bible into German. Emil Fackenheim uses these two translations as bookends to German Jewish philosophy. He claims that this philosophy began when Mendelssohn translated the Bible into German “to teach German Jews to speak German” and ended when Buber translated it into a very idiosyncratic German “to teach Hebrew to German speakers” (Fackenheim 1996, p. 40).

Both thinkers shared a pedagogical orientation. They were to draw attention to truth, to point the way, to prepare for a greater realization. They saw their task as educational in the broadest sense. Mendelssohn hoped to inspire a “Jewish cultural renaissance” that would show both that Jews could read the Bible critically and could contribute to rational discourse (Breuer 1996, 115–116). Mendelssohn differed from Emmanuel Kant precisely because he valued education so highly. Whereas Kant thought of “Enlightenment” as pointing beyond politeness and civilized action to embrace a total human attitude, Mendelssohn made education the key to becoming a member of the Enlightenment. Education provides the pathway to being enlightened (Rotenstreich 1979). Translating Judaism into modern terms meant educating Jews in modernity.

Buber inherited Mendelssohn’s valuation of education. He viewed learning as a way of affirming Jewish identity. Such an approach differs from those who saw all learning as value-free, who emphasized objectivity rather than subjectivity of education. That distinction continues through the present day in discussions about modern Jewish education both in the state of Israel and elsewhere (Meyer 2004). Although he embraced the idea of education as a means of evoking a person’s identity, Buber refused to limit its scope to Jews and Judaism. He inherited what has been called a legacy of Hegel: focusing on the needs of humanity through acting within a specific society. Being morally educated meant being “responsible to mankind (sic)” as a whole while being embedded within “a concrete community” (Seidel 2005, p. 124). Buber took this view of education seriously. He combined the universal possibility of entering into immediate meeting with the divine with the concrete facts of Zionism in the modern world.

This objective has its expression in Buber’s vision of a renewed Judaism. He sees two aspects to this renewal. The first is a reclamation of what he thinks of as the “primal” insight in Judaism of the “truth of dialogue.” The second is that this dialogue takes place through its realization “in communal life.” (Mendes-Flohr 1991, p. 301). Education provides the opportunity for such a realization. It helps create communal life by offering a common goal and shared aspiration among individuals who seem to pursue different objectives but are oriented toward a single, overarching, purpose. “Community,” he avers, “is the overcoming of otherness in living unity” (Buber 1963, p. 101). As Dan Avnon points out this “overcoming” depends first on “the prior creation of social frameworks” of which education is an essential part (Avnon 1993, p. 60).

Education in the Between

The truth of dialogue may sometimes be taken to too great an extreme. Buber contends that some human relationships involve an incomplete dialogical relationship, one in which responsibility may mitigate mutuality. Buber gives the interaction of teacher and student as an example of a relationship that cannot be fully that of am I to a Thou. Mutuality, he says, is forbidden in “a purposive working of one part on another” (1937, pp. 120–124). He recognizes that the relationship between teacher and student requires a type of distance and reserve. The teacher must remain an outsider who draws the student into a new understanding rather than a partner in a direct relationship. The educational setting represents an important aspect of Buber’s thinking in general and about Jewish national identity in particular.

Buber often taught through the use of Jewish texts. He is justly famous for his transformation of Hasidic mystical texts, but his engagement with biblical and post biblical literature also illuminated those writings. He explained that his purpose as a teacher was not to impose a meaning either on the text he used or on the pupil studying the text. He shows his own processes of thinking and living to the student without forcing the student to accept them. “To him whom I teach,” he suggests, “I make visible the working forces of the text that I have experienced” (1963, p. 100) This approach typifies Buber’s pedagogical method.

The teacher displays his own inner workings to students. This encourages them to follow a similar pathway, not to accept the teacher’s authority as such but to share the teacher’s experience. The teacher’s directive to the student has two consequences. First, it opens the student to the wider world that the teacher has encountered. A student’s vista widens through the agency of the teacher. Secondly, the teacher’s own self-evaluation enables students to develop their own “world view conscience,” their own means of testing their beliefs and discoveries. The teacher’s example helps students by showing how to evaluate possibilities rather than by imposing an evaluation on those possibilities (ibid., p. 103). This view of the relationship between teacher and student underlies Buber’s advocacy of “the truth of dialogue.”

Buber’s Dialogical Education in Context

Buber’s view of the unequal dialogue of education grew out of his engagement with a specific historical context. Buber lived in a time when educational theory provoked much debate. Two forms of pedagogy competed for dominance: that of a traditional pedagogy giving the teacher authoritarian power over the pupil and a contrasting pupil-centered pedagogy that sought to create an environment in which the teacher enabled the students to realize their inner potential without intervening or guiding that realization (Hilliard 1973).

In that context, Buber developed his own thinking. He expressed his position by means of two analogies. One type of educator is like a gardener who carefully cultivates the soil, prepares the groundwork for growth, and then allows nature to complete the task. A second type of educator is like a sculptor. That type sees a potential in the student and then molds the raw material to realize that potential (1948, pp. 149–154). Buber finds both of those approaches limited. He comments, “The gardener educator has not enough confidence; the sculptor too much” (ibid., p. 150). Buber’s approach claimed that a teacher who was fully alive to the student could influence the pupil without intervening or imposing an external system or set of beliefs on that pupil. Buber sees the teacher engaging with the student and acting as a “critical guide” who provides perspective but in a non-coercive way.

This thinking derived from and guided his view of a national education. Buber realized that his earliest models—those of the Israeli kibbutz pioneer and of the mystical Hasidic master—were not useful in the modern setting (Yaron 1993, p. 141). The historical debate in which he found himself entailed that Buber’s pedagogy would balance the authority of the teacher (perhaps idealized in the Hasidic Zaddik) with a concern for equality and social unity (perhaps idealized in the “utopia” Buber located in the kibbutz. A Jewish national education would follow the middle path. Its teachers would reflect a mythic Zion in their person and life experiences. Its students would learn from these teachers to judge the different “Zionisms” presented to them and develop a critical conscience, discovering through interaction with their teacher the most appropriate world view for a modern national identity. In this way the teacher acts like a “filter” for the student rather than as a “funnel” pouring “truth” into the student or as a “pump” bringing the truth hidden within the student out into the open (ibid., p. 139). Buber’s national education abjures the doctrinal rigidity Gur-Ze’ev laments, but also rejects the abandonment of national identity that Gur-Ze’ev suggests.

This national education required both responsible instructors and responsive student. The key to its success lies in what can be called “inclusiveness.” The teaching situation requires an inclusive environment, one in which both teacher and student share. While their respective roles differ, the occasion remains one of mutuality as the teacher draws forth the student’s recognition of social and personal responsibility (ibid., pp. 135–136). This final development of Buber’s thought reflects his wrestling with the debates of his time. His opposition to both a student-centered and a teacher-centered pedagogy led to a dialogical approach that transcended either of those models. He finally determined that such an educational system was “the only way of integrating people within a community” and of resolving disputes through discussion, education and the sharing of experience” (Morgan and Guilherme 2010, p. 993; compare their book 2014). As a result of this engagement with his context, Buber set forth a new ideal for the teacher as a partner in an educational encounter as a model of national education.

Prophets and Philosophers as Educators

At the base of Buber’s pedagogy as expressed here lies his ethical concerns. He calls for openness, but it must be of the right type. While openness is precious, it should not preclude taking a stand, holding some values as enduring (Buber 1948, p. 42). Buber calls upon people to turn toward the good, a direction that Buber finds explicit in the Hebrew Bible and in Judaism more generally. Ethical responsibility lies in this effort of turning, an effort he associates with education (Cohen 1979, pp. 86–90). Jewish consciousness recognizes both the human need to help others and the need of others for help. The educational program Buber advocates springs from this double fact—the ability to give to others and the ability to acknowledge what has been given. Buber insists that ethics occurs in the “between,” in relationship. The ethical deed is one in which “You shall awaken in the other the need of help, in yourself the capacity to help” (Buber 1963, p.110). Education serves as such an awakening. How can a teacher fulfill this obligation? The awakening occurs in a dialogue and cannot translate into ordinary experience.

The teacher dedicated to this task often must choose one of two ways to pursue it. Buber learns from Jeremiah no less than from the Eden story in the Bible that a teacher can either present students with the choice before them or announce to them the inevitable disaster that they face (ibid., pp. 196–198). The ethics of sharing one’s process and providing a conscience are derivative from the biblical teachings that Buber considers essentially Jewish. The test of being a true teacher lies in whether the student emerges more aware of the ethical problems facing them or of the consequences of unethical behavior. The teacher does not coerce the student or even present the student with solutions to these issues. The teacher, like a biblical prophet, places the student before the inevitable choices arising from his context.

Buber privileges a prophetic source in several of his writings. His contrast between Plato and Isaiah demonstrates this approach (1948, pp. 104–112; 1963, pp. 182–190). Both Isaiah and Plato, according to Buber, attempted to change society. Isaiah brought a message of divine concern to the Israelite king he served. He called for a political program different from that of expediency. Plato, at least in his seventh letter upon which Buber relies, warned by the fate of his master Socrates, seems to seek an altered political order governed by the eternal laws of truth. Both of them fail in their attempts to change society, Buber affirms. Yet Plato, he thinks, failed because he sought power as a means of enacting unchanging ideals. He desired a ruler who, Buber thinks, lives under the rational laws of philosophy. He seeks power in the political realm by teaching the political leaders of his time. Buber contrasts such a political scheme with a true social program. The social thinker, unlike the political thinker, analyzes society, recognizes both its potential and its problems, but does not seek to instigate a change in government. The social thinker imagines a better civil community and speaks to the community about this possibility but does not attempt a political coup or the installation of new governing bodies.

Buber begins his analysis by noting that Kant had taken issue with Plato’s hope for a philosopher king. Kant had averred that “power corrupts” and that no political leader could maintain a positive and ethical philosophy. Reflecting on Plato’s seventh letter—the one describing his three attempts to set an educated philosophical leader as political head—Buber claims as Plato’s impetus into the political realm the execution of Socrates (Buber does not mention the other ways in which Plato uses the political failures of Socrates in this letter). Buber comments that it is not Plato but Socrates, in fact, who serves as the model teacher. Plato, unlike his teacher, hoped to transform the social order so that it would reflect the eternal values that Socrates had taught. Buber may notice, but does not remark upon, the fact that such a transformation would create a society safe for philosophers; instead Buber thinks that Plato’s aim was more than just utilitarian. Plato, he argues, sought to “purify” political leaders by his teachings so that they could wield power responsibly and create a spiritually upright community. Buber claims that Plato hoped though inspiring such a leader to set out true and eternal laws would create an ideal society built on spiritual truth. Buber concludes that Plato failed.

Buber portrays Isaiah as a different type of spiritual advocate. Like Plato Isaiah addressed the rulers of his time. He did so by proclaiming a divine ruling specific for a certain historical situation. While that ruling derived from a universal ideal—attending to the will of the divine—its actual contents were tailored to the decisions of the moment. Isaiah failed in his effort. That failure, however, lay only in influencing his generation. His call retains its spiritual message today since it speaks its word to every changing situation. It goes out again and again “to this place, to this people, it being the people who must begin.” In that way the call of the prophet retains its ability to “rankle,” to act as a gadfly again and again. Isaiah’s failure points to a future that Plato’s does not (1948, p. 112; 1963, p. 190). Isaiah is a social visionary, not a political agitator. It would seem that Buber thinks the prophet a better model for education than the philosopher.

Socrates as a Model for National Education

Strangely in the light of this discussion, Buber’s longer piece that includes the excerpt on Plato and Isaiah continues with a remarkable saying. Buber declares that the social thinker “is not a prophet but a philosopher. He does not have a message, he has a teaching” (1963, p. 190). The philosopher, not the prophet, models the true teacher. Buber’s ideal philosopher, however, is not Plato—who he thought sought political power—but Socrates. Plato, he avers, confused the social and the political, a confusion that he imputes not only to philosophers such as Rousseau but also to modernity in general (ibid., pp. 162–163).

Socrates, however, he thinks of as avoiding the corruption of power, of affirming powerlessness, and therefore becoming the educator who “alone knew how to educate the young” (ibid., p. 184). Buber imagines the dialogical approach of Socrates as true teaching—a sharing of one’s own experience without at the same time seeking to dominate or control the pupil. Socrates was a social thinker, not a political instigator, and therefore he acted as a gadfly who reminded those sunk in complacency of a higher ideal. Socrates himself has no message, only a teaching, only this opening of himself to the other. In order to escape his master’s fate Plato, according to him, seeks to teach a specific message and make it the basis for political practice (ibid.). In this way Buber thinks Plato betrayed both Socrates and the true approach to education.

Buber’s view of Plato was deeply flawed (see Kroeker 1993).Footnote 1 Buber’s literalism led him to overlook the hints Plato gives and thus misunderstand both Plato and Plato’s Socrates. His Socrates demonstrates a teacher affirming his pupils while still guiding them. In this model the teacher refuses to abdicate authority for the sake of equality in dialogue. Buber seems not to read all that Plato’s seventh letter says about Socrates. That letter does not emphasize Socrates the teacher but rather the philosopher whose internal integrity prevented him from conceding to political demands he regarded as immoral. Socrates’ fate, as reported in that letter, came from a political naïveté rather than from an unwillingness to take part in political life. Buber reads himself into Socrates rather than discover the Socrates that Plato portrays.

Such a view of Socratic pedagogy resembles that given by Gur-Ze’ev (2003). Like Buber he valorizes Socrates as a model teacher who “redefines the pupil-teacher relationship” (ibid., p. 42). Unlike Buber, Gur-Ze’ev understands this redefinition as a radical equality in which pupil and teacher engage in a common partnership of accepting “otherness.” They radically affirm each other as “human beings” rather than seek normalization. The teacher does not seek to create a “normal” citizen, nor is the pupil panting after normality (ibid., p. 51). Buber’s recognition that both Socrates and Plato seek to undermine the “normal” social order does correspond to Gur-Ze’ev’s call for a “counter-education.” Buber’s view, however, differs significantly by showing that both Plato and Socrates, provide a social vision he wants to impart to students. Buber’s aim includes a social program, a national education rather than a counter-education. To achieve this aim he insists that the teacher remain in authority, guiding the pupil because he has a “teaching,” that is his experience and being who has encountered that which is still awaiting the pupil.

Gur-Ze’ev comments, as Buber does not, on the Platonic penchant for myth. He used myth as “meaningful” instruments of learning rather than as “absolute truths or opium for the people” (ibid., p. 60). Buber himself uses myth in that way, being, perhaps, more Platonic than he admits. A prime myth that he develops is that of Zion. His Zionism differs significantly from the Jewish nationalism that dominates Israeli education today and plays a crucial role in the pedagogy that he advocates. A later section in this essay examines that mythic element in education, but before turning to it the next section examines how Buber’s views on education have elicited both agreement and dissent among educators today.

Evaluating Buber’s Views on Education

Buber’s emphasis on “the truth of dialogue” shapes his understanding of education and has influenced pedagogical theory generally. His idea of “relational education” helps explain why one school succeeds and another fails (Guccione 2011). It has been hailed as a way to change the atmosphere in which learning takes place and the learning situation (Adkins 1999). Buber’s understanding of dialogue has been used as a technique in research and extended into an analysis of education and the oppressed (MacInnis and Portelli 2002; Wexler 1999). Pedagogues apply his thought to higher education, adult learning, and every educational context and compare it with other theories of modern education such as those found in Summerhill by A. S. Neill or in the experimental writings and communities of Robert Owen (Collins 1980 and Dror 1994). Advocates for social change see his educational thinking useful in their endeavors (Freire 2005). Much like Buber, Paolo Freire calls for an open educational approach. He advocates a dialogical method in which “cooperation” works to transform the world for the better rather than an “antidialogical” method in which “domination” seeks to transform citizens into a predetermined mold (ibid., 147).  Even those who want to go “beyond Buber” suggest that his similarities to Freire outweigh his differences (Roberts 1999, p. 188).  Important though this influence and commonality may be, Buber's view goes beyond a simple call for dialogue. Merely emphasizing the dialogical process misses Buber’s ideal of a national education that uses myth to evoke an experience of the divine.

This theological and national aspect of Buber’s educational vision often goes unnoticed, leading to criticism of his pedagogy. Many who appropriate Buber’s thinking misunderstand his view of education by concentrating only on his philosophy of I and Thou; they think that teachers are asked to surrender their authority and control. Because Buber understands education as a special case—a relationship in which one member—the teacher—must maintain a distance from the other member, the student he might disagree with those who take an exclusively dialogical stance. Those who adopt his thinking often overlook his emphasis on the teacher as filter and as one who provides a basis for developing a world view conscience (Cohen 1979). By misrepresenting Buber’s sense of the teacher’s responsibility for the learning situation critics find a subjectivity that is not present. Buber’s desire for a national identity requires him to place some distance between the student and the teacher so that the teacher can share a vision that may lead the student to new insights. Without taking Buber’s nationalist concerns seriously, even those who look positively at Buber’s pedagogy tend to mistake its meaning.

Another criticism claims that Buber’s educational theory lacks a means of verification. He is thought to present a case for creating trust between teacher and student, but to give no indication of how to judge whether that has taken place. Dan Avnon claims that Buber fails to provide any standard for determining if education produces the outcome he desires. He avers that Buber “does not know how to effect the transformation he so clearly desires” (Avnon 1998, p. 200). He offers no specific advice on enabling teachers to fulfill the task he assigns them. Avnon dismisses Buber’s suggestion that teachers educate themselves and bring their experience to bear on the learning situation as “platitudes not concrete explanations” (ibid., p. 199). Buber himself confesses this lack of verification. He acknowledges that “One cannot produce genuine dialogue.” Nevertheless he thinks one can “be at its disposal” and create the opportunity of it to arise (Buber 1963, p.106). He believes that education can foster such opportunities. His argument for a new type of national education depends on replacing ideology with dialogical learning.

Avnon contends that Buber’s “penchant for mythical thought” prevents him from dealing with “reality” (Avnon 1998, p. 200). In fact, Buber understands myth as exactly that tool which education can use to encourage the type of learning he advocates. Myth offers one of those opportunities that can lead to an engagement between student and teacher. National myths are not all created equal. A teacher’s processes in facing competing myths may open students to new avenues of decision-making. Buber’s lack of verification for educational achievement becomes less a failure than a reality born of a national education that focuses of national myths.

Education and Buber’s Myth of Zion

Buber’s educational thinking grew out of his general approach to Jewish nationalism and should be understood in the light of his “myth of Zion.” He advocated a Zionist education that would merge a modern identity with the ideals and values he associated with biblical Judaism. He associates Jewish identity with memory—not just memory of events but memory of attitudes toward those events, memory of essential attitudes (Buber 1948, pp. 146–147). Sometimes those memories point back to an encounter with the divine, they reawaken an original direct relationship that revealed the divinity. At other times they reinforce a sense of insecurity, a sense of national vulnerability. Those memories Buber associates with the idea of exile or, in Hebrew, galut (ibid., p. 167). Zionism sought to liberate Jews from exile.

Buber called for a regeneration of spiritual awareness, for revaluation of both the past and present, and for a resurrected cultural life, a resurrection that Buber thought would be more difficult for Jews than for other modern peoples. In this way Buber differed from other so-called “cultural Zionists” (Mendes-Flohr 2001). His nationalism reached beyond the cultural renaissance that other Zionists such as Ahad Ha-Am advocated. He wanted a revival of more than just Hebrew language and literature. He sought to renew the “shared sensibility of the Jewish people initially induced by the experience of the biblical Patriarchs and the subsequent experience of the Children of Israel at Sinai.” His nationalism sought to educate a new generation of Jews in their spiritual possibilities (Mendes-Flohr 1989, p. 164). For Buber that meant a cultivation of “Hebrew Humanism,” of a national spirituality that recalled the positive memories that evoked an encounter with the divine. In order to do that he sought to use the term “Zion” with full mythic force as a reminder of “its sacred, transcendental power.”

Educating Jews about their sacred memories meant reawakening their understanding of myth and the implications of those myths (ibid., p. 167). Buber insisted that the idea of Zion, the animating myth of the Jewish people, was never just a nationalism. It was always a challenge to make out of the people in its land an exemplary community. “Here,” he declared, “there is no `nation’ as such and no `religion’ as such but only a people interpreting its historical experiences as the actions of its God….This land was at no time in the history of Israel simply the property of the people; it was always at the same time a challenge to make of it what God intended to have made of it” (Buber 1975, xix). Education entailed reminding Jews of the significance of Zion as a challenge rather than as a fulfillment.

Buber’s pedagogy led him to reevaluate the place of stories within a tradition. As a teacher he could guide Jews back to their collective memory by sharing with them his own discoveries of the meaning of myth. He could communicate his recognition that through myth we are “confronted with something compellingly anthropomorphic, something demanding reciprocity.” The reeducation of the modern Jew depends as much on teachers who share mythic visions from the past as on factual accounts of history (Luz 1995, p. 73). Education involves not only the transmission of knowledge but also a shared understanding of how a teacher has encountered meaning in a text.

This view of education helps explain what Walter Kaufmann sees as a defect. Kaufmann suggests that Buber satisfies the desire for deception expressed by the motto “mundus vult decipi” (the world wants to be deceived),Footnote 2 an idea found in several ancient sources to explain the power of religion and attributed to several Hellenistic, medieval, and cited in the sixteenth century by Sebastian Franck. Yet Buber’s own style points beyond simplistic answers. Kaufmann criticizes Buber for obscuring his ethical challenge by his beauty of style. “Buber,” he com-plains, “makes it all too easy for his readers to avoid his ethical challenge by adopting an aesthetic orientation” (Kaufmann 1970, pp. 9, 19). This turn to the aesthetical reflects a pedagogical device pointing the careful reader to the multiplicity of possibilities beyond a simplistic view of reality.

Buber considers art itself a means of remembering a past encounter with the divine and a way of reviving that meeting. Art, he comments, records an engagement with a spiritual form and translates that form into the physical world. Within that world it endures “endlessly active, endlessly to become It, but also endlessly to become Thou again” (Buber 1937, p. 28). In that way art functions as a witness. It communicates the realm of the “between” to those whom it addresses” (Buber 1965a, p. 66). Myth serves such a function for national identity. Buber’s mythic understanding of Zionism enables it to act as a bridge between past and present, between a memory of an immediate relationship and engagement in one today (On Buber’s view of myth in general see Breslauer 1990).

In that way myth acts as a pedagogical tool as Buber seeks to wean Zionists away from a purely political approach. Ehud Luz notes that Buber’s advocacy of myth underlies his rejection of the secular Zionist desire to “normalize” Jewish existence. Buber, Luz comments, thought that the secular Zionism “severs itself from the ‘organic memory’ of Judaism,” and therefore from continuity with the Jewish past (Luz 1995, p. 78). That continuity, for Buber, would recall the duties and obligations associated with encountering the divine whether though relationships to nature, other people, or to artistic forms. That sense of the divine underlies the “Hebrew Humanism” that Luz claims Buber merged with an appreciation of myth in a unique contribution to contemporary Jewish thought (ibid., p. 89).

Buber’s View of Education and The Israeli Kibbutz

Buber clearly understood the dangers of a national education that fell into ideology and became indoctrinization. Nowhere is this tendency more evident than in the development of an institution that Buber exalted—the Israeli kibbutz. Buber hailed the experiment of collective socialism in Israel as an attempted utopia that did not fail, but cannot be said to have succeeded. He saw as its greatest asset its ability to unite groups with differing perspectives and different social plans around a single ideal. He interpreted this endeavor as a new type of social organization in which “an experimental station where, on common soil, different colonies or ‘cultures’ are tested out according to different methods for a common purpose” (Buber 1958, p. 146).

The kibbutz illustrated his myth of an ideal collectivity and of the Jews as called upon to exemplify the possibility of such a true community. He construes that community as made up of individuals who cohere around a centre—“whether manifest or otherwise” and whose every action is infused with “the process of community-building”(ibid., pp. 135, 137). He saw the kibbutz as an exemplar of such community drawing on the ideals of the Jewish tradition inspired by the injunction to build Zion as a realization of God’s hope for humanity. Buber’s uses myth in a pedagogical way to distinguish Zionism from the other nationalist movements of his time. By evoking the mythic elements in the idea of Zion he insisted that it had a deeper dimension than the merely political (Tal 1981, p. 21).

Buber put forth his perspective on the collectivist movement in a book entitled “Paths to Utopia.” Since its publication, some have questioned whether the movement could rightly be called “utopian.” Yuval Dror examines both the present day kibbutz and its earlier incarnations and compares them to Robert Owen’s utopianism. He considers the utopian to be “revolutionary” and finds that contemporary examples of the Israeli collective are far less so than they were before. Education as indoctrination into the national ideology blunted the exemplary nature of the kibbutz movement (Dror 1994, p. 98).

Philip Wexler notes that Buber himself recognized the inner contradictions within education that would lead to such a dilution of the original impetus. He traces how the need to prepare students for their life in society and their future occupations creates a tension with the desire to inculcate values and an ideology of “a pioneering socialist liberation movement” (Wexler 1979). He recognizes that as a group responds to the changing needs of society, its educational system changes. Its ideals and values alter as does its pedagogy and curriculum (Wexler 1999, p. 143). Buber himself eventually acknowledged that the kibbutz could fall into an ideological nationalism rather than true community. That such failure occurs, however, does not invalidate a continuing hope of educating for a different national ideal.

Others claim that utopian theory misidentifies the kibbutz movement. Rather than being a utopian experiment the movement merges utopian ideas with the modern Zionist ideology and with the “ancient Jewish tradition of covenanting” (Harris 1999) That view comes closest to Buber’s own thinking. Buber asserts that the work of education has as its aim the overcoming of disunity. “Educational forces,” he proclaims unites a community with “differing minds” in a common enterprise (Buber 1963, p. 102). This pedagogical concern animated his concern to create a nationalism with the sting of aggressiveness drawn. It was part of an attempt to devise a humanistic Zionism that some think ultimately failed (Mosse 1997, pp. 156–173). Indeed, the dominant form of Zionism followed a pragmatic and political approach rather than the humanism that Buber and others advocated.

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to assert that in the light of this failure he “retreated into an inner exile” (ibid., p. 167). Already in 1949 Buber founded an adult school to train educators, a formal educational setting rather than an informal one. Influenced by a Danish model of a “folk high school,” Buber’s entrance into the formal setting did not, however, undermine his dialogical commitment. Like all education, he envisioned this school’s purpose served best by an open and responsive atmosphere. This school embodied a progressive and liberal outlook that mirrored Buber’s commitment to a pedagogy leading students to a shared discovery with their teachers. It espoused and cultivated Buber’s ideal of a spiritual community that allows differences despite a shared goal (Yaron 1993, pp. 142–143). Within the national setting of modern Israel, Buber sought to infuse a new and more positive national myth.

Buber’s View of National Education and the Myth of the Nazi Holocaust

Buber insisted on this positive myth as the animating spirit of the new nation of Israel. He refused the temptation to look to current events such as the Nazi Holocaust or Jewish victimization to justify the existence of the new state (Avnon 1998, p. 204.). Some even criticize him for not writing enough about the tragedy that befell European Jewry (Forman-Barezilai 2003, p. 157). His reticence, however, shows a prescient sense that such an emphasis would lead to a myth of Zion destructive to a progressive society. His instinct has proven correct.

Ilan Gur-Ze’ev shows in several articles how the Israeli emphasis on the Holocaust undermines sensitivity to the suffering of others (Gur-Ze’ev 1998, 2000a, 2001a; Gur-Ze’ev and Pappé 2003a). Gur-Ze’ev shows how attempts to change the Israeli curriculum to reflect a more universal sense of genocide have failed. He also shows how this myth desensitizes Israelis.Footnote 3 Gur-Ze’ev suggests a different ideology—that of a Diasporic philosophy which he claims “is a kind of gaze that pays respect to the hospitality of improved utopias, dystopias and nomadism as part of the pantheistic feast and its pleasures” (Gur-Ze’ev 2010, p. 14).

Although he associates this philosophy with traditional Judaism, Gur-Ze’ev offers it as an alternative to other versions of Diaspora existence he claims exist at present (ibid., pp. 15, 20). Those versions envision either a Diaspora community optimistically moving toward enlightenment and assimilation into the general cultures among which Jews live or a monotheistic hope for redemption from Diaspora life. Both of these tend to an unhealthy self-understanding as a victimized minority. These reinforce the Holocaust myth in which Israelis see themselves as the triumphant answer to victimization. In contrast he claims “When the Jewish spirit is true to itself, however, beyond Western Enlightenment’s universalism or Zionist particularism, it offers health, growth and self-containment” (ibid., p. 22). This seems to produce a mythology of its own, a postmodern myth of Diaspora Zionism. In this way he offers a myth of Zion as itself in exile: “Israel has become the ultimate Diaspora of the Jewish Spirit” (ibid., 48).

Buber’s view directly opposes such a myth, one that he would consider negative. He associated the term exile with rabbinic Judaism and its displacement of the mythic forces in Jewish religion (Buber 1967). He considered the concept of exile as one of anxiety and “insecurity” that gave “every alliance” in Jewish history “an invisible terminating clause, every union with other civilizations is informed with a secret divisive force” (Buber 1948, p. 167). Buber contrasted this myth of exile with his positive myth of Zion. By focusing on the Jewish task of creating an exemplary community Buber restored the universalism he thought essential to his “Hebrew humanism.” As Paul Mendes-Flohr puts it “it will be the sublime task of a renewed Hebrew humanism to exemplify for all the nations of the world the possibility of healing the rift between Kultur and Zivilisation, between spirit and life” (Mendes-Flohr 1989, p. 164).

Education and Buber’s View of a Bi-National State

This Hebrew humanism underlay Buber’s alliance with Hans Kohn in advocating a bi-national state in Palestine. Buber’s attempt to redefine nationalism in humanistic ways led him to recognize the problem posed by the forcible displacement of Palestinians. He sought to make nationalism a force for peace that could stimulate a “renewal of Judaism.” He could, however, already see in 1921 that his myth of Zion would not prevail nor could he make “Zionism a humanistic, cultural force” (Wolf 1976, pp. 652–656). This recognition, however, did not stop him from pursuing his dream of restoring the myth of Zion to its actual centrality in Jewish life through creative education.

His advocacy for education in this mythic approach to the Jewish claim to the land of Israel also underlies his political stance toward the Palestinians. Not only do Jews have a myth of Zion linking them to the land, but the Arab inhabitants have an equal claim and a myth of their own. Buber uses his myth of Zion to justify both claims and the need for a bi-national state. A Jewish community that uses its solidarity to recall an originating meeting with the divine will also be a community that welcomes the similar solidarity among Arabs who have such a memory of their own (Tal 1981, pp. 29–31). This insight leads to an educational approach that seeks reconciliation between Jews and Palestinians.

Buber’s vision of an educational approach that bridges differences seems attainable. Grace Feuerverger examines the “School for Peace” located in a cooperative village with both Israeli and Arab members. She suggests that using Buber’s relational philosophy together with the insights of Paolo Freire creates an atmosphere of learning. A teacher, she claims, understood as one who facilitates both self-understanding and self-criticism through sharing an inclusive encounter can lead students from both backgrounds to a better sense of one another. The teacher helps students understand themselves and in that way better understand the “other” who also shares the encounter. She claims that the school places an “emphasis on knowledge of the self as a precursor to knowing the other” (Feuerverger 1997). Feuerverger’s optimism seems to suggest that Buber’s approach to learning can overcome the conflict between Jew and Arab in the Middle East. Using Buber’s pedagogy may increase the possibilities for a bi-national state.

Beyond the Bi-National State: Effective Worlds Colliding

Such a consequence, however, may elude even the best-intended efforts; the establishment of a “world view conscience” needs the direction and guidance of the educator. A national mythology may establish an “effective world” that no “understanding of the other” can challenge. Buber’s thinking not only met with resistance from Zionists. Palestinian advocates found much to disagree with as well. His insistence on an educational setting in which both Jews and Palestinians shared their encounter was “upsetting for Jewish Zionists and Arab Nationalists alike” (Guilherme and Morgan 2009, p. 278). Claims to the land often took on political rather than mythic implications. Buber’s emphasis on mythology suggested that neither Zionists nor Arab Nationalists have unassailable rights of ownership to the land. Both should be using their national identities as a way of learning open relationships, encountering the divine, and transcending the petty concerns of political divisiveness.

The movement away from Buber has influenced the discussion of a bi-national state itself. For Buber a bi-national state recognizes the contingency of any political body. It sees the political as a means to a greater end. Like other liberal Zionists he insisted that a Jewish value system would respect the rights of all people. Jewish living, he insisted, were a “moral guide” to behavior toward all people (Fish 2014, p. 19). In contrast a more recent call for bi-nationalism has been advocated by Palestinian thinkers. This approach to bi-nationalism arose among Arab communists who desired a federated state in which Jews and Arabs could live equally. They developed their ideas in response to what they saw as the colonialism evident in Israel’s territorial expansion after the June 1967 war. This new type of bi-nationalism “deconstructed” national identity to make ethnicity, heritage, or religion was no longer relevant. They imagined a unified society sharing a common goal of abolishing colonialism (ibid., 23–24).

The new view espoused a “dismantling” of ethnic divisions in favor of a “multi-national, multi-ethnic community.” An even more dramatic dismantling has been proposed that would strip Israel of its Jewish character; this view seeks “to replace Israel with a bi-national state, a single state shared by Arab and Jewish citizens, and one that had no identifying Jewish characteristics marking the public sphere” (ibid., p. 24). It envisions no sharing of concerns such as those animating Jews rejecting “exile” or of Palestinians seeking to renew their ancient identities.Footnote 4 Not only does it place all the burden of change upon Israel, but it also changes the very nature of a community. It requires that Jews recognize the Palestinians as the true natives in the land without asking Palestinians to recognize the Jewish heritage of the myth of Zion. They seek “a democratic polity rooted not in equality and justice for all its citizens but collective political recognition and governance of its Palestinian inhabitants” (ibid., p. 29). This means accepting one myth as a political reality and rejection the other as fiction. The new bi-nationalism, in effect, “privileges the minority Arab population “and demands that Jews forfeit their own traditions. In this way the contemporary discussion of bi-nationalism has thus devolved into a continuation by other means of the conflict between Arabs and Israeli Jews” (ibid., p. 30).

Ilan Gur-Ze’ev clearly recognizes the problems in this approach. He sees most efforts in “peace education” as part of the “normalizing” process that dehumanizes persons and merely preserves the powers controlling the status quo. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict illustrates the failure of such theories of peace (Gur-Ze’ev 2001b, pp. 329–334). What he calls for is a “counter-education” to combat this. Buber agrees with the criticism of “normalization”—he declares “We cannot enthrone “normalcy” in place of the eternal premise of our survival” (Buber 1948, p. 252). His view differed significantly from that of Gur-Ze’ev. He valued both the Arab and the Hebraic heritage. He found in each a common spiritual sensitivity.

Even more importantly, Buber demanded a positive goal and a “homecoming” for both peoples. Buber’s bi-nationalism envisions education as an opportunity to regain an original meeting with the divine. This criterion for a mythic “effective world” suggests that a nationalism without religion cannot educate for an open meeting between student and teacher. For Buber such a true community education would cultivate a mythic rooting that he considered essential for reawakening spiritual awareness. Buber represented a type of Zionism that advocated a cultivation of the Jewish past and heritage “while simultaneously accommodating the needs of all human beings and providing equality for all citizens while respecting their national, religious, and ethnic identity” (ibid., p. 30). He reached that view because he saw the Zionist claim as rooted in a mythic memory that could revive spiritual life in the present. He held that Palestinians shared a similar myth. He contended that but for the “political element” Jews and Palestinians could cooperate because of their “common origin and shared task”–that without political divisiveness Jews and Palestinians could learn a common myth (Buber 2005, 199). This positive mythic vision differs significantly differs from that of Gur-Ze’ev.

The Need For Mythic Education

The failure of communication that the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians represents may derive from the decline of myth as a way of thinking about human communities. Buber’s teachings may suggest not only a method of learning but also a curriculum. Making myth a central category of discussion may enable teachers from both Israeli and Palestinian communities to share a deeper sense of unity. Certainly myth plays a powerful role in many modern expressions of Judaism. Myth in the modern world seems distinctly different from traditional mythology. Contemporary life proliferates models of reality that could well bear the title “myth.” As Roland Barthes suggests, the ordinary perceptions ingrained into the social fabric provide the myths by which people live. Barthes defines myth as any language that merely refers to reality rather than seeking to create it. Myth, he argues, reproduces reality without seeking to create something new. He offers as examples of myth the cinematic icons, popular styles in dress, and commercial advertising (Barthes 1972).

Modern Jewish writing reflects this more recent mythic influence. Modern Jewish movements like Reform Judaism, Zionism, and Yiddishism create mythic images to legitimate their new constructions of Judaism. Jewish myth today seems particularly inclined toward political mythology as an ideology. Galit Hasan-Rokem surveys the controversy over myth in Judaism and concludes that whatever the truth has been in the past, present Jewish thought often represents mythic ways of thinking. She claims that secular ideologies, paradoxically but not really surprisingly, “revalorize traditional mythical ideas and idioms.” That is, the way Zionists, socialists, and various modern Jewish religionists invoke a typology of human nature that reinforces their political agenda (Hasan-Rokem 1987, p. 661).

Learning to see modern views in their mythological function helps students recognize that whether or not myth is an advance or a decline, its presence, potential for violence, and ability to mask institutional power as an inevitable aspect of human existence make it an important phenomenon to study. Some thinkers complain that this view of myth has transformed what had been a “religious” phenomenon into an “ordinary” one. These thinkers claim that a modern “secularized” myth prevents a narrative from fulfilling its true purpose. Calling Zionism a myth seems, to them, a cheapening of the term (ibid., 657–661).

This misunderstands myth, at least as Buber thought about it. Ideology, in his view, fails to perform the creative function of “true” myth. That type of myth is a positive force creating a view of reality and initiating a believer into it. If modern myth reduces this power of creativity to political expediency, then it has forfeited its most important function, yet in many ways the process works in reverse. By using mythic tropes, modern ideology taps a power and force otherwise unavailable (ibid.). Teaching Zionism in this way, following the lead of Buber, may correct the political dilemma facing Jews and Arabs today.