Freedom Among Not Apart

     To the question — which was not merely aimed at "tempting" him, but was rather a current and significant controversial question of the time — which was the all-inclusive and fundamental commandment, the "great" commandment, Jesus replied by connecting the two Old Testament commandments between which above all the choice lay: "love God with all your might" and "love  your neighbor as one like yourself." Both are to be "loved," God and the "neighbor" (i.e. not man in general, but the man who meets me time and again in the context of life), but in different ways. The neighbor is to be loved "as one like myself" (not "as I love myself"; in the last reality one does not love oneself, but one should rather learn to love oneself through love of one's neighbor), to whom, then, I should show love as I wish it may be shown to me. But God is to be loved with all my soul and all my might. By connecting the two Jesus brings to light the Old Testament truth that God and man are not rivals. Exclusive love to God ("with all you heart") is, because he is God, inclusive love, ready to accept and include all love. It is not himself that God creates, not himself he redeems, even when he "reveals himself" it is not himself he reveals: his revelation does not have himself as object. He limits himself in all his limitlessness, he makes room for the creatures, and so, in love to him, he makes room for love to the creatures.
     "In order to come to love," says Kierkegaard about his renunciation of Regina Olsen, "I had to remove the object." That is sublimely to misunderstand God. Creation is not a hurdle on the road to God, it is the road itself. We are created along with one another and dedicated to a life with one another. Creatures are placed in my way so that I, their fellow-creature, by means of them and with them find the way to God. A God reached by their exclusion would not be the God of all lives in whom all life is fulfilled. A God in whom only the parallel lines of single approaches intersect is more akin to the "God of the philosophers" than to the "God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob." God wants us to come to him by means of the Reginas he has created and not by renunciation of them. If we remove the object, then — we have removed the object altogether. Without an object, artificially producing the object from the abundance of the human spirit and calling it God, this love has its being in the void.
— Matin Buber, Between Man and Man (Smith, tr.), from "The Question of the Single One," pp. 51-52.

     There is a tendency to understand this freedom, which may be termed evolutionary freedom, as at the opposite pole from compulsion, from being under a compulsion. But at the opposite pole from compulsion there stands not freedom but communion. Compulsion is a negative reality; communion is the positive reality; freedom is a possibility, possibility regained. At the opposite pole of being compelled by destiny or nature or men there does not stand being free of destiny or nature or men but to commune and to covenant with them. To do this it is true that one must first have become independent; but this independence is a foot-bridge, not a dwelling-place. Freedom is the vibrating needle, the fruitful zero. Compulsion in education means disunion, it means humiliation and rebelliousness. Communion in education is just communion, it means being opened up and drawn in. Frreedom in education is the possibility of communion; it cannot be dispensed with and it cannot be made use of in itself; without it nothing succeeds, but neither does anything succeed by means of it: it is the run before the jump, the tuning of the violin, the confirmation of that primal and mighty potentiality which it cannot even begin to actualize.
— Martin Buber, Ibid., p. 91.

     "You were telling me about truth."
     "Oh, yes, what was I saying? Men want to know everything, absolutely everything. So I humor them; I make up stories; each one made to order: they would break your heart. Those impeciles adore stories and confessions. In every man there is a priest who sees in every woman an unhappy whore, a soul to save and console and bring back to the fold. Which offers him the luxury of behaving magnanimously, like a self-appoited or God-appointed protector of widows and orphans. That is what they all come for: not to make love — that too, of course — but to bring us their cheap pity and affection. 'Ah, my little one, you suffered so much as a child, here is another hundred francs. It's a present. You see: I am generous. But in exchange, pretty child, you'll be nice with me, promise?' So I pocket my tip and say thanks very much, mister, thanks very much, Father, you're so good, and kind, and have a heart of gold, the soul of a saint, come here, stretch out on me, I give myself to you, I'll let you do as you please, draw as much pleasure out of me as you wish, as you can, I'm a pleasure machine, don't worry, there'll be enough for everybody, for all the priests and saints still to come. That's what I tell them — joking, crying or beating them, depending on their taste: some like my tears, others are excited only by my fury. See? I'm not worth more than a hundred francs."
— Elie Wiesel, One Generation After, p. 133.