Martin Buber, who collected and commented on Hassidic legends, found in them a fraught individualism, illustrated by this story in The Way of Man:
The wise Rabbi Bunam once said in old age, when he had already grown blind: “I should not like to change places with our father Abraham! What good would it do God if Abraham became like blind Bunam, and blind Bunam became like Abraham? Rather than have this happen, I think I shall try to become a little more myself.” The same idea was expressed with even greater pregnancy by Rabbi Zusya when he said, a short while before his death: “In the world to come I shall not be asked: ‘Why were you not Moses?’ I shall be asked: ‘Why were you not Zusya?’”
Hassidism, in the tales Buber collected and embellished, is depicted as a tradition built of exemplars, primarily descriptions of the lives of rabbis by their students. One problem this tradition contemplates is how learning should be prevented from becoming imitation of the teacher, when so much learning is imitation. Another problem it deals with is the meaning and possibility of imitation. Logically speaking, to try to make oneself into another (or into the idea of another) cannot meet with success, for one person cannot be identical with another, nor ‘change places’ with another (and nor can a person become an idea). In the above story, the rabbis reject the temptation to try to make themselves into people they are not. But what is this temptation to want to be another?
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According to Buber, each person is
unique in the world in his particular character and…there has never been anyone like him in the world, for if there had been someone like him, there would have been no need for him to be in the world.
In this picture of plenitude, the reason each person needs to be in the world is related to their difference from any other person. We are not here merely to fulfil a task which another could equally well carry out; we are not service providers, even of a moral service. We are needed here in our ‘particular character’.1 From this, Buber concludes that wanting to be someone else means denying the fact of one’s own uniqueness, and wanting to replace it with an image of another person who has already existed in full, who does not and cannot exist again.
The point is perhaps clearer if I imagine that it is I who am the moral exemplar. I would be puzzled as to why anyone would want to be me, given that I am already me; they might appear to me as existential muggers. I would want to say: you be you.
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Why then do we reject our individuality, our ‘particular character’? Buber doesn’t explain, but we can speculate. We know that we reject ourselves when we condemn ourselves as bad. The greater the self-condemnation, the greater our desire not to be who we are. When the self-condemnation is total, and we have no hope of changing the way we are, we might want not to exist, or to be replaced. In such a case, imitation offers a way of eliminating myself and replacing this bad self with someone good.
This above interpretation takes the rejection of my particular character as the desire to literally be replaced by someone good – in Buber’s passage, one of the patriarchs, who are unquestionably approved by the community – and so not to exist at all. But it is I who want to be them. The imitation of Abraham, for instance, is not the desire to die and have my body be inhabited by his soul; nor do I want Abraham, soul and body, to exist where I now am. Rather, I want to be him, which means I must endure, being who I am, but also be him. This appears to be an unrealisable desire, but it is a different unrealisable desire from the desire to be literally replaced; for this latter desire involves the desire not to be at all, while the former desire is the desire for me to be someone else.
Perhaps then, a better interpretation of the desire to be someone else is that it is their qualities, not their being as such that we want; we want to be like them, it is not that we want to literally be them, or replace ourselves with them. I don’t want to become my teacher, for instance, but to imitate his forbearance, his kindness, his intelligence etc. Abraham, for instance, functions as a universal, so for me to want to be Abraham is not to want to be replaced by him, but to be Abraham-like.
This view fits with the sense we have that it is reasonable to want qualities which we think we lack and see in someone else, but not reasonable to want their very being or life. (Though interpreting a desire as reasonable isn’t necessarily a point in favour of the interpretation, as desires are not necessarily reasonable.) Perhaps more important for this interpretation is that it appears to capture the desire to imitate as a spectrum: how strong the desire is will be measured by the type and number of qualities of another I want for myself. And this will in turn depend on the extent of my self-condemnation. If I condemn myself totally and want to replace all of my qualities with, say, Abraham’s qualities, then I want to completely submerge myself in his qualities. But it may be, instead, that I merely look up to Abraham, and want to be like him in some or other way.
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Buber’s picture can help us see several errors which lead to (adult) imitation:
Thinking that we will be judged according to how close our lives are to moral exemplars (Moses, Abraham etc).
Pre-empting how we think we will be judged, we condemn ourselves for failing to live up to these standards.
Then imitating moral exemplars becomes the way we try to meet those standards.
According to Buber, (1) is false because each individual is created in their ‘particular character’ and there is a need for each to be in the world. (2) and (3) are false because (1) is false.
Buber makes the error of (1) vivid through the idea that God doesn’t measure anyone according to whether they are like anyone else. The idea that God will ask of Zusya ‘Why were you not Zusya?’ implies that each person is unique and that imitation is the rejection of who we are (and is perhaps also the idolisation of another person). The judgement will concern how close each one came to being who they are, not to how close they are to who someone else is.
Of course now a gap appears to open up between who someone is, and who they really are, and we might assume there are moral (and other) aspects to who they really are which differ from how they actually now are. However this gap is to be understood, Buber seems to think that the task of each of us is the unfolding of our inner nature, not a comparison to or imitation of an external standard, be that of a person or a principle.
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Buber’s psychology and theology cannot be told apart. Behind the idea that each person is unique in the world in their particular character is the idea of creation, in which each person is created because they are needed. And this need, we might suppose, is connected to the idea that God loves us as his children, according to which we are all equally beloved parts of creation.
We might think of the whole moral drama of self-condemnation followed by redemption through imitation as way we try to earn God’s love. (Especially because ‘I hate myself’ is cultivated as a moral position, especially in the Christian thought in which original sin is prominent.) But ultimately, we use the moral drama as a means to escape and hide from God’s love. For by saying that we are hateful and must become someone else through imitation – or something else, if what we imitate is inanimate, such as a dead body – we are effectively saying that our section of creation was originally made unlovable and must be altered in order to be loved. And so imitation is a rejection of the recognition of ourselves as created and lovable and loved unconditionally by God.2
Imitation then doesn’t address the source of our problem – the reason we condemn ourselves so harshly – but creates a life task which masks it. Imitation rejects the very idea of creation: that we were each created unique and needed for some purpose. The imitation mindset instead imagines a hierarchy of humans, in which those who are good and lovable are at the top, and those who are bad and unlovable are at the bottom. It pictures God as a hard taskmaster who ranks, judges etc., offering at best a form of conditional love. Our idea of ourselves as bad and the need to escape ourselves through imitation is then also connected to the idea of a cruel and harsh God. We cannot imagine a God any different from the way we judge ourselves. Buber invites us to reconsider both together.
This “need to be in the world” is not explained. It is, I take it, a one-off affair: once Abraham has been Abraham, the Abraham need has been met, and no one else need be, will be or can be Abraham again. But why should Abraham have been in the world at all? What was the specific requirement for Abraham, or anyone else?
If God loves unconditionally, then what role does his judgement have at all? Is judgement inconsistent with unconditional love? Only if the love is conditioned on the judgement. Perhaps the point of God asking Zusya ‘Why were you not Zusya?’ is for Zusya to face his own reality – ideally, when he is still alive – not the sort of moral condemnation we are used to imagining.
Excellent post.