Martin Buber, Hasidism, and Jewish spirituality: the implications for education and for pastoral care

Abstract

There is a legal requirement that schools engage with the spiritual aspects of education, which encompasses pastoral care. This reflects the ethical sensibility that is present in individuals and underlies interactions with Others; and which should be part of the ethos of all educational institutions and especially schools. This is because spirituality is important to leading a moral life and to understanding the Other. The article considers specifically the potential of Jewish spirituality, and uses Martin Buber’s thought, to gain a better understanding of its contribution to education and to pastoral care. In the first part, we comment on the ‘basic words’, I-Thou and I-It, which are connected with Hasidism, the Jewish spiritual movement which had a great influence on Martin Buber. Hasidism understands that it is our duty to find and connect with the ‘divine sparks’, as genuine relations merge with the Divine, and when humans relate genuinely to one another, they relate to God. This is crucial for understanding the superiority of I-Thou relations over I-It relations. In the second and third parts of the article, we consider the implications of this understanding of Jewish spirituality for education and for pastoral care. This is done through highlighting the importance of I-Thou relations if the spiritual aspects of education and of pastoral care are to be encouraged and fulfilled.

Keywords:

• Jewish spirituality
• Buber
• dialogue
• pastoral care

Notes

1. The Hasidic movement was first established in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century by Yisroel ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov (In Hebrew, the Good Master of the Name). It remains a very influential movement in Judaism, with major communities in the United States and in Israel.

2. Martin Buber worked with Franz Rosenzweig at the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus, an experiment in Jewish adult education between 1920 and 1927, which closed in 1929 on Franz Rosenzweig’s death. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 and the anti-Jewish laws banning Jews from teaching and learning at official institutions were put in place, the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus was reopened alongside many others throughout Germany to provide educational courses for the Jewish community (cf. Morgan & Guilherme, 2013, pp. 76–78).

3. In Herut: On Youth and Religion (1919), an essay written before I and Thou (1923), Buber (1995, p. 152) expresses this as awakening in the youth their latent abilities, their ‘willingness to confront, unwaveringly, the impact of the unconditional [Unbedingte]’ (cf. Levine, 2012, p. 171).