Martin Buber — and what he did to the tales

The philosopher of I and Thou, who spent forty years retelling Hasidic stories in German and made the movement famous outside Judaism. Almost every non-Jewish encounter with Hasidism in the twentieth century runs through his versions.

⭐⭐⭐ And Gershom Scholem demolished the method, in public, and the demolition is the most useful thing in this part of the wing. Buber presented Hasidism as a religion of hallowed everyday life and consciously set the theoretical literature aside as secondary, working almost entirely from the tales. Scholem's charge: the tales are late, edited and devotional, the theoretical works are what the movement actually taught, and Buber selected an existentialist Hasidism that suited his own philosophy.

⚠⚠ Buber did not really deny it. He answered that he was not writing history but transmitting a teaching. ⭐ Which leaves the reader with a live methodological question this app has to face on its own account: when you retell a tradition, are you reporting it or using it? — and every room in this application is on the hook for the answer.