Featured Book is a new series of blog posts by our librarians about books in our collection which we find particularly interesting, noteworthy or compelling. We’ll tell you a bit about what we’ve read, and why we liked it.
Martin Buber
I and Thou
Call number: HH PHL BUB
It has been quite some time since I read Martin Buber’s “I and Thou”, but the book made such an impression on me that I remember it quite distinctly. I remember the sense of having something explained to me that I felt I already knew in some way, but had not yet articulated. Books like that are special and rare and always remembered.
As a student of religious studies at McGill, I had heard about Buber, but did not know much about Hasidism or Jewish mysticism. Buber’s idea of dialogue as a religious practice was novel to me at the time, and changed my perception of religious experience. It showed how openness to experience, rather than faith or doctrine, can be fundamental to religious practice. That idea that religion can be experiential is a perspective that is open minded, engaged and accessible.
I subsequently read other books by Buber, but none matched the immediacy and passionate nature of “I and Thou”. It is the book that defined his career, and it rightfully became a classic of theology and religious studies. I think it would be interesting to anyone with an interest in Judaism or religious dialogues or religious studies more generally.
-M.E.
