Metanomianism and Religious Praxis in Martin Buber's Hasidic Tales

It is well known that Martin Buber abandoned Jewish law as a binding code. Scholars have identified him accurately as a religious anarchist, and his perspective is best characterized as metanomian—that is, one that locates the essence of religiosity outside of any fixed system, without necessarily o...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Shonkoff, Sam Berrin (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: MDPI [2018]
In: Religions
Year: 2018, Volume: 9, Issue: 12, Pages: 1-29
Further subjects:B false piety
B Law
B religious anarchism
B kavanah
B metanomianism
B Hasidism
B commandment
B Religious Practice
B Martin Buber
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Summary:It is well known that Martin Buber abandoned Jewish law as a binding code. Scholars have identified him accurately as a religious anarchist, and his perspective is best characterized as metanomian—that is, one that locates the essence of religiosity outside of any fixed system, without necessarily opposing that system as a matter of principle. And yet, such general characterizations offer only a very vague picture of Buber's stance. This paper demonstrates that it is especially illustrative for us to turn to Buber's Hasidic tales. First of all, precisely because Buber's concept of practice was irreducible to any static system or code, the genre of narrative conveys far more than any abstract formulation can. Moreover, inasmuch as Buber's Hasidic tales were his own hermeneutical refractions of earlier sources, which were in themselves teeming with images of practice, our intertextual investigations reveal at once narrative representations of religious life and Buber's personal interpretations of those narratives. What emerges from this study, then, is a textured and vivid vision of religious practice, which was not merely a peripheral concern but a life-encompassing core of Buber's thought.
ISSN:2077-1444
Contains:Enthalten in: Religions
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.3390/rel9120399