Who Owns the Timeline? Covenant in Buber, Voegelin, and Ourselves

*Note: This was originally a paper presented at the 2023 APSA

When we talk of living in history, what are we saying?  Eric Voegelin credits the Israel of Biblical times with in some sense originating or participating in a spiritual “leap in being.”[1]  The result was a new form – the form of history – through which, ever after, human experience might be shaped and perceived. 

Well then, what is the historical form?  Where can we find it?  How do we recognize it?  Is there a way to tell whether or not we ourselves are living historically?

I take this multi-part question quite literally.  Fine rhetoric will not do.  I want to find out whether Voegelin’s account of it makes sense to me.  Since Voegelin explicitly credits some of his Biblical understanding to Martin Buber,[2] it’s relevant to see whether Buber addresses the same Biblical concerns that Voegelin does, also whether his response is more clarifying or less so.  To put the question that drives me another way, I want to know what living in history asks of us that an extra-historical outlook would not ask?

In his Introduction to Israel and Revelation, Volume I of his five-volume Order and History, Voegelin sees history as “a struggle for true order”[3] and Israel’s contribution as revealing “God as … the source of order in world and man, society and history … .”[4]  He cautions us that no leap in being achieves finality.[5]  Granting that, we still want to know, what does it achieve?  And where, in what medium, is the achievement to be found?

Despite lengthy side-forays into the various non-Israelite conditions and sites in which source criticism has tried to pinpoint an external cause or medium for the Israelite achievement, finally Voegelin rejects all that.  For one thing, insofar as sources have been identified by stylistic features, he notes that such features can be multiplied indefinitely.  We wind up with too many sources, each too tiny to matter.[6]

There is also what Voegelin suspects to be source criticism’s unstated agenda: a many-pronged effort to effect “the disappearance of Moses as the author … .”[7] Unpersuaded by the source critical method and still less by what he takes to be its unspoken purpose, finally he resolves to adopt as his own, “the meanings intended by the narrative.”[8]  We are, after all, “still living in the historical present of the Covenant.”[9]

If that is so, the Biblical record might correspond to experiences that form the record of our own lives!  Perhaps the ancient story is not over.  Our questions are warming up and our answers should be at least interesting.  But we ought to start with origins: where and when did the Biblical Covenant occur?

After accepting a chronology consistent with the narrative, Voegelin situates its first occurrence “in the soul of Moses.”[10]  As to conditions that might have been the prompt for such a spiritual mutation, Voegelin at one point supposes them to lie in his having previously “lived so intensely as an Egyptian”![11]  But that supposition cannot have been the meaning intended by the narrative.  There, as Voegelin notes, we see a “growing tension” unfolding for Moses between Egyptian court life on the one hand and, on the other, his Israelite mother who has offered her services in the guise of a wet-nurse.  The time of his beginning with her must have lasted long enough for the child to gain fluency in his mother tongue, and later, a young man’s sense of identification with his mother’s people. 

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the occurrence in the soul of Moses is just the sort of happening that cannot be caused by any set of purely empirical prompts.  Its transcendent aspect is what Voegelin registers when he writes, “In an undefinable manner the presence of God has become historical through Moses.”  It’s a “mutual presence” wherein “the man who can hear [God’s command] cannot reject it because he has ontologically entered the will of God, as the will of God has entered him.”[12]

That said, what began in the soul of Moses cannot have confined itself to one man’s transfiguration.  If it had, no roadmap for historical life would have been delivered.  But we do have a series of scenes, each taking its own time to unfold: the nine interviews between Moses and Pharoah, the desperate Reed Sea crossing, the early stages of the wilderness experience, till at last, the whole people finds itself enveloped in a thunderous scene at the foot of the mountain which a solitary Moses ascends to receive the Decalogue.  Of those Ten Commandments, Voegelin says that they are “the essentials of human existence in society under God.”[13]

So the history-making scene has moved from the soul of Moses to actions that took time and involved a whole people.  How readily did that people, standing at the foot of the mountain, take in the ten requisites for human society?  In one of his regrettable resorts to source criticism, Voegelin assigns authorship of the wilderness narratives to the period of the Monarchy, whose functionaries were, he supposes, writing a national epic to support that institution.[14]

Against that are the interactions at ground level between Moses and his people.  The Israelites go the distance from early whining all the way to open rebellion.  Memorably, with Pharoah’s army approaching, with the Reed Sea at their backs, we hear them deriding the whole situation: “Is it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us out here to die in the wilderness?”  Voegelin’s supposition would be more credible had his conjectural court functionaries cleaned up their national epic a bit, instead of bequeathing so ragged a tale to posterity, the dirty laundry all quite visible, scrubbed while we look on and hung out to dry in our memories ever after.

We were trying to find out what it is like to live under the form of history. 

So far, Voegelin has told us that a transfiguring moment happened in the soul of Moses, but ascribes the rest of the wilderness narrative to writers (at one point court functionaries, later prophetic circles) whose real agenda was distinct from the purposes they assigned – fictionally and retroactively – to the people who must have received the Decalogue in the first instance.  So he has yet to show us the “form of history” that historians ordinarily record: actions that overspill the inner experience of inspired individuals to become visible and consequential in the lives of large numbers of people.

Can Buber help here?  Of him, Voegelin writes ambiguously that he was right to see Moses as paradigmatic but wrong to see him as literally historical![15] Why is that wrong?  What’s wrong about it?  Reserving judgment, let’s first try to see what distinguishes Buber’s account from Voegelin’s? 

First, and perhaps most important for Buber: the experiences recorded in the Biblical narrative “are not born at the writing desk.”[16] The people who sign on to the covenant cannot be rightly understood – even as paradigmatic – if they are seen as fictional constructs retroactively projected into a time merely imagined.  We can’t recognize their counterparts today if we dismiss them as mostly unreal back then.

Second, the narrative is liberally salted with covenant renewal occasions.  “Moses expects the people to ask the meaning and character of a name of which they have been aware since the days of their fathers.”[17] The theme of successive renewals presupposes an originating event.  The later events have their grip – their hold on imagination and the springs of action – because they fulfill a remembered promise inscribed in the first event. 

Third, the leader, be he patriarch, king or prophet, is not merely limned in antagonistic contrast to the people; his memory is preserved precisely because the people recognize him as their link to the covenant; he in turn is motivated because the people need his help to renew their covenantal linkage.  Which is to say, they need to become what they first were. 

All this is less mysterious than it sounds.  We do not have to read the minds of Biblical people to understand that sliding, mirroring relationship.  We need only recall the speeches of people who think Biblically.  Abraham Lincoln was such a man.  His speech at Gettysburg evoked the memory of an actual event, the Declaration of Independence; it situated itself on the timeline, fourscore and seven years ago; it dated from the promise of the Declaration rather than the Constitution; so it remembered, but did so selectively – for its own, consistently transcendent purpose.  His speech, composed in an inward state, did not end there.  It got delivered.  Nor was it sufficiently prompted by the President’s inner state but by “what they did here.”  Furthermore, insofar as Lincoln’s voice is prophetic, his speech at Gettysburg is not remembered by us as a spiritual repudiation of the nation he addressed.  Rather, the nation and its great leader continue to reflect each other when each is seen in depth.  And so it is with the prominent characters in the Biblical narrative.

Rather than assume that each historical stage must close itself off hygienically to escape contamination from its predecessor, Buber sees the process of temporal unfolding differently: the God of the fathers will be recognized as the God of Israel.  When more explicitly universalized at the later prophetic stage, the God of “all the nations” will still be found embryonically contained in the first lech lecha to Abraham.  In each case, the subsequent recognition “flows from this [previous one] as one historical situation flows from that which precedes it.”[18]

The leader who acts on the highest-reaching promise of his group or nation requires a mutually mirroring relation to his people.  Action taken in that spirit does not occur in a vacuum; rather it renews and reinvigorates an original commitment.  That flow between past and future – of memory, recognition and renewal – is just what goes on when one lives in history.

Take this nearer example drawn from my family’s album.   By 1945, the Nazis had lost the Second World War, which meant that the furnaces at Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, Bergen Belsen, into which they’d shoveled approximately six million Jews, were now shut down.  All the same, looking ahead, long-term Jewish existence looked to be unsustainable without a state and the means for its defense.  If a Jewish state were to declare its sovereign independence (as it would actually do in 1948), it could expect immediate attack from the encircling armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iraq.  That was the historical context in which British Mandate authorities forbade Jews under their jurisdiction to buy or manufacture arms!

At that time, Yosef Avidar (my mother’s first cousin by marriage), was one of the senior commanders in the Haganah, the underground army of pre-state Israel.  He was tasked with getting weapons.  “I found that the worst of all was the lack of bullets,” he recalled.  By then his unit had already learned to manufacture 600 Sten submachine guns.  “If we could produce enough bullets, we could increase Sten production.”  But where could they situate an underground bullet-manufacturing facility?

Well, underground – and that’s not a metaphor!  “If you wish to do something in secrecy, do it under the enemy’s nose,” said Avidar.  “That’s the one place they will never think to search.”  The facility they dug, very near a British army base, was twenty-five feet deep and about the size of a tennis court.  Its above-ground hidden entrances were placed in the bakery and laundry rooms of a newly-populated kibbutz.  The noise of the washing machines, which also served the needs of British military personnel, masked the ear-slipping noise of the bullet-making machinery down below.

The facility produced over two million bullets – crucial to winning Israel’s War of Independence.   The people who accomplished the task communicated their plans to each other in Hebrew, the Biblical language which had not been put to that kind of ordinary use for over two thousand years.[19]

So a present emergency met its real-world deadline without any attempt to look away or soften its edges.  And yet, no actor in that scene was empty of memories, both of the recent near-extermination of a whole people and of distant precedents that called for renewal, precedents evoked in the language in which they first originated.

What have we learned about living in history?  It involves bringing our highest concerns down to earth, where they are most needed and most at risk.  

On the timelines of real people in their all-too-real situations, there is always the challenge of discerning whatever calls for timely action.

NOTES:

[1] Eric Voegelin, Israel and Revelation, Volume One of Order and History, Louisiana State University Press, 1956, pp. 123, 424.

[2] Ibid. pp. 149, 400f, 407f, n. 17.

[3] Ibid. p. ix.

[4] Ibid. p. xi.

[5] Ibid. p. 7.

[6] Ibid. pp. 151, 153, 156f.

[7] Ibid. p. 153.

[8] Ibid. p. 159.

[9] Ibid. p. 163.

[10] Ibid. pp. 195, 414, 424 n. 37, p. 402.

[11] Ibid. pp. 392f.

[12] Ibid. pp. 399, 407.

[13] Ibid. p.427.

[14] Ibid. pp. 138f, 176ff.

[15] Ibid. p. 380 n.1.

[16] Martin Buber, Moses: The Revelation and the Covenant (Harper Torchbooks, New York and Evanston, 1958; first published 1946 under the title, Moses) p. 55. 

[17] Ibid.  p. 49.

[18] Buber, The Prophetic Faith (Princeton University Press, 2016; first published in English by The Macmillan Company, 1949) p. 121.

[19] “How the Ayalon Institute Changed the Tide of War,” by Debbie Paneth in Jewish National Fund-USA.

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