In Memoriam: Paul Mendes-Flohr
Paul will be buried today (Friday, October 25), in Jerusalem, the city that he loved, that he chose for his residence and teaching, and that was uplifted by his presence.
I will leave to better informed colleagues the listing of his extraordinary academic production. Paul was as close to a public intellectual as Israeli culture allows. He devoted decades to editing the voluminous complete writings of his intellectual and spiritual inspiration, Martin Buber. His beautifully composed biography of Buber reveals as much about Paul as it does about Buber himself. Paul was deeply gratified when the volume appeared in Hebrew translation in relatively short order, perhaps re-opening the hearts of younger Israelis to the teachings of dialogue.
I count among the great privileges and pleasures of my life the contact that I had with Paul over the past two decades. I hope some vignettes can shed a more intimate light on the ways of this giant.
Buber’s pathbreaking Ich und Du ( I and Thou) had been languishing in Hebrew in a too-brilliant and therefore inaccessible translation for decades, at times even out of print. I had come to teach the work in classes on family therapy at the Hebrew University but found my students unable to grasp the English translation but still preferring it to the inscrutable Hebrew. I ended up sort of translating orally. I took upon myself to create a new Hebrew text for my students and put it in a reader. The reader found its way into the hands of Buber’s family who asked Bialik Press if they would turn it into a more user-friendly form. It was Paul who saw the potential for the new translation and remained practically the only academic in Israel who supported it. We met, and I was astonished by the human warmth and lack of academic pretense with which this world-renowned expert treated a newcomer, and amateur at that. We spoke about his playing baseball in Yiddish as a kid and his relationship with the Buber family. Paul supported the translation through the vagaries of reaching publication over six years. His intuition about younger readers proved correct, and the translation has now been through five printings, all thanks to his prescience and generosity.
Paul was one of the most open-minded thinkers I have encountered. When he organized a conference in Berlin on Buber as a multiple disciplinary thinker, the description fitted Paul no less. He generously invited me to discuss Buber’s influence upon family and systems thinking, an area of scarce interest to Buberian “scholars.” Over we dinner I encountered Paul’s deep commitment to Israeli-Palestinian dialogue. We even talked about issuing a dual-language edition of I and Thou in Hebrew and Arabic. As I write I can think of no better monument to Paul than bringing such a work to completion.
Paul brought me to Germany once again for a more intimate conference of the Martin Buber Gesellschaft in Buber’s last residence in Germany, Heppenheim. I arrived a day early and took an autumn walk in the Black Forest. Colorful dried leaves crackled under me feet and brought me to memories of the clinking of the metal faces upon which one treads in the Holocaust monument by Israeli artist Kadishman in Berlin. This moved me to write a poem in Hebrew about my Jewish feet treading upon drying German leaves. I shared the poem with Paul, who encouraged me to share it as an existential statement of what I feel standing before the group. I was so moved by his response that I let one generous participant help me to render it into German, and I read it in Hebrew and German, feeling that this sharing cleared my mind for honest communication. Such was Paul’s sensitivity to the human situation and the opportunity to deepen dialogue.
Just two years ago I finally composed a full-length study of family therapy that gives a central place to Buber’s thinking. Paul, with his usual unhesitating generosity, agreed to my friend Anat Zuria’s filming a dialogue with me about therapy, therapists, families, and Buber. He was warmly forthcoming about his own thinking and his personal relationship with Buber’s family, especially his son Rafael. A short version portrays Paul at his loving, tender, and brilliant best. I felt Paul was not only giving of himself to me but trying to give the world one more portal for understanding the importance of dialogue in human life. It is my greatest wish that a longer version featuring Paul more than my work could now be issued.
As I now reviewed this film I was struck by the emphasis Paul made on creating mutual trust, being “a true companion.” I am sure that many of Paul’s colleagues and friends will remember him as an outstanding exemplar of the “true companion.”