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An unexpected and delightful little book. It combines Jewish mysticism, Hegel's Spirit and dialectic, Marx's alienation induced by economic processes and commodities, Christian existentialism, some pantheism and immanence, and so on. Beside Hegel and Marx, it reminded me of Meister Eckhart, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky. The basic theme is that God can only be encountered in a relationship with some other person (“I and you��) and in the actuality of the encounter. If we approach the other as an experience or for some other purpose (“I and it��), God is no longer there. God's redemption is not mediated by anything (faith, acts, spirituality, good deeds, and so on) or anyone (Christ, priests, and so on); but is a return to God through “I and you�� in the “now�� of our material world. Sin is just the avoidance of this encounter or approaching the encounter as “I and it��. It is all about the actuality of the encounter with "you" in the “now" - since nothing of the encounter can be named, explained, or passed to others or to ourselves later. However, it may be pointed to - and this is what Buber is doing in this book. In Nietzsche's words: “One hears―one does not seek; one takes―one does not ask who gives�� �� one just gives thanks.
In some unexpected ways, this book reminded me of Wittgenstein's “Tractatus�� - both were Austrian-Jewish authors, both books were written at almost exactly the same time and in German, both books are extremely small, both books are self-standing and self-sufficient, both offer a complete and unified theory of everything essential, both are more or less mystical, both are partially incomprehensible and open to interpretations, and so on. In other words - both books offer a delightful, unexpected, and an amazing “storm in a bottle��.