The Truth and The Crisis Martin Buber (September 1945)

The human world stands today at the beginning of a great crisis. We are able to detect only its outer symptoms, which to themselves are so horrendous, that usually our attention is drawn only to them, and we do not dare to proceed inwards. The most awful thing that nests deep inside is that man that has no truth. By this I do not mean a liar, but a man who has expelled the belief that truth exists. The source of his despicableness ( )is in the fact that he does not see a truth which hovers above, that through which his entire being is measured, trialed and judged. The thing we refer to as "conscience, which was referred to by Hitler as a Jewish invention, loses its meaning once the ancient inquiry What is the truth - is answered by "What am I able to convince others to believe in". The crisis spreads in the human world. The light is slipping away. This is not an eclipse () that we are able to measure and estimate, but more; we can say that those who are truthful to their spirits feel similar to the sinful Adam and Eve when, according to the Agada, the sun had set for the first time, and they did not know if it would ever rise again The concept of truth in modern civilization originated in the Greek term that described the acknowledgement and admission of what is real. The biblical term "truth" has an entirely different meaning; it means- the eternal ( ,)the trustworthy, the solid. And with that- it is not perceived as something to acknowledge and admit, but rather as something to act upon and experience. Truth is the essence of being and life. It takes place between the objects. It occurs in the world. It is worthy to occur in the world. To go back to the biblical sense of the word truth means to say: there is one truth that hovers above your heads, one truth for all- but it does not enter your world unless you make it, each of you with their own truth. Whenever you live with things in persistence ( ), and reliability; that is when truth occurs. That is when you reveal it as your own truth, as the human truth. The quote of our sages that the truth is the seal of God emphasizes this. And if it is in fact that sealwhat is the beeswax with which this seal is stamped? Being good means to be agile and prepared, as beeswax. "Conscience" is the living recognition that realizes when there is a match between us and the seal, and when there isnt. When man removes himself from the sealing hand, truth disappears. Light is disappearing from our world This is said out of the feeling of a great crisis, but as something that can and should be started right now of all times. What is the beginning point? When the people of Israel come to the Sinai desert they are invited by God to become "a holy nation": yet later, when He gives the laws of the people, the Ten Commandments, He also addresses each individual:

He turns to the people alongside by turning to the individual. There can be no true beginning but the beginning of each individual with themselves.