The Courage to Be an Outsider

Abstract By disposition an outsider, Martin Buber had the requisite ‘civil courage’ to speak the truth as he saw it and thus the spiritual stamina to court the scorn of being marked an outsider, or worse. Accordingly, he called upon his fellow Zionists resolutely to reject the prevailing form of European nationalism and its self-righteous, self-centred pursuit of Realpolitik. The failure to eschew what Buber alarmingly called a ‘hypertrophic’ nationalism would perforce vitiate the very cure – the restoration of national dignity and spiritual renewal – that Zionism seeks to offer the ailing Jewish people. By adopting Realpolitik, a people can win the national rights for which it strove and yet fail to regain its spiritual health – because ‘nationalism, turned false, eats at its very marrow’. A nationalism of sacro egoismo – a political ethic that assumes that the pursuit of national self-interest is sacred and thus morally justified – spells not only spiritual evisceration but also political disaster.