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Martin Buber Library
גוג ומגוג
משיחיות, אפוקליפסה, יצרים, קנאה ואהבה - הם חומרי הגלם של הסיפור ההיסטורי הגדול גוג ומגוג מאת מרדכי מרטין בובר. באמצעות דמויותיהם של שניים מגדולי תנועת החסידות, המתגוששים על הדרך הנכונה ל"תיקון עולם", משרטט הסופר והפילוסוף הגדול את עולמה המיסטי של המשיחיות היהודית במלוא עוזה. אחת משאלות היסוד של היהדות והציונות מרחפת על פני העלילה הסוחפת: האם הגאולה תפציע כתוצאה מפעילות מיסטית המנסה לשנות סדרי בראשית ולהשפיע על מהלך ההיסטוריה, או שהגאולה תגיע דווקא על ידי התמקדותו של היחיד בתיקון מעשיו ובפרטים הקטנים המרכיבים את היום-יום שלו "בשוק, בבית ובלב".
עולמה הקסום של החסידות, על אורותיה וצלליה, שב לתחייה בגוג ומגוג ומעביר לעיני הקורא גלריה ססגונית של מנהיגי החסידות ותלמידיהם הנתונים במחלוקת קשה, בקשרים עזים של אהבה וקנאה ובציפייה לגאולה - סוגיה שעדיין נושאת משמעות רבה בימינו.
ספר מופת זה, שיצא לראשונה לפני עשרות שנים בהוצאת "עם עובד" ואזל מן השוק, זוכה כאן לההדרה מחודשת ולהערות בתוספת אחרית דבר מאת אפרים מאיר.
עולמה הקסום של החסידות, על אורותיה וצלליה, שב לתחייה בגוג ומגוג ומעביר לעיני הקורא גלריה ססגונית של מנהיגי החסידות ותלמידיהם הנתונים במחלוקת קשה, בקשרים עזים של אהבה וקנאה ובציפייה לגאולה - סוגיה שעדיין נושאת משמעות רבה בימינו.
ספר מופת זה, שיצא לראשונה לפני עשרות שנים בהוצאת "עם עובד" ואזל מן השוק, זוכה כאן לההדרה מחודשת ולהערות בתוספת אחרית דבר מאת אפרים מאיר.
- GenresJudaismPhilosophy
303 pages, Paperback
First published January 4, 1984
About the author
Martin Buber
430 books495 followersMartin Buber was an Austrian-born Jewish philosopher best known for his philosophy of dialogue, a religious existentialism centered on the distinction between the I-Thou relationship and the I-It relationship.
Buber came from a family of observant Jews, but broke with Jewish custom to pursue secular studies in philosophy. In 1902, Buber became the editor of the weekly Die Welt, the central organ of the Zionist movement, although he later withdrew from organizational work in Zionism. In 1923 Buber wrote his famous essay on existence, Ich und Du (later translated into English as I and Thou), and in 1925 he began translating the Hebrew Bible into the German language.
In 1930 Buber became an honorary professor at the University of Frankfurt am Main, and resigned in protest from his professorship immediately after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. He then founded the Central Office for Jewish Adult Education, which became an increasingly important body as the German government forbade Jews to attend public education. In 1938, Buber left Germany and settled in Jerusalem, in the British Mandate of Palestine, receiving a professorship at Hebrew University and lecturing in anthropology and introductory sociology.
Buber came from a family of observant Jews, but broke with Jewish custom to pursue secular studies in philosophy. In 1902, Buber became the editor of the weekly Die Welt, the central organ of the Zionist movement, although he later withdrew from organizational work in Zionism. In 1923 Buber wrote his famous essay on existence, Ich und Du (later translated into English as I and Thou), and in 1925 he began translating the Hebrew Bible into the German language.
In 1930 Buber became an honorary professor at the University of Frankfurt am Main, and resigned in protest from his professorship immediately after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. He then founded the Central Office for Jewish Adult Education, which became an increasingly important body as the German government forbade Jews to attend public education. In 1938, Buber left Germany and settled in Jerusalem, in the British Mandate of Palestine, receiving a professorship at Hebrew University and lecturing in anthropology and introductory sociology.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
August 13, 2026
Two rabbis meet in a Polish shtetl during the Napoleonic wars, and Martin Buber turns their quarrel into something that breaks the heart. Around 1800, in the Jewish quarter clinging to the castle hill of Lublin, dwells the Seer, Rabbi Yaakov Yitzchak, a mystic born able to gaze from one end of the world to the other, so frightened by the evil he glimpsed that he begged Heaven to shrink his sight. His finest pupil, a second Yaakov Yitzchak, wins the name the Holy Jew, a scholar of huge frame and gentler faith. Their teacher believes the end of days can be forced upward through fierce prayer and secret intentions. His student believes redemption grows from below, in the market, the home, the heart. The wars roll east, Napoleon looms as a possible Gog, and these two ask whether a saint may push the Messiah or wait for him.
That premise smells of theology, yet Buber dressed it as a chronicle stitched from Hasidic folktale, so we inherit fish suppers, wonders, a wagon driver flogging his horses while the rebbe of Lilov feeds them barley, and a swindle around a forged letter from Heaven with a golden seal. The Seer opens it, counts the buttons on a fraud's coat, burns the thing, and moves on. Buber adores a good tale and plants a hard question inside each one.
Here sits the marvel. The book seems like a string of anecdotes and proves a taut moral chess match played across gravestones. The Seer keeps forcing the tempo. The Holy Jew keeps declining to grip the wheel of the chariot. A man given over to the living God stays husband and father to nobody until his God frees him.
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When the master at last commands his gentle student to depart the world and fetch a report from Heaven about the failing plan, the pupil obeys, for a Hasid may argue and squirm and still surrender his life. His final words become the liturgy of a bride in exile. He dies on Sukkot, arms lifted as though offering something to whoever stands beside him.
Buber composed this in Jerusalem in 1941, and though the pages carry only tricorn wars and candle wax, that date beats under every line about hastening the finish. Does a people bring salvation by storming the upper worlds, or by mending each tiny deed, or does the very hunger for forcing the end grow into its own Gog, the darkness feeding on the love meant to defeat it?
The rebbes of Kozienice, Rimanov, and Lublin all reach for the lever. The Holy Jew warns that Gog dwells first inside our quarreling hearts, and that every war of Gog and Magog springs from the wars we lose against Gog and Magog within.
The Hebrew here, polished from the older Am Oved text, keeps a folktale hush, plain on top and steep below, akin to the ritual bath of Apta that drops ninety steps to cold water. To submerge means to surrender wholly, and only then to find oneself. The Holy Jew says the one thing Lublin taught him was how to fall asleep, how to yield like a child into an arm.
Fresh readers of Hasidism might flounder in the roll call of masters, and the lore of sparks, husks, and primal fire wants a reader ready to labor. The chronicle folds back onto invented pupils and their notebooks, so the floor under the plot tilts on purpose.
[image error]
Come for two holy men bound in love yet split over saving the world. Come if Kafka, Agnon, or Isaac Bashevis Singer feed you, or for the ancestor of Kotzk, Ger, and every court flowering from Pshiskhe. Brief, dense, and gripping enough to invite a second pass, it offers a wound to carry out of the garden.
The Seer opens the book as a child able to gaze from one end of creation to the other, and the sight of so much evil terrifies him so deeply that he binds a cloth over his eyes for seven years and turns nearsighted for life. Buber begins with a boy sealing his own eyes against the world.
The rebbe reads souls off foreheads, tracing each visitor back to Adam and gauging whether a soul descends from Cain or from Abel. He says he loves a sinner aware of his sin above a righteous man aware of his righteousness.
A carpenter builds the Seer a bed during the Nine Days of mourning for the fallen Temple, and the carpenter's grief soaks into the wood, so the rebbe lies down and feels a thousand needles piercing his flesh. Sadness wounds him worse than sin.
Chaikel the wagon driver flogs his horses, and Rabbi David of Lilov halts him, fills his own cap with barley, and feeds the beasts. Chaikel protests that the horses are his and that dumb animals lack sense. The rebbe answers that the horses pull the cart out of their own wish to pull it.
Rabbi David once vowed that on every trip he would enter each village holding a lone Jew and greet him as a brother, and so his journeys crawl from hamlet to hamlet, brother by brother, and drive poor Chaikel half mad.
The master and the pupil carry one name, Yaakov Yitzchak, and both carry the mother's name Matel, so the moment the young stranger speaks his own name, the crowd gasps and the Seer reaches for his rare spectacles and murmurs, You are a kabbalist.
A blacksmith rises before dawn to strike his hammer, and the young sage races to wake earlier and study first, yet the smith always stands at the anvil ahead of him. From the smith the Holy Jew gathers that a man may fail to grasp his fellow and still ask honestly whether his fellow grasps him.
The great Sabbath sermon teaches that God creates evil, a black fire, and hews from it burning chunks of darkness and hurls them along the roads of the world. Each chunk falls into a human soul and eats whatever rises against it, and Gog is the darkness grown vast enough to summon God to war.
A bare woman steps into the young man's room at night while he studies by candle, and pity floods him, and the coercion pounces upon that pity. He shouts that coercion is forbidden and leaps through the open window into the dark.
An innkeeper takes the Holy Jew for the rebbe and faints dead away from grief. The sage, half laughing, tells him to buy a fat rooster, wake at its crow, and recite the Psalms word by word. Days later the man tears through Lublin bellowing that he found a treasure, silver coins his grandfather hid in a wall before dying in a war.
The Holy Jew gives away the very shirt the Seer gifted him, pressing it upon a beggar with a swollen throat and a bare chest. Afterward the loss scorches his own skin, and he feels a power inside him forcing the deed, a power foreign to mercy.
The rebbe sketches the field crows with three traits. They drown out any voice foreign to their own. They insist that every bird claiming another kind is a crow in disguise, and they deafen it into confessing. And a lone crow strayed from the flock dies at once from the horror of solitude. Buber drafted this during the Shoah, and the fable turns the stomach.
The Holy Jew tells Goldele, his late wife's mother, that the Shekhinah walks in exile, so a man does well to wander onward and onward until he grasps that enough is enough. Buber, an early Zionist drafting these pages in Jerusalem, folds the ache of a homeland into a runaway husband's excuse.
On Purim of 1812 the Maggid of Kozienice reads the Megillah, reaches the phrase fall he shall fall, and cries aloud, Napoleon shall fall. That very season Napoleon drafts his plan to split the Grand Army for the march on Russia.
The coordinated Seder shatters across every rebbe's table on one night. Shindel, the Holy Jew's wife, screams for her honored seat, flings the cushions into a side room, and bolts the door, and the boy Nechemiah trembles pale as a corpse before his weeping father. Far off in Lublin the Seer cries out, A stumbling block, the order is broken, Pshiskhe.
Rabbi Mendel of Rimanov, wasting on his deathbed, is begged to reveal when the Messiah comes. He flings his eyes open and roars that green worms with copper snouts will fall upon them all, and the Messiah has yet to come. Then he goes silent forever.
An amazing depiction of Hasiddic giants who walked the earth during the tumultuous days of Napoleon - the foundation of the Peshischa school that gave birth to Kotzk, Ger and many other courts. A simple story of two main rabbis quickly gives way to countless Jewish folktales intertwined with complex philosophical ideas, end-of-days polemic, biblical exegesis, historic shtetl background, and good old Jewish humor. A truly unique book that, despite its brevity, or perhaps because of it, is hard to follow and invites repeated readings and further inquiry.
❤️ 🇮🇱
That premise smells of theology, yet Buber dressed it as a chronicle stitched from Hasidic folktale, so we inherit fish suppers, wonders, a wagon driver flogging his horses while the rebbe of Lilov feeds them barley, and a swindle around a forged letter from Heaven with a golden seal. The Seer opens it, counts the buttons on a fraud's coat, burns the thing, and moves on. Buber adores a good tale and plants a hard question inside each one.
Here sits the marvel. The book seems like a string of anecdotes and proves a taut moral chess match played across gravestones. The Seer keeps forcing the tempo. The Holy Jew keeps declining to grip the wheel of the chariot. A man given over to the living God stays husband and father to nobody until his God frees him.
[image error]
When the master at last commands his gentle student to depart the world and fetch a report from Heaven about the failing plan, the pupil obeys, for a Hasid may argue and squirm and still surrender his life. His final words become the liturgy of a bride in exile. He dies on Sukkot, arms lifted as though offering something to whoever stands beside him.
Buber composed this in Jerusalem in 1941, and though the pages carry only tricorn wars and candle wax, that date beats under every line about hastening the finish. Does a people bring salvation by storming the upper worlds, or by mending each tiny deed, or does the very hunger for forcing the end grow into its own Gog, the darkness feeding on the love meant to defeat it?
The rebbes of Kozienice, Rimanov, and Lublin all reach for the lever. The Holy Jew warns that Gog dwells first inside our quarreling hearts, and that every war of Gog and Magog springs from the wars we lose against Gog and Magog within.
The Hebrew here, polished from the older Am Oved text, keeps a folktale hush, plain on top and steep below, akin to the ritual bath of Apta that drops ninety steps to cold water. To submerge means to surrender wholly, and only then to find oneself. The Holy Jew says the one thing Lublin taught him was how to fall asleep, how to yield like a child into an arm.
Fresh readers of Hasidism might flounder in the roll call of masters, and the lore of sparks, husks, and primal fire wants a reader ready to labor. The chronicle folds back onto invented pupils and their notebooks, so the floor under the plot tilts on purpose.
[image error]
Come for two holy men bound in love yet split over saving the world. Come if Kafka, Agnon, or Isaac Bashevis Singer feed you, or for the ancestor of Kotzk, Ger, and every court flowering from Pshiskhe. Brief, dense, and gripping enough to invite a second pass, it offers a wound to carry out of the garden.
The Seer opens the book as a child able to gaze from one end of creation to the other, and the sight of so much evil terrifies him so deeply that he binds a cloth over his eyes for seven years and turns nearsighted for life. Buber begins with a boy sealing his own eyes against the world.
The rebbe reads souls off foreheads, tracing each visitor back to Adam and gauging whether a soul descends from Cain or from Abel. He says he loves a sinner aware of his sin above a righteous man aware of his righteousness.
A carpenter builds the Seer a bed during the Nine Days of mourning for the fallen Temple, and the carpenter's grief soaks into the wood, so the rebbe lies down and feels a thousand needles piercing his flesh. Sadness wounds him worse than sin.
Chaikel the wagon driver flogs his horses, and Rabbi David of Lilov halts him, fills his own cap with barley, and feeds the beasts. Chaikel protests that the horses are his and that dumb animals lack sense. The rebbe answers that the horses pull the cart out of their own wish to pull it.
Rabbi David once vowed that on every trip he would enter each village holding a lone Jew and greet him as a brother, and so his journeys crawl from hamlet to hamlet, brother by brother, and drive poor Chaikel half mad.
The master and the pupil carry one name, Yaakov Yitzchak, and both carry the mother's name Matel, so the moment the young stranger speaks his own name, the crowd gasps and the Seer reaches for his rare spectacles and murmurs, You are a kabbalist.
A blacksmith rises before dawn to strike his hammer, and the young sage races to wake earlier and study first, yet the smith always stands at the anvil ahead of him. From the smith the Holy Jew gathers that a man may fail to grasp his fellow and still ask honestly whether his fellow grasps him.
The great Sabbath sermon teaches that God creates evil, a black fire, and hews from it burning chunks of darkness and hurls them along the roads of the world. Each chunk falls into a human soul and eats whatever rises against it, and Gog is the darkness grown vast enough to summon God to war.
A bare woman steps into the young man's room at night while he studies by candle, and pity floods him, and the coercion pounces upon that pity. He shouts that coercion is forbidden and leaps through the open window into the dark.
An innkeeper takes the Holy Jew for the rebbe and faints dead away from grief. The sage, half laughing, tells him to buy a fat rooster, wake at its crow, and recite the Psalms word by word. Days later the man tears through Lublin bellowing that he found a treasure, silver coins his grandfather hid in a wall before dying in a war.
The Holy Jew gives away the very shirt the Seer gifted him, pressing it upon a beggar with a swollen throat and a bare chest. Afterward the loss scorches his own skin, and he feels a power inside him forcing the deed, a power foreign to mercy.
The rebbe sketches the field crows with three traits. They drown out any voice foreign to their own. They insist that every bird claiming another kind is a crow in disguise, and they deafen it into confessing. And a lone crow strayed from the flock dies at once from the horror of solitude. Buber drafted this during the Shoah, and the fable turns the stomach.
The Holy Jew tells Goldele, his late wife's mother, that the Shekhinah walks in exile, so a man does well to wander onward and onward until he grasps that enough is enough. Buber, an early Zionist drafting these pages in Jerusalem, folds the ache of a homeland into a runaway husband's excuse.
On Purim of 1812 the Maggid of Kozienice reads the Megillah, reaches the phrase fall he shall fall, and cries aloud, Napoleon shall fall. That very season Napoleon drafts his plan to split the Grand Army for the march on Russia.
The coordinated Seder shatters across every rebbe's table on one night. Shindel, the Holy Jew's wife, screams for her honored seat, flings the cushions into a side room, and bolts the door, and the boy Nechemiah trembles pale as a corpse before his weeping father. Far off in Lublin the Seer cries out, A stumbling block, the order is broken, Pshiskhe.
Rabbi Mendel of Rimanov, wasting on his deathbed, is begged to reveal when the Messiah comes. He flings his eyes open and roars that green worms with copper snouts will fall upon them all, and the Messiah has yet to come. Then he goes silent forever.
An amazing depiction of Hasiddic giants who walked the earth during the tumultuous days of Napoleon - the foundation of the Peshischa school that gave birth to Kotzk, Ger and many other courts. A simple story of two main rabbis quickly gives way to countless Jewish folktales intertwined with complex philosophical ideas, end-of-days polemic, biblical exegesis, historic shtetl background, and good old Jewish humor. A truly unique book that, despite its brevity, or perhaps because of it, is hard to follow and invites repeated readings and further inquiry.
❤️ 🇮🇱
July 23, 2024
Incredibile work by Martin Buber. Martin gives us an important inside view of the early days of Hasidism.
A fictional account of the early great rabbis of the movement which takes place during the Napoleonic wars in the region of Poland. Glad I read it - concerned that I didn't catch all the nuances. And feel that a second, third, and forth reading might be necessary. Highly enlightening as the rabbis of this era seemed to have been taken with a similar apocryphal thinking as that found in fundamentalist America's dispensational community; hence the title Gog and Magog - a reference to Ezekiel 38 and 39. It is refreshing to realize that this sort of silliness is not limited to the Christian community.
Apparently, they observed Napoleon's various campaigns as a fulfillment of scripture.
On the other hand reference to Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism only makes me want to delve deeper into this time and the origin of these people. Next on the list will be 'Tales of the Hasidim Later Masters' by Buber
I feel like a slower read would be better to put geography and characters and historical timeline in its place.
A fictional account of the early great rabbis of the movement which takes place during the Napoleonic wars in the region of Poland. Glad I read it - concerned that I didn't catch all the nuances. And feel that a second, third, and forth reading might be necessary. Highly enlightening as the rabbis of this era seemed to have been taken with a similar apocryphal thinking as that found in fundamentalist America's dispensational community; hence the title Gog and Magog - a reference to Ezekiel 38 and 39. It is refreshing to realize that this sort of silliness is not limited to the Christian community.
Apparently, they observed Napoleon's various campaigns as a fulfillment of scripture.
On the other hand reference to Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism only makes me want to delve deeper into this time and the origin of these people. Next on the list will be 'Tales of the Hasidim Later Masters' by Buber
I feel like a slower read would be better to put geography and characters and historical timeline in its place.
December 29, 2019
Da leggere come il Vangelo. Una storia al giorno,
October 1, 2026
קריאה מפותלת ולא קלה, אבל כמה מהרעיונות המובאים בו שווים עיון. כדאי להתמצא ברקע ההיסטורי ולהכיר את הדמויות המובאות לפני הקריאה
March 14, 2014
це безперечно одна з най-книг.фікшн,котрий не відпускає мозок на перекур,котрий змушує судомно думати.і стратегічною помилкою було читати її під седативами в потязі.
перечитати.і обов'язково в оригіналі.
перечитати.і обов'язково в оригіналі.
May 15, 2012
I really wanted to like this book but couldn't get into it.
December 16, 2018
Stilted in the English translation. ...will have to reread in the Hebrew translation that Buber himself was involved in after WWII.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews