Chapter 18 - Jacob's Burden

Summary

Grotowski was very much influenced by Hasidic philosophy. He admittedly read Martin Buber's I and Thou, and Gog and Magog, and was greatly impressed by Buber's philosophy of history and religion. Buber, an Austrian-Jewish philosopher who believed in the Hasidic principle of the unification of religious practices with everyday life, was fluent in Polish, and his writings were quite popular in postwar Poland. As Karen Underhill pointed out,

Buber's early lectures on Judaism and his and his wife Paula Buber's retellings in German of Hasidic tales appealed particularly to those who had moved away from traditional religious practice, had been educated in German, Polish, or Czech, and had joined, or hoped to join, a cosmopolitan, secular European culture as citizens of their respective countries. Estranged from their ethnic and religious traditions, and often no longer speaking a Jewish language, whether Hebrew or even Yiddish, many in this generation developed a more or less-articulated longing for a revived relationship with Jewish tradition. […] He was able to appropriate the image of the Jew as Oriental, to make it a sign of how Jews had in themselves and in their tradition a source of deep spirituality that modern European intellectuals and artists were now seeking. […] Buber describes a particular type of individual (variously described as the Oriental, the Jew, the mystic) who is open and susceptible to the perception of that authenticity and wholeness.