Buber's Ethics: Dialogue, Revelation, Selves and Worlds

This article explores tensions between Judaism and Christianity as ethical traditions and what they can learn from each other if the Jewishness of Jesus is fully recognised. It investigates Judaism as a counter-cultural tradition to Christianity and secularised European modernities, drawing on Buber's Hasidism and his understanding of dialogue, relationship and everyday ethics. The author traces ethics as a practice of truth-telling as well as relating to show how justice is more than an individual virtue; it is a matter of community and the transformation of structural relationships of power, abuse and cruelty. It is through relating equally as ethical humans that we can hope to engage with different worlds.