Page 24 - Issue 19

ourselves, change our lives or our
relations - the only demand upon us
is to ever-more-perfectly articulate
the unspeakable injustices of today,
and the absolute justice that we
envision. This is comparable to
writing the sharpest 240 characters
on Twitter, then retiring for the evening, content from
your social justice work.

By contrast, Buber encourages us to live according to
yeud, which is an idea, and not an ideology.

Yigal Wagner explains the term, stating

“in contrast to modern man's belief that there are
no human motivations other than personal wants
or interests, and that everything else is a lie
intended to rationalize those interests as ideology,
Buber declares that there is an autonomous
human motivation to pursue that which is
good, which is also referred to as the yeud”.

Buber says that this notion of yeud is meant to exist in
our day to day - not as a means of soothing us, but rather
to ‘bother and energise’ us.

To give a more practical image, before COVID struck, I
had a couple of sessions with a personal trainer. Perhaps
it sounds trivial, but it’s the best example I can think of
at the moment. The personal . The trainer says
encouraging things to me but they also challenge me.