“The awesome power of the Evil Urge”

I slumped back again and put the book aside.  Later, I read on in the biography of Martin Buber.  I was struck by how many thoughts that I had received had also occurred to him.  He entered a Nietzschean phase with an emphasis on “dynamism” and “a creative flow of life force.”  Later Buber thought eternity “sends forth time out of itself” and “sets us in that relationship to it that we call existence.”  Thus, out of eternal stillness comes the dynamism of change and existential thrust.  To achieve wholeness as a person, he said, it is necessary to direct the creative force of the Evil Urge, the erotic energy that I had felt to be at the center of Being itself.

When I reached Washington and returned to my apartment in Alexandria, I resumed reading.  I had left off with Buber speaking of the quality of “fervor with direction, all the awesome power of  the ‘evil urge’ taken up into the service of God, [seventeenth-century visionary theologian Jakob] Boehme’s ‘ternary of fire’ [symbolizing desire] spiraling upward into the ‘ternary of light’ [symbolizing love] without losing any of its power thereby.”  These themes reverberated through the Jewish tradition known as Hasidism.  This was “one of the truly decisive moments in Buber’s life”:  “overpowered in an instant, I experienced the Hasidic soul,” he writes.  “At the same time I became aware of the summons to proclaim it to the world.”  I knew how he felt.