[Music] Martin boer's book I and thou is perhaps the most well-known philosophy of dialogue so I and thou is written in German and the German title is ISU I and you and what's important about that title is that in German there are are two forms of of you there's the form foral the Z and the informal the do do was reserved for for family members um and Friends of of a deeply intimate nature imagine that urgency in everyday language um and that's that's the German of of boer's moment I th tries to help us understand why our world is broken and and how to fix it through interpersonal relationships buber often reflected back onto the moment his mother left him when he was 3 years old and there was a sense of fear um and confusion and when his father couldn't raise him on his own he was sent to his grandparents who were Orthodox Jews living in Eastern Europe raised him it created an uncertainty in him because he didn't have the conventional relationship with parents that built that kind of trust that then allows for the use of the word do so bber opens his book on I and thou by setting up two relationships in how we uh Orient to the world the first is I it and the second is I thou so I it describes a relationship between the eyes you as a subject an interesting person interpreting the world and you interpret the world through your five senses but you understand that it's not you that it's separated from you and in many cases that those relationships become objectified the it becomes an object and we as a way of protecting ourselves from that objectification use Myriad labels to describe who we are I'm Jewish I'm American I'm from a certain place I now live in a certain place and so in the IAT world you run into the danger of racism patriarchy sexism homophobia religious bigotry because once you have the ability to objectify a human being it allows you to understand it in a way that uh gives you some sense of power some control and some [Music] understanding and that's the danger of I it yet at the at the same time you can't live in a world without I it there are certain relationships that require you to be an i and the other end to be in it every time I go to the Safeway and I buy something it's going through the conveyor belt there's another person there each of us sees us as a means to an end but it becomes a problem when I associate that interaction with some value that there's something about that person in their their work or their vocation that I can objectify and judge but what's interesting is that for Boer if that cashier and I exchanged the moment we could have an i thou relationship in which all of those ey it relationships that make up the empirical world that make up reality will disappear we're no longer the people we were in that moment we're something different and both of us recognize that that's called genuine mutuality in which we recognize each other in our absolute subjectivity and that you are a unique person at this moment in time as am I and we're sharing something but you don't get to that point without an IIT world so the world is incredibly complicated and we use our five senses to try to understand the world and in so doing we create categories and those categories allow us to to understand how things are related a little bit better it gives us a sense of confidence um and a sense of comfort that in some way we're operating in a complicated world and that we understand it what IOU does is suspend that comfort for a moment because in a relationship with a person those senses are no longer relevant uh they're no longer ways to categorize other people you're unored from your eye it reality and you don't know how to ground yourself and you allow yourself to be in a moment with a person without the need to try to categorize or understand what that moment is for some people it's Transcendent for some people it's simply time stopping and for Boer that disrupts the IIT world because it reminds us us that no matter how well we know the world there's something missing there's something lost and that something missing is where bber would like to build community for bber he would call that some sort of Eternal th uh an engagement with with God or whatever other word you want to attach to the Beyond in our contemporary situation where people are trying to find meaning in a variety of places he offers an opportunity for us to to experience Transcendence without the borders of religion of of identity that you don't need to circumscribe all aspects of your life into one thing and I think it would appeal to people who are charting a spiritual path but without the need for institutional religions so drawing from the tud the Jewish tradition's interpretation of the Bible but also of oral laws this concept of mlo which is commonly translated as argument or disagreement I'm more comfortable translating it as a form of sacred arguing in which you can debate with your interloc about a whole set of issues whether it's theological political cultural whose sports team is better so at the end of that debate I should be able to articulate back to you what your intentions were what the ideas were to give it the most charitable meaning imaginable so that when you hear it coming from me you say yes that's what I was saying then I can engage it then I can debate with it then I can offer my critique but something happens in that engagement in which the idea separates from the person and is no longer the individual that you're debating with and in that moment for bber it's both of us engaging something that has come out of one person simultaneously with the same genuine mutuality in which our armor that defines us that we place as a way of protecting ourselves from the world disappears and when that armor disappears we learn that our humanity is shared [Music] now we we come back to the world of I it because you can't live in a world that is exclusively I thou but what you recognize in that experience is that it's transformational I no longer desire to see you as an it because if you can relate to anyone with that I thou encounter what that means is that all the layers that people put on themselves to protect themselves from this this unpredictable and scary world including the meanings and values that they believe Define their life if you understand that those things can evaporate in a moment in the same way that it can evaporate with you you can build community with people who have very different orientations to the world and very different values when you recognize that the shared Humanity between you is that you can equally live in the space where there is that something missing or that deeply ineffable quality that connects you without your values without your experiences that I can see you in the nakedness of your being and not be afraid to share the nakedness of my own when you come to that realization Community then becomes understood very differently it's not a place in which you you look for people who have the same orientation to politics to religion it's to people who have the same orientation to experience these values are important in my everyday life in the same way that they are to someone else's but they need not conflict with one another when we recognize that in certain moments they don't determine our interpersonal relationship once you have that moment with the other with someone different from yourself it is transformational in such a way that you relate to every other person with the same potential for that kind of experience and when you do that it's a lot harder to categorize or objectify that person because they no longer are who they say they are or who you think they are you can engage them in in certain ways that allow for um IOU encounters when you build community in that way how we discuss politics how we discuss religious difference will take on a different [Music] urgency like everything else that becomes meaningful you want to find it everywhere and it is worthwhile and that what berer calls the sublime Melancholy of coming out of the eyou encounter it should be seen as an inspiration to find more boo Uber offers you a path that can create a lifetime of meaning and at the same time the opportunity to build more meaningful and thoughtful communities um that can build partnership across religious difference political difference but in a way in which we can mutually share this this planet together and think of solutions as a broader community