ABSTRACT
The Work in its Context I and Thou is a work of religious, specifically Jewish, philosophy but it was written by an author steeped in the traditions of western thought, and is set primarily in a western context. The book does not easily fit into any one discipline, since it fuses theological, philosophical, and socio-political themes in an unorthodox fashion. As one scholar has put it, Buber’s work “crossed hitherto sacrosanct boundaries dividing scholarly disciplines.”1 The book ranges across so many disciplines, however, for the very reason that its main subject is so fundamental: the basic character of human interaction with others, with nature, and finally with God.
