Justice & Law Quote by Martin Buber

Buber’s line refuses the comforting myth that morality is a set of external rules handed down by authorities and installed in us like software. “Not thrust upon man” is a quiet rebuke to legalism and to any politics that treats ethics as compliance: behave, or else. Instead, he relocates “the law” to the interior life, where it “rests deep” like a dormant faculty. The verb choice matters. Resting suggests presence without performance, a moral capacity that can’t be reduced to constant self-surveillance. It also implies vulnerability: what rests can be ignored, smothered, anesthetized.

Then comes the hinge: “to waken when the call comes.” Buber’s subtext is relational. In his wider thought, especially the I-Thou worldview, the ethical demand doesn’t arise from abstract principle but from encounter - with another person, with suffering, with God, with the moment that breaks routine. “The call” is not an argument; it’s a summons. That keeps the line from sounding like self-help intuitionism. This isn’t “follow your heart.” It’s closer to: you are already implicated, and reality will eventually knock.

Contextually, Buber is writing in a Europe where “law” had become a sinister word: bureaucratic, nationalistic, increasingly weaponized. His move is both spiritual and political. If law is only external, it can be hijacked by whoever controls institutions. If it’s internal, it can still be betrayed - but it can also resist. The sentence bets on the human capacity to recognize an obligation before we can justify it, and to be judged by that recognition when the call arrives.