A life of refusing to turn people into things

In a small city called Lemberg, now Lviv, Ukraine, a boy lost his mother before he understood what it meant. She left when he was three. She never came back. No one explained why.

At four, on a wooden balcony above a courtyard, he asked an older neighbor girl the question he could not bring himself to ask the adults: When would his mother return? The girl answered plainly, "Your mother is not coming back."

The boy's name was Martin Buber. Decades later he wrote that everything he came to understand about her absence began in that single hour on the balcony.

Twenty years later, the mother who had left him as a boy traveled far to see him. He could not meet her eyes. He coined a word for what had failed between them: "Vergegnung," a mismeeting. Looking at her still beautiful eyes, he wrote, was like hearing that word spoken to him.

The girl on the balcony had not lied. She had told the truth, and likely meant kindness — yet that accurate sentence left a wound. Why?

We tend to treat honesty as the highest value in any relationship. Buber's story complicates that. The question was whether her words were spoken with him or simply delivered at him. The same fact can be offered with warmth or dropped like a verdict. The content stays identical but the spirit does not.

The question Buber spent his life wrestling with was never about accuracy, but asking, "Am I informing this person, or am I present with them?" He turned that distinction into a philosophy, then into a book that opens with a sentence that is now often quoted: In the beginning is relation.

Published in 1923, "I and Thou" argues that every human relation is spoken through one of two words. "I-It" treats the other as something to analyze, predict or use. Buber does not condemn this. No one survives without treating the world this way sometimes. "I-Thou" meets the other as a whole being, unpredictable and unowned. All real living is meeting, he thought.

Buber's thought grew from Hasidism, a Jewish mystical tradition that sanctifies ordinary life. He extended I-Thou beyond people, to nature, art and faith. Meet a tree fully rather than reduce it to a photosynthesis engine, and you already stand at the threshold. Follow every particular Thou far enough, and it points toward an eternal Thou that never hardens into a thing. For Buber, that was God.

Here is the sadness he refused to hide: Even the truest meeting fades. Memory turns a living presence into something we can explain rather than encounter. The Thou becomes an It. Buber called this our sublime melancholy, a grief built into being human.

He did not escape it himself. Meeting his mother again, he could not encounter her with a fresh mind. She had already become memory, explanation, a fixed idea in his mind. The truth he had spent his life describing had overtaken him, too.

In 1957, Buber and the American psychologist Carl Rogers held a public dialogue. Rogers believed real therapy meant two people meeting fully. Buber pushed back. A counselor and a client do not start from equal footing, so their meeting can never be quite symmetrical. A parent and child carries the same asymmetry. So does an employer and employee, teacher and student. That does not make those relationships meaningless. It means they demand more care, not less.

For Buber, life became the discipline of refusing to let anyone harden into a thing — a discipline an age of AI makes harder, as people grow used to being sorted by data, function and output. We cannot stop at what we already understand about someone but must choose again to meet them anew.

Leaders reduce people to their function more easily than they meet them as people. Employees in unseen roles feel their presence shrink to a job description. Young people wait for the day someone finally calls them Thou instead of potential.

Everyone can become an It. That is not the end of the story. Can you look at someone long since fixed in your memory and see them through new eyes? Can you find once more the courage to meet someone familiar as if for the first time?

Choi Hee-jin is an educator and practical theologian, Yale Divinity School fellow (2025–2026), exploring medical humanities at Duke. She writes about medicine, technology, and human flourishing, with imagination and hope.