Martin Buber argued in I and Thou (1923) that there are only two ways to address the world. In the I–It relation we treat what is in front of us as an object to be used, categorized and known. In the I–Thou relation we meet another being whole, with nothing held back and nothing instrumental in it — and the encounter cannot be sustained, only entered and lost and entered again. God, in Buber's account, is the eternal Thou who can never be reduced to an It. The book is short, aphoristic and almost impossible to paraphrase without flattening, and it reshaped twentieth-century theology, psychotherapy and education far beyond Jewish thought. Born in Vienna and raised in Lviv by a grandfather who was a major scholar of Jewish tradition, Buber spent years collecting and retelling Hasidic tales. He led Jewish adult education in Germany under the Nazis until he emigrated in 1938, then taught at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He translated the Hebrew Bible into German with Franz Rosenzweig, and campaigned for a binational Arab-Jewish state. He died in 1965.