" He was not entirely unjustified when he told me in parting that if I should run into Buber I should hand him a barrel of tears in our names. He said that Buber personally had struck him as a man who lived in a permanent trance, somewhere very much removed from his own self, a “dual ego”; this state was shown most profoundly in an essay entitled “Das Gleichzeitige” [The simultaneous], which had appeared in the Zeit-Echo. Benjamin was especially harsh in his rejection of the cult of “experience,” which was glorified in Buber’s writings of the time (particularly from 1910 to 1917). He said derisively that if Buber had his way, first of all one would have to ask every Jew, “Have you experienced Jewishness yet?” Benjamin tried to induce me to work into my article a definite rejection of experience and Buber’s “experiencing” attitude. I actually did so in a later essay, as Benjamin had greatly impressed me in this matter. "
― Gershom Scholem , Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship
![Gershom Scholem quote : He was not entirely unjustified when he told me in parting that if I should run into Buber I should hand him a barrel of tears in our names. He said that Buber personally had struck him as a man who lived in a permanent trance, somewhere very much removed from his own self, a “dual ego”; this state was shown most profoundly in an essay entitled “Das Gleichzeitige” [The simultaneous], which had appeared in the Zeit-Echo. Benjamin was especially harsh in his rejection of the cult of “experience,” which was glorified in Buber’s writings of the time (particularly from 1910 to 1917). He said derisively that if Buber had his way, first of all one would have to ask every Jew, “Have you experienced Jewishness yet?” Benjamin tried to induce me to work into my article a definite rejection of experience and Buber’s “experiencing” attitude. I actually did so in a later essay, as Benjamin had greatly impressed me in this matter.](/image/1225247.jpg)