(2) On the seventh day God finished the work that He had been doing, and He ceased on the seventh day from all the work that He had done.
Martin Buber, Hasidism and Modern Man, P. 34
Man cannot approach the divine by reaching beyond the human; he can approach Him through becoming human. To become human is what he, this individual man, has been created for. This, so it seems to me, is the eternal core of Hasidic life and of Hasidic teaching.
Martin Buber, Hasidism and Modern Man, p. 41
God can be held in each thing and reached through each pure deed. But this insight is by no means to be equated with a pantheistic worldview, as some have thought, In the Hasidic teaching, the whole world is only a word out of the mouth of God. Nonetheless, the least thing in the world is worthy that through it God should reveal himself to the man who truly seeks Him; for no thing can exist without a divine spark, and each person can uncover and redeem that spark at each time and through each action, even the most ordinary, if only he performs it in purity, wholly directed to God and concentrated in Him.
Arthur Green, “A Neo-Hasidic Credo” in The Heart of the Matter, p. 285
Historical Hasidism underwent two great struggles: first against the dominant rabbinic culture, then against the haskalah. You might say that our situation more reflects the latter; the secularization of consciousness surely began with the enlightenment, and we continue to live in its midst. Yes but we need to go about that ongoing struggle in a manner completely different from the nineteenth-century…
Our religious consciousness has to awaken from the daze of that loss (i.e. the battle against biblical criticism and Darwinism) and seek old/new paths of expression…
The sense of the miraculous is not at all diminished by evolution. This wonder remains the object of our prayers. Nor is the transcendent beauty of insight into text, our special Jewish way of reading, lessened by our knowledge of human authorship. We need to allow ourselves the spiritual freedom to feel those things, liberating ourselves from the tyranny of our own skeptical selves (yes, tyranny exists on that side as well) that hold us back. And that freedom itself, we should recall with no small sense of irony, is a gift of modernity.