Martin Buber, who is best known in America for his classic writing on the "philosophy of dialog" in I and Thou, wrote this essay on Hasidism in 1948. Translated and edited by Maurice Friedman, the foremost Buber scholar, this pamphlet is more than an explication of Hasidism: "no one of Martin Buber's works gives us as much of his own simple wisdom as this remarkable distillation."

Taking the form of commentary on a variety of Hasidic tales or parables, Buber leads us to an understanding of this approach to life and to God in ways that Quakers can appreciate. Much like Quakerism, "Hasidism is a mysticism which hallows community and everyday life rather than withdraws from it, rejecting asceticism and the denial of the life of the senses in favor of the joy that can transform and re-direct the "alien thoughts," or fantasies, that distract man from the love of God."

The story of God's search for Adam in the Garden is set as an example for each one of us how "Adam hides himself to avoid rendering accounts, to escape responsibility for his way of living. Every man hides for this purpose, for every man is Adam and finds himself in Adam's situation. To escape responsibility for his life, he turns existence into a system of hideouts."

Each parable is interpreted with a sensitivity to our relationship with God, with each person, with the world. "The task of man, of every man, according to hasidic teaching, is to affirm for God's sake the world and himself and by this very means to transform both."

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