Hasids, Deep Bearders of Thought

     Why then do we say: “Our God and the God of our fathers?”
     There are two kinds of people who believe in God. One believes because he has taken over the faith of his fathers, and his faith is strong. The other has arrived at faith through thinking and studying. The difference between them is this: The advantage of the first is that, no matter what arguments may be brought against it, his faith cannot be shaken; his faith is firm because it was taken over from his fathers. But there is one flaw in it: he has faith only in response to the command of man, and he has acquired it without studying and thinking for himself. The advantage of the second is that, because he found God through much thinking, he has arrived at a faith of his own. But here too there is a flaw: it is easy to shake his faith by refuting it through evidence. But he who unites both kinds of faith is invincible. And so we say, “Our God” with reference to our studies, and “God of our fathers” with an eye to tradition.
     The same interpretation has been given to our saying, “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob,” and not “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” for this indicates that Isaac and Jacob did not merely take over the tradition of Abraham; they themselves searched for God.
— Martin Buber, Martin Buber’s Ten Rungs: Collected Hasidic Sayings, pp. 13-14.

     Said the Great Maggid to Rabbi Zusya, his disciple: “I cannot teach you the ten principles of service. But a little child and a thief can show you what they are.
     “From the child you can learn three things:
          He is merry for no particular reason;
          Never for a moment is he idle;
          When he needs something, he demands it vigorously.
     “The thief can instruct you in seven things:
         He does his service by night;
         If he does not finish what he set out to do in one night, he devotes the next night to it;
         He and those who work with him love one another;
         He risks his life for slight gains;
         What he takes has so little value for him that he gives it up for a very small coin;
         He endures blows and hardship, and it matters nothing to him;
         He likes his trade and would not exchange it for any other.
— Martin Buber, in Ibid., pp. 55-56.

     The kenning13 — always an implied simile — shows the imagination at work, perceiving a real or fancied resemblance of one thing to another. It may be a vividly felt, or a labored, or stereotyped, comparison. The person who first spoke of the camel as “the ship of the desert” hit on a short cut for saying: “just as the ship traverses the watery wastes of the sea, steadfastly surmounting its billows, likewise the camel plods through the sandy waste, unfalteringly climbing dune after dune.” However different in other respects, the two are seen to share one or more essential qualities, and these similarities suddenly strike our minds. Or, from another angle, in the kenning a hackneyed, faded term or name is avoided in favor of a circumlocution exhibiting the object in a new, unwonted light.
     The example chosen should immediately dispel any notion that this figure of speech is in any way peculiar to Old Germanic and, in particular, Old Norse poetry; although Scandinavians first observed it — as they had abundant opportunity to do — and gave it a name. On the contrary, it occurs in all literatures and at all levels of diction, both elevated and popular. We speak of “the blood of grapes,” “a knight of the road,” “a chip off the old block.” Sophocles refers to “the storm of the spear” for “battle”; Homer uses “the path of the fishes” for “sea,” “the tumult of Ares” for “battle” — all of which are among the commonest of Skaldic kennings. With typical baroque exuberance Shakespeare paraphrases sleep as “the death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath, balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, chief nourisher in life’s feast” — five kennings in a row!
13 Old Norse kenna, “to ken, to call (by a periphrasis)”; hence kenning, “descriptive appellation.”
— Lee M. Hollander, The Skalds, “Introduction,” p. 12.